War of the Wolf

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Lord!” Finan called.

  I turned to see a small group of Norsemen coming fast behind us. They were galloping recklessly, each holding a spear. There were only eight of them, and what could eight men do against ninety?

  They could frustrate us, and they did. They hung back for much of the time, then would gallop forward threateningly, and each time they approached we were forced to turn men around, and as soon as we did, they swerved away to avoid a fight. And each time we stopped and turned we were slowed down. Again and again they charged then turned away, and again and again we were forced to face them, and I knew the larger war-bands were not far behind and were getting closer. We needed to go faster, and so I put twenty men under Finan’s command and had them ride to the right of the road, and another twenty under Berg’s leadership who rode to the left. They took it in turns to face the annoying pursuers while the rest of us kept moving, and that checked the frustrating threats.

  I rode beside Enar Erikson, who had recovered his wits. I had taken a moment to sit him properly in his saddle, though with his hands tied at his back and his ankles lashed to the stirrup leathers. “So what happened at Eoferwic?” I asked him.

  “Eoferwic?” He was puzzled because I had used the Saxon name instead of the name the Norse used.

  “At Jorvik.”

  Rain dripped from his helmet and his mustache. “Will I live if I tell you?” he asked.

  “You’ll die if you don’t.”

  “We lost,” he said curtly. He ducked beneath a branch and almost lost his balance. We had left the moorland, and the road led through a spinney of stunted willow. As we climbed the gentle pastureland beyond the trees I looked behind and saw our enemy’s large war-band was a mile away, but it was getting dark and they were being cautious despite outnumbering us. The two pursuing groups had joined, and together they had almost double my numbers, but they still seemed reluctant to fight. I could not see Sköll’s white cloak among the distant pursuers, so I guessed he had sent another man to lead the warriors and he had doubtless told that man to be careful. If Enar was right then Sköll must have lost men at Eoferwic, and he doubtless did not want to lose more, and though he could overwhelm us in a fight he would pay dearly for our defeat. He had declared war on Sigtryggr, he had lost the opening fight, and I reckoned he needed every warrior to face my son-in-law’s revenge. Or so I hoped.

  The sun was low now and hidden by darkly heaped clouds. The wind gusted rain that had begun to fall steadily. We passed a steading that had smoke coming from the hall roof and was surrounded by a stout palisade. I knew my tired men must hope that I would attack the small farmstead and so give them a refuge with a hearth, but to stop now would be to invite our pursuers to besiege the place, and so we kept going into the wet dusk.

  “So you lost,” I said to Enar. “How?”

  He told me the tale as we rode into the darkness. The young warriors who had annoyed us abandoned their pursuit and turned back to join the larger war-band that seemed content to have chased us far away from the road across the moors. In the dying light and through the veil of hard rain I saw they had stopped. I suspected they would demand shelter in the steading we had passed.

  Enar grudgingly told me that Sköll’s best hope of capturing Eoferwic had been to move quickly, to cross the wide plain about the city as fast as possible and so take the garrison by surprise, but he had paused before he left the hills. “Where?” I asked.

  Enar shrugged. “Just a settlement,” he said. “There was a cave there.”

  “Why did he stop?”

  “Weather. It was cold. It wasn’t so cold when we left home, we thought spring had come, but winter came back. It closed in fast.”

  “You took shelter?”

  “We had to! You could hardly see through the blizzard.”

  “How long did you wait there?”

  “Just a day.” A day was not long, but the pause must have been fatal to Sköll’s hopes. “They knew we were coming,” Enar continued bitterly, “so someone must have warned them. And the sorcerer told Sköll not to attack the city. At least that’s what men said afterward.”

  “Doesn’t Sköll take his sorcerer’s advice?” I asked.

  “Usually,” Enar spoke abruptly, as if talking about Sköll’s famed sorcerer troubled him.

  “So why did Sköll attack?” I asked.

  “We’d come so far,” Enar said, “and Snorri . . .” his voice faded away.

  “Snorri is the sorcerer?” I asked.

  “He is.”

  “And he told Sköll not to attack?”

  “Men said so,” Enar spoke hesitantly, evidently reluctant to discuss the sorcerer. “But you can’t always understand what Snorri says. Sometimes he speaks in riddles.”

  “But men fear him?” I pressed.

  “Snorri is terrible,” Enar said in a low voice. “When he looks at you—”

  “I thought Sköll blinded him?”

  “He did, but Snorri still sees you! He sees the future. And in battle . . .” his voice trailed away again.

  “In battle?” I asked.

  “He gazes at the enemy,” Enar’s voice was touched with awe, “and they die!”

  “That didn’t work in Jorvik,” I said scornfully.

  “Snorri didn’t go into the city. Some days he’s too weak to summon the gods, but when Snorri is strong then Sköll always wins. Always! The blind man stares and the living men die.”

  A blind sorcerer who could see the future and kill with a glance? So had Snorri seen me in his dreams? And had he cursed me? I touched the hammer and felt the emptiness that suggested the gods had abandoned me, and I could find no omen in the darkness to give me hope. Most of us had dismounted by now and were leading our horses. The night was thick, wet, and miserable. There was no chance of a pursuit in this foul darkness, even if the men behind us had a mind to keep going, yet still we stumbled on, finally stopping where some winter-bare trees offered an illusion of shelter. I was tempted to light a fire, but dared not. We would just have to suffer through the wet cold darkness.

  We tied the two prisoners to a tree. “So what happened when you reached Jorvik?” I asked them.

  “They invited us into the city,” the second captive, a young man called Njall, answered from the dark.

  “Invited you?”

  He explained that Sköll had sent a small party ahead, just thirty men, none of them dressed for war, but pretending to be travelers. “They were to say they were looking for a ship to buy,” Enar added. “The rest of us waited a couple of miles west of the place.”

  It was not a bad plan. A handful of men, none in mail, would have hardly looked like a threat to Sigtryggr’s garrison. Enar said the thirty men had ridden through the village that spread on the Usa’s western bank and crossed the Roman bridge. Then they must have reached the southwestern gate with its massive stone towers and high fighting platform. “We know the thirty men captured the gate,” Enar said, “because they flew Sköll’s wolf flag from one of the towers, and that was the signal for us to follow. Sköll sent his best men first.”

  “The úlfhéðnar?”

  “The úlfhéðnar,” Enar confirmed, then continued his story. “Sköll led them, but it was a trap. They’d let us capture the gate, but the streets beyond were barricaded, and behind the barricades was an army. And when a hundred or so were inside the city another band appeared at the river bank to cut them off. They made a shield wall to stop the rest of us crossing the bridge, so the men inside the city were trapped.”

  “And slaughtered,” Finan put in with relish.

  “Most of them, yes.”

  “Most of them,” I repeated the words. “Didn’t you say that Sköll was inside the city?”

  A gust of wind brought rain spattering down from the branches. “Sköll,” Enar said, “is an úlfheðinn. Ten men can’t stand against Sköll.” There was awe in his voice. “He came back through the gate with twenty of his wolf-warriors, and they attacked the shield wa
ll barring the bridge. We attacked too, from the other side of the river, and we broke them. We ran the river red with their blood, but by then the city gates were closed.”

  So Sköll’s lunge across Britain had failed. His sorcerer had been right, and the defenders of Eoferwic had thwarted him and so, as recompense for his followers, he had led them on a rampage through the wide farmlands around the city, taking slaves, plunder, and cattle, and had then started back across the hills to Cumbraland. “And Sigtryggr didn’t pursue you?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “He’d gone south,” Njall said sullenly.

  “We captured a priest,” Enar explained, “who said Sigtryggr had led men to Lindcolne.” He said the unfamiliar name uncertainly.

  “Mercians,” Finan said sourly. He meant that there must have been some threat from Mercia on Northumbria’s southern border, and Sigtryggr had led men to reinforce Lindcolne’s garrison. I listened to the rain beating on the leafless trees and felt the frustration of ignorance. Had Edward of Wessex invaded Mercia? Was Lindcolne under siege? The only consolation I could find was that Eoferwic had survived and that the Norsemen had been defeated in the battle fought around the city’s gate.

  Whoever Sigtryggr had left in charge of Eoferwic’s garrison had been clever, using the same tactics to defend the city that the Danes had used when my father had died. I had been a child then, forbidden to fight, and had watched as the Northumbrian army had charged through a great gap in Eoferwic’s wall. The gap had been left on purpose, and once through the breach my father’s forces were faced by a new wall, a barricade edging a killing ground, and the Danes had made great slaughter that day. Their poets had sung of it, their hard words chanted to a harpist’s chords, and I still knew that song and sometimes chanted it myself, not out of bitterness because of my father’s death, but out of gratitude because it was on that day of killing that Ragnar had captured me.

  I was his Saxon slave and became like a son to him. I loved him like a father. I called myself Uhtred Ragnarson and took his religion, sloughing off Christianity like a snake shedding its skin. I grew up thinking I was a Dane, wanting to be a Dane, but fate had driven me back to the Saxons. Wyrd bið ful āræd.

  “Sigtryggr will come for revenge,” I told Enar.

  He gave that threat a mocking laugh. “Jarl Sköll will want revenge too.”

  “For capturing you?” I asked in derision.

  “For wounding his son,” he said. “Or did you kill him?”

  So the young man with the silver-chased helmet had been Sköll’s son? I wished I had known because I would have dragged him with us as another prisoner. “I gave him a headache he won’t lose quickly,” I said. “What’s the boy’s name?”

  “Boy?” Enar said. “He’s a warrior, a man.”

  “Unker Sköllson,” Njall said.

  “Unker is a warrior, a man,” Enar repeated, and then added the words that told me the nature of the curse that the gods had wished on me, “and destroyer of queens.”

  “Destroyer of queens?” I asked.

  “He and his father killed Sigtryggr’s queen,” Enar said.

  And I could hear the gods laughing.

  “He and his father killed Sigtryggr’s queen.” For a bleak moment those words seemed unreal, almost as if I had dreamed rather than heard them.

  In the dark, of course, Enar could not see me or else he might have kept quiet. Instead he continued his tale. “She led them. She was in mail and helmet, carrying a sword.”

  Finan’s hand gripped my arm to keep me still and silent. “She fought?” he asked.

  “Like a fiend. She was screaming insults at us, at Sköll and Unker.”

  “How do you know it was the queen?” Finan asked. He was still gripping my arm.

  “She boasted of it!” Enar said. “She called out that her husband thought a mere woman could defeat Sköll.”

  “She must have had a bodyguard,” Finan said, refusing to let go of me.

  “No bodyguard could stand against Sköll!” Njall said proudly. “He and his son killed a dozen men.”

  “So he told us,” Enar said, sounding amused, “the father and son fought through the wall, and Unker hooked the royal bitch out of the ranks with the beard of his ax and his father opened her royal belly with his sword, Grayfang.”

  One of the things they say about the úlfhéðnar is that they fight in a blind rage, like madmen. In battle, people say, the úlfhéðnar are possessed by the souls of wild beasts, of wolves who know no mercy and are hungry for flesh. They feel no pain and know no fear. Some, it is said, even fight naked to show they need no mail, no shield, no helmet, because no man can stand against them. The úlfhéðnar are beasts who fight like gods.

  It was the word “bitch” that turned me into a beast. I stood up, ripped Serpent-Breath from her scabbard, and hacked at the two defenseless men tied to the tree. Finan tried to stop me, then must have backed away. He said I was howling like a soul in torment, that the prisoners were screaming, and then there was sudden warmth in the night as their blood sprayed onto my face and I was sobbing and still howling and hacking blindly in the darkness, hacking and hacking, driving the heavy sword into bark, wood, flesh, and bone. And when there was silence, when there were no more screams, when there were no more sounds of dying men moving or groaning, and when the blood no longer flew, I rammed the sword into the soil and howled at the gods.

  Stiorra, my daughter, was dead.

  Folk say parents have no favorites among their children, which is nonsense. Maybe we love them all, yet there is always one we love the most, and of my three children that one was Stiorra. She was tall, raven-haired like her mother, decisive, strong-willed, sensible, and shrewd. She loved the gods and had learned to divine their will, yet the gods had killed her in Eoferwic. Her blood was on the street and the gods were laughing. They have no pity.

  We cling to shreds of hope. Maybe Stiorra had not died, but was wounded? Maybe Sköll’s tale was merely the boast of a defeated man, a defiant lie to restore his reputation? Maybe it had been another woman? Yet it sounded so like Stiorra. If Sigtryggr was far away then she would have led his troops, but why lead them in person? Why not inspire them and let the warriors do the fighting? Yet Stiorra would have known that her presence in Eoferwic’s main street would fire her warriors to greatness. And her death would have inspired them to a savage revenge, yet still Sköll had survived.

  And Sköll’s survival gave me one small consolation, that I would never rest until Sköll Grimmarson was at my feet and whimpering for mercy, and at that moment I would show him the same mercy that the gods had given me. That was small consolation, very small, but I clung to it through that night of misery. I wept, though no one saw my tears, and there were moments of despair, but there was always the knowledge that I would find Sköll and I would slaughter him. A curse must be followed by an oath, and I swore that oath in the rain-soaked darkness. Sköll Grimmarson must die.

  When the first gray wolf-light touched the eastern hills I went back through the trees and found Serpent-Breath where I had left her. My men, those who were awake, watched me fearfully. The bodies of the two prisoners were still tied to the tree, their gaping wounds washed clean by the rain. I pulled Serpent-Breath from the leaf mold and tossed her to Rorik. “Clean her.”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “You should eat, lord,” Finan told me.

  “No,” I said, not looking at him because I did not want him to see the tears that were blurring my eyes. “What I should do,” I snarled, “is kill that damned monk.”

  “He’s gone, lord,” Finan said.

  I turned, furious. “He’s what?”

  “He and his girl,” Finan said calmly. “They stole two of the scouts’ horses at first light.”

  “Didn’t we set sentries?”

  Finan shrugged. “They told Godric they were going for a shit.”

  “With horses?” Damn Godric. He had always been a fool. “Maybe I should k
ill Godric,” I snarled. “Send him to me.”

  “Leave him to me,” Finan said, fearing what I would do in my rage. “I’ll give him a thumping,” he promised.

  Godric was enthusiastic enough, he could hold a shield and wield a sword, but had the brains of a slug. Brother Beadwulf, I thought, would have had small trouble convincing the fool that he meant no harm. I supposed the monk and his squirrel had fled back to Arnborg, presumably because he thought the Norse would catch and slaughter us, and Brother Beadwulf wanted to be certain he would survive the slaughter. I should have killed him, I thought sourly, yet the truth, of course, was that even if Beadwulf had not lured me across Britain I could still not have saved my daughter’s life. I would have been in Bebbanburg, not in Eoferwic. “I should have killed him,” I told Finan, “just to annoy Æthelstan.”

  “Add him to the list of men to be killed,” Finan suggested, then offered me a lump of sodden bread. I shook my head, but did take his offer of a flask of ale. “That’s the last of the ale,” he said warningly.

  I drank half, then gave him back the flask. “Food?”

  “Ten loaves of rotting bread, some cheese.”

  “The gods love us,” I said sourly.

  “So where do we go, lord?” he asked.

  “Send two scouts north,” I said. “See if the bastards are still anywhere near.”

  “And if they are?”

  I said nothing for a moment. One part of me, the savage part, wanted to ride recklessly north and plunge into the heart of Sköll’s army, seek him out and have my revenge, but that was madness. “We go east,” I finally said.

  “To Eoferwic?”

  I nodded. I needed to find Sigtryggr, and together we would avenge Stiorra.

  “So we go back to the road?”

  “No.” The road might have been the quickest route to Eoferwic, but right now my men and our horses needed warmth, food, and rest. We would find none of those things on the moors, but our flight had brought us into a richer country, and I knew we would discover a steading that could provide what we needed. We had passed one such farmstead the night before, but it had been small and I suspected that by now Sköll’s men would have stripped the place bare. I needed somewhere large and well stocked. “Do any of our men know this country?”