War Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  I bowed to him. ‘Lord King.’

  ‘Sit down, man, sit down. Of course the King of the Sais has a great monastery as his lodging, but we poor Welshmen have to endure this,’ he waved around the great tent, which was carpeted with thick woollen rugs, warmed by a brazier, furnished with benches and tables, and lit by a host of tall, thick candles, ‘this hovel!’ He turned and spoke in Welsh to a servant who hurried to bring me a drinking horn that he filled with wine. A dozen other men were in the tent, sitting on benches around the brazier and listening to a harpist who played in the shadows. Hywel waved the man to silence, then smiled at me. ‘You’re still living, Lord Uhtred! I am pleased.’

  ‘You’re gracious, lord King.’

  ‘Ah, he butters me!’ He spoke to the other men in the tent, most of whom I suspected did not speak the Saxon tongue, but they smiled anyway. ‘I was gracious with His Holiness the Pope,’ Hywel continued, ‘who suffers from aches in his joints. I told the poor man to rub them with wool grease mixed with the urine of goats, but did he listen to me? He did not! Do you suffer from aches, Lord Uhtred?’

  ‘Frequently, lord King.’

  ‘Goat’s piss! Rub it in, man, rub it in. It might even improve the way you smell!’ He grinned. He looked as I remembered him, a sturdy man with a broad, wind-reddened face and eyes that readily creased with merriment. Age had whitened his clipped beard and his short hair over which he wore a simple gilt-bronze circlet. He looked to be about fifty years old, but he was still hale. He signalled to my companions. ‘Sit, all of you, sit. I remember you.’ He pointed at Finan. ‘You’re the Irishman?’

  ‘I am, lord King.’

  ‘Finan,’ I supplied the name.

  ‘And you fought like a demon, I remember that! You poor man, I’d think an Irishman had better sense than to fight for a Sais lord, eh? And you are?’ He nodded at Egil.

  ‘Egil Skallagrimmrson, lord King.’ Egil bowed, then touched Berg’s elbow, ‘and this is my brother, Berg Skallagrimmrson, who has to thank you.’

  ‘Me! Why would a Norseman thank me?’

  ‘You spared my life, lord King,’ Berg said, blushing as he bowed.

  ‘I did?’

  ‘On the beach,’ I reminded him, ‘where you killed Rognvald.’

  Hywel’s face darkened as he remembered that fight. He made the sign of the cross. ‘Upon my word, but that was a wicked man. I take no pleasure in death, but that man’s screams were like the balm of Gilead to my soul.’ He looked at me. ‘Is he honest?’ He jerked his head at Berg. ‘Is he a good man?’

  ‘A very good man, lord King.’

  ‘But not a Christian,’ he said flatly.

  ‘I swore to have him taught the faith,’ I answered, ‘because you demanded that as a condition for his life, and I did not break my word.’

  ‘He chose otherwise?’

  ‘He did, lord King.’

  ‘The world is full of fools, is it not? And why, good bishop, are you holding an arrow? Do you plan to stab me?’

  Anwyn explained what had happened in the darkness. He spoke in Welsh, but I did not need a translator to understand the tale. Hywel grunted when the bishop finished and took the arrow from him. ‘You think, Lord Uhtred,’ he asked, ‘it was one of my men?’

  ‘I don’t know, lord King.’

  ‘Did the arrow kill you?’

  I smiled. ‘No, lord King.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t one of my boys. My boys don’t miss. And this isn’t one of my arrows. We fletch them with goose feathers. These look like eagle feathers?’ He tossed the arrow onto the brazier where the ashwood shaft flared up. ‘And other men in Britain use the long hunting bow, do they not?’ Hywel asked. ‘I hear they have some small skill with it in Legeceasterscir?’

  ‘It’s a rare skill, lord King.’

  ‘So it is, so it is. And wisdom is rare too, and you are going to need wisdom, Lord Uhtred.’

  ‘I am?’

  Hywel gestured to a man sitting next to him, a man whose face was hidden by the deep hood of his cloak. ‘I have strange visitors this night, Lord Uhtred!’ Hywel said cheerfully, ‘you, your pagans, and now a new friend from a far place.’

  The stink of the arrow’s burning feathers soured the tent as the man pushed back his hood and I saw it was Cellach, eldest son of Constantine and Prince of Alba.

  I bowed my head. ‘Lord Prince,’ I said, and knew that Hywel was right; I would need wisdom.

  I was among Æthelstan’s enemies.

  Four

  Cellach had been my hostage once, years ago, and for a year he had lived with me and I had become fond of him. Back then he had been a boy, now he was a man in his prime. He had his father’s looks, the same short brown hair, blue eyes and serious face. He offered a wary smile as greeting, but said nothing.

  ‘You would think, would you not,’ Hywel said, ‘that a meeting of the kings of Britain would be a matter for celebration?’

  ‘Would I, lord King?’

  Hywel heard my scepticism and smiled. ‘Why would you say we were gathered, Lord Uhtred?’

  I gave him the same answer I had given Egil as we journeyed to Burgham. ‘He’s like a hound,’ I said, ‘he’s marking his boundaries.’

  ‘So King Æthelstan is pissing on us?’ Hywel suggested. I nodded, and Cellach grimaced. ‘Or,’ Hywel looked at the tent’s roof, ‘is he pissing beyond his frontiers? Enlarging his land?’

  ‘Is he?’ I asked.

  Hywel shrugged. ‘You should know, Lord Uhtred. You’re his friend, are you not?’

  ‘I thought I was.’

  ‘You fought for him! Men still talk of your battle at the Lundene gate!’

  ‘Battles get exaggerated, lord King. Twenty men squabble and in song it becomes a heroic bloodletting.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Hywel said happily, ‘but I do love my poets! They make my pitiful skirmishes sound like the slaughter of Badon!’ He gave a sly smile as he turned to Cellach. ‘Now that was a real battle, lord Prince! Armies in the thousands! And we Britons massacred the Sais that day! They fell to our spears like wheat before the reaping hook. I’m sure Lord Uhtred can tell you the tale.’

  ‘It was three hundred years ago,’ I said, ‘or was it four? And even I’m not old enough to remember that story.’

  Hywel chuckled. ‘And now the King of the Sais comes to piss on us. You are right, Lord Uhtred. He has demanded of King Constantine much the same terms he inflicted on me a year ago. You know what those terms were?’

  ‘I heard they were harsh.’

  ‘Harsh!’ Hywel was suddenly bitter. ‘Your King Æthelstan demanded twenty-four pounds of gold, three hundred of silver, and ten thousand head of cattle a year. A year! Each year till the crack of doom! And we must give him hawks and hounds too! We are meant to send a hundred birds and two hundred hunting dogs to Gleawecestre each spring so he can choose the best.’

  ‘And you pay?’ I made it a question, though I knew the answer.

  ‘What choice do I have? He has the armies of Wessex, of Mercia, and of East Anglia. He has fleets, and my country still has small kingdoms that itch me like fleas. I can fight Æthelstan! But to what end? If we don’t pay the tribute he will come with a horde and the kings of the little kingdoms will join him and Dyfed will be harrowed hill and vale.’

  ‘So you’ll pay till the crack of doom?’ I asked.

  Hywel smiled grimly. ‘The end of time is a long way off, Lord Uhtred, and the wheel of fortune turns, does it not?’

  I looked at Cellach. ‘He’s demanding the same of your father, lord Prince?’

  ‘More,’ Cellach said abruptly.

  ‘And,’ Hywel continued, ‘now he wants to add the army of Northumbria to his horde. He is pissing beyond his frontiers, Lord Uhtred. He is pissing on you.’

  ‘Then he’s only doing what you do,’ I said flatly. ‘What you do against all those lesser kings who itch you like fleas. Or what your father does,’ I turned to Cellach, ‘or what he’d like to do against Owain of St
rath Clota or against the Kingdom of the Hebrides. Or,’ I hesitated, then decided to confront him, ‘what you’d like to do with my lands.’

  Cellach just stared at me. He had to know of Domnall’s visit to Bebbanburg, but he betrayed nothing, said nothing.

  Hywel must have sensed the sudden discomfort between us, but he ignored it. ‘King Æthelstan,’ he said, ‘claims to be making peace! A most Christian thing to do, yes?’

  ‘Peace?’ I asked, as if I had never heard of such a thing.

  ‘And he makes peace by forcing us to come to this godforsaken place and acknowledge him as our,’ he paused, ‘how can I put it? As our High King?’

  ‘Monarchus Totius Brittaniae,’ put in a sour voice from the tent’s shadows and I saw a priest sitting on a bench. ‘Monarch of all—’ the priest began to translate.

  ‘I know what it means,’ I interrupted him.

  ‘And the monarch of all Britain will tread us underfoot,’ Hywel said softly.

  ‘Piss on us,’ Cellach added angrily.

  ‘And to keep this most Christian peace,’ Hywel went on, ‘our High King would have strong garrisons on his borders.’

  ‘Christian garrisons,’ Cellach put in.

  Again I said nothing. Hywel sighed. ‘You know what we’re saying, Lord Uhtred, and we know nothing more except this. Men made oaths to Æthelstan like obedient little boys! I swore to keep the peace, and Constantine did the same. Even Guthfrith knelt.’

  ‘Guthfrith?’

  Hywel looked disgusted. ‘He grovelled like a toad, and swore to let Æthelstan keep troops in his country. And all those oaths were witnessed by churchmen, written on parchments and sealed with wax, and copies were given to us. But there was one oath taken in secret. And all my spies cannot tell me what that oath was, only that Ealdred knelt to the king.’

  ‘And not for the first time,’ Cellach added snidely.

  I ignored that. ‘Ealdred swore?’ I asked Hywel.

  ‘He swore an oath, but what oath? We don’t know! And once the oath was sworn he was taken out of our sight and out of our hearing, we were only told that he’s an ealdorman now! We must call him lord! But an ealdorman of what? Of where?’

  Silence, except for a slight patter of rain on the tent’s roof, a patter that came and went quickly. ‘We don’t know where?’ I asked.

  ‘Of Cumbria?’ Hywel suggested. ‘Of Northumbria?’

  ‘Of Bebbanburg?’ Cellach growled.

  I turned my head and spat.

  ‘You don’t like my hospitality?’ Hywel asked, amused.

  I spat to keep faith with my promise to Benedetta, and because I did not want to believe what Cellach had suggested. ‘I met Ealdred just now,’ I told Hywel.

  ‘Ah! I would spit too. I hope you called him “lord”.’

  ‘I think I called him a rat-faced turd. Something like that.’

  Hywel laughed, then stood, which meant we all stood. He gestured me towards the tent’s door. ‘It’s late,’ he said, ‘but let me walk with you, Lord Uhtred.’

  A score of my men were waiting outside the tent and they accompanied us, as did twice as many of Hywel’s warriors. ‘I doubt your archer will try again,’ Hywel said, ‘but it’s best to be sure, is it not?’

  ‘He won’t try, lord King.’

  ‘It was not one of my men, I promise you. I have no quarrel with Bebbanburg.’

  We walked slowly towards the campfires marking my shelters. For a few paces neither of us spoke, then Hywel stopped and touched my elbow. ‘The wheel of fortune turns slowly, Lord Uhtred, but it does turn. It is not my time yet, but that time will come. But I doubt that Constantine will wait for the wheel’s turning.’

  ‘Yet he swore his oath to Æthelstan?’

  ‘When a king has three thousand warriors on your frontier, what choice do you have?’

  ‘Three thousand? I was told he only had two thousand.’

  ‘Two thousand around Eoferwic and at least another thousand here. And King Constantine can count shields as well as any man. He was forced to promise not to interfere with Northumbria, and to pay tribute. He agreed.’

  ‘So he’s oath-sworn,’ I said.

  ‘And so were you and Æthelstan sworn together, but every man in Britain knows what happened to that oath. He promised not to invade your country, yet here he is. You and I follow the old ways, Lord Uhtred, we believe an oath binds us, but now there are those who say that an oath made under duress is no oath at all.’

  I thought about that. ‘Maybe they’re right. What choice do you have if there’s a sword at your throat?’

  ‘The choice is not to swear, of course! Sign a treaty instead, maybe? But swear on the Lance of Charlemagne? On the very blade that pierced the side of our Lord?’ He shuddered.

  ‘But you swore?’ I asked, knowing the question might annoy him.

  It amused him instead. He chuckled, then touched my elbow again to signal we should walk on. ‘I swore to keep the peace, no more. And as for the tribute? I agreed to it, but I did not swear to it. I said I could not bind my successors, and the boy understood me. He wasn’t happy, Lord Uhtred, but he’s no fool. He doesn’t want trouble with the Welsh while his eyes are on the north country.’

  ‘And what of Constantine,’ I asked, ‘will he keep his oath?’

  ‘Not if he wants to keep his throne. His lords won’t be happy to have their king accept this humiliation, and the Scots are a proud nation.’ He walked a few paces in silence. ‘Constantine is a good man, a good Christian and, I believe, a good king, but he can’t afford to be humbled. So he buys himself a little time with this oath. And will he keep the oath? With Æthelstan? With a boy who breaks his promises? You want my thoughts, Lord Uhtred? I don’t believe Constantine will wait for too long, and his kingdom is stronger than mine, much stronger!’

  ‘You’re saying he’ll come south?’

  ‘I’m saying that he can’t let himself be bullied. I wish I could do the same, but for now I need peace with the Sais if I’m to make my country whole. But Constantine? He’s made peace with Strath Clota, he’ll do the same with Gibhleachán of the Hebrides, and with the beasts of Orkneyjar, and then he’ll have no enemies in the north and an army fit to challenge Æthelstan’s. If I was young Æthelstan I’d be worried.’

  I thought of the dragon and the falling star, both coming from the north and both, if Hywel was right, prophesying war.

  ‘I pray for peace,’ Hywel went on, as if reading my thoughts, ‘but I fear war is coming.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It will be a great war, and Bebbanburg, though I’m told it is formidable, is a small place to be trapped between two great countries.’ He stopped and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Choose your side well, Lord Uhtred, choose it well.’ He sighed and looked up into the clouded night. ‘There’ll be rain tomorrow! But I wish you a restful sleep.’

  I bowed to him. ‘Thank you, lord King.’

  ‘You may be a Sais,’ Hywel called as he walked away, ‘but it’s always a pleasure to meet you!’

  It was a pleasure to meet him too, or a pleasure of sorts. So Ealdred was an ealdorman, but of what? Of Northumbria? Of Cumbria?

  Of Bebbanburg?

  I slept badly.

  Finan took the first guard duty that night, placing a dozen men around our shelters. I spoke to Egil for a while, then tried to sleep on the bracken bed. It was raining when I woke at dawn, a hard rain blowing from the east to dampen the fires and darken the skies. Egil had insisted that some of his men had stood guard with mine, but only one man had anything to report. ‘I saw a snowy owl, lord,’ a Norseman told me, ‘flying low.’

  ‘Flying where?’

  ‘Northwards, lord.’

  North towards Guthfrith’s small encampment. It was an omen. An owl meant wisdom, but was it fleeing from me? Or pointing at me? ‘Is Egil still here?’ I asked the man.

  ‘He left before dawn, lord.’

  ‘Left where?’ Finan had joined me, swathed against the rain in a sealhide cloak.
/>   ‘He went hunting,’ I said.

  ‘Hunting! In this weather?’

  ‘Last night he told me he’d seen some boar across the river,’ I pointed south then turned back to the Norseman. ‘How many men did he take?’

  ‘Sixteen, lord.’

  ‘Get warm,’ I told the man, ‘and get some rest. Finan and I want to exercise our horses.’

  ‘We have servants for that,’ Finan grumbled.

  ‘Just you and me,’ I insisted.

  ‘What if Æthelstan sends for you?’

  ‘He can wait,’ I said and ordered Aldwyn, my servant, to saddle the horses. Then, as the wind gusted and the rain still pelted, Finan and I rode north. He, like me, was in battle-mail, the leather liners greasy, cold and damp. I wore my helmet and had Serpent-Breath at my hip. All around us was the wide spread of tents and shelters where the warriors of Britain were gathered uneasily at Æthelstan’s command. ‘Look at them,’ I said as our horses picked their own path through the sodden grass, ‘they’re being told they’re here to make peace, but every last man expects war.’

  ‘You too?’ Finan asked.

  ‘It’s coming, and what I should do is raise the ramparts of Bebbanburg and shut out the whole damned world.’

  He grunted at that. ‘And you think the world will leave us alone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your land will be ravaged, your livestock killed, your steadings burned and your fields turned to waste,’ he said, ‘and what good will your ramparts be then?’