The Pagan Lord

Four

The weather calmed in the night and that was not what I wanted.

Nor did I want to remember the face of that fisherman with his flattened nose and the scars on his sun-darkened cheek, and how his eyes had looked up, desperate, pleading and vulnerable, and how we had killed him, and how his black blood had sprayed the black night and vanished in the swirl of black water beside Middelniht’s hull. We are cruel people.

Hild, whom I had loved and who had been an abbess in Wessex and a good Christian, had so often spoken wistfully of peace. She had called her god the ‘prince of peace’ and tried to persuade me that if only the worshippers of the real gods would acknowledge her nailed prince then there would be perpetual peace. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ she liked to tell me, and she would have been pleased these last few years because Britain had known its uneasy peace. The Danes had done little more than raid for cattle, sometimes for slaves, and the Welsh and Scots had done the same, but there had been no war. That was why my son had not stood in the shield wall, because there had been no shield walls. He had practised time and again, day after day, but practice is not the real thing, practice is not the bowel-loosening terror of facing a mead-crazed maniac who is within arm’s length and carrying a lead-weighted war axe.

And some men had preached that the peace of these last few years was the Christian god’s will, and that we should be glad because our children could grow without fear and what we sowed we could harvest, and that it was only during a time of peace that the Christian priests could preach their message to the Danes, and that when that work was done we would all live in a Christian world of love and friendship.

But it had not been peace.

Some of it was exhaustion. We had fought and fought, and the last battle, a welter of blood-letting in the winter marshland of East Anglia, where King Eohric had died and Æthelwold the Pretender had died and Sigurd Thorrson’s son had died, that battle had been a slaughter so great it had slaked the appetite for more battle. Yet it had changed little. The north and east were still Danish, and the south and west still Saxon. All those graves had yielded little land for either side. And Alfred, who wanted peace, but had known there could be no peace while two tribes fought for the same pastures, had died. Edward, his son, was king in Wessex, and Edward was content to let the Danes live in peace. He wanted what his father had wanted, all the Saxons living under one crown, but he was young, he was nervous of failure, and he was wary of those older men who had advised his father, and so he listened to the priests who told him to hold hard to what he possessed and to let the Danes stay where they were. In the end, the priests said, the Danes would become Christians and we should all love one another. Not all the Christian priests preached that message. Some, like the abbot I had killed, urged the Saxons to war, claiming that the body of Saint Oswald would be a sign of victory.

Those belligerent priests were right. Not about Saint Oswald, at least I doubted that, but they were surely right to preach that there never could be a lasting peace while the Danes occupied lands that had once been Saxon. And those Danes still wanted it all; they wanted the rest of Mercia and all of Wessex. It did not matter what banner they fought under, whether it was the hammer or the cross, the Danes were still hungry. And they were powerful again. The losses of the wars had been made good, they were restless, and so was Æthelred, Lord of Mercia. He had lived all his life under the thrall of Wessex, but now he had a new woman and he was getting old and he wanted reputation. He wanted the poets to sing of his triumphs, he wanted the chronicles to write his name in history, and so he would start a war, and that war would be Christian Mercia against Christian East Anglia, and it would draw in the rest of Britain and there would be shield walls again.

Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win. Even the nailed god cannot change that truth. And I was a warrior, and in a world at war the warrior must be cruel.

The fisherman had looked up and there had been pleading in his eyes, but the axe had fallen and he had gone to his sea grave. He would have betrayed me to Ælfric.

I told myself there would be an end to the cruelty. I had fought for Wessex all my life. I had given the nailed god his victories, and the nailed god had turned around and spat in my face, so now I would go to Bebbanburg and, once I had captured it, I would stay there and let the two tribes fight. That was my plan. I would go home and I would stay at home and I would persuade Æthelflaed to join me, and then not even the nailed god could prise me out of Bebbanburg because that fortress is invincible.

And in the morning I told Finan how we would capture it.

He laughed when he heard. ‘It could work,’ he said.

‘Pray to your god to send the right weather,’ I said. I sounded gloomy, and no wonder. I wanted hard weather, ship-threatening weather, and instead the sky was suddenly blue and the air warm. The wind had turned light and southerly so that our sail flapped at times, losing all power and causing Middelniht to slop lazily in a sun-glittering sea. Most of my men were sleeping, and I was content to let them rest rather than take to the oars. We had steered well offshore and were alone under that empty sky.

Finan looked up to see where the sun was. ‘This isn’t the way to Bebbanburg,’ he said.

‘We’re going to Frisia.’

‘Frisia!’

‘I can’t go to Bebbanburg yet,’ I explained, ‘and I can’t stay on the Northumbrian coast because Ælfric will discover we’re here, so we must hide for a few days. We’ll hide in Frisia.’

And so we crossed the sea to that strange place of islands and water and mudbanks and reeds and sand and driftwood, and of channels that shift in the night, and land that is there one day and not the next. It is a home for herons, for seals and for outcasts. It took us three days and two nights to make the crossing, and in the third day’s dusk, when the sun had turned all the west into a cauldron of glowing fire, we crept into the islands with a man in our bows testing the depth by probing with an oar.

I had spent time here. It was in these shoals that I had ambushed Skirnir and watched him die, and in his hall on the island of Zegge I had discovered his paltry treasure. I had left his hall intact and we searched for it now, but the island had gone, washed out by the relentless tides, though we did find the crescent-shaped sandbank where we had tricked Skirnir into dividing his forces, and so we beached Middelniht there and made a camp on the dunes.

I needed two things: a second ship and bad weather. I did not dare search for the ship because we were in waters where another man held sway, and if I took the ship too early that man would have time to seek me out and demand to know why I poached in his waters. He found us anyway, arriving on our second day in a long, low vessel rowed by forty men. His ship came fast and confident through the unmarked channel that twisted towards our refuge, then the prow grated on the sand as the steersman bellowed at the oarsmen to back water. A man leaped ashore; a big man with a face as broad and flat as a spade’s blade and with a beard reaching to his waist. ‘And who,’ he bellowed cheerfully, ‘are you?’

‘Wulf Ranulfson,’ I answered. I was sitting on a bleached driftwood log and I did not bother to stand.

He paced up the beach. It was a warm day, but he wore a thick cloak, high boots, and a chain-mail hood. His hair was matted and long, hanging to his shoulders. He had a long-sword strapped at his waist and a tarnished silver chain half hidden by his beard. ‘And who is Wulf Ranulfson?’ he demanded.

‘A traveller out of Haithabu,’ I answered mildly, ‘and on his way back there.’

‘So why are you on one of my islands?’

‘We’re resting,’ I said, ‘and making repairs.’

‘I charge for rest and repairs,’ he said.

‘And I don’t pay,’ I responded, still speaking softly.

‘I am Thancward,’ he boasted, as if he expected me to recognise the name. ‘I have sixteen crews, and ships for all of them. If I say you pay, you pay.’

‘And what payment do you want?’

‘Enough silver to make two more links for this chain,’ he suggested.

I stood slowly, lazily. Thancward was a big man, but I was taller and I saw the slight surprise on his face. ‘Thancward,’ I said, as if trying to remember the name. ‘I have not heard of Thancward, and if he had sixteen ships why would Thancward come to this miserable beach himself? Why would he not send his men to run his paltry errand? And his ship has benches for fifty rowers, yet only forty are at the oars. Maybe Thancward has mislaid his men? Or perhaps he believes we’re a trading ship? Perhaps he thinks he didn’t need to bring many warriors because we’re weak?’

He was no fool. He was just a pirate, and I suspected he had two or three ships, of which perhaps only the one he was using was seaworthy, but he was trying to make himself lord of these shoals so that any passing ship would pay him passage money. But to do that he needed men, and if he fought me then he would lose men. He smiled suddenly. ‘You’re not a trading ship?’

‘No.’

‘You should have said!’ He managed to make his surprise sound genuine. ‘Then welcome! You need supplies?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Ale?’ he suggested.

‘Turnips?’ I countered. ‘Cabbages? Beans?’

‘I shall send them,’ he said.

‘And I shall pay for them,’ I promised, and each of us was satisfied. He would receive a scrap of silver, and I would be left alone.

The weather stayed obstinately warm and calm. After that bleak, cold, wet summer there were three days of burning sun and small wind. Three days of practising sword-craft on the beach and three days of fretting because I needed bad weather. I needed a north wind and high seas. I needed the view from Bebbanburg’s ramparts to be of chaos and white water, and the longer that sun shone on a limpid sea the more I worried that Father Byrnjolf might have sent another warning to Bebbanburg. I was fairly sure the priest had died when Middelniht crushed the fishing boat, but that did not mean he had not sent a second message by some trader travelling north on the old roads. That was unlikely, but it was a possibility and it gnawed at me.

But then on the fourth morning the north-eastern sky slowly filled with dark cloud. It did not pile up with a ragged edge, but made a line straight as a spear-shaft across the sky; one side of the line was a deep summer blue and the rest of the sky was dark as a pit. It was an omen, but of what I could not tell. The darkness spread, a shield wall of the gods advancing across the heavens, and I took the omen to mean that my gods, the northern gods, were bringing a great storm south. I stood on top of a dune and the wind was strong enough to blow the sand off the dune’s crest and the sea was stirring into whitecaps and the breakers were seething white on the long shoals and I knew it was time to sail into the storm.

It was time to go home.

Weapons sharp and shields stout. Swords, spears and axes had been ground with whetstones, shields bound with leather or iron. We knew we were sailing to battle, but the first fight was against the sea.

She is a bitch, the sea. She belongs to Ran, the goddess, and Ran keeps a mighty net in which to snare men, and her nine daughters are the waves that drive ships into the snare. She is married to a giant, Ægir, but he is an indolent beast, preferring to lie drunk in the halls of the gods while his bitch-wife and her vicious daughters gather ships and men to their cold unloving breasts.

So I prayed to Ran. She must be flattered, she must be told she is lovely, that no creature in the sky or on the earth or beneath the earth can compare to her beauty, that Freyja and Eostre and Sigyn and all the other goddesses of the heavens are jealous of her beauty, and if you tell her that over and over again she will reach for her polished silver shield to gaze at her own reflection, and when Ran looks upon herself the sea calms. And so I told the bitch of her loveliness, how the gods themselves shuddered with desire when she walked by, how she dimmed the stars, how she was the most beautiful of all the gods.

Yet Ran was bitter that night. She sent a storm out of the north-east, a storm that raced from the lands of ice and whipped the sea to anger. We had sailed westwards all day in a hard, lashing wind, and if that wind had lasted we would have been cold, wet and safe, but as night fell the wind increased, it howled and screamed, and we had to drop the sail and use the oars to hold Middelniht’s head towards the vicious seas that crashed about her prow, that reared in the darkness as unseen, white-topped monsters that heaved the hull up and then let it fall into a trough so that the timbers creaked, the hull strained and the water swirled about wet oarsmen. We bailed, hurling water over the side before the Middelniht was swallowed into Ran’s net, and still the wind shrieked and the waters clawed at us. I had two men helping me on the steering oar, and there were times I thought it must break, and times I thought we were sinking, and I shouted my prayers to the bitch goddess and knew every man aboard was also praying.

The dawn showed chaos. Just grey light revealing white horrors on top of short, steep waves, and the light grew greyer to reveal a sea whipped to fury. Our faces stung from the spray, our bodies ached, we wanted nothing but sleep, but still we fought the sea. Twelve men rowed, three fought the loom of the steering oar, and the others used helmets and buckets to empty the boat of the water that crashed over the prow or poured over the side as the hull tipped or a wave suddenly rose like a beast from the deep. When we were at the peak of a wave I could see nothing but turmoil, and then we would plunge into a swirling valley and the wind would vanish for a few heartbeats and the water would reach for us as the next sea roared from ahead and threatened to fall and break us.

I told that bitch Ran that she was beautiful, I told that sea-hag that she was the dream of men and the hope of gods, and perhaps she heard me and looked at her reflection in the silver shield because slowly, imperceptibly, the fury allayed. It did not die. The sea was still ragged ruin and the wind was like a madman, but the waves were lower and men could pause in their bailing, though the oarsmen still had to struggle to keep the bows headed into the anger. ‘Where are we?’ Finan asked. He sounded exhausted.

‘Between the sea and the sky,’ was all the answer I could give. I had a sunstone, which was a slab of glassy pale rock the size of a man’s hand. Such stones come from the land of ice, and it had cost me precious gold, but by holding a sunstone to the sky and sweeping it from horizon to horizon, the stone will betray the sun’s position behind the clouds, and when a man knows where the sun is, whether it is high or low, he can judge which way to travel. The sunstone glimmers when it looks toward the hidden sun, but that day the clouds were too dense and the rain too hard, and so the sunstone stayed sullen and mute. Yet I sensed the wind had shifted eastwards, and, around mid-morning, we half raised the sail and that snarling wind bellied the rope-strengthened cloth so that Middelniht raced ahead, crashing her prow into waves, but riding them now instead of fighting them. I blessed the Frisians who had built her, and I wondered how many men had gone to their wet graves that night, and then I turned Middelniht’s prow to what I thought was halfway between north and west. I needed to go north and west, always north and west, and I had no idea where we were, or which way to steer, except to follow the whisper of instinct that is a shipmaster’s friend. It is a warrior’s friend too, and as that day passed my mind wandered as a ship wanders in a ship-killing wind. I thought of battles long ago, of shield walls, of the fear, and of the prickling sense that an enemy is near, and I tried to find an omen in every cloud, every sea-bird, and every breaking wave. I thought of Bebbanburg, a fortress that had defied the Danes for all my lifetime, and the madness of planning to capture it with a small band of tired, wet, storm-beaten men, and I prayed to the Norns, those three goddesses who weave our fate at the foot of the world’s tree, to send me a sign, an omen of success.

We sailed and I had no idea where we were, only that my weary men could sleep while I steered, and when I could stay awake no longer Finan took the oar and I slept like the dead. I woke at night and still that sea seethed and the wind screamed, and I struggled forward, past sleeping men and half-woken men, to stand beneath the dragon’s head and peer into the darkness. I was listening rather than looking, listening for the sound of breakers crashing against the land, but all I could hear was the roar of water and wind. I shivered. My clothes were soaked, the wind was cold, I felt old.

The storm still blew in the early grey light, though nowhere near so fiercely as before, and I turned Middelniht west as if we fled the dawn. And the Norns loved us because we found land, though whether it was Northumbria or Scotland I had no idea. I was sure it was not East Anglia because I could see high rocky bluffs where breakers splintered into great gouts of spray. We turned northwards, and Middelniht battled the waves as we sought some place to rest from the sea’s assault, and then at last we rounded a small headland and I saw a sheltered cove where the water shivered rather than broke and the cove was edged with a great long beach and the gods must have loved me because there was the ship I sought.

She was a trading ship, half Middelniht’s length, and she had been driven ashore by the storm, but the impact had not broken her. Instead she stood canted on the beach, and three men were trying to dig a channel through the sand to refloat her. They had already lightened their stranded ship because I could see the unloaded cargo heaped above the high-tide line, and nearby was a great driftwood fire where the crew must have warmed and dried themselves. That crew had seen us, and, as Middelniht drew closer, they backed away, retreating to some dunes that overlooked the beach. ‘That’s the ship we need,’ I told Finan.

‘Aye, she’ll do well,’ he said, ‘and those poor bastards have done half the work of salvage already.’

The poor bastards had made a beginning, but it still took most of the day to wrestle the stranded ship off the sand and back into the water. I took twenty men ashore and we ended up emptying the ship of all her ballast, unstepping the mast, and then putting oars beneath the hull to lift her from the sand’s sucking embrace. The impact of her stranding had sprung some of her planks, but we stuffed the seams with seaweed. She would leak like a sieve, but I did not need her to float for long. Just long enough to deceive Ælfric.

The crew of the ship found the courage to come back down to the beach while we were still digging the trenches that would let us slide the lifting oars beneath the hull. There were two men and a small boy, all Frisians. ‘Who are you?’ one of the men asked nervously. He was a big man, broad-shouldered, with the weather-worn face of a sailor. He carried an axe low in one hand, as if to demonstrate that he meant me no harm.

‘I’m no one you know,’ I said, ‘and you are?’

‘Blekulf,’ he growled the name, then nodded at the ship, ‘I built her.’

‘You built her and I need her,’ I said bluntly. I walked to where he had piled his cargo. There were four barrels in which glassware had been packed in straw, two barrels of copper nails, a small box of precious amber, and four heavy quern stones, shaped and finished. ‘You can keep all this,’ I said.

‘For how long?’ Blekulf asked sourly. ‘What good is cargo without a ship?’ He looked inland, though there was little to be seen except rain clouds hanging low over a bleak landscape. ‘The bastards will strip me bare.’

‘What bastards?’ I asked.

‘Scots,’ he said. ‘Savages.’

So that was where we were. ‘Are we north or south of Foirthe?’ I asked him.

‘South,’ he said, ‘I think. We were trying to make the river when the storm came.’ He shrugged.

‘You were taking that cargo to Scotland?’ I asked him.

‘No, to Lundene. There were eight of us.’

‘Eight crew?’ I asked, surprised that so many had been aboard.

‘Eight ships. As far as I know we’re the only one left.’

‘You did well to survive,’ I said.

He had survived through good seamanship. He had realised the sudden storm was going to be brutal so he had taken the sail off the yard, split it so that it could be fitted around the mast, then used the nails from his cargo to fasten the sail to the ship’s sides to fashion a makeshift deck. It had kept the small boat from being swamped, but made it almost impossible to row, and so he had been driven onto this long, lonely strand. ‘There was a savage here this morning,’ he said glumly.

‘Just one?’

‘He had a spear. He watched us, then went.’

‘So he’ll be coming back with his friends,’ I said, then looked at the small boy who I reckoned was eight or nine years old. ‘Your son?’

‘My only son,’ Blekulf said.

I called to Finan. ‘Take the boy on board Middelniht,’ I ordered him, then looked back to the Frisian. ‘Your son is my hostage, and you’re coming with me. If you do everything I say then I’ll give you the ship back, with its cargo.’

‘And what must I do?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘For a start,’ I said, ‘keep your ship safe through tonight.’

‘Lord!’ Finan called, and I turned to see him pointing northwards. A dozen men mounted on small ponies had appeared on the dunes. They carried spears. But we outnumbered them and they had the sense to keep their distance as we struggled to relaunch Blekulf’s ship, which he said was named Reinbôge. It seemed an odd name to me.

‘It rained all the time we built her,’ he explained, ‘and on the day we launched her there was a double rainbow.’ He shrugged. ‘My wife named her.’

We finally had the Reinbôge lifted and could move her. We chanted Ran’s mirror song as we edged her down the beach and into the water. Finan went back aboard Middelniht and we fastened a line from the warship’s stern to the Reinbôge’s bow, and towed the smaller ship clear of the breaking waves. Then we had to pile ballast and cargo back into her fat belly. We stepped the mast and tensioned it with braided leather lines. The pony-riders watched us, but did not try to interfere. They must have thought the stranded ship would be easy prey, but Middelniht’s arrival had spoiled their hopes, and, as dusk fell, they turned and rode away.

I left Finan to command Middelniht, while I sailed in Reinbôge. She was a good ship, taut and solid, though we needed to bail her constantly because of the sprung planks, but she rode the uneasy sea with competent ease. The wind dropped in the night. It still blew fiercely, but the anger was gone from the waves. The sea was now a confusion of scudding whitecaps that faded into the darkness as we rowed offshore. All night the wind blew, gusting sometimes, but never reaching the rage of the storm’s height, and in the clouded dawn we set Reinbôge’s torn sail and surged ahead of Middelniht. We went southwards.

And at midday, under a torn sky and on a broken sea, we came to Bebbanburg.

That is where it all began, a lifetime ago.

I had been a child when I saw the three ships.

In my memory they slid from a bank of sea mist, and perhaps they did, but memory is a faulty thing and my other images of that day are of a clear, cloudless sky, so perhaps there was no mist, but it seemed to me that one moment the sea was empty and the next there were three ships coming from the south.

They had been beautiful vessels. They had appeared to rest weightless on the ocean, and when their oars dug into the waves they skimmed the water. Their prows and sterns curled high and were tipped with gilded beasts, with serpents and dragons, and on that far-off summer’s day I thought that the three boats danced on the water, propelled by the rise and fall of their silver winged oar banks. I had stared entranced. They had been Danish ships, the first of the thousands that came to ravage Britain.

‘The devil’s turds,’ my father had growled.

‘And may the devil swallow them,’ my uncle had said. That was Ælfric, and that had been a lifetime ago. Now I sailed to meet my uncle again.

And what did Ælfric see on that morning when the storm was still grumbling and the wind whipping about the wooden ramparts of his stolen fortress? First he saw a small trading ship struggling southwards. The ship was under sail, but it was a sail torn to shreds and tatters that streamed off the yard. He saw two men trying to row the heavy hull, and every few moments they needed to stop rowing to bail water.

Or rather Ælfric’s sentries saw the Reinbôge struggling. The current was against her and the ripped sail and twin oars were fighting against it. The men watching from Bebbanburg must have thought she was a tired, battered ship, low in the water and lucky to be afloat, and we made it look as if we were trying to round the shallows off Lindisfarena to bring her safe into the shelter of the shallow harbour behind the fortress. The sentries would have seen that attempt fail, and watched as the wind drove us southwards down the coast, past the high ramparts and through the treacherous gap between the shore and the bird-shrieking Farnea Islands, and all the time the foundering ship came closer to land where the sea exploded in high shattering foam until she vanished behind the southern headland. All that they would have seen, and those men watching from Bebbanburg would have guessed that the Reinbôge was being shipwrecked close to Bedehal.

That is what they saw. They saw two men struggling with long oars and a third man steering the ship, but they did not see the seven warriors hidden down with the cargo, all of whom were covered by cloaks. They would have seen plunder, not peril, and they were distracted because, not long after the Reinbôge passed their stronghold, they saw a second ship, the Middelniht, and she was far more dangerous because the Middelniht was a warship, not a trading craft. She too was struggling. Men were bailing water, others were rowing, and the men on the high ramparts would see she had a depleted crew, that she only had ten oars, though those ten were enough to bring her safe around Lindisfarena and across the ragged water to the shallow entrance of the harbour behind Bebbanburg. So perhaps an hour after the Reinbôge disappeared, the Middelniht slid into Ælfric’s harbour.

So Ælfric’s men saw two ships. They saw two survivors of a terrible storm. They saw two ships seeking shelter. That was what Ælfric’s men saw, and that was what I wanted them to see.

I was still on board Reinbôge, while Finan commanded Middelniht. He knew that once inside Bebbanburg’s haven he would be questioned, but he had his answers ready. He would say they were Danes going south to East Anglia and were prepared to pay the Lord Ælfric for the privilege of shelter while they repaired their ship from the storm’s ravages. The story would suffice. Ælfric would not question it, but doubtless he would demand a high payment, and Finan had gold coins ready. I did not think Ælfric would want anything more than money. He lived among Danes and, though they were his enemies, he gained nothing by provoking their anger. He would take the gold and lie quiet, and all Finan had to do was tell his tale, pay the coin, and wait. He would have anchored as close to the fortress entrance as he could, and his men would be sprawled in apparent weariness. None wore mail, none had a sword, though both mail and swords were close to hand.

So Finan waited.

And I let the Reinbôge drive up onto the beach south of Bedehal’s headland and waited too.

It was now up to Ælfric, and he did just what I expected him to do. He sent his reeve to the Middelniht and the reeve took the gold coins and told Finan he could stay three days. He insisted that no more than four men could go ashore together, and none must carry weapons, and Finan agreed to it all. And while the reeve was dealing with Middelniht, my uncle would send men southwards to find the shipwrecked Reinbôge. Shipwrecks were profitable; there was timber, cargo, cordage and sailcloth to be had, and though any villagers nearby would be hungry for such a windfall they knew better than to interfere with the privileges of the man who ruled the great nearby fortress and who would claim the salvage rights.

So I waited in the stranded Reinbôge, touched the hammer about my neck and prayed to Thor, asking for success.

Some folk had appeared among the dunes to the north of the beach where the Reinbôge had driven ashore. There was a weather-beaten village at the sea’s edge, inhabited mostly by fishermen whose small boats were sheltered from storms by a rill of rock that ran south from Bedehal’s low headland, and some of those villagers watched, doubtless puzzled, as we unfastened the leather line that ran from the masthead to the Reinbôge’s stern. They could only see three of us. They watched as we lowered the mast, letting it fall across the boat with its ragged sail still attached. The tide was low, but rising, and the Reinbôge kept shifting and lurching up the beach as the waves pounded in.

Poor Blekulf was agonised over his boat, fearing that every impact on the sand would spring another leak or enlarge an existing one. ‘I’ll buy you another ship,’ I said.

‘I built her,’ he answered gloomily, suggesting that no boat I bought him could ever be half as good as the one he had crafted himself.

‘Then pray you built her well,’ I said, and then told Osferth, who was hidden low in the Reinbôge’s hold, to take command. ‘You know what to do.’

‘I do, lord.’

‘You stay here with Osferth,’ I told Blekulf, then ordered Rolla, a vicious Dane, to choose his weapons and follow me. We jumped off the boat’s stem and trudged up the beach and into the dunes. I carried Serpent-Breath. I knew the men coming from the fortress would arrive soon and that meant Serpent-Breath’s moment was coming. The villagers must have seen us carry the swords up the beach, but they made no move towards us, nor towards the horsemen who came fast from the north.

I peered through wind-whipped dune grass and saw seven men on seven horses. They were all in mail, wore helmets and carried weapons. Their speed and the spiteful wind raised the seven riders’ cloaks and blew the sand thrown up by the hooves. They were cantering, eager to get their errand done and so back to the fortress. It was beginning to rain, a stinging rain blown from the sea, and that was good. It would make the seven men even more eager to finish the business. It would make them careless.

The seven rode onto the beach. They saw a stranded ship with a fallen mast and a wind-ragged sail flapping uselessly. Rolla and I were moving now, crouching behind the dunes as we hurried northwards. No one could see us. We ran to the place where the horsemen had come through the dunes, the same path they would take back to the fortress, and we waited there, swords drawn, and I edged up a sandy slope and peered over the summit.

The seven horsemen reached Reinbôge, curbing their stallions just short of the seething waves that ran up the beach past the canted hull. Five of them dismounted. I could see them calling to Blekulf, who was the only man visible. He could have warned them, of course, but his son and crewman were both on board Middelniht and he feared for his boy’s life and so he said nothing to betray us. Instead he told them he had been shipwrecked, nothing more, and the five men waded towards the ship. None had a drawn sword. The two horsemen waited on the beach, and then Osferth struck.

Seven of my men suddenly appeared, leaping over the Reinbôge’s bows with swords, axes and spears. The five men went down with appalling speed, hacked savagely with axe blows to the neck, while Osferth rammed a spear at the nearest horseman. That man turned away, escaping the thrust and spurred away from the sudden massacre that had left blood spreading in the swirling wave-froth. His companion dug in spurs and followed. ‘Two of them,’ I told Rolla, ‘coming now.’

We crouched, one on either side of the path. I heard the hoofbeats coming nearer. Serpent-Breath was in my hand and anger in my soul. I had gazed at Bebbanburg as the Reinbôge had struggled past and I had seen my inheritance, my fortress, my home, the place I had dreamed of since the day I left, the place stolen from me, and now I would take it back and slaughter the men who had usurped me.

And so I started my revenge. The leading horseman came into sight and I leaped at him, sword swinging, and his horse reared and twisted sideways so that my cut missed the rider entirely, but the horse was falling, its hooves throwing up gouts of sand, and the second horse crashed into the first and it too was going down and Rolla was gritting his teeth as his blade lunged up into the rider’s chest. The horses, eyes white, struggled to their feet and I seized one set of reins, placed my foot on the fallen rider’s chest and put Serpent-Breath at his throat.

‘You fool,’ the man said, ‘don’t you know who we are?’

‘I know who you are,’ I said.

Rolla had taken the second horse and now finished off its rider with a short, hard stab that sprayed the sand with blood. I looked back towards Reinbôge and saw that Osferth had captured the remaining five horses and that his men had hauled the corpses out of the shallow water and were stripping them of their mail, cloaks and helmets.

I bent down and unbuckled my captive’s sword belt. I tossed it to Rolla, then told the man to stand. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Cenwalh,’ he muttered.

‘Louder!’

‘Cenwalh,’ he said.

It began to rain harder, a malevolent heavy rain driving off the disturbed sea. And suddenly I laughed. It was insane. A small group of wet, desperate men against the grimmest fortress in Britain? I jabbed Serpent-Breath, driving Cenwalh back a pace. ‘How many men in Bebbanburg?’ I asked.

‘Enough to kill you ten times over,’ he snarled.

‘That many? And how many is that?’

He did not want to answer, then thought he could deceive me. ‘Thirty-eight,’ he said.

I flicked my wrist so that the tip of Serpent-Breath’s blade broke the skin of his neck. A bead of blood showed there, then trickled down beneath his mail. ‘Now try the truth,’ I said.

He put a hand to the trickle of blood. ‘Fifty-eight,’ he said sullenly.

‘Including you and these men?’

‘Including us.’

I judged he was telling the truth. My father had kept a garrison of between fifty and sixty men and Ælfric would be reluctant to have more because each housecarl had to be armed, given mail, fed and paid. If Ælfric had warning of real danger then he could summon more men from the land Bebbanburg ruled, but raising that force would take time. So we were outnumbered by about two to one, but I had expected nothing less.

Osferth and his men reached us, leading the five horses and carrying the clothes, mail, helmets and weapons of the men they had killed. ‘Did you notice which man was riding which horse?’ I asked him.

‘Of course, lord,’ Osferth replied, turning to look at his men and their captured horses, ‘brown cloak on the brindled stallion, blue cloak on the black gelding, leather jerkin on the …’ He hesitated.

‘On the piebald mare,’ my son carried on, ‘the black cloak was on the smaller black stallion and …’

‘Then change,’ I interrupted them, and looked back to Cenwalh. ‘You, undress.’

‘Undress?’ He gaped at me.

‘You can take your clothes off,’ I said, ‘or we can strip your corpse. You choose.’

There had been seven horsemen, so the guards on Bebbanburg’s gate must see seven horsemen return. Those guards would be totally familiar with the seven men, they would see them and their horses day after day, and so when we rode to the fortress those guards must see what they expected to see. If Cenwalh’s brown and white striped cloak was draped over the rump of the wrong horse then the guards would sense something was wrong, but if they saw that cloak on a rider mounted on Cenwalh’s tall chestnut stallion they would assume life was going on as it always did.

We changed clothes. Cenwalh, reduced to a woollen shirt that hung to his arse, shivered in the cold wind. He was staring at me, watching as I put a stranger’s pale blue cloak over my mail coat. He saw me push Thor’s hammer beneath the mail to hide it. He had heard Osferth call me ‘lord’, and he was slowly realising who I was. ‘You’re …’ he began, then paused. ‘You’re …’ he started again.

‘I am Uhtred Uhtredson,’ I snarled, ‘the rightful Lord of Bebbanburg. You want to swear loyalty to me now?’ I hung a dead man’s heavy silver cross around my neck. The helmet would not fit me, it was far too small, so I kept my own, but the cloak had a hood that I pulled up over the silver wolf that crested my helmet. I strapped my own sword belt round my waist. It would be hidden by the cloak and I wanted Serpent-Breath as my companion.

‘You are Uhtred the Treacherous,’ Cenwalh said tonelessly.

‘Is that what he calls me?’

‘That and worse,’ Cenwalh said.

I took Cenwalh’s sword from Rolla and drew it from the scabbard. It was a good blade, well kept and sharp. ‘My uncle lives?’ I asked Cenwalh.

‘He lives.’

‘Lord,’ Osferth chided Cenwalh, ‘you call him “lord”.’

‘Ælfric must be old,’ I said, ‘and I hear he is sick?’

‘He lives,’ Cenwalh said, stubbornly refusing to call me lord.

‘And he ails?’

‘An old man’s ailments,’ Cenwalh said dismissively.

‘And his sons?’ I asked.

‘The Lord Uhtred has the command,’ Cenwalh said. He meant my cousin, Uhtred, son of Ælfric and father of yet another Uhtred.

‘Tell me of Ælfric’s son,’ I said.

‘He looks like you,’ Cenwalh replied, making it sound an ill fortune.

‘And what would he expect of you?’ I asked him.

‘Expect of me?’

‘He sent seven of you. To do what?’

He frowned, not understanding the question, then flinched as I brought the blade close to his face. He glanced towards the Reinbôge, which was still being pounded by surf as the rising tide drove her up the beach. ‘We came to look at her,’ he said sullenly.

‘And you found us instead,’ I said, ‘but what would you have done if we hadn’t been here?’

‘Secured her,’ he said, still looking at the stranded ship.

‘And emptied her cargo? Who would have done that? You?’

‘Plenty of men in the village,’ he said.

So Cenwalh would have made certain the Reinbôge was properly stranded at high tide, then forced the villagers to empty her cargo. That meant he would have left men to make sure the work was done properly and that none of the valuables was stolen, and that in turn meant that the fortress would not expect to see seven men returning. I thought for a few moments. ‘And if she was carrying nothing but ballast?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Depends whether she’s worth saving. She looks well built.’

‘In which case you’d secure her, then leave her till the weather calms?’

He nodded. ‘And if Lord Ælfric doesn’t want her? We would break her up, or sell her.’

‘Now tell me about the fortress,’ I said.

He told me nothing I did not know. The Low Gate was approached by a road that snaked over the narrow neck of land and climbed steeply to the big wooden arch, and beyond that gate was the wide space where the stables and blacksmith’s forge were built. That outer yard was protected by a high palisade, but the inner space, which occupied the high rocky summit, had another wall, even higher, and a second gate, the High Gate. It was there, on the peak of the rock, that Ælfric had his great hall and where smaller halls served as living quarters for the housecarls and their families. The key to Bebbanburg was not the Low Gate, formidable though it was, but the High Gate.

‘The High Gate,’ I asked, ‘is it kept open?’

‘It’s closed,’ Cenwalh said defiantly, ‘it’s always closed, and he’s expecting you.’

I looked at him. ‘Expecting me?’

‘The Lord Ælfric knows your son became a priest, he knows you were outlawed. He thinks you’ll come north. He thinks you’re mad. He says you have nowhere to go so you’ll come here.’

And Ælfric was right, I thought. A gust of wind brought a hard spatter of heavy rain. The surf seethed around Reinbôge. ‘He knows nothing,’ I said angrily, ‘and won’t know it till my sword is in his gullet.’

‘He’ll kill you,’ Cenwalh sneered.

And Rolla killed him. I nodded to the Dane who was standing behind the shivering Cenwalh, who knew nothing of his death until it surprised him. The sword took him in the neck, a massive, killing, merciful blow. He crumpled to the sand.

‘Mount,’ I growled at my men.

Seven of us were mounted, three others would walk as though they were prisoners.

And so I went home.