‘What I promise,’ I said carefully, ‘is that I will do everything I can to make certain that they live and are unharmed.’ I touched the hammer at my neck, ‘and I swear that by Thor and by the lives of my own family.’
‘And how do you keep that oath?’ Sigtryggr asked me.
‘By giving Ragnall your wife, of course. Now let Jarl Orvar swear you loyalty.’
And on a beach, beside a placid lough, under a sky of blue and white, the oaths were made.
It is not difficult to be a lord, a jarl, or even a king, but it is difficult to be a leader.
Most men want to follow, and what they demand of their leader is prosperity. We are the ring-givers, the gold-givers. We give land, we give silver, we give slaves, but that alone is not enough. They must be led. Leave men standing or sitting for days at a time and they get bored, and bored men make trouble. They must be surprised and challenged, given tasks they think beyond their abilities. And they must fear. A leader who is not feared will cease to rule, but fear is not enough. They must love too. When a man has been led into the shield wall, when an enemy is roaring defiance, when the blades are clashing on shields, when the soil is about to be soaked in blood, when the ravens circle in wait for the offal of men, then a man who loves his leader will fight better than a man who merely fears him. At that moment we are brothers, we fight for each other, and a man must know that his leader will sacrifice his own life to save any one of his men.
I learned all that from Ragnar, a man who led with joy in his soul, though he was feared too. His great enemy, Kjartan, knew only how to lead by fear, and Ragnall was the same. Men who lead by fear might become great kings and might rule lands so great that no man knows their boundaries, but they can be beaten too, beaten by men who fight as brothers.
‘What my brother offered,’ Sigtryggr told me that night, ‘was that I should be king of the islands and he would be king of Britain.’
‘The islands?’
‘All the sea islands,’ he explained, ‘everything along the coast.’ He waved northwards. I had sailed those waters and knew that everything north of the Irish Sea is a tangle of islands, rocks and wild waves.
‘The Scots might not have liked that,’ I said, amused. ‘And the Scots are nothing but trouble.’
He grinned. ‘That, I think, was in Ragnall’s mind. I would keep the Scots off his back while he conquered the Saxon lands.’ He paused, watching the sparks whirl up into the darkness. ‘I’d get the rocks, the seaweed, the gulls, and the goats, and he’d get the gold, the wheat, and the women.’
‘You said no?’
‘I said yes.’
‘Why?’
He looked at me with his one eye. The other was a pucker of sunken scar tissue. ‘It’s family,’ he said, ‘it’s what our father wanted. Life has become hard here in Ireland and it’s time to find new lands.’ He shrugged. ‘Besides, if I was Lord of the Islands I could turn their rocks into gold.’
‘Rocks, seaweed, gulls, and goats?’ I asked.
‘And ships,’ he said wolfishly. He was thinking piracy. ‘And they say there are lands beyond the sea.’
‘I’ve heard those stories,’ I said dubiously.
‘But think of it! New lands! Waiting to be settled.’
‘There’s nothing but fire and ice out there,’ I said. ‘I sailed it once, out to where the ice glitters and the mountains spill fire.’
‘Then we use the fire to melt the ice.’
‘And beyond that?’ I asked. ‘Men say there are other lands, but haunted by monsters.’
‘Then we slaughter the monsters,’ he said happily.
I smiled at his enthusiasm. ‘So you said yes to your brother?’
‘I did! I would be the Sea King and he would be King of Britain,’ he paused, ‘but then he demanded Stiorra.’
There was silence around the fire. Stiorra had been listening, her long face grave, and now she caught my eye and smiled slightly, a secret smile. Men leaned in beyond the inner circle, trying to hear what was being said and relaying the words to those who were out of earshot.
‘He wanted Stiorra,’ I said flatly.
‘He always wants hostages,’ Orvar said.
I grimaced. ‘You hold your enemies’ families hostage, not your friends.’
‘We’re all enemies to Ragnall,’ Bjarke put in. He was Nidhogg’s shipmaster, a tall and lean Norseman with a long plaited beard and a face marked with an inked ship on either cheek.
‘He holds your wife too?’ I asked.
‘My wife, two daughters, and my son.’
So Ragnall ruled by fear, and only by fear. Men were scared of him and so they should be because he was a frightening man, but a leader who rules by fear must also be successful. He must lead his men from victory to victory because the moment he shows himself weak then he is vulnerable, and Ragnall had been beaten. I had thrashed him in the woods about Eads Byrig, I had driven him from the lands around Ceaster, and it was no wonder, I thought, that the men he had left in Ireland were so ready to betray the oaths they had sworn to him.
And that was another question. If a man swears an oath of loyalty and afterwards the lord takes hostages for the fulfilment of that oath, is the oath valid? When a man clasped hands with me, when he said the words that bound his fate to mine, then he became like a brother. Ragnall trusted no one, it seemed. He took oaths and he took hostages. Every man was his enemy, and a man owes no loyalty to an enemy.
Svart, a huge man who was Sigtryggr’s second-in-command, growled, ‘He didn’t want the Lady Stiorra as a hostage,’ he said.
‘No,’ Sigtryggr agreed.
‘I was to be his wife,’ Stiorra said, ‘his fifth wife.’
‘He told you that?’ I asked.
‘Fulla told me,’ she said. ‘Fulla is his first wife. She showed me her scars too.’ She spoke very calmly. ‘Did you ever beat your wives, father?’
I smiled at her through the flames. ‘I’m weak that way, no.’
She smiled back. ‘I remember you telling us that a man does not beat a woman. You said it often.’
‘Only a weak man beats a woman,’ I said. Some of the listening men looked uncomfortable, but none of them argued. ‘But it might take a strong man to have more than one wife?’ I went on, looking at Sigtryggr, who laughed.
‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he said, ‘she’d beat me to a pulp.’
‘So Ragnall demanded Stiorra?’ I prompted him.
‘He brought his whole fleet to take her! Hundreds of men! It was his right, he said. And so we came here.’
‘Fled here,’ Stiorra said drily.
‘We had six ships,’ Sigtryggr explained, ‘and he had thirty-six.’
‘What happened to the six ships?’
‘We bribed the Irish with them, exchanged them for grain and ale.’
‘The same Irish who were paid to kill you?’ I asked. Sigtryggr nodded. ‘So why haven’t they killed you?’
‘Because they don’t want to die on these rocks,’ Sigtryggr said, ‘and because of your daughter.’
I looked at her. ‘Because of your sorcery?’
Stiorra nodded, then stood, her face cast into stern shadows by the flames. ‘Come with me, father,’ she said and I saw that Sigtryggr’s men were grinning, enjoying some secret jest. ‘Father?’ Stiorra beckoned westwards. ‘It’s time, anyway.’
‘Time?’
‘You’ll see.’
I followed her westwards. She gave me her hand to guide me down the slope because the night was dark and the path off the hilltop was steep. We went slowly, our eyes adjusting to the night’s blackness. ‘It’s me,’ she called softly as we reached the foot of the hill.
‘Mistress,’ a voice acknowledged from the dark. There were evidently sentries beside the crude stone wall that had been built to bar the narrow neck of land that led away from the fort. I could see fires now, campfires, a long way off on the mainland.
‘How many men around those fires?’ I asked.
&n
bsp; ‘Hundreds,’ Stiorra said calmly. ‘Enough to overwhelm us, so we needed to use other methods to keep them away.’ She climbed onto the wall’s top and let go of my hand. I could hardly see her now. She wore a cloak as black as the night, as black as her hair, but I was aware of her standing straight and tall, facing the distant enemy.
And then she began to sing.
Or rather she crooned and she moaned, her voice sliding up and down eerily, crying in the darkness, and sometimes pausing to yelp like a vixen. Then she would stop and there would be silence in the night except for the sigh of wind across the land. She started again, yelping again, short sharp barks that she spat westwards before letting her voice slide up into a desperate scream that slowly, slowly faded into a whimper and then to nothing.
And then, as if in answer, the western horizon was lit by lightning. Not the sharp stabs of Thor’s thunderbolts, not the jagged streaks of anger that split the sky, but flickering sheets of silent summer lightning. They showed, distant and bright, then went, leaving darkness again and a stillness that felt full of menace. There was one last burst of far light and I saw the white skulls of the death fence arrayed along the wall where Stiorra stood.
‘There, father,’ she held out a hand, ‘they’re cursed again.’
I took her hand and helped her down from the wall. ‘Cursed?’
‘They think I’m a sorceress.’
‘And are you?’
‘They fear me,’ she said. ‘I call the spirits of the dead to haunt them and they know I speak to the gods.’
‘I thought they were Christians?’
‘They are, but they fear the older gods, and I keep them frightened.’ She paused, staring up into the dark. ‘There’s something different here in Ireland,’ she said, sounding puzzled, ‘as if the old magic still clings to the earth. You can feel it.’
‘I can’t.’
She smiled. I saw the white of her teeth. ‘I learned the runesticks. Fulla taught me.’
I had given her the runesticks that her mother had used, the slender polished shafts that, when cast, made intricate patterns that were said to tell the future. ‘Do they speak to you?’ I asked.
‘They said you’d come, and they said Ragnall will die. They said a third thing …’ she stopped abruptly.
‘A third thing?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘Sometimes they’re hard to read,’ she said dismissively, taking my arm and leading me back towards the fire on the hilltop. ‘In the morning the Christian sorcerers will try to undo my magic. They’ll fail.’
‘Christian sorcerers?’
‘Priests,’ she said dismissively.
‘And did the runesticks tell you that your eldest brother would be gelded?’
She stopped and looked up at me in the darkness. ‘Gelded?’
‘He almost died.’
‘No!’ she said. ‘No!’
‘Brida did it.’
‘Brida?’
‘A hell-bitch,’ I said bitterly, ‘who has joined Ragnall.’
‘No!’ she protested again. ‘But Uhtred was here! He went to Ragnall in peace!’
‘He’s called Father Oswald now,’ I said, ‘and that’s what he’ll never be, a father.’
‘This Brida,’ she asked fiercely, ‘is she an enchantress?’
‘She thinks so, she says so.’
She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘And that was the third thing the runesticks said, father, that an enchantress must die.’
‘The runesticks said that?’
‘It must be her,’ she said vengefully. She had plainly feared the sticks had foretold her own death. ‘It will be her,’ she said.
And I followed her back to the fire.
In the morning three Irish priests approached the narrow neck of land where the skulls stood on the low stone wall. They stopped at least fifty paces from the skulls, where they held their hands in the air and chanted prayers. One of them, a wild-haired man, danced in circles as he chanted. ‘What do they hope to do?’ I asked.
‘They’re praying that God will destroy the skulls,’ Finan said. He made the sign of the cross.
‘They really fear them,’ I said in wonder.
‘You wouldn’t?’
‘They’re just skulls.’
‘They’re the dead!’ he said fiercely. ‘Didn’t you know that when you put the heads around Eads Byrig?’
‘I just wanted to horrify Ragnall,’ I said.
‘You gave him a ghost fence,’ Finan said, ‘and it’s no wonder he left the place. And this one?’ He nodded downhill to where Stiorra had arranged the skulls to face the mainland. ‘This ghost fence has power!’
‘Power?’
‘Let me show you.’ He led me across the hilltop to a stone-lined pit. It was not large, perhaps six feet square, but every inch of space had been crammed with bones. ‘God knows how long they’ve been there,’ Finan said, ‘they were covered with that slab.’ He pointed to a stone slab that had been shoved away from the pit. The surface of the slab had a cross scratched into it, the cross now filled with lichen. The bones had been sorted so that the long yellowed leg bones were all stacked together and the ribs carefully piled. There were pelvises, knucklebones, arm bones, but no skulls. ‘I reckon the skulls were the top layer,’ Finan said.
‘Who were they?’ I stooped to look into the pit.
‘Monks probably. Maybe slaughtered when the first Norsemen came?’ He turned and stared westwards. ‘And those poor bastards are terrified of them. It’s an army of the dead, their own dead! They’ll be wanting more gold before they cross this ghost fence.’
‘More gold?’
Finan half smiled. ‘Ragnall paid the Uí Néill gold to capture Stiorra. But if they have to fight the dead as well as the living they’ll want a lot more than the gold he’s given them so far.’
‘The dead don’t fight,’ I said.
Finan scorned that. ‘You Saxons! I sometimes think you know nothing! No, the dead don’t fight, but they take revenge! You want your milk sour from the udder? You want your crops to shrivel? Your cattle to have the staggers? Your children sick?’
I could hear the Irish priests making yelping noises and I wondered if the air was filled with unseen spirits fighting a battle of magic. The thought made me touch the hammer about my neck, then I forgot the phantoms as my son shouted from down the hill. ‘Father!’ he called. ‘The ships!’
I saw that the last two ships were coming from the south, which meant Orvar had talked their crews into betraying Ragnall. I had my fleet now and the beginnings of an army. ‘We have to rescue Orvar’s family,’ I said.
‘We made that promise,’ Finan agreed.
‘Ragnall won’t have them with his horsemen,’ I guessed. ‘You don’t want women and children slowing you down when you’re raiding deep in hostile country.’
‘But he’ll have them kept safe,’ Finan said.
Which meant, I thought, that they were in Eoferwic. That city was Ragnall’s base, his stronghold. We knew he had sent part of his army back there, presumably to hold the Roman walls while the rest of his men ravaged Mercia. ‘Let’s just hope they’re not in Dunholm,’ I said. Brida’s fortress was formidable, perched on its crag above the river.
‘That place would be a bitch to capture again,’ Finan said.
‘They’ll be in Eoferwic,’ I said, praying I was right.
And Eoferwic, I thought, was where my story had all begun. Where my father had died. Where I had become the Lord of Bebbanburg. Where I had met Ragnar and learned of the ancient gods.
And it was time to go back.
PART THREE
War of the Brothers
Eleven
I have endured nightmare voyages. I was a slave once, pulling a heavy oar in tumbling seas, freezing in the spray, fighting waves and wind, dragging a boat towards a rock-bound shore rimmed with ice. I had almost wished that the sea would take us. We were whimpering with fear and cold.
This was
worse.
I had been aboard Alfred’s ship Heahengel when Guthrum’s fleet had died in a sudden storm that whipped the sea off the West Saxon coast to frenzy. The wind had shrieked, the waves were white devils, masts went overboard, sails were ripped to crazed tatters, and the great boats had sunk one after the other. The cries of the drowning had lived with me for days.
But this was worse.
This was worse even though the sea was calm, the waves placid and what small wind did blow wafted gently from the west. We saw no enemies. We crossed a sea as tame as a duck pond, yet every moment of that voyage was terrifying.
We left the lough at high water when the savage currents that streamed through the narrows were sullen and still. We had five ships now. All of Ragnall’s crews in Loch Cuan had sworn their loyalty to Sigtryggr, but that meant we had their families and all Sigtryggr’s people and all my men. Ships that were meant to carry no more than seventy crew had close to two hundred people aboard. They rode low in the water, the small waves constantly slopping over the upper strakes so that those men not rowing had to bail. We had thrown some of the ballast stones overboard, but that made the ships perilously top heavy so they rocked alarmingly whenever an errant breath of wind came from the north or south, and even the smallest cross-sea threatened to sink us. We crept across that gentle sea, but never for one moment did I feel out of danger. Even in the worst storm men can row, they can fight the gods, but those fragile five ships in a calm sea felt so vulnerable. The worst moments were in the night-time. The wind dropped to nothing, which might have been our salvation, but in the dark we could not see the small waves, only feel them as they spilled over the boats’ sides. We pulled slow and steady through the darkness and we hammered the ears of the gods with prayers. We watched for oar-splashes, straining to stay close to the other ships, and still we prayed to every god known to us.
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