War of the Wolf

by Bernard Cornwell

  The Tine has two headwaters and we were keeping to the southern branch. The Upper Tine twisted through the hills to the borderlands with Scotland and its valley offered an easy route to the pastures of Northumbria. But at least the Scots weren’t making trouble for us, at least not yet. They had problems of their own with the Norsemen who had settled their western coast, and that thought made me wonder about Sköll’s ambitions. He would not recognize any frontier between Northumbria and Scotland, and he would surely find allies among the Scottish Norse, and even among the Irish who had settled in Strath Clota. Did he dream of a whole new northern kingdom that stretched to the wild cliffs of the far north? “Maybe we should ally with the Scots,” I said to my son.

  “Good God!” He stared at me, thinking I had gone as mad as Ieremias. “Make an alliance with the Scots?”

  “We have the same enemies.”

  “The Norse, yes, but who else?”

  “The Ænglisc, of course.”

  Now he really did think I was crazed. “But we are the Ænglisc!” he protested.

  The Ænglisc! I think that was the first time I ever called the Saxons of Britain by that strange name. Now, of course, we all say we are Ænglisc, but it still seems weird to me. The Ænglisc of Englaland! That was King Alfred’s dream, to make a new nation out of old kingdoms. “We’re not Ænglisc,” I growled, “we’re Northumbrians.” And so we were, which meant that we were the smallest kingdom of all those that had been settled by the Angles and the Saxons. I was not being serious about an alliance with the Scots, of course; the only alliance they would ever offer Northumbria would be conquest and subjugation. I suppose that if Sköll had not killed my daughter it would have made sense to reach an agreement with Cumbraland’s Norsemen, and perhaps, I thought, with Sköll dead, many of his men might swear allegiance to Sigtryggr, and Northumbria would then possess enough strength to fight off the Ænglisc to the south and the Scots to the north. If Sigtryggr even survived the next few days, and that fear prompted me to touch my hammer. “We’re Northumbrians,” I said again to my son, “and we’re something else. We’re the lords of Bebbanburg.”

  He looked at me strangely, sensing that I was no longer speaking lightly. “We are,” he agreed uncertainly, troubled by my tone.

  “So one or two days from now,” I went on, “when we fight, one of us must live.”

  He touched the cross at his breast. “I hope both of us live, Father.”

  I ignored that pious hope. “We have to keep Bebbanburg,” I told him, “and your son won’t be of age until he’s much older, so you have to keep the fortress for him.”

  “Or you can,” he muttered.

  “Don’t be a fool!” I snarled. “I can’t live that long!” I touched the hammer again. “Bebbanburg has been in our family for almost three hundred years, and it should still belong to us when the world ends.” I thought of Snorri’s prophecy, that the Dane and the Saxon would unite against me, that I would die by the sword, that Bebbanburg would be lost, and my children’s children would eat the dung of humility. I pushed that memory away, telling myself that Snorri had deliberately been trying to frighten me with riddles. “You have to survive this fight,” I said harshly.

  “You want me to hold back from fighting?” my son asked bitterly. He still felt the keen shame of losing so many men to Sköll’s ambush and the need to prove himself all over again.

  “Yes,” I said harshly. “You hold back. If I die, you must live. If we lose this fight, you have to escape, and you have to live long enough to see your son become the Lord of Bebbanburg.”

  I have fought many battles. I have stood in shield walls and heard the sound of axes biting willow boards, I have heard men howling, heard them screaming, I have heard the butcher’s sound of blades cleaving flesh, the heart-wrenching sound of grown men weeping for their mothers’ comfort. I have heard the grating breath of the dying and the lament of the living, and in all those fights I have fought for one thing above all others. To take and to keep Bebbanburg.

  So my son must live.

  Hard were the foemen, hungry their swords.

  And stout their ramparts, they offered death

  To any man brave enough. Then stood Sigtryggr,

  Bold in strife, and called on the Measurer . . .

  “The measurer?” I asked the poet.

  “The Measurer is the Lord God,” he said. He was an inky-fingered young priest named Father Selwyn, a West Saxon who served Hrothweard, the archbishop of Eoferwic. “He measures our lives, lord.”

  “I thought the Norns did that,” I said, and he looked at me blankly, “and besides,” I went on, “Sigtryggr called on Odin for help.”

  “It’s a poem, lord,” he said weakly.

  “Were you there?”

  “No, lord.”

  “Who told you to write the poem?” I asked.

  “The archbishop, lord.”

  Hrothweard of course wanted to spread the idea that Sigtryggr’s baptism had converted a pagan into a Christian. That was not dishonesty, even if it was untrue, but rather Hrothweard’s passionate hatred of warfare. Despite the treacherous Scots he still believed that no two Christian nations would ever go to war with each other, and so wanted to convince the Saxon south, and probably himself too, that Sigtryggr led a Christian nation. The archbishop ordered the poem to be copied by monks and sent south to be read aloud in halls and churches, though I suspect most copies were used to wipe arses or light fires.

  We lit no fires that night, which we spent in an upland valley close to the river. We put sentries on the higher ground, and deep in that cold night Finan and I climbed to join one group of men who crouched in the lee of a boulder and gazed westward. The low clouds had lifted and far to the west I could see one star through a rent in the night sky, and beneath it a flicker in the darkness, the dim glitter of firelight on a far-off hilltop. “That must be the fort,” Finan said quietly. No other lights were visible. No fire burned in a hearth to leak flamelight past a shuttered window. The earth was as dark as it must have been when it was first made between the realms of fire and ice. I shivered.

  And next day it was our turn to lead the column. We were still following the river, but now the Tine had shrunk to a size that could be easily crossed in places and so I had to put scouts on both flanks, north as well as south. I sent Eadric and Oswi to explore far ahead, trusting their ability to stay hidden. Eadric, the older man, had a poacher’s ability to slide through country unseen, while Oswi had a natural cunning. He had been my servant once, and before that an orphan making a living by theft in the streets of Lundene. He had been caught trying to steal from my storeroom and brought to me for a whipping, but I had liked him, and he had served me ever since. Those two, the older man and the younger, would disappear into the hills, but closer to us I had two large and very visible bands of men, one on the southern skyline and the other high above the river’s northern bank. Both bands numbered thirty men. I called them scouts, but I hoped both were large enough to deal with any attack that might come from Sköll’s scouts. He must have men searching for us, I thought, but as the morning passed we saw no sign of them.

  We still made slow progress. I might have scouts on either side, but I feared a sudden attack like that which had severed my son’s troops, and so I insisted that the column close up and stay closed up, and that meant we could only move as fast as the slowest person on foot. The river slowed us even more because it was in spate, foaming around dead trees that had been carried downstream, and flooding its banks. In one place, where we were forced to ride around a churning flood, I saw Ieremias up to his knees in the rushing water. He had ridden to the head of the column, assuring me that was the best place where his god could warn him of danger, and something had caught his eye in the river. “What are you doing?” I called to him.

  “The ram of Abraham, lord! The ram of Abraham!” he called excitedly, bending to his task.

  I had no idea what he meant, nor how the ram of Abraham, whatever t
hat was, had reached the Northumbrian hills, but nor did I want to ask for fear of a long and complicated answer. “And where are your angels?” I asked him instead.

  “Safe, lord, safe! Still chaste!” He tugged at the tangled birch that half blocked the river, and I saw he was struggling to pull something from the gaunt branches. It proved to be a dead sheep, its fleece reduced to a sodden gray bundle and its body just bones. He managed to wrench free the skull that had a fine pair of curled horns. He held it up triumphantly. “See, lord? The heathen will be humbled! They shall be smitten!”

  “By a dead ram?”

  “Oh, thou of little faith!” He staggered in the fierce rush of water. “Didn’t Sköll’s sorcerer have a skull in his hands, lord? When he visited you?”

  “A wolf skull.”

  “Then we need a skull! A Christian skull! Behold,” he held up the ram’s skull. “The ram of Abraham!”

  He was still buffeted by the current’s force as he tried to reach the river’s edge so I reached down from the saddle, offered a hand, and helped him and his precious skull up onto the bank. “Stay out of trouble, bishop,” I said, “your flock needs you.”

  “My flock are on their knees, lord, praying mightily for us.”

  By late morning I was beginning to fear that we needed those prayers. I had joined the scouts on the crest of the southern hill and could see a smear of smoke in the west, but no enemy horsemen. The smoke, which seemed to come from a distant valley, betrayed a settlement, but if it was Heahburh then why did the smoke come from a valley? And we would surely have seen Sköll’s men by now. Had they gone south? Were they even now pushing Sigtryggr’s men out of their path and advancing on Eoferwic?

  Then, at midday, we had word at last. Sköll and his army were waiting for us.

  Eadric and Oswi brought the news. “They’re at their fort, lord,” Eadric said, “and it’s a bastard.”

  “And we’re on the wrong side of it,” Oswi added gloomily.

  I ignored Oswi’s words for the moment. “How many?” I asked Eadric.

  He shrugged. “Hard to tell, lord, most of them are inside the walls. Maybe two hundred outside? We couldn’t get close, we had to watch the bastards from across the valley.” He explained that the Tine was joined by a stream a couple of miles ahead. “The fort,” he said, “is across the stream’s valley.”

  “And it’s steep,” Oswi added.

  “Is that why we’re on the wrong side?”

  “It’ll be hard to attack from the valley this side,” Oswi said, “but to the west there’s a hill that overlooks the fort.”

  That sounded strange. Given a choice, no one would build a fort beneath a hill instead of on the summit, but the Romans were not fools, so if Oswi was right there had to be a reason. I looked at Eadric, who nodded confirmation of Oswi’s news. “And it’s a good-sized hummock, lord. Get on top of that, and the bastards will have a job to drive us away.”

  “They won’t try,” Sigtryggr said. He had joined us on the heights as soon as he saw the scouts returning, “we have to defeat them, which means we have to assault the fort. They won’t attack us, they want us to attack them.”

  “The walls?” I asked Eadric.

  “Big enough, lord. They’re not like Ceaster or Bebbanburg, but you’ll need the ladders.” Like Oswi, he sounded gloomy.

  “There were men outside, you said?”

  “Scouring out ditches, lord.”

  “Odin help us,” Sigtryggr said unhappily.

  I pointed at the distant smear of smoke. “Is that Heahburh?”

  Eadric shook his head. “That smoke’s well to the south of the fort, lord, and closer to us.”

  “Lead smelting?” Finan suggested.

  “Whatever it is,” Sigtryggr said, “it can wait till we’ve taken the fort.” He looked at me for agreement, and I nodded. “So let’s look at the damn place,” he finished.

  We took sixty men, half Sigtryggr’s and half mine, and, led by Eadric, spurred up into the hills. It seemed strange to be riding across the fells toward an enemy who was making no attempt to stop us. We had scouts ahead of us, but those riders saw nothing threatening. The fort, I thought, even if it was overlooked by a hill, had to be formidable if Sköll was content to let us approach it unchallenged, and the country we rode invited such an ambush because, though the rolling hills were bare, they were cut by steep valleys where streams, dark from the peat bogs, had worn down their beds as they tumbled to the Tine. It was a hard country, bleak and high, and perhaps the only reason the Romans had built their fort here was to protect the pits where their slaves had dug for lead and the furnaces where they had smelted the silver from the ore. There had to be a road, I thought, how else could the Romans carry away their ingots? And where, I wondered, had those ingots gone? All the way to distant Rome? And I thought of British lead and British silver being dragged across a whole world, through Frankia and whatever countries lay beyond. I had met men who had journeyed to Rome, and they had told me the road was long and hard, it crossed mountains, only to end at a ruined city where wild dogs roamed and where great pillars and towering arches stood amidst the weeds. King Alfred had made the journey twice, both times to meet the Pope, and the king had told me how guards had been hired at the foot of the mountains to protect the travelers from the savages who lived in the high places. But the journey, he had told me, was worth the hardships and the dangers. “The city must have been glorious once,” Alfred had recounted, “a wonder! But it was brought low by sin.” As so often, he had been in a melancholy mood, regretting a fallen world. “We must make a new Rome,” he had said, and I had imagined trying to build a great city from clay, wattles, timber, and thatch, but knew, as Alfred himself knew, that the world of glory was gone and we were sinking into a darkness of smoke, fire, savagery, and blood.

  “Lord,” Eadric startled me from my thoughts. “There, lord.”

  And I looked across the valley to see Heahburh. At last.

  Then did Uhtred, hoary in winters,

  Summon his men, eager for battle-slaughter,

  Their swords keen-edged, their shields bound tight,

  They prayed to the Measurer . . .

  “There’s that measurer again,” I accused Father Selwyn.

  “It’s a poem, lord,” he said weakly.

  “And tell me,” I spoke threateningly, “what does ‘hoary in winters’ mean?”

  “That you’re an experienced warrior, lord,” he said promptly, he had obviously expected the question.

  “Old, you mean.”

  “Experienced, lord, and your beard . . .” his voice faltered.

  “Go on.”

  “Your beard is white, lord,” he said, blushing, then paused. “Well, gray, lord.” Another pause. “Grayish, lord?” he tried. “In places?”

  “And my men,” I went on, “were not eager for battle-slaughter.”

  “It’s a poem, lord.”

  “My men were terrified,” I told him. “They were frightened. I’d rather fight through the pits of hell than attack Heahburh again. It was a ghastly place.”

  It was, too. I first saw Heahburh from the hill across the southern valley, and, seeing it, I cursed the Romans. They had built the fort on a wide spur of land that jutted out from the heights to dominate the Tine’s valley. We were a long way distant, perhaps a mile, but as we climbed the hill I saw more and more of the defenses, and understood why Sköll had chosen to wait for us rather than carry the war across the hills.

  The fort, which had stone walls with stubby towers at each corner, was built across the spur’s long crest. I reckoned the two longer walls were some one hundred and fifty paces each, the two shorter maybe a hundred. Those walls had decayed over the years, but Sköll, or maybe Halfdan the Mad who had once occupied Heahburh, had heightened and reinforced the broken places with stout timber barricades. There were buildings roofed with turf inside the fort and the ruins of smaller buildings just outside. Off to the west, where the long hill rose abov
e the fort, I could see pits where, presumably, lead had been mined.

  That rising ground to the fort’s west was the obvious place from which to attack. The land between that higher ground and the fort was level, meaning attackers would not have to struggle uphill to reach the walls, but the Romans, or perhaps others who came after them, had seen the danger, and in front of the fort’s western side there were rows of ditches and banks that wrapped around the northern and southern ramparts. They were the ditches that Eadric had watched being deepened. Finan, staring down at the place, made the sign of the cross. “That’s a bastard,” he said mildly.

  Sigtryggr leaned on his saddle’s pommel and just stared as a cloud shadow slid across the distant fort. He sighed, and I knew what he was thinking, that too many men must die in this high place. “If I was Sköll,” he said, “I’d put a shield wall on those ditches.”

  “He doesn’t need to,” I said. “He can just let us stumble across the ditches and hurl spears at us.”

  “I can’t see too well from here,” Finan said, “but it looks as if the entrance behind the ditches is blocked off.” There were four entrances, one on each of the fort’s walls. There were well-worn paths from three of those gates, but outside the fourth gate, which faced the widest stretch of ditches and banks, the grass showed no wear.

  “Maybe we just leave the bastard where he is,” Sigtryggr said morosely.

  “And do what?” I asked.

  “He must have farms, his lead mines. Destroy them, force him to come out and fight for them.”

  I looked northward to the valley of the Tine and guessed most of Sköll’s steadings were in the valley’s depths. “And if he refuses to fight?” I asked.

  Sigtryggr did not answer. Sköll wanted us to attack him, which was reason enough not to make an assault on his fortress. Our wisest course was to withdraw, but that gave him a victory he needed, a victory that might attract even more men to his banner of the wolf. And as we retreated he would follow us, eventually forcing us to turn and face him. “If we go south,” Sigtryggr suggested, “we could combine with Boldar’s men.”