War of the Wolf

by Bernard Cornwell

  “A pebble?” I asked.

  “That, lord,” he said in an awed tone, “is the very same sling-stone with which David slew Goliath!”

  I took the stone, which looked exactly like a million others on Lindisfarena’s beaches. I knew Ieremias collected relics, all of them worthless, but all, in his mind, were real and sacred. “Are you sure you want me to carry this?” I asked.

  “God commanded me to give it to you, lord, to grant you great smiting. That stone is a very holy and very precious object and will give you the power to overcome all enemies.” He made the sign of the cross, and Father Swithred hissed disapproval. “Turds spew from your tongue,” Ieremias spoke English again, glaring at Swithred.

  I thought back to something Ieremias had said a moment before. “You mentioned a high place.”

  “The heathen is exalted,” Ieremias said, “and must be brought low.”

  “You know Sköll lives in a high place?” I asked carefully, never quite sure whether Ieremias was listening to me, let alone telling me the truth.

  “Very high, lord! His place of refuge touches the sky and lies above the pit of silver.”

  I stared at him. “You know where it is?”

  “Of course I know!” He suddenly sounded entirely sane. “Do you remember Jarl Halfdan the Mad?”

  I shook my head. “Should I?”

  “He lost his wits, poor man, and led an assault on Dunholm. Jarl Ragnar killed him, of course, and then we all went north and laid his home waste. That was before God called me to His service.” Ieremias used one end of his intricately embroidered pallium to blow his nose, making Father Swithred flinch. “Halfdan the Mad’s fort is a very nasty place, lord! The Romans built it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Lord, Lord, Lord,” Ieremias said, evidently calling on his god to help him remember. “You know the road from Jorvik to Cair Ligualid?”

  “I know it.”

  “About an angel’s flight from Cair Ligualid another Roman road goes north into the fells. It climbs, lord. If you follow that road you’ll find Halfdan’s fort. It’s lost in the hills, very far and very high.”

  “Heahburh,” I said.

  “It is high!” Ieremias said. “And the higher you climb the nearer you come to God. I was thinking of building a tower, lord.”

  “How far is an angel’s flight?” I asked.

  “A very high tower, lord, to make it more convenient for God to speak with me.”

  “Angel’s flight,” I reminded him.

  “Oh! Just a half-day’s walk, lord.” His face lit up as he remembered something. “Halfdan’s fortress lies above the headwaters of the South Tine. Follow that river’s valley and you must come to where you can smite him, but pray, lord, pray! Halfdan’s fort is formidable! A wall, banks, and ditches, but I shall beseech God that he grants you good smiting. The Lord of Hosts is with you, you cannot fail to smite mightily!”

  “But how can you be certain that Heahburh is Halfdan’s fort?” I asked, praying that the answer would not be that his god had told him.

  “I can’t be certain,” Ieremias said, sounding perfectly sane, “but all the reports say that Sköll lives above the pit of silver. Where else can it be?”

  Some instinct told me that Ieremias’s recollection of Ragnar the Younger’s raid was the truth, which meant that Heahburh lay not too far south of the great wall, and not too distant from the place where my son had been ambushed. “The pit of silver?” I asked him.

  Ieremias looked at me as though I were the mad one, then understanding dawned. “There were lead mines there, lord.”

  “And silver is smelted from lead,” I said.

  “From the darkness cometh light,” Ieremias said happily, “and silver must be given to the poor, lord.” He looked pointedly at the sling-stone I was still holding. “That is a very valuable relic, lord. King David himself handled it!”

  Meaning he wanted silver, and, because he had told me what I needed to know, I gave him coins. He sniffed them, looked happy, then turned to the sea. “The tide is rising, lord. May I rest my head here tonight?”

  “Did you bring your own pillow?” I asked.

  He offered me a sly smile. “She is below, lord,” he said, pointing down into the lower fortress.

  Ieremias would be unable to get home that evening because at high tide the causeway to Lindisfarena was under water and the mad bishop was often sane enough to visit Bebbanburg just as a flooding tide would prevent him from riding home and just in time to share the garrison’s supper, which, I suspected, was a lot better than anything his followers cooked. “And maybe we could have a morsel to eat?” he added.

  “You will be welcome,” I told him, and so he was, because I reckoned he had told me where I could find Sköll.

  Not that I could do anything about it, at least not immediately, because the next day Sköll came to us.

  He came without anyone telling us of his presence, and that was disturbing. If a Scottish war-band came hunting for slaves or cattle we would hear about it from the folk who fled. Some would go to their hiding places in the woods or hills, but others would run or ride to warn neighbors and so the news would spread until it reached Bebbanburg, but Sköll simply arrived without any warning. He must have led his men straight across the hills, not stopping to plunder or burn, just spurring on his horses so that he appeared on the hill above the village before anyone could reach us with news of his coming. He came not long after dawn on a mellow spring day, and the rising sun glinted from the mail, helmets, and spear-blades of his gray-cloaked horsemen. “They must have ridden half the night,” Finan said.

  “All night even,” I said. It had been a cloudless night and the moon was full.

  A horn was sounding from the great hall, summoning Bebbanburg’s garrison to the ramparts. Villagers were running from their houses, driving pigs, goats, cattle, dogs, sheep, and children along the narrow neck of land that led to Bebbanburg’s Skull Gate. Sköll could surely see them, but he sent none of his warriors down the hill to stop their flight. I shouted at my son to ready men who could ride out to protect the fugitives if Sköll attacked, but the Norseman stayed on the higher ground and just watched us.

  “Two hundred and fifty men,” Finan said dourly.

  “So far,” I answered, because more men were joining Sköll even as we watched. I had fewer than sixty men in the fortress. Most of my household warriors were at their steadings, and though they would learn soon enough of Sköll’s arrival and would know to assemble south of the fortress, I could not expect to see them until midday at the earliest and even then I would have fewer men than Sköll.

  But Sköll too had his problems. I suspected he had never been to Bebbanburg before, and, though he had doubtless heard of its strength, he was now seeing the fortress in all its grim glory. I doubted he had any ships on Northumbria’s eastern coast, so the only way to attack us was along the narrow neck of land that led to the massive defenses of the Skull Gate, and if he somehow managed to capture that outer bastion he still had the Inner Gate and its mighty wall to overcome. So far as I could see he had brought no ladders, so in truth he stood no chance of capturing the fortress because even his fabled úlfhéðnar could not overcome Bebbanburg’s defenses without some means of scaling the ramparts. Unless, of course, his sorcerer had the power to defeat us.

  And was that possible? I touched my hammer. I could fight men, but I could not fight the gods, and surely, I thought, Sköll must have known of Bebbanburg’s legendary strength before coming to the fortress, so what gave him the confidence to come so boldly? “Oh, dear Christ!” Finan interrupted my thoughts. He was staring at the far hill.

  His eyes were keener than mine. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Prisoners, lord.”

  It was my turn to swear. I could see the prisoners now, four men wearing nothing but long shirts, their hands tied, their bodies draped over packhorses like sacks of grain. “My son’s men,” I said quietly.

 
“Like as not.”

  By now there were almost three hundred men on the far hill, and Sköll had raised his standard, the flag of the snarling wolf. I could see him clearly, his white cloak bright in the early sunshine. He was waiting, knowing we watched him, and ignoring the fugitives panicked from the village who had almost all reached the fortress. He was gloating, I thought. He had not come to capture a fortress, but to show how little he feared us.

  And when he did approach he came slowly, his whole line of men riding sedately downhill and threading its way between the houses that lined the harbor. I thought men would dismount to plunder the abandoned village, but instead they all followed Sköll onto the narrow neck of land. The prisoners came with them. “Can you see who they are?” I asked Finan.

  “Not yet.”

  The approaching warriors stopped at the causeway’s narrowest point, where Sköll dismounted. He handed his helmet to one of his followers and then, accompanied by just one man, walked toward the Skull Gate. He stopped after a few paces, drew his great sword, Grayfang, and rammed it into the sand, then spread his arms wide to show he came to talk, not to fight. He walked on another few paces, then stopped and waited. His companion was Snorri.

  I had only seen Snorri at a distance, now I could see him clearly, and he was far more frightening than Sköll. He was as tall as Sköll, but where Sköll was broad and heavily built, the sorcerer was thin as a wraith, his gray and white striped robe hanging loose from his shoulders like a shroud. His eye sockets were red scars in a bony face that was framed by a long tangle of white hair that hung past his white beard that was plaited into three ropes. He was led by a small white dog on a leash. He carried the leash in his right hand, while in his left was a wolf skull. I touched my hammer and saw Finan clutch at his cross.

  The Christians have priests, whom I am pleased to call sorcerers because it annoys them, but Christians condemn sorcery. They believe their nailed god could walk on water, heal the sick, and summon devils from the mad, but they claim those feats are not magic, and spit on those of us who understand that the world can never be explained, that magic belongs to the spirit realm, and that some men and women are given the ability to understand the inexplicable. Those folk are the sorcerers and sorceresses, and we revere them even as we fear them. They are not priests, our religion needs no men or women to tell us how to behave, but we do care about the will of the gods, and some folk are better than others at divining that will. Our sorcerers are often blind, like the man waiting for us outside the Skull Gate, because the blind can often see farther into the shadows where the restless spirits live. Ravn, Ragnar the Fearless’s father, had been a blind sorcerer, though he preferred to say he was a skald, what we would call a scop, or shaper, a man who makes poems. “I am a skald,” Ravn told me on our first meeting, “a weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making.” He had laughed at his own immodesty, but in truth he was much more than a man who made songs. I learned in my childhood to understand that Ravn the Skald, though blind, could see things we others could not. He could glimpse the spirit world, he could see truth in dreams, and discern the future in smoke.

  And now Sköll’s fearsome sorcerer was at my gate.

  The two men waited. It had taken me some moments to leave the upper ramparts, go through the Inner Gate, and so to the Skull Gate. Sköll had only the one companion, so I just took Finan, who muttered a prayer and fingered his cross as we left the gate and walked toward the waiting pair. The sorcerer had let go of the leash, and the small dog just sat quietly at his feet as his master clutched the wolf skull in both hands and muttered under his breath. Finan, a Christian, was not supposed to believe in a sorcerer’s skills, but Finan was no fool. Like most Christians he understood that there was a power in the shadows, and he feared it. I feared it too.

  “Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” Sköll greeted me.

  “Sköll of Niflheim,” I responded.

  He laughed at that insult. “This is Snorri Wargson,” he said, indicating the muttering sorcerer. “He is Fenrir’s beloved.”

  I had an impulse to touch the hammer around my neck, but managed to resist. Fenrir is a monstrous wolf, son of a god, who lies bound and fettered because even the gods fear him. In the last days, when chaos engulfs the world, Fenrir will free himself and the slaughter he makes will drench the heavens in blood, but until then he howls in his bonds, and Snorri, as if knowing my thoughts, put his head back and howled at the sky. The dog did not move.

  “And this is Finan,” I said, “an Irishman who has lost count of the widows he has made among the úlfhéðnar.”

  “You will both die at my hands,” Sköll said calmly, which only made Snorri howl a second time. “Snorri has seen your deaths,” Sköll added.

  “And I have seen yours,” I answered. He was younger than I remembered. His face was deeply lined and there was gray in his fair beard, but even so I reckoned he was not yet forty. He was a man in his prime, and a formidable man at that. “The last time we met,” I said, “you ran from me. My men call you Sköll the Frightened.”

  “And yet I come to meet you without a sword,” he said, “and you carry one. Who is frightened now?”

  “You’re wasting my time. Say what you have to say, then run away again.”

  Sköll fingered the empty throat of Grayfang’s scabbard. “When I came to Northumbria,” he said, “I asked men who ruled in this land. They did not say Sigtryggr, they named you.”

  “They were wrong,” I said.

  “Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” Sköll said grandly, “whom everyone fears. They told me of you! They told me of a man who wins battles, who soaks the land with his enemy’s blood, who is the warlord of Britain! Even I began to fear you!”

  “You should,” Finan said.

  “I took counsel,” Sköll ignored Finan. “I, Sköll of Northumbria, took counsel of my fears! Suppose the great Uhtred was in Jorvik when I attacked the city? How could I win? Would my wolf banner hang as a trophy in Uhtred’s great hall? If I am to be king in Northumbria then I must rule on both sides of the hills, and Uhtred rules on the eastern side! And my friend Arnborg persuaded me you could be tricked, that you could be sent to,” he paused, “what was the name of the place?”

  “Ceaster,” I said.

  “To Ceaster, yes! I planned to trap you on the way, overwhelm you, but you took a different road. You escaped me.”

  “The gods love me,” I said, and touched the hammer to fend off any offense I might give the gods with that bald claim, then thought it was not true. The gods had cursed me.

  “I would have begun my conquest of Northumbria with your death,” Sköll said. “I would have drunk my victory from your skull, but it was your daughter I killed instead.”

  I felt a pulse of fury and managed to suppress it. “And her forces drove you from Jorvik,” I retorted. “What a conqueror you are, to be defeated by a woman!”

  “I took much plunder, many cattle, slaves.” He shrugged. “A kingdom is not conquered easily, if it were easy it would not be worth conquering. But conquer it I will. Snorri has seen it. He has seen that I will be king in Northumbria!”

  “The only part of Northumbria you will rule is called your grave,” I said.

  “And you stand in my way,” Sköll went on as though I had not spoken. “But I have met you now, Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” he said, “I have seen you for what you are, an old man! A graybeard who cannot protect his own daughter, an old man who fled from me! You went south, desperate to escape me. You ran!”

  “Only after I defeated your son.”

  At our first meeting that comment had roused Sköll to immediate fury, but this time he just shrugged as though he did not care. “He still lives, but he is wounded here.” He tapped his head. “He cannot speak. He might as well be dead. I regret that, but I have other sons.” He even smiled at me as he said those words. “So I took one of yours, you took one of mine. We are equal, yes?”

  My father told me that when an
enemy talks it is because he dares not fight. Sköll, I admit, was surprising me. He was staying calm and speaking reasonably and that meant he was less impetuous than I had thought, but self-control does not win kingdoms. He had come to Bebbanburg with a purpose. So far the village had not been plundered, and no pyres of smoke smeared the western sky, which meant no halls had been burned and no farms put to the fire. He might call me old, but the very fact that he was talking told me he still feared me, and the fact that he had not burned any of my tenants’ steadings, nor ransacked the village suggested that his purpose was not to fight me. He had been waiting for my answer, but I had said nothing. “We are equal, yes?” he asked again.

  “We shall be equal,” I said, “when I kill you.”

  Sköll shook his head, as if he was disappointed in me. “No,” he said, “you won’t. Snorri has seen your future. Shall he reveal it to you?” Again I did not answer and Sköll turned to his sorcerer. “Tell them, Snorri.”

  “At the fortress of the eagles,” Snorri said dully, and the small dog, hearing his master’s voice, whined. “Three kings will fight.” Snorri abruptly stopped speaking. His vacant eye sockets had been facing the harbor as if what he said was irrelevant to us, which only made his strangely bored tone even more unsettling.

  “Three kings,” Sköll prompted him.

  “Two with crowns and one without,” Snorri said. He stroked the wolf skull. “And two kings will die.”

  “And what of me?” Sköll demanded, though in a respectful tone.

  “The úlfhéðnar will make great slaughter,” the sorcerer intoned, “the blood of their enemies will flow like streams in spate. The ravens will gorge on flesh till they vomit, the wolves will rend the carcasses, the widows will wear ashes in their hair, and King Sköll will rule.” He shuddered suddenly, then bent as if in agony. “All this I have seen, lord King.”

  “And Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” Sköll laid a hand on Snorri’s thin shoulder and spoke in a surprisingly gentle tone, “what of him?”