Sword Song

“I can read,” I growled. I could too. It was not an achievement I was proud of, because only priests and monks really needed the skill, but Father Beocca had whipped letters into me when I was a boy, and the lessons had proved useful. Alfred had decreed that all his lords should be able to read, not just so they could stagger their way through the gospel books the king insisted on sending as presents, but so they could read his messages.

I thought the letter might bring news of Æthelred, perhaps some explanation of why he was taking so long to bring his men to Coccham, but instead it was an order that I was to take one priest for every thirty men when I marched to Lundene. “I’m to do what?” I asked aloud.

“The king worries about men’s souls, lord,” the priest said.

“So he wants me to take useless mouths to feed? Tell him to send me grain and I’ll take some of his damned priests.” I looked back to the letter, which had been written by one of the royal clerks, but at the bottom, in Alfred’s bold handwriting, was one line. “Where is Osferth?” the line read. “He is to return today. Send him with Father Cuthbert.”

“You’re Father Cuthbert?” I asked the nervous priest.

“Yes, lord.”

“Well you can’t take Osferth back,” I said, “he’s ill.”

“Ill?”

“He’s sick as a dog,” I said, “and probably going to die.”

“But I thought I saw him,” Father Cuthbert said, gesturing out of the open door to where Finan was trying to goad Osferth into showing some skill and enthusiasm. “Look,” the priest said brightly, trying to be of assistance.

“Very likely to die,” I said slowly and savagely. Father Cuthbert turned back to speak, caught my eye and his voice faltered. “Finan!” I shouted, and waited till the Irishman came into the house with a naked sword in his hand. “How long,” I asked, “do you think young Osferth will live?”

“He’ll be lucky to survive one day,” Finan said, assuming I had meant how long Osferth would last in battle.

“You see?” I said to Father Cuthbert. “He’s sick. He’s going to die. So tell the king I shall grieve for him. And tell the king that the longer my cousin waits, the stronger the enemy becomes in Lundene.”

“It’s the weather, lord,” Father Cuthbert said. “Lord Æthelred cannot find adequate supplies.”

“Tell him there’s food in Lundene,” I said and knew I was wasting my breath.

Æthelred finally came in mid April, and our joint forces now numbered almost eight hundred men, of whom fewer than four hundred were useful. The rest had been raised from the fyrd of Berrocscire or summoned from the lands in southern Mercia that Æthelred had inherited from his father, my mother’s brother. The men of the fyrd were farmers, and they brought axes or hunting bows. A few had swords or spears, and fewer still had any armor other than a leather jerkin, while some marched with nothing but sharpened hoes. A hoe can be a fearful weapon in a street brawl, but it is hardly suitable to beat down a mailed Viking armed with shield, ax, short-sword, and long blade.

The useful men were my household troops, a similar number from Æthelred’s household, and three hundred of Alfred’s own guards who were led by the grim-faced, looming Steapa. Those trained men would do the real fighting, while the rest were just there to make our force look large and menacing.

Yet in truth Sigefrid and Erik would know exactly how menacing we were. Throughout the winter and early spring there had been travelers coming upriver from Lundene and some were doubtless the brothers’ spies. They would know how many men we were bringing, how many of those men were true warriors, and those same spies must have reported back to Sigefrid on the day we had last crossed the river to the northern bank.

We made the crossing upstream of Coccham, and it took all day. Æthelred grumbled about the delay, but the ford we used, which had been impassable all winter, was running high again and the horses had to be coaxed over, and the supplies had to be loaded on the ships for the crossing, though not on board Æthelred’s ship, which he insisted could not carry cargo.

Alfred had given his son-in-law the Heofonhlaf to use for the campaign. It was the smaller of Alfred’s river ships, and Æthelred had raised a canopy over the stern to make a sheltered spot just forward of the steersman’s platform. There were cushions there, and pelts, and a table and stools, and Æthelred spent all day watching the crossing from beneath the canopy while servants brought him food and ale.

He watched with Æthelflaed who, to my surprise, accompanied her husband. I first saw her as she walked the small raised deck of the Heofonhlaf and, seeing me, she had raised a hand in greeting. At midday Gisela and I were summoned to her husband’s presence and Æthelred greeted Gisela like an old friend, fussing over her and demanding that a fur cloak be fetched for her. Æthelflaed watched the fuss, then gave me a blank look. “You are going back to Wintanceaster, my lady?” I asked her. She was a woman now, married to an ealdorman, and so I called her my lady.

“I am coming with you,” she said blandly.

That startled me. “You’re coming…” I began, but did not finish.

“My husband wishes it,” she said very formally, then a flash of the old Æthelflaed showed as she gave me a quick smile, “and I’m glad. I want to see a battle.”

“A battle is no place for a lady,” I said firmly.

“Don’t worry the woman, Uhtred!” Æthelred called across the deck. He had heard my last words. “My wife will be quite safe, I have assured her of that.”

“War is no place for women,” I insisted.

“She wishes to see our victory,” Æthelred insisted, “and so she shall, won’t you, my duck?”

“Quack, quack,” Æthelflaed said so softly that only I could hear. There was bitterness in her tone, but when I glanced at her she was smiling sweetly at her husband.

“I would come if I could,” Gisela said, then touched her belly. The baby did not show yet.

“You can’t,” I said, and was rewarded by a mocking grimace, then we heard a bellow of rage from the bows of Heofonhlaf.

“Can’t a man sleep!” the voice shouted. “You Saxon earsling! You woke me up!”

Father Pyrlig had been sleeping under the small platform at the ship’s bows, where some poor man had inadvertently disturbed him. The Welshman now crawled into the sullen daylight and blinked at me. “Good God,” he said with disgust in his voice, “it’s the Lord Uhtred.”

“I thought you were in East Anglia,” I called to him.

“I was, but King Æthelstan sent me to make sure you useless Saxons don’t piss down your legs when you see Northmen on Lundene’s walls.” It took me a moment to remember that Æthelstan was Guthrum’s Christian name. Pyrlig came toward us, a dirty shirt covering his belly where his wooden cross hung. “Good morning, my lady,” he called cheerfully to Æthelflaed.

“It is afternoon, father,” Æthelflaed said, and I could tell from the warmth in her voice that she liked the Welsh priest.

“Is it afternoon? Good God, I slept like a baby. Lady Gisela! A pleasure. My goodness, but all the beauties are gathered here!” He beamed at the two women. “If it wasn’t raining I would think I’d been transported to heaven. My lord,” the last two words were addressed to my cousin and it was plain from their tone that the two men were not friends. “You need advice, my lord?” Pyrlig asked.

“I do not,” my cousin said harshly.

Father Pyrlig grinned at me. “Alfred asked me to come as an adviser.” He paused to scratch a fleabite on his belly. “I’m to advise Lord Æthelred.”

“As am I,” I said.

“And doubtless Lord Uhtred’s advice would be the same as mine,” Pyrlig went on, “which is that we must move with the speed of a Saxon seeing a Welshman’s sword.”

“He means we must move fast,” I explained to Æthelred, who knew perfectly well what the Welshman had meant.

My cousin ignored me. “Are you being deliberately offensive?” he asked Pyrlig stiffly.

“Yes, lord!” Pyrlig grinned. “I am!”

“I have killed dozens of Welshmen,” my cousin said.

“Then the Danes will be no problem to you, will they?” Pyrlig retorted, refusing to take offense. “But my advice still stands, lord. Make haste! The pagans know we’re coming, and the more time you give them, the more formidable their defenses!”

We might have moved fast had we possessed ships to carry us downriver, but Sigefrid and Erik, knowing we were coming, had blocked all traffic on the Temes and, not counting Heofonhlaf, we could only muster seven ships, not nearly sufficient to carry our men and so only the laggards and the supplies and Æthelred’s cronies traveled by water. So we marched and it took us four days, and every day we saw horsemen to the north of us or ships downstream of us, and I knew those were Sigefrid’s scouts, making a last count of our numbers as our clumsy army lumbered ever nearer Lundene. We wasted one whole day because it was a Sunday and Æthelred insisted that the priests accompanying the army said mass. I listened to the drone of voices and watched the enemy horsemen circle around us. Haesten, I knew, would already have reached Lundene, and his men, at least two or three hundred of them, would be reinforcing the walls.

Æthelred traveled on board the Heofonhlaf, only coming ashore in the evening to walk around the sentries I had posted. He made a point of moving those sentries, as if to suggest I did not know my business, and I let him do it. On the last night of the journey we camped on an island that was reached from the north bank by a narrow causeway, and its reed-fringed shore was thick with mud so that Sigefrid, if he had a mind to attack us, would find our camp hard to approach. We tucked our ships into the creek that twisted to the island’s north and, as the tide went down and the frogs filled the dusk with croaking, the hulls settled into the thick mud. We lit fires on the mainland that would illuminate the approach of any enemy, and I posted men all around the island.

Æthelred did not come ashore that evening. Instead he sent a servant who demanded that I go to him on board the Heofonhlaf and so I took off my boots and trousers and waded through the glutinous muck before hauling myself over the ship’s side. Steapa, who was marching with the men from Alfred’s bodyguard, came with me. A servant drew buckets of river water from the ship’s far side and we cleaned the mud from our legs, then dressed again before joining Æthelred under his canopy at the Heofonhlaf’s stern. My cousin was accompanied by the commander of his household guard, a young Mercian nobleman named Aldhelm who had a long, supercilious face, dark eyes, and thick black hair that he oiled to a lustrous sheen.

Æthelflaed was also there, attended by a maid and by a grinning Father Pyrlig. I bowed to her and she smiled back, but without enthusiasm, and then bent to her embroidery, which was illuminated by a horn-shielded lantern. She was threading white wool onto a dark gray field, making the image of a prancing horse that was her husband’s banner. The same banner, much larger, hung motionless at the ship’s mast. There was no wind, so the smoke from the fires of Lundene’s two towns was a motionless smear in the darkening east.

“We attack at dawn,” Æthelred announced without so much as a greeting. He was dressed in a mail coat and had his swords, short and long, belted at his waist. He was looking unusually smug, though he tried to make his voice casual. “But I will not sound the advance for my troops,” he went on, “until I hear your own attack has started.”

I frowned at those words. “You won’t start your attack,” I repeated cautiously, “until you hear mine has started?”

“That’s plain, isn’t it?” Æthelred demanded belligerently.

“Very plain,” Aldhelm said mockingly. He treated Æthelred in the same manner that Æthelred behaved to Alfred and, secure in my cousin’s favor, felt free to offer me veiled insult.

“It’s not plain to me!” Father Pyrlig put in energetically. “The agreed plan,” the Welshman went on, speaking to Æthelred, “is for you to make a feint attack on the western walls and, when you have drawn defenders from the north wall, for Uhtred’s men to make the real assault.”

“Well I’ve changed my mind,” Æthelred said airily. “Uhtred’s men will now provide the diversionary attack, and my assault will be the real one.” He tilted up his broad chin and stared at me, daring me to contradict him.

Æthelflaed also looked at me, and I sensed she wanted me to oppose her husband, but instead I surprised all of them by bowing my head as if in acquiescence. “If you insist,” I said.

“I do,” Æthelred said, unable to conceal his pleasure at gaining the apparent victory so easily. “You may take your own household troops,” he went on grudgingly, as though he possessed the authority to take them away from me, “and thirty other men.”

“We agreed I could have fifty,” I said.

“I have changed my mind about that too!” he said pugnaciously. He had already insisted that the men of the Berrocscire fyrd, my men, would swell his ranks, and I had meekly agreed to that, just as I had now agreed that the glory of the successful assault could be his. “You may take thirty,” he went on harshly. I could have argued and maybe I should have argued, but I knew it would do no good. Æthelred was beyond argument, wanting only to demonstrate his authority in front of his young wife. “Remember,” he said, “that Alfred gave me command here.”

“I had not forgotten,” I said. Father Pyrlig was watching me shrewdly, doubtless wondering why I had yielded so easily to my cousin’s bullying. Aldhelm was half smiling, probably in the belief that I had been thoroughly cowed by Æthelred.

“You will leave before us,” Æthelred went on.

“I shall leave very soon,” I said, “I have to.”

“My household troops,” Æthelred said, now looking at Steapa, “will lead the real attack. You will bring the royal troops immediately behind.”

“I’m going with Uhtred,” Steapa said.

Æthelred blinked. “You are the commander,” he said slowly, as though he talked with a small child, “of Alfred’s bodyguard! And you will bring them to the wall as soon as my men have laid the ladders.”

“I’m going with Uhtred,” Steapa said again. “The king ordered it.”

“The king did no such thing!” Æthelred said dismissively.

“In writing,” Steapa said. He frowned, then felt in a pouch and brought out a small square of parchment. He peered at it, not sure which way up the writing went, then just shrugged and gave the scrap to my cousin.

Æthelred frowned as he read the message in the light of his wife’s lantern. “You should have given me this before,” he said petulantly.

“I forgot,” Steapa said, “and I’m to take six men of my own choosing.” Steapa had a way of speaking that discouraged argument. He spoke slowly, harshly and dully, and managed to convey the impression that he was too stupid to understand any objection raised against his words. He also conveyed the thought that he might just slaughter any man who insisted on contradicting him. And Æthelred, faced with Steapa’s stubborn voice, and by the sheer presence of the man who was so tall and broad and skull-faced, surrendered without a fight.

“If the king orders it,” he said, offering back the scrap of parchment.

“He does,” Steapa insisted. He took the parchment and seemed uncertain what to do with it. For a heartbeat I thought he was going to eat it, but then he tossed it over the ship’s side and then frowned eastward at the great pall of smoke that hung above the city.

“Be certain you’re on time tomorrow,” Æthelred said to me, “success depends on it.”

That was evidently our dismissal. Another man would have offered us ale and food, but Æthelred turned away from us and so Steapa and I stripped our legs bare again and waded ashore through the cloying mud. “You asked Alfred if you could come with me?” I asked Steapa as we pushed through the reeds.

“No,” he said, “it was the king who wanted me to come with you. It was his idea.”

“Good,” I said, “I’m glad.” I meant it too. Steapa and I had begun as enemies, but we had become friends, a bond forged by standing shield to shield in the face of an enemy. “There’s no one I’d rather have with me,” I told him warmly as I stooped to pull on my boots.

“I’m coming with you,” he said in his slow voice, “because I’m to kill you.”

I stopped and stared at him in the darkness. “You’re to do what?”

“I’m to kill you,” he said, then remembered there was more to Alfred’s orders, “if you prove to be on Sigefrid’s side.”

“But I’m not,” I said.

“He just wants to be sure of that,” Steapa said, “and that monk? Asser? He says you can’t be trusted, so if you don’t obey your orders then I’m to kill you.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter whether you’re ready for me or not,” he said, “I’ll still kill you.”

“No,” I said, amending his words, “you’ll try to kill me.”

He thought about that for quite a long time, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’ll kill you.” And so he would.

We left in the black of night under a sky smothered with clouds. The enemy horsemen who had been watching us had withdrawn to the city at dusk, but I was certain Sigefrid would still have scouts in the darkness and so for an hour or more we followed a track that led north through the marshes. It was hard keeping to the path, but after a while the ground became firmer and climbed to a village where small fires burned inside mud-walled huts piled with great heaps of thatch. I pushed a door open to see a family crouched in terror about their hearth. They were frightened because they had heard us, and they knew nothing moves at night except creatures that are dangerous, sinister, and deadly. “What’s this place called?” I asked and for a moment no one answered, then a man bowed his head convulsively and said he thought the settlement was named Padintune. “Padintune?” I asked, “Padda’s estate? Is Padda here?”

“He’s dead, lord,” the man said, “he died years ago, lord. No one here knew him, lord.”

“We’re friends,” I told him, “but if anyone here leaves their house, we won’t be friends.” I did not want some villager running to Lundene to warn Sigefrid that we had stopped in Padintune. “You understand that?” I asked the man.

“Yes, lord.”

“Leave your house,” I said, “and you die.”

I assembled my men in the small street and had Finan place a guard on every hovel. “No one’s to leave,” I told him. “They can sleep in their beds, but no one’s to leave the village.”

Steapa loomed from the dark. “Aren’t we supposed to be marching north?” he asked.

“Yes, and we’re not,” I retorted. “So this is when you’re supposed to kill me. I’m disobeying orders.”

“Ah,” he grunted, then crouched. I heard the leather of his armor creak and the chink of his chain mail settling.

“You could draw your sax now,” I suggested, “and gut me in one move? One cut up into my belly? Just make it fast, Steapa. Open my belly and keep the blade moving till it reaches my heart. But just let me draw my sword first, will you? I promise not to use it on you. I just want to go to Odin’s hall when I’m dead.”

He chuckled. “I’ll never understand you, Uhtred,” he said.

“I’m a very simple soul,” I told him. “I just want to go home.”

“Not Odin’s hall?”

“Eventually,” I said, “yes, but home first.”

“To Northumbria?”

“Where I have a fortress by the sea,” I said wistfully, and I thought of Bebbanburg on its high crag, and of the wild gray sea rolling endlessly to break on the rocks, and of the cold wind blowing from the north and of the white gulls crying in the spindrift. “Home,” I said.

“The one your uncle stole from you?” Steapa asked.

“Ælfric,” I said vengefully, and I thought of fate again. Ælfric was my father’s younger brother and he had stayed in Bebbanburg while I had accompanied my father to Eoferwic. I was a child. My father had died in Eoferwic, cut down by a Danish blade, and I had been given as a slave to Ragnar the Older, who had raised me like a son, and my uncle had ignored my father’s wishes and kept Bebbanburg for himself. That treachery was ever in my heart, seeping anger, and one day I would revenge it. “One day,” I told Steapa, “I shall gut Ælfric from his crotch to his breastbone and watch him die, but I won’t do it quickly. I won’t pierce his heart. I shall watch him die and piss on him while he struggles. Then I’ll kill his sons.”

“And tonight?” Steapa asked. “Who do you kill tonight?”

“Tonight we take Lundene,” I said.

I could not see his face in the dark, but I sensed that he smiled. “I told Alfred he could trust you,” Steapa said.

It was my turn to smile. Somewhere in Padintune a dog howled and was quieted. “But I’m not sure Alfred can trust me,” I said after a long pause.

“Why?” Steapa asked, puzzled.

“Because in one way I’m a very good Christian,” I said.

“You? A Christian?”

“I love my enemies,” I said.

“The Danes?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t,” he said bleakly. Steapa’s parents had been slaughtered by Danes. I did not respond. I was thinking of destiny. If the three spinners know our fate, then why do we make oaths? Because if we then break an oath, is it treachery? Or is it fate? “So will you fight them tomorrow?” Steapa asked.

“Of course,” I said. “But not in the way Æthelred expects. So I’m disobeying orders, and your orders are to kill me if I do that.”

“I’ll kill you later,” Steapa said.

Æthelred had changed our agreed plan without ever suspecting that I had never intended to keep to it anyway. It was too obvious. How else would an army assault a city, except by trying to draw defenders away from the targeted ramparts? Sigefrid would know our first assault was a feint, and he would leave his garrison in place until he was certain he had identified the real threat, and then we would die under his walls and Lundene would remain a stronghold of the Northmen.

So the only way to capture Lundene was by trickery, stealth and by taking a desperate risk. “What I’m going to do,” I told Steapa, “is wait for Æthelred to leave the island. Then we go back there, and we take two of the ships. It will be dangerous, very, because we have to go through the bridge’s gap in the dark and ships die there even in daylight. But if we can get through then there is an easy way into the old city.”

“I thought there was a wall along the river?”

“There is,” I said, “but it’s broken in one place.” A Roman had built a great house by the river and had cut a small channel beside his house. The channel pierced the wall, breaking it. I assumed the Roman had been wealthy and he had wanted a place to berth his ship and so he had pulled down a stretch of the river wall to make his channel and that was my way into Lundene.

“Why didn’t you tell Alfred?” Steapa asked.

“Alfred can keep a secret,” I said, “but Æthelred can’t. He would have told someone and within two days the Danes would have known what we planned.” And that was true. We had spies and they had spies, and if I had revealed my real intentions then Sigefrid and Erik would have blocked the channel with ships and garrisoned the big house beside the river with men. We would have died on the wharves, and we still might die because I did not know that we could find the gap in the bridge, and if we did find it whether we could shoot through that perilous broken space where the river level dropped and the water foamed. If we missed, if one of the ships was just a half oar’s length too far south or north, then it would be swept onto the jagged pilings and men would be tipped into the river and I would not hear them drown because their armor and weapons would drag them under instantly.

Steapa had been thinking, always a slow process, but now he posed a shrewd question. “Why not land upriver of the bridge?” he suggested. “There must be gates through the wall?”

“There are a dozen gates,” I said, “maybe a score, and Sigefrid will have blocked them all, but the last thing he’ll expect is for ships to try and run the gap in the bridge.”

“Because ships die there?” Steapa said.

“Because ships die there,” I agreed. I had watched it happen once, watched a trading ship run the gap at slack water, and somehow the steersman had veered too far to one side and the broken pilings had ripped the planks from the bottom of his hull. The gap was some forty paces wide and, when the river was calm with neither tide nor wind to churn the water, the gap looked innocent, but it never was. Lundene’s bridge was a killer, and to take Lundene I had to run the bridge.

And if we survived? If we could find the Roman dock and get ashore? Then we would be few and the enemy would be many, and some of us would die in the streets before Æthelred’s force could ever cross the wall. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt and felt the small silver cross that was embedded there. Hild’s gift. A lover’s gift. “Have you heard a cuckoo yet?” I asked Steapa.

“Not yet.”

“It’s time to go,” I said, “unless you want to kill me?”

“Maybe later,” Steapa said, “but for the moment I’ll fight beside you.”

And we would have a fight. That I knew. And I touched my hammer amulet and sent a prayer into the darkness that I would live to see the child in Gisela’s belly.

Then we went back south.

Osric, who had brought me away from Lundene with Father Pyrlig, was one of our shipmasters, and the other was Ralla, the man who had carried my force to ambush the Danes whose corpses I had hanged beside the river. Ralla had negotiated the gap in Lundene’s bridge more times than he could remember. “But never at night,” he told me that night when we returned to the island.

“But it can be done?”

“We’re going to discover that, lord, aren’t we?”

Æthelred had left a hundred men to guard the island where the ships lay and those men were under the command of Egbert, an old warrior whose authority was denoted by a silver chain hanging about his neck, and who challenged me when we unexpectedly returned. He did not trust me and believed I had abandoned my northern attack because I did not want Æthelred to succeed. I needed him to give me men, but the more I pleaded the more he bristled with hostility. My own men were boarding the two ships, wading through the cold water and hauling themselves over the sides. “How do I know you’re not just going back to Coccham?” Egbert asked suspiciously.

“Steapa!” I called. “Tell Egbert what we’re doing.”

“Killing Danes,” Steapa growled from beside a campfire. The flames reflected from his mail coat and from his hard, feral eyes.

“Give me twenty men,” I pleaded with Egbert.

He stared at me, then shook his head. “I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“We have to guard the Lady Æthelflaed,” he said. “Those are the Lord Æthelred’s orders. We’re here to guard her.”

“Then leave twenty men on her ship,” I said, “and give me the rest.”

“I can’t,” Egbert insisted doggedly.

I sighed. “Tatwine would have given me men,” I said. Tatwine had been the commander of the household troops for Æthelred’s father. “I knew Tatwine,” I said.

“I know you did. I remember you.” Egbert spoke curtly and the hidden message in his tone was that he did not like me. As a young man I had served under Tatwine for a few months, and back then I had been brash, ambitious, and arrogant. Egbert plainly thought I was still brash, ambitious, and arrogant, and perhaps he was right.

He turned away and I thought he was dismissing me, but instead he watched as a pale and ghostly shape appeared beyond the campfires. It was Æthelflaed, who had evidently seen our return and had waded ashore wrapped in a white cloak to discover what we did. Her hair was unbound and fell in golden tangles over her shoulders. Father Pyrlig was with her.

“You didn’t go with Æthelred?” I asked, surprised to see the Welsh priest.

“His lordship felt he needed no more advice,” Pyrlig said, “so asked me to stay here and pray for him.”

“He didn’t ask,” Æthelflaed corrected him, “he ordered you to stay and pray for him.”

“He did,” Pyrlig said, “and as you can see, I am dressed for praying.” He was in a mail coat and had his swords strapped at his waist. “And you?” he challenged me. “I thought you were marching to the city’s north?”

“We’re going downriver,” I explained, “and attacking Lundene from the wharf.”

“Can I come?” Æthelflaed asked instantly.

“No.”

She smiled at that curt refusal. “Does my husband know what you’re doing?”

“He’ll find out, my lady.”

She smiled again, then walked to my side and pulled my cloak aside to lean against me. She wrapped my dark cloak over her white one. “I’m cold,” she explained to Egbert, whose face showed surprise and indignation at her behavior.

“We are old friends,” I said to Egbert.

“Very old friends,” Æthelflaed agreed, and she put an arm around my waist and clung to me. Egbert could not see her arm beneath my cloak. I was aware of her golden hair just beneath my beard, and I could feel her thin body shivering. “I think of Uhtred as an uncle,” she told Egbert.

“An uncle who is going to give your husband victory,” I told her, “but I need men. And Egbert won’t give me men.”

“He won’t?” she asked.

“He says he needs all his men to guard you.”

“Give him your best men,” she said to Egbert in a light, pleasant voice.

“My lady,” Egbert said, “my orders are to…”

“You will give him your best men!” Æthelflaed’s voice was suddenly hard as she stepped from beneath my cloak into the harsh light of the campfires. “I am a king’s daughter!” she said arrogantly, “and wife to Mercia’s Ealdorman! And I am demanding that you give Uhtred your best men! Now!”

She had spoken very loudly so that men all across the island were staring at her. Egbert looked offended, but said nothing. He straightened instead and looked stubborn. Pyrlig caught my eye and smiled slyly.

“None of you have the courage to fight alongside Uhtred?” Æthelflaed demanded of the watching men. She was fourteen years old, a slight, pale girl, yet in her voice was the lineage of ancient kings. “My father would want you to show courage tonight!” she went on, “or am I to return to Wintanceaster and tell my father that you sat by the fires while Uhtred fought?” This last question was directed at Egbert.

“Twenty men,” I pleaded with him.

“Give him more!” Æthelflaed said firmly.

“There’s only room in the boats for forty more,” I said.

“Then give him forty!” Æthelflaed said.

“Lady,” Egbert said hesitantly, but stopped when Æthelflaed held up one small hand. She turned to look at me.

“I can trust you, Lord Uhtred?” she asked.

It seemed a strange question from a child I had known nearly all her life and I smiled at it. “You can trust me,” I said lightly.

Her face grew harder and her eyes flinty. Perhaps that was the reflection of the fire from her pupils, but I was suddenly aware that this was far more than a child, she was a king’s daughter. “My father,” she said in a clear voice so that others could hear, “says you are the best warrior in his service. But he does not trust you.”

There was an awkward silence. Egbert cleared his throat and stared at the ground. “I have never let your father down,” I said harshly.

“He fears your loyalty is for sale,” she said.

“He has my oath,” I replied, my voice still harsh.

“And I want it now,” she demanded and held out a slender hand.

“What oath?” I asked.

“That you keep your oath to my father,” Æthelflaed said, “and that you swear loyalty to Saxon over Dane, and that you will fight for Mercia when Mercia asks it.”

“My lady,” I began, appalled at her list of demands.

“Egbert!” Æthelflaed interrupted me. “You will give Lord Uhtred no men unless he swears to serve Mercia while I live.”

“No, lady,” Egbert muttered.

While she lived? Why had she said that? I remember wondering about those words, and I remember, too, thinking that my plan to capture Lundene hung in the balance. Æthelred had stripped me of the forces I needed, and Æthelflaed had the power to restore my numbers, but to win my victory I had to lock myself in yet another oath that I did not want to swear. What did I care for Mercia? But I cared that night about taking men through a bridge of death to prove that I could do it. I cared about reputation, I cared about my name, I cared about fame.

I drew Serpent-Breath, knowing that was why she held out her hand, and I gave the blade to her, hilt first. Then I knelt and I folded my hands around hers that, in turn, were clasped about the hilt of my sword. “I swear it, lady,” I said.

“You swear,” she said, “that you will serve my father faithfully?”

“Yes, lady.”

“And, as I live, you will serve Mercia?”

“As you live, lady,” I said, kneeling in the mud, and wondering what a fool I was. I wanted to be in the north, I wanted to be free of Alfred’s piety, I wanted to be with my friends, yet here I was, swearing loyalty to Alfred’s ambitions and to his golden-haired daughter. “I swear it,” I said, and gave her hands a slight squeeze as a signal of my truthfulness.

“Give him men, Egbert,” Æthelflaed ordered.

He gave me thirty and, to give Egbert his due, he gave me his fit men, the young ones, leaving his older and sick warriors to guard Æthelflaed and the camp. So now I led over seventy men and those men included Father Pyrlig. “Thank you, my lady,” I said to Æthelflaed.

“You could reward me,” she said, and once again sounded childlike, her solemnity gone and her old mischief back.

“How?”

“Take me with you?”

“Never,” I said harshly.

She frowned at my tone and looked up into my eyes. “Are you angry with me?” she asked in a soft voice.

“With myself, lady,” I said and turned away.

“Uhtred!” She sounded unhappy.

“I will keep the oaths, lady,” I said, and I was angry that I had taken them again, but at least they had provided me with seventy men to take a city, seventy men on board two boats that pushed away from the creek into the Temes’s strong current.

I was on board Ralla’s boat, the same ship that we had captured from Jarrel, the Dane whose hanged body had long been reduced to a skeleton. Ralla was at the stern, leaning on the steering-oar. “Not sure we should be doing this, lord,” he said.

“Why not?”

He spat over the side into the black river. “Water’s running too fast. It’ll be spilling through the gap like a waterfall. Even at slack water, lord, that gap can be wicked.”

“Take it straight,” I said, “and pray to whatever god you believe in.”

“If we can even see the gap,” he said gloomily. He peered behind, looking for a glimpse of Osric’s boat, but it was swallowed in the darkness. “I’ve seen it done on a falling tide,” Ralla said, “but that was in daylight, and the river wasn’t in spate.”

“The tide’s falling?” I asked.

“Like a stone,” Ralla said gloomily.

“Then pray,” I said curtly.

I touched the hammer amulet, then the hilt of Serpent-Breath as the boat gathered speed on the surging current. The riverbanks were far off. Here and there was a glimmer of light, evidence of a fire smoldering in a house, while ahead, under the moonless sky, was a dull glow smeared with a black veil, and that, I knew, was the new Saxon Lundene. The glow came from the sullen fires in the town and the veil was the smoke of those fires, and I knew that somewhere beneath that veil Æthelred would be marshalling his men for their advance across the valley of the Fleot and up to the old Roman wall. Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten would know he was there because someone would have run from the new town to warn the old. Danes, Norsemen, and Frisians, even some masterless Saxons, would be rousing themselves and hurrying to the old city’s ramparts.

And we swept down the black river.

No one spoke much. Every man in both boats knew the danger we faced. I edged my way forward between the crouching figures, and Father Pyrlig must have sensed my approach or else a gleam of light reflected from the wolf’s head that served as the silver crest of my helmet because he greeted me before I saw him. “Here, lord,” he said.

He was sitting on the end of a rower’s bench and I stood beside him, my boots splashing in the bilge water. “Have you prayed?” I asked him.

“I haven’t stopped praying,” he said seriously. “I sometimes think God must be tired of my voice. And Brother Osferth here is praying.”

“I’m not a brother,” Osferth said sullenly.

“But your prayers might work better if God thinks you are,” Pyrlig said.

Alfred’s bastard son was crouching by Father Pyrlig. Finan had equipped Osferth with a mail coat that had been mended after some Dane had been belly-gutted by a Saxon spear. He also had a helmet, tall boots, leather gloves, a round shield, and both a long-and a short-sword, so that at least he looked like a warrior. “I’m supposed to send you back to Wintanceaster,” I told him.

“I know.”

“Lord,” Pyrlig reminded Osferth.

“Lord,” Osferth said, though reluctantly.

“I don’t want to send the king your corpse,” I said, “so stay close to Father Pyrlig.”

“Very close, boy,” Pyrlig said, “pretend you love me.”

“Stay behind him,” I ordered Osferth.

“Forget about being my lover,” Pyrlig said hurriedly, “pretend you’re my dog instead.”

“And say your prayers,” I finished. There was no other useful advice I could give Osferth, unless it was to strip off his clothes, swim ashore and go back to his monastery. I had as much faith in his fighting skills as Finan, which meant I had none. Osferth was sour, inept, and clumsy. If it had not been for his dead uncle, Leofric, I would have happily sent him back to Wintanceaster, but Leofric had taken me as a young raw boy and had turned me into a sword warrior and so I would endure Osferth for Leofric’s sake.

We were abreast of the new town now. I could smell the charcoal fires of the smithies, and see the reflected glow of fires flickering deep in alleyways. I looked ahead to where the bridge spanned the river, but all was black there.

“I need to see the gap,” Ralla called from the steering platform.

I worked my way aft again, stepping blindly between the crouching men.

“If I can’t see it,” Ralla heard me coming, “then I can’t try it.”

“How close are we?”

“Too close.” There was panic in his voice.

I clambered up beside him. I could see the old city now, the city on the hills surrounded by its Roman wall. I could see it because the fires in the city made a dull glow and Ralla was right. We were close.

“We have to make a decision,” he said. “We’ll have to land upriver of the bridge.”

“They’ll see us if we land there,” I said. The Danes would be certain to have men guarding the river wall upstream of the bridge.

“So you either die there with a sword in your hand,” Ralla said brutally, “or you drown.”

I stared ahead and saw nothing. “Then I choose the sword,” I said dully, seeing the death of my desperate idea.

Ralla took a deep breath to shout at the oarsmen, but the shout never came because, quite suddenly and far ahead, out where the Temes spread and emptied into the sea, a scrap of yellow showed. Not bright yellow, not a wasp’s yellow, but a sour, leprous, dark yellow that leaked through a rent in the clouds. It was dawn beyond the sea, a dark dawn, a reluctant dawn, but it was light, and Ralla neither shouted nor turned the steering-oar to take us into the bank. Instead he touched the amulet at his neck and kept the boat on its headlong course. “Crouch down, lord,” he said, “and hold hard to something.”

The boat was quivering like a horse before battle. We were helpless now, caught in the river’s grip. The water was sweeping down from far inland, fed by spring rains and subsiding floods, and where it met the bridge it piled itself in great white ragged heaps. It seethed, roared, and foamed between the stone pilings, but in the bridge’s center, where the gap was, it poured in a sheeting, gleaming stream that fell a man’s height to the new water level beyond where the river swirled and grumbled before becoming calm again. I could hear the water fighting the bridge, hear the thunder of it loud as wind-driven breakers assaulting a beach.

And Ralla steered for the gap, which he could just see outlined against the dull yellow of the broken eastern sky. Behind us was blackness, though once I did see that sour morning light reflect from the water-glossed stem of Osric’s ship and I knew he was close behind us.

“Hold hard!” Ralla called to our crew, and the ship was hissing, still quivering, and she seemed to race faster, and I saw the bridge come toward us and it loomed black over us as I crouched beside the ship’s side and gripped the timber hard.

And then we were in the gap, and I had the sensation of falling as though we had tipped into an abyss between the worlds. The noise was deafening. It was the noise of water fighting stone, water tearing, water breaking, water pouring, a noise to fill the skies, a noise louder even than Thor’s thunder, and the ship gave a lurch and I thought she must have struck and would slew sideways and tip us to our deaths, but somehow she straightened and flew on. There was blackness above, the blackness of the stub ends of the bridge’s broken timbers, and then the noise doubled and spray flew across the deck and we were slamming downward, ship tipping, and there was a crack like the gates of Odin’s hall banging shut and I was spilled forward as water cascaded over us. We had struck stone, I thought, and I waited to drown and I even remembered to grip Serpent-Breath’s hilt so I would die with my sword in my hand, but the ship staggered up and I understood the crash had been the bows striking the river beyond the bridge and that we were alive.

“Row!” Ralla shouted. “Oh you lucky bastards, row!”

Water was deep in the bilge, but we were afloat, and the eastern sky was ragged with rents and in their shadowy light we could see the city, and see the place where the wall was broken. “And the rest,” Ralla said with pride in his voice, “is up to you, lord.”

“It’s up to the gods,” I said, and looked behind to see Osric’s boat fighting up from the maelstrom where the river fell. So both our ships had lived, and the current was sweeping us downstream of the place we wished to land, but the oarsmen turned us and fought against the water so that we came to the wharf from the east, and that was good, because anyone watching would assume we had rowed upriver from Beamfleot. They would think we were Danes who had come to reinforce the garrison that now readied itself for Æthelred’s assault.

There was a large sea-going ship moored in the dock where we wanted to land. I could see her clearly because torches blazed on the white wall of the mansion the dock served. The ship was a fine thing, her stem and stern rearing high and proud. There were no beast-heads on the ship, for no Northman would let his carved heads frighten the spirit of a friendly land. A lone man was on board the ship and he watched us approach. “Who are you?” he shouted.

“Ragnar Ragnarson!” I called back. I heaved him a line woven from walrus hide. “Has the fighting started?”

“Not yet, lord,” he said. He took the line and twisted it around the other ship’s stem. “And when it does they’ll get slaughtered!”

“We’re not too late, then?” I said. I staggered as our ship struck the other, then stepped over the sheer-strakes onto one of the empty rowers’ benches. “Whose ship is this?” I asked the man.

“Sigefrid’s, lord. The Wave-Tamer.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said, then turned back. “Ashore!” I shouted in English and watched as my men retrieved shields and weapons from the flooded bilge. Osric’s ship came in behind us, low in the water, and I realized she had been half swamped as she shot the bridge’s gap. Men began clambering onto the Wave-Tamer and the Northman who had taken my line saw the crosses hanging from their necks.

“You…” he began, and found he had nothing more to say. He half turned to run ashore, but I had blocked his escape. There was shock on his face, shock and puzzlement.

“Put your hand on your sword hilt,” I said, drawing Serpent-Breath.

“Lord,” he said, as if about to plead for his life, but then he understood his life was ending because I could not leave him alive. I could not let him go, because then he would warn Sigefrid of our arrival, and if I had tied his hands and feet and left him aboard the Wave-Tamer then some other person might have found and released him. He knew all that, and his face changed from puzzlement to defiance and, instead of just gripping his sword’s hilt, he began to pull the weapon free of its scabbard.

And died.

Serpent-Breath took him in the throat. Hard and fast. I felt her tip pierce muscle and tough tissue. Saw the blood. Saw his arm falter and the blade drop back into its scabbard, and I reached out with my left hand to grip his sword hand and hold it over his hilt. I made sure that he kept hold of his sword as he died, for then he would be taken to the feasting hall of the dead. I held his hand tight and let him collapse onto my chest where his blood ran down my mail. “Go to Odin’s hall,” I told him softly, “and save a place for me.”

He could not speak. He choked as blood spilled down his windpipe.

“My name is Uhtred,” I said, “and one day I will feast with you in the corpse-hall and we shall laugh together and drink together and be friends.”

I let his body drop, then knelt and found his amulet, Thor’s hammer, which I cut from his neck with Serpent-Breath. I put the hammer in a pouch, cleaned my sword’s tip on the dead man’s cloak, then slid the blade back into her fleece-lined scabbard. I took my shield from Sihtric, my servant.

“Let’s go ashore,” I said, “and take a city.”

Because it was time to fight.

FIVE

Then all, suddenly, was quiet.

Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled, and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city, and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet. Dawn was now a paler yellow, half concealed by dark clouds.

“And now?” Finan appeared beside me. Steapa loomed beside him, but said nothing.

“We go to the gate,” I said, “Ludd’s Gate.” But I did not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to be back at Coccham with Gisela. It was not cowardice. Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear. It was tiredness that made me reluctant to move, but not a physical tiredness. I was young then and the wounds of war had yet to sap my strength. I think I was tired of Wessex, tired of fighting for a king I did not like, and, standing on that Lundene wharf, I did not understand why I fought for him. And now, looking back over the years, I wonder if that lassitude was caused by the man I had just killed and whom I had promised to join in Odin’s hall. I believe the men we kill are inseparably joined to us. Their life threads, turned ghostly, are twisted by the Fates around our own thread and their burden stays to haunt us till the sharp blade cuts our life at last. I felt remorse for his death.

“Are you going to sleep?” Father Pyrlig asked me. He had joined Finan.

“We’re going to the gate,” I said.

It seemed like a dream. I was walking, but my mind was somewhere else. This, I thought, was how the dead walked our world, for the dead do come back. Not as Bjorn had pretended to come back, but in the darkest nights, when no one alive can see them, they wander our world. They must, I thought, only half see it, as if the places they knew were veiled in a winter mist, and I wondered if my father was watching me. Why did I think that? I had not been fond of my father, nor he of me, and he had died when I was young, but he had been a warrior. The poets sang of him. And what would he think of me? I was walking through Lundene instead of attacking Bebbanburg, and that was what I should have done. I should have gone north. I should have spent my whole hoard of silver on hiring men and leading them in an assault across Bebbanburg’s neck of land and up across the walls to the high hall where we could make great slaughter. Then I could live in my own home, my father’s home, forever. I could live near Ragnar and be far from Wessex.

Except my spies, for I employed a dozen in Northumbria, had told me what my uncle had done to my fortress. He had closed the landside gates. He had taken them away altogether and in their place were ramparts, newly built, high and reinforced with stone, and now, if a man wished to get inside the fortress, he needed to follow a path that led to the northern end of the crag on which the fortress stood. And every step of that path would be under those high walls, under attack, and then, at the northern end, where the sea broke and sucked, there was a small gate. Beyond that gate was a steep path leading to another wall and another gate. Bebbanburg had been sealed, and to take it I would need an army beyond even the reach of my hoarded silver.

“Be lucky!” a woman’s voice startled me from my thoughts. The folk of the old city were awake and they saw us pass and took us for Danes because I had ordered my men to hide their crosses.

“Kill the Saxon bastards!” another voice shouted.

Our footsteps echoed from the high houses that were all at least three stories tall. Some had beautiful stonework over their bricks and I thought how the world had once been filled with these houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole world rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve. “Thirty years,” I said aloud.

“Is that how old you are?” Father Pyrlig asked me.

“It’s how long a hall lasts,” I said, “unless you keep repairing it. Our world is falling apart, father.”

“My God, you’re gloomy,” Pyrlig said, amused.

“And I watch Alfred,” I went on, “and see how he tries to tidy our world. Lists! Lists and parchment! He’s like a man putting wattle hurdles in the face of a flood.”

“Brace a hurdle well,” Steapa was listening to our conversation and now intervened, “and it’ll turn a stream.”

“And better to fight a flood than drown in it,” Pyrlig commented.

“Look at that!” I said, pointing to the carved stone head of a beast that was fixed to a brick wall. The beast was like none I had ever seen, a shaggy great cat, and its open mouth was poised above a chipped stone basin suggesting that water had once flowed from mouth to bowl. “Could we make that?” I asked bitterly.

“There are craftsmen who can make such things,” Pyrlig said.

“Then where are they?” I demanded angrily, and I thought that all these things, the carvings and bricks and marble, had been made before Pyrlig’s religion came to the island. Was that the reason for the world’s decay? Were the true gods punishing us because so many men worshipped the nailed god? I did not make the suggestion to Pyrlig, but kept silent. The houses loomed above us, except where one had collapsed into a heap of rubble. A dog rooted along a wall, stopped to cock its leg, then turned a snarl on us. A baby cried in a house. Our footsteps echoed from the walls. Most of my men were silent, wary of the ghosts they believed inhabited these relics of an older time.

The baby wailed again, louder. “Be a young mother in there,” Rypere said happily. Rypere was his nickname and meant “thief,” and he was a skinny Angle from the north, clever and sly, and he at least was not thinking of ghosts.

“I should stick to goats, if I were you,” Clapa said, “they don’t mind your stink.” Clapa was a Dane, one who had taken an oath to me and served me loyally. He was a hulking great boy raised on a farm, strong as an ox, ever cheerful. He and Rypere were friends who never stopped goading each other.

“Quiet!” I said before Rypere could make a retort. I knew we had to be getting close to the western walls. At the place where we had come ashore, the city climbed the wide terraced hill to the palace at the top, but that hill was flattening now, which meant we were nearing the valley of the Fleot. Behind us the sky was lightening to morning and I knew Æthelred would think I had failed to make my feint attack just before the dawn and that belief, I feared, might have persuaded him to abandon his own assault. Perhaps he was already leading his men back to the island? In which case we would be alone, surrounded by our enemies, and doomed.

“God help us,” Pyrlig suddenly said.

I held up my hand to stop my men because, in front of us, in the last stretch of the street before it passed under the stone arch called Ludd’s Gate, was a crowd of men. Armed men. Men whose helmets, ax blades, and spear-points caught and reflected the dull light of the clouded and newly-risen sun.

“God help us,” Pyrlig said again and made the sign of the cross. “There must be two hundred of them.”

“More,” I said. There were so many men that they could not all stand in the street, forcing some into the alleyways on either side. All the men we could see were facing the gate, and that made me understand what the enemy was doing and my mind cleared at that instant as if a fog had lifted. There was a courtyard to my left and I pointed through its gateway. “In there,” I ordered.

I remember a priest, a clever fellow, visiting me to ask for my memories of Alfred, which he wanted to put in a book. He never did, because he died of the flux shortly after he saw me, but he was a shrewd man and more forgiving than most priests, and I recall how he asked me to describe the joy of battle. “My wife’s poets will tell you,” I said to him.

“Your wife’s poets never fought,” he pointed out, “and they just take songs about other heroes and change the names.”

“They do?”

“Of course they do,” he had said, “wouldn’t you, lord?”

I liked that priest and so I talked to him, and the answer I eventually gave him was that the joy of battle was the delight of tricking the other side. Of knowing what they will do before they do it, and having the response ready so that, when they make the move that is supposed to kill you, they die instead. And at that moment, in the damp gloom of the Lundene street, I knew what Sigefrid was doing and knew too, though he did not know it, that he was giving me Ludd’s Gate.

The courtyard belonged to a stone-merchant. His quarries were Lundene’s Roman buildings and piles of dressed masonry were stacked against the walls ready to be shipped to Frankia. Still more stones were heaped against the gate that led through the river wall to the wharves. Sigefrid, I thought, must have feared an assault from the river and had blocked every gate through the walls west of the bridge, but he had never dreamed anyone would shoot the bridge to the unguarded eastern side. But we had, and my men were hidden in the courtyard while I stood in the entrance and watched the enemy throng at Ludd’s Gate.

“We’re hiding?” Osferth asked me. His voice had a whine to it, as if he were perpetually complaining.

“There are hundreds of men between us and the gate,” I explained patiently, “and we are too few to cut through them.”

“So we failed,” he said, not as a question, but as a petulant statement.

I wanted to hit him, but managed to stay patient. “Tell him,” I said to Pyrlig, “what is happening.”

“God in his wisdom,” the Welshman explained, “has persuaded Sigefrid to lead an attack out of the city! They’re going to open that gate, boy, and stream across the marshes, and hack their way into Lord Æthelred’s men. And as most of Lord Æthelred’s men are from the fyrd, and most of Sigefrid’s are real warriors, then we all know what’s going to happen!” Father Pyrlig touched his mail coat where the wooden cross was hidden. “Thank you, God!”

Osferth stared at the priest. “You mean,” he said after a pause, “that Lord Æthelred’s men will be slaughtered?”

“Some of them are going to die!” Pyrlig allowed cheerfully, “and I hope to God they die in grace, boy, or they’ll never hear that heavenly choir, will they?”

“I hate choirs,” I growled.

“No, you don’t,” Pyrlig said. “You see, boy,” he looked back to Osferth, “once they’ve gone out of the gate, then there’ll only be a handful of men guarding it. So that’s when we attack! And Sigefrid will suddenly find himself with an enemy in front and another one behind, and that predicament can make a man wish he’d stayed in bed.”

A shutter opened in one of the high windows over the courtyard. A young woman stared out at the lightening sky, then stretched her hands high and yawned hugely. The gesture stretched her linen shift tight across her breasts, then she saw my men beneath her and instinctively clutched her arms to her chest. She was clothed, but must have felt naked. “Oh, thank you dear Savior for another sweet mercy,” Pyrlig said, watching her.

“But if we take the gate,” Osferth said, worrying at the problems he saw, “the men left in the city will attack us.”

“They will,” I agreed.

“And Sigefrid…” he began.

“Will probably turn back to slaughter us,” I finished his sentence for him.

“So?” he said, then checked, because he saw nothing but blood and death in his future.

“It all depends,” I said, “on my cousin. If he comes to our aid then we should win. If he doesn’t?” I shrugged, “then keep good hold of your sword.”

A roar sounded from Ludd’s Gate and I knew it had been swung open and that men were streaming down the road that led to the Fleot. Æthelred, if he was still readying his assault, would see them coming and have a choice to make. He could stand and fight in the new Saxon town, or else run. I hoped he would stand. I did not like him, but I never saw a lack of courage in him. I did see a great deal of stupidity, which suggested he would probably welcome a fight.

It took a long time for Sigefrid’s men to get through the gate. I watched from the shadows at the courtyard’s entrance and reckoned at least four hundred men were leaving the city. Æthelred had over three hundred good troops, most of them from Alfred’s household, but the rest of his force was from the fyrd and would never stand against a hard, savage attack. The advantage lay with Sigefrid whose men were warm, rested, and fed, while Æthelred’s troops had stumbled through the night and would be tired.

“The sooner we do it,” I said to no one in particular, “the better.”

“Go now, then?” Pyrlig suggested.

“We just walk to the gate!” I shouted to my men. “You don’t run! Look as if you belong here!”

Which is what we did.

And so, with a stroll down a Lundene street, that bitter fight began.

There were no more than thirty men left at Ludd’s Gate. Some were sentries posted to guard the archway, but most were idlers who had climbed to the rampart to watch Sigefrid’s sally. A big man with one leg was climbing the uneven stone steps on his crutches. He stopped halfway and turned to watch our approach. “If you hurry, lord,” he shouted to me, “you can join them!”

He called me lord because he saw a lord. He saw a warrior lord.

A handful of men could go to war as I did. They were chieftains, earls, kings, lords; the men who had killed enough other men to amass the fortune needed to buy mail, helmet, and weapons. And not just any mail. My coat was of Frankish make and would cost a man more than the price of a warship. Sihtric had polished the metal with sand so that it shone like silver. The hem of the coat was at my knees and was hung with thirty-eight hammers of Thor; some made of bone, some of ivory, some of silver, but all had once hung about the necks of brave enemies I had killed in battle, and I wore the amulets so that when I came to the corpse-hall the former owners would know me, greet me, and drink ale with me.

I wore a cloak of wool dyed black on which Gisela had embroidered a white lightning flash that ran from my neck to my heels. The cloak could be an encumbrance in battle, but I wore it now, for it made me look larger, and I was already taller and broader than most men. Thor’s hammer hung at my neck, and that alone was a poor thing, a miserable amulet made of iron that rusted constantly, and all the scraping and cleaning had worn it thin and misshapen over the years, but I had taken that little iron hammer with my fists when I was a boy and I loved it. I wear it to this day.

My helmet was a glorious thing, polished to an eye-blinding shine, inlaid with silver and crested with a silver wolf’s head. The face-plates were decorated with silver spirals. That helmet alone told an enemy I was a man of substance. If a man killed me and took that helmet he would be instantly rich, but my enemies would rather have taken my arm rings, which, like the Danes, I wore over my mail sleeves. My rings were silver and gold, and there were so many that some had to be worn above my elbows. They spoke of men killed and wealth hoarded. My boots were of thick leather and had iron plates sewn around them to deflect the spear thrust that comes under the shield. The shield itself, rimmed with iron, was painted with a wolf’s head, my badge, and at my left hip hung Serpent-Breath and at my right Wasp-Sting, and I strode toward the gate with the sun rising behind me to throw my long shadow on the filth-strewn street.

I was a warlord in my glory, I had come to kill, and no one at the gate knew it.

They saw us coming, but assumed we were Danes. Most of the enemy were on the high rampart, but five were standing in the open gate and all were watching Sigefrid’s force that streamed down the brief steep slope to the Fleot. The Saxon settlement was not far beyond and I hoped Æthelred was still there. “Steapa,” I called, still far enough from the gate so that no one there could hear me speak English, “take your men and kill those turds in the archway.”

Steapa’s skull face grinned. “You want me to close the gate?” he asked.

“Leave it open,” I said. I wanted to lure Sigefrid back to prevent his hardened men getting among Æthelred’s fyrd, and if the gate were open Sigefrid would be more inclined to attack us.

The gate was built between two massive stone bastions, each with its own stairway and I remembered how, when I was a child, Father Beocca had once described the Christian heaven to me. It would have crystal stairs, he had claimed, and enthusiastically described a great flight of glassy steps climbing to a white-hung throne of gold where his god sat. Angels would surround that throne, each brighter than the sun, while the saints, as he had called the dead Christians, would cluster about the stairs and sing. It sounded dull then and still does. “In the next world,” I told Pyrlig, “we will all be gods.”

He looked at me with surprise, wondering where that statement had come from. “We will be with God,” he corrected me.

“In your heaven, maybe,” I said, “but not in mine.”

“There is only one heaven, Lord Uhtred.”

“Then let mine be that one heaven,” I said, and I knew at that moment that my truth was the truth, and that Pyrlig, Alfred, and all the other Christians were wrong. They were wrong. We did not go toward the light, we slid from it. We went to chaos. We went to death and to death’s heaven, and I began to shout as we drew nearer the enemy. “A heaven for men! A heaven for warriors! A heaven where swords shine! A heaven for brave men! A heaven of savagery! A heaven of corpse-gods! A heaven of death!”

They all stared at me, friend and enemy alike. They stared and they thought me mad, and perhaps I was mad as I climbed the right-hand stairway where the man on crutches gazed at me. I kicked one of his crutches away so that he fell. The crutch clattered down the stairs and one of my men booted it back to the ground. “Death’s heaven!” I screamed, and every man on the rampart had his eyes on me and still they thought I was a friend because I shouted my weird war cry in Danish.

I smiled behind my twin face-plates, then drew Serpent-Breath. Beneath me, out of my sight, Steapa and his men had begun their killing.

Not ten minutes before I had been in a waking dream, and now the madness had come. I should have waited for my men to climb the stairs and form a shield wall, but some impulse drove me forward. I was screaming still, but screaming my own name now, and Serpent-Breath was singing her hunger-song and I was a lord of war.

The happiness of battle. The ecstasy. It is not just deceiving an enemy, but feeling like a god. I had once tried to explain it to Gisela and she had touched my face with her long fingers and smiled. “It’s better than this?” she had asked.

“The same,” I had said.

But it is not the same. In battle a man risks all to gain reputation. In bed he risks nothing. The joy is comparable, but the joy of a woman is fleeting, while reputation is forever. Men die, women die, all die, but reputation lives after a man, and that was why I screamed my name as Serpent-Breath took her first soul. He was a tall man with a battered helmet and a long-bladed spear that he instinctively thrust at me and, just as instinctively, I turned his lunge away with my shield and put Serpent-Breath into his throat. There was a man to my right and I shoulder-charged him, driving him down, and stamped on his groin while my shield took a sword swing from my left. I stepped over the man whose groin I had pulped and the rampart’s protective wall was on my right now, where I wanted it, and ahead of me was the enemy.

I drove into them. “Uhtred!” I was shouting, “Uhtred of Bebbanburg!”

I was inviting death. By attacking alone I let the enemy get behind me, but at that moment I was immortal. Time had slowed so that the enemy moved like snails and I was fast as the lightning on my cloak. I was shouting still as Serpent-Breath lunged into a man’s eye, driving hard till the bone of his socket stopped her thrust, and then I swept her left to slam down a sword coming at my face, and my shield lifted to take an ax blow, and Serpent-Breath dropped and I pushed her hard forward to pierce the leather jerkin of the man whose sword I had parried. I twisted her so the blade would not be seized by his belly while she gouged his blood and guts, and then I stepped left and rammed the iron boss of the shield at the axman.

He staggered back. Serpent-Breath came from the swordsman’s belly and flew wide right to crash against another sword. I followed her, still screaming, and saw the terror on that enemy’s face, and terror on an enemy breeds cruelty. “Uhtred,” I shouted, and stared at him, and he saw death coming, and he tried to back from me, but other men came behind to block his retreat and I was smiling as I slashed Serpent-Breath across his face. Blood sprayed in the dawn, and the backswing sliced his throat and two men pushed past him and I parried one with the sword and the other with my shield.

Those two men were no fools. They came with their shields touching and their only ambition was to push me back against the rampart and hold me there, pinned by their shields, so that I could not use Serpent-Breath. And once they had trapped me they would let other men come to jab me with blades until I lost too much blood to stand. Those two knew how to kill me, and they came to do it.

But I was laughing. I was laughing because I knew what they planned, and they seemed so slow and I rammed my own shield forward to crash against theirs and they thought they had trapped me because I could not hope to push two men away. They crouched behind their shields and heaved forward and I just stepped back, snatching my own shield backward so that they stumbled forward as my resistance vanished. Their shields were slightly lowered as they stumbled and Serpent-Breath flickered like a viper’s tongue so that her bloodied tip smashed into the forehead of the man on my left. I felt his thick bone break, saw his eyes glaze, heard the crash of his dropped shield, and I swept her to the right and the second man parried. He rammed his shield at me, hoping to unbalance me, but just then there was a mighty shout from my left. “Christ Jesus and Alfred!” It was Father Pyrlig, and behind him the wide bastion was now swarming with my men. “You damned heathen fool,” Pyrlig shouted at me.

I laughed. Pyrlig’s sword cut into my opponent’s arm, and Serpent-Breath beat down his shield. I remember he looked at me then. He had a fine helmet with raven wings fixed to its sides. His beard was golden, his eyes blue, and in those eyes was the knowledge of his imminent death as he tried to lift his sword with a wounded arm.

“Hold tight to your sword,” I told him. He nodded.

Pyrlig killed him, though I did not see it. I was moving past the man to attack the remaining enemy and beside me Clapa was swinging a huge ax so violently that he was as much a danger to our side as to the enemy, but no enemy wanted to face the two of us. They were fleeing along the ramparts and the gate was ours.

I leaned on the low outer wall and immediately stood upright because the stones shifted under my weight. The masonry was crumbling. I slapped the loose stonework and laughed aloud for joy. Sihtric grinned at me. He had a bloodied sword. “Any amulets, lord?” he asked.

“That one,” I pointed to the man whose helmet was decorated with raven wings, “he died well, I’ll take his.”

Sihtric stooped to find the man’s hammer-image. Beyond him Osferth was staring at the half-dozen dead men who lay in splats of blood across the stones. He was carrying a spear that had a reddened tip. “You killed someone?” I asked him.

He looked at me wide-eyed, then nodded. “Yes, lord.”

“Good,” I said and jerked my head toward the sprawling corpses. “Which one?”

“It wasn’t here, lord,” he said. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then looked back at the steps we had climbed. “It was over there, lord.”

“On the steps?”

“Yes,” he said.

I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Tell me,” I said at last, “did he threaten you?”

“He was an enemy, lord.”

“What did he do,” I asked, “wave his one crutch at you?”

“He,” Osferth began, then appeared to run out of words. He stared down at a man I had killed, then frowned. “Lord?”

“Yes?”

“You told us it was death to leave the shield wall.”

I stooped to clean Serpent-Breath’s blade on a dead man’s cloak. “So?”

“You left the shield wall, lord,” Osferth said, almost reprovingly.

I straightened and touched my arm rings. “You live,” I told him harshly, “by obeying the rules. You make a reputation, boy, by breaking them. But you do not make a reputation by killing cripples.” I spat those last words, then turned to see that Sigefrid’s men had crossed the River Fleot, but had now become aware of the commotion behind them and had stopped to stare back at the gate.

Pyrlig appeared beside me. “Let’s get rid of this rag,” he said, and I saw there was a banner hanging from the wall. Pyrlig hauled it up and showed me Sigefrid’s raven badge. “We’ll let them know,” Pyrlig said, “that the city has a new master.” He hauled up his mail coat and pulled out a banner that had been folded and tucked into his waistband. He shook it loose to reveal a black cross on a dull white field. “Praise God,” Pyrlig said, then dropped the banner over the wall, securing it by weighting its top edge with dead men’s weapons. Now Sigefrid would know that Ludd’s Gate was lost. The Christian banner was flaunted in his face.

Yet, for the next few moments, things were quiet. I suppose Sigefrid’s men were astonished by what had happened and were recovering from that surprise. They were no longer moving toward the new Saxon town, but were still staring back at the cross-hung gate, while inside the city groups of men gathered in the streets and gazed up at us.

I was staring toward the new town. I could see no sign of Æthelred’s men. There was a wooden palisade cresting the low slope where the Saxon town was built and it was possible Æthelred’s troops were behind the fence that had decayed in places and was entirely missing in others.

“If Æthelred doesn’t come,” Pyrlig said softly.

“Then we’re dead,” I finished the remark for him. To my left the river slid gray as misery toward the broken bridge and distant sea. Gulls were white on the gray. Far off, on the southern bank, I could see a few hovels where smoke rose. That was Wessex. In front of me, where Sigefrid’s men remained motionless, was Mercia, while behind me, north of the river, was East Anglia.

“Do we shut the gate?” Pyrlig asked.

“No,” I said. “I told Steapa to leave it open.”

“You did?”

“We want Sigefrid to attack us,” I said, and I thought that if Æthelred had abandoned his attack then I would die in the gate where the three kingdoms met. I still could not see Æthelred’s force, yet I was relying on my cousin’s men to give us victory. If I could tempt Sigefrid’s warriors back to the gate, and hold them there, then Æthelred could assail them from behind. That was why I had to leave the gate open, as an invitation to Sigefrid. If I had shut it then he could have used another entrance to the Roman city, and his men would not be exposed to my cousin’s assault.

The more immediate problem was that the Danes who had stayed in the city were at last recovering from their surprise. Some were in the streets while others gathered on the walls either side of Ludd’s Gate. The walls were lower than the gate’s bastion, which meant any attack on us had to be made up the narrow stone steps which climbed from wall to bastion. Each of those steps would need five men to hold them, as would the twin stairways climbing from the street. I thought about abandoning the bastion’s top, but if the fight went badly in the archway, then the high rampart was our best refuge. “You’ll have twenty men,” I told Pyrlig, “to hold this bastion. And you can have him as well,” I nodded toward Osferth. I did not want Alfred’s cripple-killing son in the arch below where the fighting would be fiercest. It was down there that we would make two shield walls, one facing into the city and the other looking out toward the Fleot, and there the shield walls would clash, and there, I thought, we would die because I still could not see Æthelred’s army.

I was tempted to run away. It would have been simple enough to have retreated the way we had come, thrusting aside the enemy in the streets. We could have taken Sigefrid’s boat, the Wave-Tamer, and used her to cross to the West Saxon bank. But I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, stuffed full of warrior pride, and I had sworn to take Lundene. We stayed.

Fifty of us went down the stairways and filled the gate. Twenty men faced into the city while the rest faced out toward Sigefrid. Inside the gate arch there was just room for eight men to stand abreast with their shields touching and so we made our twin shield walls under the shadows of the stone. Steapa commanded the twenty, while I stood in the front rank of the wall looking west.

I left the shield wall and walked a few paces toward the Fleot valley. The small river, fouled by the tanners’ pits upstream, ran dirty and sluggish toward the Temes. Beyond the river Sigefrid, Haesten, and Erik had at last turned their force around and what had been their rearmost ranks of northern warriors were now wading back across the shallow Fleot to thrust my little force aside.

I stood on their skyline. The cloud-veiled sun was behind me, but its pale light would be reflecting from the silver of my helmet and from the smoky sheen of Serpent-Breath’s blade. I had drawn her again, and now I stood with sword held out to my right and shield to my left. I stood above them, a lord in glory, a man in mail, a warrior inviting warriors to fight, and I saw no friendly troops on the farther hill.

And if Æthelred had gone, I thought, then we would die.

I gripped Serpent-Breath’s hilt. I stared at Sigefrid’s men, then clashed Serpent-Breath’s blade against my shield. I beat her three times and the sound echoed from the walls behind me, and then I turned and went back to my small shield wall.

And, with a roar of anger and the howling of men who see victory, Sigefrid’s army came to kill us.

A poet should have written the tale of that fight.

That is what poets are for.

My present wife, who is a fool, pays poets to sing of Christ Jesus, who is her god, but her poets falter into embarrassed silence when I limp into the hall. They know scores of songs about their saints, and they sing melancholy chants about the day their god was nailed to the cross, but when I am present they sing the real poems, those poems that the clever priest told me had been written about other men whose names had been taken out so mine could be inserted.

They are poems about slaughter, poems about warriors, real poems.

Warriors defend the home, they defend children, they defend women, they defend the harvest, and they kill the enemies who come to steal those things. Without warriors the land would be a waste place, desolate and full of laments. Yet a warrior’s real reward is not the silver and gold he can wear on his arms, but his reputation, and that is why there are poets. Poets tell the tales of the men who defend the land and kill a land’s enemies. That is what poets are for, yet there is no poem about the fight in Ludd’s Gate of Lundene.

There is a poem sung in what used to be Mercia that tells of Lord Æthelred’s capture of Lundene, and it is a fine poem, yet it does not mention my name, nor Steapa’s name, nor Pyrlig’s name, nor the names of the men who really fought that day. You would think, listening to that poem, that Æthelred came and those whom the poet calls “the heathen” just ran.

But it was not like that.

It was not like that at all.

I say that the Northmen came in a rush, and they did, but Sigefrid was no fool when it came to a fight. He could see how few of us blocked that gateway and he knew that if he could break my shield wall quickly then we would all die under that old Roman arch.

I had gone back to my troops. My shield overlapped the shields of the men to my left and right, and it was just as I set myself, ready for their charge, that I saw what Sigefrid planned.

His men had not just been staring at Ludd’s Gate, but had been reorganized so that eight warriors had been placed in the van of his attack. Four of them carried massive long spears that needed two hands to hold level. Those four had no shields, but next to each spearman was a massive warrior armed with shield and ax, and behind them were more men with shields, spears, and long-swords. I knew just what was about to happen. The four men would come at a run and hammer their spears into four of our shields. The weight of the spears and the power of the charge would drive four of us into the rank behind, and then the axmen would strike. They would not try to batter our shields into splinters, but would instead widen the gaps the four spearmen had made, hook and pull down the shields of our second rank, and so expose us to the long weapons of the men following the ax-warriors. Sigefrid had only one ambition, and that was to break our wall fast, and I had no doubt that the eight men were not only trained to break a shield wall quickly, but had done it before.

“Brace yourselves!” I shouted, though it was a pointless shout. My men knew what they had to do. They had to stand and die. That was what they had sworn in their oaths to me.

And I knew we would die unless Æthelred came. The power of Sigefrid’s attack would hammer into our shield wall and I had no spears long enough to counter the four that were coming. We could only try to stand fast, but we were outnumbered and the enemy’s confidence was plain. They were shouting insults, promising us death, and death was coming.

“Close the gate, lord?” Cerdic, standing beside me, suggested nervously.

“Too late,” I said.

And the attack came.

The four spearmen screamed as they ran at us. Their weapons were as big as oar shafts and had spearheads the size of short-swords. They held the spears low and I knew they aimed to strike the lower part of our shields to tip the upper rims forward so the axmen could hook more easily and thus strip our defense in an instant.

And I knew it would work because the men attacking us were Sigefrid’s breakers of shield walls. This was what they had trained to do, and had done, and the corpse-hall must have been full of their victims. They screamed their incoherent challenge as they ran at us. I could see their distorted faces. Eight men, big men, big-bearded and mail-coated, warriors to fear, and I braced my shield and crouched slightly, hoping a spear would strike the heavy metal boss in the shield’s center. “Push against us,” I called to my second rank.

I could see one of the spears was aimed at my shield. If it struck low enough then my shield would be tilted forward and the axman would strike down with his big blade. Death in a spring morning, and so I put my left leg against the shield, hoping that would stop the shield being driven inward, but I suspected the spear would shatter the limewood anyway and the blade would gouge into my groin. “Brace yourselves!” I shouted again.

And the spears came for us. I saw the spearman grimacing as he readied to hurl his weight against my shield. And that crash of metal on wood was just a heartbeat away when Pyrlig struck instead.

I did not know what happened at first. I was waiting for the spear’s blow and readying to parry an ax blow with Serpent-Breath, when something fell from the sky to slam into the attackers. The long spears dropped and their blades gouged the roadway just paces in front of me, and the eight men staggered, all cohesion and impetus gone. At first I thought two of Pyrlig’s men had jumped from the gate’s high rampart, but then I saw that the Welshman had hurled two corpses from the bastion’s top. The bodies, both of big men, were still dressed in mail and their weight slammed onto the spear shafts, driving the weapons down and causing chaos in the enemy’s front rank. One moment they had been in line, threatening, and now they were stumbling on corpses.

I moved without thinking. Serpent-Breath hissed in a backswing and her blade crashed into an axman’s helmet and I sawed her back, seeing blood show through the broken metal. That axman went down as I slammed my shield’s heavy boss into a spearman’s face and felt his bones collapse.

“Shield wall!” I shouted, stepping back.

Finan had gone forward like me and had killed another spearman. The road was obstructed now by three corpses and at least one stunned man, and as I backed toward the gate’s arch, two more bodies were hurled from the bastion. The corpses thumped heavily on the roadway, bounced, then lay as extra stumbling blocks to Sigefrid’s advance, and it was then that I saw Sigefrid.

He was in the second rank, a baleful figure in his thick bear cloak. That fur alone could stop most sword blows, and beneath it he wore shining mail. He was roaring at his men to advance, but the sudden corpse fall had checked them. “Forward!” Sigefrid bellowed, and pushed his way into the front rank and came straight for me. He was staring at me and shouting, but what he shouted I do not remember.

Sigefrid’s attack had lost all its impetus. Instead of hitting us at a run, they closed on us at a walk and I remember thrusting my shield forward, and the crash as our two shields banged together, and the shock of Sigefrid’s weight, though he must have felt the same because neither of us was thrown off balance. He rammed a sword at me and I felt a thudding blow on my shield, and I did the same to him. I had sheathed Serpent-Breath. She was and is a lovely blade, but a long-sword is no use when the shield walls come close as lovers. I had drawn Wasp-Sting, my short-sword, and I felt with her blade for a gap between the enemy’s shields and drove her forward. She struck nothing.

Sigefrid heaved at me. We heaved back. A line of shields had crashed against another line, and behind them, on both sides, men pushed and swore, grunted and heaved. An ax came toward my head, swung by the man behind Sigefrid, but behind me Clapa had his shield raised and caught the blow, which was powerful enough to drive his shield down onto my helmet. For a moment I could see nothing, but I shook my head and my vision cleared. Another ax had hooked its blade over my shield’s top edge and the man was trying to pull my shield down, but it was crammed so tight against Sigefrid’s shield that it would not move. Sigefrid was cursing me, spitting into my face, and I was calling him the son of a goat-humping whore and stabbing at him with Wasp-Sting. She had found something solid behind the enemy wall and I gouged her, then shoved her hard forward and gouged the blade again, but what damage she did I do not know to this day.

The poets tell of those battles, but no poet I know was ever in the front rank of a shield wall. They boast of a warrior’s prowess and they record how many men he killed. Bright his blade flashed, they sing, and great was his spear’s slaughter, but it was never like that. Blades were not bright, but cramped. Men swore, pushed and sweated. Not many men died once the shields touched and the heaving began because there was not room enough to swing a blade. The real killing began when a shield wall broke, but ours held against that first attack. I saw little because my helmet had been shoved low over my eyes, but I remember Sigefrid’s open mouth, all rotten teeth and yellow spittle. He was cursing me, and I was cursing him, and my shield shuddered from blows and men were shouting. One was screaming. Then I heard another scream and Sigefrid suddenly stepped back. His whole line was moving away from us and for a moment I thought they were trying to tempt us out of the gate’s archway, but I stayed where I was. I dared not take my little shield wall out of the arch, for the great stone walls on either side protected my flanks. Then there was a third scream and at last I saw why Sigefrid’s men had faltered. Big blocks of stone were falling from the ramparts. Pyrlig was evidently not being attacked and so his men were prising away lumps of masonry and dropping them on the enemy, and the man behind Sigefrid had been struck on the head and Sigefrid stumbled on him.

“Stay here!” I shouted at my men. They were tempted to go forward and take advantage of the enemy’s disarray, but that would mean leaving the gate’s safety. “Stay!” I bellowed angrily, and they stayed.

It was Sigefrid who retreated. He looked angry and puzzled. He had expected an easy victory, but instead he had lost men while we were unscathed. Cerdic’s face was covered in blood, but he shook his head when I asked if he had been badly wounded. Then from behind me I heard a roar of voices and my men, packed together in the archway, shuddered forward as an enemy struck from the streets. Steapa was there and I did not even bother to turn and see the fight because I knew Steapa would hold. I could also hear the clash of blades above me and knew that Pyrlig too was now fighting for his life.

Sigefrid saw Pyrlig’s men fighting and deduced he would be spared their shower of masonry and so he shouted at his men to ready themselves. “Kill the bastards!” he bellowed, “kill them! But take the big one alive. I want him.” He swept his sword to point at me and I remembered his blade’s name; Fear-Giver. “You’re mine!” he shouted at me, “and I still have to crucify a man! And you’re the man!” He laughed, sheathed Fear-Giver and took a long-handled war ax from one his followers. He offered me a malevolent grin, covered his body with his raven-decorated shield, and shouted at his men to advance. “Kill them all! All but the big bastard! Kill them!”

But this time, instead of pushing close to shove us through the gate like a stopper being forced through a bottle’s neck, he made his men pause at sword’s length and try to haul our shields down with their long-hafted war axes. And so the work became desperate.

An ax is a vicious weapon in a fight between shield walls. If it does not hook a shield down it can still break the boards into splinters. I felt Sigefrid’s blows crashing into the shield, saw the ax blade appear through a rent in the limewood, and all I could do was endure the assault. I dared not go forward because that would break our wall, and if our whole wall stepped forward then the men on the flanks would be exposed and we would die.

A spear was jabbing at my ankles. A second ax crashed on the shield. All along our short line the blows were falling, the shields were breaking, and death was looming. I had no ax to swing, for I was never fond of it as a weapon, though I recognized how lethal it was. I kept Wasp-Sting in my hand, hoping Sigefrid would close the gap and I could slide the blade past his shield and deep into his big belly, but Sigefrid stayed an ax’s length away, and my shield was broken, and I knew a blow would soon crack my forearm into a useless mess of blood and shattered bone.

I risked one step forward. I made it suddenly so that Sigefrid’s next swing was wasted, though the ax shaft bruised my left shoulder. He had to drop his shield to swing the ax and I lunged Wasp-Sting across his body and the blade rammed into his right shoulder, but his expensive mail held. He recoiled. I sliced her at his face, but he rammed his shield into mine, driving me back, and an instant later his ax slammed into my shield again.

He grimaced then, all rotten teeth and angry eyes and bushy beard. “I want you alive,” he said. He swung the ax sideways and I managed to pull the shield inward just enough so that the blade crashed against the boss. “Alive,” he said again, “and you will die a death fit for a man who breaks his oath.”

“I made no oath to you,” I said.

“But you will die as though you had,” he said, “with your hands and feet nailed to a cross, and your screams won’t stop until I tire of them.” He grimaced again as he drew the ax back for a last shield-splintering stroke. “And I’ll flay your corpse, Uhtred the Betrayer,” he said, “and cover my shield with your tanned skin. I’ll piss in your dead throat and dance on your bones.” He swung the ax, and the sky fell.

A whole length of heavy masonry had been toppled from the rampart and slammed into Sigefrid’s ranks. There was dust and screaming and broken men. Six warriors were either on the ground or clutching shattered bones. All were behind Sigefrid, and he turned, astonished, and just then Osferth, Alfred’s bastard son, jumped from the gate’s top.

He should have broken his ankles in that desperate leap, but somehow he survived. He landed amid the broken stones and shattered bodies that had been Sigefrid’s second rank and he screamed like a girl as he swung his sword at the huge Norseman’s head. The blade thumped into Sigefrid’s helmet. It did not break the metal, but it must have stunned Sigefrid for an instant. I had broken my shield wall by taking two paces forward and I rammed my broken shield at the dazed man and stabbed Wasp-Sting into his left thigh. This time she broke through the links of his mail and I twisted her, ripping muscle. Sigefrid staggered and it was then that Osferth, whose face was a picture of pure terror, stabbed his sword into the small of the Norseman’s back. I do not think Osferth was aware of what he was doing. He had pissed himself with fear, he was dazed, he was confused, the enemy was recovering their sense and coming to kill him, and Osferth just stabbed his sword with enough desperate force to pierce the bear-fur cloak, Sigefrid’s mail, and then Sigefrid himself.

The big man screamed with agony. Finan was beside me, dancing as he always danced in battle, and he fooled the man next to Sigefrid with a lunge that was a feint, flicked his sword sideways across the man’s face, then shouted at Osferth to come to us.

But Alfred’s son was frozen by terror. He would have lived no longer than one more heartbeat if I had not shaken off the remnants of my shattered shield and reached past the screaming Sigefrid to haul Osferth toward me. I shoved him back into the second rank and, with no shield to protect myself, waited for the next attack.

“My God, thank you, thank you, Lord God,” Osferth was saying. He sounded pathetic.

Sigefrid was on his knees, whimpering. Two men dragged him away, and I saw Erik staring appalled at his wounded brother. “Come and die!” I shouted at him, and Erik answered my anger with a sad look. He nodded to me, as if to acknowledge that custom forced me to threaten him, but that the threat in no way diminished his regard for me. “Come on!” I goaded him, “come and meet Serpent-Breath!”

“In my own time, Lord Uhtred,” Erik called back, his courtesy a reproof to my snarl. He stooped beside his wounded brother, and Sigefrid’s plight had persuaded the enemy to hesitate before attacking us again. They hesitated long enough for me to turn and see that Steapa had beaten off the attack from the inside of the city.

“What’s happening on the bastion?” I asked Osferth.

He stared at me with pure terror on his face. “Thank you, Lord Jesus,” he stammered.

I rammed my left fist into his belly. “What’s happening up there!” I shouted at him.

He gaped at me, stammered again, then managed to speak coherently. “Nothing, lord. The pagans can’t get up the stairs.”

I turned back to face the enemy. Pyrlig was holding the bastion’s top, Steapa was holding the inner side of the gate, so I had to hold here. I touched my hammer amulet, brushed my left hand over Serpent-Breath’s hilt, and thanked the gods I was still alive. “Give me your shield,” I said to Osferth. I snatched it from him, put my bruised arm through the leather loops, and saw the enemy was forming a new line.

“Did you see Æthelred’s men?” I asked Osferth.

“Æthelred?” he responded as though he had never heard the name.

“My cousin!” I snarled. “Did you see him?”

“Oh yes, lord, he’s coming,” Osferth said, giving the news as though it were utterly unimportant, as if he were telling me that he had seen rain in the distance.

I risked turning to face him. “He is coming?”

“Yes, lord,” Osferth said.

And so Æthelred was, and so he did. Our fight more or less ended there, because Æthelred had not abandoned his plan to assault the city, and now brought his men across the Fleot to attack the rear of the enemy, and that enemy fled north toward the next gate. We pursued for a while. I drew Serpent-Breath because she was a better weapon for an open fight, and I caught a Dane who was too fat to run hard. He turned, lunged at me with a spear, and I slid the lunge away with my borrowed shield and sent him to the corpse-hall with a lunge of my own. Æthelred’s men were howling as they fought up the slope, and I reckoned they might easily mistake my men for the enemy and so I called for my troops to return to Ludd’s Gate. The arch was empty now, though on either side were bloodied corpses and broken shields. The sun was higher, but the clouds still made it look a dirty yellow behind their veil.

Some of Sigefrid’s men died outside the walls and such was their panic that some were even hacked to death with sharpened hoes. Most managed to get through the next gate and into the old city, and there we hunted them down.

It was a wild and howling hunt. Sigefrid’s troops, those who had not sallied beyond the walls, were slow to learn of their defeat. They stayed on their ramparts until they saw death coming, and then they fled into streets and alleys already choked with men, women, and children fleeing the Saxon assault. They ran down the terraced hills of the city, going for the boats that were tied to the wharves downstream of the bridge. Some, the fools, tried to save their belongings, and that was fatal for they were burdened by their possessions, caught in the streets and cut down. A young girl screamed as she was dragged into a house by a Mercian spearman. Dead men lay in gutters, sniffed by dogs. Some houses showed a cross, denoting that Christians lived there, but the protection meant nothing if a girl in the house was pretty. A priest held a wooden crucifix aloft outside a low doorway, and shouted that there were Christian women sheltering in his small church, but the priest was cut down by an ax and the screaming began. A score of Northmen were caught in the palace where they guarded the treasury amassed by Sigefrid and Erik and they all died there, their blood trickling between the small tiles of the mosaic floor of the Roman hall.

It was the fyrd that did most destruction. The household troops had discipline and stayed together, and it was those trained troops who chased the Northmen out of Lundene. I stayed on the street next to the river wall, the street that we had followed from our half-swamped ships, and we drove the fugitives as though they were sheep running from wolves. Father Pyrlig had attached his cross banner to a Danish spear and he waved it over our heads to show Æthelred’s men that we were friends. Screams and howling sounded from the higher streets. I stepped over a dead child, her golden curls thick with the blood of her father who had died beside her. His last act had been to seize his child’s arm and his dead hand was still curled about her elbow. I thought of my daughter, Stiorra. “Lord!” Sihtric shouted, “lord!” He was pointing with his sword.

He had seen that one large group of Northmen, presumably cut off as they retreated toward their ships, had taken refuge on the broken bridge. The bridge’s northern end was guarded by a Roman bastion through which an arch led, though the arch had long lost its gateway. Instead the passage to the bridge’s broken timber roadway was blocked by a shield wall. They were in the same position I had been in Ludd’s Gate with their flanks protected by high stonework. Their shields filled the arch, and I could see at least six ranks of men behind the front line of round overlapping shields.

Steapa made a low growling noise and hefted his ax. “No,” I said, laying a hand on his massive shield arm.

“Make a boar’s tusk,” he said vengefully, “kill the bastards. Kill them all.”

“No,” I said again. A boar’s tusk was a wedge of men that would drive into a shield wall like a human spear-point, but no boar’s tusk would pierce this Northmen’s wall. They were too tightly packed in the archway, and they were desperate, and desperate men will fight fanatically for the chance to live. They would die in the end, that was true, but many of my men would die with them.

“Stay here,” I told my men. I handed my borrowed shield to Sihtric, then gave him my helmet. I sheathed Serpent-Breath. Pyrlig copied me, taking off his helmet. “You don’t have to come,” I told him.

“And why shouldn’t I?” he asked, smiling. He handed his makeshift standard to Rypere, laid his shield down, and, because I was glad of the Welshman’s company, the two of us walked to the bridge’s gate.

“I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I announced to the hard-faced men staring over their shield rims, “and if you wish to feast in Odin’s corpse-hall this night then I am willing to send you there.”

Behind me the city screamed and smoke drifted dense across the sky. The nine men in the enemy’s front rank stared at me, but none spoke.

“But if you want to taste the joys of this world longer,” I went on, “then speak to me.”

“We serve our earl,” one of the men finally said.

“And he is?”

“Sigefrid Thurgilson,” the man said.

“Who fought well,” I said. I had been screaming insults at Sigefrid not two hours before, but now was the time for softer speech. A time to arrange for an enemy to yield and thus save my men’s lives. “Does the Earl Sigefrid live?” I asked.

“He lives,” the man said curtly, jerking his head to indicate that Sigefrid was somewhere behind him on the bridge.

“Then tell him Uhtred of Bebbanburg would speak with him, to decide whether he lives or dies.”

That was not my choice to make. The Fates had already made the decision, and I was but their instrument. The man who had spoken to me called the message to the men behind on the bridge and I waited. Pyrlig was praying, though whether he beseeched mercy for the folk who screamed behind us or death for the men in front of us, I never asked.

Then the tight-packed shield wall in the arch shuffled aside as men made a passage down the roadway’s center. “The Earl Erik will speak with you,” the man told me.

And Pyrlig and I went to meet the enemy.

SIX

My brother says I should kill you,” Erik greeted me. The younger of the Thurgilson brothers had been waiting for me on the bridge and, though his words held menace, there was none in his face. He was placid, calm and apparently unworried by his predicament. His black hair was crammed beneath a plain helmet and his fine mail was spattered with blood. There was a rent at the mail’s hem, and I guessed that marked where a spear had come beneath his shield, but he was evidently unwounded. Sigefrid, though, was horribly injured. I could see him on the roadway, lying on his bear-fur cloak, twisting and jerking in pain, and being tended by two men.

“Your brother,” I said, still watching Sigefrid, “thinks that death is the answer to everything.”

“Then he’s like you in that regard,” Erik said with a wan smile, “if you are what men say you are.”

“What do men say of me?” I asked, curious.

“That you kill like a Northman,” Erik said. He turned to stare downriver. A small fleet of Danish and Norse ships had managed to escape the wharves, but some now rowed back upstream in an attempt to save the fugitives who crowded the river’s edge, but the Saxons were already among that doomed crowd. A furious fight was raging on the wharves where men hacked at each other. Some, to escape the fury, were leaping into the river. “I sometimes think,” Erik said sadly, “that death is the real meaning of life. We worship death, we give it, we believe it leads to joy.”

“I don’t worship death,” I said.

“Christians do,” Erik remarked, glancing at Pyrlig, whose mailed chest displayed his wooden cross.

“No,” Pyrlig said.

“Then why the image of a dead man?” Erik asked.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead,” Pyrlig said energetically, “he conquered death! He died to give us life and regained his own life in his dying. Death, lord, is just a gate to more life.”

“Then why do we fear death?” Erik asked in a voice that suggested he expected no answer. He turned to look at the downstream chaos. The two ships we had used to shoot the bridge’s gap had been commandeered by fleeing men, and one of those ships had foundered just yards from the wharf where it now lay on its side, half sunken. Men had been spilled into the water where many must have drowned, but others had managed to reach the muddy foreshore where they were being hacked to death by gleeful men with spears, swords, axes, and hoes. The survivors clung to the wreck, trying to shelter from a handful of Saxon bowmen whose long hunting arrows thudded into the ship’s timbers. There was so much death that morning. The streets of the broken city reeked of blood and were filled with the wailing of women beneath the smoke-smeared yellow sky. “We trusted you, Lord Uhtred,” Erik said bleakly, still staring downriver. “You were going to bring us Ragnar, you were to be king in Mercia, and you were to give us the whole island of Britain.”

“The dead man lied,” I said. “Bjorn lied.”

Erik turned back to me, his face grave. “I said we should not try and trick you,” he said, “but Earl Haesten insisted.” Erik shrugged, then looked at Father Pyrlig, noting his mail coat and the well-worn hilts of his swords. “But you also tricked us, Lord Uhtred,” Erik went on, “because I think you knew this man was no priest, but a warrior.”

“He is both,” I said.

Erik grimaced, perhaps remembering the skill with which Pyrlig had defeated his brother in the arena. “You lied,” he said sadly, “and we lied, but we still could have taken Wessex together. And now?” he turned and looked along the bridge’s roadway, “now I don’t know whether my brother will live or die.” He grimaced. Sigefrid was motionless now and for a moment I thought he might have gone to the corpse-hall already, but then he slowly turned his head to give me a baleful stare.

“I shall pray for him,” Pyrlig said.

“Yes,” Erik said simply, “please.”

“And what shall I do?” I asked.

“You?” Erik frowned, puzzled by my question.

“Do I let you live, Erik Thurgilson?” I asked. “Or kill you?”

“You will find us difficult to kill,” he said.

“But kill you I will,” I responded, “if I must.” That was the real negotiation in those two sentences. The truth was that Erik and his men were trapped and doomed, but to kill them we would need to hack our way through a fearsome shield wall, and then batter down desperate men whose only thought would be to take many of us with them to the next world. I would lose twenty or more men here, and others of my household troops would be crippled for life. That was a price I did not want to pay, and Erik knew it, but he also knew that the price would be paid if he was not reasonable. “Is Haesten here?” I asked him, looking down the broken bridge.

Erik shook his head. “I saw him leave,” he said, nodding downriver.

“A pity,” I said, “because he broke an oath to me. If he had been here I would have let you all go in exchange for his life.”

Erik stared at me for a few heartbeats, judging whether I had spoken the truth. “Then kill me instead of Haesten,” he said at last, “and let all these others leave.”

“You broke no oath to me,” I said, “so you owe me no life.”

“I want these men to live,” Erik said with a sudden passion, “and my life is a small price for theirs. I will pay it, Lord Uhtred, and in return you give my men their lives, and give them Wave-Tamer,” he pointed to his brother’s ship that was still tied in the small dock where we had landed.

“Is it a fair price, father?” I asked Pyrlig.

“Who can set a value on life?” Pyrlig asked in return.

“I can,” I said harshly, and turned back to Erik. “The price is this,” I told him. “You will leave every weapon you carry on this bridge. You will leave your shields. You will leave your mail coats, and you will leave your helmets. You will leave your arm rings, your chains, your brooches, your coins, and your belt buckles. You will leave everything of value, Erik Thurgilson, and then you may take a ship that I choose to give you, and you may go.”

“A ship that you choose,” Erik said.

“Yes.”

He smiled wanly. “I made Wave-Tamer for my brother,” he said. “I first found her keel in the forest. It was an oak with a trunk straight as an oar shaft and I cut that myself. We used eleven other oaks, Lord Uhtred, for her ribs and her cross-pieces, for her stem and her planking. Her caulking was hair from seven bears I killed with my own spear, and I made her nails on my own forge. My mother made her sail, I wove her lines, and I gave her to Thor by killing a horse I loved and sprinkling his blood on her stem. She has carried my brother and me through storms and fog and ice. She is,” he turned to look at Wave-Tamer, “she is beautiful. I love that ship.”

“You love her more than your life?”

He thought for an instant, then shook his head. “No.”

“Then it will be a ship of my choice,” I said stubbornly, and that might have ended the negotiation except there was a commotion under the archway where the Northmen’s shield wall still faced my troops.

Æthelred had come to the bridge, and was demanding to be allowed through the gate. Erik offered me a quizzical look when the news was brought to us and I shrugged. “He commands here,” I said.

“So I will need his permission to leave?”

“You will,” I said.

Erik sent word that the shield wall was to let Æthelred onto the roadway and my cousin strutted onto the bridge with his customary cockiness. Aldhelm, the commander of his guard, was his only companion. Æthelred ignored Erik, instead facing me with a belligerent expression. “You presume to negotiate on my behalf?” he accused me.

“No,” I said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Negotiating on my own behalf,” I said. “This is the Earl Erik Thurgilson,” I introduced the Norseman in English, but now changed to Danish. “And this,” I said to Erik, “is the Ealdorman of Mercia, the Lord Æthelred.”

Erik responded to the introduction by offering Æthelred a small bow, but the courtesy was wasted. Æthelred looked around the bridge, counting the men who had taken refuge there. “Not so many,” he said brusquely. “They must all die.”

“I have already offered them their lives,” I said.

Æthelred rounded on me. “We had orders,” he said bitingly, “to capture Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten, and deliver them as captives to King Æthelstan.” I saw Erik’s eyes widen slightly. I had assumed he spoke no English, but now realized he must have learned enough of the language to understand Æthelred’s words. “Are you disobeying my father-in-law?” Æthelred challenged me when I made no response.

I kept my temper. “You can fight them here,” I explained patiently, “and you’ll lose many good men. Too many. You can trap them here, but at slack water a ship will row to the bridge and rescue them.” That would be a hard thing to do, but I had learned never to underestimate the seamanship of the Northmen. “Or you can rid Lundene of their presence,” I said, “and that is what I chose to do.” Aldhelm sniggered at that, implying that I had chosen the coward’s option. I looked at him and he challenged my gaze, refusing to look away.

“Kill them, lord,” Aldhelm said to Æthelred, though he continued staring at me.

“If you wish to fight them,” I said, “then that is your privilege, but I’ll have none of it.”

For a moment both Æthelred and Aldhelm were tempted to accuse me of cowardice. I could see the thought on their faces, but they could also see something in my face and they let the thought go unsaid. “You always loved pagans,” Æthelred sneered instead.

“I loved them so well,” I said angrily, “that I took two ships through that gap in the black of night,” I pointed to where the jagged stumps of the bridge’s planking ended. “I brought men into the city, cousin, and I captured Ludd’s Gate, and I fought a battle in that gate such as I would never wish to fight again, and in that fight I killed pagans for you. And yes, I love them.”

Æthelred looked at the gap. Spray showed continually there, thrown up by the seethe of water falling through the break with such force that the ancient wooden roadway quivered and the air was filled with the river’s noise. “You had no orders to come by ship,” Æthelred said indignantly, and I knew he resented my actions because they might detract from the glory he expected to garner from his capture of Lundene.

“I had orders to give you the city,” I retorted, “so here it is!” I gestured at the smoke drifting over the scream-filled hill. “Your wedding present,” I said, mocking him with a bow.

“And not just the city, lord,” Aldhelm said to Æthelred, “but everything in it.”

“Everything?” Æthelred asked, as if he could not believe his good fortune.

“Everything,” Aldhelm said wolfishly.

“And if you’re grateful for that,” I interjected sourly, “then thank your wife.”

Æthelred jerked around to stare wide-eyed at me. Something in my words had astonished him for he looked as though I had struck him. There was disbelief on his broad face, and anger, and for a moment he was incapable of speaking. “My wife?” he finally asked.

“If it had not been for Æthelflaed,” I explained, “we could not have taken the city. Last night she gave me men.”

“You saw her last night?” he asked incredulously.

I looked at him, wondering if he was mad. “Of course I saw her last night!” I said. “We went back to the island to board the ships! She was there! She shamed your men into coming with me.”

“And she made Lord Uhtred give her an oath,” Pyrlig added, “an oath to defend your Mercia, Lord Æthelred.”

Æthelred ignored the Welshman. He was still staring at me, but now with an expression of hatred. “You boarded my ship?” he could barely speak for loathing and anger, “and saw my wife?”

“She came ashore,” I said, “with Father Pyrlig.”

I meant nothing by saying that. I had merely reported what had happened and hoped that Æthelred would admire his wife for her initiative, but the moment I spoke I saw I had made a mistake. I thought for a heartbeat that Æthelred was going to hit me, so fierce was the sudden fury on his broad face, but then he controled himself and turned and walked away. Aldhelm hurried after him and managed to check my cousin’s haste long enough to speak with him. I saw Æthelred make a furious, careless gesture, then Aldhelm turned back to me. “You must do what you think best,” he called, then followed his master through the arch where the Northmen’s shield wall made a passage for them.

“I always do,” I said to no one in particular.

“Do what?” Father Pyrlig asked, staring at the arch where my cousin had so abruptly vanished.

“What I think is best,” I said, then frowned. “What happened there?” I asked Pyrlig.

“He doesn’t like other men speaking to his wife,” the Welshman said. “I noticed that when I was on the ship with them, coming down the Temes. He’s jealous.”

“But I’ve known Æthelflaed forever!” I exclaimed.

“He fears you know her only too well,” Pyrlig said, “and it drives him to madness.”

“But that’s stupid!” I spoke angrily.

“It’s jealousy,” Pyrlig said, “and all jealousy is stupid.”

Erik had also watched Æthelred walk away and was as confused as I was. “He is your commander?” the Norseman asked.

“He’s my cousin,” I said bitterly.

“And he’s your commander?” Erik asked again.

“The Lord Æthelred commands,” Pyrlig explained, “and the Lord Uhtred disobeys.”

Erik smiled at that. “So, Lord Uhtred, do we have an agreement?” He asked that question in English, hesitating slightly over the words.

“Your English is good,” I said, sounding surprised.

He smiled. “A Saxon slave taught me.”

“I hope she was beautiful,” I said, “and yes, we do have an agreement, but with one change.”

Erik bridled, but stayed courteous. “One change?” he asked cautiously.

“You may take Wave-Tamer,” I said.

I thought Erik would kiss me. For a heartbeat he did not believe my words, then he saw that I was sincere and he smiled broadly. “Lord Uhtred,” he began.

“Take her,” I interrupted him, not wanting his gratitude, “just take her and go!”

It had been Aldhelm’s words that had changed my mind. He had been right; everything in the city now belonged to Mercia, and Æthelred was Mercia’s ruler, and my cousin had a lust for anything beautiful and, if he discovered I wanted Wave-Tamer for myself, which I did, he would be sure to take it from me, and so I kept the ship from his grasp by giving it back to the Thurgilson brothers.

Sigefrid was carried to his own ship. The Northmen, stripped of their weapons and valuables, were guarded by my men as they walked to the Wave-Tamer. It took a long time, but at last they were all on board and they shoved away from the quay, and I watched as they rowed downstream toward the small mists that still hovered above the lower reaches of the river.

And somewhere in Wessex the first cuckoo called.

I wrote Alfred a letter. I have always hated writing, and it has been years since I last used a quill. My wife’s priests now scratch letters for me, but they know I can read what they write so they take care to write what I tell them. But on the night of Lundene’s fall, I wrote in my own hand to Alfred. “Lundene is yours, lord King,” I told him, “and I am staying here to rebuild its walls.”

Writing even that much exhausted my patience. The quill spluttered, the parchment was uneven, and the ink, which I had found in a wooden chest containing plunder evidently stolen from a monastery, spat droplets over the parchment. “Now fetch Father Pyrlig,” I told Sihtric, “and Osferth.”

“Lord,” Sihtric said nervously.

“I know,” I said impatiently, “you want to marry your whore. But fetch Father Pyrlig and Osferth first. The whore can wait.”

Pyrlig arrived a moment later and I pushed the letter across the table to him. “I want you to go to Alfred,” I told him, “give him that, and tell him what happened here.”

Pyrlig read my message and I saw a small smile flicker on his ugly face, a smile that vanished swiftly so that I would not be offended by his opinion of my handwriting. He said nothing of my short message, but glanced around with surprise as Sihtric brought Osferth into the room.

“I’m sending Brother Osferth with you,” I explained to the Welshman.

Osferth stiffened. He hated being called brother. “I want to stay here,” he said, “lord.”

“The king wants you in Wintanceaster,” I said dismissively, “and we obey the king.” I took the letter back from Pyrlig, dipped the quill in the ink that had faded to a rusty brown, and added more words. “Sigefrid,” I wrote laboriously, “was defeated by Osferth, who I would like to keep in my household guard.”

Why did I write that? I did not like Osferth any more than I liked his father, yet he had leaped from the bastion and that had shown courage. Foolish courage, perhaps, but still courage, and if Osferth had not leaped then Lundene might be in Norse or Danish hands to this day. Osferth had earned his place in the shield wall, even if his prospects of surviving there were still desperately low. “Father Pyrlig,” I said to Osferth as I blew on the ink, “will tell the king of your actions today, and this letter requests that you be returned to me. But you must leave that decision to Alfred.”

“He’ll say no,” Osferth said sullenly.

“Father Pyrlig will persuade him,” I said. The Welshman raised an eyebrow in silent question and I gave him the smallest nod to show I spoke the truth. I gave the letter to Sihtric and watched as he folded the parchment, then sealed it with wax. I pressed my badge of the wolf’s head into the seal, then handed the letter to Pyrlig. “Tell Alfred the truth about what happened here,” I said, “because he’s going to hear a different version from my cousin. And travel fast!”

Pyrlig smiled. “You want us to reach the king before your cousin’s messenger?”

“Yes,” I said. That was a lesson I had learned; that the first news is generally the version that is believed. I had no doubt Æthelred would be sending a triumphant message to his father-in-law, and I had no doubt either that in his telling, our part in the victory would be diminished to nothing. Father Pyrlig would ensure that Alfred heard the truth, though whether the king would believe what he heard was another matter.

Pyrlig and Osferth left before dawn, using two horses out of the many we had captured in Lundene. I walked around the circuit of the walls as the sun rose, noting those places that still needed repair. My men were standing guard. Most were from the Berrocscire fyrd, which had fought under Æthelred the previous day, and their excitement at their apparently easy victory had still not subsided.

A few of Æthelred’s men were also posted on the walls, though most were recovering from the ale and mead they had drunk through the night. At one of the northern gates, which looked toward misted green hills, I met Egbert, the elderly man who had yielded to Æthelflaed’s demands and had given me his best men. I rewarded him with the gift of a silver arm ring I had taken from one of the many corpses. Those dead were still unburied and, in the dawn, ravens and kites were feasting. “Thank you,” I said.

“I should have trusted you,” he said awkwardly.

“You did trust me.”

He shrugged. “Because of her, yes.”

“Is Æthelflaed here?” I asked.

“Still at the island,” Egbert said.

“I thought you were guarding her?”

“I was,” Egbert said dully, “but Lord Æthelred had me replaced last night.”

“Had you replaced?” I asked, then saw that his silver chain, the symbol that he commanded men, had been taken from him.

He shrugged as if to tell me he did not understand the decision. “Ordered me to come here,” he said, “but when I arrived he wouldn’t see me. He was sick.”

“Something serious, I hope?”

A half-smile flickered and died on Egbert’s face. “He was vomiting, I’m told. Probably nothing.”

My cousin had taken the palace at the top of Lundene’s hill as his quarters, while I stayed in the Roman house by the river. I liked it. I have always liked Roman buildings because their walls possess the great virtue of keeping out wind, rain, and snow. That house was large. You entered through an arch leading from the street into a courtyard surrounded by a pillared arcade. On three sides of the courtyard were small rooms that must have been used by servants or for storage. One was a kitchen and had a brick bread oven so large that you could bake enough loaves to feed three crews at one time. The courtyard’s fourth side led into six rooms, two of them big enough to assemble my whole bodyguard. Beyond those two big rooms was a paved terrace that overlooked the river and at evening time that was a pleasant place, though at low tide the stench of the Temes could be overwhelming.

I could have gone back to Coccham, but I stayed anyway and the men of Berrocscire’s fyrd also stayed, though they were unhappy because it was springtime and there was work to do on their farms. I kept them in Lundene to strengthen the city’s walls. I would have gone home if I thought Æthelred would have done that work, but he seemed blithely unaware of the sad state of the city’s defenses. Sigefrid had patched a few places and he had strengthened the gates, but there was still much to do. The old masonry was crumbling and had even fallen into the outer ditch in places, and my men cut and trimmed trees to make new palisades wherever the wall was weak. Then we cleared the ditch outside the wall, scraping out matted filth and planting sharpened stakes to welcome any attacker.

Alfred sent orders that the whole of the old city was to be rebuilt. Any Roman building in good repair was to be kept, while dilapidated ruins were to be pulled down and replaced with sturdy timber and thatch, but there were neither the men nor the funds to attempt such work. Alfred’s idea was that the Saxons of the undefended new town would move into old Lundene and be safe behind its ramparts, but those Saxons still feared the ghosts of the Roman builders and they stubbornly resisted every invitation to take over the deserted properties. My men of the Berrocscire fyrd were just as frightened of the ghosts, but they were still more frightened of me and so they stayed and worked.

Æthelred took no notice of what I did. His sickness must have passed for he busied himself hunting. Every day he rode to the wooded hills north of the city where he pursued deer. He never took fewer than forty men, for there was always a chance that some marauding Danish band might come close to Lundene. There were many of those bands, but fate decreed that none went near Æthelred. Every day I would see horsemen to the east, picking their way through the desolate dark marshes that lay seaward of the city. They were Danes, watching us, and doubtless reporting back to Sigefrid.

I got news of Sigefrid. He lived, the reports said, though he was so crippled by his wound that he could neither walk nor stand. He had taken refuge at Beamfleot with his brother and with Haesten, and from there they sent raiders into the mouth of the Temes. Saxon ships dared not sail to Frankia, for the Northmen were in a vengeful mood after their defeat in Lundene. One Danish ship, dragon-prowed, even rowed up the Temes to taunt us from the churning water just below the gap in the broken bridge. They had Saxon prisoners aboard and the Danes killed them, one by one, making sure we could see the bloody executions. There were also women captives aboard and we could hear them screaming. I sent Finan and a dozen men to the bridge and they carried a clay pot of fire, and once on the bridge they used hunting bows to shoot fire-arrows at the intruder. All shipmasters fear fire, and the arrows, most of which missed altogether, persuaded them to drop downriver until the arrows could no longer reach them, but they did not go far and their oarsmen held the ship against the current as more prisoners were killed. They did not leave until I had assembled a crew to man one of the captured boats tied at the wharves, and only then did they turn and row downriver into the darkening evening.

Other ships from Beamfleot crossed the wide estuary of the Temes and landed men in Wessex. That part of Wessex was an alien place. It had once been the kingdom of Cent until it was conquered by the West Saxons and, though the men of Cent were Saxons, they spoke in a strange accent. It had always been a wild place, close to the other lands across the sea, and ever liable to be raided by Vikings. Now Sigefrid’s men launched ship after ship across the estuary and pillaged deep into Cent. They took slaves and burned villages. A messenger came from Swithwulf, Bishop of Hrofeceastre, to beg for my help. “The heathen were at Contwaraburg,” the messenger, a young priest, told me gloomily.

“Did they kill the archbishop?” I asked cheerfully.

“He was not there, lord, thank God.” The priest made the sign of the cross. “The pagans are everywhere, lord, and no one is safe. Bishop Swithwulf begs your help.”

But I could not help the bishop. I needed men to guard Lundene, not Cent, and I needed men to guard my family too for, a week after the city’s fall, Gisela, Stiorra, and a half-dozen maids arrived. I had sent Finan and thirty men to escort them safely down the river and the house by the Temes seemed to grow warmer with the echoes of women’s laughter. “You might have swept the house,” Gisela chided me.

“I did!”

“Ha!” she pointed to a ceiling, “what are those?”

“Cobwebs,” I said, “they’re holding the beams in place.”

The cobwebs were swept away and the kitchen fires were lit. In the courtyard, under a corner where the tiled arcade roofs met, there was an old stone urn that was choked with rubbish. Gisela cleaned the filth out, then she and two maids scrubbed the outside of the urn to reveal white marble carved with delicate women who appeared to be chasing each other and waving harps. Gisela loved those carvings. She crouched beside them, tracing a finger over the hair of the Roman women, and then she and the maids tried to copy the hairstyle. She loved the house too, and even endured the river’s stench to sit on the terrace in the evening and watch the water slide by. “He beats her,” she told me one evening.

I knew of whom she spoke and said nothing.

“She’s bruised,” Gisela said, “and she’s pregnant, and he beats her.”

“She’s what?” I asked in surprise.

“Æthelflaed,” Gisela said patiently, “is pregnant.” Almost every day Gisela went to the palace and spent time with Æthelflaed, though Æthelflaed was never allowed to visit our house.

I was surprised by Gisela’s news of Æthelflaed’s pregnancy. I do not know why I should have been surprised, but I was. I suppose I still thought of Æthelflaed as a child. “And he hits her?” I asked.

“Because he thinks she loves other men,” Gisela said.

“Does she?”

“No, of course she doesn’t, but he fears she does.” Gisela paused to gather more wool that she was spinning onto a distaff. “He thinks she loves you.”

I thought of Æthelred’s sudden anger on Lundene’s bridge. “He’s mad!” I said.

“No, he’s jealous,” Gisela said, laying a hand on my arm. “And I know he has nothing to be jealous about.” She smiled at me, then went back to gathering her wool. “It’s a strange way to show love, isn’t it?”

Æthelflaed had come to the city the day after it fell. She traveled by boat to the Saxon town, and from there an ox cart had carried her across the Fleot and so up to her husband’s new palace. Men lined the route waving leafy green boughs, a priest walked ahead of the oxen scattering holy water while a choir of women followed the cart, which, like the oxen’s horns, was hung with spring flowers. Æthelflaed, clutching the cart’s side to steady herself, had looked uncomfortable, but she had given me a wan smile as the oxen dragged her over the uneven stones inside the gate.

Æthelflaed’s arrival was celebrated by a feast in the palace. I am certain Æthelred had not wanted to invite me, but my rank had given him little choice and a grudging message had arrived on the afternoon before the celebration. The feast had been nothing special, though the ale was plentiful enough. A dozen priests shared the top table with Æthelred and Æthelflaed, and I was given a stool at the end of that long board. Æthelred glowered at me, the priests ignored me, and I left early, pleading that I had to walk the walls and make certain the sentries were awake. I remember my cousin had looked pale that night, but it was soon after his vomiting fit. I had asked after his health and he had waved the question away as though it were irrelevant.

Gisela and Æthelflaed became friends in Lundene. I repaired the wall and Æthelred hunted while his men plundered the city for his palace’s furnishings. I went home one day to find six of his followers in the courtyard of my house. Egbert, the man who had given me the troops on the eve of the attack, was one of the six and his face showed no expression as I came into the courtyard. He just watched me. “What do you want?” I asked the six men. Five were in mail and had swords, the sixth wore a finely embroidered jerkin that showed hounds chasing deer. That sixth man also wore a silver chain, a sign of noble rank. It was Aldhelm, my cousin’s friend and the commander of his household troops.

“This,” Aldhelm answered. He was standing by the urn that Gisela had cleaned. It served now to catch rainwater that fell from the roof, and that water was sweet and clean-tasting, a rarity in any city.

“Two hundred silver shillings,” I told Aldhelm, “and it’s yours.”

He sneered at that. The price was outrageous. The four younger men had succeeded in tipping the urn so that its water had flowed out and now they were struggling to right it again, though they had stopped their efforts when I appeared.

Gisela came from the main house and smiled at me. “I told them they couldn’t have it,” she said.

“Lord Æthelred wants it,” Aldhelm insisted.

“You’re called Aldhelm,” I said, “just Aldhelm, and I am Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, and you call me ‘Lord.’”

“Not this one,” Gisela spoke silkily. “He called me an interfering bitch.”

My men, there were four of them, moved to my side and put hands on sword hilts. I gestured for them to step back and unbuckled my own sword belt. “Did you call my wife a bitch?” I asked Aldhelm.

“My lord requires this statue,” he said, ignoring my question.

“You will apologize to my wife,” I told him, “and then to me.” I laid the belt with its two heavy swords on the flagstones.

He pointedly turned away from me. “Leave it on its side,” he told the four men, “and roll it out to the street.”

“I want two apologies,” I said.

He heard the menace in my voice and turned back to me, alarmed now. “This house,” Aldhelm explained, “belongs to the Lord Æthelred. If you live here it is by his gracious permission.” He became even more alarmed as I drew closer. “Egbert!” he said loudly, but Egbert’s only response was a calming motion with his right hand, a signal that his men should keep their swords scabbarded. Egbert knew that if a single blade left its long scabbard there would be a fight between his men and mine, and he had the sense to avoid that slaughter, but Aldhelm had no such sense. “You impertinent bastard,” he said, and snatched a knife from a sheath at his waist and lunged it at my belly.

I broke Aldhelm’s jaw, his nose, both his hands, and maybe a couple of his ribs before Egbert hauled me away. When Aldhelm apologized to Gisela he did so while spitting teeth through bubbling blood, and the urn stayed in our courtyard. I gave his knife to the girls who worked in the kitchen, where it proved useful for cutting onions.

And the next day, Alfred came.

The king came silently, his ship arriving at a wharf upstream of the broken bridge. The Haligast waited for a river trader to pull away, then ghosted in on short, efficient oar strokes. Alfred, accompanied by a score of priests and monks, and guarded by six mailed men, came ashore unheralded and unannounced. He threaded the goods stacked on the wharf, stepped over a drunken man sleeping in the shade, and ducked through the small gate in the wall leading to a merchant’s courtyard.

I heard he went to the palace. Æthelred was not there, he was hunting again, but the king went to his daughter’s chamber and stayed there a long time. Afterward he walked back down the hill and, still with his priestly entourage, came to our house. I was with one of the groups making repairs to the walls, but Gisela had been warned of Alfred’s presence in Lundene and, suspecting he might come to our house, had prepared a meal of bread, ale, cheese, and boiled lentils. She offered no meat, for Alfred would not touch flesh. His stomach was tender and his bowels in perpetual torment and he had somehow persuaded himself that meat was an abomination.

Gisela had sent a servant to warn me of the king’s arrival, yet even so I arrived at the house long after Alfred to find my elegant courtyard black with priests, among whom was Father Pyrlig and, next to him, Osferth, who was once again dressed in monkish robes. Osferth gave me a sour look, as if blaming me for his return to the church, while Pyrlig embraced me. “Æthelred said nothing of you in his report to the king,” he murmured those words, gusting ale-smelling breath over my face.

“We weren’t here when the city fell?” I asked.

“Not according to your cousin,” Pyrlig said, then chuckled. “But I told Alfred the truth. Go on, he’s waiting for you.”

Alfred was on the river terrace. His guards stood behind him, lined against the house, while the king was seated on a wooden chair. I paused in the doorway, surprised because Alfred’s face, usually so pallid and solemn, had an animated look. He was even smiling. Gisela was seated next to him and the king was leaning forward, talking, and Gisela, whose back was to me, was listening. I stayed where I was, watching that rarest of sights, Alfred happy. He tapped a long white finger on her knee once to stress some point. There was nothing untoward in the gesture, except it was so unlike him.

But then, of course, maybe it was very like him. Alfred had been a famous womanizer before he was caught in the snare of Christianity, and Osferth was a product of that early princely lust. Alfred liked pretty women, and it was obvious he liked Gisela. I heard her laugh suddenly and Alfred, flattered by her amusement, smiled shyly. He seemed not to mind that she was no Christian and that she wore a pagan amulet about her neck, he was simply happy to be in her company and I was tempted to leave them alone. I had never seen him happy in the company of Ælswith, his weasel-tongued, stoat-faced, shrike-voiced wife. Then he happened to glance over Gisela’s shoulder and saw me.

His face changed immediately. He stiffened, sat upright, and reluctantly beckoned me forward.

I picked up a stool that our daughter used and heard a hiss as Alfred’s guards drew swords. Alfred waved the blades down, sensible enough to know that if I had wanted to attack him then I would hardly use a three-legged milking stool. He watched as I gave my swords to one of the guards, a mark of respect, then as I carried the stool across the terrace flagstones. “Lord Uhtred,” he greeted me coldly.

“Welcome to our house, lord King.” I gave him a bow, then sat with my back to the river.

He was silent for a moment. He was wearing a brown cloak that was drawn tight around his thin body. A silver cross hung at his neck, while on his thinning hair was a circlet of bronze, which surprised me, for he rarely wore symbols of kingship, thinking them vain baubles, but he must have decided that Lundene needed to see a king. He sensed my surprise for he clawed the circlet off his head. “I had hoped,” he said coldly, “that the Saxons of the new town would have abandoned their houses. That they would live here instead. They could be protected here by the walls! Why won’t they move?”

“They fear the ghosts, lord,” I said.

“And you do not?”

I thought for a while. “Yes,” I said after thinking about my answer.

“Yet you live here?” he waved at the house.

“We propitiate the spirits, lord,” Gisela explained softly and, when the king raised an eyebrow, she told how we placed food and drink in the courtyard to greet any ghosts who came to our house.

Alfred rubbed his eyes. “It might be better,” he said, “if our priests exorcise the streets. Prayer and holy water! We shall drive the ghosts away.”

“Or let me take three hundred men to sack the new town,” I suggested. “Burn their houses, lord, and they’ll have to live in the old city.”

A half-smile flickered on his face, gone as quickly as it had showed. “It is hard to force obedience,” he said, “without encouraging resentment. I sometimes think the only true authority I have is over my family, and even then I wonder! If I release you with sword and spear onto the new town, Lord Uhtred, then they will learn to hate you. Lundene must be obedient, but it must also be a bastion of Christian Saxons, and if they hate us then they will welcome a return of the Danes, who left them in peace.” He shook his head abruptly. “We shall leave them in peace, but don’t build them a palisade. Let them come into the old city of their own accord. Now, forgive me,” those last two words were to Gisela, “but we must speak of still darker things.”

Alfred gestured to a guard who pushed open the door from the terrace. Father Beocca appeared and with him a second priest; a black-haired, pouchy-faced, scowling creature called Father Erkenwald. He hated me. He had once tried to have me killed by accusing me of piracy and, though his accusations had been entirely true, I had slipped away from his bad-tempered clutches. He gave me a sour look while Beocca offered a solemn nod, then both men stared attentively at Alfred.

“Tell me,” Alfred said, looking at me, “what Sigefrid, Haesten, and Erik do now?”

“They’re at Beamfleot, lord,” I said, “strengthening their camp. They have thirty-two ships, and men enough to crew them.”

“You’ve seen this place?” Father Erkenwald demanded. The two priests, I knew, had been fetched onto the terrace to serve as witnesses to this conversation. Alfred, ever careful, liked to have a record, either written or memorized, of all such discussions.

“I’ve not seen it,” I said coldly.

“Your spies, then?” Alfred resumed the questions.

“Yes, lord.”

He thought for a moment. “The ships can be burned?” he asked.

I shook my head. “They’re in a creek, lord.”

“They must be destroyed,” he said vengefully, and I saw his long thin hands clench on his lap. “They raided Contwaraburg!” he said, sounding distraught.

“I heard of it, lord.”

“They burned the church!” he said indignantly, “and stole everything! Gospel books, crosses, even the relics!” He shuddered. “The church possessed a leaf of the fig tree that our Lord Jesus withered! I touched it once, and felt its power.” He shuddered again. “It is all gone to pagan hands.” He sounded as if he might weep.

I said nothing. Beocca had started writing, his pen scratching on a parchment held awkwardly in his lamed hand. Father Erkenwald was holding a pot of ink and had a look of disdain as if such a chore was belittling him. “Thirty-two ships, did you say?” Beocca asked me.

“That was the last I heard.”

“Creeks can be entered,” Alfred said acidly, his distress suddenly gone.

“The creek at Beamfleot dries at low tide, lord,” I explained, “and to reach the enemy ships we must pass their camp, which is on a hill above the mooring. And the last report I received, lord, said a ship was permanently moored across the channel. We could destroy that ship and fight our way through, but you’ll need a thousand men to do it and you’ll lose at least two hundred of them.”

“A thousand?” he asked skeptically.

“The last I heard, lord, said Sigefrid had close to two thousand men.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “Sigefrid lives?”

“Barely,” I said. I had received most of this news from Ulf, my Danish trader, who loved the silver I paid him. I had no doubt Ulf was receiving silver from Haesten or Erik for telling them what I did in Lundene, but that was a price worth paying. “Brother Osferth wounded him badly,” I said.

The king’s shrewd eyes rested on me. “Osferth,” he said tonelessly.

“Won the battle, lord,” I said just as tonelessly. Alfred just watched me, still expressionless. “You heard from Father Pyrlig?” I asked, and received a curt nod. “What Osferth did, lord, was brave,” I said, “and I am not certain I would have had the courage to do it. He jumped from a great height and attacked a fearsome warrior, and he lived to remember the achievement. If it was not for Osferth, lord, Sigefrid would be in Lundene today and I would be in my grave.”

“You want him back?” Alfred asked.

The answer, of course, was no, but Beocca gave an almost imperceptible nod of his gray head and I understood Osferth was not wanted in Wintanceaster. I did not like the youth and, judging from Beocca’s silent message, no one liked him in Wintanceaster either, yet his courage had been exemplary. Osferth was, I thought, a warrior at heart. “Yes, lord,” I said, and saw Gisela’s secret smile.

“He’s yours,” Alfred said shortly. Beocca rolled his good eye to heaven in gratitude. “And I want the Northmen out of the Temes estuary,” Alfred went on.

I shrugged. “Isn’t that Guthrum’s business?” I asked. Beamfleot lay in the kingdom of East Anglia with which, officially, we were at peace.

Alfred looked irritated, probably because I had used Guthrum’s Danish name. “King Æthelstan has been informed of the problem,” he said.

“And does nothing?”

“He makes promises.”

“And Vikings use his land with impunity,” I observed.

Alfred bridled. “Are you suggesting I declare war on King Æthelstan?”

“He allows raiders to come to Wessex, lord,” I said, “so why don’t we return the favor? Why don’t we send ships to East Anglia to hurt King Æthelstan’s holdings?”

Alfred stood, ignoring my suggestion. “What is most important,” he said, “is that we do not lose Lundene.” He held a hand toward Father Erkenwald who opened a leather satchel and took out a scroll of parchment sealed with brown wax. Alfred held the parchment to me. “I have appointed you as Military Governor of this city. Do not let the enemy retake it.”

I took the parchment. “Military Governor?” I asked pointedly.

“All troops and fyrd members will be under your command.”

“And the city, lord?” I asked.

“Will be a godly place,” Alfred said.

“We shall cleanse it of its iniquity,” Father Erkenwald interjected, “and wash it whiter than snow.”

“Amen,” Beocca said fervently.

“I am naming Father Erkenwald as Bishop of Lundene,” Alfred said, “and the civil governance will reside with him.”

I felt a lurch in my heart. Erkenwald? Who hated me? “And what about the Ealdorman of Mercia?” I asked, “does he not have civil governance here?”

“My son-in-law,” Alfred said distantly, “will not countermand my appointments.”

“And how much authority does he have here?” I asked.

“This is Mercia!” Alfred said, tapping the terrace with a foot, “and he rules Mercia.”

“So he can appoint a new military governor?” I asked.

“He will do as I tell him,” Alfred said, and there was a sudden anger in his voice. “And in four days’ time we shall all gather,” he had recovered his poise quickly, “and discuss what needs to be done to make this city safe and full of grace.” He nodded brusquely to me, inclined his head to Gisela, and turned away.

“Lord King,” Gisela spoke softly, checking Alfred’s departure, “how is your daughter? I saw her yesterday and she was bruised.”

Alfred’s gaze flickered to the river where six swans rode the water beneath the tumult of the broken bridge. “She’s well,” he said distantly.

“The bruising…” Gisela began.

“She was always a mischievous child,” Alfred interrupted her.

“Mischievous?” Gisela’s response was tentative.

“I love her,” Alfred said, and there could have been no doubt of that from the unexpected passion in his voice, “but while mischief in a child is amusing, in an adult it is sinful. My dear Æthelflaed must learn obedience.”

“So she learns to hate?” I asked, echoing the king’s earlier words.

“She’s married now,” Alfred said, “and her duty before God is to be obedient to her husband. She will learn that, I am sure, and be grateful for the lesson. It is hard to inflict punishment on a child you love, but it is a sin to withhold such punishment. I pray God she comes to a state of good grace.”

“Amen,” Father Erkenwald said.

“Praise God,” Beocca said.

Gisela said nothing and the king left.

I should have known that the summons to the palace on top of Lundene’s low hill would involve priests. I had expected a council of war and a hard-headed discussion on how best to scour the Temes of the brigands who infested the estuary, but instead, once I had been relieved of my swords, I was shown into the pillared hall where an altar had been erected. Finan and Sihtric were with me. Finan, a good Christian, made the sign of the cross, but Sihtric, like me, was a pagan and he looked at me with alarm as though he feared some religious magic.

I endured the service. Monks chanted, priests prayed, bells were rung, and men genuflected. There were some forty men in the room, most of them priests, but only one woman. Æthelflaed was seated beside her husband. She was dressed in a white robe, gathered at her waist by a blue sash, and her corn-gold hair had speedwell woven into its bun. I was behind her, but once, when she turned to look at her father, I saw the purplish bruise around her right eye. Alfred did not look at her, but stayed on his knees. I watched him, watched Æthelflaed’s slumped shoulders, and thought about Beamfleot, and how that wasps’ nest could be burned out. First, I thought, I needed to take a ship downriver and see Beamfleot for myself.

Alfred suddenly stood up and I assumed the service was at last over, but instead the king turned to us and delivered a mercifully brief homily. He encouraged us to ponder the words of the prophet Ezekiel, whoever he was. “‘Then the heathen that are left round about you,’” the king read to us, “‘shall know that I the Lord build the ruined places, and plant that which was desolate.’ Lundene,” the king put down the parchment with Ezekiel’s words, “is again a Saxon city, and though it is in ruins, with God’s help we shall rebuild it. We shall make it a place of God, a light to the pagans.” He paused, smiled gravely and beckoned to Bishop Erkenwald who, draped in a white cape hung with red strips on which silver crosses had been embroidered, stood to deliver a sermon. I groaned. We were supposed to be discussing how to rid the Temes of our enemies, and instead were being tortured with dull piety.

I had long learned to ignore sermons. It has been my unhappy fate to hear many, and the words of most have passed over me like rain running down newly laid thatch, but some minutes into Erkenwald’s hoarse harangue I began to take notice.

Because he was not preaching about remaking ruined cities, nor even about the heathen who threatened Lundene, instead he was preaching to Æthelflaed.

He stood by the altar and he shouted. He was ever an angry man, but on that spring day in the old Roman hall, he was filled with a passionate fury. God, he said, was speaking through him. God had a message, and God’s word could not be ignored or else the brimstone fires of hell would consume all mankind. He never used Æthelflaed’s name, but he stared at her, and no man in the room could doubt the message that the Christians’ god was sending to the poor girl. God, it seemed, had even written the message down in a gospel book, and Erkenwald snatched a copy from the altar, held it up so that the light from the smoke-hole in the roof caught the page, and read aloud.

“‘To be discreet, ‘”he looked up to glare at Æthelflaed, “‘chaste! Keepers of the home! Good! Obedient to their husbands!’ Those are God’s own words! That is what God demands of a woman! To be discreet, to be chaste, to be home-keepers, to be obedient! God spoke to us!” He almost writhed in ecstasy as he said those last four words. “God still speaks to us!” he gazed up at the roof as if he could glimpse his god peering through the ceiling. “God speaks to us!”

He preached for over an hour. His spittle spun through the ray of sunlight cast through the smoke-hole. He cringed, he shouted, he shuddered. And time and again he went back to the words in the gospel book that wives must be obedient to their husbands.

“Obedient!” he shouted, and paused.

I heard a thump from the outer hall as a guard rested his shield.

“Obedient!” Erkenwald shrieked again.

Æthelflaed’s head was held high. From my view behind her it seemed as if she were staring straight at that mad, vicious priest who was now the bishop and ruler of Lundene. Æthelred, beside her, fidgeted, but the few glimpses I got of his face showed a smug, self-satisfied look. Most of the men there looked bored and only one, Father Beocca, seemed to disapprove of the bishop’s sermon. He caught my eye once and made me smile by raising an indignant eyebrow. I am certain Beocca did not dislike the message, but he doubtless believed it should not have been preached in so public a manner. As for Alfred, he just gazed serenely at the altar as the bishop ranted, yet his passivity disguised involvement because that bitter sermon could never have been preached without the king’s knowledge and permission.

“Obedient!” Erkenwald cried again, and stared up at heaven as though that one word was the solution to all mankind’s troubles. The king nodded approval, and it occurred to me that Alfred had not only approved Erkenwald’s rant, but must have requested it. Perhaps he thought that a public admonition would save Æthelflaed from private beatings? The message certainly matched Alfred’s philosophy, for he believed that a kingdom could only thrive if it was ruled by law, was ordered by government, and was obedient to the will of God and the king. Yet he could look at his daughter, see her bruises and approve? He had always loved his children. I had watched them grow, and I had seen Alfred play with them, yet his religion could allow him to humiliate a daughter he loved? Sometimes, when I pray to my gods, I thank them fervently that they let me escape Alfred’s god.

Erkenwald at last ran out of words. There was a pause, then Alfred stood and turned to face us. “The word of God,” he said, smiling. The priests murmured brief prayers, then Alfred shook his head as though clearing it of pious matters. “The city of Lundene is now a proper part of Mercia,” he said, and a louder murmur of approval echoed through the room. “I have entrusted its civil government to Bishop Erkenwald,” he turned and smiled at the bishop, who smirked and bowed, “while Lord Uhtred will be responsible for the defense of the city,” Alfred said, looking at me. I did not bow.

Æthelflaed turned then. I think she had not known I was in the room, but she turned when my name was spoken and stared at me. I winked at her, and her bruised face smiled. Æthelred did not see the wink. He was pointedly ignoring me.

“The city, of course,” Alfred went on, his voice suddenly ice cold because he had seen my wink, “falls under the authority and rule of my beloved son-in-law. In time it will become a valuable part of his possessions, yet for the moment he has graciously agreed that Lundene must be administered by men experienced in government.” In other words Lundene might be part of Mercia, but Alfred had no intention of allowing it out of West Saxon hands. “Bishop Erkenwald has the authority to set dues and raise taxes,” Alfred explained, “and one third of the money will be spent on civil government, one third on the church, and one third on defending the city. And I know that under the bishop’s guidance and with the help of Almighty God we can raise a city that glorifies Christ and His church.”

I did not know most of the men in the room because they were almost all Mercian thegns who had been summoned to Lundene to meet Alfred. Aldhelm was among them, his face still black and bloodied from my hands. He had glanced at me once and twisted fast away. The summons had been unexpected and only a few thegns had made the journey to Lundene, and those men now listened politely enough to Alfred, but almost all were torn between two masters. Northern Mercia was under Danish rule, and only the southern part, which bordered Wessex, could be called free Saxon land and even that land was under constant harassment. A Mercian thegn who wished to stay alive, who wished his daughters safe from slavers and his livestock free of cattle-raiders, did well to pay tribute to the Danes as well as pay taxes to Æthelred who, because of his inherited landholdings, marriage, and lineage, was acknowledged as the most noble of the Mercian thegns. He might call himself king if he wished, and I had no doubt he did so wish, but Alfred did not, and Æthelred without Alfred was nothing.

“It is our intention,” Alfred said, “to rid Mercia of its pagan invaders. To do that we needed to secure Lundene and so put a stop to the Northmen’s ships raiding up the Temes. Now we must hold Lundene. How is that to be done?”

The answer to that was obvious, though it did not stop a general discussion that meandered aimlessly as men argued about how many troops would be needed to defend the walls. I took no part. I leaned against the back wall and noted which of the thegns were enthusiastic and which were guarded. Bishop Erkenwald glanced at me occasionally, plainly wondering why I did not contribute my grain of wheat to the threshing floor, but I kept silent. Æthelred listened intently and finally summed up the discussion. “The city, lord King,” he said brightly, “needs a garrison of two thousand men.”

“Mercians,” Alfred said. “Those men must come from Mercia.”

“Of course,” Æthelred agreed quickly. I noted that many of the thegns looked dubious.

Alfred saw it, too, and glanced at me. “This is your responsibility, Lord Uhtred. Have you no opinion?”

I almost yawned, but managed to resist the impulse. “I have better than an opinion, lord King,” I said, “I can give you fact.”

Alfred raised an eyebrow and managed to look disapproving at the same time. “Well?” he asked irritably when I paused too long.

“Four men for every pole,” I said. A pole was six paces, or thereabouts, and the allocation of four men to a pole was not mine, but Alfred’s. When he ordered the burhs built he had worked out in his meticulous way how many men would be needed to defend each, and the distance about the walls determined the final figure. Coccham’s walls were one thousand four hundred paces in length and so my household guards and the fyrd had to supply a thousand men for its defense. But Coccham was a small burh, Lundene a city.

“And the distance about Lundene’s walls?” Alfred demanded.

I looked at Æthelred, as though expecting him to answer and Alfred, seeing where I looked, also gazed at his son-in-law. Æthelred thought for a heartbeat and, instead of telling the truth which was that he did not know, made a guess. “Eight hundred poles, lord King?”

“The landward wall,” I broke in harshly, “is six hundred and ninety-two poles. The river wall adds a further three hundred and fifty-eight. The defenses, lord King, stretch for one thousand and fifty poles.”

“Four thousand, two hundred men,” Bishop Erkenwald said immediately, and I confess I was impressed. It had taken me a long time to discover that number, and I had not been certain my computation had been correct until Gisela also worked the problem out.

“No enemy, lord King,” I said, “can attack everywhere at once, so I reckon the city can be defended by a garrison of three thousand, four hundred men.”

One of the Mercian thegns made a hissing noise, as though such a figure was an impossibility. “Only one thousand men more than your garrison in Wintanceaster, lord King,” I pointed out. The difference, of course, was that Wintanceaster lay in a loyal West Saxon shire that was accustomed to its men serving their turn in the fyrd.

“And where do you find those men?” a Mercian demanded.

“From you,” I said harshly.

“But…” the man began, then faltered. He was going to point out that the Mercian fyrd was a useless thing, grown weak by disuse, and that any attempt to raise the fyrd might draw the malevolent attention of the Danish earls who ruled in northern Mercia, and so these men had learned to lie low and keep silent. They were like deerhounds who shiver in the undergrowth for fear of attracting the wolves.

“But nothing,” I said, louder and harsher still. “For if a man does not contribute to his country’s defense then that man is a traitor. He should be dispossessed of his land, put to death, and his family reduced to slavery.”

I thought Alfred might object to those words, but he kept silent. Indeed, he nodded agreement. I was the blade inside his scabbard and he was evidently pleased that I had shown the steel for an instant. The Mercians said nothing.

“We also need men for ships, lord King,” I went on.

“Ships?” Alfred asked.

“Ships?” Erkenwald echoed.

“We need crewmen,” I explained. We had captured twenty-one ships when we took Lundene, of which seventeen were fighting boats. The others were wider beamed, built for trading, but they could be useful too. “I have the ships,” I went on, “but they need crews, and those crews have to be good fighters.”

“You defend the city with ships?” Erkenwald asked defiantly.

“And where will your money come from?” I asked him. “From customs dues. But no trader dare sail here, so I have to clear the estuary of enemy ships. That means killing the pirates, and for that I need crews of fighting men. I can use my household troops, but they have to be replaced in the city’s garrison by other men.”

“I need ships,” Æthelred suddenly intervened.

Æthelred needed ships? I was so astonished that I said nothing. My cousin’s job was to defend southern Mercia and push the Danes northward from the rest of his country, and that would mean fighting on land. Now, suddenly, he needed ships? What did he plan? To row across pastureland?

“I would suggest, lord King,” Æthelred was smiling as he spoke, his voice smooth and respectful, “that all the ships west of the bridge be given to me, for use in your service,” and he bowed to Alfred when he said that, “and my cousin be given the ships east of the bridge.”

“That…” I began, but was cut off by Alfred.

“That is fair,” the king said firmly. It was not fair, it was ridiculous. There were only two fighting ships in the stretch of river east of the bridge, and fifteen upstream of the obstruction. The presence of those fifteen ships suggested that Sigefrid had been planning a major raid on Alfred’s territory before we struck him, and I needed those ships to scour the estuary clear of enemies. But Alfred, eager to be seen supporting his son-in-law, swept my objections aside. “You will use what ships you have, Lord Uhtred,” he insisted, “and I will put seventy of my household guard under your command to crew one ship.”

So I was to drive the Danes from the estuary with two ships? I gave up, and leaned against the wall as the discussion droned on, mostly about the level of customs to be charged, and how much the neighboring shires were to be taxed, and I wondered yet again why I was not in the north where a man’s sword was free and there was small law and much laughter.

Bishop Erkenwald cornered me when the meeting was over. I was strapping on my sword belt when he peered up at me with his beady eyes. “You should know,” he greeted me, “that I opposed your appointment.”

“As I would have opposed yours,” I said bitterly, still angry at Æthelred’s theft of the fifteen warships.

“God may not look with blessing on a pagan warrior,” the newly appointed bishop explained himself, “but the king, in his wisdom, considers you a soldier of ability.”

“And Alfred’s wisdom is famous,” I said blandly.

“I have spoken with the Lord Æthelred,” he went on, ignoring my words, “and he has agreed that I can issue writs of assembly for Lundene’s adjacent counties. You have no objection?”

Erkenwald meant that he now had the power to raise the fyrd. It was a power that might better have been given me, but I doubted Æthelred would have agreed to that. Nor did I think that Erkenwald, nasty man though he was, would be anything but loyal to Alfred. “I have no objection,” I said.

“Then I shall inform Lord Æthelred of your agreement,” he said formally.

“And when you speak with him,” I said, “tell him to stop hitting his wife.”

Erkenwald jerked as though I had just struck him in the face. “It is his Christian duty,” he said stiffly, “to discipline his wife, and it is her duty to submit. Did you not listen to what I preached?”

“To every word,” I said.

“She brought it on herself,” Erkenwald snarled. “She has a fiery spirit, she defies him!”

“She’s little more than a child,” I said, “and a pregnant child at that.”

“And foolishness is deep in the heart of a child,” Erkenwald responded, “and those are the words of God! And what does God say should be done about the foolishness of a child? That the rod of correction shall beat it far away!” He shuddered suddenly. “That is what you do, Lord Uhtred! You beat a child into obedience! A child learns by suffering pain, by being beaten, and that pregnant child must learn her duty. God wills it! Praise God!”

I heard only last week that they want to make Erkenwald into a saint. Priests come to my home beside the northern sea where they find an old man, and they tell me I am just a few paces from the fires of hell. I only need repent, they say, and I will go to heaven and live for evermore in the blessed company of the saints.

And I would rather burn till time itself burns out.

SEVEN

Water dripped from oar-blades, the drips spreading ripples in a sea that was shining slabs of light that slowly shifted and parted, joined and slid.

Our ship was poised on that shifting light, silent.

The sky to the east was molten gold pouring around a bank of sun-drenched cloud, while the rest was blue. Pale blue to the east and dark blue to the west where night fled toward the unknown lands beyond the distant ocean.

To the south I could see the low shore of Wessex. It was green and brown, treeless and not that far away, though I would go no closer for the light-sliding sea concealed mudbanks and shoals. Our oars were resting and the wind was dead, but we moved relentlessly eastward, carried by the tide and by the river’s strong flow. This was the estuary of the Temes; a wide place of water, mud, sand, and terror.

Our ship had no name and she carried no beast-heads on her prow or stern. She was a trading ship, one of the two I had captured in Lundene, and she was wide-beamed, sluggish, big-bellied, and clumsy. She carried a sail, but the sail was furled on the yard, and the yard was in its crutches. We drifted on the tide toward the golden dawn.

I stood with the steering-oar in my right hand. I wore mail, but no helmet. My two swords were strapped to my waist, but they, like my mail coat, were hidden beneath a dirty brown woolen cloak. There were twelve rowers on the benches, Sihtric was beside me, one man was on the bow platform and all those men, like me, showed neither armor nor weapons.

We looked like a trading ship drifting along the Wessex shore in hope that no one on the northern side of the estuary would see us.

But they had seen us.

And a sea-wolf was stalking us.

She was rowing to our north, slanting south and eastward, waiting for us to turn and try to escape upriver against the tide. She was perhaps a mile away and I could see the short black upright line of her stemhead, which ended in a beast’s head. She was in no hurry. Her shipmaster could see we were not rowing and he would take that inactivity as a sign of panic. He would think we were discussing what to do. His own oar banks were dipping slow, but every stroke surged that distant boat forward to cut off our seaward escape.

Finan, who was manning one of the stern oars of our ship, glanced over his shoulder. “Crew of fifty?” he suggested.

“Maybe more,” I said.

He grinned. “How many more?”

“Could be seventy?” I guessed.

We numbered forty-three, and all but fifteen of us were hidden in the place where the ship would normally have carried goods. Those hidden men were covered by an old sail, making it look as though we carried salt or grain, some cargo that needed to be protected from any rain or spray. “Be a rare fight if it’s seventy,” Finan said with relish.

“Won’t be any fight at all,” I said, “because they won’t be ready for us,” and that was true. We looked like an easy victim, a handful of men on a tubby ship, and the sea-wolf would come alongside and a dozen men would leap aboard while the rest of the crew just watched the slaughter. That, at least, was what I hoped. The watching crew would be armed, of course, but they would not be expecting battle, and my men were more than ready.

“Remember,” I called loudly so the men beneath the sail would hear me, “we kill them all!”

“Even women?” Finan asked.

“Not women,” I said. I doubted there would be women aboard the far ship.

Sihtric was crouching beside me and now squinted up. “Why kill them all, lord?”

“So they learn to fear us,” I said.

The gold in the sky was brightening and fading. The sun was above the cloud bank and the sea shimmered with its new brilliance. The reflected image of the enemy was long on the light-flickering, slow-moving water.

“Steorbord oars!” I called, “back water. Clumsy now!”

The oarsmen grinned as they deliberately churned the water with clumsy strokes that slowly turned our prow upriver so that it appeared as though we were trying to escape. The sensible thing for us to have done, had we been as innocent and vulnerable as we looked, would have been to row to the southern shore, ground the boat, and run for our lives, but instead we turned and started rowing against tide and current. Our oars clashed, making us look like incompetent, scared fools.

“He’s taken the bait,” I said to our rowers, though, because our bows now pointed westward, they could see for themselves that the enemy had started rowing hard. The Viking was coming straight for us, her oar banks rising and falling like wings and the white water swelling and shrinking at her stem as each blade-beat surged the ship.

We kept feigning panic. Our oars banged into each other so that we did little except stir the water around our clumsy hull. Two gulls circled our stubby mast, their cries sad in the limpid morning. Far to the west, where the sky was darkened by the smoke of Lundene that lay beyond the horizon, I could just see a tiny dark streak, which I knew to be the mast of another ship. She was coming toward us, and I knew the enemy ship would have seen her too and would be wondering whether she was friend or foe.

Not that it mattered, for it would take the enemy only five minutes to capture our small, undermanned cargo ship and it would be the best part of an hour before the ebbing tide and steady rowing could bring that western ship to where we struggled. The Viking boat came on fast, her oars working in lovely unison, but the ship’s speed meant that her oarsmen would be tired as well as unprepared by the time she reached us. Her beast-head, proud on her high stem, was an eagle with an open beak painted red as if the bird had just ripped bloody flesh from a victim, while beneath the carved head a dozen armed men were crowded on the bow platform. They were the men supposed to board and kill us.

Twenty oars a side made forty men. The boarding party added a dozen, though it was hard to count the men who were crowded so close together, and two men stood beside the steering-oar. “Between fifty and sixty,” I called aloud. The enemy rowers were not in mail. They did not expect to fight, and most would have their swords at their feet and their shields stacked in the bilge.

“Stop oars!” I called. “Rowers, get up!”

The eagle-prowed ship was close now. I could hear the creak of her oar tholes, the splash of her blades, and the hiss of the sea at her cutwater. I could see bright ax blades, the helmeted faces of the men who thought they would kill us, and the anxiety on the steersman’s face as he attempted to lay his bows directly on ours. My rowers were milling about, feigning panic. The Viking oarsmen gave a last heave and I heard their shipmaster order them to cease rowing and ship oars. She ran on toward us, water sliding away from her stem and she was very close now, close enough to smell, and the men on her bow platform hefted their shields as the steersman aimed her bows to slide along our flank. Her oars were drawn inboard as she swooped to her kill.

I waited a heartbeat, waited until the enemy could no longer avoid us, then sprang our ambush. “Now!” I shouted.

The sail was dragged away and suddenly our little ship bristled with armed men. I threw off my cloak and Sihtric brought me my helmet and shield. A man shouted a warning on the enemy ship and the steersman threw his weight on his long oar and his vessel turned slightly, but she had turned away too late, and there was a splintering sound as her bows cracked through our oar shafts. “Now!” I shouted again.

Clapa was my man in our bows and he hurled a grapnel to haul the enemy into our embrace. The grapnel slammed over her sheer-strake, Clapa heaved, and the impetus of the enemy ship made her swing on the line to crash against our flank. My men immediately swarmed over her side. These were my household troops, trained warriors, dressed in mail and hungry for slaughter, and they leaped among unarmored oarsmen who were utterly unprepared for a fight. The enemy boarders, the only men armed and keyed for a battle, hesitated as the two ships crashed together. They could have attacked my men who were already killing, but instead their leader shouted at them to jump across onto our ship. He hoped to take my men in the rear, and it was a shrewd enough tactic, but we still had enough men left aboard to thwart them. “Kill them all!” I shouted.

One Dane, I assume he was a Dane, tried to jump onto my platform and I simply banged my shield into him and he disappeared between the ships where his mail took him instantly to the sea’s bed. The other Viking boarders had reached the stern rowers’ benches where they hacked and cursed at my men. I was behind and above them, and only had Sihtric for company, and the two of us could have stayed safe by remaining on the steering platform, but a man does not lead by staying out of a fight. “Stay where you are,” I told Sihtric, and jumped.

I shouted a challenge as I jumped and a tall man turned to face me. He had an eagle’s wing on his helmet, and his mail was fine, and his arms were bright with rings, and his shield was painted with an eagle, and I knew he must be the owner of the enemy ship. He was a Viking lord, fair-bearded and brown-eyed, and he carried a long-handled ax, its blade already reddened, and he swept it at me and I parried with the shield and his ax dropped at the last moment to cut at my ankles and, by the gift of Thor, the ship lurched and the ax lost its force in a rib of the trading ship. He kept my sword lunge away with his shield as he raised the ax again and I shield-charged him, throwing him back with my weight.

He should have fallen, but he staggered back into his own men and so stayed on his feet. I cut at his ankle and Serpent-Breath rasped on metal. His boots were protected as mine were by metal strips. The ax hurtled around and thumped into my shield, and his shield crashed into my sword and I was hurled back by the double blow. I hit the edge of the steering platform with my shoulderblades and he charged me again, trying to drive me down, and I was half aware of Sihtric still standing on the small stern platform and beating a sword at my enemy, but the blade glanced off the Dane’s helmet and wasted itself on the man’s mailed shoulders. He kicked at my feet, knowing I was unbalanced, and I fell.

“Turd,” he snarled, then took one backward step. Behind him his men were dying, but he had time to kill me before he died himself. “I am Olaf Eagleclaw,” he told me proudly, “and I will meet you in the corpse-hall.”

“Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said, and I was still on the deck as he lifted his ax high.

And Olaf Eagleclaw screamed.

I had fallen on purpose. He was heavier than me, and he had me cornered, and I knew he would go on beating at me and I would be helpless to push him away, and so I had fallen. Sword blades were wasted on his fine mail and on his shining helmet, but now I thrust Serpent-Breath upward, under the skirt of his mail, up into his unarmored groin, and I followed her up, ripping the blade into him and through him as the blood drenched the deck between us. He was staring at me, wide-eyed and mouth open, as the ax fell from his hand. I was standing now, still hauling on Serpent-Breath, and he fell away, twitching, and I yanked her out of his body and saw his right hand scrabbling for his ax handle, and I kicked it toward him and watched his fingers curl around the haft before I killed him with a quick thrust into the throat. More blood spilled across the ship’s timbers.

I make that small fight sound easy. It was not. It is true I fell on purpose, but Olaf made me fall, and instead of resisting, I let myself drop. Sometimes, in my old age, I wake shivering in the night as I remember the moments I should have died and did not. That is one of those moments. Perhaps I remember it wrong? Age clouds old things. There must have been the sound of feet scraping on the deck, the grunt of men making a blow, the stench of the filthy bilge, the gasps of wounded men. I remember the fear as I fell, the gut-souring, mind-screaming panic of imminent death. It was but a moment of life, soon gone, a flurry of blows and panic, a fight hardly worth remembering, yet still Olaf Eagleclaw can wake me in the darkness and I lie, listening to the sea beat on the sand, and I know he will be waiting for me in the corpse-hall where he will want to know whether I killed him by pure luck or whether I planned that fatal thrust. He will also remember that I kicked the ax back into his grasp so that he could die with a weapon in his hand, and for that he will thank me.

I look forward to seeing him.

By the time Olaf was dead his ship was taken and his crew slaughtered. Finan had led the charge onto the Sea-Eagle. I knew she was called that, for her name was cut in runic letters on her stem-post. “It was no fight,” Finan reported, sounding disgusted.

“I told you,” I said.

“A few of the rowers found weapons,” he said, dismissing their effort with a shrug. Then he pointed down into the Sea-Eagle’s bilge that was sodden with blood. Five men crouched there, shivering, and Finan saw my questioning look. “They’re Saxons, lord,” he explained why the men still lived.

The five men were fishermen who told me they lived at a place called Fughelness. I hardly understood them. They spoke English, but in such a strange way that it was like a foreign language, yet I understood them to say that Fughelness was a barren island in a waste of marshes and creeks. A place of birds, emptiness, and a few poor folk who lived in the mud by trapping birds, catching eels, and netting fish. They said Olaf had captured them a week before and forced them to his rowing benches. There had been eleven of them, but six had died in the fury of Finan’s assault before these survivors had managed to convince my men that they were prisoners, not enemies.

We stripped the enemy of everything, then piled their mail, weapons, arm rings, and clothes at the foot of Sea-Eagle’s mast. In time we would divide those spoils. Each man would receive one share, Finan would take three, and I would take five. I was supposed to yield one third to Alfred and another third to Bishop Erkenwald, but I rarely gave them the plunder I took in battle.

We threw the naked dead into the trading ship where they made a grisly cargo of blood-spattered bodies. I remember thinking how white those bodies looked, yet how dark their faces were. A cloud of gulls screamed at us, wanting to come down and peck the corpses, but the birds were too nervous of our proximity to dare try. By now the ship that had been coming downtide from the west had reached us. She was a fine fighting ship, her bow crowned with a dragon’s head, her stern showing a wolf’s head and her masthead decorated with a raven wind-vane. She was one of the two warships we had captured in Lundene and Ralla had christened her Sword of the Lord. Alfred would have approved. She slewed to a stop and Ralla, her shipmaster, cupped his hands. “Well done!”

“We lost three men,” I called back. All three had died in the fight against Olaf’s boarders, and those men we carried aboard Sea-Eagle. I would have dropped them into the sea and let them sink to the seagod’s embrace, but they were Christians and their friends wanted them carried back to a Christian graveyard in Lundene.

“You want me to tow her?” Ralla shouted, gesturing at the trading ship.

I said yes, and there was a pause while he fixed a line to the stem-post of the cargo ship. Then, in consort, we rowed northward across the estuary of the Temes. The gulls, emboldened now, were plucking at the dead men’s eyes.

It was close to midday and the tide had gone slack. The estuary heaved oily and sluggish under the high sun as we rowed slowly, conserving our strength, sliding across the sun-silvered sea. And slowly, too, the estuary’s northern shore came into view.

Low hills shimmered in the day’s heat. I had rowed that shore before and knew that wooded hills lay beyond a flat shelf of waterlogged land. Ralla, who knew the coast much better than I, guided us, and I memorized the landmarks as we approached. I noted a slightly higher hill, a bluff and a clump of trees, and I knew I would see those things again because we were rowing our ships toward Beamfleot. This was the den of sea-wolves, the sea-serpent’s haunt, Sigefrid’s refuge.

This was also the old kingdom of the East Saxons, a kingdom that had long vanished, though ancient stories said they had once been feared. They had been a sea-people, raiders, but the Angles to their north had conquered them and now this coast was a part of Guthrum’s realm, East Anglia.

It was a lawless coast, far from Guthrum’s capital. Here, in the creeks that dried at low tide, ships could wait and, as the tide rose, they could slip out of their inlets to raid the merchants whose goods were carried up the Temes. This was a pirates’ nest, and here Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten had their camp.

They must have seen us approach, but what did they see? They saw the Sea-Eagle, one of their own ships, and with her another Danish ship, both boats proudly decorated with beast-heads. They saw a third ship, a tubby cargo ship, and would have assumed Olaf was returning from a successful foray. They would have thought Sword of the Lord a Northmen’s ship newly come to England. In short, they saw us, but they suspected nothing.

As we neared the land I ordered the beast-heads taken from stern and stem-posts. Such things were never left on display as a boat entered its home waters, for the animals were there to frighten hostile spirits and Olaf would have assumed that the spirits inhabiting the creeks at Beamfleot were friendly, and he would have been loath to frighten them. And so the watchers from Sigefrid’s camp saw the carved heads heaved off and they would have thought we were friends rowing homeward.

And I stared at that shore, knowing that fate would bring me back, and I touched the hilt of Serpent-Breath, for she had a fate too, and I knew she would come to this place again. This was a place for my sword to sing.

Beamfleot lay beneath a hill that sloped steeply down to the creek. One of the fishermen, a younger man who seemed blessed with more wit than his companions, stood beside me and named the places as I pointed at them. The settlement beneath the hill, he confirmed, was Beamfleot, and the creek he insisted was a river, the Hothlege. Beamfleot lay on the Hothlege’s northern bank while the southern bank was a low, dark, wide and sullen island. “Caninga,” the fisherman told me.

I repeated the names, memorizing them as I memorized the land I saw.

Caninga was a sodden place, an island of marsh and reeds, wildfowl and mud. The Hothlege, which looked to me more like a creek than a river, was a tangle of mudbanks through which a channel twisted toward the hill above Beamfleot, and now, as we rounded the eastern tip of Caninga, I could see Sigefrid’s camp crowning that hill. It was a green hill, and his walls, made of earth and topped with a timber palisade, lay like a brown scar on its domed summit. The slope from his southern wall was precipitous, dropping to where a crowd of ships lay canted on the mud exposed by low tide. The Hothlege’s mouth was guarded by a ship that blocked the channel. She lay athwart the waterway, held against the tides by chains at stem and stern. One chain led to a massive post sunk on Caninga’s shore, while the other was attached to a tree that grew lonely on the smaller island that formed the northern bank of the channel’s mouth. “Two-Tree Island,” the fisherman saw where I was looking and named the islet.

“But there’s only one tree there,” I pointed out.

“In my father’s day there were two, lord.”

The tide had turned. The flood had begun, and the great waters were surging into the estuary so that our three ships were being carried toward the enemy’s camp. “Turn!” I shouted to Ralla, and saw the relief on his face, “but put the dragon’s head back first!”

And so Sigefrid’s men saw the dragon’s head replaced, and the eagle’s beaked head put high on Sea-Eagle’s stem, and they must have known something was wrong, not just because we displayed our beasts, but because we turned our ships and Ralla cut the smaller cargo boat loose. And, as they watched from their high fort, they would have seen my banner unfurled from Sea-Eagle’s mast. Gisela and her women had made that flag of the wolf’s head, and I flew it so that the watching men would know who had killed the Sea-Eagle’s crew.

Then we rowed away, pulling hard against that flooding tide. We turned south and west about Caninga, then let the strong new tide carry us upriver toward Lundene.

And the cargo ship, its hold filled with blood-laced gull-pecked corpses, rode the same tide up the creek to bump against the longship moored athwart the channel.

I had three fighting ships now while my cousin possessed fifteen. He had moved those captured boats upriver where, for all I knew, they rotted. If I had possessed ten more ships and had the crews to man them I could have taken Beamfleot, but all I had was three ships and the creek beneath the high fort was crammed with masts.

Still, I was sending a message.

That death was coming to Beamfleot.

Death visited Hrofeceastre first. Hrofeceastre was a town close to Lundene on the southern bank of the Temes estuary in the old kingdom of Cent. The Romans had made a fort there, and now a sizable town had grown in and around the old stronghold. Cent, of course, had long been a part of Wessex and Alfred had ordered the town’s defenses to be strengthened, which was easily done for the old earth walls of the Roman fort still stood, and all that had to be added was a deepening of the ditch, the making of an oak palisade, and the destruction of some buildings that were outside and too close to the ramparts. And it was well that the work had been completed because, early that summer, a great fleet of Danish ships came from Frankia. They found refuge in East Anglia, from where they sailed south, rode the tide up the Temes, and then beached their ships on the River Medwæg, the tributary on which Hrofeceastre stood. They had hoped to storm the town, sacking it with fire and terror, but the new walls and the strong garrison defied them.

I had news of their coming before Alfred. I sent a messenger to tell him of the attack and, that same day, took Sea-Eagle down the Temes and up the Medwæg to find that I was helpless. At least sixty warships were beached on the river’s muddy bank, and two others had been chained together and moored athwart the Medwæg to deter any attack by West Saxon ships. On shore I could see the invaders throwing up an earthen embankment, suggesting that they intended to ring Hrofeceastre with their own wall.

The leader of the invaders was a man called Gunnkel Rodeson. I learned later he had sailed from a lean season in Frankia in hope of taking the silver reputed to be in Hrofeceastre’s big church and monastery. I rowed away from his ships and, in a brisk southeast wind, hoisted Sea-Eagle’s sail and crossed the estuary. I hoped to find Beamfleot deserted, but though it was obvious that many of Sigefrid’s ships and men had gone to join Gunnkel, sixteen vessels remained and the fort’s high wall still bristled with men and spear-points.

And so we went back to Lundene.

“Do you know Gunnkel?” Gisela asked me. We spoke in Danish as we almost always did.

“Never heard of him.”

“A new enemy?” she asked, smiling.

“They come from the north endlessly,” I said. “Kill one and two more sail south.”

“A very good reason to stop killing them, then,” she said. That was as close as Gisela ever came to chiding me for killing her own people.

“I am sworn to Alfred,” I said in bleak explanation.

Next day I woke to find ships coming through the bridge. A horn alerted me. The horn was blown by a sentry on the walls of a small burh I was building at the bridge’s southern end. We called that burh Suthriganaweorc, which simply meant the southern defense, and it was being built and guarded by men of the Suthrige fyrd. Fifteen warships were coming downstream, and they rowed through the gap at high water when the tumult in the broken middle was at its calmest. All fifteen ships came through safely and the third, I saw, flew my cousin Æthelred’s banner of the prancing white horse. Once below the bridge the ships rowed for the wharves where they tied up three abreast. Æthelred, it seemed, was returning to Lundene. At the beginning of summer he had taken Æthelflaed back to his estates in western Mercia, there to fight against the Welsh cattle thieves who loved riding into Mercia’s fat lands. Now he was back.