War of the Wolf

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I thought I saw God, lord. He glowed and had wings.”

  “You saw God? Not Wynflæd?”

  He had blushed. “I am a sinner, lord.”

  I gave him back the pot. “So Arnborg took seeds with him?”

  “He took four jars of the prepared ointment, lord.”

  “You have the grease?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Make me a pot,” I had ordered him.

  “Lord?” he had pleaded, and waited till I nodded. “If I stay here, lord,” he went on, “Eerika will kill me. She will think I brought you here.”

  “You did bring me here,” I had said, “but if you’re so scared, just go. Walk south. Take your girl.”

  “They’ll follow me, lord. Take us with you. I can treat the sick. Please, lord.”

  I had scowled at him. “How can I trust you?”

  “Do I look like a man who would offend you again, lord?”

  And that, I confess, had made me smile. Beadwulf was thoroughly cowed. It would have been easy to kill him, even satisfying, but Wynflæd was so pathetic, so wan and childlike, that I relented. “Make me the wolf ointment,” I had told him, “and then you can ride with us.”

  We plundered the hall for warm clothing, took all eight horses that were still in Arnborg’s stables, burned the three ships at the wharf, and, under a pale afternoon sun, went eastward.

  Finan spurred his horse alongside mine. “You’re such a weakling, lord,” he said.

  “I am?”

  He grinned, turned, and nodded toward Beadwulf and Wynflæd who were mounted on the same horse, a big, placid gray gelding we had taken from Arnborg’s stables. The squirrel sat in front, enfolded by the monk’s arms. “I felt sorry for her,” I said.

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “Killing him would be too easy.”

  “So what will you do with him?”

  I shrugged. “Let them both go, I suppose. I don’t care what happens to them. I care about Stiorra and my grandchildren.”

  Stiorra was my daughter, and sometimes I thought she should have been my son because she was the strongest of my children. My eldest boy shared her strength, but he had become a Christian, a priest no less, and that made him no son of mine. My second son, named Uhtred like me, was a good warrior and a good man, but he had none of Stiorra’s strength of will. She had married Sigtryggr, who had once been my enemy, but was now my son-in-law and King of Northumbria, and they lived with their two children in the old Roman palace in Eoferwic. “Eoferwic’s walls are strong,” Finan said, reading my thoughts.

  “But to Sigtryggr and Stiorra,” I said, “the enemy are the Mercians. Not the pagans. If Sköll comes to their gate they’ll likely invite him into the city.”

  “Not if he has an army with him,” Finan retorted. He glanced toward the setting sun. “If I know Sigtryggr,” he said, “then Sköll Grimmarson and his men are slaughtered by now.” He saw he had not convinced me. “If two or three hundred warriors turned up at the Skull Gate at Bebbanburg, would you let them in?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And you think Sigtryggr would?”

  I touched the hammer hanging at my neck and prayed he was right.

  We spent that night in the remnants of the Roman fort at Ribelcastre, a fort that had guarded the ford where the road that led north to Cair Ligualid crossed the Ribbel. I had thought that some of the Danes or Norse who had fled to this wild country would have taken the fort for themselves, but it was deserted, nothing but weather-worn turf walls and the rotted stumps of an ancient palisade. “They fear the place, lord,” Beadwulf told me. “They believe it is a haunt of ghosts.” He crossed himself.

  “So you’re still a Christian?” I asked sourly.

  “Of course, lord!” He frowned uncertainly. “It’s just that the monastic life . . .” he shrugged, evidently lost for words.

  “Only lets you hump other monks?” I finished for him.

  “Please, lord!” he protested, blushing.

  “So what will your abbot do when he finds you’ve broken your vows?”

  “If he finds me, lord? He’ll beat me.”

  “I just hope Wynflæd is worth the beating,” I said.

  “Oh she is, lord! She is!”

  We had ridden from Arnborg’s home through good farm country, but we had seen few people, and those we did see were old, children, or women, which was hardly surprising if most of the men of fighting age had followed Sköll Grimmarson eastward. The first few steadings we had passed all belonged to Arnborg’s men, who I assumed were now somewhere close to Eoferwic. I touched the hammer again, praying they were not in the city that lay some three or four days’ journey across the high moors.

  It was a cold night. We cut wood, mostly alder and birch, and used it for fires, confident that the fighting men of the district were far away. We had stripped Arnborg’s hall of pelts, fleeces, even woolen rags, anything that might keep us warm. I placed sentries who gazed into the frost-bright night beneath a star-filled sky. The few high clouds were drifting southward and the next day promised to be dry, cold, and hard.

  We had two ways to reach Eoferwic. The easiest route, and the longest, was to follow the good Roman road south to Mameceaster, then take another Roman road that went northeast and led straight to Sigtryggr’s city. The shorter route also followed Roman roads, but one of Arnborg’s slaves, a sullen Saxon who had driven cattle across the moors, told us the road was decayed. “You can get lost up there, lord,” he had warned me. “There are places the road is washed out. It’s hard to follow.”

  Nevertheless I was determined to use the shorter route. I needed to reach Eoferwic swiftly, needed to discover what had happened in eastern Northumbria. Perhaps Sköll Grimmarson had not ridden to Eoferwic, but had gone to Bebbanburg instead? I only had Beadwulf’s word for where Arnborg had gone. “Wasn’t he worried you’d betray him?” I asked Beadwulf in the heart of that freezing night.

  “He was holding Wynflæd as a hostage, lord.”

  I grimaced. “The power of women.”

  “Besides, lord,” he went on, “I only discovered what they planned when I returned. When I came to you I still believed what Arnborg had told me, that Prince Æthelstan was under siege.”

  “And Arnborg paid Prince Æthelstan tribute,” I said.

  “He did once, lord.”

  But the Danes and the Norse who lived in the western wilds of Cumbraland had seen Mercia weakened by rebellion, and they, like Sigtryggr, had been living under the fear of a Saxon invasion. The Mercian rebellion had encouraged them to break free. “Why didn’t they just ally with Sigtryggr?” I asked. “He fears the Saxons as much as they do.”

  “They believe he is weak, lord.”

  I laughed at that. “Sigtryggr? He’s not weak.”

  “They call him a client king, lord.”

  “Client to who?”

  “To the Christians.”

  “Christians! He’s a pagan like me!”

  “But Eoferwic is filled with Christians, lord, and the archbishop is there, and he’s a Saxon.”

  “Hrothweard is a good man,” I said grudgingly.

  “Snorri says that the archbishop has ensorceled Sigtryggr, lord.”

  “Ensorceled?”

  “Used magic spells to make Sigtryggr obedient, lord. And Jarl Arnborg says there are too many Saxon Christians in Northumbria, lord. He fears they would fight for Mercia if it came to war, and King Sigtryggr is blinded to the danger.”

  I shook my head. “Eoferwic is a Christian city, and Sigtryggr rules there. He needs the Christians, he tolerates them, and he tries hard not to make enemies of them.” I turned and looked back into the firelit fort. “Most of my men are Christians. What am I supposed to do, slaughter them?”

  “Sköll Grimmarson believes Northumbria needs a stronger king, lord,” Beadwulf had finished.

  So once again I was fighting for the Christians! I would have laughed if I had not been so fearful for Eoferwic
’s fate. Everything Beadwulf told me that night made sense. The Danes in Mercia had succumbed to the Saxons, many of them becoming Christians, just as the conquered Danes in East Anglia had converted. Mercia might be troubled by rebellion, but it was plain to anyone that the Saxons wanted to invade Northumbria when the rebels were defeated. They were making King Alfred’s dream come true. When I was a child the land that would become Englaland had been divided into four kingdoms; Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex. Four kingdoms and four kings. The Danes had invaded, they had taken Northumbria, taken East Anglia, taken all of northern Mercia, and very nearly subjugated Wessex, but the Saxons had fought back. I had fought back, at times reluctantly, fighting to make Alfred’s dream of one Saxon kingdom come true, and the realization of that dream was so close now! The West Saxons had already invaded East Anglia and made it part of their kingdom, and now Edward, Anglorum Saxonum Rex, was binding Mercia to the West Saxon throne. Only Northumbria was left. It was the last pagan kingdom in Englaland.

  And the Norse, the fierce Norse, were making Cumbraland their new home. No man fights the Norse willingly, but their weakness is that they rarely unite. They follow their chieftains and, when those chieftains quarrel, they fight each other. And those divisions had led to defeat in Ireland and to savage combats along the western coast of Scotland, and so the losers sailed in their dragon-boats to Cumbraland, the last refuge in Britain. And now a new leader had appeared, Sköll Grimmarson, who had performed the miracle of uniting the Norse war-bands, and was seeking his own kingdom, my kingdom, Northumbria.

  “I should have taken the throne of Northumbria,” I grumbled to Finan next morning.

  “Yes, lord, you should. Why didn’t you?”

  “I never wanted to be a king.”

  “And if you had been king,” he asked, “what would you have done?”

  “I’d have hammered these Norsemen into obedience for a start,” I said, though in truth I was talking nonsense. If Sigtryggr had taken men west into Cumbraland then either the Mercians or the Scots would have attacked Eoferwic in the east, and so long as he defended the east, so long would the western part of his kingdom stay lawless. “You don’t win wars by defending,” I said, “and if Northumbria is to stay free then it needs to attack.”

  But that was a notion as wispy as the high thin clouds that were being driven away by a brisk wind, and behind those wispy clouds was a wall of dark, tumultuous cloud that promised snow. It was still bitterly cold. The horses’ hooves shattered ice at the river’s edge when we took them to the ford to drink, while the turf on which we had tried to sleep was frost hard. Soon after dawn we loaded the packhorses, saddled the stallions, and left the smoking ashes of our campfires behind. I wanted to hurry, but dared not because we had few spare horses and could not risk losing any to a broken leg, and the Roman road was now little more than a trace of half-buried stones in the frost-paled turf of the hills. Our breath misted, and the small streams were frozen. The scouts, mounted on our swiftest stallions, rode ahead, and it was those scouts who first saw the approaching horsemen.

  It was midafternoon. The sky was covered in dark cloud, and every few minutes there were spatters of sleet, though the threatened hard fall of snow had not yet arrived. The road, laid arrogantly straight across the flank of a hill, ignoring spurs and streams, had climbed all day, and we were now in bare, bleak moorland, still climbing, but I saw that our furthest scouts, maybe a mile ahead, had dismounted and were keeping below the skyline of a high spur. That told me there were other men even farther ahead, men who would have seen our scouts outlined against the gray winter sky if those scouts had not been so cautious. Then one of those far scouts hauled himself into his saddle, turned his horse, and spurred back toward us. “Trouble,” Finan grunted.

  There were no steadings this high on the moors. In summer sheep and goats might be brought here to graze, but in winter the land was empty, and so it was unlikely that any merchants would be traveling this broken road across the moors. “It must be men coming back from Eoferwic.” I suggested.

  “Defeated men, I hope,” Finan said. He and I had hurried ahead to meet the scout, Kettil, curbing our horses where some yards of the road had long ago been washed away by a sudden flood. Kettil slowed as he neared us, and let his horse pick its way across the slope.

  “Men, lord,” he said, “maybe two hundred? Some on the road, some are driving cattle in the valley.” The valley was a wide, boggy swale to our left.

  “How far away?”

  “A good mile beyond that crest, lord. And they’re coming slow because of the cattle.”

  Any cattle captured at this time of year would have been taken from byres or barns, not from the fields. The herds had been slaughtered at the beginning of winter, with just enough beasts left safe behind walls to breed for the new year, so the approaching men must have raided Sigtryggr’s land, maybe my land too, and had doubtless stolen cattle, silver, and slaves, and were now bringing their spoils home. The presence of the cattle, indeed of the men themselves, suggested they had failed to capture Eoferwic. Why else would they be coming west across the hills instead of staying in the city?

  “Just two hundred men?” Finan asked.

  “So far,” Kettil said, “but more were still coming when I left.”

  “Scouts?” I asked.

  “None, lord.” Kettil spat. “Reckon they feel safe without them. There’s enough of the bastards.”

  “We’ll go south,” I said bleakly. “We’ll let them pass, but I want to capture some of the bastards too.” I would have preferred to go north because the land there was more rugged, promising more hiding places, but the valley immediately to our north was wide, and I reckoned it would take too much time to reach the far crest, time in which the approaching enemy might see us, while the southern skyline was much closer. I stood in my stirrups, pointed south, and the far scouts, who had already started back toward us, saw my gesture and changed direction. Then I led my men over the hill, and, once hidden from the road, dismounted.

  I lay on the crest, waiting, watching, and shivering. A hard fall of rain swept the valley. It was no longer sleet, so perhaps it was warmer, though I felt chilled to the marrow. The wind gusted, died, and gusted again, billowing the great veils of rain. The hard rain stopped, and for a while there was nothing to see except a pair of curlews above the empty valley and a buzzard drifting south on the uncertain wind. Was that an omen? During the night I had woken, cold and shivering, with the memory of a dream fresh in my mind. I had been steering a ship along a strange shore, looking for a safe harbor and finding none, and I had tried to see the message in that dream, but I could find nothing ominous in the dream-ship or the placid shore. The gods do talk to us in our dreams, just as the flight of birds can reveal their wishes, but it seemed the gods were not talking to me. The buzzard flew out of sight. I wanted a reassurance from the gods, and I was finding none.

  “There,” Finan said beside me, and I saw the first horsemen appear on the eastern crest.

  And so they came, horseman after horseman, and in the wide valley to their north were straggling lines of cattle herded by boys. “Christ,” Finan said, “there’s more than two hundred of the bastards!”

  Some men were on foot, while others guarded the women and children who had been captured. Those women would mostly be sold as slaves, though doubtless some would find new husbands among the Norse. I had gestured Beadwulf to join us, snarling at him to crawl the last few paces so his head did not show above the skyline. “Tell me if you see Sköll,” I ordered him.

  “I’ve never seen him, lord.” He saw the anger on my face. “But they say he is a big man and that he wears a cloak of white fur.”

  For a time we lay in silence, just watching the folk trudge along the road. I counted over three hundred men before Beadwulf made a nervous sound. “There, lord,” he said, his eyes widening as he watched a knot of horsemen, perhaps forty or fifty strong, appear beneath us.

  “There what?�
��

  “That must be Sköll Grimmarson,” he said, speaking softly as though he feared the far horsemen could hear us. “The man in the white bear fur, lord,” he added, and there, riding alone at the center of the horsemen, was a big man on a big horse wearing a big cloak of pure white fur.

  I had heard of the white bears, though I had never seen one. But travelers said that in the far north where the snow never melts and where even in summer the sea is ice-locked there are massive bears with thick white pelts. I would never have believed such stories had I not once seen such a pelt for sale in Lundene, though at a price that only a king could afford. Most of the men riding with Sköll wore gray cloaks. Wolf pelts? Were those men, I wondered, the feared úlfhéðnar?

  “And that’s his sorcerer, lord,” Beadwulf was whispering, “Snorri.” He did not need to point out the sorcerer, who had long white hair and wore a long white robe beneath a cloak of dark fur. I instinctively touched my hammer amulet. “He’s blind, lord,” Beadwulf said.

  “The sorcerer?”

  “They say Sköll blinded him with a red-hot sword tip, lord.”

  “Jesus,” Finan muttered in disgust. But it made sense to me. We know that Odin’s great wisdom came at the price of an eye, so Sköll had made his sorcerer pay double the price to endow him with even more knowledge.

  “Men fear Snorri,” Beadwulf said, “because he sees the future and he can kill with a curse.” He watched the riders beneath us. “And I think that’s Arnborg,” Beadwulf went on, “the man on the roan horse, lord. I think that’s him. It looks like his horse.”

  The roan horse was some twenty paces behind Sköll and his sorcerer, but the rider was too far away for me to make out his face. He wore a helmet, a sword hung by his side, and a great dark cloak covered his horse’s rump. Like most of the passing riders he slumped in his saddle, plainly weary, and I was tempted to tell my men to mount, then charge across the crest and wreak havoc on the horsemen below. Kill the leaders, I thought, and the rest of the Norsemen would be discouraged. It was a risk, I might lose some horses to broken legs, and perhaps the Norsemen were not as tired as they appeared, and I was still weighing the dangers of such an attack when even more riders appeared. “God in his heaven,” Finan said, “but how many are there?”