Lords of the North

“We march north to settle Kjartan,” Guthred said.

“And Ælfric,” I insisted.

“Of course,” Guthred said.

“How much plunder does Kjartan have?” Ulf wanted to know.

“Vast plunder,” I said, remembering Tekil’s tales. I said nothing of the feral dogs that guarded the silver and gold. “Kjartan is rich beyond dreams.”

“Time to sharpen our swords,” Ulf said.

“And Ælfric has an even bigger hoard,” I added, though I had no idea whether I spoke the truth.

But I truly believed we could capture Bebbanburg. It had never been taken by an enemy, but that did not mean it could not be taken. It all depended on Ivarr. If he could be defeated then Guthred would be the most powerful man in Northumbria and Guthred was my friend and he, I believed, would not only help me kill Kjartan and so revenge Ragnar the Elder, but then return me to my lands and to my fortress beside the sea. Those were my dreams that summer. I thought the future was golden if only I could secure the kingdom for Guthred, but I had forgotten the malevolence of the three spinners at the world’s root.

Father Willibald wanted to return to Wessex, for which I did not blame him. He was a West Saxon and he disliked Northumbria. I remember one night when we ate a dish of elder, which is cow’s udder pressed and cooked, and I was devouring it and saying that I had not eaten so well since I was a child, and poor Willibald could not finish a mouthful. He looked as though he wanted to be sick, and I mocked him for being a weak-spined southerner. Sihtric, who was my servant now, brought him bread and cheese instead and Hild and I divided his elder between us. She was a southerner too, but not so choosy as Willibald. It was that night, as he grimaced at the food, that he told us he wanted to go back to Alfred.

We had heard little news of Wessex, except that it was at peace. Guthrum, of course, had been defeated and had accepted baptism as part of the peace treaty he made with Alfred. He had taken the baptismal name of Æthelstan, which meant “noble stone’, and Alfred was his godfather, and reports from the south said that Guthrum or whatever he was now called was keeping the peace. Alfred lived, and that was about all we knew.

Guthred decided he would send an embassy to Alfred. He chose four Danes and four Saxons to ride south, reckoning that such a group could ride safely through Danish or Saxon territory, and he chose Willibald to carry his message. Willibald wrote it down, his quill scratching on a piece of newly scraped parchment. “By God’s help,” Guthred dictated, “I have taken the kingdom of Northumbria…”

“Which is called Haliwerfolkland,” Eadred interrupted.

Guthred waved courteously, as if to suggest that Willibald could decide for himself whether to add that phrase. “And I am determined,” Guthred went on, “by God’s grace to rule this land in peace and justice…”

“Not so fast, lord,” Willibald said.

“And to teach them how to brew proper ale,” Guthred continued.

“And to teach them…” Willibald said under his breath.

Guthred laughed. “No, no, father! You don’t write that!”

Poor Willibald. That letter was so long that another lambskin had to be stretched, scraped, and trimmed. The message went on and on about the holy Saint Cuthbert and how he had brought the army of the holy folk to Eoferwic, and how Guthred would make a shrine to the saint. The letter did mention that there were still enemies who might spoil that ambition, but it made light of them, as though Ivarr and Kjartan and Ælfric were minor obstacles. It asked for King Alfred’s prayers and assured the king of Wessex that prayers were being said for him each day by the Christians of Haliwerfolkland. “I should send Alfred a present,” Guthred said, “what would he like?”

“A relic,” I suggested sourly.

That was a good suggestion for there was nothing Alfred loved so dearly as a holy relic, but there was nothing much to be had in Eoferwic. The archbishop’s church possessed many treasures, including the sponge on which Jesus had been given wine to drink as he died and it also had the halter from Balaam’s ass, though who Balaam was I did not know, and why his ass was holy was even more of a mystery. The church possessed a dozen such things, but the archbishop had carried them away with him and no one was certain where Wulfhere was. I assumed he had joined Ivarr. Hrothweard said he had a seed from a sycamore tree mentioned in the gospel book, but when we opened the silver box in which the seed was kept there was nothing but dust. In the end I suggested that we drew two of Saint Oswald’s three teeth. Eadred bridled at that, then decided that the idea was not so bad after all, so pliers were fetched and the small chest opened and one of the monks tugged out two of the dead king’s yellow peg-like teeth and they were placed in a beautiful silver pot that Egbert had used to store smoked oysters.

The embassy left on a late August morning. Guthred took Willibald aside and gave him a last message for Alfred, assuring Alfred that though he, Guthred, was a Dane he was also a Christian, and begging that should Northumbria be threatened by enemies that Alfred should send warriors to fight for God’s land. That was pissing into the wind, I thought, for Wessex had enemies enough without worrying about Northumbria’s fate.

I also took Willibald aside. I was sorry he was going, for I liked him, and he was a good man, but I could see he was impatient to see Wessex again. “You will do something for me, father,” I said.

“If it is possible,” he said cautiously.

“Give the king my greetings,” I said.

Willibald looked relieved as if he had expected my favor to be a great deal more burdensome, which it was, as he would find out. “The king will want to know when you will return, lord,” he said.

“In good time,” I answered, though the only reason I now had for visiting Wessex was to retrieve the hoard I had hidden at Fifhaden. I regretted burying that treasure now, for in truth I never wanted to see Wessex again. “I want you to find Earl Ragnar,” I told Willibald.

His eyes widened. “The hostage?” he asked.

“Find him,” I said, “and give him a message from me.”

“If I can,” he said, still cautious.

I gripped his shoulders to make him pay attention and he grimaced from the strength of my hands. “You will find him,” I said threateningly, “and you will give him a message. Tell him I am going north to kill Kjartan. And tell him his sister lives. Tell him I will do all I can to find her and keep her safe. Tell him I swear that on my life. And tell him to come here as soon as he is freed.” I made him repeat it, and I made him swear on his crucifix that he would deliver the message and he was reluctant to make such an oath, but he was frightened of my anger and so he gripped the little cross and made the solemn promise.

And then he went.

And we had an army again, for the harvest was gathered, and it was time to strike north.

Guthred went north for three reasons. The first was Ivarr who had to be defeated, and the second was Kjartan whose presence in Northumbria was like a foul wound and the third was Ælfric who had to submit to Guthred’s authority. Ivarr was the most dangerous and he would surely defeat us if he brought his army south. Kjartan was less dangerous, but he had to be destroyed for there could be no peace in Northumbria while he lived. Ælfric was the least dangerous. “Your uncle is king in Bebbanburg,” Guthred told me as we marched north.

“Does he call himself that?” I asked, angry.

“No, no! He’s got too much sense. But in effect that’s what he is. Kjartan’s land is a barrier, isn’t it? So Eoferwic’s rule doesn’t stretch past Dunholm.”

“We used to be kings in Bebbanburg,” I said.

“You did?” Guthred was surprised. “Kings of Northumbria?”

“Of Bernicia,” I said. Guthred had never heard the name. “It was all of northern Northumbria,” I said, “and everything around Eoferwic was the kingdom of Deira.”

“They joined together?” Guthred asked.

“We killed their last king,” I said, “but that was years ago. Back before Christianity came.”

“So you have a claim to the kingship here?” he asked and, to my astonishment, there was suspicion in his voice. I stared at him and he blushed. “But you do?” he said, trying to sound as if he did not care what I answered.

I laughed at him. “Lord King,” I said, “if you restore me to Bebbanburg I shall kneel to you and swear you and your heirs lifelong fealty.”

“Heirs!” he said brightly. “Have you seen Osburh?”

“I’ve seen Osburh,” I said. She was Egbert’s niece, a Saxon girl, and she had been living in the palace when we took Eoferwic. She was fourteen, dark-haired and had a plump, pretty face.

“If I marry her,” Guthred asked me, “will Hild be her companion?”

“Ask her,” I said, jerking my head to where Hild followed us. I had thought Hild might return to Wessex with Father Willibald, but she had said she was not ready to face Alfred yet and I could not blame her for that and so I had not pressed her. “I think she’d be honored to be your wife’s companion,” I told Guthred.

We camped that first night at Onhripum where a small monastery gave Guthred, Eadred, and the host of clergymen shelter. Our army was close to six hundred men now, and almost half of them were mounted, and our campfires lit the fields all about the monastery. As commander of the household troops I camped closest to the buildings and my young men, who now numbered forty, and most of whom possessed mail coats plundered from Eoferwic, slept close to the monastery’s gate.

I stood guard with Clapa and two Saxons for the first part of the night. Sihtric was with me. I called him my servant, but he was learning to use a sword and shield and I reckoned he would make a useful soldier in a year or two. “You have the heads safe?” I asked him.

“You can smell them!” Clapa protested.

“No worse than you smell, Clapa,” I retorted.

“They’re safe, lord,” Sihtric said.

“I should have eight heads,” I said, and put my fingers around Sihtric’s throat. “Pretty skinny neck, Sihtric.”

“But it’s a tough neck, lord,” he said.

Just then the monastery door opened and Gisela, cloaked in black, slipped through. “You should be asleep, lady,” I chided her.

“I can’t sleep. I want to walk.” She stared defiantly at me. Her lips were slightly apart and the firelight glinted off her teeth and reflected from her wide eyes.

“Where do you want to walk?” I asked.

She shrugged, still looking at me, and I thought of Hild sleeping in the monastery.

“I’ll leave you in charge, Clapa,” I said, “and if Ivarr comes, kill the bastard.”

“Yes, lord.”

I heard the guards sniggering as we walked away. I quietened them with a growl, then led Gisela toward the trees east of the monastery for it was dark there. She reached out and took my hand. She said nothing, content to walk close beside me. “Aren’t you frightened of the night?” I asked her.

“Not with you.”

“When I was a child,” I said, “I made myself into a sceadugengan.”

“What’s a sceadugengan?” The word was Saxon and unfamiliar to her.

“A shadow-walker,” I told her. “A creature that stalks the dark.” An owl hooted quite close by and her fingers instinctively tightened on mine.

We stopped under some wind-rustled beech trees. Some small light came through the leaves, cast by the campfires, and I tilted her face up and looked down at her. She was tall, but still a head shorter than me. She let herself be examined, then closed her eyes as I drew a gentle finger down her long nose. “I…” I said, then stopped.

“Yes,” she said, as if she knew what I had been about to say.

I made myself turn away from her. “I cannot make Hild unhappy.”

“She told me,” Gisela said, “that she would have gone back to Wessex with Father Willibald, but she wants to see if you capture Dunholm. She says she’s prayed for that and it will be a sign from her god if you succeed.”

“She said that?”

“She said it would be a sign that she must go back to her convent. She told me that tonight.”

I suspected that was true. I stroked Gisela’s face. “Then we should wait till after Dunholm is taken,” I said, and it was not what I wanted to say.

“My brother says I have to be a peace cow,” she said bitterly. A peace cow was a woman married to a rival family in an attempt to bring friendship, and doubtless Guthred had in mind Ivarr’s son or else a Scottish husband. “But I won’t be a peace cow,” she said harshly. “I cast the runesticks and learned my fate.”

“What did you learn?”

“I am to have two sons and a daughter.”

“Good,” I said.

“They will be your sons,” she said defiantly, “and your daughter.”

For a moment I did not speak. The night suddenly seemed fragile. “The runesticks told you that?” I managed to say after a few heartbeats.

“They have never lied,” she said calmly. “When Guthred was taken captive the runesticks told me he would come back, and they told me my husband would arrive with him. And you came.”

“But he wants you to be a peace cow,” I said.

“Then you must carry me off,” she said, “in the old way.” The old Danish way of taking a bride was to kidnap her, to raid her household and snatch her from her family and carry her off to marriage. It is still done occasionally, but in these softer days the raid usually follows formal negotiations and the bride has time to pack her belongings before the horsemen come.

“I will carry you off,” I promised her, and I knew I was making trouble, and that Hild had done nothing to deserve the trouble, and that Guthred would feel betrayed, but even so I tipped Gisela’s face up and kissed her.

She clung to me and then the shouting started. I held Gisela tight and listened. The shouts were from the camp and I could see, through the trees, folk running past fires toward the road. “Trouble,” I said, and I seized her hand and ran with her to the monastery where Clapa and the guards had drawn swords. I pushed Gisela toward the door and drew Serpent-Breath.

But there was no trouble. Not for us. The newcomers, attracted by the light of our campfires, were three men, one of them badly wounded, and they brought news. Within an hour the monastery’s small church blazed with fire and the priests and monks were singing God’s praises, and the message the three men had brought from the north went all through our camp so that newly-woken folk came to the monastery to hear the news again and to be assured that it was true.

“God works miracles!” Hrothweard shouted at the crowd. He had used a ladder to climb onto the monastery roof. It was dark, but some people had brought flaming torches and in their light Hrothweard looked huge. He raised his arms so that the crowd fell silent. He let them wait as he stared down at their upturned faces, and from behind him came the solemn chanting of the monks, and somewhere in the night an owl called, and Hrothweard clenched his fists and reached higher still as though he could touch heaven in the moonlight. “Ivarr is defeated!” he finally shouted. “Praise God and the saints, the tyrant Ivarr Ivarson is defeated! He has lost his army!”

And the people of Haliwerfolkland, who had feared to fight the mighty Ivarr, cheered themselves hoarse because the biggest obstacle to Guthred’s rule in Northumbria had been swept away. He could truly call himself king at last and so he was. King Guthred.

FOUR

There had been a battle, we heard, a slaughter battle, a fight of horror in which a dale had reeked of blood, and Ivarr Ivarson, the most powerful Dane of Northumbria, had been defeated by Aed of Scotland.

The killing on both sides had been awesome. We heard more about the fight next morning when nearly sixty new survivors arrived. They had traveled in a band large enough to be spared Kjartan’s attention, and they were still reeling from the butcher’s work they had endured. Ivarr, we learned, had been lured across a river and into a valley where he believed Aed had taken refuge, but it was a trap. The hills on either side of the valley were thick with tribesmen who came howling through the mist and heather to hack into the Danish shield walls. “There were thousands of them,” one man said and he was still shaking as he spoke.

Ivarr’s shield wall held, but I could imagine the ferocity of that battle. My father had fought the Scots many times and he had always described them as devils. Mad devils, he said, sword devils, howling devils, and Ivarr’s Danes told us how they had rallied from that first assault, and used sword and spear to cut the devils down, and still the shrieking hordes came, climbing over their own dead, their wild hair red with blood, their swords hissing, and Ivarr tried to climb north out of the dale to reach the high ground. That meant cutting and slashing a path through flesh, and he failed. Aed had then led his household troops against Ivarr’s best men and the shields clashed and the blades rang and one by one the warriors died. Ivarr, the survivors said, fought like a fiend, but he took a sword thrust to the chest and a spear cut in his leg and his household troops dragged him back from the shield wall. He raved at them, demanding to die in the face of his enemies, but his men held him back and fought off the devils and by then night was falling.

The rearmost part of the Danish column still held, and the survivors, almost all of them bleeding, dragged their leader south toward the river. Ivarr’s son, Ivar, just sixteen years old, assembled the least wounded warriors and they made a charge and broke through the encircling Scots, but scores more died as they tried to cross the river in the dark. Some, weighed down by their mail, drowned. Others were butchered in the shallows, but perhaps a sixth of Ivarr’s army made it through the water and they huddled on the southern bank where they listened to the cries of the dying and the howling of the Scots. In the dawn they made a shield wall, expecting the Scots to cross the river and complete the slaughter, but Aed’s men were almost as bloodied and wearied as the defeated Danes. “We killed hundreds,” a man said bleakly, and later we heard that was true and that Aed had limped back north to lick his wounds.

Earl Ivarr lived. He was wounded, but he lived. He was said to be hiding in the hills, fearful of being captured by Kjartan, and Guthred sent a hundred horsemen north to find him and they discovered that Kjartan’s troops were also scouring the hills. Ivarr must have known he would be found, and he preferred being Guthred’s captive to being Kjartan’s prisoner, and so he surrendered to a troop of Ulf’s men who brought the injured earl back to our camp just after midday. Ivarr could not ride a horse so he was being carried on a shield. He was accompanied by his son, Ivar, and by thirty other survivors, some of them as badly wounded as their leader, but when Ivarr realized he must confront the man who had usurped Northumbria’s throne he insisted that he did so on his own two feet. He walked. I do not know how he did it for he must have been in agony, but he forced himself to limp and every few steps he paused to lean on the spear he used as a crutch. I could see the pain, but I could also see the pride that would not let him be carried into Guthred’s presence.

So he walked to us. He flinched with every step, but he was defiant and angry. I had never met him before because he had been raised in Ireland, but he looked just like his father. He had Ivar the Boneless’s skeletal appearance. He had the same skull-like face with its sunken eyes, the same yellow hair drawn back to the nape of his neck and the same sullen malevolence. He had the same power.

Guthred waited at the monastery entrance and his household troops made two lines through which Ivarr had to walk. Guthred was flanked by his chief men and attended by Abbot Eadred, Father Hrothweard and all the other churchmen. When Ivarr was a dozen paces away he stopped, leaned on the spear and gave us all a scathing look. He mistook me for the king, perhaps because my mail and helmet were so much finer than Guthred’s. “Are you the boy who calls himself king?” he demanded.

“I’m the boy who killed Ubba Lothbrokson,” I answered. Ubba had been Ivarr’s uncle, and the taunt made Ivarr jerk up his face and I saw a strange green glint in his eyes. They were serpent’s eyes in a skull face. He might have been wounded and he might have had his power broken, but all he wanted at that moment was to kill me.

“And you are?” he demanded of me.

“You know who I am,” I said scornfully. Arrogance is all in a young warrior.

Guthred gripped my arm as if to tell me to be quiet, then stepped forward. “Lord Ivarr,” he said, “I am sorry to see you wounded.”

Ivarr sneered at that. “You should be glad,” he said, “and only sorry I am not dead. You’re Guthred?”

“I grieve you are wounded, lord,” Guthred said, “and I grieve for the men you have lost and I rejoice in the enemies you have killed. We owe you thanks.” He stepped back and looked past Ivarr to where our army had gathered about the road. “We owe Ivarr Ivarson thanks!” Guthred shouted. “He has removed a threat to our north! King Aed has limped home to weep over his losses and to console the widows of Scotland!”

The truth, of course, was that Ivarr was limping and Aed was victorious, but Guthred’s words prompted cheers, and those cheers astonished Ivarr. He must have expected that Guthred would kill him, which is exactly what Guthred should have done, but instead Ivarr was being treated with honor.

“Kill the bastard,” I muttered to Guthred.

He gave me a look of utter astonishment, as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “Why?” he asked quietly.

“Just kill him now,” I said urgently, “and that rat of a son.”

“You’re obsessed with killing,” Guthred said, amused, and I saw Ivarr watching and he must have known what I had been saying. “You are truly welcome, Lord Ivarr,” Guthred turned away from me and smiled at Ivarr. “Northumbria has need of great warriors,” he went on, “and you, lord, are in need of rest.”

I was watching those serpent eyes and I saw Ivarr’s amazement, but I also saw that he thought Guthred a fool, but it was at that moment I understood Guthred’s fate was golden. Wyrd biful aræd. When I had rescued Guthred from Sven and he had claimed to be a king I had thought him a joke, and when he was made a king in Cair Ligualid I still thought the jest was rich, and even in Eoferwic I could not see the laughter lasting more than a few weeks for Ivarr was the great brutal overlord of Northumbria, but now Aed had done our work for us. Ivarr had lost most of his men, he had been wounded, and there were now just three great lords in Northumbria. There was Ælfric, clinging to his stolen land at Bebbanburg, Kjartan, who was the dark spider lord in his fastness by the river, and there was King Guthred, lord of the north, and the only Dane in Britain who led willing Saxons as well as Danes.

We stayed at Onhripum. We had not planned to do that, but Guthred insisted that we wait while Ivarr was treated for his wounds. The monks tended him and Guthred waited on the wounded earl, taking him food and ale. Most of Ivarr’s survivors were wounded, and Hild washed wounds and found clean cloths for bandages. “They need food,” she told me, but we had little enough food already and every day I had to lead forage parties farther away to find grain or livestock. I urged Guthred to march again, to take us into country where supplies might be more plentiful, but he was entranced by Ivarr. “I like him!” he told me, “and we can’t leave him here.”

“We can bury him here,” I suggested.

“He’s our ally!” Guthred insisted, and he believed it. Ivarr was heaping praises on him and Guthred trusted every treacherous word.

The monks did their work well, for Ivarr recovered swiftly. I had hoped he would die of his wounds, but within three days he was riding a horse. He still hurt. That was obvious. The pain must have been terrible, but he forced himself to walk and to mount a horse, just as he forced himself to offer fealty to Guthred.

He had little choice in that. Ivarr now led fewer than a hundred men, many of whom were injured, and he was no longer the great warlord he had been, so he and his son knelt to Guthred and clasped his hands and swore their loyalty. The son, sixteen-year old Ivar, looked like his father and grandfather, lean and dangerous. I distrusted them both, but Guthred would not listen to me. It was right, he said, that a king should be generous, and in showing mercy to Ivarr he believed he was binding the man to him for ever. “It’s what Alfred would have done,” he told me.

“Alfred would have taken the son hostage and sent the father away,” I said.

“He has taken an oath,” Guthred insisted.

“He’ll raise new men,” I warned him.

“Good!” He offered me his infectious grin. “We need men who can fight.”

“He’ll want his son to be king.”

“He didn’t want to be king himself, so why should he want it for his son? You see enemies everywhere, Uhtred. Young Ivar’s a good-looking fellow, don’t you think?”

“He looks like a half-starved rat.”

“He’s the right age for Gisela! Horseface and the rat, eh?” he said, grinning at me and I wanted to strike the grin off his face with my fist. “It’s an idea, isn’t it?” he went on. “It’s time she married and it would bind Ivarr to me.”

“Why not bind me to you?” I asked.

“You and I are friends already,” he said, still grinning, “and I thank God for that.”

We marched northward when Ivarr was sufficiently recovered. Ivarr was certain others of his men had survived the Scottish slaughter and so Brothers Jænberht and Ida rode ahead with an escort of fifty men. The two monks, Guthred assured me, knew the country about the River Tuede and could guide the searchers who looked for Ivarr’s missing men.

Guthred rode with Ivarr for much of the journey. He had been flattered by Ivarr’s oath which he ascribed to Christian magic and when Ivarr dropped behind to ride with his own men Guthred summoned Father Hrothweard and questioned the wild-bearded priest about Cuthbert, Oswald, and the Trinity. Guthred wanted to know how to work the magic for himself and was frustrated by Hrothweard’s explanations. “The son is not the father,” Hrothweard tried again, “and the father is not the spirit, and the spirit is not the son, but father, son and spirit are one, indivisible, and eternal.”

“So they’re three gods?” Guthred asked.

“One god!” Hrothweard said angrily.

“Do you understand it, Uhtred?” Guthred called back to me.

“I never have, lord,” I said. “To me it’s all nonsense.”

“It is not nonsense!” Hrothweard hissed at me. “Think of it as the clover leaf, lord,” he said to Guthred, “three leaves, separate, but one plant.”

“It is a mystery, lord,” Hild put in.

“Mystery?”

“God is mysterious, lord,” she said, ignoring Hrothweard’s malevolent glance, “and in his mystery we can discover wonder. You don’t need to understand it, just be astonished by it.”

Guthred twisted in his saddle to look at Hild. “So will you be my wife’s companion?” he asked her cheerfully.

“Marry her first, lord,” Hild said, “and then I’ll decide.”

He grinned and turned away.

“I thought you’d decided to go back to a nunnery,” I said quietly.

“Gisela told you that?”

“She did.”

“I’m looking for a sign from God,” Hild said.

“The fall of Dunholm?”

She frowned. “Maybe. It’s an evil place. If Guthred takes it under the banner of Saint Cuthbert then it will show God’s power. Perhaps that’s the sign I want.”

“It sounds to me,” I said, “as though you have your sign already.”

She moved her mare away from Witnere who was giving it the evil eye. “Father Willibald wanted me to go back to Wessex with him,” she said, “but I said no. I told him that if I retire from the world again then first I want to know what the world is.” She rode in silence for a few paces, then spoke very softly. “I would have liked children.”

“You can have children,” I said.

She shook her head dismissively. “No,” she said, “it is not my fate.” She glanced at me. “You know Guthred wants to marry Gisela to Ivarr’s son?” she asked.

I was startled by her sudden question. “I know he’s thinking about it,” I said cautiously.

“Ivarr said yes. Last night.”

My heart sank, but I tried to show nothing. “How do you know?” I asked.

“Gisela told me. But there is a bride-price.”

“There’s always a bride-price,” I said harshly.

“Ivarr wants Dunholm,” she said.

It took me a moment to understand, then I saw the whole monstrous bargain. Ivarr had lost most of his power when his army was massacred by Aed, but if he were to be given Dunholm and Dunholm’s lands, then he would be strong again. The men who now fol lowed Kjartan would become his men and in a stroke Ivarr would regain his strength. “And has Guthred accepted?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“He can’t be that stupid,” I said angrily.

“Of the stupidity of men,” Hild said tartly, “there seems no end. But do you remember, before we left Wessex, how you told me Northumbria was full of enemies?”

“I remember.”

“More full, I think, than you realize,” she said, “so I will stay till I know that you will survive.” She reached out and touched my arm. “I think, sometimes, I am the only friend you have here. So let me stay till I know you’re safe.”

I smiled at her and touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt. “I’m safe,” I said.

“Your arrogance,” she said, “blinds folk to your kindness.” She said it reprovingly, then looked at the road ahead. “So what will you do?” she asked.

“Finish my bloodfeud,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.” And that was true. That was why I rode north, to kill Kjartan and to free Thyra, but if I achieved those things then Dunholm would belong to Ivarr, and Gisela would belong to Ivarr’s son. I felt betrayed, though in truth there was no betrayal, for Gisela had never been promised to me. Guthred was free to marry her to whoever he wished. “Or maybe we should just ride away,” I said bitterly.

“Ride where?”

“Anywhere.”

Hild smiled. “Back to Wessex?”

“No!”

“Then where?”

Nowhere. I had ridden away from Wessex and would not ride back except to fetch my hoard when I had a safe place to bring it. Fate had me in its grip and fate had given me enemies. Everywhere.

We forded the River Wiire well west of Dunholm and then marched the army to a place the locals called Cuncacester which lay athwart the Roman road five miles north of Dunholm. The Romans had built a fort at Cuncacester, and the walls were still there, though by now they were little more than worn-down banks in green fields. Guthred announced the army would stay close to the decrepit fort, and I said the army should keep marching south until it reached Dunholm, and we had our first argument, because he would not change his mind. “What is the purpose, lord,” I asked, “of keeping an army two hours’ march from its enemy?”

“Eadred says we must stop here.”

“Abbot Eadred? He knows how to take fortresses?”

“He had a dream,” Guthred said.

“A dream?”

“Saint Cuthbert wants his shrine here,” Guthred said. “Right there,” he pointed to a small hill where the coffined saint was surrounded by praying monks.

It made no sense to me. The place was undistinguished, except for the remnants of the fort. There were hills, fields, a couple of farms, and a small river, altogether a pleasant enough spot, though why it was the right place for the saint’s shrine was quite beyond my understanding. “Our job, lord,” I said, “is to capture Dunholm. We don’t do that by building a church here.”

“But Eadred’s dreams have always been right,” Guthred said earnestly, “and Saint Cuthbert has never failed me.”

I argued and I lost. Even Ivarr supported me, telling Guthred that we had to take the army closer to Dunholm, but Abbot Eadred’s dream meant that we camped at Cuncacester and the monks immediately began working on their church. The hilltop was leveled, trees were felled, and Abbot Eadred planted stakes to show where the walls should go. He wanted stone for its foundations, and that meant searching for a quarry, or better still an old Roman building that could be pulled down, but it would have to be a large building because the church he planned was bigger than the halls of most kings.

And next day, a late summer’s day, under high scattered clouds, we rode south to Dunholm. We rode to confront Kjartan and to explore the fortress’s strength.

One hundred and fifty men made the short journey. Ivarr and his son flanked Guthred, Ulf and I followed, and only the churchmen stayed at Cuncacester. We were Danes and Saxons, sword-warriors and spearmen, and we rode under Guthred’s new banner that showed Saint Cuthbert with one hand raised in blessing and the other hand holding the jeweled gospel book of Lindisfarena. It was not an inspiring banner, at least not to me, and I wished I had thought to ask Hild to make me a banner, one showing the wolf’s head of Bebbanburg. Earl Ulf had his banner of the eagle’s head, Guthred had his flag, and Ivarr rode under a ragged banner showing two ravens that he had somehow rescued from his defeat in Scotland, but I rode without any standard.

Earl Ulf cursed when we came in sight of Dunholm for it was the first time he had ever seen the strength of that high rock girdled by a loop of the River Wiire. The rock was not sheer, for hornbeams and sycamore grew thick on its steep slopes, but the summit had been cleared and we could see a stout wooden palisade protecting the height where three or four halls had been built. The entrance to the fort was a high gatehouse, surmounted by a rampart where a triangular banner flew. The flag showed a serpent-headed ship, a reminder that Kjartan had once been a shipmaster, and beneath the banner were men with spears, and hanging on the palisade were rows of shields.

Ulf stared at the fortress. Guthred and Ivarr joined him and none of us spoke, for there was nothing to say. It looked impregnable. It looked terrible. There was a path up to the fortress, but it was steep and it was narrow, and very few men would be needed to hold that track as it twisted up through tree stumps and past boulders to the high gate. We could throw all our army up that path, but in places the way was so constricted that twenty men could hold off that army, and all the while spears and rocks would rain down on our heads. Guthred, who plainly believed Dunholm could not be taken, threw me a mute look of pleading.

“Sihtric!” I called, and the boy hurried to my side. “That wall,” I said, “does it go all the way around the summit?”

“Yes, lord,” he said, then hesitated, “except…”

“Except where?”

“There’s a small place on the southern side, lord, where there’s a crag. No wall there. It’s where they throw the shit.”

“A crag?” I asked, and he made a gesture with his right hand to show that it was a sheer slab of rock. “Can the crag be climbed?” I asked him.

“No, lord.”

“What about water?” I asked him. “Is there a well?”

“Two wells, lord, both outside the palisade. There’s one to the west which they don’t often use, and the other’s on the eastern side. But that one’s high up the slope where the trees grow.”

“It’s outside the wall?”

“It’s outside, lord, but it has its own wall.”

I tossed him a coin as reward, though his answers had not cheered me. I had thought that if Kjartan’s men took their water from the river then we might post archers to stop them, but no archer could pierce trees and a wall to stop them reaching the well.

“So what do we do?” Guthred asked me, and a flicker of annoyance tempted me to ask him why he didn’t consult his priests who had insisted on making the army’s camp so inconveniently far away. I managed to stifle that response. “You can offer him terms, lord,” I said, “and when he refuses you’ll have to starve him out.”

“The harvest is in,” Guthred pointed out.

“So it will take a year,” I retorted. “Build a wall across the neck of land. Trap him. Let him see we won’t go away. Let him see starvation coming for him. If you build the wall,” I said, warming to the idea, “you won’t have to leave an army here. Even sixty men should be enough.”

“Sixty?” Guthred asked.

“Sixty men could defend a wall here,” I said. The great mass of rock on which Dunholm stood was shaped like a pear, its lower narrow end forming the neck of land from where we stared at the high walls. The river ran to our right, swept about the great bulge of stone, then reappeared to our left, and just here the distance between the river banks was a little less than three hundred paces. It would take us a week to clear those three hundred paces of trees, and another week to dig a ditch and throw up a palisade, and a third week to strengthen that palisade so that sixty men would be sufficient to defend it. The neck was not a flat strip of land, but an uneven hump of rock, so the palisade would have to climb across the hump. Sixty men could never defend three hundred paces of wall, but much of the neck was impassable because of stone bluffs where no attack could ever come, so in truth the sixty would only have to defend the palisade in three or four places.

“Sixty,” Ivarr had been silent, but now spat that word like a curse. “You’ll need more than sixty. The men will have to be relieved at night. Other men have to fetch water, herd cattle, and patrol the river’s bank. Sixty men might hold the wall, but you’ll need two hundred more to hold those sixty men in place.” He gave me a scathing look. He was right, of course. And if two to three hundred men were occupied at Dunholm, then that was two to three hundred men who could not guard Eoferwic or patrol the frontiers or grow crops.

“But a wall here,” Guthred said, “would defeat Dunholm.”

“It would,” Ivarr agreed, though he sounded dubious.

“So I just need men,” Guthred said. “I need more men.”

I walked Witnere to the east as if I were exploring where the wall might be made. I could see men on Dunholm’s high gate watching us. “Maybe it won’t take a year,” I called back to Guthred. “Come and look at this.”

He urged his horse toward me and I thought I had never seen him so out of spirits. Till now everything had come easily to Guthred, the throne, Eoferwic, and Ivarr’s homage, but Dunholm was a great raw block of brute power that defied his optimism. “What are you showing me?” he asked, puzzled that I had brought him away from the path.

I glanced back, making sure that Ivarr and his son were out of earshot, then I pointed to the river as if I were discussing the lie of the land. “We can capture Dunholm,” I told Guthred quietly, “but I won’t help you if you give it as a reward to Ivarr.” He bridled at that, then I saw a flicker of guile on his face and knew he was tempted to deny he had ever considered giving Dunholm to Ivarr. “Ivarr is weak,” I told him, “and so long as Ivarr is weak he will be your friend. Strengthen him and you make an enemy.”

“What use is a weak friend?” he asked.

“More use than a strong enemy, lord.”

“Ivarr doesn’t want to be king,” he said, “so why should he be my enemy?”

“What Ivarr wants,” I said, “is to control the king like a puppy on his leash. Is that what you want? To be Ivarr’s puppy?”

He stared up at the high gate. “Someone has to hold Dunholm,” he said weakly.

“Then give it to me,” I said, “because I’m your friend. Do you doubt that?”

“No, Uhtred,” he said, “I do not doubt it.” He reached over and touched my elbow. Ivarr was watching us with his snake-like eyes. “I have made no promises,” Guthred went on, but he looked troubled as he said it. Then he forced a smile. “Can you capture the place?”

“I think we can get Kjartan out of there, lord.”

“How?” he asked.

“I work sorcery tonight, lord,” I told him, “and tomorrow you talk with him. Tell him that if he stays here then you will destroy him. Tell him you’ll start by firing his steadings and burning his slave pens at Gyruum. Promise that you’ll impoverish him. Let Kjartan understand that nothing but death, fire, and misery wait for him so long as he stays here. Then you offer him a way out. Let him go across the seas.” That was not what I wanted, I wanted Kjartan the Cruel writhing under Serpent-Breath, but my revenge was not so important as getting Kjartan out of Dunholm.

“So work your sorcery,” Guthred told me.

“And if it works, lord, you promise you won’t give the place to Ivarr?”

He hesitated, then held his hand to me. “If it works, my friend,” he said, “then I promise I will give it to you.”

“Thank you, lord,” I said, and Guthred rewarded me with his infectious smile.

Kjartan’s watching men must have been puzzled when we rode away late in the afternoon. We did not go far, but made a camp on a hillside north of the fortress and we lit fires to let Kjartan know that we were still close. Then, in the darkness, I rode back to Dunholm with Sihtric. I went to work my sorcery, to scare Kjartan, and to do that I needed to be a sceadugengan, a shadow-walker. The sceadugengan walk at night, when honest men fear to leave their houses. The night is when strange things stalk the earth, when shape-shifters, ghosts, wild men, elves, and beasts roam the land.

But I had ever been comfortable with the night. From a child I had practiced shadow-walking until I had become one of the creatures men fear, and that night I took Sihtric up the path toward Dunholm’s high gate. Sihtric led our horses and they, like him, were scared. I had trouble keeping to the path for the moon was hidden by newly arrived clouds, so I felt my way, using Serpent-Breath as a stick to find bushes and rocks. We went slowly with Sihtric holding onto my cloak so that he did not lose me. It became easier as we went higher, for there were fires inside the fortress and the glow of their flames above the palisade acted as a beacon. I could see the shadowed outlines of sentries on the high gate, but they could not see us as we reached a shelf of land where the path dropped a few feet before climbing the last long stretch to the gate. The whole slope between the brief shelf and the palisade had been cleared of trees so that no enemy could creep unseen to the defenses and attempt a sudden assault.

“Stay here,” I told Sihtric. I needed him to guard the horses and to carry my shield, helmet, and the bag of severed heads which I now took from him. I told him to hide behind the trees and wait there.

I placed the heads on the path, the closest less than fifty paces from the gate, the last very near to the trees which grew at the lip of the shelf. I could feel maggots squirming under my hands as I lifted the heads from the sack. I made the dead eyes look toward the fortress, positioning the rotting skulls by feel so that my hands were slimy when at last I was finished. No one heard me, no one saw me. The dark wrapped about me and the wind sighed across the hill and the river ran noisily over the rocks below. I found Sihtric, who was shivering, and he gave me the black scarf that I wrapped about my face, knotting it at the nape of my neck, and then I forced my helmet over the linen and took my shield. Then I waited.

The light comes slowly in a clouded dawn. First there is just a shiver of grayness that touches the sky’s eastern rim, and for a time there is neither light nor dark, nor any shadows, just the cold gray filling the world as the bats, the shadow-fliers, skitter home. The trees turn black as the sky pales the horizon, and then the first sunlight skims the world with color. Birds sang. Not as many as sing in spring and early summer, but I could hear wrens, chiff-chaffs, and robins greeting the day’s coming, and below me in the trees a woodpecker rattled at a trunk. The black trees were dark green now and I could see the bright red berries of a rowan bush not far away. And it was then that the guards saw the heads. I heard them shout, saw more men come to the rampart, and I waited. The banner was raised over the high gate, and still more men came to the wall and then the gate opened and two men crept out. The gate closed behind them and I heard a dull thud as its great locking bar was dropped into place. The two men looked hesitant. I was hidden in the trees, Serpent-Breath drawn, my cheek-pieces open so that the black linen filled the space between the helmet’s edges. I wore a black cloak over my mail that Hild had brightened by scrubbing it with river-sand. I wore high black boots. I was the dead swordsman again and I watched as the two men came cautiously down the path toward the line of heads. They reached the first blood-matted head and one of them shouted up to the fortress that it was one of Tekil’s men. Then he asked what he should do.

Kjartan answered. I was sure it was him, though I could not see his face, but his voice was a roar. “Kick them away!” he shouted, and the two men obeyed, kicking the heads off the path so that they rolled down into the long grass where the trees had been felled.

They came closer until there was only one of the seven heads left and, just as they reached it, I stepped from the trees.

They saw a shadow-faced warrior, gleaming and tall, with sword and shield in hand. They saw the dead swordsman, and I just stood there, ten paces from them, and I did not move and I did not speak, and they gazed at me and one made a sound like a kitten mewing and then, without another word, they fled.

I stood there as the sun rose. Kjartan and his men stared at me and in that early light I was dark-faced death in shining armor, death in a bright helmet, and then, before they decided to send the dogs to discover I was not a specter, but flesh and blood, I turned back into the shadows and rejoined Sihtric.

I had done my best to terrify Kjartan. Now Guthred had to talk him into surrender, and then, I dared hope, the great fort on its rock would become mine, and Gisela with it, and I dared hope those things because Guthred was my friend. I saw my future as golden as Guthred’s. I saw the bloodfeud won, I saw my men raiding Bebbanburg’s land to weaken my uncle, and I saw Ragnar returning to Northumbria to fight at my side. In short I forgot the gods and spun my own bright fate, while at the root of life the three spinners laughed.

Thirty horsemen rode back to Dunholm in midmorning. Clapa went ahead of us with a leafy branch to show we came in peace. We were all in mail, though I had left my good helmet with Sihtric. I had thought of dressing as the dead swordsman, but he had done his sorcery and now we would discover if it had worked.

We came to the place where I had stood and watched the two men kick the seven heads off the path and there we waited. Clapa waved the branch energetically and Guthred fidgeted as he watched the gate. “How long will it take us to reach Gyruum tomorrow?” he asked.

“Gyruum?” I asked.

“I thought we’d ride there tomorrow,” he said, “and burn the slave pens. We can take hawks. Go hunting.”

“If we leave at dawn,” Ivarr answered, “we’ll be there by noon.”

I looked to the west where there were ominous dark clouds. “There’s bad weather coming,” I said.

Ivarr slapped at a horsefly on his stallion’s neck, then frowned at the high gate. “Bastard doesn’t want to speak to us.”

“I’d like to go tomorrow,” Guthred said mildly.

“There’s nothing there,” I said.

“Kjartan’s slave pens are there,” Guthred said, “and you told me we have to destroy them. Besides, I have a mind to see the old monastery. I hear it was a great building.”

“Then go when the bad weather’s passed,” I suggested.

Guthred said nothing because, in response to Clapa’s waving branch, a horn had suddenly sounded from the high gate. We fell silent as the gates were pushed open and a score of men rode toward us.

Kjartan led them, mounted on a tall, brindled horse. He was a big man, wide-faced, with a huge beard and small suspicious eyes, and he carried a great war ax as though it weighed nothing. He wore a helmet on which a pair of raven wings had been fixed and had a dirty white cloak hanging from his broad shoulders. He stopped a few paces away and for a time he said nothing, but just stared at us, and I tried to find some fear in his eyes, but he just looked belligerent, though when he broke the silence his voice was subdued. “Lord Ivarr,” he said, “I am sorry you did not kill Aed.”

“I lived,” Ivarr said drily.

“I am glad of it,” Kjartan said, then he gave me a long look. I was standing apart from the others, off to one side of the path and slightly above them where the track rose to the tree-covered knob before dropping to the neck. Kjartan must have recognized me, known I was Ragnar’s adopted son who had cost his own son an eye, but he decided to ignore me, looking back to Ivarr. “What you needed to defeat Aed,” he said, “was a sorcerer.”

“A sorcerer?” Ivarr sounded amused.

“Aed fears the old magic,” Kjartan said. “He would never fight against a man who could take heads by sorcery.”

Ivarr said nothing. Instead he just turned and stared at me, and thus he betrayed the dead swordsman and reassured Kjartan that he did not face sorcery, but an old enemy, and I saw the relief on Kjartan’s face. He laughed suddenly, a brief bark of scorn, but he still ignored me. He turned on Guthred instead. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“I am your king,” Guthred said.

Kjartan laughed again. He was relaxed now, certain that he faced no dark magic. “This is Dunholm, pup,” he said, “and we have no king.”

“Yet here I am,” Guthred said, unmoved by the insult, “and here I stay until your bones have bleached in Dunholm’s sun.”

Kjartan was amused at that. “You think you can starve me out? You and your priests? You think I’ll die of hunger because you’re here? Listen, pup. There are fish in the river and birds in the sky and Dunholm will not starve. You can wait here till chaos shrouds the world and I’ll be better fed than you. Why didn’t you tell him that, Lord Ivarr?” Ivarr just shrugged as though Guthred’s ambitions were no concern of his. “So,” Kjartan rested the ax on his shoulder as if to suggest it would not be needed, “what are you here to offer me, pup?”

“You can take your men to Gyruum,” Guthred said, “and we shall provide ships and you can sail away. Your folk can go with you, except those who wish to stay in Northumbria.”

“You play at being a king, boy,” Kjartan said, then looked at Ivarr again. “And you’re allied to him?”

“I am allied to him,” Ivarr said tonelessly.

Kjartan looked back to Guthred. “I like it here, pup. I like Dunholm. I ask for nothing more than to be left in peace. I don’t want your throne, I don’t want your land, though I might want your woman if you have one and if she’s pretty enough. So I shall make you an offer. You leave me in peace and I shall forget that you exist.”

“You disturb my peace,” Guthred said.

“I’ll shit all over your peace, pup, if you don’t leave here,” Kjartan snarled, and there was a force in his voice that startled Guthred.

“So you refuse my offer?” Guthred asked. He had lost this confrontation and knew it.

Kjartan shook his head as if he found the world a sadder place than he had expected. “You call that a king?” he demanded of Ivarr. “If you need a king, find a man.”

“I hear this king was man enough to piss all over your son,” I spoke for the first time, “and I hear Sven crawled away weeping. You bred a coward, Kjartan.”

Kjartan pointed the ax at me. “I have business with you,” he said, “but this is not the day to make you scream like a woman. But that day will come.” He spat at me, then wrenched his horse’s head about and spurred back toward the high gate without another word. His men followed.

Guthred watched him go. I stared at Ivarr, who had deliberately betrayed the sorcery, and I guessed that he had been told I was to hold Dunholm if it fell and so he had made certain it did not fall. He glanced at me, said something to his son, and they both laughed.

“In two days,” Guthred spoke to me, “you start work on the wall. I’ll give you two hundred men to make it.”

“Why not start tomorrow?” I asked.

“Because we’re going to Gyruum, that’s why. We’re going to hunt!”

I shrugged. Kings have whims and this king wanted to hunt.

We rode back to Cuncacester where we discovered that Jænberht and Ida, the two monks, had returned from their search for more of Ivarr’s survivors. “Did you find anyone?” I asked them as we dismounted.

Jænberht just stared at me, as if the question puzzled him, then Ida shook his head hurriedly. “We found no one,” he said.

“So you wasted your time,” I said.

Jænberht smirked at that, or perhaps it was just his twisted mouth that made me think he smirked, then both men were summoned to tell Guthred of their journey and I went to Hild and asked her if Christians pronounced curses, and if they did then she was to make a score of curses against Ivarr. “Put your devil onto him,” I said.

That night Guthred tried to restore our spirits by giving a feast. He had taken a farm in the valley below the hill where Abbot Eadred was laying out his church, and he invited all the men who had confronted Kjartan that morning and served us seethed mutton and fresh trout, ale, and good bread. A harpist played after the meal and then I told the tale of Alfred going into Cippanhamm disguised as a harpist. I made them laugh when I described how a Dane had thumped him because he was such a bad musician.

Abbot Eadred was another of the guests and, when Ivarr left, the abbot offered to say evening prayers. The Christians gathered at one side of the fire, and that left Gisela with me beside the farm’s door. She had a lambskin pouch at her belt and, as Eadred chanted his words, she opened the pouch and took out a bundle of runesticks bound with a woolen thread. The sticks were slender and white. She looked at me as if to ask whether she should cast them and I nodded. She held them above the ground, closed her eyes, then let them go.

The sticks fell in their usual disarray. Gisela knelt beside them, her face sharply shadowed by the fire’s dying flames. She stared at the tangled sticks a long time, once or twice looking up at me, and then, quite suddenly, she began to cry. I touched her shoulder. “What is it?” I asked.

Then she screamed. She raised her head to the smoky rafters and wailed. “No!” she called, startling Eadred into silence, “no!” Hild came hurrying around the hearth and put an arm about the weeping girl, but Gisela tore herself free and stooped over the runesticks again. “No!” she shouted a third time.

“Gisela!” Her brother crouched beside her. “Gisela!”

She turned on him and slapped him once, slapped him hard about the face, and then she began gasping as if she could not find breath enough to live, and Guthred, his cheek red, scooped up the sticks.

“They are a pagan sorcery, lord,” Eadred said, “they are an abomination.”

“Take her away,” Guthred said to Hild, “take her to her hut,” and Hild pulled Gisela away, helped by two serving women who had been attracted by her wailing.

“The devil is punishing her for sorcery,” Eadred insisted.

“What did she see?” Guthred asked me.

“She didn’t say.”

He kept looking at me and I thought for a heartbeat that there were tears in his eyes, then he abruptly turned away and dropped the runesticks onto the fire. They crackled fiercely and a searing flame leaped toward the roof-tree, then they dulled into blackened squiggles. “What do you prefer,” Guthred asked me, “falcon or hawk?” I stared at him, puzzled. “When we hunt tomorrow,” he explained, “what do you prefer?”

“Falcon,” I said.

“Then tomorrow you can hunt with Swiftness,” he said, naming one of his birds.

“Gisela’s ill,” Hild told me later that night, “she has a fever. She shouldn’t have eaten meat.”

Next morning I bought a set of runesticks from one of Ulf’s men. They were black sticks, longer than the burned white ones, and I paid well for them. I took them to Gisela’s hut, but one of her women said Gisela was sick with a woman’s sickness and could not see me. I left the sticks for her. They told the future and I would have done better, much better, to have cast them myself. Instead I went hunting.

It was a hot day. There were still dark clouds heaped in the west, but they seemed to be no nearer, and the sun burned fiercely so that only the score of troops who rode to guard us wore mail. We did not expect to meet enemies. Guthred led us, and Ivarr and his son rode, and Ulf was there, and so were the two monks, Jænberht and Ida, who came to say prayers for the monks who had once been massacred at Gyruum. I did not tell them that I had been present at the massacre that had been the work of Ragnar the Elder. He had cause. The monks had murdered Danes and Ragnar had punished them, though these days the story is always told that the monks were innocently at prayer and died as spotless martyrs. In truth they were malevolent killers of women and children, but what chance does truth have when priests tell tales?

Guthred was feverishly happy that day. He talked incessantly, laughed at his own jests, and even tried to stir a smile on Ivarr’s skull face. Ivarr said little except to give his son advice on hawking. Guthred had given me his falcon to fly, but at first we rode through wooded country where a falcon could not hunt, so his goshawk had an advantage and brought down two rooks among the branches. He whooped with each kill. It was not till we reached the open ground by the river that my falcon could fly high and stoop fast to strike at a duck, but the falcon missed and the duck flew into the safety of a grove of alders. “Not your lucky day,” Guthred told me.

“We might all be unlucky soon,” I said, and pointed westward to where the clouds were gathering. “There’s going to be a storm.”

“Maybe tonight,” he said dismissively, “but not till after dark.” He had given his goshawk to a servant and I handed the falcon to another. The river was on our left now and the scorched stone buildings of Gyruum’s monastery were ahead, built on the riverbank where the ground rose above the long salt-marshes. It was low tide and wicker fish traps stretched into the river that met the sea a short distance eastward.

“Gisela has a fever,” Guthred told me.

“I heard.”

“Eadred says he’ll touch her with the cloth that covers Cuthbert’s face. He says it will cure her.”

“I hope it does,” I said dutifully. Ahead of us Ivarr and his son rode with a dozen of their followers in mail. If they turned now, I thought, they could slaughter Guthred and me, so I leaned over and checked his horse so that Ulf and his men could catch up with us.

Guthred let me do that, but was amused. “He’s no enemy, Uhtred.”

“One day,” I said, “you will have to kill him. On that day, lord, you’ll be safe.”

“I’m not safe now?”

“You have a small army, an untrained army,” I said, “and Ivarr will raise men again. He’ll hire sword-Danes, shield-Danes and spear-Danes until he is lord of Northumbria again. He’s weak now, but he won’t always be weak. That’s why he wants Dunholm, because it will make him strong again.”

“I know,” Guthred said patiently. “I know all that.”

“And if you marry Gisela to Ivarr’s son,” I said, “how many men will that bring you?”

He looked at me sharply. “How many men can you bring me?” he asked, but did not wait for my answer. Instead he put spurs to his horse and hurried up the slope to the ruined monastery that Kjartan’s men had used as their hall. They had made a thatched roof between the stone walls, and beneath it was a hearth and a dozen sleeping platforms. The men who had lived here must have gone back to Dunholm before we ever crossed the river on our way north for the hall had long been deserted. The hearth was cold. Beyond the hill, in the wide valley between the monastery and the old Roman fort on its headland, were slave pens that were just wattle hurdles staked into enclosures. All were deserted. Some folk lived up at the old fort and they tended a high beacon which they were supposed to light if raiders came to the river. I doubted if the beacon was ever used for no Dane would raid Kjartan’s land, but there was a single ship beneath the beacon’s hill, anchored where the River Tine made its turn toward the sea. “We’ll see what business he has,” Guthred said grimly, as if he resented the ship’s presence, then he ordered his household troops to pull down the wattle fences and burn them with the thatch roof. “Burn it all!” he ordered. He watched as the work began, then grinned at me. “Shall we see what ship that is?”

“It’s a trader,” I said. It was a Danish ship, for no other kind sailed this coast, but she was plainly no warship for her hull was shorter and her beam wider than any warrior’s boat.

“Then let’s tell him there’s no trade here any more,” Guthred said, “at least none in slaves.”

He and I rode eastward. A dozen men came with us. Ulf was one, Ivarr and his son came too, and tagging behind them was Jænberht who kept urging Guthred to start rebuilding the monastery.

“We must finish Saint Cuthbert’s church first,” Guthred told Jænberht.

“But the house here must be remade,” Jænberht insisted, “it’s a sacred place. The most holy and blessed Bede lived here.”

“It will be rebuilt,” Guthred promised, then he curbed his horse beside a stone cross that had been toppled from its pedestal and now lay half buried in the soil and overgrown with grass and weeds. It was a fine piece of carving, writhing with beasts, plants, and saints. “And this cross shall stand again,” he said and then looked around the wide river bend. “A good place,” he said.

“It is,” I agreed.

“If the monks come back,” he said, “then we can make it prosperous again. Fish, salt, crops, cattle. How does Alfred raise money?”

“Taxes,” I said.

“He taxes the church too?”

“He doesn’t like taxing the church,” I said, “but he does when things are hard. They have to pay to be protected, after all.”

“He mints his own money?”

“Yes, lord.”

He laughed. “It’s complicated, being a king. Maybe I should visit Alfred. Ask his advice.”

“He’d like that,” I said.

“He’d welcome me?” He sounded wary.

“He would.”

“Though I’m a Dane?”

“Because you’re a Christian,” I said.

He thought about that, then rode on to where the path twisted through a marsh and crossed a small shallow stream where two ceorls were setting eel traps. They knelt as we passed and Guthred acknowledged them with a smile which neither of them saw because their heads were bowed so low. Four men were wading ashore from the moored ship and none of them had weapons and I supposed they were merely coming to greet us and assure us that they meant no harm. “Tell me,” Guthred said suddenly, “is Alfred different because he’s a Christian?”

“Yes,” I said.

“In what way?”

“He’s determined to be good, lord,” I said.

“Our religion,” he said, momentarily forgetting that he had been baptized, “doesn’t do that, does it?”

“It doesn’t?”

“Odin and Thor want us to be brave,” he said, “and they want us to respect them, but they don’t make us good.”

“No,” I agreed.

“So Christianity is different,” he insisted, then curbed his horse where the path ended in a low ridge of sand and shingle. The four men waited a hundred paces away at the shingle’s far end. “Give me your sword,” Guthred said suddenly.

“My sword?”

He smiled patiently. “Those sailors are not armed, Uhtred, and I want you to go and talk to them, so give me your sword.”

I was only armed with Serpent-Breath. “I hate being unarmed, lord,” I said in mild protest.

“It is a courtesy, Uhtred,” Guthred insisted, and held out his hand.

I did not move. No courtesy I had ever heard of suggested that a lord should take off his sword before talking to common seamen. I stared at Guthred and behind me I heard blades hissing from scabbards.

“Give me the sword,” Guthred said, “then walk to the men. I’ll hold your horse.”

I remember looking around me and seeing the marsh behind and the shingle ridge in front and I was thinking that I only had to dig my spurs in and I could gallop away, but Guthred reached over and gripped my reins. “Greet them for me,” he said in a forced voice.

I could still have galloped away, tearing the reins from his hand, but then Ivarr and his son crowded me. Both men had drawn swords and Ivarr’s stallion blocked Witnere who snapped in irritation. I calmed the horse. “What have you done, lord?” I asked Guthred.

For a heartbeat he did not speak. Indeed he seemed incapable of looking at me, but then he made himself answer. “You told me,” he said, “that Alfred would do whatever is necessary to preserve his kingdom. That is what I’m doing.”

“And what is that?”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Ælfric of Bebbanburg is bringing troops to help capture Dunholm,” he said. I just stared at him. “He is coming,” Guthred went on, “to give me an oath of loyalty.”

“I gave you that oath,” I said bitterly.

“And I promised I would free you from it,” he said, “which now I do.”

“So you’re giving me to my uncle?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Your uncle’s price was your life, but I refused it. You are to go away, Uhtred. That is all. You are to go far away. And in exchange for your exile I gain an ally with many warriors. You were right. I need warriors. Ælfric of Bebbanburg can provide them.”

“And why must an exile go unarmed?” I asked, touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

“Give me the sword,” Guthred said. Two of Ivarr’s men were behind me, also with drawn swords.

“Why must I go unarmed?” I asked again.

Guthred glanced at the ship, then back to me. He forced himself to say what needed to be said. “You will go unarmed,” he told me, “because what I was, you must be. That is the price of Dunholm.”

For a heartbeat I could neither breathe nor speak and it took me a moment to convince myself that he meant what I knew he meant. “You’re selling me into slavery?” I asked.

“On the contrary,” he said, “I paid to have you enslaved. So go with God, Uhtred.”

I hated Guthred then, though a small part of me recognized that he was being ruthless and that is part of kingship. I could provide him with two swords, nothing more, but my uncle Ælfric could bring him three hundred swords and spears, and Guthred had made his choice. It was, I suppose, the right choice and I was stupid not to have seen it coming.

“Go,” Guthred said more harshly and I vowed revenge and rammed my heels back and Witnere lunged forward, but was immediately knocked off balance by Ivarr’s horse so that he stumbled onto his foreknees and I was pitched onto his neck. “Don’t kill him!” Guthred shouted, and Ivarr’s son slapped the flat of his sword-blade against my head so that I fell off and, by the time I had regained my feet, Witnere was safe in Ivarr’s grasp and Ivarr’s men were above me with their sword-blades at my neck.

Guthred had not moved. He just watched me, but behind him with a smile on his crooked face, was Jænberht and I understood then. “Did that bastard arrange this?” I asked Guthred.

“Brother Jænberht and Brother Ida are from your uncle’s household,” Guthred admitted.

I knew then what a fool I had been. The two monks had come to Cair Ligualid and ever since they had been negotiating my fate and I had been oblivious of it.

I dusted off my leather jerkin. “Grant me a favor, lord?” I said.

“If I can.”

“Give my sword and my horse to Hild. Give her everything of mine and tell her to keep them for me.”

He paused. “You will not be coming back, Uhtred,” he said gently.

“Grant me that favor, lord,” I insisted.

“I shall do all that,” Guthred promised, “but give me the sword first.”

I unbuckled Serpent-Breath. I thought of drawing her and laying about me with her good blade, but I would have died in an eyeblink and so I kissed her hilt and then handed her up to Guthred. Then I slid off my arm rings, those marks of a warrior, and I held those to him. “Give these to Hild,” I asked him.

“I will,” he said, taking the rings, then he looked at the four men who waited for me. “Earl Ulf found these men,” Guthred said, nodding at the waiting slavers, “and they do not know who you are, only that they are to take you away.” That anonymity was a gift, of sorts. If the slavers had known how badly Ælfric wanted me, or how much Kjartan the Cruel would pay for my eyes, then I would not have lived a week. “Now go,” Guthred commanded me.

“You could have just sent me away,” I told him bitterly.

“Your uncle has a price,” Guthred said, “and this is it. He wanted your death, but accepted this instead.”

I looked beyond him to where the black clouds heaped in the west like mountains. They were much closer and darker, and a freshening wind was chilling the air. “You must go too, lord,” I said, “for a storm is coming.”

He said nothing and I walked away. Fate is inexorable. At the root of life’s tree the three spinners had decided that the thread of gold that made my life fortunate had come to its end. I remember my boots crunching on the shingle and remember the white gulls flying free.

I had been wrong about the four men. They were armed, not with swords or spears, but with short cudgels. They watched me approach as Guthred and Ivarr watched me walk away, and I knew what was to happen and I did not try to resist. I walked to the four men and one of them stepped forward and struck me in the belly to drive all the breath from my body, and another hit me on the side of the head so that I fell onto the shingle and then I was hit again and knew nothing more. I was a lord of Northumbria, a sword-warrior, the man who had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and who had brought down Svein of the White Horse, and now I was a slave.

PART TWO

THE RED SHIP

FIVE

The shipmaster, my master, was called Sverri Ravnson and had been one of the four men who greeted me with blows. He was a head shorter than me, ten years older, and twice as wide. He had a face flat as an oar-blade, a nose that had been broken to a pulp, a black beard shot through with wiry gray strands, three teeth, and no neck. He was one of the strongest man I ever knew. He did not speak much.

He was a trader and his ship was called Trader. She was a tough craft, well built and strongly rigged, with benches for sixteen oarsmen, though when I joined Sverri’s crew he only had eleven rowers so he was glad to have me to balance the numbers. The rowers were all slaves. The five free crew members never touched an oar, but were there to relieve Sverri on the steering oar, to make certain we worked, to ensure we did not escape, and to throw our bodies overboard if we died. Two, like Sverri, were Norsemen, two were Danes and the fifth was a Frisian called Hakka and it was Hakka who riveted the slave manacles onto my ankles. They first stripped me of my fine clothes, leaving only my shirt. They tossed me a pair of louse-ridden breeches. Hakka, having chained my ankles, tore the shirt open at the left shoulder and carved a big S in the flesh of my upper arm with a short knife. The blood poured down to my elbow where it was diluted by the first few specks of rain gusting from the west. “I should burn your skin,” Hakka said, “but a ship’s no place for a fire.” He scooped filth from the bilge and rubbed it into the newly opened cut. It turned foul, that wound, and wept pus and gave me a fever, but when it healed I was left with Sverri’s mark on my arm. I have it to this day.

The slave mark almost had no time to heal, for we all came near death that first night. The wind suddenly blew hard, turning the river into a welter of small, hurrying whitecaps, and Trader jerked at her anchor line, and the wind rose and the rain was being driven horizontally. The ship was bucking and shuddering, the tide was ebbing so that wind and current were trying to drive us ashore, and the anchor, that was probably nothing more than a big stone ring that held the ship by weight alone, began to drag. “Oars!” Sverri shouted and I thought he wanted us to row against the pressure of wind and tide, but instead he slashed through the quivering hide rope that tied us to the anchor and Trader leaped away. “Row, you bastards!” Sverri shouted, “row!”

“Row!” Hakka echoed and slashed at us with his whip. “Row!”

“You want to live?” Sverri bellowed over the wind, “row!”

He took us to sea. If we had stayed in the river we would have been driven ashore, but we would have been safe because the tide was dropping and the next high tide would have floated us off, but Sverri had a hold full of cargo and he feared that if he were stranded he would be pillaged by the sullen folk who lived in Gyruum’s hovels. He reckoned it was better to risk death at sea than to be murdered ashore, and so he took us into a gray chaos of wind, darkness, and water. He wanted to turn north at the river mouth and take shelter by the coast and that was not such a bad idea, for we might have lain in the lee of the land and ridden out the storm, but he had not reckoned with the force of the tide and, row as we might, and despite the lashes put onto our shoulders, we could not haul the boat back. Instead we were swept to sea and within moments we had to stop rowing, plug the oar-holes and start bailing the boat. All night we scooped water from the bilge and chucked it overboard and I remember the weariness of it, the bone-aching tiredness, and the fear of those vast unseen seas as they lifted us and roared beneath us. Sometimes we turned broadside onto the waves and I thought we must capsize and I remember clinging to a bench as the oars clattered across the hull and water churned about my thighs, but somehow Trader staggered upward and we hurled water over the side, and why she did not sink I will never know.

Dawn found us half waterlogged in an angry, but no longer vicious sea. No land was in sight. My ankles were bloody for the manacles had bitten into the skin during the night, but I was still bailing. No one else moved. The other slaves, I had not even learned their names yet, were slumped on the benches and the crew was huddled under the steering platform where Sverri was clinging to the steering oar and I felt his dark eyes watching me as I scooped up buckets of water and poured them back to the ocean. I wanted to stop. I was bleeding, bruised, and exhausted, but I would not show weakness. I hurled bucket after bucket, and my arms were aching and my belly was sour and my eyes stung from the salt and I was miserable, but I would not stop. There was vomit slopping in the bilge, but it was not mine.

Sverri stopped me in the end. He came down the boat and struck me across the shoulders with a short whip and I collapsed onto a bench, and a moment later two of his men brought us stale bread soaked in seawater and a skin of sour ale. No one spoke. The wind slapped the leather halliards against the short mast and the waves hissed down the hull and the wind was bitter and rain pitted the sea. I clutched the hammer amulet. They had left me that, for it was a poor thing of carved oxbone and had no value. I prayed to all the gods. I prayed to Njord to let me live in his angry sea, and I prayed to the other gods for revenge. I thought Sverri and his men must sleep and when they slept I would kill them, but I fell asleep before they did and we all slept as the wind lost its fury, and some time later we slaves were kicked awake and we hauled the sail up the mast and ran before the rain toward the gray-edged east.

Four of the rowers were Saxons, three were Norsemen, three were Danes and the last man was Irish. He was on the bench across from me and I did not know he was Irish at first for he rarely spoke. He was wiry, dark-skinned, black-haired and, though only a year or so older than me, he bore the battle scars of an old warrior. I noted how Sverri’s men watched him, fearing he was trouble and when, later that day, the wind went southerly and we were ordered to row, the Irishman pulled his oar with an angry expression. That was when I asked him his name and Hakka came storming down the boat and struck me across the face with a leather knout. Blood ran from my nostrils. Hakka laughed, then became angry because I showed no sign of pain and so hit me again. “You do not speak,” he told me, “you are nothing. What are you?” I did not answer, so he hit me again, harder. “What are you?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I grunted.

“You spoke!” he snarled, and hit me again. “You mustn’t speak!” he screamed into my face and slashed me around the scalp with his knout. He laughed, having tricked me into breaking the rules, and went back to the prow. So we rowed in silence, and we slept through the dark, though before we slept they chained our manacles together. They always did that and one man always had an arrow on a bow in case any of us tried to fight as the man threading the chain bent in front of us.

Sverri knew how to run a slave ship. In those first days I looked for a chance to fight and had none. The manacles never came off. When we made port we were ordered into the space beneath the steering platform and it would be closed up by planks that were nailed into place. We could talk there and that is how I learned something of the other slaves. The four Saxons had all been sold into slavery by Kjartan. They had been farmers and they cursed the Christian god for their predicament. The Norsemen and Danes were thieves, condemned to slavery by their own people, and all of them were sullen brutes. I learned little of Finan, the Irishman, for he was tight-lipped, silent, and watchful. He was the smallest of us, but strong, with a sharp face behind his black beard. Like the Saxons he was a Christian, or at least he had the splintered remnants of a wooden cross hanging on a leather thong, and sometimes he would kiss the wood and hold it to his lips as he silently prayed. He might not have spoken much, but he listened intently as the other slaves spoke of women, food, and the lives they had left behind, and I daresay they lied about all three. I kept quiet, just as Finan kept quiet, though sometimes, if the others were sleeping, he would sing a sad song in his own language.

We would be let out of the dark prison to load cargo that went into the deep hold in the center of the ship just aft of the mast. The crew sometimes got drunk in port, but two of them were always sober and those two guarded us. Sometimes, if we anchored offshore, Sverri would let us stay on deck, but he chained our manacles together so none of us could attempt an escape.

My first voyage on Trader was from the storm-racked coast of Northumbria to Frisia where we threaded a strange seascape of low islands, sandbanks, running tides, and glistening mudflats. We called at some miserable harbor where four other ships were loading cargoes and all four ships were crewed by slaves. We filled Trader’s hold with eelskins, smoked fish, and otter pelts.

From Frisia we ran south to a port in Frankia. I learned it was Frankia because Sverri went ashore and came back in a black mood. “If a Frank is your friend,” he snarled to his crew, “you can be sure he’s not your neighbor.” He saw me looking at him and lashed out with his hand, cutting my forehead with a silver and amber ring he wore. “Bastard Franks,” he said, “bastard Franks! Tight-moneyed misbegotten bastard Franks.” That evening he cast the runesticks on the steering platform. Like all sailors, Sverri was a superstitious man and he kept a sheaf of black runesticks in a leather bag and, locked away beneath the platform, I heard the thin sticks clatter on the deck above. He must have peered at the pattern the fallen sticks made and found some hope in their array, for he decided we would stay with the tight-moneyed misbegotten bastard Franks, and at the end of three days he had bargained successfully for we loaded a cargo of sword-blades, spear-heads, scythes, mail coats, yew logs, and fleeces. We took that north, far north, into the lands of the Danes and the Svear where he sold the cargo. Frankish blades were much prized, while the yew logs would be cut into plow blades, and with the money he earned Sverri filled the boat with iron-ore that we carried back south again.

Sverri was good at managing slaves and very good at making money. The coins fairly flowed into the ship, all of them stored in a vast wooden box kept in the cargo hold. “You’d like to get your hands on that, wouldn’t you?” he sneered at us one day as we sailed up some nameless coast. “You sea-turds!” The thought of us robbing him had made him voluble. “You think you can cheat me? I’ll kill you first. I’ll drown you. I’ll push seal shit down your throats till you choke.” We said nothing as he raved.

Winter was coming by then. I did not know where we were, except we were in the north and somewhere in the sea that lies about Denmark. After delivering our last cargo we rowed the unladen ship beside a desolate sandy shore until Sverri finally steered us up a tidal creek edged with reeds and there he ran Trader ashore on a muddy bank. It was high tide and the ship was stranded at the beginning of the ebb. There was no village at the creek, just a long low house thatched with moss-covered reeds. Smoke drifted from the roof hole. Gulls called. A woman emerged from the house and, as soon as Sverri jumped down from the ship, she ran to him with cries of joy and he took her in his arms and swept her about in a circle. Then three children came running and he gave each a handful of silver and tickled them and threw them in the air and hugged them.

This was evidently where Sverri planned to winter Trader and he made us empty her of her stone ballast, strip her sail, mast, and rigging, and then haul her on log rollers so she stood clear of the highest tides. She was a heavy boat and Sverri called on a neighbor from across the marsh to help haul her with a pair of oxen. His eldest child, a son aged about ten, delighted in pricking us with the ox goad. There was a slave hut behind the house. It was made of heavy logs, even the roof was of logs, and we slept there in our manacles. By day we worked, cleaning Trader’s hull, scraping away the filth and weeds and barnacles. We cleaned the muck from her bilge, spread the sail to be washed by rain, and watched hungrily as Sverri’s woman repaired the cloth with a bone needle and catgut. She was a stocky woman with short legs, heavy thighs, and a round face pockmarked by some disease. Her hands and arms were red and raw. She was anything but beautiful, but we were starved of women and gazed at her. That amused Sverri. He hauled down her dress once to show us a plump white breast and then laughed at our wide-eyed stares. I dreamed of Gisela. I tried to summon her face to my dreams, but it would not come, and dreaming of her was no consolation.

Sverri’s men fed us gruel and eel soup and rough bread and fish stew, and when the snow came they threw us mud-clotted fleeces and we huddled in the slave hut and listened to the wind and watched the snow through the chinks between the logs. It was cold, so cold, and one of the Saxons died. He had been feverish and after five days he just died and two of Sverri’s men carried his body to the creek and threw him beyond the ice so that his body floated away on the next tide. There were woods not far away and every few days we would be taken to the trees, given axes and told to make firewood. The manacles were deliberately made too short so that a man could not take a full stride, and when we had axes they guarded us with bows and with spears, and I knew I would die before I could reach one of the guards with the ax, but I was tempted to try. One of the Danes tried before I did, turning and screaming, running clumsily, and an arrow took him in the belly and he doubled over and Sverri’s men killed him slowly. He screamed for every long moment. His blood stained the snow for yards around and he died so very slowly as a lesson to the rest of us, and so I just chopped at trees, trimmed the trunks, split the trunks with a maul and wedges, chopped again and went back to the slave hut.

“If the little bastard children would just come close,” Finan said next day, “I’d strangle the filthy wee creatures, so I would.”

I was astonished for it was the longest statement I had ever heard him make. “Better to take them hostage,” I suggested.

“But they know better than to come close,” he said, ignoring my suggestion. He spoke Danish in a strange accent. “You were a warrior,” he said.

“I am a warrior,” I said. The two of us were sitting outside the hut on a patch of grass where the snow had melted and we were gutting herrings with blunt knives. The gulls screamed about us. One of Sverri’s men watched us from outside the long-house. He had a bow across his knees and a sword at his side. I wondered how Finan had guessed I was a warrior, for I had never talked of my life. Nor had I revealed my true name, preferring them to think that I was called Osbert. Osbert had once been my real name, the name I was given at birth, but I had been renamed Uhtred when my elder brother died because my father insisted his eldest son must be called Uhtred. But I did not use the name Uhtred on board Trader. Uhtred was a proud name, a warrior’s name, and I would keep it a secret until I had escaped slavery. “How did you know I’m a warrior?” I asked Finan.

“Because you never stop watching the bastards,” he said. “You never stop thinking about how to kill them.”

“You’re the same,” I said.

“Finan the Agile, they called me,” he said, “because I would dance around enemies. I would dance and kill. Dance and kill.” He slit another fish’s belly and flicked the offal into the snow where two gulls fought for it. “There was a time,” he went on angrily, “when I owned five spears, six horses, two swords, a coat of bright mail, a shield, and a helmet that shone like fire. I had a woman with hair that fell to her waist and with a smile that could dim the noonday sun. Now I gut herrings.” He slashed with the knife. “And one day I shall come back here and I shall kill Sverri, hump his woman, strangle his bastard children, and steal his money.” He gave a harsh chuckle. “He keeps it all here. All that money. Buried it is.”

“You know that for sure?”

“What else does he do with it? He can’t eat it because he doesn’t shit silver, does he? No, it’s here.”

“Wherever here is,” I said.

“Jutland,” he said. “The woman’s a Dane. We come here every winter.”

“How many winters?”

“This is my third,” Finan said.

“How did he capture you?”

He flipped another cleaned fish into the rush basket. “There was a fight. Us against the Norsemen and the bastards beat us. I was taken prisoner and the bastards sold me to Sverri. And you?”

“Betrayed by my lord.”

“So that’s another bastard to kill, eh? My lord betrayed me too.”

“How?”

“He wouldn’t ransom me. He wanted my woman, see? So he let me go, in return for which favor I pray he may die and that his wives get lockjaw and that his cattle get the staggers and that his children rot in their own shit and that his crops wither and his hounds choke.” He shuddered as if his anger was too much to contain.

Sleet came instead of snow and the ice slowly melted in the creek. We made new oars from seasoned spruce cut the previous winter, and by the time the oars had been shaped the ice was gone. Gray fogs cloaked the land and the first flowers showed at the edges of the reeds. Herons stalked the shallows as the sun melted the morning frosts. Spring was coming and so we caulked Trader with cattle hair, tar, and moss. We cleaned her and launched her, returned the ballast to her bilge, rigged the mast and bent the cleaned and mended sail onto her yard. Sverri embraced his woman, kissed his children, and waded out to us. Two of his crew hauled him aboard and we gripped the oars.

“Row, you bastards!” he shouted, “row!”

We rowed.

Anger can keep you alive, but only just. There were times when I was sick, when I felt too weak to pull the oar, but pull it I did for if I faltered then I would be tossed overboard. I pulled as I vomited, pulled as I sweated, pulled as I shivered, and pulled as I hurt in every muscle. I pulled through rain and sun and wind and sleet. I remember having a fever and thinking I was going to die. I even wanted to die, but Finan cursed me under his breath. “You’re a feeble Saxon,” he goaded me, “you’re weak. You’re pathetic, you Saxon scum.” I grunted some response, and he snarled at me again, louder this time so that Hakka heard from the bows. “They want you to die, you bastard,” Finan said, “so prove them wrong. Pull, you feeble Saxon bastard, pull.” Hakka hit him for speaking. Another time I did the same for Finan. I remember cradling him in my arms and putting gruel into his mouth with my fingers. “Live, you bastard,” I told him, “don’t let these earslings beat us. Live!” He lived.

We went north that next summer, pulling into a river that twisted through a landscape of moss and birch, a place so far north that rills of snow still showed in shadowed places. We bought reindeer hides from a village among the birches and carried them back to the sea, and exchanged them for walrus tusks and whalebone, which in turn we traded for amber and eider feathers. We carried malt and sealskin, furs and salt meat, iron-ore and fleeces. In one rock-circled cove we spent two days loading slates that would be turned into whetstones, and Sverri traded the slates for combs made from deer antlers and for big coils of sealskin rope and a dozen heavy ingots of bronze, and we took all those back to Jutland, going into Haithabu which was a big trading port, so big that there was a slave compound and we were taken there and released inside where we were guarded by spearmen and high walls.

Finan found some fellow Irishmen in the compound and I discovered a Saxon who had been captured by a Dane from the coast of East Anglia. King Guthrum, the Saxon said, had returned to East Anglia where he called himself Æthelstan and was building churches. Alfred, so far as he knew, was still alive. The East Anglian Danes had not tried to attack Wessex, but even so he had heard that Alfred was making forts about his frontier. He knew nothing about Alfred’s Danish hostages, so could not tell me whether Ragnar had been released, nor had the man heard any news of Guthred or Northumbria, so I stood in the compound’s center and shouted a question. “Is anyone here from Northumbria?” Men stared at me dully. “Northumbria?” I shouted again, and this time a woman called from the far side of the palisade which divided the men’s compound from the women’s. Men were crowded at the palisade, peering through its chinks at the women, but I pushed two aside. “You’re from Northumbria?” I asked the woman who had called to me.

“From Onhripum,” she told me. She was a Saxon, fifteen years old and a tanner’s daughter. Her father had owed money to Earl Ivarr and, to settle the debt, Ivarr had taken the girl and sold her to Kjartan.

At first I thought I must have misheard. “To Kjartan?” I asked her.

“To Kjartan,” she said dully, “who raped me, then sold me to these bastards.”

“Kjartan’s alive?” I asked, astonished.

“He lives,” she said.

“But he was being besieged,” I protested.

“Not while I was there,” she said.

“And Sven? His son?”

“He raped me too,” she said.

Later, much later, I pieced the whole tale together. Guthred and Ivarr, joined by my uncle Ælfric, had tried to starve Kjartan into submission, but the winter was hard, their armies had been struck by disease, and Kjartan had offered to pay tribute to all three and they had accepted his silver. Guthred had also extracted a promise that Kjartan would stop attacking churchmen, and for a time that promise was kept, but the church was too wealthy and Kjartan too greedy, and within a year the promise had been broken and some monks were killed or enslaved. The annual tribute of silver that Kjartan was supposed to give to Guthred, Ælfric, and Ivarr had been paid once, and never paid again. So nothing had changed. Kjartan had been humbled for a few months, then he had judged the strength of his enemies and found it feeble. The tanner’s daughter from Onhripum knew nothing of Gisela, had never even heard of her, and I thought perhaps she had died and that night I knew despair. I wept. I remembered Hild and I wondered what had happened to her, and I feared for her, and I remembered that one night with Gisela when I had kissed her beneath the beech trees and I thought of all my dreams that were now hopeless and so I wept.

I had married a wife in Wessex and I knew nothing of her and, if the truth were known, I cared nothing. I had lost my baby son to death. I had lost Iseult to death. I had lost Hild, I had lost all chance of Gisela, and that night I felt a swamping pity for myself and I sat in the hut and tears rolled down my cheeks and Finan saw me and he began weeping too and I knew he had been reminded of home. I tried to rekindle my anger because it is only anger that will keep you alive, but the anger would not come. I just wept instead. I could not stop. It was the darkness of despair, of the knowledge that my fate was to pull an oar until I was broken and then I would go overboard. I wept.

“You and me,” Finan said, and paused. It was dark. It was a cold night, though it was summer.

“You and me?” I asked, my eyes closed in an attempt to stop the tears.

“Swords in hand, my friend,” he said, “you and me. It will happen.” He meant we would be free and we would have our revenge.

“Dreams,” I said.

“No!” Finan said angrily. He crawled to my side and took my hand in both his. “Don’t give up,” he snarled at me. “We’re warriors, you and I, we’re warriors!” I had been a warrior, I thought. There had been a time when I shone in mail and helmet, but now I was lice-ridden, filthy, weak, and tearful. “Here,” Finan said, and he pushed something into my hand. It was one of the antler-combs we had carried as cargo and somehow he had managed to steal it and secrete it in his rags. “Never give up,” he told me, and I used the comb to disentangle my hair that now grew almost to my waist. I combed it out, tearing knots free, pulling lice from the teeth, and next morning Finan plaited my straight hair and I did the same for him. “It’s how warriors dress their hair in my tribe,” he explained, “and you and I are warriors. We’re not slaves, we’re warriors!” We were thin, dirty, and ragged, but the despair had passed like a squall at sea and I let the anger give me resolve.

Next day we loaded Trader with ingots of copper, bronze, and iron. We rolled barrels of ale into her stern and filled the remaining cargo space with salt meat, rings of hard bread, and tubs of salted cod. Sverri laughed at our plaited hair. “You two think you’ll find women, do you?” he mocked us. “Or are you pretending to be women?” Neither of us answered and Sverri just grinned. He was in a good mood, one of unusual excitement. He liked seafaring and from the amount of provisions we stowed I guessed he planned a long voyage and so it proved. He cast his runesticks time after time and they must have told him he would prosper for he bought three new slaves, all of them Frisians. He wanted to be well-manned for the voyage ahead, a voyage that began badly, for, as we left Haithabu, we were pursued by another ship. A pirate, Hakka announced sourly, and we ran north under sail and oars and the other ship slowly overhauled us for she was longer, leaner, and faster, and it was only the coming of night that let us escape, but it was a nervous night. We stowed the oars and lowered the sail so that Trader would make no noise, and in the dark I heard the oar-splashes of our pursuer and Sverri and his men were crouching near us, swords in hand, ready to kill us if we made a noise. I was tempted, and Finan wanted to thump on the ship’s side to bring the pursuers to us, but Sverri would have slaughtered us instantly and so we kept silent and the strange ship passed us in the darkness and when dawn came she had vanished.

Such threats were rare. Wolf does not eat wolf, and the falcon does not stoop on another falcon, and so the Northmen rarely preyed on each other, though some men, desperate, would risk attacking a fellow Dane or Norseman. Such pirates were reviled as outcasts, as nothings, but they were feared. Usually they were hunted down and the crews were killed or enslaved, but still some men risked being outcasts, knowing that if they could just capture one rich ship like Trader they could make a fortune that would give them status, power, and acceptance. But we escaped that night, and next day we sailed farther north and still farther north, and we did not put into land that night, nor for many nights. Then one morning I saw a black coast of terrible cliffs and the sea was shattering white against those grim rocks, and I thought we had come to our journey’s end, but we did not seek land. Instead we sailed on, going west now, and then briefly south to put into the bay of an island where we anchored.

At first Finan thought it was Ireland, but the folk who came to Trader in a small skin boat did not speak his language. There are islands all about the northern coast of Britain and this, I think was one of them. Savages live on those islands and Sverri did not go ashore, but traded a few paltry coins with the savages and received in return some gulls’ eggs, dried fish and goat-meat. And next morning we rowed into a brisk wind and we rowed all day and I knew we were heading into the western wastes of the wilderness sea. Ragnar the Elder had warned me of those seas, saying that there were lands beyond them, but that most men who sought the far lands never came back. Those western lands, he told me, were inhabited by the souls of dead sailors. They were gray places, fog-shrouded and storm-battered, but that was where we were going and Sverri stood at the steering oar with a look of happiness on his flat face and I remembered that same happiness. I remembered the joy of a good ship and the pulse of its life in the loom of the steering oar.

For two weeks we voyaged. This was the whale path, and the monsters of the sea rolled to look at us or spouted water, and the air became colder and the sky was forever clouded, and I knew Sverri’s crewmen were nervous. They thought we were lost, and I thought the same, and I believed my life would end at the sea’s edge where great whirlpools drag ships down to their deaths. Seabirds circled us, their cries forlorn in the white cold, and the great whales plunged beneath us, and we rowed until our backs were sore. The seas were gray and mountainous, unending and cold, scummed with white foam, and we had only one day of friendly wind when we could travel under sail with the big gray seas hissing along our hull.

And so we came to Horn in the land of fire that some men call Thule. Mountains smoked and we heard tales of magical pools of hot water, though I saw none. And it was not just a land of fire, but a haunt of ice. There were mountains of ice, rivers of ice, and shelves of ice in the sky. There were codfish longer than a man is tall and we ate well there and Sverri was happy. Men feared to make the voyage we had just made, and he had achieved it, and in Thule his cargo was worth three times what he would have received in Denmark or Frankia, though of course he had to yield some of the precious cargo as tribute to the local lord. But he sold the rest of the ingots and took on board whalebones and walrus tusks and walrus hides and sealskin, and he knew he would make much money if he could take those things home. He was in such a good mood that he even allowed us ashore and we drank sour birch wine in a long-house that stank of whale flesh. We were all shackled, not just with our ordinary manacles, but with neck chains too, and Sverri had hired local men to guard us. Three of those sentinels were armed with the long heavy spears that the men of Thule use to kill whales while the other four had flensing knives. Sverri was safe with them watching us, and he knew it, and for the only time in all the months I was with him he deigned to speak with us. He boasted of the voyage we had made and even praised our skill at the oars. “But you two hate me,” he said, looking at Finan and then at me.

I said nothing.

“The birch wine is good,” Finan said, “thank you for it.”

“The birch wine is walrus piss,” Sverri said, then belched. He was drunk. “You hate me,” he said, amused by our hatred. “I watch you two and you hate me. The others now, they’re whipped, but you two would kill me before I could sneeze. I should kill you both, shouldn’t I? I should sacrifice you to the sea.” Neither of us spoke. A birch log cracked in the fire and spewed sparks. “But you row well,” Sverri said. “I did free a slave once,” he went on, “I released him because I liked him. I trusted him. I even let him steer Trader, but he tried to kill me. You know what I did with him? I nailed his filthy corpse to the prow and let him rot there. And I learned my lesson. You’re there to row. Nothing else. You row and you work and you die.” He fell asleep shortly after, and so did we, and next morning we were back on board Trader and, under a spitting rain, left that strange land of ice and flame.

It took much less time to go back east because we ran before a friendly wind and so wintered in Jutland again. We shivered in the slave hut and listened to Sverri grunting in his woman’s bed at night. The snow came, ice locked the creek, and it became the year 880 and I had lived twenty-three years and I knew my future was to die in shackles because Sverri was watchful, clever, and ruthless.

And then the red ship came.

She was not truly red. Most ships are built of oak that darkens as the ship lives, but this ship had been made from pine and when the morning or evening light lanced low across the sea’s edge she seemed to be the color of darkening blood.

She looked a livid red when we first saw her. That was on the evening of the day we had launched and the red ship was long and low and lean. She coursed from the eastern horizon, coming toward us at an angle, and her sail was a dirty gray, criss-crossed by the ropes that strengthen the cloth, and Sverri saw the beast-head at her prow and decided she was a pirate and so we struck inshore to waters he knew well. They were shallow waters and the red ship hesitated to follow. We rowed through narrow creeks, scattering wildfowl, and the red ship stayed within sight, but out beyond the dunes, and then the night fell and we reversed our course and let the ebb-tide take us out to sea and Sverri’s men whipped us to make us row hard to escape the coast. The dawn came cold and misty, but as the mist lifted we saw that the red ship was gone.

We were going to Haithabu to find the first cargo of the season, but as we approached the port Sverri saw the red ship again and she turned toward us and Sverri cursed her. We were upwind of her, which made escaping easy, but even so she tried to catch us. She used her oars and, because she had at least twenty benches, she was much faster than Trader, but she could not close the wind’s gap and by the following morning we were again alone on an empty sea. Sverri cursed her all the same. He cast his runesticks and they persuaded him to abandon the idea of Haithabu and so we crossed to the land of the Svear where we loaded beaver hides and dung-encrusted fleeces.

We exchanged that cargo for fine candles of rolled wax. We shipped iron-ore again and so the spring passed and the summer came and we did not see the red ship. We had forgotten her. Sverri reckoned it was safe to visit Haithabu so we took a cargo of reindeer skins to the port, and there he learned that the red ship had not forgotten him. He came back aboard in a hurry, not bothering to load a cargo, and I heard him talking to his crewmen. The red ship, he said, was prowling the coasts in search of Trader. She was a Dane, he thought, and she was crewed by warriors.

“Who?” Hakka asked.

“No one knows.”

“Why?”

“How would I know?” Sverri growled, but he was worried enough to throw his runesticks on the deck and they instructed him to leave Haithabu at once. Sverri had made an enemy and he did not know who, and so he took Trader to a place near his winter home and there he carried gifts ashore. Sverri had a lord. Almost all men have a lord who offers protection, and this lord was called Hyring and he owned much land, and Sverri would pay him silver each winter and in return Hyring would offer protection to Sverri and his family. But there was little Hyring could do to protect Sverri on the sea, though he must have promised to discover who sailed the red ship and to learn why that man wanted Sverri. In the meantime Sverri decided to go far away and so we went into the North Sea and down the coast and made some money with salted herrings. We crossed to Britain for the first time since I had been a slave. We landed in an East Anglian river, and I never did learn what river it was, and we loaded thick fleeces that we took back to Frankia and there bought a cargo of iron ingots. That was a rich cargo because Frankish iron is the best in the world, and we also purchased a hundred of their prized sword-blades. Sverri, as ever, cursed the Franks for their hard-headedness, but in truth Sverri’s head was as hard as any Frank’s and, though he paid well for the iron and sword-blades, he knew that they would bring him a great profit in the northern lands.

So we headed north and the summer was ending and the geese were flying south above us in great skeins and, two days after we had loaded the cargo, we saw the red ship waiting for us off the Frisian coast. It had been weeks since we had seen her and Sverri must have hoped that Hyring had ended her threat, but she was lying just offshore and this time the red ship had the wind’s advantage and so we turned inshore and Sverri’s men whipped us desperately. I grunted with every stroke, making it look as though I hauled the oar-loom with all my strength, but in truth I was trying to lessen the force of the blade in the water so that the red ship could catch us. I could see her clearly. I could see her oar-wings rising and falling and see the white bone of water snapping at her bows. She was much longer than Trader, and much faster, but she also drew more water which is why Sverri had taken us inshore to the coast of Frisia which all shipmasters fear.

It is not rockbound like so many northern coasts. There are no cliffs against which a good ship can be broken in pieces. Instead it is a tangle of reeds, islands, creeks, and mudflats. For mile after mile there is nothing but dangerous shallows. Passages are marked through those shallows with withies rammed into the mud, and those frail signals offer a safe way through the tangle, but the Frisians are pirates too. They like to mark false channels that lead only to a mudbank where a falling tide can strand a ship, and then the folk, who live in mud huts on their mud islands, will swarm like water-rats to kill and pillage.

But Sverri had traded here and, like all good shipmasters, he carried memories of good and bad water. The red ship was catching us, but Sverri did not panic. I would watch him as I rowed, and I could see his eyes darting left and right to decide which passage to take, then he would make a swift push on the steering oar and we would turn into his chosen channel. He sought the shallowest places, the most twisted creeks, and the gods were with him for, though our oars sometimes struck a mudbank, Trader never grounded. The red ship, being larger, and presumably because her master did not know the coast as Sverri did, was traveling much more cautiously and we were leaving her behind.

She began to overhaul us again when we had to cross a wide stretch of open water, but Sverri found another channel at the far side, and here, for the first time, he slowed our oar-beats. He put Hakka in the bows and Hakka kept throwing a lead-weighted line into the water and calling the depth. We were crawling into a maze of mud and water, working our slow way north and east, and I looked across to the east and saw that Sverri had at last made a mistake. A line of withies marked the channel we threaded, but beyond them and beyond a low muddy island thick with birds, larger withies marked a deep water channel that cut inshore of our course and would allow the red ship to head us off, and the red ship saw the opportunity and took that larger channel. Her oar-blades beat at the water, she ran at full speed, she was overtaking us fast, and then she ran aground in a tangle of clashing oars.

Sverri laughed. He had known the larger withies marked a false channel and the red ship had fallen into the trap. I could see her clearly now, a ship laden with armed men, men in mail, sword-Danes and spear-warriors, but she was stranded.

“Your mothers are goats!” Sverri shouted across the mud, though I doubt his voice carried to the grounded ship, “you are turds! Learn to master a ship, you useless bastards!”

We took another channel, leaving the red ship behind, and Hakka was still in Trader’s bows where he constantly threw the line weighted with its lump of lead. He would shout back how deep the water was. This channel was unmarked, and we had to go perilously slowly for Sverri dared not run aground. Behind us, far behind now, I could see the crew of the red ship laboring to free her. The warriors had discarded their mail and were in the water, heaving at the long hull, and as night fell I saw her slip free and resume her pursuit, but we were far ahead now and the darkness cloaked us.

We spent that night in a reed-fringed bay. Sverri would not go ashore. There were folk on the nearby island, and their fires sparked in the night. We could see no other lights, which surely meant that the island was the only settlement for miles, and I knew Sverri was worried because the fires would attract the red ship and so he kicked us awake in the very first glimmerings of the dawn and we pulled the anchor and Sverri took us north into a passage marked by withies. The passage seemed to wriggle about the island’s coast to the open sea where the waves broke white, and it offered a way out of the tangled shore. Hakka again called the depths as we eased our way past reeds and mudbanks. The creek was shallow, so shallow that our oar-blades constantly struck bottom to kick up swirls of mud, yet pace by pace we followed the frail channel marks, and then Hakka shouted that the red ship was behind us.

She was a long way behind us. As Sverri had feared she had been attracted by the settlement’s fires, but she had ended up south of the island, and between us and her was the mystery of mudbanks and creeks. She could not go west into the open sea, for the waves broke continuously on a long half-sunken beach there, so she could either pursue us or else try to loop far around us to the east and discover another way to the ocean.

She decided to follow us and we watched as she groped her way along the island’s southern coast, looking for a channel into the harbor where we had anchored. We kept creeping north, but then, suddenly, there was a soft grating sound beneath our keel and Trader gave a gentle shudder and went ominously still. “Back oars!” Sverri bellowed.

We backed oars, but she had grounded. The red ship was lost in the half-light and in the tenuous mist that drifted across the islands. The tide was low. It was the slack water between ebb and flood and Sverri stared hard at the creek, praying that he could see the tide flowing inward to float us off, but the water lay still and cold.

“Overboard!” he shouted. “Push her!”

We tried. Or the others tried, while Finan and I merely pretended to push, but Trader was stuck hard. She had gone aground so softly, so quietly, yet she would not move and Sverri, still standing on the steering platform, could see the islanders coming toward us across the reed-beds and, more worrying, he could see the red ship crossing the wide bay where we had anchored. He could see death coming.

“Empty her,” he shouted.

That was a hard decision for Sverri to take, but it was better than death, and so we threw all the ingots overboard. Finan and I could no longer shirk, for Sverri could see how much work we were doing, and he lashed at us with a stick and so we destroyed the profits of a year’s trading. Even the sword-blades went, and all the time the red ship crept closer, coming up the channel, and she was only a quarter-mile behind us when the last ingots splashed over the side and Trader gave a slight lurch. The tide was flooding now, swirling past and around the jettisoned ingots.

“Row!” Sverri shouted. The islanders were watching us. They had not dared approach for fear of the armed men on the red ship, and now they watched as we slid away northward, and we fought the incoming tide and our oars pulled on mud as often as they bit water, but Sverri screamed at us to row harder. He would risk a further grounding to get clear, and the gods were with him, for we shot out of the passage’s mouth and Trader reared to the incoming waves and suddenly we were at sea again with the water breaking white on our bows and Sverri hoisted the sail and we ran northward and the red ship seemed to have grounded where we had been stranded. She had run onto the pile of ingots and, because her hull was deeper than Trader’s, it took her a long time to escape and by the time she was free of the channel we were already hidden by rain squalls that crashed from the west and pounded the ship as they passed.

Sverri kissed his hammer amulet. He had lost a fortune, but he was a wealthy man and could afford it. Yet he had to stay wealthy and he knew that the red ship was pursuing him and that it would stay on the coast until it found us and so, as dark fell, he dropped the sail and ordered us to the oars.

We went northward. The red ship was still behind us, but far behind, and the rain squalls hid us from time to time and when a bigger squall came Sverri dropped the sail, turned the ship westward into the wind and his men whipped us to work. Two of his men even took oars themselves so that we could escape across the darkening horizon before the red ship saw that we had changed course. It was brutally hard work. We were thumping into the wind and seas, and every stroke burned the muscles until I thought I would drop from exhaustion. Deep night ended the work. Sverri could no longer see the big waves hissing from the west and so he let us ship the oars and plug the oar-holes and we lay like dead men as the ship heaved and wallowed in the dark and churning sea.

Dawn found us alone. Wind and rain whipped from the south, and that meant we did not have to row, but instead could hoist the sail and let the wind carry us across the gray waters. I looked aft, searching for the red ship and she was not to be seen. There were only the waves and the clouds and the squalls hurtling across our wake and the wild birds flying like white scraps in the bitter wind, and Trader bent to that wind so that the water rushed past us and Sverri leaned on the steering oar and sang to celebrate his escape from the mysterious enemy. I could have wept again. I did not know what the red ship was, or who sailed her, but I knew she was Sverri’s enemy and that any enemy of Sverri was my friend. But she was gone. We had escaped her.

And so we came back to Britain. Sverri had not intended to go there, and he had no cargo to sell though he did have coins hidden aboard to buy goods, but the coins would also have to be expended in survival. He had evaded the red ship, but he knew that if he went home he would find her lurking off Jutland and I do not doubt he was thinking of some other place he might spend the winter in safety. That meant discovering a lord who would shelter him while Trader was hauled ashore, cleaned, repaired, and re-caulked, and that lord would require silver. We oarsmen heard snatches of conversation and gathered that Sverri reckoned he should pick up one last cargo, take it to Denmark, sell it, then find some port where he could shelter and from where he could travel overland to his home to collect more silver to fund the next year’s trading.

We were off the British coast. I did not recognize where we were. I knew it was not East Anglia for there were bluffs and hills. “Nothing to buy here,” Sverri complained.

“Fleeces?” Hakka suggested.

“What price will they fetch at this time of year?” Sverri demanded angrily. “All we’ll get is whatever they couldn’t sell in the spring. Nothing but rubbish matted with sheep shit. I’d rather carry charcoal.”

We sheltered one night in a river mouth and armed horsemen rode to the shore to stare at us, but they did not use any of the small fishing craft which were hauled on the beach to come out to us, suggesting that if we left them alone then they would leave us alone. Just as dark fell another trading boat came into the river and anchored near us, and its Danish shipmaster used a small craft to row across to us and he and Sverri squatted in the space beneath the steering platform and exchanged news. We heard none of it. We just saw the two men drinking ale and talking. The stranger left before darkness hid his ship and Sverri seemed pleased with the conversation, for in the morning he shouted his thanks to the other boat and ordered us to haul the anchor and take the oars. It was a windless day, the sea was calm, and we rowed northward beside the shore. I stared inland and saw smoke rising from settlements and thought that freedom lay there.

I dreamed of freedom, but now I did not think it would ever come. I thought I would die at that oar as so many others had died under Sverri’s lash. Of the eleven oarsmen who had been aboard when I was given to Sverri only four still lived, of whom Finan was one. We now had fourteen oarsmen, for Sverri had replaced the dead and, ever since the red ship had come to haunt his existence, he had paid for more slaves to man his oars. Some shipmasters used free men to row their boats, reckoning they worked more willingly, but such men expected a share in the silver and Sverri was a miserly man.

Late that morning we came to a river’s mouth and I gazed up at the headland on the southern bank and saw a high beacon waiting to be lit to warn the inland folk that raiders came, and I had seen that beacon before. It was like a hundred others, yet I recognized it, and I knew it stood in the ruins of the Roman fort at the place where my slavery had begun. We had come back to the River Tine.

“Slaves!” Sverri announced to us. “That’s what we’re buying. Slaves, just like you bastards. Except they’re not like you, because they’re women and children. Scots. Anyone here speak their bastard language?” None of us answered. Not that we needed to speak the Scottish language, for Sverri had whips that spoke loudly enough.

He disliked carrying slaves as cargo for they needed constant watching and feeding, but the other trader had told him of women and children newly captured in one of the endless border raids between Northumbria and Scotland, and those slaves offered the best prospect of any profit. If any of the women and children were pretty then they would sell high in Jutland’s slave markets, and Sverri needed to make a good trade, and so we rowed into the Tine on a rising tide. We were going to Gyruum, and Sverri waited until the water had almost reached the high-tide mark of sea-wrack and flotsam, and then he beached Trader. He did not often beach her, but he wanted us to scrape her hull before going back to Denmark, and a beached ship made it easier to load human cargo, and so we ran her ashore and I saw that the slave pens had been rebuilt and that the ruined monastery had a thatched roof again. All was as it was.

Sverri made us wear slave collars that were chained together so we could not escape and then, while he crossed the salt-marsh and climbed to the monastery, we scraped the exposed hull with stones. Finan sang in his native Irish as he worked, but sometimes he would throw me a crooked grin. “Tear the caulking out, Osbert,” he suggested.

“So we sink?”

“Aye, but Sverri sinks with us.”

“Let him live so we can kill him,” I said.

“And we will kill him,” Finan said.

“Never give up hope, eh?”

“I dreamed it,” Finan said. “I’ve dreamed it three times since the red ship came.”

“But the red ship’s gone,” I said.

“We’ll kill him. I promise you. I’ll dance in his guts, I will.”

The tide had been at its height at midday so all afternoon it fell until Trader was stranded high above the fretting waves, and she could not be refloated until long after dark. Sverri was always uneasy when his ship was ashore and I knew he would want to load his cargo that same day and then refloat the ship on the night’s tide. He had an anchor ready so that, in the dark, we could push off from the beach and moor in the river’s center and be ready to leave the river at first light.

He purchased thirty-three slaves. The youngest were five or six years old, the oldest were perhaps seventeen or eighteen, and they were all women and children, not a man among them. We had finished cleaning the hull and were squatting on the beach when they arrived, and we stared at the women with the hungry eyes of men denied partners. The slaves were weeping, so it was hard to tell if any were pretty. They were weeping because they were slaves, and because they had been stolen from their own land, and because they feared the sea, and because they feared us. A dozen armed men rode behind them. I recognized none of them. Sverri walked down the manacled line, examining the children’s teeth and pulling down the women’s dresses to examine their breasts. “The red-haired one will fetch a good price,” one of the armed men called to Sverri.

“So will they all.”

“I humped her last night,” the man said, “so perhaps she’s carrying my baby, eh? You’ll get two slaves for the price of one, you lucky bastard.”

The slaves were already shackled and Sverri had been forced to pay for those manacles and chains, just as he had to buy food and ale to keep the thirty-three Scots alive on their voyage to Jutland. We had to fetch those provisions from the monastery and so Sverri led us back across the salt-marsh, over the stream, and up to the fallen stone cross where a wagon and six mounted men waited. The wagon had barrels of ale, tubs of salt herring and smoked eels, and a sack of apples. Sverri bit into an apple, made a wry face, and spat out the mouthful. “Worm-ridden,” he complained and tossed the remnants to us, and I managed to snatch it out of the air despite everyone else reaching for it. I broke it in half and gave one portion to Finan. “They’ll fight over a wormy apple,” Sverri jeered, then spilled a bag of coins onto the wagon bed. “Kneel, you bastards,” he snarled at us as a seventh horseman rode toward the wagon.

We knelt in obeisance to the newcomer. “We must test the coins,” the newcomer said and I recognized the voice and looked up and saw Sven the One-Eyed.

And he looked at me.

I dropped my gaze and bit into the apple.

“Frankish deniers,” Sverri said proudly, offering some of the silver coins to Sven.

Sven did not take them. He was staring at me. “Who is that?” he demanded.

Sverri looked at me. “Osbert,” he said. He selected some more coins. “These are Alfred’s pennies,” he said, holding them out to Sven.

“Osbert?” Sven said. He still gazed at me. I did not look like Uhtred of Bebbanburg. My face had new scars, my nose was broken, my uncombed hair was a great tangled thatch, my beard was ragged, and my skin was as dark as pickled wood, but still he stared at me. “Come here, Osbert,” he said.

I could not go far, because the neck chain held me close to the other oarsmen, but I stood and shuffled towards him and knelt again because I was a slave and he was a lord.

“Look at me,” he snarled.

I obeyed, staring into his one eye, and I saw he was dressed in fine mail and had a fine cloak and was mounted on a fine horse. I made my right cheek quiver and I dribbled as if I were halfway mad and I grinned as though I were pleased to see him and I bobbed my head compulsively and he must have decided I was just another ruined half-mad slave and he waved me away and took the coins from Sverri. They haggled, but at last enough coins were accepted as good silver, and we oarsmen were ordered to carry the barrels and tubs down to the ship.

Sverri clouted me over the shoulders as we walked. “What were you doing?”

“Doing, master?”

“Shaking like an idiot. Dribbling.”

“I think I’m falling ill, master.”

“Did you know that man?”

“No, lord.”

Sverri was suspicious of me, but he could learn nothing, and he left me alone as we heaved the barrels onto Trader that was still half stranded on the beach. But I did not shake or dribble as we stowed the provisions, and Sverri knew something was amiss and he thought about it further and then hit me again as the answer came to him. “You came from here, didn’t you?”

“Did I, lord?”

He hit me again, harder, and the other slaves watched. They knew a wounded animal when they saw one and only Finan had any sympathy for me, but he was helpless. “You came from here,” Sverri said. “How could I have forgotten that? This is where you were given to me.” He pointed toward Sven who was across the marsh on the ruin-crowned hill. “What’s Sven the One-Eyed to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”

“You lying turd,” he said. He had a merchant’s instinct for profit and so he ordered me released from the other oarsmen though he made sure my ankles were still shackled and that I still wore the neck chain. Sverri took its end, meaning to lead me back to the monastery, but we got no farther than the shingle bank because Sven had also been having second thoughts. My face haunted his bad dreams and, in the twitching idiot visage of Osbert, he had seen his nightmares and now he was galloping toward us, followed by six horsemen.

“Kneel,” Sverri ordered me.

I knelt.

Sven’s horse skidded to a halt on the shingle bank. “Look at me,” he ordered a second time, and I looked up and spittle hung from my mouth into my beard. I twitched, and Sverri struck me hard. “Who is he?” Sven demanded.

“He told me his name was Osbert, lord,” Sverri said.

“He told you?”

“I was given him here, lord, in this place,” Sverri said, “and he told me he was called Osbert.”

Sven smiled then. He dismounted and walked to me, tipping my chin up so he could stare into my face. “You got him here?” he asked Sverri.

“King Guthred gave him to me, lord.”

Sven knew me then and his one-eyed face was contorted with a strange mix of triumph and hatred. He hit me across the skull, hit me so hard that my mind went dark for an instant and I fell to one side. “Uhtred!” he proclaimed triumphantly, “you’re Uhtred!”

“Lord!” Sverri was standing over me, protecting me. Not because he liked me, but because I represented a windfall profit.

“He’s mine,” Sven said, and his long sword whispered out of its fleece-lined scabbard.

“He’s mine to sell, lord, and yours to buy,” Sverri said humbly, but firmly.

“To take him,” Sven said, “I will kill you, Sverri, and all your men. So the price for this man is your life.”

Sverri knew he was beaten then. He bowed, released my neck chain and stepped back, and I seized the neck chain and whipped its loose end at Sven and it whistled close to him, driving him back, and then I ran. The leg shackles hobbled me and I had no choice but to run into the river. I stumbled through the small waves and turned, ready to use the chain as a weapon and I knew I was dead because Sven’s horsemen were coming for me and I backed deeper into the water. It was better to drown, I thought, than to suffer Sven’s tortures.

Then the horsemen stopped. Sven pushed past them and then he too checked and I was up to my chest in the river and the chain was awkward in my hand and I was readying to throw myself backward to black death in the river when Sven himself stepped away. Then he went back another pace, turned, and ran for his horse. There had been fear on his face and I risked turning to see what had frightened him.

And there, coming from the sea, driven by twin oar-banks and by the swiftly flooding tide, was the red ship.

SIX

The red ship was close and was coming fast. Her bows were crowned with a black-toothed dragon’s head and filled with armed men in mail and helmets. She came in a gale of noise; the splash of oar-blades, the shouts of her warriors and the seethe of white water around the great red breast of her high prow. I had to stagger to one side to avoid her, for she did not slow as she neared the beach, but kept coming, and the oars gave one last heave and the bows grated on the shore and the dragon’s head reared up and the great ship’s keel crashed up the beach in a thunder of scattering shingle. The dark hull loomed above me, then an oar-shaft struck me in the back, throwing me under the waves and when I managed to stagger upright I saw the ship had shuddered to a halt and a dozen mail-clad men had jumped from the prow with spears, swords, axes and shields. The first men onto the beach bellowed defiance as the rowers dropped their oars, plucked up weapons, and followed. This was no trading ship, but a Viking come to her kill.

Sven fled. He scrambled into his saddle and spurred across the marsh while his six men, much braver, rode their horses at the invading Vikings, but the beasts were axed down screaming and the unsaddled riders were butchered on the strand, their blood trickling to the small waves where I stood, mouth open, hardly believing what I saw. Sverri was on his knees with his hands spread wide to show he had no weapons.

The red ship’s master, glorious in a helmet crested with eagle wings, took his men to the marsh path and led them toward the monastery buildings. He left a half-dozen warriors on the beach and one of those was a huge man, tall as a tree and broad as a barrel, who carried a great war ax that was stained with blood. He dragged off his helmet and grinned at me. He said something, but I did not hear him. I was just staring in disbelief and he grinned wider.

It was Steapa.

Steapa Snotor. Steapa the Clever, that meant, which was a joke because he was not the brightest of men, but he was a great warrior who had once been my sworn enemy and had since become my friend. Now he grinned at me from the water’s edge and I did not understand why a West Saxon warrior was traveling in a Viking ship, and then I began to cry. I cried because I was free and because Steapa’s broad, scarred, baleful face was the most beautiful thing I had seen since I had last been on this beach.

I waded out of the water and I embraced him, and he patted my back awkwardly and he could not stop grinning because he was happy. “They did that to you?” he said, pointing at my leg shackles.

“I’ve worn them for more than two years,” I said.

“Put your legs apart, lord,” he said.

“Lord?” Sverri had heard Steapa and he understood that one Saxon word. He got up from his knees and took a faltering step toward us. “Is that what he called you?” he asked me, “lord?”

I just stared at Sverri and he went on his knees again. “Who are you?” he asked, frightened.

“You want me to kill him?” Steapa growled.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I kept you alive,” Sverri said, “I fed you.”

I pointed at him. “Be silent,” I said and he was.

“Put your legs apart, lord,” Steapa said again. “Stretch that chain for me.”

I did as he ordered. “Be careful,” I said.

“Be careful!” he mocked, then he swung the ax and the big blade whistled past my groin and crashed into the chain and my ankles were twitched inward by the massive blow so that I staggered. “Be still,” Steapa ordered me, and he swung again and this time the chain snapped. “You can walk now, lord,” Steapa said, and I could, though the links of broken chain dragged behind my ankles.

I walked to the dead men and selected two swords. “Free that man,” I told Steapa, pointing at Finan, and Steapa chopped through more chains and Finan ran to me, grinning, and we stared at each other, eyes bright with tears of joy, and then I held a sword to him. He looked at the blade for a moment as though he did not believe what he was seeing, then he gripped the hilt and bayed like a wolf at the darkening sky. Then he threw his arms around my neck. He was weeping. “You’re free,” I told him.

“And I am a warrior again,” he said. “I am Finan the Agile!”

“And I am Uhtred,” I said, using that name for the first time since I had last been on this beach. “My name is Uhtred,” I said again, but louder this time, “and I am the lord of Bebbanburg.” I turned on Sverri, my anger welling up. “I am Lord Uhtred,” I told him, “the man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and sent Svein of the White Horse to the corpse-hall. I am Uhtred.” I was in a red rage now. I stalked to Sverri and tipped his face up with the sword-blade. “I am Uhtred,” I said, “and you call me lord.”

“Yes, lord,” he said.

“And he is Finan of Ireland,” I said, “and you call him lord.”

Sverri looked at Finan, could not meet his gaze and lowered his eyes. “Lord,” he said to Finan.

I wanted to kill him, but I had a notion that Sverri’s usefulness on this earth was not quite finished and so I contented myself with taking Steapa’s knife and slitting open Sverri’s tunic to bare his arm. He was shaking, expecting his throat to be cut, but instead I carved the letter S into his flesh, then rubbed sand into the wound. “So tell me, slave,” I said, “how you undo these rivets?” I tapped my ankle chains with the knife.

“I need a blacksmith’s tools, lord,” Sverri said.

“If you want to live, Sverri, pray that we find them.”

There had to be tools up at the ruined monastery, for that was where Kjartan’s men manacled their slaves, and so Steapa sent two men to search for the means to strike off our chains and Finan amused himself by butchering Hakka because I would not let him slaughter Sverri. The Scottish slaves watched in awe as the blood swilled into the sea beside the stranded Trader. Finan danced with joy afterward and chanted one of his wild songs, then he killed the rest of Sverri’s crew.

“Why are you here?” I asked Steapa.

“I was sent, lord,” he said proudly.

“Sent? Who sent you?”

“The king, of course,” he said.

“Guthred sent you?”

“Guthred?” Steapa asked, puzzled by the name, then shook his head. “No, lord. It was King Alfred, of course.”

“Alfred sent you?” I asked, then gaped at him. “Alfred?”

“Alfred sent us,” he confirmed.

“But these are Danes,” I gestured at the crewmen who had been left on the beach with Steapa.

“Some are Danes,” Steapa said, “but we’re mostly West Saxons. Alfred sent us.”

“Alfred sent you?” I asked again, knowing I sounded like an incoherent fool, but I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “Alfred sent Danes?”

“A dozen of them, lord,” Steapa said, “and they’re only here because they follow him.” He pointed to the shipmaster in his winged helmet who was striding back to the beach. “He’s the hostage,” Steapa said as though that explained everything, “and Alfred sent me to keep him honest. I guard him.”

The hostage? Then I remembered whose badge was the eagle wing and I stumbled toward the red ship’s master, inhibited by the ragged chains dragging from my ankles, and the approaching warrior took off his winged helmet and I could scarcely see his face because of my tears. But I still shouted his name. “Ragnar!” I shouted. “Ragnar!”

He was laughing when we met. He embraced me, whirled me about, embraced me a second time, and then pushed me away. “You stink,” he said, “you’re the ugliest, hairiest, smelliest bastard I’ve ever laid eyes on. I should throw you to the crabs, except why would a good crab want anything as revolting as you?”

I was laughing and I was crying. “Alfred sent you?”

“He did, but I wouldn’t have come if I’d known what a filthy turd you’ve become,” he said. He smiled broadly and that smile reminded me of his father, all good humor and strength. He embraced me again. “It is good to see you, Uhtred Ragnarson,” he said.

Ragnar’s men had driven Sven’s remaining troops away. Sven himself had escaped on horseback, fleeing toward Dunholm. We burned the slave pens, freed the slaves, and that night, by the light of the burning wattle hurdles, my shackles were struck off and for the next few days I raised my feet ludicrously high when I walked for I had grown so accustomed to the weight of the iron bonds.

I washed. The red-haired Scottish slave cut my hair, watched by Finan. “Her name’s Ethne,” he told me. He spoke her language, or at least they could understand one another, though I guessed, from the way they looked at each other, that different languages would not have been a barrier. Ethne had found two of the men who had raped her among Sven’s dead and she had borrowed Finan’s sword to mutilate their corpses and Finan had watched her proudly. Now she used shears to cut my hair and trim my beard, and afterward I dressed in a leather jerkin and in clean hose and proper shoes. And then we ate in the ruined monastery church and I sat with Ragnar, my friend, and heard the tale of my rescue.

“We’ve been following you all summer,” he said.

“We saw you.”

“Couldn’t miss us, could you, not with that hull? Isn’t she a horror? I hate pine-built hulls. She’s called Dragon-Fire, but I call her Worm-Breath. It took me a month to get her ready for sea. She belonged to a man who was killed at Ethandun and she was just rotting away on the Temes when Alfred gave her to us.”

“Why would Alfred do that?”

“Because he said you won him his throne at Ethandun,” Ragnar said and grinned. “Alfred was exaggerating,” he went on, “I’m sure he was. I imagine you just stumbled about the battlefield and made a bit of noise, but you did enough to fool Alfred.”

“I did enough,” I said softly, remembering the long green hill. “But I thought Alfred didn’t notice.”

“He noticed,” Ragnar said, “but he didn’t do this just for you. He gained a nunnery as well.”

“He did what?”

“Got himself a nunnery. God knows why he’d want one. Me, I might have exchanged you for a whorehouse, but Alfred got a nunnery and he seemed well enough pleased with that bargain.”

And that was when the story emerged. I did not hear the whole tale that night, but later I pieced it all together and I shall tell it here. It had all started with Hild.

Guthred kept his last promise to me and treated her honorably. He gave her my sword and my helmet, he let her keep my mail and my arm rings, and he asked her to be the companion of his new wife, Queen Osburh, the Saxon niece of the dethroned king in Eoferwic. But Hild blamed herself for my betrayal. She decided that she had offended her god by resisting her calling as a nun and so she begged Guthred to give her leave to go back to Wessex and rejoin her order. He had wanted her to stay in Northumbria, but she pleaded with him to let her go and she told him that God and Saint Cuthbert demanded it of her, and Guthred was ever open to Cuthbert’s persuasion. And so he allowed her to accompany messengers he was sending to Alfred and thus Hild returned to Wessex and once there she found Steapa, who had always been fond of her.

“She took me to Fifhaden,” Steapa told me that night when the hurdles burned beneath the ruined walls of Gyruum’s monastery.

“To Fifhaden?”

“And we dug up your hoard,” Steapa said. “Hild showed me where it was and I dug it up. Then we carried it to Alfred. All of it. We poured it on the floor and he just stared at it.”

That hoard was Hild’s weapon. She told Alfred the story of Guthred and how he had betrayed me, and she promised Alfred that if he sent men to find me then she would use all that gold and silver on his hall’s floor to build a house of God and that she would repent of her sins and live the rest of her life as a bride of Christ. She would wear the church’s manacles so that my iron chains could be struck off.

“She became a nun again?” I asked.

“She said she wanted that,” Steapa said. “She said God wanted it. And Alfred did. He said yes to her.”

“So Alfred released you?” I asked Ragnar.

“I hope he will,” Ragnar said, “when I take you back home. I’m still a hostage, but Alfred said I could search for you if I promised to return to him. And we’ll all be released soon enough. Guthrum’s making no trouble. King Æthelstan, he’s called now.”

“He’s in East Anglia?”

“He’s in East Anglia,” Ragnar confirmed, “and he’s building churches and monasteries.”

“So he really did become a Christian?”

“The poor bastard’s as pious as Alfred,” Ragnar said gloomily. “Guthrum always was a credulous fool. But Alfred sent for me. Told me I could search for you. He let me take the men who served me in exile and the rest are crewmen that Steapa found. They’re Saxons, of course, but the bastards can row well enough.”

“Steapa said he was here to guard you,” I said.

“Steapa!” Ragnar looked across the fire we had lit in the nave of the monastery’s ruined church, “you foul scrap of stinking stoat-shit. Did you say you were here to guard me?”

“But I am, lord,” Steapa said.

“You’re a piece of shit. But you fight well.” Ragnar grinned and looked back to me. “And I’m to take you back to Alfred.”

I stared into the fire where strips of burning wattle glowed a brilliant red. “Thyra is at Dunholm,” I said, “and Kjartan still lives.”

“And I go to Dunholm when Alfred releases me,” Ragnar said, “but first I have to take you to Wessex. I swore an oath on it. I swore I would not break Northumbria’s peace, but only fetch you. And Alfred kept Brida, of course.” Brida was his woman.

“He kept her?”

“As a hostage for me, I suppose. But he’ll release her and I shall raise money and I shall assemble men and then I shall scrape Dunholm off the face of the earth.”

“You have no money?”

“Not enough.”

So I told him about Sverri’s home in Jutland and how there was money there, or at least we believed there was money there, and Ragnar thought about that and I thought about Alfred.

Alfred did not like me. He had never liked me. At times he hated me, but I had done him service. I had done him great service, and he had been less than generous in rewarding that service. Five hides, he had given me, while I had given him a kingdom. Yet now I owed my freedom to him, and I did not understand why he had done it. Except, of course, that Hild had given him a house of prayer, and he would have wanted that, and he would have welcomed her repentance, and both those things made a twisted kind of sense. Yet he had still rescued me. He had reached out and plucked me from slavery and I decided he was generous after all. But I also knew there would be a price to pay. Alfred would want more than Hild’s soul and a new convent. He would want me. “I hoped I’d never see Wessex again,” I said.

“Well you’re going to see it,” Ragnar said, “because I swore to take you back. Besides, we can’t stay here.”

“No,” I agreed.

“Kjartan will have a hundred men here in the morning,” Ragnar said.

“Two hundred,” I said.

“So we must go,” he said, then looked wistful. “There’s a hoard in Jutland?”

“A great hoard,” Finan said.

“We think it’s buried in a reed hut,” I added, “and guarded by a woman and three children.”

Ragnar stared through the door to where a few sparks of fire showed among the hovels built by the old Roman fort. “I can’t go to Jutland,” he said softly. “I swore an oath that I would take you back as soon as I found you.”

“So someone else can go,” I suggested. “You have two ships now. And Sverri will reveal where his hoard is if he’s frightened enough.”

So next morning Ragnar ordered his twelve Danes to take Trader across the sea. The command of the ship was given to Rollo, Ragnar’s best steersman, and Finan begged to go with Rollo’s crew, and the Scottish girl Ethne went with Finan who now wore mail and a helmet and had a long sword buckled at his waist. Sverri was chained to one of Trader’s oar-benches and, as she left the shore, I saw Finan whipping him with the lash that had scarred our backs for so many months.

Trader left and we then carried the Scottish slaves across the river in the red ship and released them on the northern bank. They were frightened and did not know what to do, so we gave them a handful of the coins we had taken from Sverri’s strongbox and told them to keep walking with the sea always on their right hand and, with a little luck, they might reach home. They would more likely be captured by Bebbanburg’s garrison and sold back into slavery, but we could not help that. We left them, pushed the red ship away from the shore, and turned for the sea.

Behind us, where Gyruum’s hilltop smoked from the remnants of our fires, horsemen in mail and helmets appeared. They lined the crest, and a column of them galloped across the salt-marsh to clatter onto the shingle bank, but they were much too late. We were riding the ebb-tide toward the open sea and I looked behind and saw Kjartan’s men and I knew I would see them again and then the Dragon-Fire rounded the river’s bend and the oars bit the water and the sun glittered like sharpened spear-points on the small waves and an osprey flew overhead and I raised my eyes to the wind and wept.

Pure tears of joy.

It took us three weeks to voyage to Lundene where we paid silver to the Danes who exacted a toll from every ship that rowed upriver, and then it was another two days to Readingum where we beached Dragon-Fire and purchased horses with Sverri’s money. It was autumn in Wessex, a time of mists and fallow fields. The peregrine falcons had returned from wherever they voyage in the high sky during the summer months and the oak leaves were turning a wind-shivered bronze.

We rode to Wintanceaster for we were told that was where Alfred was holding court, but the day we arrived he had ridden to one of his estates and was not expected to return that night and so, as the sun lowered over the scaffolding of the big church Alfred was building, I left Ragnar in the Two Cranes tavern and walked to the northern edge of the town. I had to ask directions and was pointed down a long alley that was choked with muddy ruts. Two pigs rooted in the alley that was bordered on one side by the town’s high palisade and on the other by a wooden wall in which there was a low door marked by a cross. A score of beggars were crouched in the mud and dung outside the door. They were in rags. Some had lost arms or legs, most were covered in sores, while a blind woman held a scarred child. They all shuffled nervously aside as I approached.

I knocked and waited. I was about to knock again when a small hatch was slid aside in the door and I explained my business, then the hatch snapped shut and I waited again. The scarred child cried and the blind woman held a begging bowl toward me. A cat walked along the wall’s top and a cloud of starlings flew westward. Two women with huge loads of firewood strapped on their backs passed me and behind them a man drove a cow. He bobbed his head in deference to me for I looked like a lord again. I was dressed in leather and had a sword at my side, though the sword was not Serpent-Breath. My black cloak was held at my throat with a heavy brooch of silver and amber that I had taken from one of Sverri’s dead crewmen, and that brooch was my only jewel for I had no arm rings.

Then the low door was unbolted and pulled inward on its leather hinges and a small woman beckoned me inside. I ducked through, she closed the door and led me across a patch of grass, pausing there to let me scrape the street dung off my boots before taking me to a church. She ushered me inside, then paused again to genuflect toward the altar. She muttered a prayer, then gestured that I should go through another door into a bare room with walls made of mud and wattle. Two stools were the only furniture and she told me I might sit on one of them, and then she opened a shutter so that the late sun could illuminate the room. A mouse scuttled in the floor rushes and the small woman tutted and then left me alone.

I waited again. A rook cawed on the roof. From some place nearby I could hear the rhythmic squirt of milk going into a pail. Another cow, its udder full, waited patiently just beyond the open shutter. The rook cawed again and then the door opened and three nuns came into the room. Two of them stood against the far wall, while the third just gazed at me and began to weep silently. “Hild,” I said, and I stood to embrace her, but she held a hand out to keep me from touching her. She went on weeping, but she was smiling too, and then she put both her hands over her face and stayed that way for a long while.

“God has forgiven me,” she finally spoke through her fingers.

“I am glad of it,” I said.

She sniffed, took her hands from her face and indicated that I should sit again, and she sat opposite me and for a time we just looked at each other and I thought how I had missed her, not as a lover, but as a friend. I wanted to embrace her, and perhaps she sensed that for she sat straighter and spoke very formally. “I am now the Abbess Hildegyth,” she said.

“I had forgotten your proper name is Hildegyth,” I said.

“And it does my heart good to see you,” she said primly. She was dressed in a coarse gray robe that matched the gowns of her two companions, both of whom were older women. The robes were belted with hemp-rope and had heavy hoods hiding their hair. A plain wooden cross hung at Hild’s neck and she fingered it compulsively. “I have prayed for you,” she went on.

“It seems your prayers worked,” I said awkwardly.

“And I stole all your money,” she said with a touch of her old mischief.

“I give it to you,” I said, “willingly.”

She told me about the nunnery. She had built it with the money from Fifhaden’s hoard and now it housed sixteen sisters and eight laywomen. “Our lives,” she said, “are dedicated to Christ and to Saint Hedda. You know who Hedda was?”

“I’ve never heard of her,” I said.

The two older nuns, who had been looking at me with stern disapproval, suddenly broke into giggles. Hild smiled. “Hedda was a man,” she told me gently, “and he was born in Northumbria and he was the first bishop of Wintanceaster. He is remembered as a most holy and good man, and I chose him because you are from Northumbria and it was your unwitting generosity that let us build this house in the town where Saint Hedda preached. We vowed to pray to him every day until you returned, and now we shall pray to him every day to thank him for answering our prayers.”

I said nothing for I did not know what to say. I remember thinking that Hild’s voice was forced as if she were persuading herself as well as me that she was happy, and I was wrong about that. It was forced because my presence brought her unpleasant memories, and in time I learned she truly was happy. She was useful. She had made her peace with her god and after she died she was remembered as a saint. Not so very long ago a bishop told me all about the most holy and blessed Saint Hildegyth and how she had been a shining example of Christian chastity and charity, and I was sorely tempted to tell him that I had once spread-eagled the saint among the buttercups, but managed to restrain myself. He was certainly right about her charity. Hild told me that the purpose of Saint Hedda’s nunnery was not just to pray for me, its benefactor, but to heal the sick. “We are busy all day,” she said, “and all night. We take the poor and we tend them. I’ve no doubt there are some waiting outside our gate right now.”

“There are,” I said.

“Then those poor folk are our purpose,” she said, “and we are their servants.” She gave me a brisk smile. “Now tell me what I have prayed to hear. Tell me your tales.”

So I told her and I did not tell her all of what had happened, but made light of slavery, saying only that I had been chained so I could not escape. I told her of the voyages, of the strange places and of the people I had seen. I spoke of the land of ice and fire, of watching the great whales breach in the endless sea, and I told her of the long river that twisted into a land of birch trees and lingering snow, and I finished by saying that I was glad to be a free man again and grateful to her for making me so.

Hild was silent when I finished. The milk still spurted into the pail outside. A sparrow perched on the window ledge, preened itself and flew away. Hild had been staring at me, as if testing the veracity of my words. “Was it bad?” she asked after a while.

I hesitated, tempted to lie, then shrugged. “Yes,” I said shortly.

“But now you are the Lord Uhtred again,” she said, “and I have your possessions.” She signaled to one of the nuns, who left the room. “We kept everything for you,” Hild said brightly.

“Everything?” I asked.

“Except your horse,” she said ruefully. “I couldn’t bring the horse. What was he called? Witnere?”

“Witnere,” I said.

“I fear he was stolen.”

“Stolen?”

“The Lord Ivarr took him.”

I said nothing because the nun had come back into the room with a cumbersome armful of weapons and mail. She had my helmet, my heavy coat of leather and mail, she had my arm rings and she had Wasp-Sting and Serpent-Breath, and she dropped them all at my feet and there were tears in my eyes as I leaned forward and touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt. “The mail coat was damaged,” Hild said, “so we had one of the king’s armorers repair it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I have prayed,” Hild said, “that you will not take revenge on King Guthred.”

“He enslaved me,” I said harshly. I could not take my hand from the sword. There had been so many moments of despair in the last two years, moments when I thought I would never touch a sword again, let alone Serpent-Breath, yet here she was, and my hand slowly closed about the hilt.

“Guthred did what he felt was best for his kingdom,” Hild said sternly, “and he is a Christian.”

“He enslaved me,” I said again.

“And you must forgive him,” Hild said forcefully, “as I have forgiven the men who wronged me and as God has forgiven me. I was a sinner,” she went on, “a great sinner, but God has touched me and poured his grace into me and so forgiven me. So swear to me that you will spare Guthred.”

“I will make no oaths,” I said harshly, still holding Serpent-Breath.

“You are not an unkind man,” Hild said. “I know that. You were kinder to me than I ever deserved. So be kind to Guthred. He’s a good man.”

“I will remember that when I meet him,” I said evasively.

“And remember that he regretted what he did,” Hild said, “and that he did it because he believed it would preserve his kingdom. And remember too that he has given this house money as a penance. We have much need of silver. There is no shortage of poor, sick folk, but there is ever a shortage of alms.”

I smiled at her. Then I stood and I unbuckled the sword I had taken from one of Sven’s men at Gyruum and I unpinned the brooch at my neck, and I dropped cloak, brooch, and sword onto the rushes. “Those you can sell,” I said. Then, grunting with the effort, I pulled on my old mail coat and I buckled on my old swords and I picked up my wolf-crested helmet. The coat felt monstrously heavy because it had been so long since I had worn mail. It was also too big for me for I had become thinner in those years of pulling Sverri’s oar. I slipped the arm rings over my hands, then looked at Hild. “I will give you one oath, Abbess Hildegyth,” I said. She looked up at me and she was seeing the old Uhtred, the shining lord and sword-warrior. “I will support your house,” I promised, “and you will have money from me and you will thrive and you will always have my protection.”

She smiled at that, then reached into a purse that hung at her belt and held out a small silver cross. “And that is my gift to you,” she said, “and I pray that you will revere it as I do and learn its lesson. Our Lord died on that cross for the evil we all do, and I have no doubt, Lord Uhtred, that some of the pain he felt at his death was for your sins.”

She gave me the cross and our fingers touched and I looked into her eyes and she snatched her hand away. She blushed, though, and she looked up at me through half-lowered lids. For a heartbeat I saw the old Hild, the fragile, beautiful Hild, but then she composed her face and tried to look stern. “Now you can go to Gisela,” she said.

I had not mentioned Gisela and now I pretended the name meant little. “She will be married by now,” I said carelessly, “if she even lives.”

“She lived when I left Northumbria,” Hild said, “though that was eighteen months ago. She would not speak to her brother then, not after what he did to you. I spent hours comforting her. She was full of tears and anger. A strong girl, that one.”

“And marriageable,” I said harshly.

Hild smiled gently. “She swore to wait for you.”

I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt. I was so full of hope and so racked by dread. Gisela. In my head I knew she could not match a slave’s feverish dreams, but I could not rid my head of her.

“And perhaps she does wait for you,” Hild said, then she stepped back, brusque suddenly. “Now we have prayers to say, folk to feed, and bodies to heal.”

And so I was dismissed and I ducked out of the door in the convent wall to stand in the muddy alleyway. The beggars were allowed inside, leaving me leaning against the wooden wall with tears in my eyes. Folk edged by on the alley’s far side, fearful of me for I was dressed for war with my two swords.

Gisela, I thought, Gisela. Maybe she did wait, but I doubted it for she was too valuable as a peace cow, but I knew I would go back north as soon as I could. I would go for Gisela. I gripped the silver cross until I could feel its edges hurting through the great callouses that Sverri’s oar had made on my hand. Then I drew Serpent-Breath and I saw that Hild had looked after the blade well. It shone with a light coating of lard or lanolin that had prevented the patterned steel from rusting. I raised the sword to my lips and kissed her long blade. “You have men to kill,” I told her, “and revenge to take.”

And so she had.

I found a swordsmith the next day and he told me he was too busy and could not do my work for many days and I told him that he would do my work that day or else he would do no work ever again, and in the end we came to an agreement. He agreed to do my work that day.

Serpent-Breath is a lovely weapon. She was made by Ealdwulf the Smith in Northumbria and her blade is a magical thing, flexible and strong, and when she had been made I had wanted her plain iron hilt decorated with silver or gilt-bronze, but Ealdwulf had refused. “It’s a tool,” he had told me, “just a tool. Something to make your work easier.”

She had handles of ash wood, one either side of the sword’s tang, and over the years the twin handles had become polished and smooth. Such worn handles are dangerous. In battle they can slip in the hand, especially when blood is splashed on them, and so I told the swordsmith that I wanted new handles riveted onto the hilt, and that the handles must give a good grip, and that the small silver cross that Hild had given me must be embedded in the hilt’s pommel.

“I shall do it, lord,” he said.

“Today.”

“I shall try, lord,” he said weakly.

“You will succeed,” I said, “and the work will be well done.” I drew Serpent-Breath and her blade was bright in the shadowed room as I held her toward the smith’s furnace and in the red firelight I saw the patterns on her steel. She had been forged by beating three smooth and four twisted rods into one metal blade. She had been heated and hammered, heated and hammered, and when she was done, and when the seven rods had become one single savage streak of shining steel, the twists in the four rods were left in the blade as ghostly patterns. That was how she got her name, for the patterns looked like the swirling breath of a dragon.

“She is a fine blade, lord,” the swordsmith said.

“She is the blade that killed Ubba by the sea,” I said, stroking the steel.

“Yes, lord,” he said. He was terrified of me now.

“And you will do the work today,” I stressed, and I put sword and scabbard on his fire-scarred bench. I laid Hild’s cross on the hilt, then added a silver coin. I was no longer wealthy, but nor was I poor, and with the help of Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting I knew I would be rich again.

It was a lovely autumn day. The sun shone, making the new wood of Alfred’s church glow like gold. Ragnar and I were waiting for the king and we sat on the newly-scythed grass in a courtyard and Ragnar watched a monk carrying a pile of parchments to the royal scriptorium. “Everything’s written down here,” he said, “everything! Can you read?”

“I can read and write.”

He was impressed by that. “Is it useful?”

“It’s never been useful for me,” I admitted.

“So why do they do it?” he wondered.

“Their religion is written down,” I said, “ours isn’t.”

“A written religion?” He was puzzled by that.

“They’ve got a book,” I said, “and it’s all in there.”

“Why do they need it written down?”

“I don’t know. They just do. And, of course, they write down the laws. Alfred loves making new laws, and they all have to be written in books.”

“If a man can’t remember the laws,” Ragnar said, “then he’s got too many of them.”

The shouts of children interrupted us, or rather the offended screech of one small boy and the mocking laughter of a girl, and a heartbeat later the girl ran around the corner. She looked nine or ten years old, had golden hair as bright as the sun, and was carrying a carved wooden horse that was plainly the property of the small boy who followed her. The girl, brandishing the carved horse like a trophy, ran across the grass. She was coltish, thin and happy, while the boy, three or four years younger, was built more solidly and looked thoroughly miserable. He had no chance of catching the girl for she was much too quick, but she saw me and her eyes widened and she stopped in front of us. The boy caught up with her, but was too overawed by Ragnar and me to try to retrieve his wooden horse. A nurse, red-faced and panting, appeared around the corner and shouted the children’s names. “Edward! Æthelflaed!”

“It’s you!” Æthelflaed said, staring at me with a look of delight.

“It’s me,” I said, and I stood because Æthelflaed was the daughter of a king and Edward was the ætheling, the prince who might well rule Wessex when Alfred, his father, died.

“Where have you been?” Æthelflaed demanded, as if she had only missed me for a week or two.

“I have been in the land of giants,” I said, “and places where fire runs like water and where the mountains are made of ice and where sisters are never, ever unkind to their little brothers.”

“Never?” she asked, grinning.

“I want my horse!” Edward insisted and tried to snatch it from her, but Æthelflaed held it out of reach.

“Never use force to get from a girl,” Ragnar said to Edward, “what you can take by guile.”

“Guile?” Edward frowned, evidently unfamiliar with the word.

Ragnar frowned at Æthelflaed. “Is the horse hungry?”

“No.” She knew he was playing a game and she wanted to see if she could win.

“But suppose I use magic,” Ragnar suggested, “and make it eat grass?”

“You can’t.”

“How do you know?” he asked. “I have been to places where the wooden horses go to pasture every morning, and every night the grass grows to touch the sky and every day the wooden horses eat it back to nothing again.”

“No they don’t,” she said, grinning.

“And if I say the magic words,” Ragnar said, “your horse will eat the grass.”

“It’s my horse,” Edward insisted.

“Magic words?” Æthelflaed was interested now.

“You have to put the horse on the grass,” Ragnar said.

She looked at me, wanting reassurance, but I just shrugged, and so she looked back at Ragnar who was being very serious, and she decided she wanted to see some magic and so she carefully placed the wooden horse beside a swathe of cut grass. “Now?” she asked expectantly.

“You have to shut your eyes,” Ragnar said, “turn around three times very fast, then shout Havacar very loudly.”

“Havacar?”

“Careful!” he warned her, looking alarmed. “You can’t say magic words carelessly.”

So she shut her eyes, turned around three times, and while she did Ragnar pointed at the horse and nodded to Edward who snatched it up and ran off to the nurse, and by the time Æthelflaed, staggering slightly from dizziness, had shouted her magic word the horse was gone.

“You cheated!” she accused Ragnar.

“But you learned a lesson,” I said, squatting beside her as if I were going to tell her a secret. I leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Never trust a Dane.”

She smiled at that. She had known me well during the long wet winter when her family had been fugitives in the marshes of Sumorsæte and in those dismal months she had learned to like me and I had come to like her. She reached out now and touched my nose. “How did that happen?”

“A man broke my nose,” I said. It had been Hakka, striking me in Trader because he thought I was shirking at the oar.

“It’s crooked,” she said.

“It lets me smell crooked smells.”

“What happened to the man who broke it?”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “I’m going to be married.”

“You are?” I asked.

“To Æthelred of Mercia,” she said proudly, then frowned because a flicker of distaste had crossed my face.

“To my cousin?” I asked, trying to look pleased.

“Is Æthelred your cousin?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m to be his wife,” she said, “and live in Mercia. Have you been to Mercia?”

“Yes.”

“Is it nice?”

“You will like it,” I said, though I doubted she would, not married to my snotty-nosed, pompous cousin, but I could hardly say that.

She frowned. “Does Æthelred pick his nose?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Edward does,” she said, “and then he eats it. Ugh.” She leaned forward, gave me an impulsive kiss on my broken nose, then ran off to the nurse.

“A pretty girl,” Ragnar said.

“Who is to be wasted on my cousin,” I said.

“Wasted?”

“He’s a bumptious little shit called Æthelred,” I said. He had brought men to Ethandun, only a few, but enough to loft him into Alfred’s good graces. “The idea is,” I went on, “that he’ll be Ealdorman of Mercia when his father dies and Alfred’s daughter will be his wife, and that will bind Mercia to Wessex.”

Ragnar shook his head. “There are too many Danes in Mercia. The Saxons won’t ever rule there again.”

“Alfred wouldn’t waste his daughter on Mercia,” I said, “unless he thought there was something to gain.”

“To gain things,” Ragnar said, “you have to be bold. You can’t write things down and win, you have to take risks. Alfred’s too cautious.”

I half smiled. “You really think he’s cautious?”

“Of course he is,” Ragnar said scornfully.

“Not always,” I said, then paused, wondering if I should say what I was thinking.

My hesitation provoked Ragnar. He knew I was hiding something. “What?” he demanded.

I still hesitated, then decided no harm could come from an old tale. “Do you remember that winter night in Cippanhamm?” I asked him. “When Guthrum was there and you all believed Wessex had fallen, and you and I drank in the church?”

“Of course I remember it, yes.”

It had been the winter when Guthrum had invaded Wessex and it had seemed that Guthrum must have won the war, for the West Saxon army was scattered. Some thegns fled abroad, many made their own peace with Guthrum, while Alfred had been driven into hiding on the marshes of Sumorsæte. Yet Alfred, though he was defeated, was not broken, and he had insisted on disguising himself as a harpist and going secretly to Cippanhamm to spy on the Danes. That had almost ended in disaster, for Alfred did not possess the cunning to be a spy. I had rescued him that night, the same night that I had found Ragnar in the royal church. “And do you remember,” I went on, “that I had a servant with me and he sat at the back of the church with a hood over his head and I ordered him to be silent?”

Ragnar frowned, trying to recall that winter night, then he nodded. “You did, that’s right.”

“He was no servant,” I said, “that was Alfred.”

Ragnar stared at me. In his head he was working things out, realizing that I had lied to him on that distant night, and he was understanding that if he had only known that the hooded servant had been Alfred then he could have won all Wessex for the Danes that same night. For a moment I regretted telling him, because I thought he would be angry with me, but then he laughed. “That was Alfred? Truly?”

“He went to spy on you,” I said, “and I went to rescue him.”

“It was Alfred? In Guthrum’s camp?”

“He takes risks,” I said, reverting to our talk of Mercia.

But Ragnar was still thinking of that far-off cold night. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded.

“Because I’d given him my oath.”

“We would have made you richer than the richest king,” Ragnar said. “We would have given you ships, men, horses, silver, women, anything! All you had to do was speak.”

“I had given him my oath,” I said again, and I remembered how close I had come to betraying Alfred. I had been so tempted to blurt out the truth. That night, with a handful of words, I could have ensured that no Saxon ever ruled in England again. I could have made Wessex into a Danish kingdom. I could have done all that by betraying a man I did not much like to a man I loved as a brother, and yet I had kept silent. I had given an oath and honor binds us to paths we might not choose. “Wyrd biful aræd,” I said.

Fate is inexorable. It grips us like a harness. I thought I had escaped Wessex and escaped Alfred, yet here I was, back in his palace, and he returned that afternoon in a clatter of hooves and a noisy rush of servants, monks, and priests. Two men carried the king’s bedding back to his chamber while a monk wheeled a barrow piled with documents which Alfred had evidently needed during his single day’s absence. A priest hurried by with an altar cloth and a crucifix, while two more brought home the relics that accompanied Alfred on all his travels. Then came a group of the king’s bodyguards, the only men allowed to carry weapons in the royal precincts, and then more priests, all talking, among whom was Alfred himself. He had not changed. He still had a clerk’s look about him, lean and pale and scholarly. A priest was talking urgently to him and he nodded his head as he listened. He was dressed simply, his black cloak making him look like a cleric. He wore no royal circlet, just a woolen cap. He was holding Æthelflaed’s hand and Æthelflaed, I noticed, was once again holding her brother’s horse. She was hopping on one leg rather than walking which meant that she kept tugging her father away from the priest, but Alfred indulged her for he was ever fond of his children. Then she tugged him purposely, trying to draw him onto the grass where Ragnar and I had stood to welcome him and he yielded to her, letting her bring him to us.

Ragnar and I knelt. I kept my head bowed.

“Uhtred has a broken nose,” Æthelflaed told her father, “and the man who did it is dead now.”

A royal hand tipped my head up and I stared into that pale, narrow face with its clever eyes. He looked drawn. I supposed that he was suffering another bout of the bowel cramps that made his life perpetual agony. He was looking at me with his customary sternness, but then he managed a half-smile. “I thought never to see you again, Lord Uhtred.”

“I owe you thanks, lord,” I said humbly, “so I thank you.”

“Stand,” he said, and we both stood and Alfred looked at Ragnar. “I shall free you soon, Lord Ragnar.”

“Thank you, lord.”

“But in a week’s time we shall be holding a celebration here. We shall rejoice that our new church is finished, and we shall formally betroth this young lady to Lord Æthelred. I have summoned the Witan, and I would ask you both to stay until our deliberations are over.”

“Yes, lord,” I said. In truth all I wanted was to go to Northumbria, but I was beholden to Alfred and could wait a week or two.

“And at that time,” he went on, “I may have matters,” he paused, as if fearing that he spoke too much, “matters,” he said vaguely, “in which you might be of service to me.”

“Yes, lord,” I repeated, then he nodded and walked away.

And so we waited. The town, anticipating the celebrations, filled with folk. It was a time of reunions. All the men who had led Alfred’s army at Ethandun were there, and they greeted me with pleasure. Wiglaf of Sumorsæte and Harald of Defnascir and Osric of Wiltunscir and Arnulf of Suth Seaxa all came to Wintanceaster. They were the powerful men of the kingdom now, the great lords, the men who had stood by their king when he had seemed doomed. But Alfred did not punish those who had fled Wessex. Wilfrith was still Ealdorman of Hamptonscir, even though he had run to Frankia to escape Guthrum’s attack, and Alfred treated Wilfrith with exaggerated courtesy, but there was still an unspoken divide between those who had stayed to fight and those who had run away.

The town also filled with entertainers. There were the usual jugglers and stilt-walkers, story-tellers and musicians, but the most successful was a dour Mercian called Offa who traveled with a pack of performing dogs. They were only terriers, the kind most men use to hunt rats, but Offa could make them dance, walk on their hind legs, and jump through hoops. One of the dogs even rode a pony, holding the reins in its teeth, and the other dogs followed with small leather pails to collect the crowd’s pennies. To my surprise Offa was invited to the palace. I was surprised because Alfred was not fond of frivolity. His idea of a good time was to discuss theology, but he commanded the dogs be brought to the palace and I assumed it was because he thought they would amuse his children. Ragnar and I both went to the performance, and Father Beocca found me there.

Poor Beocca. He was in tears because I lived. His hair, which had always been red, was heavily touched by gray now. He was over forty, an old man, and his wandering eye had gone milky. He limped and had a palsied left hand, for which afflictions men mocked him, though none did in my presence. Beocca had known me since I was a child, for he had been my father’s mass-priest and my early tutor, and he veered between loving me and detesting me, though he was ever my friend. He was also a good priest, a clever man, and one of Alfred’s chaplains, and he was happy in the king’s service. He was delirious now, beaming at me with tears in his eyes. “You live,” he said, giving me a clumsy embrace.

“I’m a hard man to kill, father.”

“So you are, so you are,” he said, “but you were a weakly child.”

“Me?”

“The runt of the litter, your father always said. Then you began to grow.”

“Haven’t stopped, have I?”

“Isn’t that clever!” Beocca said, watching two dogs walk on their hind legs. “I do like dogs,” he went on, “and you should talk to Offa.”

“To Offa?” I asked, glancing at the Mercian who controlled his dogs by clicking his fingers or whistling.

“He was in Bebbanburg this summer,” Beocca said. “He tells me your uncle has rebuilt the hall. It’s bigger than it was. And Gytha is dead. Poor Gytha,” he made the sign of the cross, “she was a good woman.”

Gytha was my stepmother and, after my father was killed at Eoferwic, she married my uncle and so was complicit in his usurpation of Bebbanburg. I said nothing of her death, but after the performance, when Offa and his two women assistants were packing up the hoops and leashing the dogs, I sought the Mercian out and said I would talk with him.

He was a strange man. He was tall like me, lugubrious, knowing, and, oddest of all, a Christian priest. He was really Father Offa. “But I was bored with the church,” he told me in the Two Cranes where I had bought him a pot of ale, “and bored with my wife. I became very bored with her.”

“So you walked away?”

“I danced away,” he said, “I skipped away. I would have flown away if God had given me wings.”

He had been traveling for a dozen years now, ranging throughout the Saxon and Danish lands in Britain and welcome everywhere because he provided laughter, though in conversation he was a gloomy man. But Beocca had been right. Offa had been in Northumbria and it was clear that he had kept a very sharp eye on all that he saw. So sharp that I understood why Alfred had invited his dogs to the palace. Offa was plainly one of the spies who brought news of Britain to the West Saxon court. “So tell me what happens in Northumbria,” I invited him.

He grimaced and stared up at the ceiling beams. It was the pleasure of the Two Cranes for a man to cut a notch in the beam every time he hired one of the tavern’s whores and Offa seemed to be counting the cuts, a job that might take a lifetime, then he glanced at me sourly. “News, lord,” he said, “is a commodity like ale or hides or the service of whores. It is bought and sold.” He waited until I laid a coin on the table between us, then all he did was look at the coin and yawn, so I laid another shilling beside the first. “Where do you wish me to begin?” he asked.

“The north.”

Scotland was quiet, he said. King Aed had a fistula and that distracted him, though of course there were frequent cattle raids into Northumbria where my uncle, Ælfric the Usurper, now called himself the Lord of Bernicia.

“He wants to be king of Bernicia?” I asked.

“He wants to be left in peace,” Offa said. “He offends no one, he amasses money, he acknowledges Guthred as king, and he keeps his swords sharp. He is no fool. He welcomes Danish settlers because they offer protection against the Scots, but he allows no Danes to enter Bebbanburg unless he trusts them. He keeps that fortress safe.”

“But he wants to be king?” I insisted.

“I know what he does,” Offa said tartly, “but what he wants is between Ælfric and his god.”

“His son lives?”

“He has two sons now, both young, but his wife died.”

“I heard.”

“His eldest son liked my dogs and wanted his father to buy them. I said no.”

He had little other news of Bebbanburg, other than that the hall had been enlarged and, more ominously, the outer wall and the low gate rebuilt higher and stronger. I asked if he and his dogs were welcome at Dunholm and he gave me a very sharp look and made the sign of the cross. “No man goes to Dunholm willingly,” Offa said. “Your uncle gave me an escort through Kjartan’s land and I was glad of it.”

“So Kjartan thrives?” I asked bitterly.

“He spreads like a green bay tree,” Offa said and, when he saw my puzzlement, enlarged the answer. “He thrives and steals and rapes and kills and he lurks in Dunholm. But his influence is wider, much wider. He has money and he uses it to buy friends. If a Dane complains about Guthred then you can be sure he has taken Kjartan’s money.”

“I thought Kjartan agreed to pay a tribute to Guthred?”

“It was paid for one year. Since then Good King Guthred has learned to do without.”

“Good King Guthred?” I asked.

“That is how he is known in Eoferwic,” Offa said, “but only to the Christians. The Danes consider him a gullible fool.”

“Because he’s a Christian?”

“Is he a Christian?” Offa asked himself. “He claims to be, and he goes to church, but I suspect he still half believes in the old gods. No, the Danes dislike him because he favors the Christians. He tried to levy a church tax on the Danes. It was not a clever idea.”

“So how long does Good King Guthred have?” I asked.

“I charge more for prophecy,” Offa said, “on the grounds that what is worthless must be made expensive.”

I kept my money in its purse. “What of Ivarr?” I asked.

“What of him?”

“Does he still acknowledge Guthred as king?”

“For the moment,” Offa said carefully, “but the Earl Ivarr is once again the strongest man in Northumbria. He took money from Kjartan, I hear, and used it to raise men.”

“Why raise men?”

“Why do you think?” Offa asked sarcastically.

“To put his own man on the throne?”

“It would seem likely,” Offa said, “but Guthred has an army too.”

“A Saxon army?”

“A Christian army. Mostly Saxon.”

“So civil war is brewing?”

“In Northumbria,” Offa said, “civil war is always brewing.”

“And Ivarr will win,” I said, “because he’s ruthless.”

“He’s more cautious than he was,” Offa said. “Aed taught him that three years ago. But in time, yes, he will attack. When he’s sure he can win.”

“So Guthred,” I said, “must kill Ivarr and Kjartan.”

“What kings must do, lord, is beyond my humble competence. I teach dogs to dance, not men to rule. You wish to know about Mercia?”

“I wish to know about Guthred’s sister.”

Offa half smiled. “That one! She’s a nun.”

“Gisela!” I was shocked. “A nun? She’s become a Christian?”

“I doubt she’s a Christian,” Offa said, “but going into a nunnery protected her.”

“From whom?”

“Kjartan. He wanted the girl as a bride for his son.”

That did surprise me. “But Kjartan hates Guthred,” I said.

“But even so Kjartan decided Guthred’s sister would be a suitable bride for his one-eyed son,” Offa said. “I suspect he wants the son to be king in Eoferwic one day, and marrying Guthred’s sister would help that ambition. Whatever, he sent men to Eoferwic and offered Guthred money, peace, and a promise to stop molesting Christians and I think Guthred was half tempted.”

“How could he be?”

“Because a desperate man needs allies. Perhaps, for a day or two, Guthred dreamed of separating Ivarr and Kjartan. He certainly needs money, and Guthred has the fatal mind of a man who always believes the best in other people. His sister isn’t so burdened with charitable ideas, and she would have none of it. She fled to a nunnery.”

“When was this?”

“Last year. Kjartan took her rejection as another insult and has threatened to let his men rape her one by one.”

“She’s still in the nunnery?”

“She was when I left Eoferwic. She’s safe from marriage there, isn’t she? Perhaps she doesn’t like men. Lots of nuns don’t. But I doubt her brother will leave her there for very much longer. She’s too useful as a peace cow.”

“To marry Kjartan’s son?” I asked scornfully.

“That won’t happen,” Offa said. He poured himself more ale. “Father Hrothweard, you know who he is?”

“A nasty man,” I said, remembering how Hrothweard had raised the mob in Eoferwic to murder the Danes.

“Hrothweard is an exceedingly unpleasant creature,” Offa agreed with rare enthusiasm. “He was the one who suggested the church tax on the Danes. He’s also suggested that Guthred’s sister become your uncle’s new wife, and that notion probably does have some appeal to Guthred. Ælfric needs a wife, and if he were willing to send his spearmen south then it would hugely increase Guthred’s strength.”

“It would leave Bebbanburg unprotected,” I said.

“Sixty men can hold Bebbanburg till Judgment Day,” Offa said dismissively. “Guthred needs a larger army, and two hundred men from Bebbanburg would be a Godsend, and certainly worth a sister. Mind you, Ivarr would do anything to stop that marriage. He doesn’t want the Saxons of northern Northumbria uniting with the Christians of Eoferwic. So, lord,” he pushed his bench back as if to suggest that his survey was finished, “Britain is at peace, except for Northumbria, where Guthred is in trouble.”

“No trouble in Mercia?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing unusual.”

“East Anglia?”

He paused. “No trouble there,” he said after the hesitation, but I knew the pause had been deliberate, a bait on a hook, and so I waited. Offa just looked innocently at me and so I sighed, took another coin from my purse and placed it on the table. He rang it to make sure the silver was good. “King Æthelstan,” he said, “Guthrum as was, negotiates with Alfred. Alfred doesn’t think I know, but I do. Together they will divide England.”

“They?” I asked. “Divide England? It’s not theirs to divide!”

“The Danes will be given Northumbria, East Anglia, and the northeastern parts of Mercia. Wessex will gain the southwestern part of Mercia.”

I stared at him. “Alfred won’t agree to that,” I said.

“He will.”

“He wants all England,” I protested.

“He wants Wessex to be safe,” Offa said, spinning the coin on the table.

“So he’ll agree to give up half England?” I asked in disbelief.

Offa smiled. “Think of it this way, lord,” he said. “In Wessex there are no Danes, but where the Danes rule there are many Saxons. If the Danes agree not to attack Alfred then he can feel safe. But how can the Danes ever feel safe? Even if Alfred agrees not to attack them, they still have thousands of Saxons on their land and those Saxons could rise against them at any time, especially if they receive encouragement from Wessex. King Æthelstan will make his treaty with Alfred, but it won’t be worth the parchment it’s scribbled on.”

“You mean Alfred will break the treaty?”

“Not openly, no. But he will encourage Saxon revolt, he will support Christians, he will foment trouble, and all the time he will say his prayers and swear eternal friendship with the enemy. You all think of Alfred as a pious scholar, but his ambition embraces all the land between here and Scotland. You see him praying, I see him dreaming. He will send missionaries to the Danes and you will think that’s all he does, but whenever a Saxon kills a Dane then Alfred will have supplied the blade.”

“No,” I said, “not Alfred. His god won’t let him be treacherous.”

“What do you know of Alfred’s god?” Offa asked scornfully, then closed his eyes. “‘Then the Lord our God delivered the enemy to us,’” he intoned, “‘and we struck him, and his sons, and all his tribe. We took all his cities and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little children.’” He opened his eyes. “Those are the actions of Alfred’s god, Lord Uhtred. You want more from the holy scriptures? “‘The Lord thy God shall deliver all thy enemies to thee and thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.’” Offa grimaced. “Alfred believes in God’s promises, and he dreams of a land free of pagans, a land where the enemy is utterly destroyed and where only godly Christians live. If there is one man in the island of Britain to fear, Lord Uhtred, that man is King Alfred.” He stood. “I must make sure those stupid women have fed my dogs.”