‘Cerdic,’ I said, not turning around to look at him, ‘make it quick!’
I heard, but did not see, Skirnir die. The spear-blade was thrust so hard that it pierced his throat and then drove into the planks of the ship. ‘I wanted to kill him!’ Skade shrieked.
I ignored her. Instead I walked past Rollo to approach the undefeated Frisians. These men were Skirnir’s own crew, maybe sixty in all, who watched me come in silence. I had dropped my shield so they could see the blood spattered on my mail and see the blood streaked across my helmet’s mask and see the blood congealing on Serpent-Breath’s blade. My helmet was surmounted by a silver wolf, my belt had plates of gold, and my arm rings shone through their gloss of blood. They saw a warlord and I walked to within ten paces of them to show that I had no fear of pirates.
‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘and I give you a choice. You can live or you can die.’
Rollo, behind me, had started the shield music. His men were beating blades against linden wood in the dark rhythm of death’s promise.
‘We are Danes,’ I told the Frisians, ‘and we are Saxons, and we are warriors who love to fight. In our halls at night we chant the tales of the men we have killed, of the women we have widowed and of the children we have orphaned. So make your choice! Either give me a new song to sing or else lay down your weapons.’
They lay down their weapons. I made them take off their mail, those that possessed it, or else their leather tunics. I took their boots, their belts, their armour and their weapons and we piled that plunder in Seolferwulf, and then we burned both of Skirnir’s long ships. They burned well, great plumes of flame climbing the masts beneath churning black smoke that drifted up into the low clouds.
Skirnir had come with one hundred and thirty-one men. We had killed twenty-three of those, while another sixteen were grievously wounded. One of Rollo’s men had lost an eye to a spear thrust, and Ælric, a Saxon in my service, lay dying. He had fought beside Finan and had tripped on a rower’s bench and had taken an axe blow in the back, and I knelt beside him on the sand and held his hand firm around his sword’s hilt and promised I would give his widow gold and raise his children as though they were my own. He heard me, though he could not speak back, and I held his hand until the noise rattled in his throat and his body quivered as his soul went to the long darkness. We took his corpse away with us and buried him at sea. He was a Christian, and Osferth said a prayer over the dead Ælric before we tipped him into eternity. We took another corpse with us, Skirnir’s, that we stripped naked and hung from our wolf’s-head prow to show that we had conquered.
We poled Seolferwulf back down the creek on the ebbing tide. When the creek widened we turned and rowed her, towing the small fishing craft that I abandoned beside the village. Then we went out to sea and Seolferwulf shuddered to the first small waves. The grey clouds that had covered the place of slaughter were at last shredding, letting a watery sunlight beat down on the choppy sea. ‘You shouldn’t have let them live,’ Skade told me.
‘Skirnir’s men?’ I asked. ‘Why kill them? They were beaten.’
‘They should all be dead,’ she said vengefully, then turned a gaze of utter fury on me. ‘You left two of his brothers alive! They should be dead!’
‘I let them live,’ I said. Without Skirnir and his large boats they were harmless, though Skade did not see it that way.
‘Milksop!’ she spat at me.
I stared at her. ‘Careful, woman,’ I said, and she went sulkily silent.
We had brought just one prisoner with us, the shipmaster from Skirnir’s own vessel. He was an old man, over forty, and years of squinting at the sun-reflecting sea had made his eyes mere crinkled slits in a face beaten dark by salt and weather. He would be our guide. ‘If my ship so much as touches a sandbank,’ I told him, ‘I’ll let Skade kill you in her own way.’
Seolferwulf touched no sandbank as we rowed to Zegge. The channel was intricate, and misleading marks had been planted to lure attackers onto shoals, but the prisoner’s pure terror of Skade made him careful. We arrived in the early evening, feeling our way gently, and led by the corpse hanging at the bows. Spray had washed Skirnir’s carcass clean and gulls, smelling him, screamed as they wheeled in hungry frustration around our prow.
Men and women watched us pass through the crooked channel that twisted between two of the inner islands, and then we glided across sheltered water that reflected the settling sun in shivering gold. The watchers were Skirnir’s followers, but these men had not sailed with their lord in the dawn, and now they saw our proud shields that we had hung from Seolferwulf’s topmost strakes, and they saw the corpse dangling white from the rope, and none wanted to challenge us.
There were fewer people on Zegge than on the outer islands, because it was from Zegge that the two defeated crews had sailed, and where most of the dead, wounded or stranded men had lived. A crowd of women came to the grey wooden pier that jutted out beneath the mound which supported Skirnir’s hall. The women watched our boat approach, then some recognised the body that was our trophy and they all fled, dragging their children by the hands. Eight men, dressed in mail and carrying weapons, came from the hall, but when they saw my crew disembarking they ostentatiously put their weapons down. They knew now their lord was dead, and not one of them was minded to fight for his reputation.
And so, in the twilight of that day, we came to the hall on the mound of Zegge, and I stared up at its black bulk and thought of the dragon sleeping on his hoard of silver and gold. The high-roofed hall had great wooden horns at its eaves, horns that reared into the darkening sky where the first stars pricked the dusk.
I left fifteen men to guard the ship, then climbed the hill, seeing how the mound was made from great baulks of timber planted in a long rectangle that had been filled with sand, and on that first layer another smaller rectangle had been built, and then a third, and at the summit a final layer where a palisade stood, though it offered no defiance now, for its heavy wooden gate stood wide open. There was no fight left in Skirnir’s men. Their lord was dead.
The hall’s door was framed by a pair of vast curved bones that had come from some sea monster. I passed beneath them with a drawn sword with Rollo and Finan flanking me. A fire burned in the central hearth, spitting like a cat as salt-caked driftwood does. Skade came behind us and the waiting servants shivered at the sight of her. Skirnir’s steward, a plump man, bowed low to me. ‘Where’s the treasure?’ I asked harshly.
The steward was too frightened to answer and Skade thrust him aside. ‘Lanterns!’ she called to the servants, and small rushlamps were brought and in their paltry light she led me to a door at the back of the hall which opened onto a small square chamber heaped with sealskins. ‘He slept here,’ she said.
‘Above the dragon?’
‘He was the dragon,’ she said scornfully, ‘he was a pig and a dragon,’ and then she dropped to her knees and scrabbled the stinking skins aside. I called for Skirnir’s plump steward to help her. Finan looked at me, an eyebrow raised in expectation, and I could not resist a smile.
To take Bebbanburg I needed men. To storm that great stone wall and slaughter my uncle’s warriors, I needed men, and to buy men I needed gold. I needed silver. I needed a treasure guarded by a dragon to make that long dream come true, and so I smiled as Skade and the steward pulled away the high pile of pelts that covered the hiding place.
And then, in the light of the smoking lamps, the door was revealed.
It was a trapdoor of dark heavy wood into which an iron ring was set. I remember Father Beocca, years ago, telling me how he had visited a monastery in Sumorsæte and how the abbot had reverently showed him a crystal vial in which was kept milk from the Virgin Mary’s breasts. ‘I shivered, Uhtred,’ Beocca had told me earnestly, ‘I shook like a leaf in the wind. I dared not hold the flask for fear of dropping it! I shook!’
I do not think I shook at that moment, but I felt the same awe, the same sense of being close to someth
ing inexplicable. My future lay beneath that trapdoor. My hopes, my sons’ futures, my dreams of freedom beneath a northern sky, all lay so close. ‘Open it,’ I ordered, and my voice was hoarse, ‘open it.’
Rollo and the steward took hold of the ring. The trapdoor was stiff, jammed in its frame, and they needed to tug it hard to move it at all. Then, abruptly, the heavy door came free and the two men staggered as they dragged it aside.
I stepped forward and looked down.
And started laughing.
There was no dragon. I have never seen a dragon, though I am assured they exist and I have heard men describe those awful beasts with their malevolent scarlet eyes, flame-shooting mouths, questing necks and crackling wings the size of ship sails. They are the beasts of nightmare, and though I have sailed into the distant north, sailed to where the ice blanches the sky with its reflections, I have never been far enough north to the frost lands where dragons are said to roost.
There was no dragon in Skirnir’s pit, but there was a skeleton and some rats. The rats looked up startled, their tiny eyes winking back the flames of our inadequate lanterns, then they scuttled into cracks between the elm planks that lined the pit. Two rats were inside the ribcage of the dead man and they were the last to leave, first wriggling between the bones then slithering fast into their hiding place.
And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw the coins and the silver shards. I heard them first, chinking under the feet of the rats, then I saw them, dully gleaming, spilling from the leather sacks that had held them. The rotting sacks had been gnawed by rats. ‘What’s the corpse?’ I asked.
‘A man who tried to steal Lord Skirnir’s treasure, lord,’ the steward answered in a whisper.
‘He was left here to die?’
‘Yes, lord. He was blinded first, then his sinews were cut, and he was put in the pit to die slowly.’
Skade smiled.
‘Bring it all out,’ I ordered Finan, then pushed the steward towards the hall. ‘You feed us tonight,’ I ordered him, ‘all of us.’
I went back into the hall. It had only one table, so that most men would have eaten on the rush-covered floor. It was dark now, the only light coming from the big fire that we fed with logs my men tore from the palisade. I sat at the table and watched as Skirnir’s treasure was laid before me. I had laughed when the pit was first opened, and that laughter had been scornful because, in the feeble light, the treasure had appeared so paltry. What had I expected? A glittering heap of gold, studded with precious stones?
The laughter was sour because Skirnir’s treasure was indeed paltry. He had boasted of his wealth, but the truth was hidden behind those boasts and beneath his stinking bed-skins. He was not poor, true, but his hoard was just what I should have expected from a man who did little except steal scraps of silver from small traders.
My men watched the table. It was important that they saw what they had won so they would know I did not cheat them when I divided the hoard. They mostly saw silver, but there were two pieces of gold, both thin torques made of twisted strands, and I put one in the pile for Rollo and his men, and kept the other for my followers. Then there were coins, mostly Frankish silver, but there were a few Saxon shillings and a handful of those mysterious coins that have curly writing no one can read and which are rumoured to come from some great empire to the east. There were four silver ingots, but the greatest part of the treasure was in silver shards. The northmen have no coinage, other than what they steal, and so they pay for their goods, when they pay at all, with silver scraps. A Viking will steal a silver bracelet, and when he needs to buy something he will hack the bracelet into shards that a merchant will weigh on scales. The steward brought us a scale and we weighed the silver and the coins. There was just over thirty pounds.
That was not to be despised. We would all go home richer. Yet my share of the treasure would hardly raise one crew of men for one season’s fighting. I stared at the divided treasure, the last silver shards still resting in the bowl of the scales, and knew that it would not bring me Bebbanburg. It would not give me an army. It would not buy the fulfilment of my dreams. I felt my spirits sink and thought of Ælfric’s laughter. My uncle would soon enough learn that I had voyaged, captured and been disappointed, and it was while I was thinking of his enjoyment that Skade chose to speak. ‘You said you would give me half,’ she demanded.
My fist crashed on the table so hard that the small piles of silver shuddered. ‘I said no such thing,’ I snarled.
‘You said. …’
I pointed at her, silencing her. ‘You want to go in the hole?’ I asked. ‘You want to live with the rats in the silver vault?’
My men smiled. Since coming to Frisia they had learned to dislike Skade and at that moment she began to hate me. I had begun to hate her earlier, when I saw the cruelty beneath her beauty. She was like a sword haunted by a spirit of greed, like a blade of shining beauty, but with a heart as dark as blood. Later that night she demanded her share again and I reminded her that though she had asked for half her husband’s treasure, I had never promised it. ‘And don’t think to curse me again,’ I told her, ‘because if you do, woman, I shall sell you into slavery, but not before I disfigure you. You want a scarred face? You want me to make you ugly? Then keep your curses to yourself.’
I do not know where she slept that night, nor did I care.
We left Zegge in the dawn. I burned the six smaller ships Skirnir had left in the harbour, but I did not burn the hall. Wind and tide would take care of it. The islands come and go, the channels change from year to year, and the sand shifts to make new islands. Folk live on those islands for a few years, and then the surging tides dissolve the land again. When I next saw the islands, many years later, Zegge was quite gone, as though it had never existed at all.
We went home, and we had fair weather for the crossing. The sun glinted off the sea, the sky was clear and the air cold. It was only as we approached the coast of Britain that the clouds came and the wind rose. It took me some time to find a landmark I knew, and then we had to row hard into a north wind to find the Tinan’s mouth and it was almost dark as we rowed Seolferwulf into the river beneath the ruined monastery. We beached her and next day we went to Dunholm.
I did not know it, but I was never to see Seolferwulf again.
She was a noble ship.
PART THREE
Battle’s Edge
The deep winter came and with it a fever. I have been lucky, rarely being ill, but a week after we reached Dunholm I began to shiver, then sweat, then feel as though a bear were clawing the insides of my skull. Brida made a bed for me in a small house where a fire burned day and night. That winter was cold, but there were moments when I thought my body was on fire, and then there were times when I shivered as if I were bedded in ice even though the fire roared in its stone hearth so fiercely that it scorched the roof beams. I could not eat. I grew weak. I woke in the night, and sometimes I thought of Gisela and of my lost children, and I wept. Ragnar told me I raved in my sleep, but I do not remember that madness, only that I was convinced I would die and so I made Brida tie my hand to Wasp-Sting’s hilt.
Brida brought me infusions of herbs in mead, she spooned honey into my mouth, and she made certain that the small house was guarded against Skade’s malevolence. ‘She hates you,’ she told me one cold night when the wind pulled at the thatch and bellied the leather curtain which served as a door.
‘Because I didn’t give her any silver?’
‘Because of that.’
‘There was no hoard,’ I said, ‘not as she described it.’
‘But she denies cursing you.’
‘What else can have caused this?’
‘We tied her to a post,’ Brida said, ‘and showed her the whip. She swore she had not cursed you.’
‘She would,’ I said bitterly.
‘And she still denied it when her back was bloody.’
I looked at Brida, dark-eyed, her face shadowed by her wild black hair.
‘Who used the whip?’
‘I did,’ she said calmly, ‘and then I took her to the stone.’
‘The stone?’
She nodded eastwards. ‘Across the river, Uhtred, is a hill, and on the hill is a stone. A big one, planted upright. It was put there by the ancient people and it has power. The stone has breasts.’
‘Breasts?’
‘It’s shaped that way,’ she said, momentarily cupping her hands over her own small breasts. ‘It’s tall,’ she went on, ‘even taller than you, and I took her there at night and lit fires to the gods, and put skulls in a ring, and I told her I would summon the demons to turn her skin yellow and her hair white and to make her face wrinkled and her breasts sag and her back humped. She cried.’
‘Could you have done all that?’
‘She believed so,’ Brida said with a sly smile, ‘and she promised me on her life she had not cursed you. She spoke true, I’m sure.’
‘So it’s just a fever?’
‘More than a fever, a sickness. Others have it. Two men died last week.’
A priest came each week and bled me. He was a morose Saxon who preached his gospel in the small town that had appeared just to the south of Ragnar’s fortress. Ragnar had brought prosperity to the local countryside and the town was growing quickly, the smell of newly sawn wood as constant as the stink of sewage flowing downhill to the river. Brida, of course, had objected to the church being constructed, but Ragnar had allowed it. ‘They’ll worship any god they choose,’ he had told me, ‘whatever I might wish. And the Saxons here were Christians before I arrived. A few have gone back to the real gods. The first priest wanted to pull down Brida’s stone and called me an evil heathen bastard when I stopped him, so I drowned him and this new one is a lot more polite.’ The new priest was also reckoned to be a skilled healer, though Brida, who had her own knowledge of herbs, would not let him prescribe any potions for me. He would just open a vein in one of my arms and watch the blood pulse thick and slow into a horn cup. When it was done he was instructed to pour the blood onto the fire, then scour out the cup, which he always did with a scowl because it was a pagan precaution. Brida wanted the blood destroyed so no one could use it to cast a spell on me.
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