Oathbreaker (The King's Hounds series)

by Martin Jensen

  His response was yes.

  Winston was waiting for us at the house, and he got up from his seat and greeted Godskalk politely before inviting the thane to join us at the table. Alfilda brought in a simmering pan smelling of thyme-rubbed lamb chops and butter-fried root vegetables. She set it on the table in front of us and took her own seat on the bench next to Winston.

  We ate with a good appetite. Then Winston sat up and pushed himself back a little from the table, and Alfilda followed suit. Godskalk and I shared the last contents in the pan, and then we, too, were full. Once all our tankards were refilled, Godskalk cleared his throat and said, “The king is satisfied with your report.”

  I cocked my head and gave Winston a questioning look. He explained that he had prepared a report and convinced one of the monastery’s messengers, who was heading south, to deliver it to the king. “While you were off bedding another man’s woman,” he added unnecessarily, thus provoking me to snap in retort that if my having a good time bothered him so much, he could simply have sent me as the messenger instead of entrusting our confidential messages to a monastery soldier.

  “Whatever,” he said, making light of my ruffled feathers. “All the same, I am glad Cnut is satisfied.”

  “For the moment,” Godskalk said with a wink.

  That’s how it is with kings. Something always comes up that worries them and ruins their satisfaction.

  “Part of his satisfaction is because Leofwine’s son Eadwin renewed his oath of allegiance to the king,” Godskalk said with an impish smile. “I don’t suppose any of you have any idea what might have prompted the jarl’s son to do that?”

  Ah yes. We had guessed as much. Ælfgar had told Leofwine that Cnut had sent us to Mercia, and it wasn’t hard for Leofwine to work out why. A renewed oath of allegiance was the best guarantee that not just he, but also his youngest son, would keep the peace.

  “Plus you cleared up the murder case nicely,” Godskalk said with a satisfied nod and took a swig.

  We looked at him with suspicion.

  “Cnut is satisfied that the two men went free? Two men who murdered someone who was doing Cnut’s bidding?” I asked skeptically.

  Godskalk nodded. We all exchanged looks.

  “Well, I suppose Thurbrand, who also killed on the king’s orders, shouldn’t feel too safe then,” Alfilda said with a smile.

  Godskalk smiled back, and we all nodded at each other. No one needed to put into words what we all knew: as long as Thurbrand had to fear revenge from Uhtred’s family and friends, he would remain loyal to Cnut, who was the only one who might be able to guarantee his safety.

  Godskalk bade us good night but left a tied leather pouch behind on the table. As soon as the door closed behind him, Winston opened the pouch, and out rolled coins worth a pound of silver.

  When Winston went to the monastery the next morning, I left the house as well. I visited a fabric merchant’s stall that I’d had my eye on for several days now.

  Once my purchase was neatly packaged, I sought out Godskalk, who was just on his way to the stable for his horse.

  “Are you going through Brixworth on your way to Hampton?” I asked and added, “It wouldn’t add much distance to your journey, and you could do me a favor.”

  Once he’d agreed, I described Elvina and her father’s farm to him and asked him to give her the package I handed to him.

  I was confident she would appreciate a blue kerchief.

  Epilogue

  It was raining when Ealdred and Ulf rode into Bamburgh Castle. The ride from the south had been uneventful. No soldiers had bayed at their heels. No attackers had jumped them from thickets or shrubbery. They’d spent nights in ditches and outbuildings, in haylofts and stable lofts, never with both of them asleep at the same time, always looking over their shoulders, their ears alert to every sound.

  And now they’d reached Bamburgh. They’d ridden across stubble fields and fallow fields, crossed the tops of dunes and finally the bridge into the castle itself, which had proven impregnable until forced to succumb to a Viking army forty years earlier. After that it had risen again as a fist, one the defeated clenched at their victors.

  Ealdred swung himself out of his saddle with difficulty. They’d been riding since early morning, and he was beat. The guards who came over to them had their arms outstretched, a clear sign that they were recognized. The leader of the guard greeted them and then let them continue, without demanding that they hand over their weapons.

  They walked toward the hall side by side. Ulf carried his sword in front of him in both hands. He hadn’t drawn it since Brixworth, and he could no longer wear it as his own weapon.

  Ealdred, son of Uhtred and jarl of Northumbria, greeted them from his high seat, but when he saw who it was, he got up and came over to meet them. Ealdred and Ulf stopped two paces in front of him.

  “Thane Ealdred, my namesake and friend,” the jarl said, and then turned to Ulf. “And you, Ulf, my father’s trusted man. We thought you dead.”

  “It was best that way,” Ealdred explained.

  The jarl’s eyes were drawn to the sword; Ulf knelt and held it out to him.

  “This was my father’s?” the jarl asked.

  “Yes,” Ealdred said with a nod. “Now it can rest with him.”

  Standing in the hall before the kneeling Ulf, the jarl listened to Ealdred’s recounting. His men sat and stood around him. Those who had cried at not having been able to fall beside his father, Uhtred, sat shoulder to shoulder with younger men, whose fathers, uncles, and brothers had been killed at Wiheal. They had all sworn their oaths to the current jarl, and they all listened to the account in rapt silence.

  When Ealdred finished, there was a profound silence in the hall. Then a murmur spread, a sound like waves on the beach, rising into a mighty roar when the jarl drew the sword and swung it over the heads of the two men. The jarl’s thunderous voice yelled that the footpath of revenge begun by these two men would grow into a broad street that he would lead the men of Northumbria down.

  “And this sword,” the jarl declared when the silence had once again settled over the hall, “will not rest with my father. It will be the tool in my hand, which will strike down the murderer and his scions.”

  Again the murmur grew into a churning sea of sound, rumbling between the hall’s walls, penetrating them, and billowing upward toward the sword-gray autumn sky. Then it faded, again becoming a promising silence, a peace that settled over them all and bound them together like the oaths they’d sworn to their master and jarl.

  “And you, who before were the most welcome among us, will now be the most honored of us all.” The jarl extended his hands to Ulf and Ealdred, guided them to his high seat, positioned them on either side of him, and let them yet again receive their companions’ roaring adulation.

  Once it was quiet again, Ealdred rose.

  “Have I kept my word to your father?” he asked the jarl.

  “In truth, yes,” the jarl replied, looking at him in puzzlement.

  Thane Ealdred bowed his head and sighed. When he raised it again, he looked the jarl in the eye.

  “So am I released from my oath?” he inquired.

  “If you wish to be,” the jarl said with a nod, astonished.

  “Wish it, I do not,” Ealdred said, and sighed again. “But my honor requires me now to give my oath to another.”

  Only then did he explain how he and Ulf had made it out of Brixworth with their lives intact.

  When he concluded, the jarl rose and extended him his hand. And this time the men in the hall honored both him and Thane Ælfgar, a man who was unknown to them, by hammering their swords against their shields.

  Author’s Note

  When I traveled around eastern England along with my editor, Svend Åge Petersen, in the spring of 2010 (I would like to thank the Literature Committee of the Danish Agency for Culture for the travel grant), I visited a bookshop in Ely where I happened upon a fascinating work by Richard Flet
cher titled Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2003) that discusses the murders of Uhtred and his followers in AD 1016. This story, as recounted in the prologue to Oathbreaker, is thus true in the sense that Uhtred of Northumbria was a historical figure who was killed by Thurbrand the Hold in the village of Wiheal (wherever it may have been located) on King Cnut’s direct orders—or at least with his approval.

  In his learned and thoroughly researched book, Professor Fletcher also discusses the repercussions of that incident on three generations of Uhtred’s and Thurbrand’s families, who ravaged each other with bloodthirsty acts of revenge until the final killing (probably) took place, between 1073–1074.

  The story of the event in Wiheal is an example of how actual history exceeds even an author’s imagination, since I must simply admit that it would never have occurred to me—not even in a murder mystery—to kill off forty-one men who rode to their deaths confident in the knowledge that they had been guaranteed safe passage by those who had sworn their allegiance to the king.

  My trip to England in 2010 actually began with a three-day stay in Brixworth, home to All Saints’ Church, a structure that to this day displays prominent Saxon features and is what many consider the finest remaining example of a seventh-century building north of the Alps.

  After spending three days exploring the church and wandering about the surrounding countryside, I was convinced that this was where the second story about Halfdan, Winston, and Alfilda would play out. Once I finished Professor Fletcher’s book a few weeks later, I started picturing the contours of a plot—a chain of events that gradually took shape and ended up as the present novel.

  A few—and by no means anywhere near exhaustive—words about the construction of Anglo-Saxon society are probably appropriate here.

  Excluding slaves, the basis of Anglo-Saxon society was freemen, called ceorls in Anglo-Saxon (cf. Modern English churl). Their freedom was defined by three things: service in the fyrd (England’s national militia), the right to attend and speak at the gemot (cf. Modern English moot), and their value in wergeld (blood money) of 200 shillings.

  Above the freemen was the aristocracy. A member of this class was called a thane and was tied to the king or to another lord, at whose pleasure he served. The lord could terminate this service abruptly—including by deprivation of land and in some cases deprivation of life—if the lord felt the thane was not meeting his obligations. A thane’s wergeld was set at 1,200 shillings.

  A step up from a thane was an ealdorman, who pledged his oath directly to the king and acted as the king’s representative in one or more shires. (The local judge of a shire was called a reeve, or shire reeve, whence the word sheriff.) An ealdorman was responsible for making sure court was held in the shire, for assembling and leading the fyrd in battle, and for being the king’s hand and eye in every way within his shire. The title of ealdorman, like the office, was hereditary, but from the eleventh century on, ealdormen were selected from a limited number of families.

  Shortly after Cnut’s conquest of England, and in the setting of the stories about Winston, Halfdan, and Alfilda, the Anglo-Saxon title of ealdorman started to be replaced by the Old Norse title jarl (which is cognate with the English word earl). I use jarl or ealdorman in the books to communicate whether the nobleman feels himself to be English or Danish (Old Norse being the precursor to Danish, as Anglo-Saxon is the precursor to English).

  At the top of the social hierarchy was the royal family. The king and his closest relatives led the nation and the people in war and peace, controlled the army, and guaranteed law and order. The title of cyning (Modern English king) was not originally hereditary, unlike the title of wita (plural witan)—designating the noblemen, prelates, and influential officials who met periodically in the Witenagemot, a sort of senate. The witan had the right and power to choose the member of the royal family they considered best suited to rule, but from the middle of the ninth century on, the royal family of Wessex became the only recognized family from which the witan could elect England’s rulers. This was a tradition that Cnut broke when his father and he conquered the country.

  The supremacy of Wessex meant that previously independent kingdoms—including Essex, Mercia, Bernicia, and Deira, for example—became jarldoms (or earldoms). Over time even the names of these jarldoms faded as their boundaries changed—whether due to kings seeing advantages to moving boundaries at their discretion or jarls moving the boundaries themselves in their incessant struggles against each other.

  One particular region of England was called the Danelaw: After the Viking chieftain Guthrum’s defeat to Alfred the Great at Eathandun in the late ninth century, England was divided, and Guthrum received, roughly, what lay to the north of the old Watling Street. Some of Guthrum’s army displaced or intermarried with the Saxon and Angle farm families in the area. They settled down and lived among the English but in accordance with Danish law—and over the subsequent centuries they managed to make the area so wealthy that the Danelaw itself became a target for new Viking attacks.

  In the novels, therefore, I distinguish between Danes, the descendants of Guthrum’s men who had settled in England and had been living there for well over a century by the time this story is set, and Vikings. The Vikings were of the same ethnic group as the Danes—but I use the term to describe the raiders who arrived much later, with Sweyn I Forkbeard and Cnut the Great.

  About the Author

  © Ilona Dreve

  Best-selling Danish novelist Martin Jensen was born in 1946 and worked as a teacher and a headmaster in Sweden and Denmark before becoming a full-time writer in 1996. The author of twenty-one novels, he has been honored by the Danish Crime Academy twice and was awarded the Royal Library’s Prize for his medieval novel Soldiers’ Whore. He and his wife are botany enthusiasts who also enjoy bird-watching and gathering mushrooms.

  About the Translator

  © Libby Lewis, 2006

  Tara F. Chace has translated over twenty novels from Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Her most recent translations include Martin Jensen’s The King’s Hounds and Oathbreaker (AmazonCrossing, 2013 and 2014), Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff’s More Bitter Than Death (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis’s Invisible Murder (Soho Crime, 2012), Jo Nesbø’s Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series (Aladdin, 2010–2013), and Johan Harstad’s 172 Hours on the Moon (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012).

  An avid reader and language learner, Chace earned her PhD in Scandinavian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington in 2003. She enjoys translating books for adults and children. She lives in Seattle with her family and their black lab, Zephyr.