The Burning Land

TWO

A storm came that night. It hurtled sudden from the north, its first signs a violent gust of wind that shuddered across the fortress. Within moments clouds drowned the stars and lightning shivered the sky. The storm woke me in the house where I had sweated and frozen through the sickness, and I heard the first few heavy drops of rain fall plump and hard on the thatch, then it seemed as though a river was emptying itself on Dunholm’s fort. The sky seethed and the rain’s noise was louder than any thunder. I got out of bed and wrapped a blanket of sheepskins around my naked shoulders and went to stand in the doorway where I pulled aside the leather curtain. The girl in my bed whimpered and I told her to join me. She was a Saxon slave, and I lifted the blanket to enfold her and she stood pressed against me, wide-eyed in the lightning flashes as she watched the roaring darkness. She said something, but what it was I could not tell because the wind and the rain drowned her words.

The storm came fast and it went fast. I watched the lightning travel southward and heard the rain diminish, and then it seemed as though the night held its breath in the silence that followed the thunder. The rain stopped, though water still dripped from the eaves, and some trickled through the thatch to hiss on the remnants of the fire. I threw new wood onto the smoldering embers, added kindling, and let the flames leap upward. The leather curtain was still hooked open and I saw the firelight brighten in other houses and in the two big halls. It was a restless night at Dunholm. The girl lay on the bed again, swathing herself in fleeces and furs, and her fire-bright eyes watched as I drew Serpent-Breath from her scabbard and slid the blade slowly through the newly revived flames. I did it twice, slowly bathing each side of her long blade, then wiping the steel with the sheepskin. “Why do you do that, lord?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, nor did I, except that Serpent-Breath, like all swords, had been born in flames and sometimes I liked to bathe her in fire to preserve whatever sorcery had been enchanted into her at the moment of her creation. I kissed the warm steel reverently and slid it back into her scabbard. “We can be certain of nothing,” I said, “except our weapons and death.”

“We can be certain of God, lord,” she insisted in a small voice.

I smiled, but said nothing. I wondered if my gods cared about us. Perhaps that was the advantage of the Christian god, that he had somehow convinced his followers that he did care, that he watched over them and protected them, yet I did not see that Christian children died any less often than pagan children, or that Christians were spared disease and floods and fire. Yet Christians forever declared their god’s love.

Footsteps sounded wet outside. Someone was running toward my hut and, though I was safe inside Ragnar’s fortress, I instinctively reached for Serpent-Breath, and was still holding the hilt as a burly man ducked inside the open doorway. “Dear sweet Jesus,” he said, “but it’s cold out there.”

I let go of the sword as Father Pyrlig crouched on the fire’s far side. “You couldn’t sleep?” I asked.

“Now who in God’s name could sleep through that storm?” he demanded. “You’d have to be deaf, blind, drunk, and stupid to sleep through that. Good morning, lord,” he grinned at me, “naked like a newborn as you are.” He twisted his head and smiled at the slave. “Blessings on you, child,” he said.

She was nervous of the newcomer and glanced anxiously at me. “He’s a kind man,” I reassured her, “and a priest.” Father Pyrlig was dressed in breeches and jerkin with no sign of any priestly robes. He had arrived the previous evening, earning a chill reception from Brida, but enchanting Ragnar with his exaggerated tales of battle. He had been drunk by the time Ragnar went to bed, so I had found very little chance to talk with my old friend.

I took a cloak from a peg and clasped it around my throat. The wool was damp. “Does your god love you?” I asked Pyrlig.

He laughed at that. “My God, what a question, lord! Well, he keeps me miles away from my wife, so he does, and what greater blessing can a man ask? And he fills my belly and he keeps me amused! Did I tell you about the slave girl that died of drinking milk?”

“The cow collapsed on her,” I said flatly.

“He’s a funny man, that Cnut,” Pyrlig said, “I’ll regret it when you kill him.”

“I kill him?” I asked. The girl stared at me.

“You’ll probably have to,” Pyrlig said.

“Don’t listen to him,” I told the girl, “he’s raving.”

“I’m Welsh, my darling,” he explained to her, then turned back to me, “and can you tell me, lord, why a good Welshman should be doing Saxon business?”

“Because you’re an interfering earsling,” I said, “and god knows what arse you dropped out of, but here you are.”

“God uses strange instruments for his wondrous purposes,” Pyrlig said. “Why don’t you dress and watch the dawn with me?”

Father Pyrlig, like Bishop Asser, was a Welshman who had found employment in Alfred’s service, though he told me he had not come to Dunholm from Wessex, but rather from Mercia. “I was last in Wintanceaster at Christmas,” he told me, “and my God, poor Alfred is sick! He looks like a warmed-up corpse, he does, and not very well warmed-up either.”

“What were you doing in Mercia?”

“Smelling the place,” he said mysteriously, then, just as mysteriously, added, “it’s that wife of his.”

“Whose wife?”

“Ælswith. Why did Alfred marry her? She should feed the poor man some butter and cream, make him eat some good beef.”

Father Pyrlig had eaten his share of butter and cream. He was big-bellied, broad-shouldered, and eternally cheerful. His hair was a tangled mess, his grin was infectious, and his religion was carried lightly, though never shallowly. He stood beside me above Dunholm’s south gate and I told him how Ragnar and I had captured the fortress. Pyrlig, before he became a priest, had been a warrior and he appreciated the tale of how I had sneaked inside Dunholm by a water-gate on the west side, and how we had survived long enough to open the gate above which we now stood, and how Ragnar had led his flame-bearing sword-Danes through the gate and into the fortress where we had fought Kjartan’s men to defeat and death. “Ah,” he said when the tale was finished, “I should have been here. It sounds like a rare fight!”

“So what brings you here now?”

He grinned at me. “A man can’t just visit an old friend?”

“Alfred sent you,” I said sourly.

“I told you, I came here from Mercia, not Wessex.” He leaned on the palisade’s top. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “the night before you captured Lundene?”

“I do remember,” I said, “that you told me you were dressed for prayer that night. You were in mail and carried two swords.”

“What better time to pray than before a battle?” he asked. “And that was another rare fight, my friend.”

“It was.”

“And before it, lord,” he said, “you made an oath.”

My anger rose as swiftly as the river had been swollen by the storm’s sudden rain. “Damn Alfred and his oaths,” I said, “damn him to his hell. I gave that bastard the best years of my life! He wouldn’t even sit on the throne of Wessex if I hadn’t fought for him! Harald Bloodhair would be king now, and Alfred would be rotting in his tomb, and does he thank me? Once in a while he’d pat me on the head like a damned dog, but then he lets that turd-brained monk insult Gisela and he expects me to crawl to him for forgiveness after I kill the bastard. Yes,” I said, turning to look into Pyrlig’s broad face, “I took an oath. Then let me tell you I am breaking it. It is broken. The gods can punish me for that and Alfred can rot in hell’s depth for all I care.”

“I doubt it will be him in hell,” Pyrlig said mildly.

“You think I’d want to be in your heaven?” I demanded. “All those priests and monks and dried-up nuns? I’d rather risk hell. No, father, I am not keeping my oath to Alfred. You can ride back and you can tell him that I have no oath to him, no allegiance, no duty, no loyalty, nothing! He’s a scabby, ungrateful, cabbage-farting, squint-eyed bastard!”

“You know him better than I do,” Pyrlig said lightly.

“He can take his oath and shit on it,” I snarled. “Go back to Wessex and give him that answer.” A shout made me turn, but it was only a servant bellowing at a protesting horse. One of the lords was leaving and evidently making an early start. A group of warriors, helmeted and in mail, were already mounted, while two horses waited with empty saddles. A pair of Ragnar’s men ran to the gate beneath us and I heard the bar being lifted.

“Alfred didn’t send me,” Pyrlig said.

“You mean this is all your idea? To come and remind me of my oath? I don’t need reminding.”

“To break an oath is a…”

“I know!” I shouted.

“Yet men break oaths all the time,” Pyrlig went on calmly, gazing south to where the first gray light of dawn was touching the crests of the hills. “Maybe that’s why we hedge oaths with harsh law and strict custom, because we know they will be broken. I think Alfred knows you will not return. He is sad about that. If Wessex is attacked then he will lack his sharpest sword, but even so he didn’t send me. He thinks Wessex is better without you. He wants a godly country and you were a thorn in that ambition.”

“He might need some thorns if the Danes return to Wessex,” I snarled.

“He trusts in God, Lord Uhtred, he trusts in God.”

I laughed at that. Let the Christian god defend Wessex against the Northumbrian Danes when they stormed ashore in the summer. “If Alfred doesn’t want me back,” I said, “then why are you wasting my time?”

“Because of the oath you made on the eve of the battle for Lundene,” Pyrlig said, “and it was the person to whom you made that promise who asked me to come here.”

I stared at him and fancied I heard the laughter of the Norns. The three spinners. The busy-fingered Norns who weave our fate. “No,” I said, but without anger or force.

“She sent me.”

“No,” I said again.

“She wants your help.”

“No!” I protested.

“And she asked me to remind you that you once swore to serve her.”

I closed my eyes. It was true, all true. Had I forgotten that oath I made in the night before we attacked Lundene? I had not forgotten it, but nor had I ever thought that oath would harness me. “No,” I said again, this time a mere whisper of denial.

“We are all sinners, lord,” Pyrlig said gently, “but even the church recognizes that some sins are worse than others. The oath you made to Alfred was duty and it should have been rewarded with gratitude, land, and silver. It is wrong of you to break that oath and I cannot approve, but I understand that Alfred was careless in his duty toward you. But the oath you made to the lady was sworn in love, and that oath you cannot break without destroying your soul.”

“Love?” I made the query sound like a challenge.

“You loved Gisela, I know, and you did not break the oaths you gave to her, but you love the lady who sent me. You always have. I see it in your face, and I see it in hers. You are blind to it, but it dazzles the rest of us.”

“No,” I said.

“She is in trouble,” Pyrlig said.

“Trouble?” I asked dully.

“Her husband is sick in the mind.”

“Is he mad?”

“Not so you’d know.”

Beneath me the hinges squealed as the two great gates were pushed outward. Ragnar, bare-legged beneath swathing cloaks, was shouting farewell to the horsemen who passed beneath us through Dunholm’s High Gate, the hooves clattering on the stones of the road that led down through the town. One of the riders turned and I saw it was Haesten who raised a hand to salute me, and I raised a hand in return, then froze because the rider next to him also twisted in her saddle. She smiled, but savagely. It was Skade. She must have seen the astonishment on my face because she laughed, then kicked her heels so her horse rode free and fast downhill. “Trouble,” I said, watching her, “more trouble than you know.”

“Because Haesten will attack Mercia?” Pyrlig asked.

I did not confirm that, though I doubted Haesten would have kept his intentions secret. “Because that woman is with him,” I said.

“Women brought sin into this world,” Pyrlig said, “and by God they do keep it bubbling. But I can’t imagine a world without them, can you?”

“She wants me to go to her?”

“Yes,” Pyrlig said, “and she sent me to fetch you. She also told me to tell you something else. That if you cannot keep the oath then she releases you from it.”

“So I don’t have to go,” I said.

“No.”

“But I made the oath.”

“Yes.”

To Æthelflæd. I had escaped Alfred and felt nothing but relief at the freedom I had found, and now his daughter summoned me. And Pyrlig was right. Some oaths are made with love, and those we cannot break.

All winter I had felt like a steersman in a fog, tideswept to nowhere, windblown to no harbor, lost, but now it was as though the fog lifted. The Fates had shown me the landmark I had sought, and if it was not the landmark I had wished for, it still gave my ship direction.

I had indeed sworn an oath to Æthelflæd. Almost every promise I had ever made to her father had been wrung from me, sometimes forced from me, but so was the oath I swore to Æthelflæd. The promise to serve her had been her price for giving me men to help in the desperate assault on Lundene, and I remembered resenting that price, but I had still knelt to her and given her the vow.

I had known Æthelflæd since she was a child, the one child of Alfred’s who had mischief and life and laughter, and I had seen those qualities curdled by the marriage to my cousin. And in the months and years after the oath I had come to love her, not as I loved Gisela who was a friend to Æthelflæd, but as a sparkling girl whose light was being doused by the cruelty of men. And I had served her. I had protected her. And now she asked me to protect her again, and the request filled me with indecision. I busied the next few days with activity, hunting and practicing weapons, and Finan, who often sparred sword-to-sword with me, stepped back one day and asked if I was trying to kill him. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s the Welsh priest, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s fate,” I said.

“And where’s fate taking us, lord?” he asked.

“South,” I said, “south,” and I hated that word. I was a northerner, Northumbria was my country, yet the spinners were taking me south.

“To Alfred?” Finan asked in disbelief.

“No,” I said, “to Æthelflæd,” and as I said her name I knew I could delay no longer.

So, a week after Haesten left, I went to Ragnar and I lied to him because I did not want him to see my betrayal. “I’m going to protect my children,” I told him.

“Haesten surely won’t kill them,” he tried to reassure me.

“But Skade will.”

He thought about that, then nodded. “True.”

“Or she’ll sell them into slavery,” I said bleakly. “She hates me.”

“Then you must go,” he said. And so I rode from Dunholm, and my men came with me because they were oath-sworn, and their families came too and because of that Ragnar knew I was riding away for good. He had watched my men load packhorses with mail and weapons, and he had gazed at me, hurt and puzzled. “Are you going to Wessex?” he asked.

“No,” I promised him, and I spoke truthfully.

Brida knew it. “Then where?” she demanded angrily.

“To my children.”

“You’ll bring them back here?” Ragnar had asked eagerly.

“There is a friend,” I avoided answering his question, “who has the care of my children, and she is in trouble.”

Brida cut through my evasions. “Alfred’s daughter?” she asked scornfully.

“Yes.”

“Who hates the Danes,” Brida said.

“She has pleaded for my help,” I spoke to Ragnar, “and I cannot refuse her.”

“Women weaken you,” Brida snarled at me. “What of your promise to sail with Ragnar?”

“I made no such promise,” I snapped back at her.

“We need you!” Ragnar pleaded.

“Me and my half-crew?”

“If you don’t help destroy Wessex,” Brida said, “you will get no share in Wessex’s wealth, and without that, Uhtred, you have no hopes of Bebbanburg.”

“I am riding to find my children,” I said obstinately, and both Ragnar and Brida knew that was a half-truth at best.

“You were always a Saxon before you were a Dane,” Brida said derisively. “You want to be a Dane, but you don’t have the courage.”

“You may be right,” I admitted.

“We should kill you now,” Brida said, and she meant it.

Ragnar laid a hand on Brida’s arm to silence her, then embraced me. “You are my brother,” he said. He held me close for an instant. He knew, and I knew, that I was going back to the Saxons, that we would forever be on opposing sides, and all I could do was promise that I would never fight against him.

“And will you betray our plans to Alfred?” Brida demanded. Ragnar might make his peace with my departure, but Brida was ever unforgiving.

“I hate Alfred,” I said, “and wish you joy in toppling his kingdom.”

There, I have written it, and it hurt me to write it because the memory of that parting is so painful. Brida hated me at that moment, and Ragnar was saddened, and I was a coward. I hid behind the fate of my children and betrayed my friendship. All winter Ragnar had sheltered me and fed my men, and now I deserted him. He had been happy with me at his side, and he was unhappy at the prospect of fighting Wessex, but he had thought he and I would wage that war together. Now I left him. He allowed me to leave him. Brida truly would have killed me that day, but Ragnar forgave me. It was a clear spring day. It was the day my life changed. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

So we rode south and for a long time I could not speak. Father Pyrlig sensed my mood and said nothing till at last I broke the morose silence. “You say my cousin’s sick in the mind?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “and no.”

“Thank you for making it so plain,” I said.

He half smiled. He rode beside me, eyes narrowed against the day’s sun. “He’s not mad as poor Guthred is mad,” he said after a while, “he doesn’t have visions or talk to the angels or chew the rushes. He’s angry that he’s not a king. Æthelred knows that when he dies Mercia will fall to Wessex. That’s what Alfred wants, and what Alfred wants he usually gets.”

“So why does Æthelflæd send for me?”

“Your cousin hates his wife,” Pyrlig said, his voice low so it would not carry to Finan and Sihtric who rode close behind. A dog harried sheep out of our path, obeying the shrill whistle of a shepherd on a farther hill. Pyrlig sighed. “Every time he sees Æthelflæd,” he went on, “he feels the chains that Alfred has hung on him. He would be king, and he cannot be king because Alfred will not allow it.”

“Because Alfred wants to be King of Mercia?”

“Alfred wants to be King of England,” Pyrlig said, “and if he can not boast that title, then he would have his son wear that crown. And so there cannot be another Saxon king. A king is God’s anointed, a king is sacred, so there must be no other anointed king to obstruct the path.”

“And Æthelred resents that,” I said.

“He does, and he would punish his wife.”

“How?”

“By divorcing her.”

“Alfred wouldn’t stand for it,” I said dismissively.

“Alfred is a sick man. He could die at any moment.”

“Divorcing her,” I said, “which means…” I paused. Æthelflæd, of course, had told me of her husband’s ambitions before, but I still found them scarcely credible. “No, he wouldn’t do that!”

“He tried when we all thought Alfred lay dying,” Pyrlig said, “and Æthelflæd got word of what was to happen and took refuge in a nunnery at Lecelad.”

“On the border of Wessex?”

Pyrlig nodded. “So she can flee to her father if they try again, which they will.”

I swore softly. “Aldhelm?” I asked.

“The Lord Aldhelm,” Pyrlig agreed.

“Æthelred will force her to Aldhelm’s bed?” I asked, my voice rising with incredulity.

“That would be the Lord Æthelred’s pleasure,” Pyrlig said drily, “and doubtless Lord Aldhelm’s greater pleasure. And when it is done Æthelred can offer the church proof of adultery, confine her to a nunnery and the marriage is over. Then he’s free to marry again, beget an heir, and as soon as Alfred dies he can call himself king.”

“So who protects her?” I asked, “and who protects my children?”

“Nuns.”

“No man protects her?”

“Her husband is the giver of gold, not she,” Pyrlig said. “Men love her, but she has no wealth to give them.”

“She does now,” I said savagely, and dug my spurs into the horse I had purchased in Dunholm. I did not have much wealth left. I had purchased more than seventy horses to make this journey possible, and the little silver that remained was packed into two saddlebags, but I had Serpent-Breath and I had Wasp-Sting and now, because the three spinners had twisted my life yet again, I had a purpose. I would go to Æthelflæd.

Lecelad was a straggle of hovels built along the northern bank of the Temes where the Lec, a boggy stream, flowed into the river. A watermill stood where the stream emptied itself, and next to it was a wharf where a handful of small, leaking boats was tied. At the eastern end of the village street, which was a collection of mud-colored puddles, was the convent. It was surrounded by a palisade built, I suspected, to keep the nuns in rather than their enemies out, and over that rain-darkened wall reared a gaunt and ugly church made of timber and wattle. The bell-tower scraped the low clouds as rain seethed from the west. On the far side of the Temes was a wooden landing stage and above it, on the bank, a group of men who sheltered beneath a makeshift awning propped on poles. They were all in mail, their spears stacked against a willow. I stepped onto the wharf, cupped my hands, and shouted at them. “Who do you serve?”

“Lord Æthelnoth!” one of the men shouted back. He did not recognize me. I was swathed in a dark cloak and had a hood over my fair hair.

“Why are you there?” I shouted, but the only reply was a shrug of incomprehension.

That southern bank was West Saxon territory, which was doubtless why Æthelflæd had chosen Lecelad. She could flee into her father’s kingdom at a moment’s notice, though Alfred, who held the bonds of marriage to be sacred, would doubtless be reluctant to offer her refuge for fear of the resultant scandal. Nevertheless I guessed he had ordered Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte to watch the convent, if for no other reason than to report any strange happenings on the river’s Mercian bank. They would have something to report now, I thought.

“Who are you, lord?” the man called back across the river. He might not have recognized me, but he saw I led a band of horsemen and perhaps the gold of my lavish cloak-brooch glinted in the dull rainy air.

I ignored his question, turning instead to Finan who grinned at me from horseback. “Just thirty men, lord,” he told me. I had sent him to explore the village and find how many men guarded the convent.

“Is that all?”

“There are more in a village to the north,” he said.

“Who commands the thirty?”

“Some poor bastard who almost shit himself when he saw us.”

The thirty men were posted in Lecelad itself, presumably on my cousin’s orders and presumably to make sure Æthelflæd stayed immured in the ugly convent. I hauled myself into the wet, slippery saddle and fiddled my right foot into the stirrup. “Let’s kick this wasp’s nest,” I said.

I led my men eastward past cottages, dunghills, and rooting pigs. Some folk watched us from doorways, while at the street’s end, in front of the convent itself, a straggle of men in leather jerkins and rusted helmets waited, but if they had orders to prevent anyone entering the convent they were in no mood to enforce them. They moved sullenly aside as we approached. I ignored them and they neither demanded my name nor tried to stop us.

I kicked the convent’s gate, spattering rain from its upper edge. My horse whinnied, and I kicked the gate a second time. The Mercian troops watched. One ran into an alley and I suspected he was going to fetch help. “We’ll be fighting someone before this day’s through,” I told Finan.

“I hope so, lord,” he said gloomily, “it’s been much too long.”

A small hatch in the big gate slid open and a woman’s face appeared in the hole. “What do you want?” the face demanded.

“To get out of this rain,” I said.

“The villagers will offer you shelter,” the woman said and began to slide the hatch shut, but I managed to get my toe into the space.

“You can open the gate,” I said, “or you can watch us chop it to splinters.”

“They are friends of the Lady Æthelflæd,” Father Pyrlig intervened helpfully.

The hatch slid fully open again. “Is that you, father?”

“It is, sister.”

“Have manners vanished from the surface of God’s earth?” she asked.

“He can’t help it, sister,” Pyrlig said, “he’s just a brute.” He grinned at me.

“Remove your foot,” the woman demanded crossly, and when I obeyed she closed the hatch and I heard the locking bar being lifted. Then the gate creaked wide.

I climbed out of the saddle. “Wait,” I told my men, and walked into the nunnery’s courtyard. The gaunt church comprised the whole of the southern part, while the other three sides were edged with low timber buildings, thatched with straw, in which I assumed the nuns slept, ate, and spun wool. The nun, who introduced herself as the Abbess Werburgh, bowed to me. “You’re truly a friend of the Lady Æthelflæd?” she asked. She was an elderly woman, so small that she scarcely reached my waist, but she had a fierce face.

“I am.”

Werburgh twitched with disapproval when she noticed the hammer of Thor hanging at my neck. “And your name?” she demanded, but just then a shriek sounded and a child hurtled out of a doorway and pelted across the puddled courtyard.

It was Stiorra, my daughter, and she threw herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. I was glad it was raining, or else the nun might have thought the drops on my face were tears. They were. “I knew you’d come,” Stiorra said fiercely, “I knew, I knew, I knew.”

“You’re Lord Uhtred?” the abbess asked.

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” she said.

Stiorra was telling me of her adventures, and Osbert, my youngest, had run to me and was trying to climb my leg. Uhtred, my eldest son, was nowhere to be seen. I picked up Osbert and shouted for Finan to bring the other men inside. “I don’t know how long we’re staying,” I told the Abbess Werburgh, “but the horses need stabling and food.”

“You think we’re a tavern?” she demanded.

“You won’t leave again, will you?” Stiorra was asking insistently.

“No,” I said, “no, no, no,” and then I stopped talking because Æthelflæd had appeared in a doorway, framed there by the darkness behind and even on that drab gray day it seemed to me that, though she was dressed in a cloak and hood of coarse brown weave, she glowed.

And I remembered Iseult’s prophecy made so many years ago, made when Æthelflæd was no older than Stiorra, a prophecy made when Wessex was at its weakest, when the Danes had overrun the country and Alfred was a fugitive in the marshes. Iseult, that strange and lovely woman, dark as shadows, had promised me that Alfred would give me power and that my woman would be a creature of gold.

And I stared at Æthelflæd and she stared back, and I knew the promise I had made to my daughter was one I would keep. I would not leave.

I put my children down, warning them to stay away from the horses’ hooves, and I walked across the puddled courtyard, oblivious of the nuns who had crept out to watch our arrival. I planned to bow to Æthelflæd. She was, after all, a king’s daughter and the wife of Mercia’s ruler, but her face was at once tearful and happy and I did not bow. I held out my arms and she came to me, and I felt her body trembling as I held her close. Maybe she could feel my heart beating, for it seemed to me as loud as a great drumbeat. “You’ve come,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I knew you would.”

I pushed back her hood to see her hair, as golden as mine. I smiled. “A creature of gold,” I said.

“Foolish man,” she said, smiling.

“What happens now?” I asked her.

“I imagine,” she said, stepping gently away from me and pulling the hood back over her hair, “that my husband will try to kill you.”

“And he can summon?” I asked, then paused to think, “fifteen hundred trained warriors?”

“At least that many.”

“Then I see no difficulty,” I said lightly. “I have at least forty men.”

And that afternoon the first of the Mercian warriors came.

They arrived in groups, ten or twenty at a time, riding from the north and making a loose cordon about the nunnery. I watched them from the bell-tower, counting over a hundred warriors, and still more came. “The thirty men in the village,” I asked Æthelflæd, “they were here to keep you from leaving?”

“They were supposed to stop food reaching the nunnery,” she said, “though they weren’t very effective. Supplies came across the river by boat.”

“They wanted to starve you?”

“My husband thought that would make me leave. Then I’d have to go back to him.”

“Not to your father?”

She grimaced. “He would have sent me back to my husband, wouldn’t he?”

“Would he?”

“Marriage is a sacrament, Uhtred,” she said almost wearily, “it is sanctified by God, and you know my father won’t offend God.”

“So why didn’t Æthelred just drag you back?”

“Invade a nunnery? My father would disapprove of that!”

“He would,” I said, watching a larger group of horsemen appear to the north.

“They thought my father would die at any moment,” she said, and I knew she spoke of my cousin and his friend, Aldhelm, “and they were waiting for that.”

“But your father lives.”

“He recovers,” Æthelflæd said, “God be thanked.”

“And here comes trouble,” I said, because the new band of horsemen, at least fifty in number, rode beneath a banner, suggesting that whoever commanded the troops guarding the nunnery was coming himself. As the horsemen drew nearer, I saw the banner displayed a cross made of two big-bladed war axes. “Whose badge is that?”

“Aldhelm’s,” Æthelflæd said flatly.

Two hundred men ringed the monastery now, and Aldhelm, riding a tall black stallion, placed himself fifty paces from the nunnery gates. He had a bodyguard of two priests and a dozen warriors. The warriors carried shields that bore their lord’s crossed-ax badge, and those grim men gathered just behind him and, like their lord, gazed in silence at the closed gates. Did Aldhelm know I was inside? He might have suspected, but I doubt he had any certainty. We had ridden fast through Mercia, keeping to the eastern half where the Danes were strongest, so few men in Saxon Mercia would realize I had come south. Yet perhaps Aldhelm suspected I was there, for he made no attempt to enter the nunnery, or else he was under orders not to offend his god by committing sacrilege. Alfred might forgive Æthelred for making Æthelflæd unhappy, but he would never forgive an insult to his god.

I went down to the courtyard. “What’s he waiting for?” Finan asked me.

“Me,” I said.

I dressed for war. I dressed in shining mail, sword-belted, booted, with my wolf-crested helmet and my shield with the wolf badge, and I chose to carry a war ax as well as my two scabbarded swords. I ordered one leaf of the convent gate to be opened, then walked out alone. I did not ride because I had not been able to buy a battle-trained stallion.

I walked in silence and Aldhelm’s men watched me. If Aldhelm had possessed a scrap of courage he should have ridden at me and chopped me down with the long sword hanging at his waist, and even without courage he could have ordered his personal guard to cut me down, but instead he just stared at me.

I stopped a dozen paces from him, then leaned the battle-ax on my shoulder. I had pushed open the hinged cheek-plates of my helmet so Aldhelm’s men could see my face. “Men of Mercia!” I shouted so that not only Aldhelm’s men could hear me, but the West Saxon troops across the river. “Any day now Jarl Haesten will lead an attack on your country! He comes with thousands of men, hungry men, spear-Danes, sword-Danes, Danes who would rape your wives, enslave your children, and steal your lands. They will make a greater army than the horde of warriors you defeated at Fearnhamme! How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”

Men glanced at each other, but none raised a hand or shouted that they had been present at that great victory.

“You’re ashamed of your triumph?” I asked them. “You made a slaughter that will be remembered so long as men live in Mercia! And you are ashamed of it? How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”

Some found their courage then and lifted their arms, and one man cheered, and suddenly most of them were cheering. They cheered themselves. Aldhelm, confused, raised a hand to call for silence, but they ignored him.

“And who,” I bellowed louder, “do you want to lead you against the Jarl Haesten who comes here with Vikings and pirates, with killers and slavers, with spears and axes, with murder and fire? It was the Lady Æthelflæd who encouraged you to victory at Fearnhamme, and you want her locked in a nunnery? She begged me to come and fight with you again, and here I am, and you greet me with swords? With spears? So who do you want to lead you against Jarl Haesten and his killers?” I let that question hang for a few heartbeats, then I leveled the ax so it pointed at Aldhelm. “Do you want him?” I shouted, “or me?”

What a fool that man was. At that moment, in the remnants of rain that spat out of the west, he should have killed me fast, or else he should have embraced me. He could have leaped from his saddle and offered me friendship, and so pretended an alliance that would buy him the time during which he could arrange my death by stealth, but instead he showed fear. He was a coward, he had always been a coward, brave only when faced by the weak, and the fear was on his face, it was in his hesitation, and it was not till one of his followers leaned and whispered in his ear that he found his voice. “This man,” he called, pointing at me, “is outlawed from Wessex.”

That was news to me, but it was not surprising. I had broken my oath to Alfred, so Alfred would have little choice but to declare me outlaw and thus prey to anyone with the courage to capture me. “So I’m an outlaw!” I shouted, “so come and kill me! And who will protect you from Jarl Haesten then?”

Aldhelm came to his senses then and muttered something to the man who had whispered to him, and that man, a big broad-shouldered warrior, spurred his horse forward. His sword was drawn. He knew what he was doing. He did not ride at me frantically, but deliberately. He came to kill me, and I could see his eyes judging me from deep in the shadow of his helmet. His sword was already drawn back, his arm tensed for the sweeping stroke that would crash into my shield with the weight of man and horse behind the blade to throw me off balance. Then the horse would turn into me and the sword would come again from behind me, and he knew that I knew all that, but he was reassured when I raised my shield, for that meant I would do what he expected me to do. I saw his mouth tighten and his heels nudge back and his stallion, a big gray beast, lunged ahead and the sword flashed in the dull air.

All the man’s great strength was in that stroke. It came from my right. My shield was in my left hand, the ax in my right. I did two things.

I dropped onto one knee and lifted the shield over my head so it was almost flat above my helmet, and at the same moment I lunged the ax into the horse’s legs and let go of the haft.

The sword slammed onto my shield, skidded across the wood, clanged against the boss, and just then the horse, the ax tangled in its rear legs, whinnied and stumbled. I saw blood bright on a fetlock, and I was already standing as the horseman slashed again, but he and his horse were off balance and the stroke screeched harmlessly off the iron rim of my shield. Aldhelm shouted at men to help his champion, but Finan, Sihtric, and Osferth were already out of the convent’s gate, mounted and armed, and Aldhelm’s men hesitated as I took a pace toward the horseman. He slashed again, still hampered by his horse’s skittishness, and this time I let my shield glance the blow downward and simply reached out and grasped the horseman’s wrist. He shouted in alarm, and I pulled hard. He fell from the saddle, crashed onto the damp street and, for a heartbeat, looked dazed. His stallion, whinnying, twisted away as the man stood. His shield, looped onto his left arm, was streaked with mud.

I had stepped back. I drew Serpent-Breath, the blade hissing in the scabbard’s tight throat. “What’s your name?” I asked. More of my men were coming from the nunnery, though Finan held them back.

The man rushed at me, hoping to throw me off balance with his shield, but I stepped aside and let him go past me. “What’s your name?” I asked again.

“Beornoth,” he told me.

“Were you at Fearnhamme?” I asked, and he gave a curt nod. “I didn’t come here to kill you, Beornoth,” I said.

“I’m sworn to my lord,” he said.

“An unworthy lord,” I told him.

“You should know,” he said, “you breaker of oaths,” and with that he attacked again, and I raised my shield to take the stroke and he dropped his arm fast, taking the sword beneath my shield and the blade slammed into my calf, but I have always worn strips of iron sewn into my boots because the stroke beneath the shield is such a danger. Some men wear leg armor, but that display will deter an enemy from the stroke beneath the shield, while hidden strips of iron make the legs look vulnerable and invite the stroke, which opens the enemy to destruction. My strips stopped Beornoth’s sword dead and he looked surprised as I rammed Serpent-Breath’s hilt to hit him in the face with my gloved fist that was closed about the sword’s handle. He staggered back. My left leg was aching from his blow, but he was bleeding from a broken nose and I slammed the shield into him, forcing him back again, then I bullied him again with the shield and this time he fell backward and I kicked his sword arm aside, put a foot on his belly, and placed Serpent-Breath’s tip at his mouth. He stared up at me with hatred. He was wondering if he had time to sweep the sword up at me, but he knew there was no time left. I had but to move my hand and he would be choking on his own blood.

“Stay still, Beornoth,” I said softly, then looked at Aldhelm’s men. “I didn’t come here to kill Mercians!” I shouted. “I came here to fight Jarl Haesten!” I stepped away and took my sword from Beornoth’s face. “Get up,” I told him. He stood uncertainly, not sure whether the fight was over or not. The hatred was gone from his eyes, now he was just staring at me with puzzlement. “Go,” I said.

“I am sworn to kill you,” he said.

“Don’t be a fool, Beornoth,” I said wearily, “I just gave you your life. That makes you mine.” I turned my back on him. “The Lord Aldhelm,” I shouted, “sends a brave man to do what he dares not do! Would you be led by a coward?”

There were men here who remembered me, not just from Fearnhamme, but from the attack on Lundene. These were warriors, and all warriors want to be led by a man who brings them success. Aldhelm was no warrior. They knew that, but they were still confused and uncertain. All of these Mercians were sworn to Aldhelm and some had become wealthy from his gifts. Those men kicked their horses close to their lord and I saw their hands reaching for sword hilts.

“At Fearnhamme,” a voice called from behind me, “the Lord Aldhelm wished to run away. Is he the man to protect us?” It was Æthelflæd, mounted on my horse and still wearing her drab convent clothes, though with her bright hair uncovered. “Who was it that led you to the slaughter?” she demanded, “who protected your homes? Who protected your wives and your children? Who would you rather serve?”

Someone from among the Mercian warriors shouted my name, and a cheer followed. Aldhelm had lost and he knew it. He shouted at Beornoth to kill me, but Beornoth stayed still and so Aldhelm, his voice desperate, ordered his supporters to cut me down.

“You don’t want to fight each other!” I shouted, “you’ll have real enemies enough soon!”

“God damn you,” one of Aldhelm’s men snarled. He drew his sword and spurred his horse, and his action broke the uncertainty. More swords were drawn and it was suddenly chaos.

Men made their decisions, either for or against Aldhelm, and the vast majority were against him. They turned on his guards just as the man attacking me slashed with his sword. I deflected the blow with my shield as the horsemen swirled around me in a clash of blades. Finan took care of my attacker. Osferth, I noted, had put his horse in front of Æthelflæd so he could protect his half-sister, but she was in no danger. It was Aldhelm’s men who were being hacked down, though Aldhelm himself, in pure panic, managed to kick his horse free of the sudden and savage fight. His sword was drawn, but all he wanted was to escape, but there were men all around him and then, seeing me, he realized his advantage, that he was on horseback and I was not, and he drove his spurs back and came to kill me.

He attacked with the despair of a man who did not believe he could win. He did not gauge me, as Beornoth had, but just came as fast as he could and hacked with his sword as strongly as he was able, and I met the massive blow by holding Serpent-Breath upright. I knew that sword, I knew her strength, I had watched as Ealdwulf the Smith had forged the four rods of iron and three of steel into one long blade. I had fought with her, I had killed with her, and I had matched her against the blades of Saxons, Danes, Norsemen, and Frisians. I knew her and I trusted her, and when Aldhelm’s sword met her with a clang that must have been heard far across the river, I knew what would happen.

His sword broke. It shattered. The broken end, two thirds of the blade, struck my helmet and fell to the mud, then I was pursuing Aldhelm who, holding a stump of sword, tried to flee, but there was no escape. The fight was over. The men who had supported him were either dead or disarmed, and the warriors who had sided with me formed a circle that ringed the two of us. Aldhelm curbed his stallion and stared at me. He opened his mouth, but could find no words. “Down,” I told him, and when he hesitated, I shouted it again, “down!” I looked at Beornoth who had recovered his horse. “Give him your sword,” I ordered.

Aldhelm was unsteady on his feet. He had a shield and now he had Beornoth’s sword, but there was no fight in him. He was whimpering. There was no pleasure in killing such a man and so I made it quick. One thrust above his crossed-ax shield, which made him lift it and I dropped Serpent-Breath before the blade struck and cut instead into his left ankle with enough force to topple him. He fell to one knee and Serpent-Breath took him on the side of his neck. He wore a mail hood beneath his helmet, and the links did not split, but the blow drove him into a puddle and I struck again, this time breaking the neck-mail so that his blood misted and splashed across the nearest horsemen. He was shaking and crying, and I sawed the blade toward me until the blade’s point was in the ragged wound of blood and mangled mail, then I thrust her down hard into his gullet where I twisted her. He was quivering, bleeding like a pig, and then he was dead.

I threw his banner into the Temes, then cupped my hands and shouted at the men across the river. “Tell Alfred that Uhtred of Bebbanburg has returned!”

Only now I was fighting for Mercia.

Æthelflæd insisted that Aldhelm receive a Christian burial. There was a small church in the village, little more than a cattle byre with a cross nailed to its gable, and around it was a graveyard where we dug six graves for the six dead men. The existing graves were badly marked and one of the spades sliced into a corpse, tearing the woolen shroud and spilling stinking fat and ribs. We lay Aldhelm into that grave and, because so many of the Mercians had been his men and I did not want to strain their loyalty any further, I let him be buried in his fine clothes and mail coat. I kept his helmet, a gold chain, and his horse. Father Pyrlig prayed above the fresh burials, and then we could leave. My cousin was evidently at his estate near Gleawecestre, and so we rode there. I now led over two hundred men, mostly Mercians and, doubtless, in my cousin’s eyes, rebels. “You want me to kill Æthelred?” I asked Æthelflæd.

“No!” She sounded shocked.

“Why not?”

“Do you want to be Lord of Mercia?” she retorted.

“No.”

“He is the chief Ealdorman of Mercia,” Æthelflæd said, “and my husband.” She shrugged. “I may not like him, but I am wedded to him.”

“You can’t be wedded to a dead man,” I said.

“Murder is still a sin,” Æthelflæd said gently.

“Sin,” I said scornfully.

“Some sins are so bad,” she said, “that a lifetime’s penance isn’t enough to redeem them.”

“Then let me do the sinning,” I suggested.

“I know what’s in your heart,” she said, “and if I don’t stop you then I am as guilty as you.”

I growled some retort, then nodded curtly to folk who knelt as we passed through their village that was all thatch, dung, and pigs. The villagers had no idea who we were, but they recognized mail and weapons and shields. They would be holding their breath till we had gone, but soon, I thought, the Danes might come this way and the thatch would be burned and the children taken for slaves.

“When you die,” Æthelflæd said, “you’ll want a sword in your hand.”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“So you’ll go to Valhalla. When I die, Uhtred, I want to go to heaven. Would you deny me that?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I cannot commit the awful sin of murder. Æthelred must live. Besides,” she gave me a smile, “my father would never forgive me if I were to murder Æthelred. Or allow you to murder him. And I don’t want to disappoint my father. He’s a dear man.”

I laughed at that. “Your father,” I said, “will be angry anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked for my help, of course.”

Æthelflæd gave me a curious look. “Who do you think suggested that I ask for your help?”

“What?” I gaped at her and she laughed. “Your father wanted me to come to you?” I asked in disbelief.

“Of course!” she said.

I felt like a fool. I thought I had escaped Alfred, only to discover that he had drawn me south. Pyrlig must have known, but had been very careful not to tell me. “But your father hates me!” I told Æthelflæd.

“Of course he doesn’t. He just thinks of you as a very wayward hound, one that needs a whipping now and then.” She gave me a deprecatory smile, then shrugged. “He knows Mercia will be attacked, Uhtred, and fears that Wessex won’t be able to help.”

“Wessex always helps Mercia.”

“Not if Danes are landing on Wessex’s coast,” she said, and I almost laughed aloud. We had gone to such trouble in Dunholm to keep our plans secret, yet Alfred was already preparing for those plans. To which end he had used his daughter to draw me south, and I thought first how clever he was, then wondered just what sins that clever man was prepared to tolerate to keep the Danes from destroying Christianity in England.

We left the village to ride through sunlit country. The grass had greened and was growing fast. Cattle, released from their winter imprisonment, were gorging themselves. A hare stood on its hind legs to watch us, then skittered away before standing and staring at us again. The road climbed gently into the soft hills. This was good country, well watered and fertile, the kind of land the Danes craved. I had been to their homeland and seen how men scratched a bare living from small fields, from sand and from rock. No wonder they wanted England.

The sun was sinking as we passed through another village. A girl carrying two yoked pails of milk was so scared by the sight of armed men that she stumbled as she tried to kneel and the precious milk ran into the road’s ruts. She began to cry. I tossed her a silver coin, enough to dry her tears, and asked her if there was a lord living nearby. She pointed us northward to where, behind a great stand of elm trees, we discovered a fine hall surrounded by a decaying palisade.

The thegn who owned the village was named Ealdhith. He was a stout, red-haired man who looked aghast at the number of horses and riders who came seeking shelter for the night. “I can’t feed you all,” he grumbled, “and who are you?”

“My name is Uhtred,” I said, “and that is the Lady Æthelflæd.”

“My lady,” he said, and went onto one knee.

Ealdhith fed us well enough, though he complained next morning that we had emptied all his ale barrels. I consoled him with a gold link I chopped from Aldhelm’s chain. Ealdhith had little news to tell us. He had heard, of course, that Æthelflæd had been a prisoner in the convent at Lecelad. “We sent eggs and flour to her, lord,” he told me.

“Why?”

“Because I live a stone’s throw from Wessex,” he said, “and I like West Saxons to be friendly to my folk.”

“Have you seen any Danes this spring?”

“Danes, lord? Those bastards don’t come near here!” Ealdhith was sure of that, which explained why he had allowed his palisade to deteriorate. “We just till our land and raise our cattle,” he said guardedly.

“And if Lord Æthelred summons you?” I asked, “you go to war?”

“I pray it doesn’t happen, but yes, lord. I can take six good warriors to serve.”

“You were at Fearnhamme?”

“I couldn’t go, lord, I had a broken leg.” He lifted his smock to show me a twisted calf. “I was lucky to live.”

“Be ready for a summons now,” I warned him.

He made the sign of the cross. “There’s trouble coming?”

“There’s always trouble coming,” I said, and hauled myself into the saddle of Aldhelm’s fine stallion. The horse, unused to me, trembled and I patted his neck.

We rode westward in the cool morning air. My children rode with me. A beggar was coming the other way and he knelt by the ditch to let us pass, holding out one mangled hand. “I was wounded in the fight at Lundene,” he called. There were many such men reduced by war’s injury to beggary. I gave my son Uhtred a silver coin and told him to toss it to the man, which he did, but then added some words. “May Christ bless you!”

“What did you say?” I demanded.

“You heard him.” Æthelflæd, riding on my left, was amused.

“I offered him a blessing, Father,” Uhtred said.

“Don’t tell me you’ve become a Christian!” I snarled.

He reddened, but before he could say anything in reply Osferth spurred from among the horsemen behind. “Lord! Lord!”

“What is it?”

He did not answer, but just pointed back the way we had come.

I turned to see a thickening plume of smoke on the eastern horizon. How often I have seen those great smoke columns! I have caused many myself, the marks of war.

“What is it?” Æthelflæd asked.

“Haesten,” I said, my son’s idiocy forgotten. “It has to be Haesten.” I could think of no other explanation.

The war had started.