The Pagan Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  We rode anyway, and if we did not ride to save Christianity we did ride to save the Saxons.

  Perhaps the most dangerous part of all that journey was the first, though it did not seem so at the time. We had to cross the river at Lindcolne and, to save time, and because we were shrouded by the thick fog, I chose to use the bridge. We knew there was a bridge because a frightened cowherd at Bearddan Igge stammered that he had seen it. He knelt to me, awed by my mail, my helmet, my fur-edged cloak and my silver-spurred boots. ‘You’ve seen the bridge?’ I asked him.

  ‘Once, lord.’

  ‘Is it close to the fort?’

  ‘No, lord, not close,’ he frowned, thinking, ‘the fort is on the hill,’ he added as though that made everything clear.

  ‘Is it guarded? The bridge?’

  ‘Guarded, lord?’ He seemed puzzled by that question.

  ‘If you cross the bridge,’ I asked patiently, ‘do armed men stop you?’

  ‘Oh no, lord,’ he answered confidently, ‘you never take your cows over a bridge in case the water spirits get jealous and then they get the dropsy.’

  ‘So are there fords?’

  He shook his head, though I doubted he knew the answer to that either. The man lived a short walk from Lindcolne, yet as far as I could discover he had only been there once. If the Danish garrison in Lindcolne had any sense then they would keep guards on the bridge, but I reckoned we would outnumber them, and by the time reinforcements arrived from the hill we would be long gone into the fog.

  It was easy enough to find Lindcolne because the Romans had made a road and the road had their sign-stones counting down the miles, but the fog was so dense that I never saw the fort on its high hill and only realised we had reached the town when I rode beneath a crumbling and unguarded gate arch. The gates were long gone, as were the walls on either side.

  And I rode through a place of ghosts.

  We Saxons have always been unwilling to live in Roman buildings unless we disguise them with thatch and mud. The folk of Lundene had been forced to occupy the old city when the Danes attacked because that was the only part that was defended by a wall, but still they preferred their timber and thatch houses in the new city to the west. I had lived with Gisela in a big Roman house beside the river in Lundene and I never saw a ghost, but I had noticed how Christians coming to the house made the sign of the cross and looked anxiously into its dark corners. Now our horses walked down a deserted street flanked by ruined houses. The roofs had fallen in, the pillars had collapsed, and the stonework was cracked and thick with moss. They would have made fine houses, but the Saxons who still lived in the town preferred to make a hovel of mud and wattle. Here and there a house was occupied, but only because the people had built a hut inside the shell of an old stone building.

  The bridge was also made of stone. Its parapets were broken and a great hole gaped in its central span, but it was unguarded, and so we passed over the river and on into the wide fog-shrouded country beyond.

  None of us knew the country, or which way we should go, so I simply followed the Roman road until it joined another that ran north and south. ‘We keep going west,’ I told Finan.

  ‘Just west?’

  ‘We’ll find somewhere we know.’

  ‘Or ride to the world’s end,’ he said happily.

  The fog was lifting and the land rose slowly until we reached a rolling upland where there were fat farms and big halls half hidden by groves of good trees, and though I was sure folk saw us, no one came to enquire what brought us to their land. We were armed men, best left alone. I sent scouts ahead as I always did in hostile country, and this land was certainly hostile. We were either in Cnut’s land or Sigurd’s territory and all the halls would be Danish. The scouts rode either side of the road, using woods or hedgerows for cover and always looking for any sign of an enemy, but we met none. Once, on the second day, five horsemen came towards us from the north, but they saw our numbers and veered away.

  We were among higher hills by then. The villages were smaller and more scattered, the halls less wealthy. I sent my Danes to purchase ale and food from the halls and the Saxons to buy provisions from the villages, but there was scarce any spare food because so many armed bands had been this way before us. I went to one hall where an old man greeted me. ‘I am Orlyg Orlygson,’ he said proudly.

  ‘Wulf Ranulfson,’ I responded.

  ‘I have not heard of you,’ he said, ‘but you’re welcome.’ He limped because of an old wound in his left leg. ‘And where does Wulf Ranulfson ride?’

  ‘To join Jarl Cnut.’

  ‘You’re late,’ he said, ‘the summons was for the moon’s death. She’s growing again.’

  ‘We’ll find him.’

  ‘I wish I could go,’ Orlyg patted his injured leg, ‘but what use is an old man?’ He looked at my companions. ‘Just seven of you?’

  I gestured vaguely northwards. ‘I’ve got three crews on the road.’

  ‘Three! I can’t feed that many. But I’ll have my steward find you something. Come inside, come inside!’ He wanted to talk. Like all of us, he welcomed travellers if they brought news, and so I sat in his hall and petted his hounds and invented tales about Frisia. I said the harvest there would be poor.

  ‘Here too!’ Orlyg said gloomily.

  ‘But there is good news,’ I went on, ‘I heard that Uhtred Uhtredson attacked Bebbanburg and failed.’

  ‘Not just failed,’ Orlyg said, ‘he was killed there!’ I just stared at him and he grinned at the surprise on my face. ‘You hadn’t heard?’ he asked.

  ‘Uhtred Uhtredson was killed?’ I could not keep the astonishment from my voice. ‘I heard that he failed,’ I went on, ‘but he survived.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Orlyg said confidently, ‘he died. The man who told me was a witness to the fight.’ He pushed his fingers into his tangled white beard to touch the hammer at his neck. ‘He was cut down by the Lord Ælfric. Or maybe it was Ælfric’s son. The man wasn’t sure, but it was one of them.’

  ‘I heard Ælfric died,’ I said.

  ‘Then it must have been the son who dealt the blow,’ Orlyg said, ‘but it’s true! Uhtred Uhtredson is dead.’

  ‘That will make Jarl Cnut’s life easier,’ I said.

  ‘They all feared Uhtred,’ Orlyg said, ‘and no wonder. He was a warrior!’ He looked wistful for a moment. ‘I saw him once.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘A big man, tall. He carried an iron shield.’

  ‘I heard that,’ I said. I had never carried an iron shield in my life.

  ‘He was fearsome, right enough,’ Orlyg said, ‘but a warrior.’

  ‘He belongs to the Corpse-Ripper now.’

  ‘Someone should go to the Lord Ælfric,’ Orlyg suggested, ‘and buy the fiend’s corpse.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To make the skull into a drinking cup, of course! It would make a fine gift for Jarl Cnut.’

  ‘The jarl will have drinking cups enough,’ I said, ‘when he’s beaten Æthelred and Edward.’

  ‘And he will,’ Orlyg said enthusiastically. He smiled. ‘At Yule, my friend, we shall all drink from Edward’s skull and dine in Edward’s hall and use Edward’s wife for pleasure!’

  ‘I heard Jarl Cnut’s wife was captured by Uhtred,’ I said.

  ‘A rumour, my friend, a rumour. You can’t believe everything you hear. I’ve learned that much over the years. Men come here and give me news and we celebrate it and then discover it isn’t true at all!’ He chuckled.

  ‘So perhaps Uhtred lives,’ I suggested mischievously.

  ‘Oh no! That is true, my friend. He was chopped down in battle, and he still lived, so they tied him to a post and loosed the dogs on him. They tore him to bits!’ He shook his head. ‘I’m glad he’s dead, but that’s no way for a warrior to die.’

  I watched as servants carried ale, bread and smoked meat to my men waiting in the orchard. ‘To find the jarl,’ I asked Orlyg, ‘we keep going west?’

&
nbsp; ‘Cross the hills,’ he said, ‘and just follow the road. The jarl won’t be in any of his halls, he’ll have sailed south by now.’

  ‘To Wessex?’

  ‘To wherever he wants!’ Orlyg said. ‘But if you follow the road west you’ll come to Cesterfelda and you can ask there.’ He frowned. ‘I think you go from there to Buchestanes and the jarl has a hall there, a fine hall! One of his favourite halls, and there’ll be men in the hall who’ll tell you where to find him.’

  ‘Buchestanes,’ I repeated the name as if I had never heard it before, but my interest was roused. Cnut had told me his wife and two children had been captured while travelling to Buchestanes, and maybe Orlyg’s mention of the town was just a coincidence, but fate does not like coincidences. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

  ‘A good town,’ Orlyg said, ‘it has hot springs. I went there two summers ago and sat in the water. It took away the pain.’

  I paid him gold for his generosity. He had told me that his son had led twenty-three men to Cnut’s service and I said I hoped they came back victorious, and so I left him.

  ‘I’m dead,’ I told Finan.

  ‘You are?’

  I told him Orlyg’s tale and he laughed. We slept that night in Cesterfelda, a village I had never heard of and reckoned I might never see again, though it was a pleasant enough place with good farmland spread around the small village, which itself surrounded some fine Roman buildings, though of course they had decayed over the long years. A magnificent pillared hall, which I supposed had been a temple to the Roman gods, was now a cattle shelter. There was a fallen statue of a hook-nosed man draped in a sheet and with a wreath of leaves about his short-cut hair, and the statue was evidently used as a sharpening stone because it had been deeply grooved by blades. ‘Pity it’s not marble,’ Finan said, kicking the statue.

  ‘Wouldn’t be here if it was,’ I said. Sometimes a farmer finds a Roman statue made from marble and such a thing is valuable because it can be put in a furnace to make lime, but a stone statue is not worth anything. I looked down at the statue’s hooked nose. ‘Is that their god?’ I asked Finan.

  ‘The Romans were Christians,’ my son answered instead.

  ‘Some of them were Christians,’ Finan said, ‘but I think the others worshipped eagles.’

  ‘Eagles!’

  ‘I think so.’ He gazed up at the cattle shed’s gable that was cleverly carved with half-naked girls running through a forest pursued by a man with goat’s legs. ‘Maybe they worshipped goats?’

  ‘Or tits,’ my son said, staring up at the lissom girls.

  ‘That would be a religion worth having,’ I said.

  Merewalh had joined us and he also stared up at the gable. The carving was distinct because the sun was low and the shadows long and sharp. ‘When we take this land back,’ he said, ‘we’ll pull all this down.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because the priests won’t like that.’ He nodded at the long-legged girls. ‘They’ll order it destroyed. It’s pagan, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think I’d like to have been a Roman,’ I said, gazing upwards.

  They laughed, but I was melancholy. The remnants of Rome always make me sad, simply because they are proof that we slide inexorably towards the darkness. Once there was light falling on marbled magnificence, and now we trudge through mud. Wyrd bið ful āræd.

  We bought butter, oatcakes, cheese and beans, we slept under the naked girls in the empty cattle shelter and next morning rode on westwards. And the wind blew strong and the rain began again, and by mid-morning we were riding into a gale. The land was rising and the track we followed turned into a stream. Lightning flickered to the north and thunder rolled across the sky and I raised my face to the wind and rain and knew Thor was there. I prayed to him. I told him I had sacrificed my best animals to him, that I had been loyal, that he should give me aid, but I knew Cnut would be making the same prayer, and so would Cnut’s friend, Sigurd Thorrson, and the gods, I feared, would favour the Danes because more of them were his worshippers.

  The rain hardened, the wind shrieked and some of the horses shied from the hammer of Thor’s wrath and so we sheltered beneath the gale-thrashed branches of an oak wood. It was hardly shelter, for the rain pierced the leaves and dripped incessantly. Men walked their horses while Finan and I crouched by a thorn bush at the western edge of the trees. ‘Never known a summer like it,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll be a hard winter.’

  ‘God help us,’ he said grimly and made the sign of the cross. ‘So what are we doing?’

  ‘Travelling to Buchestanes.’

  ‘To see the sorceress?’

  I shook my head and wished I had not because the motion let rainwater trickle down inside my jerkin. ‘To see her granddaughter perhaps,’ I said, smiling. ‘Cnut says the sorceress still lives, but she must be older than time.’ The sorceress’s name was Ælfadell and she was reputed to have greater powers than any other aglæcwif in Britain. I had visited her and drunk her potion and dreamed the dreams and been told my future. Seven kings would die, she had said, seven kings in one great battle.

  ‘To see her granddaughter?’ Finan asked. ‘Is she the one who’s deaf and dumb?’

  ‘And the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen,’ I said wistfully.

  Finan smiled. ‘So if we’re not going to see this creature,’ he said after a pause, ‘why are we going there?’

  ‘Because it’s on the way to Ceaster.’

  ‘Just that?’

  I shook my head. ‘Cnut said his wife and son were captured while they were travelling to Buchestanes. And that old fellow yesterday said Cnut has a hall there, a fine hall.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he didn’t have a hall there ten years ago. It’s new.’

  ‘If I remember,’ Finan said, ‘there’s no wall at Buchestanes.’

  I knew what he was saying. I was suggesting that the new hall was important to Cnut, and Finan was suggesting it was undefended and therefore not as important as I thought. ‘There wasn’t a wall ten years ago,’ I said, ‘but there could be now.’

  ‘And you think his wife is there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  He frowned, then flinched as a gust of wind drove rain into our faces. ‘Maybe?’

  ‘We know Cnut went to Ceaster,’ I said, ‘and she probably went with him, but she wouldn’t have sailed with him. Her children are too young. You don’t take small children to war, so either she’s still at Ceaster, or Cnut sent her somewhere further from Mercia.’

  ‘Could be anywhere.’

  ‘I’m groping in the dark,’ I admitted.

  ‘But you are always lucky.’

  ‘Sometimes I’m lucky,’ I said, and thought of the wheel of fate. Thor was in the sky and the wind bitter in my face. The omens were bad. ‘Sometimes,’ I said again.

  We waited till the rain eased, then rode on.

  Groping in the dark.

  We reached Buchestanes the next day. I dared not enter the town for fear of being recognised and so I sent Rolla, Eldgrim and Kettil, three Danes, down into the hollow where the small town was cradled by hills. I could see that Cnut had made a palisade around the place, though it was hardly formidable, merely a wall the height of a man and better suited to keep cattle out than to deter enemies.

  It was still raining. The clouds were low, the ground soaked, the rain persistent, but the wind had eased. I led my horsemen to the wood close to the cave where the sorceress wove her spells, then took my son, Finan and Merewalh up to the great limestone crag that was streaming with water. The rock was slashed with a crevice where ferns and moss grew thick, and the crevice led into the cave. I hesitated at the entrance, remembering my fear.

  Caves are the entrances to the netherworld, to the dark places where the Corpse-Ripper lurks and where Hel, the grim goddess, rules. These are the lands of the dead where even most gods walk warily, where silence is a howl, where all the memorie
s of all the living are endlessly echoed in misery, and where the three Norns weave our fates and play their jests. This is the netherworld.

  It was dark beyond the low, narrow entrance, but the sound of my boots suddenly echoed loud and I knew I had come into the larger chamber. Water dripped. I waited. Finan blundered into me, I heard my son breathing. Slowly, so slowly, my eyes became accustomed to the dark, helped by what small grey light leaked from the crevice, and I saw the flat rock where the sorceress had worked her magic. ‘Is anyone here?’ I shouted and the echo of my voice was the only answer.

  ‘What happened here?’ my son asked in an awed tone.

  ‘This was where Ælfadell the sorceress told the future,’ I said, ‘and maybe still does.’

  ‘And you came here?’ Merewalh asked.

  ‘Just once,’ I said, as if it were no great thing. Something moved in the back of the cave, a scrabbling noise, and the three Christians touched their crosses as I fingered Thor’s hammer. ‘Is anyone there?’ I called, and again there was no answer.

  ‘A rat,’ Finan suggested.

  ‘And what future did you discover, lord?’ Merewalh asked.

  I hesitated. ‘It was nonsense,’ I said harshly. Seven kings will die, she had said, seven kings and the women you love. And Alfred’s son will not rule and Wessex will die and the Saxon will kill what he loves and the Danes will gain everything, and all will change and all will be the same. ‘It was nonsense,’ I said again, and I lied when I said it, though I did not know it. I know now, because everything she said came true except one thing, and perhaps that one thing still lies in the future.

  And Alfred’s son did rule, so was that wrong? In time I saw her meaning, but back then, standing on a floor made slippery with bat-shit and listening to the water run underground, I did not know the significance of what I had been told. Instead I was thinking of Erce.