The Burning Land

THREE

I tried to persuade Ragnar to come with me to Frisia, but he laughed it away. “You think I want to get a wet arse at this time of year?” It was a cold day, the countryside sodden from two days of heavy rain that had crashed in from the sea. The rain had ended, but the land was heavy, the winter colors dark, and the air damp.

We rode across the hills. Thirty of my men and forty of Ragnar’s. We were all in mail, all helmeted, all armed. Shields hung at our sides or on our backs, and there were long scabbarded swords at our waists. “I’m going in winter,” I explained, “because Skirnir won’t expect me till spring.”

“You hope,” he said, “but maybe he’s heard you’re an idiot?”

“So come,” I said, “and let’s fight together again.”

He smiled, but did not meet my gaze. “I’ll give you Rollo,” he said, naming one of his best fighters, “and whoever volunteers to go with him. You remember Rollo?”

“Of course.”

“I have duties,” he said vaguely. “I should stay here.” It was not cowardice that made him refuse my invitation. No one could ever accuse Ragnar of timidity. Instead, I think, it was laziness. He was happy and did not need to disturb that happiness. He curbed his horse on the crest of a rise and gestured at the wide strip of coastland that lay beneath us. “There it is,” he said, “the English kingdom.”

“The what?” I asked indignantly. I was gazing at the rain-darkened land with its small hills and smaller fields with their familiar stone walls.

“That’s what everyone calls it,” Ragnar said. “The English kingdom.”

“It isn’t a kingdom,” I said sourly.

“That’s what they call it,” he said patiently. “Your uncle has done well.” I made a vomiting noise which made Ragnar laugh. “Think of it,” he said, “the whole of the north is Danish, all except Bebbanburg’s land.”

“Because none of you could take the fort,” I retorted.

“It probably can’t be taken. My father always said it was too hard.”

“I shall take it,” I said.

We rode down from the hills. Trees were losing their last leaves in the sea wind. The pastures were dark, the thatch of the cottages almost black, and the rich smell of the year’s decay thick in our nostrils. I stopped at one farmstead, deserted because the folk had seen us coming and fled to the woods, and I looked inside the granary to find the harvest had been good. “He gets richer,” I said of my uncle. “Why don’t you tear his land apart?”

“We do when we’re bored,” Ragnar said, “and then he tears ours apart.”

“Why don’t you just capture his land?” I asked, “and let him starve in the fortress.”

“Men have tried that. He either fights or pays them to leave.”

My uncle, who called himself Ælfric of Bernicia, was said to keep over a hundred household warriors in his fortress, and could raise four times that many from the villages scattered across his realm. It was, indeed, a small kingdom. To the north its boundary ran along the Tuede, beyond which lay the land of the Scots who were forever raiding for cattle and crops. To the south of Bebbanburg’s land was the Tinan, where Seolferwulf now lay, and to the west were hills, and all the land beyond the hills and all to the south of the Tinan was in Danish hands. Ragnar ruled south of the river. “We sometimes raid your uncle’s land,” he said, “but if we take twenty cows he’ll come back and take twenty of ours. And when the Scots are troublesome?” he shrugged, leaving the thought unfinished.

“The Scots are always troublesome,” I said.

“His warriors are useful when they raid,” Ragnar admitted.

So Ælfric of Bernicia could be a good neighbor, cooperating with the Danes to repel and punish the Scots, and in return he asked only to be left in peace. That was how Bebbanburg had survived as a Christian enclave in a country of Danes. Ælfric was my father’s younger brother, and he had always been the clever one in the family. If I had not hated him so much I might have admired him. He knew one thing well, that his survival depended on the great fortress where I had been born and which, all my life, I have thought of as home. There had once been a real kingdom ruled from Bebbanburg. My ancestors had been the kings of Bernicia, ruling deep into what the Scots impudently claim as their land, and south toward Eoferwic, but Bernicia had been swallowed into Northumbria, and Northumbria had fallen to the Danes, yet still the old fortress stood and around it was the remnant of that old English kingdom. “Have you met Ælfric?” I asked Ragnar.

“Many times.”

“You didn’t kill him for me?”

“We meet under a truce.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Old, gray, sly, watchful.”

“His sons?”

“Young, cautious, sly, watchful.”

“I heard Ælfric was ill.”

Ragnar shrugged. “He’s close to fifty years old, what man isn’t ill who lives that long? But he recovers.”

My uncle’s eldest son was called Uhtred. That name was an affront. For generations the oldest son in our family has been named Uhtred, and if that heir dies then, as had happened to me, the next youngest son takes the name. My uncle, by naming his eldest Uhtred, was proclaiming that his descendants would be the rulers of Bebbanburg, and their greatest enemy was not the Danes, not even the Scots, but me. Ælfric had tried to kill me, and as long as he lived he would go on trying. He had put a reward on my head, but I was a hard man to kill and it had been years since any warrior dared the attempt. Now I rode toward him, my borrowed horse stepping high through the muck of the cattle-track we followed down from the hills. I could smell the sea and, though the waves were not yet visible, the sky to the east had the empty look of air above water. “He’ll know we’re coming?” I suggested to Ragnar.

“He knows. He never stops watching.”

Horsemen would have sped to Bebbanburg and told of Danes crossing the hills. Even now, I knew, we were being watched. My uncle would not realize I was among the horsemen. His sentinels would have reported Ragnar’s eagle’s-wing banner, but I was not flying my own flag. Not yet.

We had our own scouts riding ahead and to our flanks. For so many years this had been my life. Whenever some restless East Anglian Dane had thought fit to steal a couple of sheep or snatch a cow from some pasture close to Lundene, we would ride in vengeance. This was very different country, though. Near Lundene the ground was flat, while here the small hills hid much of the landscape and so our scouts kept close to us. They saw nothing to alarm them, and they finally stopped on a wooded crest and that was where we joined them.

And beneath me was home.

The fortress was vast. It lay between us and the sea on its great lump of rock, connected to the land by a thin strip of sandy ground. To north and south were the high dunes, but the fortress broke the coast, its crag sheltering a wide shallow pool where a few fishing boats were moored. The village had grown, I saw, but so had the fortress. When I had been a child, a man crossed the sandy spit to reach a wooden palisade with a large gate surmounted by a fighting platform. That entrance, the Low Gate, was still there, and if any enemy fought through that archway he would still have had to climb to a second gate in another wooden palisade that was built on the rock itself, but that second palisade was gone entirely, and in its place was a high stone wall without any gate. So the old main entrance, the High Gate, was gone, and an attacker, if he breached the outer palisade to reach the smithy and the stables, would then have to scale that new stone wall. It was thick, high, and equipped with its own fighting platform, so arrows, spears, boiling water, rocks, and anything else the defenders could find would rain down on an attacking force.

The old gate had been at the fortress’s southern end, but my uncle had made a path along the beach on the seaward side of Bebbanburg, and now a visitor had to follow the path to a new gate at the fort’s northern extremity. The path began in the outer enclosure, so even to reach it, the old wall and its Low Gate had to be taken, then the attackers would have to advance along the new path beneath Bebbanburg’s seaward ramparts, assailed by missiles, and then somehow fight through the new gate, which was also protected by a stone rampart. Even if the attackers somehow got through that new gate, a second wall waited with more defenders, and the attackers would need to capture that inner rampart before they broke through to Bebbanburg’s heart, where two great halls and a church crowned the crag. Tendrils of smoke drifted above the fortress’s roofs.

I swore softly.

“What are you thinking?” Ragnar asked.

I was thinking that Bebbanburg was impregnable. “I’m wondering who has Smoka now.” I said.

“Smoka?”

“Best horse I ever owned.”

Ragnar chuckled and nodded at the fort. “It’s a brute, isn’t it?” he said.

“Land ships at the northern end,” I suggested. If ships came ashore where the new gate was built then the attackers would have no need to fight through the Low Gate.

“The beach is narrow there,” Ragnar warned, though I probably knew the waters about Bebbanburg better than he did, “and you can’t get ships into the harbor,” he added, pointing to where the fishing boats were moored. “Little ships, yes, but anything bigger than a wash tub? Maybe at a spring high tide, but only for an hour or so, and that channel is a bitch when tide and wind are running. Waves build there. You’d be lucky to make it in one piece.”

And even if I could land a dozen crews close to the new gate, what was to stop the defenders sending a force along the new path to trap the attackers? That would only happen if my uncle had warning of an attack and could assemble enough men to spare a force to make that counterattack. So the answer, I thought, was a surprise attack. But a surprise attack would be difficult. The sentries would see the ships approaching and call the garrison to arms, and the attacking crews would have to clamber ashore in the surf, then carry ladders and weapons over a hundred rocky paces to where the new stone wall barred them. It would hardly be a surprise by then, and the defenders would have plenty of time to assemble at the new gate. So two attacks? That meant starting a formal siege, using three or four hundred men to seal off the strip of land leading to the Low Gate. That would prevent reinforcements reaching the garrison and those besiegers could assault the Low Gate while the ships approached the new. That would split the defenders, but I would need at least as many men to attack the new gate, which meant I was looking for a thousand men, say twenty crews, and they would bring wives, servants, slaves, and children, so I would be feeding at least three thousand. “It has to be done,” I said quietly.

“No one has ever captured Bebbanburg,” Ragnar said.

“Ida did.”

“Ida?”

“My ancestor. Ida the Flamebearer. One of the first Saxons in Britain.”

“What kind of fort did he capture?”

I shrugged. “Probably a small one.”

“Maybe nothing but a thorn fence guarded by half-naked savages,” Ragnar said. “The best way to capture that place is to starve the bastards.”

That was a possibility. A small army could seal off the landward approach, and ships could patrol the waters to stop supplies reaching my uncle, but bad weather would drive those ships away, leaving an opportunity for small local vessels to reach the fortress. It would take at least six months to starve Bebbanburg into surrender. Six months of feeding an army and persuading restless Danes to stay and fight. I stared at the Farnea Islands where the sea fret ted white on rocks. Gytha, my stepmother, used to tell me tales of how Saint Cuthbert preached to the seals and the puffins on those rocks. He had lived on the islands as a hermit, eating barnacles and fern fronds, scratching his lice, and so the islands were sacred to Christians, but they were of little practical use. I could not shelter a blockading fleet there, for the scatter of islets offered no shelter, nor did Lindisfarena, that lay to the north. That island was much larger. I could see the remnants of the monastery there, but Lindisfarena offered no decent harbor.

I was still gazing at Lindisfarena, remembering how Ragnar the Elder had slaughtered the monks there. I had been a child, and that same day Ragnar the Elder had let me kill Weland, a man sent by my uncle to murder me, and I had hacked at him with my sword, cutting and slicing him, bleeding him to death in writhing agony. I stared at the island, remembering the death of enemies, when Ragnar touched my elbow. “They’re curious about us,” he said.

Horsemen were riding from the Low Gate. I counted them, reckoning there to be around seventy, which suggested my uncle was not looking for a fight. A man with a hundred household warriors does not want to lose ten in some meaningless skirmish, so he was matching our force with just enough men to deter either side from attacking the other. I watched the horsemen climb the hill toward us. They were in mail and helmeted, with shields and weapons, but they stopped a good four hundred paces away, all except three men who kept riding, though they ostentatiously laid aside their swords and shields before leaving their companions. They flew no banner.

“They want to talk,” Ragnar said.

“Is that my uncle?”

“Yes.”

The three men had curbed their horses halfway between the two armed bands. “I could kill the bastard now,” I said.

“And his son inherits,” Ragnar said, “and everyone knows you killed an unarmed man who had offered a truce.”

“Bastard,” I said of Ælfric. I unbuckled my two swords and tossed them to Finan, then spurred my borrowed horse. Ragnar came with me. I had half hoped my uncle was accompanied by his two sons, and if he had been I might have been tempted to try and kill all three, but instead his companions were two hard-looking warriors, doubtless his best men.

The three waited close to the rotting carcass of a sheep. I assume a wolf had killed the beast, then been driven off by dogs, and the corpse lay there, crawling with maggots, torn by ravens, and buzzing with flies. The wind blew the stench toward us, which was probably why Ælfric had chosen to stop there.

My uncle looked distinguished. He was slender and narrow-faced with a high hooked nose and dark, guarded eyes. His hair, the little that showed beneath his helmet’s rim, was white. He watched me calmly, showing no fear as I stopped close. “I assume you are Uhtred?” he greeted me.

“Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said.

“Then I should congratulate you,” he said.

“Why?”

“For your victory over Harald. The news of it caused much rejoicing among good Christians.”

“So you didn’t rejoice?” I retorted.

“Jarl Ragnar,” Ælfric ignored my small insult and nodded gravely to my companion, “you do me honor with this visit, lord, but you should have given me warning of your arrival. I would have made a feast for you.”

“We’re just exercising the horses,” Ragnar said cheerfully.

“A long way from your home,” Ælfric observed.

“Not from mine,” I said.

The dark eyes brooded on me. “You are always welcome here, Uhtred,” my uncle said, “any time you wish to come home, then just come. Believe me, I shall be glad to see you.”

“I’ll come,” I promised him.

There was silence for a moment. My horse stamped a mud-clodded foot. The two lines of mail-clad warriors watched us. I could just hear the gulls at the distant shore. Their sound had been my childhood noise, never-ending like the sea. “As a child,” my uncle broke the awkward silence, “you were disobedient, headstrong, and foolish. It seems you haven’t changed.”

“Ask Alfred of Wessex,” I said, “he wouldn’t be king now without my headstrong foolishness.”

“Alfred knew how to use you,” my uncle observed. “You were his dog. He fed you and held you. But like a fool you’ve slipped his lead. Who will feed you now?”

“I will,” Ragnar said happily.

“But you, lord,” Ælfric said respectfully, “don’t have enough men to watch them die against my walls. Uhtred will have to find his own men.”

“There are many Danes in Northumbria,” I said.

“And Danes seek gold,” Ælfric said, “do you really think there’s enough inside my walls to draw the Danes of Northumbria to Bebbanburg?” He half smiled. “You will have to find your own gold, Uhtred.” He paused, expecting me to say something, but I kept quiet. A raven, driven away from the sheep’s carcass by our presence, protested from a bare tree. “Do you think your aglæcwif will lead you to the gold?” Ælfric asked.

An aglæcwif was a fiendish woman, a sorceress, and he meant Skade. “I have no aglæcwif,” I said.

“She tempts you with her husband’s riches,” Ælfric said.

“Does she?”

“What else?” he asked. “But Skirnir knows she does that.”

“Because you told him?”

My uncle nodded. “I saw fit to send him news of his wife. A courtesy, I think, to a neighbor across the sea. Skirnir, no doubt, will greet you in the spring as I would greet you, Uhtred, should you decide to come home.” He stressed the last word, curdling it on his tongue, then gathered his reins. “I have nothing more to say to you.” He nodded at Ragnar, then at his men, and the three turned away.

“I’ll kill you!” I shouted after him, “and your cabbage-shitting sons!”

He just waved negligently and kept riding.

I remember thinking he had won that encounter. Ælfric had come from his fastness and he had treated me like a child, and now he rode back to that beautiful place beside the sea where I could not reach him. I did not move.

“What now?” Ragnar asked.

“I’ll hang him with his son’s intestines,” I said, “and piss on his corpse.”

“And how do you do that?”

“I need gold.”

“Skirnir?”

“Where else?”

Ragnar turned his horse. “There’s silver in Scotland,” he said, “and in Ireland.”

“And hordes of savages protect both,” I said.

“Then Wessex?” he suggested.

I had not moved my horse and Ragnar was forced to turn back to me. “Wessex?” I echoed him.

“They say Alfred’s churches are rich.”

“Oh, they are,” I said. “They’re so rich they can afford to send silver to the Pope. They drip with silver. There’s gold on the altars. There’s money in Wessex, my friend, so much money.”

Ragnar beckoned to his men and two of them rode forward with our swords. We buckled the belts around our waists and no longer felt naked. The two men walked their horses away, leaving us alone again. The sea wind brought the smell of home to lessen the smell of the carcass. “So will you attack next year?” I asked my friend.

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Brida thinks I’ve grown fat and happy,” he said.

“You have.”

He smiled briefly. “Why do we fight?” he asked.

“Because we were born,” I answered savagely.

“To find a place we call home,” Ragnar suggested. “A place where we don’t need to fight anymore.”

“Dunholm?”

“It’s as safe a fortress as Bebbanburg,” he said, “and I love it.”

“And Brida wants you to leave it?”

He nodded. “She’s right,” he admitted wanly. “If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There’ll be priests everywhere.”

We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate. All my life I have tried to under stand the past because that past was so glorious and we see remnants of that glory all across Britain. We see the great marble halls the Romans made, and we travel the roads they laid and cross the bridges they built, and it is all fading. The marble cracks in the frost and the walls collapse. Alfred and his like believed they were bringing civilization to a wicked, fallen world, but all he did was make rules. So many rules, but the laws were only ever an expression of hope, because the reality was the burhs, the walls, the spears on the ramparts, the glint of helmets in the dawn, the fear of mailed riders, the thump of hoofbeats, and the screams of victims. Alfred was proud of his schools and his monasteries and his silver-rich churches, but those things were protected by blades. And what was Wessex compared to Rome?

It is hard to bring thoughts into order, but I sense, I have always sensed, that we slide from light to darkness, from glory to chaos, and perhaps that is good. My gods tell us that the world will end in chaos, so perhaps we are living the last days and even I might survive long enough to see the hills crack and the sea boil and the heavens burn as the great gods fight. And in the face of that great doom, Alfred built schools. His priests scurried like mice in rotting thatch, imposing their rules as if mere obedience could stop the doom. Thou shalt not kill, they preached, then screamed at us warriors to slaughter the pagans. Thou shalt not steal, they preached, and forged charters to take men’s lands. Thou shalt not commit adultery, they preached, and rutted other men’s wives like besotted hares in springtime.

There is no sense. The past is a ship’s wake etched on a gray sea, but the future has no mark. “What are you thinking?” Ragnar asked, amused.

“That Brida is right.”

“I must go to Wessex?”

I nodded, yet I knew he did not want to go where so many had failed. All my life till that moment had been spent, one way or another, in attacking or defending Wessex. Why Wessex? What was Wessex to me? It was the bastion of a dark religion in Britain, it was a place of rules, a Saxon place, and I worshiped the older gods, the gods the Saxons themselves had worshiped before the missionaries came from Rome and gave them their new nonsense. Yet I had fought for Wessex. Time and again the Danes tried to capture Wessex, and time and again Uhtred of Bebbanburg had helped the West Saxons. I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea, I had screamed in the shield wall that broke Guthrum’s great army, and I had destroyed Harald. So many Danes had tried, and so many had failed, and I had helped them fail because fate had made me fight for the side with the priests. “Do you want to be King of Wessex?” I asked Ragnar.

He laughed. “No! Do you?”

“I want to be Lord of Bebbanburg.”

“And I want to be Lord of Dunholm.” He paused. “But.”

“But if we don’t stop them,” I finished for him, “they’ll come here.”

“That’s worth fighting for,” Ragnar said reluctantly, “or else our children will be Christians.”

I grimaced, thinking of my own children in Æthelflæd’s household. They would be learning about Christianity. Maybe, by now, they had already been baptized, and that thought gave me a surge of anger and guilt. Should I have stayed in Lundene and meekly accepted the fate Alfred wanted for me? But Alfred had humiliated me once before, forcing me to crawl on my knees to one of his damned altars, and I would not do it again. “We’ll go to Wessex,” I said, “and make you king, and I’ll defend you like I defended Alfred.”

“Next year,” Ragnar said.

“But I won’t go naked,” I said harshly. “I need gold, I need men.”

“You can lead my men,” Ragnar suggested.

“They’re sworn to you. I want my own. I need gold.”

He nodded. He understood what I was saying. A man is judged by his deeds, by his reputation, by the number of his oath-men. I was reckoned a warlord, but so long as I only led a handful of men, so long could people like my uncle afford to insult me. I needed men. I needed gold. “So you really will make a winter voyage to Frisia?” Ragnar asked.

“Why else did the gods send me Skade?” I retorted, and at that moment it was as if the fog had cleared and I could at last see the way ahead. Fate had sent me Skade, and Skade would lead me to Skirnir, and Skirnir’s gold would let me raise the men who would fight with me through the burhs of Wessex, then I would take the silver of the Christian god and employ it to forge the army that would capture Bebbanburg.

It was all so clear. It even seemed easy.

We turned our horses and rode toward Dunholm.

Seolferwulf’s prow slammed into a wave and the water exploded into white shards that whipped down the deck like ice missiles. Green sea surged over the bows and swilled cold into the bilge. “Bail!” I shouted, and the men not working the oars frantically scooped water over the side as our wolf’s-head prow reared into the sky. “Row!” I bellowed, and the oars bit the water and Seolferwulf fell into a trough of the ocean with a crash that made her timbers tremble. I love the sea.

My forty-three men were on board, though I had allowed none of their women or children to accompany us, and Skade was only on board because she knew Zegge, the sandy island where Skirnir had his treasure hoard. I also had thirty-four of Ragnar’s men, all of them volunteers, and together we sailed eastward into the teeth of a winter wind. This was no time to be at sea. Winter was when ships were laid up and men stayed in fire-bright halls, but Skirnir would expect me in the spring so I had risked this winter voyage.

“Wind’s rising!” Finan shouted at me.

“It does that!” I shouted back, and was rewarded with a skeptical look. Finan was never as happy as I was at sea. For months we had shared a rowing bench, and he had endured the discomfort, but he had never reveled in the sea’s threat.

“Shouldn’t we turn and run?” he asked.

“In this little blow? Never!” I yelled at him over the wind’s howl, then flinched as a slap of cold water hit my face. “Row, you bastards,” I shouted, “if you want to live, row!”

We rowed and we lived, reaching the Frisian coast on a morning of cold air, dying winds, and sullen seas. The improving weather had released ships from the local harbors and I followed one into the intricate channels that led to the inner sea, a stretch of shallow water that lies between the islands and the mainland. The ship we followed had eight oarsmen and a cargo hidden beneath a great leather cloth, which suggested she carried salt, flour, or some other commodity that needed to be protected from the rain. The steersman was terrified by our close approach. He saw a wolf-headed ship crammed with fighting men and he feared he was about to be attacked, but I shouted that we merely needed guidance through the channels. The tide was rising, so even if we had gone aground, we would be safe enough, but the cargo ship led us safely into the deeper water, and it was there we first encountered Skirnir’s reach.

A ship, much smaller than Seolferwulf, lay waiting a half-mile beyond the place where the channel emptied into the inner sea. I reckoned she had a crew of around twenty men and she was plainly watching the channels, ready to pounce on any shipping, though the sight of Seolferwulf made her cautious. I guessed she would normally have intercepted the incoming cargo ship, but instead she stayed motionless, watching us. The cargo ship’s steersman pointed at the waiting boat. “I have to pay him, lord.”

“Skirnir?” I asked.

“That’s one of his ships, lord.”

“So pay him!” I said. I spoke in English because the language of the Frisian people is so close to our own.

“He’ll ask me about you, lord,” he called back, and I understood his terror. The waiting ship would be curious about us, and they would demand answers from the trading ship’s master, and if he had no satisfactory explanation they might well attempt to beat it out of him.

“Tell him we’re Danes on our way home,” I said. “My name is Lief Thorrson and if he wants money he must come and ask me.”

“He won’t ask you, lord,” the man said. “A rat doesn’t demand supper from a wolf.”

I smiled at that. “You can tell the rat we mean no harm, we’re just going home, and we merely followed you through the channel, nothing more.” I tossed him a coin, making sure it bore the legend Christiano Religio, which meant it came from Frankia. I did not want to betray that we had come from Britain.

I watched the cargo ship row to Skirnir’s vessel. Skade had been in the small space beneath the steering platform, but now joined me. “That’s the Sea-Raven,” she said, nodding at Skirnir’s ship. “Her master is called Haakon. He’s a cousin to my husband.”

“So he’ll recognize you?”

“Of course.”

“Then don’t let him see you,” I said.

She bridled at that direct order, but did not argue. “He won’t come near us,” she said.

“No?”

“Skirnir leaves fighting ships alone, unless he outnumbers them by four or five to one.”

I gazed at the Sea-Raven. “You said he had sixteen ships like that?”

“Two years ago,” she said, “he had sixteen about that size, and two larger boats.”

“That was two years ago,” I said grimly. We had come into Skirnir’s lair where we would be grossly outnumbered, but I reckoned he would still be wary of us. He would learn that a Viking ship was in his waters, and he would fear that an attack on us might bring other Vikings to take revenge. Would it cross his mind that Uhtred of Bebbanburg might have risked a winter voyage? Even if not, he would surely be curious about Lief Thorrson, and would not relax till that curiosity had been satisfied.

I ordered the wolf’s head taken from the prow, then turned Seolferwulf toward the mainland shore. The Sea-Raven made no move to intercept us, but she did start to follow us, though when I checked the oars, as if waiting for her to catch up, she veered away. We rowed on and she fell out of sight behind us.

I wanted a place to hide, but there was too much shipping for that to be possible. Wherever we took shelter some local boat would see us, and the report would be passed from ship to ship until it reached Skirnir. If we were indeed a Danish ship on passage, going home for the dark winter nights, he would expect us to be gone from his waters in two or three days, so the longer we lingered, the greater his suspicion. And here, in the treacherous shoal waters of the inner sea, we were the rat and Skirnir the wolf.

We rowed north and east all day. We went slowly. Skirnir would hear that we were doing what he anticipated, making passage, and he would expect us to seek shelter for the night. We found that shelter in a creek on the mainland shore, though the tangle of marsh, sand, and inlets hardly deserved to be called a shore. It was a place of waterfowl, reeds, and hovels. A small village lay on the creek’s southern bank, merely a dozen cottages and a small wooden church. It was a fishing community, and the folk watched Seolferwulf nervously, fearing we might come ashore to steal what little they possessed. Instead we purchased eel and herring from them, paying with Frankish silver, and we carried a barrel of Dunholm’s ale to the village.

I took six men with me, leaving the remainder on Seolferwulf. All the men I took were Ragnar’s Danes and we boasted of a successful summer cruise in the lands far to the south. “Our ship has a belly of gold and silver,” I crowed, and the villagers just stared at us, trying to imagine the life of men who sailed to steal treasure from far shores. I let the ale-loosened conversation turn to Skirnir, though I learned little enough. He had men, he had ships, he had family, and he ruled the inner sea. He was evidently no fool. He would let fighting ships like Seolferwulf pass unmolested, but any other vessel had to pay to use the safe channels inside the islands where he had his lair. If a shipmaster could not pay, then he forfeited his cargo, his ship, and probably his life. “So they all pay,” a man said glumly.

“Who does Skirnir pay?” I demanded.

“Lord?” he asked, not understanding the question.

“Who allows him to be here?” I asked, but they did not know the answer. “There must be a lord of this land,” I explained, gesturing at the darkness beyond the fire, but if there was such a lord who permitted Skirnir to rule the sea then these villagers did not know of him. Even the village priest, a fellow as hairy and dirt-matted as his parishioners, did not know if there was a lord of the marshes. “So what does Skirnir want of you?” I asked him.

“We have to give him food, lord,” the priest said.

“And men,” one of the villagers added.

“Men?”

“The young men go to him, lord. They serve on his ships.”

“They go willingly?”

“He pays silver,” a villager said grudgingly.

“He takes girls too,” the priest said.

“So he pays his men with silver and women?”

“Yes, lord.”

They did not know how many ships Skirnir possessed, though the priest was certain he only had two the size of Seolferwulf. We heard the same things the next night when we stopped at another village in another creek on that treeless shore. We had rowed all day, the mainland to our right and the islands to our north and west. Skade had pointed to Zegge, but from our distance it looked little different from any other island. Many of them had mounds, the terpen, but we were so far off that we could see no detail. Sometimes only the shimmering dark shape of a terpen showing at the sea’s edge betrayed that there was an island just beyond the horizon.

“So what do we do?” Finan asked me that night.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

He grinned. The water lapped at Seolferwulf ’s hull. We slept aboard her and most of the crew had already swathed themselves in cloaks and had lain down between the benches while Skade, Finan, Osferth, and Rollo, who was the leader of Ragnar’s men, talked with me on the steering platform.

“Skirnir has around four hundred men,” I said.

“Maybe four hundred and fifty,” Skade said.

“So we kill six men apiece,” Rollo said. He was an easygoing man like Ragnar, with a round and guileless face, though that was deceiving for, though he was young, he had already earned a reputation as a formidable fighter. He was called Rollo the Hairy, not just because he wore his fair hair down to his waist, but because he had woven the locks of hair cut from his dead enemies into a thick sword belt. “I wish Saxons would grow their hair longer,” he had grumbled to me as we crossed the sea.

“If they did,” I had said, “you’d have ten sword belts.”

“I already have seven,” he said, and grinned.

“How many men on Zegge?” I now asked Skade.

“No more than a hundred.”

Osferth spat out a fish bone. “You’re thinking of attacking Zegge directly, lord?”

“It won’t work,” I said, “we won’t find our way through the shoals.” One thing I had learned from the villagers was that Zegge was surrounded by shallow waters, that the channels shifted with the sand and tide, and that none of the passages was marked.

“What then?” Osferth asked.

A star fell. It scratched a flicker of light across the darkness and was gone, and with its fall the answer came to me. I had been thinking that I would attack Skirnir’s ships one by one, destroying the small ships and so weakening him, but within a day or two he would realize what was happening and he would use his larger ships to destroy us. There was no safe way to attack Skirnir. He had found a perfect refuge in the islands, and I would need ten ships like Seolferwulf to challenge him there.

So I had to lure him out of his perfect refuge. I smiled. “You’re going to betray me,” I told Osferth.

“I am?”

“Who’s your father?”

“You know who my father is,” he said resentfully. He never liked being reminded that he was Alfred’s bastard.

“And your father is old,” I said, “and his chosen heir is scarcely weaned, and you are a warrior. You want gold.”

“I do?”

“You want gold to raise men, because you want to be King of Wessex.”

Osferth snorted at that. “I don’t,” he said.

“You do now,” I said, “because you’re the bastard son of a king and you have a warrior’s reputation. And tomorrow you betray me.”

I told him how.

Nothing great is done without risk, but there are times I look back on those days and am amazed at the risk we ran in Frisia. It was, in its small way, like luring Harald to Fearnhamme, because again I divided my forces, and again I risked everything on the assumption that my enemy would do exactly what I wished him to do. And once again the lure was Skade.

She was so beautiful. It was a sinuous dark beauty. To look at her was to want her, to know her was to distrust her, but the distrust was ever conquered by that extraordinary beauty. Her face was high-boned, smooth-skinned, large-eyed, and full-mouthed. Her black hair was lustrous, her body was languorous. Of course many girls are beautiful, but life is hard on a woman. Childbirth racks her body like storms, and the never-ending work of pounding grains and spinning yarn takes its toll on that early loveliness, yet Skade, even though she had lived longer than twenty years, had kept her fresh beauty. She knew it too, and it mattered to her, for it had carried her from a widow’s poor house to the high tables of long-beamed mead halls. She liked to say that she had been sold to Skirnir, but in truth she had welcomed him, then been disappointed by him because, for all the treasure he amassed, he had no ambitions beyond the Frisian Islands. He had found a plump patch for piracy, and it made no sense to Skirnir to sail far away to seek a plumper patch, and so Skade had found Harald, who promised her Wessex, and now she had found me.

“She’s using you,” Brida had told me in Dunholm.

“I’m using her,” I had answered.

“There are a dozen whores here who’ll prove cheaper,” Brida had retorted scornfully.

So Skade was using me, but for what? She was demanding half her husband’s hoard, but what would she do with it? When I asked her, she shrugged as if the question was unimportant, but late that night, before Osferth’s feigned betrayal, she spoke with me. Why did I want her husband’s money?

“You know why.”

“To take your fortress back?”

“Yes.”

She lay silent for a while. The water made its small noise along Seolferwulf ’s strakes. I could hear the snores of my men, the shifting feet of the sentries in the prow and above our heads on the steering platform. “And what then?” she asked.

“I will be the Lord of Bebbanburg,” I said.

“As Skirnir is Lord of Zegge?”

“There was a time,” I said, “when the Lord of Bebbanburg ruled far into the north and all the way down to the Humbre.”

“They ruled Northumbria?”

“Yes.”

I was bewitched by her. My ancestors had never ruled Northumbria, merely the northern part of that kingdom when it was divided between two thrones, but I was laying imaginary tribute at her feet. I was holding out the prospect of her being a queen, for that was what Skade wanted. She wanted to rule, and for that she needed a man who could lead warriors, and for the moment she believed I was that man.

“Guthred rules Northumbria now?” she asked.

“And he’s mad,” I said, “and he’s sick.”

“And when he dies?”

“Another man will be king,” I said.

She slid a long thigh up mine, caressed a hand across my chest and kissed my shoulder. “Who?” she asked.

“Whoever is strongest,” I said.

She kissed me again, then she lay still, dreaming. And I dreamed of Bebbanburg, of its windswept halls, its small fields and its tough, dour people. And I thought of the risk we must run in the dawn.

Earlier that night, under the cover of darkness, we had loaded a small boat with mail coats, weapons, helmets, and my iron-bound chest. We had carried that precious cargo to the uninhabited northern side of the creek and hidden it among reeds. Two men stayed to guard it, and their orders were to stay concealed.

In the morning, as the fishermen waded to their moored ships, we began the argument. We shouted, we bellowed insults, and then, as the villagers paused in their tasks to watch Seolferwulf, we began to fight. Swords clashed, there was the thump of steel on shield-wood, the screams of injured men, though none was really hurt. Some of my men were laughing at the pretense, but from the creek’s shore it would have all looked real, and slowly a part of the crew was driven to Seolferwulf ’s stern where they began to leap to safety. I was one of them. I wore no mail and the only weapon I had was Wasp-Sting and I held onto her as I leaped. Skade jumped with me. Our ship was anchored on the creek’s southern side, away from the deeper water in the channel’s center, and none of us needed to swim. I floundered for a moment, then my feet found the muddy bottom and I grabbed hold of Skade and dragged her toward the village. The men remaining on Seolferwulf jeered at us, and Osferth hurled a spear that came perilously close to me. “Go and die!” Osferth shouted.

“And take your whore with you!” Finan added. Another spear splashed into the creek, and I seized it as we struggled up the shelving beach.

There were thirty-two of us, just under half the crew, while the rest had stayed aboard Seolferwulf. We came ashore soaking wet, none of us in mail and some without even a weapon. The villagers gaped at us. The fishermen had paused to watch the fight, but now some headed out to sea, but not before I made certain they had a good view of Skade. She wore a thin linen shift that clung wetly to her shivering body, and she had gold at her neck and on her wrists. The villagers might not have recognized her, but they would remember her.

A pair of fishing boats still lay at their moorings and I waded out to one and hauled myself aboard. Back on the beach my small band was gathering round a herring-smoking fire to dry themselves. I had Rollo and ten of his men, the rest were my warriors.

We watched as Osferth’s men hauled up the stone anchor, then took Seolferwulf out of the creek. She used ten oars on each side, and she went slowly. I felt a moment of alarm as she turned northeast and her pale hull was hidden from me by the intervening dunes. A ship is a kind of fortress, and I had abandoned her, and I touched Thor’s hammer in a silent plea that the gods would preserve us.

Skirnir, I knew, would hear of the fight. He would learn that Seolferwulf was half-crewed, and he would hear of the tall, black-haired, gold-draped girl. He would know that we had been abandoned without mail and with few weapons. Thus I baited him. I had thrown down the raw meat and now waited for the wolf to come to the trap.

We used the fishing boat to cross the creek and made a driftwood fire on the beach. We stayed all day, like men who had no plan. It began to rain in the late morning, and after a while the rain became harder, crashing down from a low gray sky. We piled wood on the fire, the flames fighting the downpour that hid us as we brought back the weapons and mail we had hidden the night before. I now had thirty-four men, and I sent two of them to explore the creek’s higher reaches. Both men had been raised on the banks of the Temes where it widens into the sea, and the coast there is not unlike the shore where we were stranded. They could both swim, both were at ease in the marshes, and I told them what I wanted and they set off to find it. They came back in the late afternoon, just as the rain was easing.

In the early evening, when the fishing boats returned on an incoming tide, I took six men over the creek and used a handful of silver scraps to buy fish. We all had swords, and the villagers treated us with a cautious respect. “What lies that way?” I asked them, pointing up the creek.

They knew there was a monastery inland, but it was far off, and only three of the men had ever seen the place. “It’s a whole day’s journey,” they said with awe.

“Well I can’t go to sea,” I said, “or Skirnir will catch us.”

They said nothing to that. The very name of Skirnir was frightening.

“I hear he’s a rich man,” I remarked.

One of the old men made the sign of the cross. I had seen wooden idols in the village, but the folk knew of Christianity too, and his quick gesture told me that I had frightened him. “His treasure, lord,” he told me quietly, “is in a great mound, and a huge dragon guards it.”

“A dragon?”

“A fire dragon, lord, with black wings to shadow the moon.” He made the sign of the cross again, then, to make certain, tugged a hammer amulet from beneath his filthy shirt and kissed it.

We took the food back to our side of the creek and then, on the last of the flood, we rowed the fishing boat inland. It was crowded and our small boat floated low. The villagers watched until we vanished, and still we rowed, gliding between reed beds and mudbanks until we reached the place that my two scouts had chosen. They had done well. The place was exactly what I wanted, an island of dunes isolated in a tangle of water, and accessible only in two places. We grounded the boat and lit another driftwood fire. The day was ending. The dark clouds had blown westward so that Skirnir’s sea was in deep shadow, while to the east the land glowed beneath the dying sun. I could see the smoke of three settlements and, far on the horizon, some low hills where the tangle of marsh and sand ended and the higher land began. I assumed the monastery was in those hills, but it was too far away to be seen. Then the sun slid below the rain clouds and everything was in shadow, but a call from Rollo made me turn to see ships approaching the coast in the last of the daylight. Two large ships came first. They came from the direction of the islands, and then a third ship, paler than the first two and travelling much slower because she had fewer oarsmen.

Seolferwulf was the last of the three ships, while the darker pair belonged to Skirnir.

The wolf had come for his bitch.