War of the Wolf
Page 36
“Greet the Norns,” I told him, “and give them my thanks.” Then I tugged Serpent-Breath free and Sköll whimpered in pain, shuddered, and blood welled up through the rent in his mail. I held the sword’s bloody tip at Sköll’s throat. “Lord King!” I called to Sigtryggr.
“Lord Uhtred?”
“You want to kill the bastard who killed your wife?”
I heard Sigtryggr draw his sword. Sköll was staring up at me, weakening. His eyes widened as Sigtryggr lifted his blade. “Wait,” I told Sigtryggr, then leaned down and prised Grayfang out of Sköll’s grasp. I threw it toward Finan. “That,” I said, “is for my daughter.”
“No!” Sköll cried. “Please, no! Give me my sword!”
And Sigtryggr struck.
And so Sköll went to Niflheim where he is a feast for the Corpse-Ripper.
Stiorra was avenged.
I think of my daughter every day. I have watched her children grow and wept that she would not see them become a man and a woman. I tell them of their mother and sometimes tears still glint in my eyes when I speak of her. The waves roll on Bebbanburg’s long beach and the wind comes across the wild waters and I know she is somewhere in the afterlife. Not in Niflheim, nor in the Christian heaven, but somewhere. Ieremias tells me there is a blessed place for good pagans, a vale of soft grass and clear streams. “She’s happy there, lord,” he tells me, and I try to tell myself that he is not mad and that he speaks the truth. He goes nowhere without his small white dog that he calls Scarioðe, “Like Judas, lord, who betrayed his master.”
I have added Sköll’s flensed skull and Snorri’s wolf skull to the masonry niches in Bebbanburg’s Skull Gate. The skulls gaze blindly southward to where Northumbria’s enemies will gather. The Norse still live in Cumbraland, but have sworn oaths to Sigtryggr. He is king of all Northumbria, but Egil Skallagrimmrson, whom I have come to treasure as a companion, tells me the Norse cannot be trusted. “Can I trust you then?” I asked him.
“Of course not!”
“But I do.”
“That, lord, is because you are a fool. But I am a poet, and poets love fools.”
I gave Egil and his brother good land north of Bebbanburg. They gave me their oaths because, Egil said, I had saved the life of his youngest brother. “We shall keep our oaths, lord,” he promised me as we rode home from Heahburh. “Not that I care about Berg, of course. He’s so ugly!”
I had laughed. Berg was a good-looking boy, while Egil was extraordinarily ugly, yet women seemed attracted to him like flies to blood, and soon there will be babies born in Bebbanburg with ears like bat wings and chins like ship prows.
And still the waves roll in and the wind blows, and one day, I know, a horseman will ride up the coast road and he will bring me news from far away, of the death of a king, and of an oath to be kept.
Wyrd bið ful āræd.
Historical Note
There was unrest in Mercia following Æthelflaed’s death, though the siege of Chester (Ceaster) is fictional. Æthelflaed had wanted her daughter, Ælfwynn, to succeed her, but Æthelflaed’s brother, King Edward of Wessex, swiftly placed Ælfwynn in a West Saxon convent and took the Mercian throne for himself. By then he had put aside his second wife (if we believe that he had a brief first marriage to Æthelstan’s mother) and married Eadgifu, who gave him yet more sons, and thus, eventually, more possible claimants to his throne.
Æthelstan did have a twin sister, Eadgyth, and she did marry Sigtryggr. I confess to some regret for killing off the fictional Stiorra, but her death was necessary to bring Eadgyth into her proper place as Queen of Northumbria. That country, still independent, was troubled by Norse settlers on the western coast. Sköll is fictional, Ingilmundr and the brothers Egil and Thorolf Skallagrimmrson are not. “Heahburh” is Whitley Castle in Northumberland, and the battle I describe there is wholly fictional. Whitley Castle (sometimes known as Epiacum) is the highest fort built in Britain by the Romans and lies north of Alston just off the A689 close to Kirkhaugh (or you can reach it by following the wonderfully named hiking path Isaac’s Tea Trail). All that remains of the fort are the earth walls and the extraordinary array of ditches that the Romans dug to protect the ramparts. All Roman forts were built to a pattern, it’s sometimes called the “playing-card” design because the regulation shape of Roman forts was that of a playing-card, but to fit Whitley Castle to its high spur of land the Romans squeezed the playing-card into a lozenge shape, another feature that, with the outlying ditches, makes Whitley Castle unique. The fort was doubtless built to protect the lead and silver works among the adjacent hills.
The poetry fragments in Chapter Ten are my own, but try to imitate the form of Old English verse, while those in Chapters Eleven and Twelve are very free translations of existing poems. The first in Chapter Eleven (“War cries were loud”) and second (“There was the clashing of shields”) are from “The Battle of Maldon,” a poem describing a Saxon defeat at the hands of the Vikings in AD 991, some seventy years after the fictional battle in the novel. The third (“Now they go forth”) is probably earlier and is a conflation of two brief passages from the Finnsburh Fragment, which, as the name suggests, is all that remains of a much longer poem. The surviving fragment is only known now by copies of a seventeenth-century copy, also now lost, which describes a fight at a besieged hall. The first in Chapter Twelve (“Many a carcass they left to be carrion”) is from a very short poem about the Battle of Brunanburh, which is quoted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year AD 937. Rather than attempt a translation, I adapted Alfred Lord Tennyson’s version, which he published in 1880 in Ballads and Other Poems. The second (“Then carry your willow shields”) and third (“Almighty God, Lord and Ruler”) are from a poem called “Judith” that tells the ancient story found in the extracanonical Book of Judith, which describes how the eponymous heroine beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes. The poem is probably from the ninth century, and, though the setting might be Israel, the battle descriptions (and much else) are thoroughly Anglo-Saxon.
Snorri’s prophecy about the Dane and the Saxon joining forces will eventually come true, though not till AD 1016, long past Uhtred’s lifetime. The story of how the family lost Bebbanburg is wonderfully told in Richard Fletcher’s book Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2004). In Chapter Six I mention Father Oda, a Danish priest, and say he became a bishop. That is not a novelist’s fancy. Oda’s parents were Danes who, it is thought, came to Britain in the service of Ubba and then settled in East Anglia. Oda was converted to Christianity, became a priest, and was appointed Bishop of Ramsbury in the 920s. His story did not end there, he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in AD 941, the first Dane to head the church in England.
The young Oda was probably a priest in Æthelhelm the Elder’s household, but in time became a supporter of Æthelstan, whose chief rival for Edward’s throne was indeed Ælfweard, whose mother was a daughter of Æthelhelm the Elder. The rivalry between Ælfweard and Æthelstan must wait for another novel. King Edward of Wessex, who claimed the title Anglorum Saxonum Rex and who is usually known as Edward the Elder, is overshadowed by his father and by his successor, but it is worth noting that Edward did much to unite the territories that would become England. He inherited Wessex from his father, conquered Danish-ruled East Anglia, and then annexed Mercia on the death of his sister Æthelflaed. That left only Northumbria. It is also worth noting that the unification of England was a West Saxon project, that it moved from the south to the north, and that whoever inherited the throne of Wessex would inevitably inherit the ambition for unification that had burned so fiercely in King Alfred.
War of the Wolf is set in the early 920s. Uhtred, though born a Saxon (his mother was a Saxon, his father an Angle, though for fictional purposes I usually conflate the two), thinks of himself as Northumbrian. He is surprised by the word Ænglisc, English, but that word will come to have real meaning during his long lifetime. Englaland, England, does not yet exist, b
ut its birth, in blood, slaughter, and horror, is close. But that too is a story for another novel.
About the Author
BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of over fifty novels, including the acclaimed New York Times bestselling Saxon Tales, which serve as the basis for the hit Netflix series The Last Kingdom. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod and in Charleston, South Carolina.
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Also by Bernard Cornwell
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Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, and places and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
WAR OF THE WOLF. Copyright © 2018 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2018 by HarperCollins Publishers.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Map © John Gilkes 2018
Cover illustration by Stephen Mulcahey
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-256319-4
Version 09122018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-256317-0
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Map
Dedication
Place Names
Part One: The Wild Lands One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Part Two: Eostre’s Feast Six
Seven
Eight
Part Three: Fortress of the Eagles Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Historical Note
About the Author
Also by Bernard Cornwell
Copyright
About the Publisher