The Pagan Lord

Eleven

The Danes decided not to leave Gleawecestre.

It was not Bjorgulf’s decision, at least I thought not, but he must have sent a messenger eastwards in search of orders or advice because, next morning, a delegation of Danes rode towards Gleawecestre’s walls. They came on horseback, their stallions picking their way through the ruins of the houses that had been dismantled beyond the ramparts. There were six men, led by a standard-bearer who carried a leafy branch as a signal that they came to talk and not to fight. Bjorgulf was one of the six, but he hung back and left the talking to a tall, heavy-browed man with a long red beard that was plaited, knotted and hung with small silver rings. He was dressed in mail, had a sword at his side, but wore no helmet and carried no shield. His arms were bright with the rings of war, and a chain of heavy gold links hung at his neck. He motioned for his companions to stop some twenty paces from the ditch, then rode forward alone until he reached the ditch’s edge where he curbed his horse and stared up at the ramparts. ‘Are you Lord Uhtred?’ he called to me.

‘I am Uhtred.’

‘I am Geirmund Eldgrimson,’ he said.

‘I have heard of you,’ I said, and that was true. He was one of Cnut’s battle-leaders, a man with a reputation for fearlessness and savagery. His estates, I knew, were in northern Northumbria, and he had earned his fame by fighting against the Scots, who were forever coming south to rob, rape and ravish.

‘The Jarl Cnut sends you greetings,’ Geirmund said.

‘You will return my greetings to him,’ I said, just as courteously.

‘He heard you were dead.’ Geirmund stroked his horse’s mane with a gloved hand.

‘I heard the same.’

‘And he regretted that news.’

‘He did?’ I asked in surprise.

Geirmund offered me a grimace that I supposed was meant to be a smile. ‘He had wanted the pleasure of killing you himself,’ he explained. He spoke mildly, not wanting to provoke an exchange of insults. Not yet, anyway.

‘Then he will be as pleased as I am that I live,’ I said just as mildly.

Geirmund nodded. ‘Yet the jarl sees no need to fight against you,’ he said, ‘and sends you a proposal.’

‘Which I shall hear with great interest.’

Geirmund paused, looking left and right. He was examining the walls, seeing the ditch and the stakes, and estimating the number of spears that bristled above the high Roman parapet. I let him stare because I wanted him to see just how formidable these defences were. He looked back to me. ‘The Jarl Cnut offers you this,’ he said, ‘if you return his woman and children unharmed then he will return to his own lands.’

‘A generous offer,’ I said.

‘The jarl is a generous man,’ Geirmund replied.

‘I do not command here,’ I said, ‘but I shall talk with the city leaders and bring you their answer in one hour.’

‘I advise you to accept the offer,’ Geirmund said. ‘The jarl is generous, but he is not patient.’

‘One hour,’ I repeated, and stepped back out of his sight.

And that was interesting, I thought. Had Cnut really made such an offer? If so then he had no intention of keeping to its terms. If I handed over Frigg and her children then we had lost what small hold we had on Cnut and as a result his savagery would double. So the offer was a lie, of that I was sure, but did it even come from Cnut? My suspicion was that Cnut and his main army were on the other side of Mercia, waiting to pounce on Æthelred’s smaller force as it left East Anglia, and if that suspicion was right then there was no possibility that a messenger could have reached him and returned to Gleawecestre in the one day since my arrival. I suspected Geirmund had invented the offer.

Bishop Wulfheard, of course, believed otherwise. ‘If Cnut returns to his own land,’ he said, ‘then we have gained the victory we desire without the shedding of blood.’

‘Victory?’ I asked dubiously.

‘The pagans will have left our land!’ the bishop explained.

‘And left it ravaged,’ I said.

‘There must be compensation, of course.’ The bishop saw my point.

‘You’re a nose-picking idiot,’ I said. We had gathered in the hall again where I had told the assembled thegns and churchmen of the Danish offer. I now told them it was a ruse. ‘Cnut is miles away,’ I explained. ‘He’s somewhere on the East Anglian frontier, and Geirmund didn’t have time to send him a messenger and get a reply, so he invented the offer. He’s trying to trick us into returning Cnut’s family, and we have to persuade him to leave Gleawecestre.’

‘Why?’ a man asked. ‘I mean if they’re here we know where they are, and the city is strong.’

‘Because Cnut has his fleet here,’ I said. ‘If things go badly for him, and I plan to make things go very badly for him, then he’ll withdraw towards his boats. He doesn’t want to lose a hundred and sixty-eight ships. But if we burn those ships then he’ll withdraw northwards, and that’s where I want him.’

‘Why?’ the man asked again. He was one of Æthelred’s thegns, which meant he disliked me. All of Saxon Mercia was divided between those who followed Æthelred, and the supporters of his estranged wife, Æthelflaed.

‘Because right now,’ I said angrily, ‘his army is in between Æthelred’s forces and King Edward’s army, and as long as he’s there those two armies cannot join together, so I have to move him out of the way.’

‘The Lord Uhtred knows what he is doing,’ Æthelflaed chided the man mildly.

‘You told them you would kill the children if they didn’t leave.’ The speaker was one of Wulfheard’s priests.

‘An empty threat,’ I said.

‘Empty?’ The bishop sounded angry.

‘I know this will astonish you,’ I said, ‘but I have a reputation for not killing women and children. Maybe that’s because I’m a pagan, not a Christian.’

Æthelflaed sighed.

‘But we still have to get the Danes away from Gleawecestre,’ I went on, ‘and unless I do slaughter one of the twins, Geirmund won’t move.’

They understood that. They might not have liked me, but they could not dispute my reasoning. ‘The girl, then,’ Bishop Wulfheard said.

‘The girl?’ I asked.

‘She’s the least valuable,’ he said and, when I did not respond, he tried to explain, ‘she’s a girl!’

‘So we just kill her?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t that what you suggested?’

‘Will you do it?’ I asked him.

He opened his mouth, discovered he had nothing to say, so closed it again.

‘We do not kill small children,’ I said. ‘We wait till they’re grown up and then we kill them. So. How do we persuade Geirmund to go away?’ No one had an answer. Æthelflaed was watching me warily. ‘Well?’ I asked.

‘Pay him?’ Ealdorman Deogol suggested weakly. I said nothing and he looked around the hall seeking support. ‘We guard the Lord Æthelred’s treasure,’ he said, ‘so we can afford to pay him.’

‘Pay a Dane to go away,’ I said, ‘and they come back next day to be paid again.’

‘So what are we going to do?’ Deogol asked plaintively.

‘Kill the girl, of course,’ I said. ‘Bishop,’ I looked at Wulfheard, ‘be useful. Talk to the city’s priests and discover if a small girl has died in the last week. She needs to be six or seven years old. If she has, dig her up. Tell the parents she’ll become a saint, or an angel, or whatever else will make them happy. Then bring the body to the ramparts, but don’t let the Danes see it! Merewalh?’

‘Lord?’

‘Find me a piglet. Take it to the ramparts, but keep it below the parapet so the Danes don’t know it’s there. Finan? You’ll bring Frigg and the twins to the walls.’

‘Piglet,’ Bishop Wulfheard said in a scornful tone.

I stared at him, then held up a hand to check Merewalh, who was about to leave the hall. ‘Maybe we don’t need a piglet,’ I said slowly, as if an idea was just coming to me. ‘Why waste a baby pig when there’s a bishop available?’

Wulfheard fled.

And Merewalh fetched the piglet.

Geirmund was waiting, though now he had been joined by almost twenty other men. Their horses were picketed a hundred paces from the ditch, while the Danes were much closer, and all in a cheerful mood. Servants had brought ale, bread and meat, and there were half a dozen boys, presumably the sons of the warriors who had joined Geirmund to witness his confrontation with Uhtred of Bebbanburg whose reputation did not stretch to the slaughter of women and children. Geirmund was chewing on a goose-leg when I appeared, but he tossed it away and strolled towards the ramparts. ‘You have come to a decision?’ he called up to me.

‘You forced me to a decision,’ I said.

He smiled. He was not a man accustomed to smiling, so it looked more like a snarl, but at least he tried to smile. ‘As I told you,’ he said, ‘the jarl is merciful.’

‘And he will leave Saxon Mercia?’

‘He has promised it!’

‘And he will pay compensation for the damage he has done to Lord Æthelred’s land?’ I asked.

Geirmund hesitated, then nodded. ‘There will be compensation, I’m sure. The jarl is not an unreasonable man.’

And you, I thought, are a lying bastard. ‘So,’ I asked, ‘the jarl will pay us gold and return to his own land?’

‘That is his wish, but only if you return his family unharmed.’

‘They have neither been harmed nor molested,’ I assured him, ‘I swear it by Thor’s spittle.’ I spat to show the sincerity of that promise.

‘I am glad to hear it,’ Geirmund said, and spat to show that he accepted my promise, ‘and the jarl will also be glad.’ He tried to smile again because Frigg and her two children had just appeared on the high rampart. They were escorted by Finan and five men. Frigg looked scared and exquisitely beautiful. She was wearing a linen dress lent to her by Æthelflaed. The dress was dyed palest yellow, and the twins clung to the pretty garment’s skirts. Geirmund bowed to her. ‘My lady,’ he said formally, then looked at me. ‘Would it not be better, Lord Uhtred,’ he suggested, ‘if you were to allow the lady and her children to leave by the gate?’

‘The gate?’ I asked, pretending not to understand.

‘You can’t expect them to swim that filthy ditch?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll throw them to you.’

‘You’ll …’ he began, then went silent because I had seized the girl, Sigril, and now held her in front of me. She screamed in terror and her mother lunged for her, but was restrained by Finan. I had my left arm around Sigril’s throat, pinning her, and drew a knife from my belt with my right hand.

‘I’ll throw her to you in bits,’ I called to Geirmund, and grasped Sigril’s long black hair. ‘Hold her,’ I ordered Osferth and while he held her I cut the hair, sawing through the strands and tossing them over the wall to be caught by the wind. The girl was screaming wonderfully as I forced her down to the stones where the parapet hid her from Geirmund. I clapped a hand over her mouth and nodded to the man concealed behind the parapet, and he stabbed a knife into the piglet’s neck. It gave a shriek and blood spattered and flew. The Danes, beyond the wall, would just see the blood and hear the terrified squealing, then they saw Rolla slam down an axe.

The dead child was yellow, waxen and stinking. Rolla had chopped off a leg, and the smell was like the stench of the Corpse-Ripper’s lair. Rolla bent down, smeared the severed leg in the piglet’s blood, then tossed it over the rampart. It splashed into the ditch, and he cut down again, this time taking an arm.

‘Oh, sweet mother of God,’ Osferth said faintly. Frigg was struggling, her mouth opening and closing in terror, her eyes wide. Her pretty dress was spattered with blood, and to the watching Danes it must have seemed she was seeing her daughter being butchered before her eyes, but in truth it was the horror of watching that half-decayed, liquid-oozing corpse being disjointed that was scaring her. Her son was screaming. I still had my hand over Sigril’s mouth and the little bitch bit me hard enough to draw blood.

‘Her head next,’ I called to Geirmund, ‘then we kill the boy, and after that we’ll take the mother back for our amusement.’

‘Stop!’ he shouted.

‘Why? I’m enjoying myself!’ I used my free hand to throw the dead child’s remaining foot over the wall. Rolla raised the axe that had been smeared with piglet blood. ‘Chop her head off,’ I ordered loudly.

‘What do you want?’ Geirmund called.

I held up a hand to check Rolla. ‘I want you to stop telling me lies,’ I said to Geirmund. I beckoned to Osferth and he knelt beside me and put his hand on Sigril’s mouth. She managed a yelp as my bloodied hand left her lips and before Osferth’s palm clamped down, but none of the Danes seemed to notice. They just saw Frigg’s terrible distress and the boy’s utter fear. I stood in the piglet’s blood and stared down at Geirmund. ‘You had no promise from Cnut,’ I said, ‘and he sent no message! He’s too far away!’ Geirmund said nothing, but his face betrayed that I had told the truth. ‘But you will send him a message now!’ I was shouting, so that all Geirmund’s companions could hear me. ‘Tell Jarl Cnut that his daughter is dead, and his son will be dead too if you’re not gone from here in one hour. You leave! All of you! You go now! You go up to the hills and far away. You leave this place. If I see one Dane anywhere near Gleawecestre one hour from now then I shall feed the boy to my wolfhounds and whore his mother for my men’s pleasure.’ I took hold of Frigg’s arm and pulled her to the parapet so that the Danes could see that pretty dress with its pattern of blood spots. ‘If you’re not gone within one hour,’ I told Geirmund, ‘then Jarl Cnut’s woman becomes our whore. You understand? You go east, up into the hills!’ I pointed that way. ‘Go to Jarl Cnut and tell him his wife and son will be returned unharmed if he goes back to Northumbria. Tell him that! Now go! Or else watch Cnut Cnutson’s body being eaten by dogs!’

They believed me. They left.

And so, in that next hour as a pale cloud-shrouded sun climbed towards its noon height, we watched the Danes leave Gleawecestre. They rode east towards the Coddeswold hills, and the horsemen were followed by a crowd of women, children and servants on foot. The dead child’s leg had drifted to the ditch’s bank where two ravens came to feast. ‘Bury the child again,’ I told a priest, ‘and send the parents to me.’

‘To you?’

‘So I can give them gold,’ I explained. ‘Go,’ I told him, then looked at my son who was watching the retreating Danes. ‘The art of war,’ I told him, ‘is to make the enemy do your bidding.’

‘Yes, Father,’ he said obediently. He had been distressed by Frigg’s frantic and silent misery, though by now I supposed Æthelflaed would have calmed the poor woman. I had ruined little Sigril’s hair, but it would grow again, and I had given her a dripping honeycomb as consolation.

So, for the price of one piglet and a small girl’s hair, we had cleared the Danes away from Gleawecestre, and, as soon as they were gone, I took a hundred men to where their boats were tethered in the river. Some had been hauled onto land, but most were tied to the Sæfern’s bank, and we burned them all except for one smaller craft. One by one the ships caught the fire and the flames leaped up the hemp ropes and the high masts crashed down in blasts of sparks and smoke, and the Danes saw it all. I might have told Geirmund to go all the way to the high ground, but I knew he would have men watching us and they saw their fleet turned to ash that turned the river grey as it floated seawards. Boat after boat burned, their dragon prows belching flame, their timbers cracking and their hulls hissing as the ships sank. I kept the one ship afloat and took Osferth aside. ‘That ship’s yours,’ I said.

‘Mine?’

‘Take a dozen men,’ I said, ‘and row it downriver. Then up the Afen. Take Rædwulf.’ Rædwulf was one of my older men, slow and steady, who had been born and raised in Wiltunscir and knew the rivers there. ‘The Afen will take you deep into Wessex,’ I went on, ‘and I want you there fast!’ That was why I had kept the one boat unburned; the journey would be far faster by water than by land.

‘You want me to go to King Edward,’ Osferth said.

‘I want you to put on your heaviest boots and kick his arse hard! Tell him to get his army north of the Temes, but he’s to look for Æthelred coming from the east. Ideally they should join up. Then they’re to march towards Tameworþig. I can’t tell you where we’ll be, or where Cnut will be, but I’m trying to lure him north onto his own land.’

‘Tameworþig?’ Osferth asked.

‘I’ll start with Tameworþig and work my way north and east, and he’ll come for me. He’ll come fast, and he’s going to outnumber me by twenty or thirty to one, so I need Edward and Æthelred.’

Osferth frowned. ‘So why not stay in Gleawecestre, lord?’ he asked.

‘Because Cnut can put five hundred men here to keep us caged and do whatever he wants while we scratch our backsides. I can’t let him trap me in a burh. He has to pursue me. I’m leading him in a dance, and you have to bring Edward and Æthelred to join it.’

‘I understand, lord,’ he said. He turned to look at the burning boats and at the great swathe of smoke darkening the sky above the river. Two swans went past, going southwards, and I took them for a good omen. ‘Lord?’ Osferth asked.

‘Yes?’

‘The boy,’ Osferth sounded embarrassed.

‘Cnut’s son?’

‘No, Ingulfrid’s son. What will you do with him?’

‘Do? I’d like to cut his miserable little throat, but I’ll settle for selling him back to his father.’

‘Promise me you won’t hurt him, lord, or sell him to slavery.’

‘Promise you?’

He looked defiant. ‘It’s important to me, lord. Have I ever asked you for a favour before?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you asked me to save you from being a priest, and I did.’

‘Then I’m asking a second favour of you, lord. Please let me buy the boy from you.’

I laughed. ‘You can’t afford him.’

‘I will pay you, lord, if it takes the rest of my life.’ He stared at me so earnestly. ‘I swear it, lord,’ he said, ‘on the blood of our Saviour.’

‘You’ll pay me,’ I said, ‘in gold?’

‘If it takes my whole life, lord, I will pay you.’

I pretended to think about the offer, then shook my head. ‘He’s not for sale,’ I said, ‘except to his father. But I will give him to you.’

Osferth gazed at me. He was not sure he had heard correctly. ‘Give him to me?’ he asked faintly.

‘You bring me Edward’s army,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give the boy to you.’

‘Give?’ he asked a second time.

‘I swear on Thor’s hammer that I will give you the boy if you bring me Edward’s army.’

‘Truly, lord?’ He looked pleased.

‘Get your skinny arse into that boat and go,’ I said, ‘and yes. But only if you bring me Edward and Æthelred. Or just Edward. And if you don’t bring them,’ I went on, ‘the boy’s yours anyway.’

‘He is?’

‘Because I’ll be dead. Now go.’

The ships burned into the night. Geirmund would have seen the western sky aglow and he would know that everything had changed. His messengers would be riding eastwards to Cnut, telling him that his fleet was cinders and his daughter dead, and that Uhtred of Bebbanburg was loose in the west.

Which meant that the dance of death was about to begin.

And next morning, when the sky was still smeared with the smoke of the burning, we rode north.

Two hundred and sixty-nine warriors rode from Gleawecestre.

And one woman warrior. Æthelflaed insisted she would accompany us, and when Æthelflaed insisted then not all the gods of Asgard could change her mind. I tried. I might as well have attempted to turn back a tempest by farting into its face.

We took Frigg too, along with her son, her ragged-haired daughter and her servants. And we took a score of boys whose job was to look after the spare horses. One of those boys was Æthelstan, King Edward’s eldest son though not his heir. I had insisted on leaving him behind under the care of Merewalh and Bishop Wulfheard, safe behind Gleawecestre’s Roman walls, but fifteen miles up the road I saw him galloping a grey horse through a meadow where he was racing another boy. ‘You!’ I bellowed, and he slewed the stallion around and kicked it towards me.

‘Lord?’ he asked innocently.

‘I ordered you to stay in Gleawecestre,’ I snarled.

‘And so I did, lord,’ he said respectfully. ‘I always obey you.’

‘I should beat you till you bleed, you foul little liar.’

‘But you didn’t say how long I should stay, lord,’ he said reprovingly, ‘so I stayed a few minutes and then followed you. But I did obey you. I did stay.’

‘And what will your father say when you die?’ I demanded. ‘Tell me that, you excrescence.’

He pretended to think about the question, then looked at me with his most innocent expression. ‘He’ll probably thank you, lord. Bastards are a nuisance.’

Æthelflaed laughed and I had to stop myself from laughing too. ‘You’re a hideous nuisance,’ I told him. ‘Now get out of my sight before I break your skull.’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said, grinning, ‘and thank you, lord.’ He turned his horse and rode back to his friends.

Æthelflaed smiled. ‘He has spirit.’

‘A spirit that will get him killed,’ I said, ‘but it probably doesn’t matter. We’re all doomed.’

‘We are?’

‘Two hundred and sixty-nine men,’ I said, ‘and one woman, while Cnut has between three and four thousand men. What do you think?’

‘I think no one lives for ever,’ she said.

And for some reason I thought of Iseult then, of Iseult the Shadow Queen, born into darkness and given the gift of prophecy, or so she had said, and she had also said Alfred would give me power and I would take back my northern home and my woman would be a woman of gold and I would lead armies that would crush the earth with their size and power. Two hundred and sixty-nine men. I laughed.

‘You’re laughing because I’m going to die?’ Æthelflaed asked.

‘Because almost none of the prophecies have come true,’ I said.

‘What prophecies?’ she asked.

‘I was promised that your father would give me power, that I would take back Bebbanburg, that I would lead armies to darken the land, and that seven kings would die. All false.’

‘My father gave you power.’

‘He gave it,’ I agreed, ‘and he took it away. He lent it to me. I was a dog and he held the leash.’

‘And you will take back Bebbanburg,’ she said.

‘I tried, I failed.’

‘And you will try again,’ she said confidently.

‘If I live.’

‘If you live,’ she said, ‘and you will.’

‘And the seven kings?’

‘We’ll know who they are,’ she said, ‘when they die.’

The men who had deserted me at Fagranforda were back now. They had served Æthelflaed ever since my departure, but one by one they came to me and pledged their loyalty once again. They were embarrassed. Sihtric stammered his explanation, which I cut short. ‘You were frightened,’ I said.

‘Frightened?’

‘That you’d go to hell.’

‘The bishop said we’d be cursed for ever, us and our children. And Ealhswith said …’ His voice trailed away.

Ealhswith had been a whore, a good one too, and Sihtric had fallen in love with her and, against my advice, married her. It turned out he was right and I was wrong because the marriage was a happy one, but part of the price Sihtric had paid was to become a Christian, and, it seemed, a Christian who feared his wife as much as he feared the fires of hell.

‘And now?’ I asked.

‘Now, lord?’

‘Are you so sure you won’t be cursed now? You’re back under my command.’

He gave a quick smile. ‘It’s the bishop who’s frightened now, lord.’

‘So he should be,’ I said. ‘The Danes would feed him his own balls to eat, then turn him inside out, and not quickly either.’

‘He gave us absolution, lord,’ he stumbled over the long word, ‘and said we wouldn’t be doomed if we followed you.’

I laughed at that, then clapped his back. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Sihtric. I need you!’

‘Lord,’ was all he could say.

I needed him. I needed every man. Above all I needed Edward of Wessex to hurry. Cnut, once he decided to change his plans, and if he decided to change his plans, would move with lightning speed. His men, all mounted, would thunder across Mercia. It would be the wild hunt with thousands of hunters, and I would be the prey.

But first I had to draw him, and so we rode north, back into Danish territory. I knew we were being followed. Geirmund Eldgrimson would have men pursuing us, and I thought of turning back to confront them, but reckoned they would simply ride away if they saw us threaten them. So let them follow. It would take two or three days for any news of our whereabouts to reach Cnut, and two or three more days for his forces to reach us, and I had no intention of staying in the same place for more than a day. Besides, I wanted Cnut to find me. What I did not want was for Cnut to catch me.

We crossed into Danish-held Mercia and we burned. We fired halls, barns and hovels. Wherever a Dane lived, we set fires. We filled the sky with smoke. We were making signals, telling the Danes where we were, but moving fast after each burning so that it must have seemed that we were everywhere. We were not opposed. The men from these steadings had been summoned to Cnut’s army, leaving the old, the young and the women behind. I did not kill, not even livestock. We gave folk minutes to leave their homes, then used their hearths to fire the thatch. Other folk saw the smoke and fled before we arrived, and we would search the ground about such abandoned homes for signs of hasty digging. We found two hoards that way, one of them a deep hole filled with heavy silver bowls and jugs that we chopped to pieces. I remember one of those bowls, big enough to hold a pig’s head, and decorated with bare-legged girls dancing. They held garlands and they were lithe, graceful and smiling, as if they danced in a forest glade for pure joy. ‘It must be Roman,’ I said to Æthelflaed. No one I knew could have made such a delicate thing.

‘It is Roman,’ she said, pointing to words incised about the rim.

I read the words aloud, stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables. ‘Moribus et forma conciliandus amor,’ I read. ‘And what does that mean?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Amor is love, I think. The priests would know.’

‘We’re blessedly short of priests,’ I said. A couple had accompanied us because most of our men were Christians and wanted priests to be with them.

She ran a finger around the bowl’s rim. ‘It’s beautiful. A pity to break it.’

We broke it anyway, hacking it to shreds with our axes. The ancient work of a craftsman, a thing of elegant beauty, was turned into hacksilver, and hacksilver was far more useful than a bowl of half-naked dancers. Hacksilver was easy to carry and it was money. The bowl yielded at least three hundred pieces, which we shared out, and then we rode on.

We slept in groves of trees, or else in abandoned halls that we would burn in the dawn. We never lacked food. The harvest had been gathered and there was grain, there were vegetables, and there was livestock. For a whole week we roamed Cnut’s land and we ate his food and we burned his halls, and no hall-burning gave me as much pleasure as destroying his great feasting-hall at Tameworþig.

We had been riding in the countryside north of that town, deep inside Cnut’s territory, but now we went south to where the rivers met and to where old King Offa had built his magnificent hall on Tameworþig’s fortified hill. Spearmen manned the wooden palisade, but they were few in number, probably all old or injured men, and they made no attempt to resist us. As we came from the north they fled across the Roman bridge that spanned the Tame and vanished southwards.

We searched the high, old hall, seeking silver or better, but we found nothing. The feasting platters were clay, the drinking horns were undecorated, and the treasures, if there had been any, were gone. Saxons lived in the town that was built just north of the hill on which the great hall stood and they told us that men had carried four wagonloads of goods eastwards just two days before. Those men had stripped the hall, leaving only the antlers and skulls, and even the food stores were almost bare. We used hacksilver to buy bread, smoked meat and salt fish from the townspeople, and that night we slept in Cnut’s hall, but I made certain there were sentries on the wall and more on the Roman bridge that led southwards.

And in the morning we put fire to Offa’s hall. Was it King Offa’s? I do not know; I only know it was age-blackened, and that Offa had built the fort there and must have had a hall inside its wall. Perhaps the hall had been rebuilt since his death, but whoever built it, it now burned. It blazed. It caught the fire with savage speed, the ancient timbers seeming to embrace their fate, and we drew back in awe as the high beams fell to erupt sparks, smoke and new bright flame. Men must have seen that burning from fifty miles away. I have never seen a hall burn so fierce or so fast. Rats fled it, birds panicked from the thatch, and the heat drove us down to the town where our horses were penned.

We had lit a signal to defy the Danes, and next morning, as the fires still burned and the smoke drifted in a cool, damp wind, I put two hundred men on the wall facing the river. Parts of the wall had burned, and much of the rest was scorched, but to anyone coming from south of the river it would look like a fiercely defended fortress. A fortress of smoke. I took the rest of my men to the bridge and there we waited.

‘You think he’ll come?’ my son asked me.

‘I think he’ll come. Today or tomorrow.’

‘And we fight him here?’

‘What would you do?’ I asked him.

He grimaced. ‘We can defend the bridge,’ he said uncertainly, ‘but he can cross the river upstream or downstream. The water’s not that deep.’

‘So would you fight him here?’

‘No.’

‘Then we won’t,’ I said. ‘I want him to think we will, but we won’t.’

‘Then where?’ he asked.

‘You tell me.’

He thought for a while. ‘You don’t want to go back north,’ he said eventually, ‘because that takes us away from King Edward.’

‘If he’s coming,’ I said.

‘And you can’t go south,’ he continued, ignoring my pessimism, ‘and going east puts Cnut between us and Edward, so we have to go west.’

‘You see?’ I said. ‘It’s easy when you think.’

‘And going west takes us towards the Welsh,’ he said.

‘So let’s hope those bastards are sleeping.’

He stared at the long green weeds stirring languidly in the river. He was frowning. ‘But why not go south?’ he asked after a while. ‘Why not try to join Edward’s army?’

‘If it’s coming,’ I said, ‘and we don’t know that.’

‘We have no hope if it isn’t,’ he said grimly, ‘so suppose that it is. Why don’t we join it?’

‘You just said we couldn’t.’

‘But if we leave now? If we travel fast?’

I had thought of doing that. We could indeed hurry southwards, going towards the West Saxon army that I hoped was coming north, but I could not be sure that Cnut had not already blocked the way, or that he would not intercept us on the road, and then I would be forced to fight a battle in a place of his choosing, not mine. So we would go west and hope the Welsh were drunk and sleeping.

The Roman bridge was made of four stone arches and it was in surprisingly good repair. In the centre, built into one of the parapets, was a wide limestone slab cut with words, pontem perpetui mansurum in saecula, and again I had no idea what it meant, though the word perpetui suggested the bridge was intended to last for ever. If so, it was untrue, because my men broke one of the two centre arches. We used massive hammers and it took most of the day, but eventually the old stones were all on the river’s bed and we bridged the gap with baulks of timber taken from the town. We used more timber to make a barrier at the bridge’s northern end, and behind that barrier we made our shield wall.

And waited.

And next day, as the sun sank scarlet in the west, Cnut came.

Cnut’s scouts came first, riders on small, light horses that could travel fast. They reached the river and just stood there, watching us, all except a small group who rode along the Tame’s bank, presumably to discover whether we had placed men to bar the next crossing place upstream.

The bulk of Cnut’s forces arrived an hour or so after the scouts, and they covered the land, a horde of horsemen in mail and helmets, their round shields decorated with ravens, axes, hammers and hawks. It was impossible to count them because they numbered thousands. And nearly all had sacks or bags hanging from the cantles of their saddles: the plunder of Mercia. Those bags would have the valuable items, the silver, amber and gold, while the rest of the plunder would be on packhorses behind the vast army that threw long shadows as it advanced towards the bridge.

They stopped fifty paces short of the bridge to let Cnut ride forward. He was in a coat of mail polished silver-bright. He wore a white cloak, and rode a grey horse. With him was his close friend, Sigurd Thorrson, and where Cnut was all silver and white, Sigurd was dark. His horse was black, his cloak was black, and his helmet was crested with raven feathers. He hated me and I did not blame him for that hatred. I would hate any man who killed my son. He was a big man, heavily muscled, looming over his powerful horse, and beside him Cnut looked thin and pale. But of the two I feared Cnut more. He was snake-fast, weasel-cunning, and his sword, Ice-Spite, was famous as a drinker of blood.

Behind the two jarls were standard-bearers. Cnut’s flag showed the axe and the broken cross, while Jarl Sigurd’s displayed a flying raven. There were a hundred other standards among the army, but I looked for only one, and saw it. Haesten’s bleached skull-symbol was held aloft on a pole in the army’s centre. So he was here, but he had not been invited to accompany Cnut and Sigurd.

The banners of the broken cross and the flying raven halted at the bridge’s southern end, while the two jarls rode on towards us. They checked their horses just short of the timber roadway. Æthelflaed, standing beside me, shivered. She hated the Danes and now she was within yards of the two most formidable jarls of Britain.

‘This is what I shall do,’ Jarl Cnut said without any greeting or even insult. He spoke in a reasonable voice, as if he merely arranged a feast or a horse race. ‘I shall capture you alive, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and I shall keep you alive. I shall tie you between two posts so that folk can mock you, and I shall have my men use your woman in front of your eyes until there is no use left in her.’ He looked at Æthelflaed with his pale, cold eyes. ‘I will bare you naked, woman, and give you to my men, even to the slaves, and you, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, will hear her sobbing, you will watch her shame and you will see her die. Then I shall begin on you. I have dreamed of it, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. I have dreamed of cutting you piece by piece until you have no hands, no feet, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no manhood. And then we shall peel your skin away, inch by inch, and rub salt on your flesh, and listen to your screams. And men will piss on you and women laugh at you, and all this you will see because I will have left you your eyes. But they will go. And then you will go, and so will end the tale of your miserable life.’

I said nothing when he had finished. The river seethed over the broken stones of the bridge.

‘Lost your tongue already, you shit-slimed bastard?’ Jarl Sigurd snarled.

I smiled at Cnut. ‘Now why would you do that to me?’ I asked. ‘Did I not do your bidding? Didn’t I discover who took your wife and children?’

‘A child,’ Cnut said passionately, ‘a small girl! What had she done? And I will find your daughter, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and when she has pleasured as many of my men who wish to use her I shall kill her as you killed my daughter! And if I find her before your death then you will witness that too.’

‘So you’ll do to her what I did to your daughter?’ I asked.

‘It is a promise,’ Cnut said.

‘Truly?’ I asked.

‘I swear it,’ he said, touching the hammer hanging over his silver-shining mail.

I beckoned. The shield wall behind me parted, and my son brought Cnut’s daughter to the barrier. He held her hand. ‘Father!’ Sigril shouted when she saw Cnut, and Cnut just stared at her in shock. ‘Father!’ Sigril called and tried to pull away from my son.

I took the girl from him. ‘I am sorry about her hair,’ I said to Cnut, ‘and it probably hurt her a little when I cut it because the knife wasn’t nearly as sharp as I’d have liked. But hair does grow again and she’ll be as beautiful as ever in a few months.’ I picked the girl up, lifted her over the barricade and let her go. She ran to Cnut and I saw the joy and relief on his face. He leaned down and extended a hand to her, she gripped it and he raised her up so she could sit on his saddle. He hugged her, then stared at me with puzzlement.

‘Lost your tongue already, you shit-slimed bastard?’ I asked pleasantly, then beckoned again, and this time Frigg was allowed through the shield wall. She ran to the barrier, looked at me, and I nodded. She climbed over it, making an incoherent sobbing noise, and ran to Cnut’s side and he looked even more astonished as she gripped his leg and stirrup leather, clinging to them as if her life depended on it. ‘She wasn’t harmed,’ I said, ‘not even touched.’

‘You …’ he began.

‘Geirmund was easy to fool,’ I said. ‘A piglet and a body were all we needed. And that was enough to clear him away so we could burn your ships. Yours too,’ I added to Sigurd, ‘but I expect you know that.’

‘We know more, you pig-turd,’ Sigurd said. He raised his voice so the men behind me could hear him. ‘Edward of Wessex is not coming,’ he shouted. ‘He has decided to cower behind his town walls. Were you hoping he would come to rescue you?’

‘Rescue?’ I asked. ‘Why would I want to share the glory of victory with Edward of Wessex?’

Cnut was still staring at me. He said nothing. Sigurd did all the talking. ‘Æthelred is still in East Anglia,’ he shouted, ‘because he fears to come out from behind the rivers in case he meets a Dane.’

‘That does sound like Æthelred,’ I said.

‘You’re alone, you shit-slimed bastard.’ Sigurd was almost shaking with his anger.

‘I have my vast army,’ I said, pointing to the small shield wall behind me.

‘Your army?’ Sigurd sneered, then went silent because Cnut had reached out and silenced him by touching his gold-ringed arm.

Cnut still held his daughter tightly. ‘You can go,’ he said to me.

‘Go?’ I asked. ‘Go where?’

‘I give you life,’ he said, and touched Sigurd’s arm again to still the protest.

‘My life is not yours to give,’ I told him.

‘Go, Lord Uhtred,’ Cnut said, almost pleading with me. ‘Go south to Wessex, take all your men, just go.’

‘You can count, Jarl Cnut?’ I asked him.

He smiled. ‘You have fewer than three hundred men,’ he said, ‘and as for me? I cannot count my men. They are as grains of sand on a wide beach.’ He hugged his daughter with one arm and reached down to stroke Frigg’s cheek with his other hand. ‘I thank you for this, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘but just go.’

Sigurd growled. He wanted my death, but he would agree to anything Cnut suggested.

‘I asked if you could count,’ I said to Cnut.

‘I can count,’ he said, puzzled.

‘Then you might remember you had two children. A girl and a boy, remember? And I still have the boy.’ He flinched at that. ‘If you stay in Saxon Mercia or attack Wessex,’ I said, ‘perhaps you will only have a daughter?’

‘I can make more sons,’ he said, though without much conviction.

‘Go back to your lands,’ I told him, ‘and your son will be returned to you.’

Sigurd began to speak, his tone angry, but Cnut checked him. ‘We shall talk in the morning,’ he told me, and turned his horse.

‘We shall speak in the morning,’ I agreed, and watched them ride away with Frigg running between them.

Except we would not speak in the morning, because once they had gone I had my men kick the timber roadway off the bridge, and then we left.

We went west.

And Cnut, I knew, would follow.