The Burning Land sc-5

by Bernard Cornwell

  Then, next day, Father Pyrlig came to Dunholm.

  TWO

  A storm came that night. It hurtled sudden from the north, its first signs a violent gust of wind that shuddered across the fortress. Within moments clouds drowned the stars and lightning shivered the sky. The storm woke me in the house where I had sweated and frozen through the sickness, and I heard the first few heavy drops of rain fall plump and hard on the thatch, then it seemed as though a river was emptying itself on Dunholm’s fort. The sky seethed and the rain’s noise was louder than any thunder. I got out of bed and wrapped a blanket of sheepskins around my naked shoulders and went to stand in the doorway where I pulled aside the leather curtain. The girl in my bed whimpered and I told her to join me. She was a Saxon slave, and I lifted the blanket to enfold her and she stood pressed against me, wide-eyed in the lightning flashes as she watched the roaring darkness. She said something, but what it was I could not tell because the wind and the rain drowned her words.

  The storm came fast and it went fast. I watched the lightning travel southward and heard the rain diminish, and then it seemed as though the night held its breath in the silence that followed the thunder. The rain stopped, though water still dripped from the eaves, and some trickled through the thatch to hiss on the remnants of the fire. I threw new wood onto the smoldering embers, added kindling, and let the flames leap upward. The leather curtain was still hooked open and I saw the firelight brighten in other houses and in the two big halls. It was a restless night at Dunholm. The girl lay on the bed again, swathing herself in fleeces and furs, and her fire-bright eyes watched as I drew Serpent-Breath from her scabbard and slid the blade slowly through the newly revived flames. I did it twice, slowly bathing each side of her long blade, then wiping the steel with the sheepskin. “Why do you do that, lord?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, nor did I, except that Serpent-Breath, like all swords, had been born in flames and sometimes I liked to bathe her in fire to preserve whatever sorcery had been enchanted into her at the moment of her creation. I kissed the warm steel reverently and slid it back into her scabbard. “We can be certain of nothing,” I said, “except our weapons and death.”

  “We can be certain of God, lord,” she insisted in a small voice.

  I smiled, but said nothing. I wondered if my gods cared about us. Perhaps that was the advantage of the Christian god, that he had somehow convinced his followers that he did care, that he watched over them and protected them, yet I did not see that Christian children died any less often than pagan children, or that Christians were spared disease and floods and fire. Yet Christians forever declared their god’s love.

  Footsteps sounded wet outside. Someone was running toward my hut and, though I was safe inside Ragnar’s fortress, I instinctively reached for Serpent-Breath, and was still holding the hilt as a burly man ducked inside the open doorway. “Dear sweet Jesus,” he said, “but it’s cold out there.”

  I let go of the sword as Father Pyrlig crouched on the fire’s far side. “You couldn’t sleep?” I asked.

  “Now who in God’s name could sleep through that storm?” he demanded. “You’d have to be deaf, blind, drunk, and stupid to sleep through that. Good morning, lord,” he grinned at me, “naked like a newborn as you are.” He twisted his head and smiled at the slave. “Blessings on you, child,” he said.

  She was nervous of the newcomer and glanced anxiously at me. “He’s a kind man,” I reassured her, “and a priest.” Father Pyrlig was dressed in breeches and jerkin with no sign of any priestly robes. He had arrived the previous evening, earning a chill reception from Brida, but enchanting Ragnar with his exaggerated tales of battle. He had been drunk by the time Ragnar went to bed, so I had found very little chance to talk with my old friend.

  I took a cloak from a peg and clasped it around my throat. The wool was damp. “Does your god love you?” I asked Pyrlig.

  He laughed at that. “My God, what a question, lord! Well, he keeps me miles away from my wife, so he does, and what greater blessing can a man ask? And he fills my belly and he keeps me amused! Did I tell you about the slave girl that died of drinking milk?”

  “The cow collapsed on her,” I said flatly.

  “He’s a funny man, that Cnut,” Pyrlig said, “I’ll regret it when you kill him.”

  “I kill him?” I asked. The girl stared at me.

  “You’ll probably have to,” Pyrlig said.

  “Don’t listen to him,” I told the girl, “he’s raving.”

  “I’m Welsh, my darling,” he explained to her, then turned back to me, “and can you tell me, lord, why a good Welshman should be doing Saxon business?”

  “Because you’re an interfering earsling,” I said, “and god knows what arse you dropped out of, but here you are.”

  “God uses strange instruments for his wondrous purposes,” Pyrlig said. “Why don’t you dress and watch the dawn with me?”

  Father Pyrlig, like Bishop Asser, was a Welshman who had found employment in Alfred’s service, though he told me he had not come to Dunholm from Wessex, but rather from Mercia. “I was last in Wintanceaster at Christmas,” he told me, “and my God, poor Alfred is sick! He looks like a warmed-up corpse, he does, and not very well warmed-up either.”

  “What were you doing in Mercia?”

  “Smelling the place,” he said mysteriously, then, just as mysteriously, added, “it’s that wife of his.”

  “Whose wife?”

  “Ælswith. Why did Alfred marry her? She should feed the poor man some butter and cream, make him eat some good beef.”

  Father Pyrlig had eaten his share of butter and cream. He was big-bellied, broad-shouldered, and eternally cheerful. His hair was a tangled mess, his grin was infectious, and his religion was carried lightly, though never shallowly. He stood beside me above Dunholm’s south gate and I told him how Ragnar and I had captured the fortress. Pyrlig, before he became a priest, had been a warrior and he appreciated the tale of how I had sneaked inside Dunholm by a water-gate on the west side, and how we had survived long enough to open the gate above which we now stood, and how Ragnar had led his flame-bearing sword-Danes through the gate and into the fortress where we had fought Kjartan’s men to defeat and death. “Ah,” he said when the tale was finished, “I should have been here. It sounds like a rare fight!”

  “So what brings you here now?”

  He grinned at me. “A man can’t just visit an old friend?”

  “Alfred sent you,” I said sourly.

  “I told you, I came here from Mercia, not Wessex.” He leaned on the palisade’s top. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “the night before you captured Lundene?”

  “I do remember,” I said, “that you told me you were dressed for prayer that night. You were in mail and carried two swords.”

  “What better time to pray than before a battle?” he asked. “And that was another rare fight, my friend.”

  “It was.”

  “And before it, lord,” he said, “you made an oath.”

  My anger rose as swiftly as the river had been swollen by the storm’s sudden rain. “Damn Alfred and his oaths,” I said, “damn him to his hell. I gave that bastard the best years of my life! He wouldn’t even sit on the throne of Wessex if I hadn’t fought for him! Harald Bloodhair would be king now, and Alfred would be rotting in his tomb, and does he thank me? Once in a while he’d pat me on the head like a damned dog, but then he lets that turd-brained monk insult Gisela and he expects me to crawl to him for forgiveness after I kill the bastard. Yes,” I said, turning to look into Pyrlig’s broad face, “I took an oath. Then let me tell you I am breaking it. It is broken. The gods can punish me for that and Alfred can rot in hell’s depth for all I care.”

  “I doubt it will be him in hell,” Pyrlig said mildly.

  “You think I’d want to be in your heaven?” I demanded. “All those priests and monks and dried-up nuns? I’d rather risk hell. No, father, I am not keeping my oath to Al
fred. You can ride back and you can tell him that I have no oath to him, no allegiance, no duty, no loyalty, nothing! He’s a scabby, ungrateful, cabbage-farting, squint-eyed bastard!”

  “You know him better than I do,” Pyrlig said lightly.

  “He can take his oath and shit on it,” I snarled. “Go back to Wessex and give him that answer.” A shout made me turn, but it was only a servant bellowing at a protesting horse. One of the lords was leaving and evidently making an early start. A group of warriors, helmeted and in mail, were already mounted, while two horses waited with empty saddles. A pair of Ragnar’s men ran to the gate beneath us and I heard the bar being lifted.

  “Alfred didn’t send me,” Pyrlig said.

  “You mean this is all your idea? To come and remind me of my oath? I don’t need reminding.”

  “To break an oath is a…”

  “I know!” I shouted.

  “Yet men break oaths all the time,” Pyrlig went on calmly, gazing south to where the first gray light of dawn was touching the crests of the hills. “Maybe that’s why we hedge oaths with harsh law and strict custom, because we know they will be broken. I think Alfred knows you will not return. He is sad about that. If Wessex is attacked then he will lack his sharpest sword, but even so he didn’t send me. He thinks Wessex is better without you. He wants a godly country and you were a thorn in that ambition.”

  “He might need some thorns if the Danes return to Wessex,” I snarled.

  “He trusts in God, Lord Uhtred, he trusts in God.”

  I laughed at that. Let the Christian god defend Wessex against the Northumbrian Danes when they stormed ashore in the summer. “If Alfred doesn’t want me back,” I said, “then why are you wasting my time?”

  “Because of the oath you made on the eve of the battle for Lundene,” Pyrlig said, “and it was the person to whom you made that promise who asked me to come here.”

  I stared at him and fancied I heard the laughter of the Norns. The three spinners. The busy-fingered Norns who weave our fate. “No,” I said, but without anger or force.

  “She sent me.”

  “No,” I said again.

  “She wants your help.”

  “No!” I protested.

  “And she asked me to remind you that you once swore to serve her.”

  I closed my eyes. It was true, all true. Had I forgotten that oath I made in the night before we attacked Lundene? I had not forgotten it, but nor had I ever thought that oath would harness me. “No,” I said again, this time a mere whisper of denial.

  “We are all sinners, lord,” Pyrlig said gently, “but even the church recognizes that some sins are worse than others. The oath you made to Alfred was duty and it should have been rewarded with gratitude, land, and silver. It is wrong of you to break that oath and I cannot approve, but I understand that Alfred was careless in his duty toward you. But the oath you made to the lady was sworn in love, and that oath you cannot break without destroying your soul.”

  “Love?” I made the query sound like a challenge.

  “You loved Gisela, I know, and you did not break the oaths you gave to her, but you love the lady who sent me. You always have. I see it in your face, and I see it in hers. You are blind to it, but it dazzles the rest of us.”

  “No,” I said.

  “She is in trouble,” Pyrlig said.

  “Trouble?” I asked dully.

  “Her husband is sick in the mind.”

  “Is he mad?”

  “Not so you’d know.”

  Beneath me the hinges squealed as the two great gates were pushed outward. Ragnar, bare-legged beneath swathing cloaks, was shouting farewell to the horsemen who passed beneath us through Dunholm’s High Gate, the hooves clattering on the stones of the road that led down through the town. One of the riders turned and I saw it was Haesten who raised a hand to salute me, and I raised a hand in return, then froze because the rider next to him also twisted in her saddle. She smiled, but savagely. It was Skade. She must have seen the astonishment on my face because she laughed, then kicked her heels so her horse rode free and fast downhill. “Trouble,” I said, watching her, “more trouble than you know.”

  “Because Haesten will attack Mercia?” Pyrlig asked.

  I did not confirm that, though I doubted Haesten would have kept his intentions secret. “Because that woman is with him,” I said.

  “Women brought sin into this world,” Pyrlig said, “and by God they do keep it bubbling. But I can’t imagine a world without them, can you?”

  “She wants me to go to her?”

  “Yes,” Pyrlig said, “and she sent me to fetch you. She also told me to tell you something else. That if you cannot keep the oath then she releases you from it.”

  “So I don’t have to go,” I said.

  “No.”

  “But I made the oath.”

  “Yes.”

  To Æthelflæd. I had escaped Alfred and felt nothing but relief at the freedom I had found, and now his daughter summoned me. And Pyrlig was right. Some oaths are made with love, and those we cannot break.

  All winter I had felt like a steersman in a fog, tideswept to nowhere, windblown to no harbor, lost, but now it was as though the fog lifted. The Fates had shown me the landmark I had sought, and if it was not the landmark I had wished for, it still gave my ship direction.

  I had indeed sworn an oath to Æthelflæd. Almost every promise I had ever made to her father had been wrung from me, sometimes forced from me, but so was the oath I swore to Æthelflæd. The promise to serve her had been her price for giving me men to help in the desperate assault on Lundene, and I remembered resenting that price, but I had still knelt to her and given her the vow.

  I had known Æthelflæd since she was a child, the one child of Alfred’s who had mischief and life and laughter, and I had seen those qualities curdled by the marriage to my cousin. And in the months and years after the oath I had come to love her, not as I loved Gisela who was a friend to Æthelflæd, but as a sparkling girl whose light was being doused by the cruelty of men. And I had served her. I had protected her. And now she asked me to protect her again, and the request filled me with indecision. I busied the next few days with activity, hunting and practicing weapons, and Finan, who often sparred sword-to-sword with me, stepped back one day and asked if I was trying to kill him. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s the Welsh priest, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “It’s fate,” I said.

  “And where’s fate taking us, lord?” he asked.

  “South,” I said, “south,” and I hated that word. I was a northerner, Northumbria was my country, yet the spinners were taking me south.

  “To Alfred?” Finan asked in disbelief.

  “No,” I said, “to Æthelflæd,” and as I said her name I knew I could delay no longer.

  So, a week after Haesten left, I went to Ragnar and I lied to him because I did not want him to see my betrayal. “I’m going to protect my children,” I told him.

  “Haesten surely won’t kill them,” he tried to reassure me.

  “But Skade will.”

  He thought about that, then nodded. “True.”

  “Or she’ll sell them into slavery,” I said bleakly. “She hates me.”

  “Then you must go,” he said. And so I rode from Dunholm, and my men came with me because they were oath-sworn, and their families came too and because of that Ragnar knew I was riding away for good. He had watched my men load packhorses with mail and weapons, and he had gazed at me, hurt and puzzled. “Are you going to Wessex?” he asked.

  “No,” I promised him, and I spoke truthfully.

  Brida knew it. “Then where?” she demanded angrily.

  “To my children.”

  “You’ll bring them back here?” Ragnar had asked eagerly.

  “There is a friend,” I avoided answering his question, “who has the care of my children, and she is in trouble.”

  Brida cut through my evasions. “Alfred’s dau
ghter?” she asked scornfully.

  “Yes.”

  “Who hates the Danes,” Brida said.

  “She has pleaded for my help,” I spoke to Ragnar, “and I cannot refuse her.”

  “Women weaken you,” Brida snarled at me. “What of your promise to sail with Ragnar?”

  “I made no such promise,” I snapped back at her.

  “We need you!” Ragnar pleaded.

  “Me and my half-crew?”

  “If you don’t help destroy Wessex,” Brida said, “you will get no share in Wessex’s wealth, and without that, Uhtred, you have no hopes of Bebbanburg.”

  “I am riding to find my children,” I said obstinately, and both Ragnar and Brida knew that was a half-truth at best.

  “You were always a Saxon before you were a Dane,” Brida said derisively. “You want to be a Dane, but you don’t have the courage.”

  “You may be right,” I admitted.

  “We should kill you now,” Brida said, and she meant it.

  Ragnar laid a hand on Brida’s arm to silence her, then embraced me. “You are my brother,” he said. He held me close for an instant. He knew, and I knew, that I was going back to the Saxons, that we would forever be on opposing sides, and all I could do was promise that I would never fight against him.

  “And will you betray our plans to Alfred?” Brida demanded. Ragnar might make his peace with my departure, but Brida was ever unforgiving.

  “I hate Alfred,” I said, “and wish you joy in toppling his kingdom.”

  There, I have written it, and it hurt me to write it because the memory of that parting is so painful. Brida hated me at that moment, and Ragnar was saddened, and I was a coward. I hid behind the fate of my children and betrayed my friendship. All winter Ragnar had sheltered me and fed my men, and now I deserted him. He had been happy with me at his side, and he was unhappy at the prospect of fighting Wessex, but he had thought he and I would wage that war together. Now I left him. He allowed me to leave him. Brida truly would have killed me that day, but Ragnar forgave me. It was a clear spring day. It was the day my life changed. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.