The Pagan Lord

Eight

We left Bearddan Igge in a thick fog just two mornings after Saint Oswald had been so miraculously discovered entangled in the fish trap.

One hundred and thirty-three men rode. We took fifty packhorses to carry armour and weapons, and we carried two banners: the wolf’s head of Bebbanburg and the white horse of Mercia, though for most of our journey those banners would have to stay hidden. We also took one priest, Father Wissian. Merewalh insisted that a priest accompany us. He said his men fought better when they had a priest to shepherd their souls, and I growled that they were warriors, not sheep, but Merewalh insisted in his polite way and so I grudgingly permitted Wissian to ride with us. He was a Mercian, a tall, thin young man with a perpetually nervous look and an unkempt shock of hair that had gone prematurely white. ‘We’ll be riding through Danish land,’ I told him, ‘and I don’t want them knowing we’re Saxons, which means you can’t wear that dress,’ I pointed to his long black priestly robe, ‘so take it off.’

‘I can’t …’ he began, then just stammered.

‘Take it off,’ I ordered him again, ‘and borrow a mail coat or a leather jerkin.’

‘I …’ he began again and discovered he still could not talk, but he obeyed me and changed into a servant’s drab clothes, which he then covered with a long black cloak that he belted at the waist with a length of twine so that he still looked like a priest, though at least his heavy wooden cross was covered.

We rode to save Christianity in Britain. Was that true? Father Ceolberht claimed it was true in a fiery sermon he had preached on the day we waited for Finan’s arrival. The priest had harangued Merewalh’s men, telling them that the Christian’s holy book had foretold how the king of the north would attack the king of the south, and that this prophecy was being fulfilled, which meant it was now God’s war. Perhaps it was, but Cnut was no king even though he did come from the north. I have often wondered whether, if the Danes had won and if I now lived in a country called Daneland, would we be Christians? I would like to think not, but the truth was that Christianity was already infecting the Danes. That long war was never about religion. Alfred believed it was, the priests proclaimed it a holy struggle, and men died under the banner of the cross in the belief that once we were all Christians, both Saxons and Danes, we would live in perpetual peace, but that was plain wrong. The Danes of East Anglia were Christians, but that did not stop the Saxons attacking them. The simple truth was that the Danes and the Saxons wanted the same land. The priests said that the lion would lie down with the lamb, but I never saw that happen. Not that I ever knew what a lion was. I once asked Mehrasa, Father Cuthbert’s dark-skinned wife, if she had ever seen a lion and she said yes, she had, and that when she was a child the lions would come from the desert to kill cattle in her village, and that they were animals larger than any horse and had six legs, two forked tails, three horns made of molten iron and teeth like seaxes. Eohric, who had been King of East Anglia before we killed him, had a lion on his banner and his animal had only four legs and one horn, but I doubted Eohric had ever seen a lion so I suppose Mehrasa was right.

We rode anyway, and if we did not ride to save Christianity we did ride to save the Saxons.

Perhaps the most dangerous part of all that journey was the first, though it did not seem so at the time. We had to cross the river at Lindcolne and, to save time, and because we were shrouded by the thick fog, I chose to use the bridge. We knew there was a bridge because a frightened cowherd at Bearddan Igge stammered that he had seen it. He knelt to me, awed by my mail, my helmet, my fur-edged cloak and my silver-spurred boots. ‘You’ve seen the bridge?’ I asked him.

‘Once, lord.’

‘Is it close to the fort?’

‘No, lord, not close,’ he frowned, thinking, ‘the fort is on the hill,’ he added as though that made everything clear.

‘Is it guarded? The bridge?’

‘Guarded, lord?’ He seemed puzzled by that question.

‘If you cross the bridge,’ I asked patiently, ‘do armed men stop you?’

‘Oh no, lord,’ he answered confidently, ‘you never take your cows over a bridge in case the water spirits get jealous and then they get the dropsy.’

‘So are there fords?’

He shook his head, though I doubted he knew the answer to that either. The man lived a short walk from Lindcolne, yet as far as I could discover he had only been there once. If the Danish garrison in Lindcolne had any sense then they would keep guards on the bridge, but I reckoned we would outnumber them, and by the time reinforcements arrived from the hill we would be long gone into the fog.

It was easy enough to find Lindcolne because the Romans had made a road and the road had their sign-stones counting down the miles, but the fog was so dense that I never saw the fort on its high hill and only realised we had reached the town when I rode beneath a crumbling and unguarded gate arch. The gates were long gone, as were the walls on either side.

And I rode through a place of ghosts.

We Saxons have always been unwilling to live in Roman buildings unless we disguise them with thatch and mud. The folk of Lundene had been forced to occupy the old city when the Danes attacked because that was the only part that was defended by a wall, but still they preferred their timber and thatch houses in the new city to the west. I had lived with Gisela in a big Roman house beside the river in Lundene and I never saw a ghost, but I had noticed how Christians coming to the house made the sign of the cross and looked anxiously into its dark corners. Now our horses walked down a deserted street flanked by ruined houses. The roofs had fallen in, the pillars had collapsed, and the stonework was cracked and thick with moss. They would have made fine houses, but the Saxons who still lived in the town preferred to make a hovel of mud and wattle. Here and there a house was occupied, but only because the people had built a hut inside the shell of an old stone building.

The bridge was also made of stone. Its parapets were broken and a great hole gaped in its central span, but it was unguarded, and so we passed over the river and on into the wide fog-shrouded country beyond.

None of us knew the country, or which way we should go, so I simply followed the Roman road until it joined another that ran north and south. ‘We keep going west,’ I told Finan.

‘Just west?’

‘We’ll find somewhere we know.’

‘Or ride to the world’s end,’ he said happily.

The fog was lifting and the land rose slowly until we reached a rolling upland where there were fat farms and big halls half hidden by groves of good trees, and though I was sure folk saw us, no one came to enquire what brought us to their land. We were armed men, best left alone. I sent scouts ahead as I always did in hostile country, and this land was certainly hostile. We were either in Cnut’s land or Sigurd’s territory and all the halls would be Danish. The scouts rode either side of the road, using woods or hedgerows for cover and always looking for any sign of an enemy, but we met none. Once, on the second day, five horsemen came towards us from the north, but they saw our numbers and veered away.

We were among higher hills by then. The villages were smaller and more scattered, the halls less wealthy. I sent my Danes to purchase ale and food from the halls and the Saxons to buy provisions from the villages, but there was scarce any spare food because so many armed bands had been this way before us. I went to one hall where an old man greeted me. ‘I am Orlyg Orlygson,’ he said proudly.

‘Wulf Ranulfson,’ I responded.

‘I have not heard of you,’ he said, ‘but you’re welcome.’ He limped because of an old wound in his left leg. ‘And where does Wulf Ranulfson ride?’

‘To join Jarl Cnut.’

‘You’re late,’ he said, ‘the summons was for the moon’s death. She’s growing again.’

‘We’ll find him.’

‘I wish I could go,’ Orlyg patted his injured leg, ‘but what use is an old man?’ He looked at my companions. ‘Just seven of you?’

I gestured vaguely northwards. ‘I’ve got three crews on the road.’

‘Three! I can’t feed that many. But I’ll have my steward find you something. Come inside, come inside!’ He wanted to talk. Like all of us, he welcomed travellers if they brought news, and so I sat in his hall and petted his hounds and invented tales about Frisia. I said the harvest there would be poor.

‘Here too!’ Orlyg said gloomily.

‘But there is good news,’ I went on, ‘I heard that Uhtred Uhtredson attacked Bebbanburg and failed.’

‘Not just failed,’ Orlyg said, ‘he was killed there!’ I just stared at him and he grinned at the surprise on my face. ‘You hadn’t heard?’ he asked.

‘Uhtred Uhtredson was killed?’ I could not keep the astonishment from my voice. ‘I heard that he failed,’ I went on, ‘but he survived.’

‘Oh no,’ Orlyg said confidently, ‘he died. The man who told me was a witness to the fight.’ He pushed his fingers into his tangled white beard to touch the hammer at his neck. ‘He was cut down by the Lord Ælfric. Or maybe it was Ælfric’s son. The man wasn’t sure, but it was one of them.’

‘I heard Ælfric died,’ I said.

‘Then it must have been the son who dealt the blow,’ Orlyg said, ‘but it’s true! Uhtred Uhtredson is dead.’

‘That will make Jarl Cnut’s life easier,’ I said.

‘They all feared Uhtred,’ Orlyg said, ‘and no wonder. He was a warrior!’ He looked wistful for a moment. ‘I saw him once.’

‘You did?’

‘A big man, tall. He carried an iron shield.’

‘I heard that,’ I said. I had never carried an iron shield in my life.

‘He was fearsome, right enough,’ Orlyg said, ‘but a warrior.’

‘He belongs to the Corpse-Ripper now.’

‘Someone should go to the Lord Ælfric,’ Orlyg suggested, ‘and buy the fiend’s corpse.’

‘Why?’

‘To make the skull into a drinking cup, of course! It would make a fine gift for Jarl Cnut.’

‘The jarl will have drinking cups enough,’ I said, ‘when he’s beaten Æthelred and Edward.’

‘And he will,’ Orlyg said enthusiastically. He smiled. ‘At Yule, my friend, we shall all drink from Edward’s skull and dine in Edward’s hall and use Edward’s wife for pleasure!’

‘I heard Jarl Cnut’s wife was captured by Uhtred,’ I said.

‘A rumour, my friend, a rumour. You can’t believe everything you hear. I’ve learned that much over the years. Men come here and give me news and we celebrate it and then discover it isn’t true at all!’ He chuckled.

‘So perhaps Uhtred lives,’ I suggested mischievously.

‘Oh no! That is true, my friend. He was chopped down in battle, and he still lived, so they tied him to a post and loosed the dogs on him. They tore him to bits!’ He shook his head. ‘I’m glad he’s dead, but that’s no way for a warrior to die.’

I watched as servants carried ale, bread and smoked meat to my men waiting in the orchard. ‘To find the jarl,’ I asked Orlyg, ‘we keep going west?’

‘Cross the hills,’ he said, ‘and just follow the road. The jarl won’t be in any of his halls, he’ll have sailed south by now.’

‘To Wessex?’

‘To wherever he wants!’ Orlyg said. ‘But if you follow the road west you’ll come to Cesterfelda and you can ask there.’ He frowned. ‘I think you go from there to Buchestanes and the jarl has a hall there, a fine hall! One of his favourite halls, and there’ll be men in the hall who’ll tell you where to find him.’

‘Buchestanes,’ I repeated the name as if I had never heard it before, but my interest was roused. Cnut had told me his wife and two children had been captured while travelling to Buchestanes, and maybe Orlyg’s mention of the town was just a coincidence, but fate does not like coincidences. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

‘A good town,’ Orlyg said, ‘it has hot springs. I went there two summers ago and sat in the water. It took away the pain.’

I paid him gold for his generosity. He had told me that his son had led twenty-three men to Cnut’s service and I said I hoped they came back victorious, and so I left him.

‘I’m dead,’ I told Finan.

‘You are?’

I told him Orlyg’s tale and he laughed. We slept that night in Cesterfelda, a village I had never heard of and reckoned I might never see again, though it was a pleasant enough place with good farmland spread around the small village, which itself surrounded some fine Roman buildings, though of course they had decayed over the long years. A magnificent pillared hall, which I supposed had been a temple to the Roman gods, was now a cattle shelter. There was a fallen statue of a hook-nosed man draped in a sheet and with a wreath of leaves about his short-cut hair, and the statue was evidently used as a sharpening stone because it had been deeply grooved by blades. ‘Pity it’s not marble,’ Finan said, kicking the statue.

‘Wouldn’t be here if it was,’ I said. Sometimes a farmer finds a Roman statue made from marble and such a thing is valuable because it can be put in a furnace to make lime, but a stone statue is not worth anything. I looked down at the statue’s hooked nose. ‘Is that their god?’ I asked Finan.

‘The Romans were Christians,’ my son answered instead.

‘Some of them were Christians,’ Finan said, ‘but I think the others worshipped eagles.’

‘Eagles!’

‘I think so.’ He gazed up at the cattle shed’s gable that was cleverly carved with half-naked girls running through a forest pursued by a man with goat’s legs. ‘Maybe they worshipped goats?’

‘Or tits,’ my son said, staring up at the lissom girls.

‘That would be a religion worth having,’ I said.

Merewalh had joined us and he also stared up at the gable. The carving was distinct because the sun was low and the shadows long and sharp. ‘When we take this land back,’ he said, ‘we’ll pull all this down.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because the priests won’t like that.’ He nodded at the long-legged girls. ‘They’ll order it destroyed. It’s pagan, isn’t it?’

‘I think I’d like to have been a Roman,’ I said, gazing upwards.

They laughed, but I was melancholy. The remnants of Rome always make me sad, simply because they are proof that we slide inexorably towards the darkness. Once there was light falling on marbled magnificence, and now we trudge through mud. Wyrd bið ful āræd.

We bought butter, oatcakes, cheese and beans, we slept under the naked girls in the empty cattle shelter and next morning rode on westwards. And the wind blew strong and the rain began again, and by mid-morning we were riding into a gale. The land was rising and the track we followed turned into a stream. Lightning flickered to the north and thunder rolled across the sky and I raised my face to the wind and rain and knew Thor was there. I prayed to him. I told him I had sacrificed my best animals to him, that I had been loyal, that he should give me aid, but I knew Cnut would be making the same prayer, and so would Cnut’s friend, Sigurd Thorrson, and the gods, I feared, would favour the Danes because more of them were his worshippers.

The rain hardened, the wind shrieked and some of the horses shied from the hammer of Thor’s wrath and so we sheltered beneath the gale-thrashed branches of an oak wood. It was hardly shelter, for the rain pierced the leaves and dripped incessantly. Men walked their horses while Finan and I crouched by a thorn bush at the western edge of the trees. ‘Never known a summer like it,’ he said.

‘It’ll be a hard winter.’

‘God help us,’ he said grimly and made the sign of the cross. ‘So what are we doing?’

‘Travelling to Buchestanes.’

‘To see the sorceress?’

I shook my head and wished I had not because the motion let rainwater trickle down inside my jerkin. ‘To see her granddaughter perhaps,’ I said, smiling. ‘Cnut says the sorceress still lives, but she must be older than time.’ The sorceress’s name was Ælfadell and she was reputed to have greater powers than any other aglæcwif in Britain. I had visited her and drunk her potion and dreamed the dreams and been told my future. Seven kings would die, she had said, seven kings in one great battle.

‘To see her granddaughter?’ Finan asked. ‘Is she the one who’s deaf and dumb?’

‘And the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen,’ I said wistfully.

Finan smiled. ‘So if we’re not going to see this creature,’ he said after a pause, ‘why are we going there?’

‘Because it’s on the way to Ceaster.’

‘Just that?’

I shook my head. ‘Cnut said his wife and son were captured while they were travelling to Buchestanes. And that old fellow yesterday said Cnut has a hall there, a fine hall.’

‘So?’

‘So he didn’t have a hall there ten years ago. It’s new.’

‘If I remember,’ Finan said, ‘there’s no wall at Buchestanes.’

I knew what he was saying. I was suggesting that the new hall was important to Cnut, and Finan was suggesting it was undefended and therefore not as important as I thought. ‘There wasn’t a wall ten years ago,’ I said, ‘but there could be now.’

‘And you think his wife is there?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

He frowned, then flinched as a gust of wind drove rain into our faces. ‘Maybe?’

‘We know Cnut went to Ceaster,’ I said, ‘and she probably went with him, but she wouldn’t have sailed with him. Her children are too young. You don’t take small children to war, so either she’s still at Ceaster, or Cnut sent her somewhere further from Mercia.’

‘Could be anywhere.’

‘I’m groping in the dark,’ I admitted.

‘But you are always lucky.’

‘Sometimes I’m lucky,’ I said, and thought of the wheel of fate. Thor was in the sky and the wind bitter in my face. The omens were bad. ‘Sometimes,’ I said again.

We waited till the rain eased, then rode on.

Groping in the dark.

We reached Buchestanes the next day. I dared not enter the town for fear of being recognised and so I sent Rolla, Eldgrim and Kettil, three Danes, down into the hollow where the small town was cradled by hills. I could see that Cnut had made a palisade around the place, though it was hardly formidable, merely a wall the height of a man and better suited to keep cattle out than to deter enemies.

It was still raining. The clouds were low, the ground soaked, the rain persistent, but the wind had eased. I led my horsemen to the wood close to the cave where the sorceress wove her spells, then took my son, Finan and Merewalh up to the great limestone crag that was streaming with water. The rock was slashed with a crevice where ferns and moss grew thick, and the crevice led into the cave. I hesitated at the entrance, remembering my fear.

Caves are the entrances to the netherworld, to the dark places where the Corpse-Ripper lurks and where Hel, the grim goddess, rules. These are the lands of the dead where even most gods walk warily, where silence is a howl, where all the memories of all the living are endlessly echoed in misery, and where the three Norns weave our fates and play their jests. This is the netherworld.

It was dark beyond the low, narrow entrance, but the sound of my boots suddenly echoed loud and I knew I had come into the larger chamber. Water dripped. I waited. Finan blundered into me, I heard my son breathing. Slowly, so slowly, my eyes became accustomed to the dark, helped by what small grey light leaked from the crevice, and I saw the flat rock where the sorceress had worked her magic. ‘Is anyone here?’ I shouted and the echo of my voice was the only answer.

‘What happened here?’ my son asked in an awed tone.

‘This was where Ælfadell the sorceress told the future,’ I said, ‘and maybe still does.’

‘And you came here?’ Merewalh asked.

‘Just once,’ I said, as if it were no great thing. Something moved in the back of the cave, a scrabbling noise, and the three Christians touched their crosses as I fingered Thor’s hammer. ‘Is anyone there?’ I called, and again there was no answer.

‘A rat,’ Finan suggested.

‘And what future did you discover, lord?’ Merewalh asked.

I hesitated. ‘It was nonsense,’ I said harshly. Seven kings will die, she had said, seven kings and the women you love. And Alfred’s son will not rule and Wessex will die and the Saxon will kill what he loves and the Danes will gain everything, and all will change and all will be the same. ‘It was nonsense,’ I said again, and I lied when I said it, though I did not know it. I know now, because everything she said came true except one thing, and perhaps that one thing still lies in the future.

And Alfred’s son did rule, so was that wrong? In time I saw her meaning, but back then, standing on a floor made slippery with bat-shit and listening to the water run underground, I did not know the significance of what I had been told. Instead I was thinking of Erce.

Erce was the aglæcwif’s granddaughter. I did not know her real name, only that she was called Erce after the goddess, and in my trance I had seen what I thought was the goddess come to me. She had been naked and beautiful, pale as ivory, lithe as a willow-wand, a dark-haired girl who had smiled as she rode me, her light hands touching my face as my fingers caressed her small breasts. Had she been real? Or a dream? Men said she was real, that she was deaf and dumb, but ever after that night I doubted their tales. Perhaps there was a granddaughter who could neither hear nor speak, but it was surely not the lovely creature I remembered from this dank cave. She had been a goddess, come to our middle earth to touch our souls with sorcery, and it was the memory of her that had drawn me to this cave. Did I expect to see her again? Or did I just want to remember that strange night?

Uhtred, my son, walked to the pale flat stone and ran his hand over its table-like surface. ‘I’d like to hear the future,’ he said wistfully.

‘There’s a sorceress in Wessex,’ Finan said, ‘and men say she speaks true.’

‘The woman in Ceodre?’ I asked.

‘That’s the one.’

‘But she’s a pagan,’ my son said disapprovingly.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I snarled. ‘You think the gods speak only to Christians?’

‘But a sorceress …’ he began.

‘Some folk are better than others at knowing what the gods are doing. Ælfadell was one of them. She talked to them in here; they used her. And yes, she was, is, a pagan, but that doesn’t mean she can’t see farther than the rest of us.’

‘So what did she see?’ my son asked. ‘What did she tell of your future?’

‘That I whelped idiots who would ask stupid questions.’

‘So she really did see the future!’ Uhtred said, and laughed. Finan and Merewalh laughed too.

‘She said there would be a great battle and seven kings would die.’ I spoke bleakly. ‘It was like I said, just nonsense.’

‘There aren’t seven kings in Britain,’ my son said.

‘There are,’ Merewalh said. ‘The Scots have three at least, and God alone knows how many men call themselves king in Wales. Then there are the Irish kings.’

‘A battle which everyone joins in?’ Finan said lightly. ‘We can’t miss that.’

Rolla and his companions returned late in the afternoon, bringing bread and lentils. The rain had eased and they found us in the wood where we had lit a fire and were trying to dry our clothes. ‘The woman’s not there,’ Rolla told me, meaning Cnut’s wife.

‘So who is there?’

‘Thirty, forty men,’ he said dismissively, ‘most of them too old to go to war, and Cnut’s steward. I told him what you told me to say.’

‘He believed you?’

‘He was impressed!’ I knew that the folk inside Buchestanes’s palisade would be curious, even suspicious, because we had not ridden into the town, but had stayed outside, so I had told Rolla to say I had sworn an oath to pass through no town walls until I assaulted a Saxon stronghold. ‘I told him you were Wulf Ranulfson, out of Haithabu,’ Rolla went on, ‘and he said Cnut would welcome us.’

‘But where?’

‘He said to go to Ceaster, then just ride south if there are no ships.’

‘Just south?’

‘That’s all he said, yes.’

And south could be either Mercia or Wessex, but instinct, that voice of the gods which we so often mistrust, told me it was Mercia. Cnut and Sigurd had attacked Wessex ten years before and had achieved nothing. They had landed their forces on the banks of the Uisc and marched two miles to Exanceaster where the walls of that burh had defeated them, and Wessex was full of such burhs, the fortified towns that Alfred had made and in which folk could shelter as the Danes roamed impotently outside. Mercia had burhs too, but fewer, and the Mercian army, which should have been prepared to attack the Danes as they besieged a burh, was a long way away in East Anglia.

‘Then we’ll do what he suggested,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to Ceaster.’

‘Why not head directly south?’ Merewalh asked.

I knew what was in his mind. By going south we would reach Mercia far more quickly than by travelling to Britain’s west coast and, once at Ceaster, we would be on the very edge of Mercia, in a region already dominated by the Danes. Merewalh wanted to get back to his country fast, to find out what had happened, and perhaps to reunite his men with Æthelred’s forces. Æthelred would be annoyed that Merewalh had accompanied me, and that worry was nagging at the Mercian.

‘You’ll gain nothing by going south now,’ I explained.

‘We save time.’

‘I don’t want to save time. I need time. I need time for Edward of Wessex and for Æthelred to join forces.’

‘Then go back to East Anglia,’ Merewalh said, but without much conviction.

‘Cnut wants Æthelred in East Anglia,’ I said, ‘so why should we do what Cnut wants? He wants Æthelred to come to him and he’ll wait for him on a hill or beside a river, and Æthelred will have to fight uphill or through deep water, and at the end of the day Æthelred will be dead and Cnut will be boiling his skull to make a drinking cup. Is that what you want?’

‘Lord,’ Merewalh protested.

‘We have to make Cnut do what we want,’ I said, ‘so we go to Ceaster.’

So we rode to Ceaster. The countryside was strangely empty. There were harvesters in the fields and cowherds in the pastures, there were shepherds and woodsmen, but the warriors were gone. There were no men hawking, no men practising the shield wall or exercising horses, because the warriors were all gone southwards, leaving the halls protected only by old and injured men. We should have been challenged a hundred times on that journey, but the road had seen countless bands pass and folk assumed we were just another group seeking Jarl Cnut’s generosity.

We followed a Roman road out of the hills. The fields either side were churned by hoofprints, all going west. The stones counted the miles down to Deva, because that was what the Romans had called Ceaster. I knew the place, as did Finan and Merewalh, indeed most of our men had spent time to the south of the town, riding the woods and fields on the southern bank of the River Dee and watching the Danes on Ceaster’s ramparts. Those walls, and the river, protected the town, and if we had ever wanted to attack from the south we would have had to cross the Roman bridge that led to the town’s southern gate, but now we came from the east and the road took us north of the river. We rode through heathland where a few scattered trees bent to the west wind. I could smell the sea. The rain had stopped and the sky was thronged with fast-moving clouds that threw vast scudding shadows across the lower country ahead of us. The river’s coils glinted in that landscape, which, beyond the heath, was marsh and, way beyond that and nothing but a hazed glimmer on the skyline, was the sea.

I rode ahead with Finan, Merewalh, and my son. We slanted left, going to a stand of trees on a small hillock, and from there we could see Ceaster itself. Smoke rose from thatched roofs inside the walls. A few roofs were tile, and some buildings rose higher than others, and the stone of those high walls looked pale gold in the patchy sunlight. The town’s defences were formidable. It was fronted with a ditch flooded by the river, and behind the ditch was an earthen bank topped by stone ramparts. Some of the stone had fallen, but timber palisades filled those gaps. There were stone towers studding the long walls, and timber towers stood above the four gateways, one gate in the centre of each long wall, but we had watched Ceaster long enough to learn that two of those gates were never used. The north gate and south gate had usually been busy, but none of us had ever seen men or horses use the east and west entrances, and I suspected they had been blocked up. Just outside the walls was a stone arena where the Romans had staged fights and slaughters, but cattle now grazed beneath the decaying arches. There were four ships downstream of the bridge, only four, but there must have been two or three hundred before Cnut left. Those ships would have rowed out through the river curves, past the wild sea-birds of the Dee’s estuary to the open sea, and then where?

‘That’s a burh,’ Finan said admiringly. ‘Be a right bastard of a place to capture.’

‘Æthelred should have captured it ten years ago,’ I said.

‘Æthelred couldn’t capture a flea if it was biting his cock,’ Finan said scornfully.

Merewalh cleared his throat as a mild protest against this insult to his sworn lord.

A banner flew above the gate-tower in the southern wall. We were too far away to see what was embroidered or daubed on the cloth, but I knew anyway. It would show Cnut’s emblem of the axe and the shattered cross, and that flag was on the southern ramparts, facing Saxon country, the direction from which the garrison could expect an attack. ‘How many men can you see?’ I asked Finan, knowing his eyes were better than mine.

‘Not many,’ he said.

‘Cnut told me the garrison was a hundred and fifty men.’ I was remembering our conversation in Tameworþig. ‘He could have been lying, of course.’

‘A hundred and fifty men would be enough most of the time,’ Finan said.

A hundred and fifty men would not have been enough to stop a determined attack on two or more of the four walls, but they would have been more than sufficient to defeat an assault coming across the long bridge against the southern gate. If the town was threatened by war then more men could be brought in to stiffen the garrison. King Alfred, who had always been precise in his calculations, demanded that four men should be stationed for every pole of a burh’s wall. A pole was six paces, more or less, and I tried to reckon the length of Ceaster’s ramparts and decided they would need a thousand men to defend against a determined attack, but how likely was such an attack? Æthelred had been supine, and now he was far away, and Cnut was on the rampage somewhere, and Cnut would want every available man for the battles he knew he must fight. Ceaster, I suspected, was very lightly defended.

‘We just ride in,’ I said.

‘We do?’ Merewalh sounded surprised.

‘They’re not expecting an attack,’ I said, ‘and I doubt there’s as many as a hundred and fifty men there. Maybe eighty?’

Eighty men could stop us if we tried to assault the wall, though without ladders such an assault was unthinkable. But would they try to stop us if we rode peaceably up the road? If we looked like all the other bands of men who had obeyed Cnut’s summons?

‘Why eighty?’ my son asked.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, ‘I made the figure up. There could be five hundred men in there.’

‘And we just ride in?’ Finan asked.

‘You have a better plan?’

He shook his head, grinning. ‘Just like Bebbanburg,’ he said, ‘we just ride in.’

‘And pray for a better ending,’ I added grimly.

And so we did.

We just rode in.

The road leading to the fortress’s northern gate was paved with wide slabs, most of which were now cracked or canted. Grass grew thick on either verge, dunged by the hundreds of horses that had passed before us. There were rich farms on either side where slaves were using sickles to cut tall rye and rain-beaten barley. The farmhouses were made of stone, though all were patched with wattle and mud, and usually re-roofed with thatch. They, like the town, were Roman. ‘I’d like to go to Rome,’ I said.

‘King Alfred went,’ Merewalh said.

‘Twice, he told me,’ I replied, ‘and all he saw were ruins. Great ruins.’

‘They say the city was made of gold.’ Merewalh sounded wistful.

‘A city of gold on a river of silver,’ I said, ‘and once we’ve defeated Cnut we should go there and dig it all up.’

We were riding slowly, like tired men on weary horses. We wore no mail and carried no shields. The packhorses with the long battle-axes and heavy round shields were at the back of our column, while I had put my Danes at the front. ‘Keep your Saxon mouth shut when we get to the gate,’ I told Merewalh.

‘A river of silver?’ he asked. ‘Is that true?’

‘It’s probably more like our rivers,’ I said, ‘full of piss, shit and mud.’

A beggar with half his face eaten by ulcers crouched in the ditch. He mewed as we passed and held out a crooked hand. Wissian, our Christian priest, made the sign of the cross to ward off any evil that the beggar might harbour and I snarled at him. ‘The Danes will see you do that, you fool. Save it till we’re out of their sight.’ My son dropped a piece of bread close to the beggar who scrabbled after it on all fours.

We passed the great bend in the river east of the fortress and the road now turned south to run straight as a spear-shaft towards the town. There was a Roman shrine at the road’s bend, just a stone shelter where, I supposed, the statue of a god had once stood, but now the small building housed an old one-legged man who was weaving baskets from willow wands. ‘Has Jarl Cnut gone?’ I asked him.

‘Gone and gone,’ he said. ‘Half the world’s gone.’

‘Who’s left?’ I asked.

‘None that matters, none that can row, ride, fly or crawl.’ He cackled. ‘Half the world went by and half the world has gone. Only the elf now!’

‘The elf?’

‘The elf is here,’ he said very seriously, ‘but all else is gone.’ He was mad, I think, but his old hands wove the willow deftly. He tossed a finished basket onto a pile and took up more withies. ‘All else is gone,’ he said again, ‘and only the elf be left.’

I spurred on. A pair of posts flanked the road, and on both posts a skeleton was lashed with hemp twine. They were warnings, of course, a warning that thieves would be killed. Most men would be content with a pair of skulls, but it was typical of Haesten to want more. The sight of the bones reminded me of Saint Oswald, and then I forgot that saint because our road ran straight towards Ceaster’s northern gate and, even as I watched, that gate was pulled shut. ‘That’s a welcome,’ Finan said.

‘If you saw horsemen approaching, what would you do?’

‘I thought the bastards would leave it open and make it easy for us,’ he said.

The gate was formidable. A pair of stone towers flanked the gate’s arch, though one of the towers had partially collapsed into the ditch that was crossed by a timber bridge. The fallen tower had been rebuilt in wood. The top of the arch was a platform where one man stood watching our approach, but as we drew nearer another three men joined him.

The gates, there were a pair, stood about twice the height of a man. They looked solid as rocks. Above them was an open space because the gates did not reach all the way up to the high fighting platform, which was protected by a timber wall and a stout-looking roof. One of the men in the shadow of the roof cupped his hands. ‘Who are you?’ he called.

I pretended not to hear. We ambled on.

‘Who are you?’ the man shouted again.

‘Rolla of Haithabu!’ Rolla called out the answer. I was deliberately staying behind my leading men and keeping my head down because it was possible some of these men had been at Tameworþig and would recognise me.

‘You’re late!’ the man called. Rolla made no answer. ‘You came to join the Jarl Cnut?’ the man asked.

‘From Haithabu,’ Rolla shouted.

‘You can’t come in!’ the man said. We were very close now and he had no need to shout.

‘What are we supposed to do?’ Rolla asked. ‘Stay here and starve? We need food!’

Our horses had stopped just short of the bridge, which was as wide as the road and about ten paces long. ‘Ride around the walls,’ the man ordered, ‘to the southern gate. Cross the bridge there and you can buy food in the village.’

‘Where’s Jarl Cnut?’ Rolla demanded.

‘You’ll have to ride south,’ the man said. ‘But cross the river first. Leiknir will tell you what to do.’

‘Who’s Leiknir?’

‘He commands here.’

‘But why can’t we come in?’ Rolla asked.

‘Because I say so. Because no one comes in. Because the jarl gave orders.’

Rolla hesitated. He did not know what to do and glanced back at me as if seeking guidance, but at that moment my son spurred his horse past me and onto the bridge. He looked up at the four men. ‘Is Brunna still here?’ he asked. He spoke in Danish, the language he had learned from his mother and from me.

‘Brunna?’ The man was puzzled, as well he might be because Brunna was the name of Haesten’s wife, though I doubted my son knew that.

‘Brunna!’ my son said as if everyone would recognise the name. ‘Brunna!’ he said again. ‘You must know Brunna the Bunny! The sweet little whore with bouncy tits and an arse to dream about?’ He made a pumping motion with a fist.

The man laughed. ‘That’s not the Brunna I know.’

‘You should meet her!’ my son said enthusiastically. ‘But only when I’ve finished with her.’

‘I’ll send her across the river,’ the man said, amused.

‘Whoa!’ Uhtred shouted, not in excitement, but because his horse was skittering sideways. It looked accidental, but I had seen him rowel a spur, and the horse reacted by jerking away from the pain and the motion took Uhtred beneath the fighting platform so that he could not be seen by the four men above. Then, to my amazement, he kicked his feet from the stirrups and stood on the saddle. He did it smoothly, but it was a dangerous move because the horse was not his own, it had been borrowed from Merewalh’s men and Uhtred could not have known how it would react to his strange behaviour. I held my breath, but the horse just tossed his head and stayed still, letting my son reach with both hands to the gate’s top. He pulled himself up, straddled the gate and then dropped over. It took almost no time.

‘What …’ The man on the gate-tower leaned over, trying to see what was happening.

‘Will you send all the town’s whores across the river?’ I called, to keep his attention.

Uhtred had vanished. He was inside the town. I waited to hear a shout, or a clash of swords, but instead heard the scrape of the locking bar being lifted from its brackets, a thump as it was dropped, and then one of the gates was being pushed open. The heavy iron hinges squealed. ‘Hey!’ the man called from above.

‘Go!’ I called. ‘Go!’

I spurred my horse, driving Uhtred’s riderless stallion ahead of me. We had planned what we would do if we got inside the town and those plans needed to be changed. The Romans built their towns to a pattern, with the four gates in the four walls and two streets running between the pairs of gates to make a crossroads at the town centre. My idea had been to go fast to that centre and make a shield wall there, inviting men to come and be killed. I would have then sent twenty men to the southern gate, to make sure it was closed and barred, but now I suspected most of the defending garrison would be concentrated at that southern gate, so that was where we would go to make our shield wall. ‘Merewalh!’

‘Lord?’

‘Twenty men to guard this gate. Shut it, bar it, hold it! Finan! South gate!’

My son ran alongside his horse, reached for the pommel and leaped up into the saddle. He drew his sword.

And I drew mine.

Our hooves sounded loud on the paved street. Dogs barked and a woman screamed.

Because the Saxons had come to Ceaster.