Sword Song

by Bernard Cornwell

  I frowned at those words. “You won’t start your attack,” I repeated cautiously, “until you hear mine has started?”

  “That’s plain, isn’t it?” Æthelred demanded belligerently.

  “Very plain,” Aldhelm said mockingly. He treated Æthelred in the same manner that Æthelred behaved to Alfred and, secure in my cousin’s favor, felt free to offer me veiled insult.

  “It’s not plain to me!” Father Pyrlig put in energetically. “The agreed plan,” the Welshman went on, speaking to Æthelred, “is for you to make a feint attack on the western walls and, when you have drawn defenders from the north wall, for Uhtred’s men to make the real assault.”

  “Well I’ve changed my mind,” Æthelred said airily. “Uhtred’s men will now provide the diversionary attack, and my assault will be the real one.” He tilted up his broad chin and stared at me, daring me to contradict him.

  Æthelflaed also looked at me, and I sensed she wanted me to oppose her husband, but instead I surprised all of them by bowing my head as if in acquiescence. “If you insist,” I said.

  “I do,” Æthelred said, unable to conceal his pleasure at gaining the apparent victory so easily. “You may take your own household troops,” he went on grudgingly, as though he possessed the authority to take them away from me, “and thirty other men.”

  “We agreed I could have fifty,” I said.

  “I have changed my mind about that too!” he said pugnaciously. He had already insisted that the men of the Berrocscire fyrd, my men, would swell his ranks, and I had meekly agreed to that, just as I had now agreed that the glory of the successful assault could be his. “You may take thirty,” he went on harshly. I could have argued and maybe I should have argued, but I knew it would do no good. Æthelred was beyond argument, wanting only to demonstrate his authority in front of his young wife. “Remember,” he said, “that Alfred gave me command here.”

  “I had not forgotten,” I said. Father Pyrlig was watching me shrewdly, doubtless wondering why I had yielded so easily to my cousin’s bullying. Aldhelm was half smiling, probably in the belief that I had been thoroughly cowed by Æthelred.

  “You will leave before us,” Æthelred went on.

  “I shall leave very soon,” I said, “I have to.”

  “My household troops,” Æthelred said, now looking at Steapa, “will lead the real attack. You will bring the royal troops immediately behind.”

  “I’m going with Uhtred,” Steapa said.

  Æthelred blinked. “You are the commander,” he said slowly, as though he talked with a small child, “of Alfred’s bodyguard! And you will bring them to the wall as soon as my men have laid the ladders.”

  “I’m going with Uhtred,” Steapa said again. “The king ordered it.”

  “The king did no such thing!” Æthelred said dismissively.

  “In writing,” Steapa said. He frowned, then felt in a pouch and brought out a small square of parchment. He peered at it, not sure which way up the writing went, then just shrugged and gave the scrap to my cousin.

  Æthelred frowned as he read the message in the light of his wife’s lantern. “You should have given me this before,” he said petulantly.

  “I forgot,” Steapa said, “and I’m to take six men of my own choosing.” Steapa had a way of speaking that discouraged argument. He spoke slowly, harshly and dully, and managed to convey the impression that he was too stupid to understand any objection raised against his words. He also conveyed the thought that he might just slaughter any man who insisted on contradicting him. And Æthelred, faced with Steapa’s stubborn voice, and by the sheer presence of the man who was so tall and broad and skull-faced, surrendered without a fight.

  “If the king orders it,” he said, offering back the scrap of parchment.

  “He does,” Steapa insisted. He took the parchment and seemed uncertain what to do with it. For a heartbeat I thought he was going to eat it, but then he tossed it over the ship’s side and then frowned eastward at the great pall of smoke that hung above the city.

  “Be certain you’re on time tomorrow,” Æthelred said to me, “success depends on it.”

  That was evidently our dismissal. Another man would have offered us ale and food, but Æthelred turned away from us and so Steapa and I stripped our legs bare again and waded ashore through the cloying mud. “You asked Alfred if you could come with me?” I asked Steapa as we pushed through the reeds.

  “No,” he said, “it was the king who wanted me to come with you. It was his idea.”

  “Good,” I said, “I’m glad.” I meant it too. Steapa and I had begun as enemies, but we had become friends, a bond forged by standing shield to shield in the face of an enemy. “There’s no one I’d rather have with me,” I told him warmly as I stooped to pull on my boots.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said in his slow voice, “because I’m to kill you.”

  I stopped and stared at him in the darkness. “You’re to do what?”

  “I’m to kill you,” he said, then remembered there was more to Alfred’s orders, “if you prove to be on Sigefrid’s side.”

  “But I’m not,” I said.

  “He just wants to be sure of that,” Steapa said, “and that monk? Asser? He says you can’t be trusted, so if you don’t obey your orders then I’m to kill you.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter whether you’re ready for me or not,” he said, “I’ll still kill you.”

  “No,” I said, amending his words, “you’ll try to kill me.”

  He thought about that for quite a long time, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’ll kill you.” And so he would.

  We left in the black of night under a sky smothered with clouds. The enemy horsemen who had been watching us had withdrawn to the city at dusk, but I was certain Sigefrid would still have scouts in the darkness and so for an hour or more we followed a track that led north through the marshes. It was hard keeping to the path, but after a while the ground became firmer and climbed to a village where small fires burned inside mud-walled huts piled with great heaps of thatch. I pushed a door open to see a family crouched in terror about their hearth. They were frightened because they had heard us, and they knew nothing moves at night except creatures that are dangerous, sinister, and deadly. “What’s this place called?” I asked and for a moment no one answered, then a man bowed his head convulsively and said he thought the settlement was named Padintune. “Padintune?” I asked, “Padda’s estate? Is Padda here?”

  “He’s dead, lord,” the man said, “he died years ago, lord. No one here knew him, lord.”

  “We’re friends,” I told him, “but if anyone here leaves their house, we won’t be friends.” I did not want some villager running to Lundene to warn Sigefrid that we had stopped in Padintune. “You understand that?” I asked the man.

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Leave your house,” I said, “and you die.”

  I assembled my men in the small street and had Finan place a guard on every hovel. “No one’s to leave,” I told him. “They can sleep in their beds, but no one’s to leave the village.”

  Steapa loomed from the dark. “Aren’t we supposed to be marching north?” he asked.

  “Yes, and we’re not,” I retorted. “So this is when you’re supposed to kill me. I’m disobeying orders.”

  “Ah,” he grunted, then crouched. I heard the leather of his armor creak and the chink of his chain mail settling.

  “You could draw your sax now,” I suggested, “and gut me in one move? One cut up into my belly? Just make it fast, Steapa. Open my belly and keep the blade moving till it reaches my heart. But just let me draw my sword first, will you? I promise not to use it on you. I just want to go to Odin’s hall when I’m dead.”

  He chuckled. “I’ll never understand you, Uhtred,” he said.

  “I’m a very simple soul,” I told him. “I just want to go home.”

  �
�Not Odin’s hall?”

  “Eventually,” I said, “yes, but home first.”

  “To Northumbria?”

  “Where I have a fortress by the sea,” I said wistfully, and I thought of Bebbanburg on its high crag, and of the wild gray sea rolling endlessly to break on the rocks, and of the cold wind blowing from the north and of the white gulls crying in the spindrift. “Home,” I said.

  “The one your uncle stole from you?” Steapa asked.

  “Ælfric,” I said vengefully, and I thought of fate again. Ælfric was my father’s younger brother and he had stayed in Bebbanburg while I had accompanied my father to Eoferwic. I was a child. My father had died in Eoferwic, cut down by a Danish blade, and I had been given as a slave to Ragnar the Older, who had raised me like a son, and my uncle had ignored my father’s wishes and kept Bebbanburg for himself. That treachery was ever in my heart, seeping anger, and one day I would revenge it. “One day,” I told Steapa, “I shall gut Ælfric from his crotch to his breastbone and watch him die, but I won’t do it quickly. I won’t pierce his heart. I shall watch him die and piss on him while he struggles. Then I’ll kill his sons.”

  “And tonight?” Steapa asked. “Who do you kill tonight?”

  “Tonight we take Lundene,” I said.

  I could not see his face in the dark, but I sensed that he smiled. “I told Alfred he could trust you,” Steapa said.

  It was my turn to smile. Somewhere in Padintune a dog howled and was quieted. “But I’m not sure Alfred can trust me,” I said after a long pause.

  “Why?” Steapa asked, puzzled.

  “Because in one way I’m a very good Christian,” I said.

  “You? A Christian?”

  “I love my enemies,” I said.

  “The Danes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t,” he said bleakly. Steapa’s parents had been slaughtered by Danes. I did not respond. I was thinking of destiny. If the three spinners know our fate, then why do we make oaths? Because if we then break an oath, is it treachery? Or is it fate? “So will you fight them tomorrow?” Steapa asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “But not in the way Æthelred expects. So I’m disobeying orders, and your orders are to kill me if I do that.”

  “I’ll kill you later,” Steapa said.

  Æthelred had changed our agreed plan without ever suspecting that I had never intended to keep to it anyway. It was too obvious. How else would an army assault a city, except by trying to draw defenders away from the targeted ramparts? Sigefrid would know our first assault was a feint, and he would leave his garrison in place until he was certain he had identified the real threat, and then we would die under his walls and Lundene would remain a stronghold of the Northmen.

  So the only way to capture Lundene was by trickery, stealth and by taking a desperate risk. “What I’m going to do,” I told Steapa, “is wait for Æthelred to leave the island. Then we go back there, and we take two of the ships. It will be dangerous, very, because we have to go through the bridge’s gap in the dark and ships die there even in daylight. But if we can get through then there is an easy way into the old city.”

  “I thought there was a wall along the river?”

  “There is,” I said, “but it’s broken in one place.” A Roman had built a great house by the river and had cut a small channel beside his house. The channel pierced the wall, breaking it. I assumed the Roman had been wealthy and he had wanted a place to berth his ship and so he had pulled down a stretch of the river wall to make his channel and that was my way into Lundene.

  “Why didn’t you tell Alfred?” Steapa asked.

  “Alfred can keep a secret,” I said, “but Æthelred can’t. He would have told someone and within two days the Danes would have known what we planned.” And that was true. We had spies and they had spies, and if I had revealed my real intentions then Sigefrid and Erik would have blocked the channel with ships and garrisoned the big house beside the river with men. We would have died on the wharves, and we still might die because I did not know that we could find the gap in the bridge, and if we did find it whether we could shoot through that perilous broken space where the river level dropped and the water foamed. If we missed, if one of the ships was just a half oar’s length too far south or north, then it would be swept onto the jagged pilings and men would be tipped into the river and I would not hear them drown because their armor and weapons would drag them under instantly.

  Steapa had been thinking, always a slow process, but now he posed a shrewd question. “Why not land upriver of the bridge?” he suggested. “There must be gates through the wall?”

  “There are a dozen gates,” I said, “maybe a score, and Sigefrid will have blocked them all, but the last thing he’ll expect is for ships to try and run the gap in the bridge.”

  “Because ships die there?” Steapa said.

  “Because ships die there,” I agreed. I had watched it happen once, watched a trading ship run the gap at slack water, and somehow the steersman had veered too far to one side and the broken pilings had ripped the planks from the bottom of his hull. The gap was some forty paces wide and, when the river was calm with neither tide nor wind to churn the water, the gap looked innocent, but it never was. Lundene’s bridge was a killer, and to take Lundene I had to run the bridge.

  And if we survived? If we could find the Roman dock and get ashore? Then we would be few and the enemy would be many, and some of us would die in the streets before Æthelred’s force could ever cross the wall. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt and felt the small silver cross that was embedded there. Hild’s gift. A lover’s gift. “Have you heard a cuckoo yet?” I asked Steapa.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s time to go,” I said, “unless you want to kill me?”

  “Maybe later,” Steapa said, “but for the moment I’ll fight beside you.”

  And we would have a fight. That I knew. And I touched my hammer amulet and sent a prayer into the darkness that I would live to see the child in Gisela’s belly.

  Then we went back south.

  Osric, who had brought me away from Lundene with Father Pyrlig, was one of our shipmasters, and the other was Ralla, the man who had carried my force to ambush the Danes whose corpses I had hanged beside the river. Ralla had negotiated the gap in Lundene’s bridge more times than he could remember. “But never at night,” he told me that night when we returned to the island.

  “But it can be done?”

  “We’re going to discover that, lord, aren’t we?”

  Æthelred had left a hundred men to guard the island where the ships lay and those men were under the command of Egbert, an old warrior whose authority was denoted by a silver chain hanging about his neck, and who challenged me when we unexpectedly returned. He did not trust me and believed I had abandoned my northern attack because I did not want Æthelred to succeed. I needed him to give me men, but the more I pleaded the more he bristled with hostility. My own men were boarding the two ships, wading through the cold water and hauling themselves over the sides. “How do I know you’re not just going back to Coccham?” Egbert asked suspiciously.

  “Steapa!” I called. “Tell Egbert what we’re doing.”

  “Killing Danes,” Steapa growled from beside a campfire. The flames reflected from his mail coat and from his hard, feral eyes.

  “Give me twenty men,” I pleaded with Egbert.

  He stared at me, then shook his head. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “We have to guard the Lady Æthelflaed,” he said. “Those are the Lord Æthelred’s orders. We’re here to guard her.”

  “Then leave twenty men on her ship,” I said, “and give me the rest.”

  “I can’t,” Egbert insisted doggedly.

  I sighed. “Tatwine would have given me men,” I said. Tatwine had been the commander of the household troops for Æthelred’s father. “I knew Tatwine,” I said.

  “I know you did. I remember you.” Egbert
spoke curtly and the hidden message in his tone was that he did not like me. As a young man I had served under Tatwine for a few months, and back then I had been brash, ambitious, and arrogant. Egbert plainly thought I was still brash, ambitious, and arrogant, and perhaps he was right.

  He turned away and I thought he was dismissing me, but instead he watched as a pale and ghostly shape appeared beyond the campfires. It was Æthelflaed, who had evidently seen our return and had waded ashore wrapped in a white cloak to discover what we did. Her hair was unbound and fell in golden tangles over her shoulders. Father Pyrlig was with her.

  “You didn’t go with Æthelred?” I asked, surprised to see the Welsh priest.

  “His lordship felt he needed no more advice,” Pyrlig said, “so asked me to stay here and pray for him.”

  “He didn’t ask,” Æthelflaed corrected him, “he ordered you to stay and pray for him.”

  “He did,” Pyrlig said, “and as you can see, I am dressed for praying.” He was in a mail coat and had his swords strapped at his waist. “And you?” he challenged me. “I thought you were marching to the city’s north?”

  “We’re going downriver,” I explained, “and attacking Lundene from the wharf.”

  “Can I come?” Æthelflaed asked instantly.

  “No.”

  She smiled at that curt refusal. “Does my husband know what you’re doing?”

  “He’ll find out, my lady.”

  She smiled again, then walked to my side and pulled my cloak aside to lean against me. She wrapped my dark cloak over her white one. “I’m cold,” she explained to Egbert, whose face showed surprise and indignation at her behavior.

  “We are old friends,” I said to Egbert.

  “Very old friends,” Æthelflaed agreed, and she put an arm around my waist and clung to me. Egbert could not see her arm beneath my cloak. I was aware of her golden hair just beneath my beard, and I could feel her thin body shivering. “I think of Uhtred as an uncle,” she told Egbert.