Lords of the North s-3

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sihtric’s horse had cast a shoe and we waited while he saddled one of the spare horses, then we kept going northwest for another hour. We went slowly, following sheep tracks down into a valley where trees grew thick. Once in the valley we sent Guthred and most of the riders ahead, still following the tracks west, while twenty of us waited in the trees. Kjartan’s scouts, seeing Guthred and the others climb onto the farther moors, followed carelessly. Our pursuers were only nine men now, the rest had been sent with messages to Dunholm, and the nine who remained were mounted on light horses, ideal for scrambling away from us if we turned on them, but they came unsuspecting into the trees. They were halfway through the wood when they saw Ragnar waiting ahead and then they turned to spur away, but we had four groups of men waiting to ambush them. Ragnar was in front of them, I was moving to bar their retreat, Steapa was on their left and Rollo on their right, and the nine men suddenly realized they were surrounded. They charged at my group in an attempt to break free of the thick wood, but the five of us blocked their path and our horses were heavier and two of the scouts died quickly, one of them gutted by Serpent-Breath, and the other seven tried to scatter, but they were obstructed by brambles and trees, and our men closed on them. Steapa dismounted to pursue the last enemy into a bramble thicket. I saw his ax rise and chop down, then heard a scream that went on and on. I thought it must stop, but on it went and Steapa paused to sneeze, then his ax rose and fell again and there was sudden silence.

  “Are you catching a cold?” I asked him.

  “No, lord,” he said, forcing his way out of the brambles and dragging the corpse behind him. “His stink got up my nose.”

  Kjartan was blind now. He did not know it, but he had lost his scouts, and as soon as the nine men were dead we sounded a horn to summon Guthred back, and, as we waited for him, we stripped the corpses of anything valuable. We took their horses, arm rings, weapons, a few coins, some damp bread, and two flasks of birch ale. One of the dead men had been wearing a fine mail coat, so fine that I suspected it had been made in Frankia, but the man had been so thin that the coat fitted none of us until Gisela took it for herself. “You don’t need mail,” her brother said scornfully.

  Gisela ignored him. She seemed astonished that so fine a coat of mail could weigh so much, but she pulled it over her head, freed her hair from the links at her neck and buckled one of the dead men’s swords about her waist. She put on her black cloak and stared defiantly at Guthred. “Well?”

  “You frighten me,” he said with a smile.

  “Good,” she said, then pushed her horse against mine so the mare would stay still as she mounted, but she had not reckoned with the weight of the mail and had to struggle into the saddle.

  “It suits you,” I said, and it did. She looked like a Valkyrie, those warrior maidens of Odin who rode the sky in shining armor.

  We turned east then, going faster now. We rode through the trees, ducking continually to keep the branches from whipping our eyes, and we went downhill, following a rain-swollen stream that must lead to the Wiire. By the early afternoon we were close to Dunholm, probably no more than five or six miles away, and Sihtric now led us, for he reckoned he knew a place where we could cross the river. The Wiire, he told us, turned south once it had passed Dunholm, and it widened as it flowed through pastureland and there were fords in those gentler valleys. He knew the country well for his mother’s parents had lived there and as a child he had often driven cattle through the river. Better still those fords were on Dunholm’s eastern side, the flank Kjartan would not be guarding, but there was a risk that the rain, which started to pour again in the afternoon, would so fill the Wiire that the fords would be impassable.

  At least the rain hid us as we left the hills and rode into the river valley. We were now very close to Dunholm, that lay just to the north, but we were hidden by a wooded spur of high ground at the foot of which was a huddle of cottages. “Hocchale,” Sihtric told me, nodding at the settlement, “it’s where my mother was born.”

  “Your grandparents are still there?” I asked.

  “Kjartan had them killed, lord, when he fed my mother to his dogs.”

  “How many dogs does he have?”

  “There were forty or fifty when I was there, lord. Big things. They only obeyed Kjartan and his huntsmen. And the Lady Thyra.”

  “They obeyed her?” I asked.

  “My father wanted to punish her once,” Sihtric said, “and he set the dogs on her. I don’t think he was going to let them eat her, I think he just wanted to frighten her, but she sang to them.”

  “She sang to them?” Ragnar asked. He had hardly mentioned Thyra in the last weeks. It was as if he felt guilty that he had left her so long in Kjartan’s power. I knew he had tried to find her in the early days of her disappearance, he had even faced Kjartan once when another Dane had arranged a truce between them, but Kjartan had vehemently denied that Thyra was even at Dunholm, and after that Ragnar had joined the Great Army that had invaded Wessex and then he had become a hostage, and all that while Thyra had been in Kjartan’s power. Now Ragnar looked at Sihtric. “She sang to them?” he asked again.

  “She sang to them, lord,” Sihtric confirmed, “and they just lay down. My father was angry with them.” Ragnar frowned at Sihtric as though he did not believe what he heard. Sihtric shrugged. “They say she’s a sorcerer, lord,” he explained humbly.

  “Thyra’s no sorcerer,” Ragnar said angrily. “All she ever wanted was to marry and have children.”

  “But she sang to the dogs, lord,” Sihtric insisted, “and they lay down.”

  “They won’t lie down when they see us,” I said. “Kjartan will loose them on us as soon as he sees us.”

  “He will, lord,” Sihtric said, and I could see his nervousness.

  “So we’ll just have to sing to them,” I said cheerfully.

  We followed a sodden track beside a flooded ditch to find the Wiire swirling fast and high. The ford looked impassable. The rain was getting harder, pounding the river that fretted at the top of its steep banks. There was a high hill on the far bank and the clouds were low enough to scrape the black, bare branches at its long summit. “We’ll never cross here,” Ragnar said. Father Beocca, tied to his saddle and with his priest’s robes sodden, shivered. The horsemen milled in the mud, watching the river that threatened to spill over its banks, but then Steapa, who was mounted on a huge black stallion, gave a grunt and simply rode down the track into the water. His horse baulked at the river’s hard current, but he forced it onward until the water was seething over his stirrups, and then he stopped and beckoned that I should follow.

  His idea was that the biggest horses would make a barrier to break the river’s force. I pushed my horse up against Steapa’s, then more men came and we held onto each other, making a wall of horseflesh that slowly reached across the Wiire, that was some thirty or forty paces wide. We only needed to make our dam at the river’s center where the current was strongest, and once we had a hundred men struggling to keep their horses still, Ragnar urged the rest through the calmer water provided by our makeshift dam. Beocca was terrified, poor man, but Gisela took his reins and spurred her own mare into the water. I hardly dared watch: If her horse had been swept away then the mail coat would have dragged her under, but she and Beocca made it safe to the far bank, and two by two the others followed. One woman and one warrior were swept away, but both scrambled safely across and their horses found footing downstream and reached the bank. Once the smaller horses were across we slowly unmade our wall and inched through the rising river to safety.

  It was already getting dark. It was only midafternoon, but the clouds were thick. It was a black, wet, miserable day, and now we had to climb the escarpment through the dripping trees, and in places the slope was so steep that we were forced to dismount and lead the horses. Once at the summit we turned north, and I could see Dunholm when the low cloud allowed it. The fortress showed as a dark smear on its high rock and above it I could see
the smoke from the garrison fires mingling with the rain clouds. It was possible that men on the southern ramparts could see us now, except that we were riding through trees and our mail was smeared with mud, but even if they could see us they would surely not suspect we were enemies. The last they had heard of Guthred was that he and his desperate men were riding westward, looking for a place to cross the Wiire, and now we were to the east of the fortress and already across the river.

  Sihtric still led us. We dropped east off the hill’s summit, hiding ourselves from the fortress, then rode into a valley where a stream foamed westward. We forded it easily enough, climbed again, and all the time we pounded past miserable hovels where frightened folk peered from low doorways. They were Kjartan’s own slaves, Sihtric told me, their job to raise pigs and cut firewood and grow crops for Dunholm.

  Our horses were tiring. They had been ridden hard across soft ground and they carried men in mail with heavy shields, but our journey was almost done. It did not matter now if the garrison saw us, because we had come to the hill on which the fortress stood and no one could leave Dunholm without fighting their way past us. If Kjartan had sent warriors west to find us then he could no longer send a messenger to summon those men back because we now controlled the only road that led to his fastness.

  And so we came to the neck where the ridge dropped slightly and the road turned south before climbing to the massive gatehouse, and we stopped there and our horses spread along the higher ground and, to the men on Dunholm’s wall, we must have looked like a dark army. All of us were muddy, our horses were filthy, but Kjartan’s men could see our spears and shields and swords and axes. By now they would know we were the enemy and that we had cut their only road, and they probably laughed at us. We were so few and their fortress was so high and their wall was so big and the rain still crashed on us and the drenching dark crept along the valleys on either side of us as a slither of lightning crackled wicked and sharp across the northern sky.

  We picketed the horses in a waterlogged field. We did our best to rid the beasts of mud and pick their hooves clean, then we made a score of fires in the lee of a blackthorn hedge. It took forever to light the first fire. Many of our men carried dry kindling in leather pouches, but as soon as the kindling was exposed to the rain it became soggy. Eventually two men made a crude tent with their cloaks and I heard the click of steel on flint and saw the first trace of smoke. They protected that small fire as though it were made of gold, and at last the flames took hold and we could pile the wet firewood on top. The logs seethed and hissed and crackled, but the flames gave us some small warmth and the fires told Kjartan that his enemies were still on the hill. I doubt he thought Guthred had the courage to make such an attack, but he must have known Ragnar was returned from Wessex and he knew I had come back from the dead and perhaps, in that long wet night of rain and thunder, he felt a shiver of fear.

  And while he shivered, the sceadugengan slithered in the dark.

  As night fell I stared at the route I had to take in the darkness, and it was not good. I would have to go down to the river, then southward along the water’s edge, but just beneath the fortress wall, where the river vanished about Dunholm’s crag, a massive boulder blocked the way. It was a monstrous boulder, bigger than Alfred’s new church at Wintanceaster, and if I could not find a way around it then I would have to climb over its wide, flat top which lay less than a spear’s throw from Kjartan’s ramparts. I sheltered my eyes from the rain and stared hard, and decided there might be a way past the giant stone at the river’s edge.

  “Can it be done?” Ragnar asked me.

  “It has to be done,” I said.

  I wanted Steapa with me, and I chose ten other men to accompany us. Both Guthred and Ragnar wanted to come, but I refused them. Ragnar was needed to lead the assault on the high gate, and Guthred was simply not warrior enough. Besides, he was one of the reasons we fought this battle and to leave him dead on Dunholm’s slopes would make a nonsense of the whole gamble. I took Beocca to one side. “Do you remember,” I asked him, “how my father made you stay by my side during the assault on Eoferwic?”

  “Of course I do!” he said indignantly. “And you didn’t stay with me, did you? You kept trying to join the fight! It was all your fault that you were captured.” I had been ten years old and desperate to see a battle. “If you hadn’t run away from me,” he said, still sounding indignant, “you would never have been caught by the Danes! You’d be a Christian now. I blame myself. I should have tied your reins to mine.”

  “Then you’d have been captured as well,” I said, “but I want you to do the same for Guthred tomorrow. Stay by him and don’t let him risk his life.”

  Beocca looked alarmed. “He’s a king! He’s a grown man. I can’t tell him what to do.”

  “Tell him Alfred wants him to live.”

  “Alfred might want him to live,” he said gloomily, “but put a sword into a man’s hand and he loses his wits. I’ve seen it happen!”

  “Then tell him you had a dream and Saint Cuthbert says he’s to stay out of trouble.”

  “He won’t believe me!”

  “He will,” I promised.

  “I’ll try,” Beocca said, then looked at me with his one good eye. “Can you do this thing, Uhtred?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him honestly.

  “I shall pray for you.”

  “Thank you, father,” I said. I would be praying to every god I could think of, and adding another could not hurt. In the end, I decided, it was all up to fate. The spinners already knew what we planned and knew how those plans would turn out and I could only hope they were not readying the shears to cut my life’s threads. Perhaps, above everything else, it was the madness of my idea that might give it wings and so let it succeed. There had been madness in Northumbria’s air ever since I had first returned. There had been a slaughterous madness in Eoferwic, a holy insanity in Cair Ligualid, and now this desperate idea.

  I had chosen Steapa, for he was worth three or four other men. I took Sihtric because, if we got inside Dunholm, he would know the ground. I took Finan because the Irishman had a fury in his soul that I reckoned would turn to savagery in battle. I took Clapa because he was strong and fearless, and Rypere because he was cunning and lithe. The other six were from Ragnar’s men, all of them strong, all young, and all good with weapons, and I told them what we were going to do, and then made sure that each man had a black cloak that swathed him from head to foot. We smeared a mixture of mud and ash on our hands, faces, and helmets. “No shields,” I told them. That was a hard decision to make, for a shield is a great comfort in battle, but shields were heavy and, if they banged on stones or trees, would make a noise like a drumbeat. “I go first,” I told them, “and we’ll be going slowly. Very slowly. We have all night.”

  We tied ourselves together with leather reins. I knew how easy it was for men to get lost in the dark, and on that night the darkness was absolute. If there was any moon it was hidden by thick clouds from which the rain fell steadily, but we had three things to guide us. First there was the slope itself. So long as I kept the uphill side to my right then I knew we were on the eastern side of Dunholm, and second there was the rushing hiss of the river as it curled about the crag, and last there were the fires of Dunholm itself. Kjartan feared an assault in the night and so he had his men hurl flaming logs from the high gate’s rampart. Those logs lit the track, but to produce them he had to keep a great fire burning in his courtyard and that blaze outlined the top of the ramparts and glowed red on the belly of the low rushing clouds. That raw light did not illuminate the slope, but it was there, beyond the black shadows, a livid guide in our wet darkness.

  I had Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting hanging from my belt and, like the others, I carried a spear with its blade wrapped in a scrap of cloth so that no stray light could reflect from the metal. The spears would serve as staffs on the uneven ground and as probes to feel the way. We did not leave until it was utterly dark, for
I dared not risk a sharp-eyed sentry seeing us scramble toward the river, but even in the dark our journey was easy enough at first, for our own fires showed us a way down the slope. We headed away from the fortress so that no one on its ramparts would see us leave the firelit camp, and then we worked our way down to the river and there turned southward. Our route now led across the base of the slope where trees had been felled and I had to feel my way between the stumps. The ground was thick with brambles and with the litter of tree-felling. There were small branches left to rot and we made a lot of noise trampling them underfoot, but the sound of the rain was louder still and the river seethed and roared to our left. My cloak kept catching on twigs or stumps and I tore its hem ragged dragging it free. Every now and then a great crack of lightning whipped earthward and we froze each time and, in the blue-white dazzle, I could see the fort outlined high above me. I could even see the spears of the sentries like thorny sparks against the sky, and I thought those sentries must be cold, soaked, and miserable. The thunder came a heartbeat later and it was always close, banging above us as if Thor were beating his war hammer against a giant iron shield. The gods were watching us. I knew that. That is what the gods do in their sky-halls. They watch us and they reward us for our daring or punish us for our insolence, and I clutched Thor’s hammer to tell him that I wanted his help, and Thor cracked the sky with his thunder and I took it as a sign of his approval.

  The slope grew steeper. Rain was running off the soil which, in places, was nothing but slick mud. We all fell repeatedly as we edged southward. The tree stumps became sparser, but now there were boulders embedded in the slope and the wet stones were slick, so slick that in some places we were forced to crawl. It was getting darker too, for the slope bulged above us to hide the fire-edged ramparts and we slid and scrambled and cursed our way into a soul-scaring blackness. The river seemed very close and I feared sliding off a slab of rock and falling into the hurrying water.