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He grimaced. ‘A woman.’
‘Surprise me,’ I said wryly.
‘I was married,’ he went on as though I had not spoken. ‘A good woman, she was, a royal daughter of the Uí Néill, and I was a prince of my people. My brother was too. Prince Conall.’
‘Conall,’ I said after a few heartbeats of silence.
‘They’re small kingdoms in Ireland,’ he said bleakly, staring across the water. ‘Small kingdoms and great kings, and we fight. Christ, how we love to fight! The Uí Néill, of course, are the great ones, at least in the north. We were their clients. We gave them tribute. We fought for them when they demanded it, we drank with them and we married their good women.’
‘And you married a Uí Néill woman?’ I prompted him.
‘Conall is younger than me,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘I should have been the next king, but Conall met a maid from the Ó Domhnaill. God, lord, but she was beautiful! She was nothing by birth! She was no chieftain’s daughter, but a dairy girl. And she was lovely,’ he spoke wistfully, his eyes gleaming wet. ‘She had hair dark as night and eyes like stars and a body as graceful as an angel in flight.’
‘And she was called?’ I asked.
He shook his head abruptly, rejecting the question. ‘And God help us we fell in love. We ran away. We took horses and we rode south. Just Conall’s wife and me. We thought we’d ride, we’d hide, and we’d never be found.’
‘And Conall pursued you?’ I guessed.
‘The Uí Néill pursued us. God knows it was a hunt. Every Christian in Ireland knew of us, knew of the gold they would make if they found us, and yes, Conall rode with the men of the Uí Néill.’
I said nothing. I waited.
‘Nothing is hidden in Ireland,’ Finan went on. ‘You can’t hide. The little people see you. Folk see you. Find an island in a lake and they know you’re there. Go to a mountain top and they’ll find you, hide in a cave and they’ll hunt you down. We should have taken ship, but we were young. We didn’t know.’
‘They found you.’
‘They found us, and Conall promised he would make my life worse than death.’
‘By selling you to Sverri?’ Sverri was the slaver who had branded us.
He nodded. ‘I was stripped of my gold, whipped, made to crawl through Uí Néill shit, and then sold to Sverri. I am the king that never was.’
‘And the girl?’
‘And Conall took my Uí Néill wife as his own. The priests allowed it, they encouraged it, and he raised my sons as his own. They cursed me, lord. My own sons cursed me. That one,’ he nodded at the corpse, ‘cursed me just now. I am the betrayer, the cursed.’
‘And he’s your son?’ I asked gently.
‘He wouldn’t say. He could be. Or Conall’s boy. He’s my blood, anyway.’
I walked to the dead man, put my right foot on his belly, and tugged the spear free. It was a struggle and the corpse made an obscene sucking noise as I wrenched the wide blade out. A bloody cross lay on the dead man’s chest. ‘The priests will bury him,’ I said, ‘they’ll say prayers over him.’ I hurled the spear into the shallows and turned back to Finan. ‘What happened to the girl?’
He stared empty-eyed across the river that was smeared dark with the ash of our ships. ‘For one day,’ he said, ‘they let the warriors of the Uí Néill do as they wished with her. They made me watch. And then they were merciful, lord. They killed her.’
‘And your brother,’ I said, ‘has sent men to help Ragnall?’
‘The Uí Néill sent men to help Ragnall. And yes, my brother leads them.’
‘And why would they do that?’ I asked.
‘Because the Uí Néill would be kings of all the north. Of Ireland and of Scotland too, of all the north. Ragnall can have the Saxon lands. That’s the agreement. He helps them, they help him.’
‘And he begins with Northumbria?’
‘Or Mercia,’ Finan suggested with a shrug. ‘But they won’t rest there,’ he went on, ‘because they want everything.’
It was the ancient dream, the dream that had haunted my whole life, the dream of the Northmen to conquer all Britain. They had tried so often and they had come so close to success, yet still we Saxons lived and still we fought back so that now half the island was ours again. Yet we should have lost! The Northmen were savage, they came with fury and anger, and their armies darkened the land, but they had one fatal weakness. They were like dogs that fought each other, and only when one dog was strongest and could snarl and bite and force the others to his bidding were the invasions dangerous. But one defeat shattered their armies. They followed a man so long as he was successful, but if that man showed weakness they deserted in droves to find other, easier prey.
And Ragnall had led an army here. An army of Norsemen and Danes and Irish, and that meant Ragnall had united our enemies. That made him dangerous.
Except he had not whipped all the dogs to his bidding.
I learned one other thing from our prisoners. Sigtryggr, my daughter’s husband, had refused to sail with his brother. He was still in Ireland. Beadwulf would think otherwise because he would see the flag of the red axe and he would think it belonged to Sigtryggr, but two of the prisoners told me that the brothers shared the symbol. It was their dead father’s flag, the bloody red axe of Ivar, but Sigtryggr’s axe, at least for the moment, was resting. Ragnall’s axe had chopped a bloody hole in our defences, but my son-in-law was still in Ireland. I touched my hammer and prayed he stayed there.
‘We must go,’ I told Finan.
Because we had to whip Ragnall into defeat.
And I thought we would ride east.
TWO (#ulink_6ef47e46-36b0-5764-9307-e1f8b1af0066)
The priests came to me early next morning. There were four of them, led by the Mercian twins Ceolnoth and Ceolberht who hated me. I had known them since boyhood and had no more love for them than they had for me, but at least I could now tell them apart. For years I had never known which twin I spoke to, they were as alike as two eggs, but one of our arguments had ended with me kicking out Ceolberht’s teeth, so now I knew that he was the one who hissed when he spoke. He dribbled too. ‘Will you be back by Easter, lord?’ he asked me. He was being very respectful, perhaps because he still had one or two teeth left and wanted to keep them.
‘No,’ I said, then urged my horse forward a pace. ‘Godwin! Put the fish in sacks!’
‘Yes, lord!’ Godwin called back. Godwin was my servant, and he and three other men had been rolling barrels from one of Ceaster’s storehouses. The barrels were filled with smoked fish, and the men were trying to make rope slings that would let each packhorse carry two barrels. Godwin frowned. ‘Do we have sacks, lord?’
‘There are twenty-two sacks of fleeces in my storeroom,’ I told him. ‘Tell my steward to empty them!’ I looked back to Father Ceolberht. ‘We won’t get all the wool out of the sacks,’ I told him, ‘and some of the wool will stick to the fish and then get caught in our teeth.’ I smiled at him. ‘If we have teeth.’
‘How many men will be left to defend Ceaster?’ his brother asked sternly.
‘Eighty,’ I said.
‘Eighty!’
‘And half of those are sick,’ I added. ‘So you’ll have forty fit men and the rest will be cripples.’
‘It isn’t enough!’ he protested.
‘Of course it isn’t enough,’ I snarled, ‘but I need an army to finish off Ragnall. Ceaster will have to take its chances.’
‘But if the heathens come …’ Father Wissian suggested nervously.
‘The heathens won’t know how big the garrison is,’ I said, ‘but they will know how strong the walls are. Leaving so few men here is a risk, but it’s a risk I’m taking. And you’ll have men from the fyrd. Godwin! Use the sacks for the bread too!’
I was taking just over three hundred men, leaving behind barely enough troops to defend the ramparts of Ceaster and Brunanburh. It might sound simple to say I was leading three hundred men, as if all we had to do was mount our horses, leave Ceaster and ride eastwards, but it takes time to organise the army. We had to carry our own food. We would be riding into country where food could be bought, but never enough for all of us. The Northmen would steal what they wanted, but we paid because we rode in our own country, and so I had a packhorse laden with silver coins and guarded by two of my warriors. And we would number well over three hundred because many men would take servants, some would take the women they could not bear to leave behind, and then there were the boys to lead the spare horses and the herd of packhorses laden with armour, weapons, and the sacks of salted meat, smoked fish, hard-baked bread, and thick-rinded cheese.
‘You do know what happens at Easter!’ Ceolnoth demanded sternly.
‘Of course I know,’ I said, ‘we make babies.’
‘That is the most ridiculous …’ Ceolberht began to protest, then went silent when his brother glared at him.
‘It’s my favourite feast,’ I continued happily. ‘Easter is baby-making day!’
‘It is the most solemn and joyous feast of the Christian year,’ Ceolnoth lectured me, ‘solemn because we remember the agony of our Saviour’s death, and joyous because of His resurrection.’
‘Amen,’ Father Wissian said.
Wissian was another Mercian, a young man with a shock of prematurely white hair. I rather liked Wissian, but he was cowed by the twins. Father Cuthbert stood beside him, blind and smiling. He had heard this argument before and was enjoying it. I glowered at the priests. ‘Why is it called Easter?’ I demanded.
‘Because our Lord died and was resurrected in the east, of course,’ Ceolnoth answered.
‘Horse shit,’ I said, ‘it’s called Easter because it’s Eostre’s feast, and you know it.’
‘It is not …’ Ceolberht began indignantly.
‘Eostre!’ I overrode him. ‘Goddess of the spring! Goddess of baby-making! You Christians stole both her name and her feast!’
‘Ignore him,’ Ceolnoth said, but he knew I was right. Eostre is the goddess of the spring, and a merry goddess she is too, which means many babies are born in January. The Christians, of course, try to stop the merriment, claiming that the name Easter is all about the east, but as usual the Christians are spouting nonsense. Easter is Eostre’s feast and despite all the sermons that insisted feast was solemn and sacred, most folk had a half memory of their duties towards Eostre and so the babies duly arrived every winter. In the three years I had lived at Ceaster I had always insisted on a fair to celebrate Eostre’s feast. There were fire-walkers and jugglers, musicians and acrobats, wrestling matches and horse races. There were booths selling everything from pottery to jewellery, and there was dancing. The priests disapproved of the dancing, but folk danced anyway, and the dances ensured that the babies came on time.
But this year was going to be different. The Christians had decided to create a Bishop of Ceaster and had set Easter as the date of his enthronement. The new bishop was called Leofstan, and I had never met the man and knew little of him except that he came from Wessex and had an exaggerated reputation for piety. He was a scholar, I had been told, and was married, but on being named as the new bishop he had famously sworn to fast three days in every week and to stay celibate. Blind Father Cuthbert, who revelled in nonsense, had told me of the new bishop’s oath, knowing it would amuse me. ‘He did what?’ I asked.
‘He vowed to give up pleasuring his wife, lord.’
‘Maybe she’s old and ugly?’
‘Men say she’s comely,’ Father Cuthbert said dubiously, ‘but our bishop-to-be says that our Lord gave up His life for us and the very least we can do is to give up our carnal pleasures for Him.’
‘The man’s an idiot,’ I had said.
‘I can’t agree with you,’ Cuthbert said slyly, ‘but yes, lord, Leofstan’s an idiot.’
The idiot’s consecration was what had brought Ceolnoth and Ceolberht to Ceaster. They were planning the ceremonies and had invited abbots, bishops, and priests from all across Mercia, from Wessex, and from even further afield in Frankia. ‘We need to ensure their safety,’ Ceolnoth insisted now. ‘We have promised them the city will be defended against any attack. Eighty men isn’t enough!’ he said scornfully.
I pretended to be worried. ‘You mean your churchmen might all be slaughtered if the Danes come?’
‘Of course!’ Then he saw my smile and that only increased his fury. ‘We need five hundred men! King Edward might come! The Lady Æthelflaed will certainly be here!’
‘She won’t,’ I said. ‘She’ll be with me, fighting Ragnall. If the Northmen come you’d better just pray. Your god is supposed to work miracles, isn’t he?’
Æthelflaed, I knew, would come north as soon as my messengers reached Gleawecestre. Those same messengers would then order new ships from the boatbuilders along the Sæfern. I would have preferred to buy ships from Lundene where the yards employed skilled Frisian boatbuilders, but for now we would buy three vessels from the shipwrights on the Sæfern. ‘Tell them I want their smaller ships,’ I told the messengers, ‘no more than thirty oars on each side!’ The Sæfern men built heavy ships, wide and deep, which could ride the rough seas to Ireland, but such vessels would be cumbersome in a shallow river. There was no hurry. The men who would man those ships were riding east with me, and in our absence I ordered Rædwald to start rebuilding the wharf. He would do the job well, though slowly.
I had sent my son ahead with fifty men, all mounted on light fast horses. They had left the day before and their job was to pursue the enemy, attack their forage parties and ambush their scouts. Beadwulf was already following Ragnall’s men, but his task was simply to report back to me where the army went ashore, and that must happen soon because the river became unnavigable after a few miles. Once ashore, Ragnall’s army would spread out to find horses, food, and slaves, and my son had been sent to slow them, annoy them, and, if he was sensible, avoid a major fight with them.
‘What if Ragnall goes north?’ Finan asked me.
‘I told Uhtred not to leave Saxon land,’ I said. I knew what Finan was asking. If Ragnall chose to take his men north he would be entering Northumbria, a land ruled by the Danes, and if my son and his war-band followed they would find themselves in enemy land, outnumbered and surrounded.
‘And you think he’ll obey you?’ Finan asked.
‘He’s no fool.’
Finan half smiled. ‘He’s like you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning he’s like you, so as like or not he’ll chase Ragnall halfway to Scotland before he comes to his senses.’ He stooped to tighten his saddle’s girth. ‘Besides, how can you tell where Mercia ends and Northumbria begins?’
‘He’ll be careful,’ I said.
‘He’d better be, lord.’ He put his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle where he settled himself, collected the reins, and turned to look at the four priests. They were talking to each other, heads bowed, hands gesticulating. ‘What did they want?’
‘For me to leave an army here to protect their damned bishops.’
Finan sneered at that, then turned and stared northwards. ‘Life’s a crock of shit, isn’t it?’ he said bitterly. I said nothing, just watched as Finan loosened his sword, Soul-Stealer, in its scabbard. He had buried his son or nephew beside the river, digging the grave himself and marking it with a stone. ‘Families,’ he said bitterly, ‘now let’s go and kill more of the bastards.’
I pulled myself up into the saddle. The sun was up now, but still low in the east where it was shrouded by grey clouds. A chill wind blew from the Irish Sea. Men were mounting and the last spears were being tied to packhorses when a horn sounded from the northern gate. That horn only sounded if the sentries had seen something worth my attention and so I kicked my horse up the main street and my men, thinking we were leaving, followed. The horn sounded again as I cantered past Ceaster’s great hall, then a third time as I slid from the saddle and climbed the stone steps that led to the rampart above the gate arch.
A dozen horsemen were approaching, spurring their stallions across the Roman cemetery, coming as fast as they could ride. I recognised my son’s grey horse, then saw Beadwulf was with him. They slewed to a stop just beyond the ditch and my son looked up. ‘They’re at Eads Byrig,’ he called.
‘A thousand of the bastards,’ Beadwulf added.
I instinctively looked eastwards, even though I knew Eads Byrig was not visible from the gateway. But it was close. It lay no further to the east than Brunanburh did to the west. ‘They’re digging in!’ my son shouted.
‘What is it?’ Finan had joined me on the rampart.
‘Ragnall’s not going north,’ I said, ‘and he’s not going south.’
‘Then where?’
‘He’s here,’ I said, still staring east. ‘He’s coming here.’
To Ceaster.
Eads Byrig lay on a low ridge that ran north and south. The hill was simply a higher part of the ridge, a grassy hump rising like an island above the oaks and sycamores that grew thick about its base. The slopes were mostly shallow, an easy stroll, except that the ancient people who had lived in Britain long before my ancestors had crossed the sea, indeed before even the Romans came, had ringed the hill with walls and ditches. They were not stone walls, as the Romans had made at Lundene and Ceaster, nor wooden palisades as we build, but walls made of earth. They had dug a deep ditch all around the hill’s long crest and thrown the soil up to make a steep embankment inside the ditch, then made a second ditch and wall inside the first, and though the long years and the hard rain had eroded the double walls and half filled the two ditches, the defences were still formidable. The hill’s name meant Ead’s stronghold, and doubtless some Saxon called Ead had once lived there and used the walls to defend his herds and home, but the stronghold was much older than its name suggested. There were such grassy forts on high hills throughout Britain, proof that men have fought for this land as long as men have lived here, and I sometimes wonder whether a thousand years from now folk will still be making walls in Britain and setting sentries in the night to watch for enemies in the dawn.
It was difficult to approach Ead’s stronghold. The woods were dense and an ambush among the trees was all too easy. My son’s men had managed to get close to the ridge before Ragnall’s numbers forced them away. They had retreated to the open pastureland to the west of the forest, where I found them watching the thick woods. ‘They’re deepening the ditches,’ one of Beadwulf’s men greeted my arrival, ‘we could see the bastards shovelling away, lord.’
‘Cutting trees too, lord,’ Beadwulf added.
I could hear the axes working. They sounded far off, muffled by the spring foliage. ‘He’s making a burh,’ I said. Ragnall’s troops would be deepening the old ditches and raising the earth walls, on top of which they would build a wooden palisade. ‘Where did the ships land?’ I asked Beadwulf.
‘By the fish traps, lord.’ He nodded to the north, showing where he meant, then turned as a distant crash announced a tree’s fall. ‘They went aground before that. They took a fair time to get their ships off the mud.’
‘The ships are still there?’
