The Pagan Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘And is that your daughter?’ I asked, nodding at the younger woman who was sitting beside Brunna.

  This time Leiknir said nothing. Brunna was screaming at me now, demanding that I release her, but I ignored her. Two small children, twins, were clinging to the younger woman’s skirts and she also said nothing, but just stared at me with large, dark eyes that I remembered so well. She was so beautiful, so fragile, so frightened, and she just stared at me and said nothing. She had grown older, but not as the rest of us had aged. I suppose she must have been fifteen or sixteen when I first met her, and now she was ten years older, but those years had merely added dignity to beauty.

  ‘Is she your daughter?’ I asked Leiknir again, savagely, and he said nothing.

  ‘What is her name?’ I demanded.

  ‘Frigg.’ Leiknir almost whispered the answer.

  Frigg, wife of Odin, chief of all the goddesses in Asgard, the only one allowed to sit on Odin’s high throne, and a creature of surpassing beauty who also had the great gift of prophecy, though she chose never to reveal what she knew.

  And perhaps this Frigg also knew everything that would ever come to pass, but she would never tell because the girl I knew as Erce, granddaughter of Ælfadell the sorceress, was both deaf and dumb.

  And she was also, I presumed, the wife of Jarl Cnut.

  And I had found her.

  Two hundred Danes had been left to guard Ceaster, though many of those were old or slowed by wounds. ‘Why so few?’ I asked Leiknir.

  ‘No one expected Ceaster to be attacked,’ he said bitterly.

  I was walking through the captured town, exploring and admiring. Not even Lundene’s old city, the part built on the hill, had so many Roman buildings in such good repair. If I ignored the thatch I could almost imagine myself back in the times when men could make such marvels, when half the world had been ruled from one shining city. How had they done that, I wondered, and how could such a people, so strong and so clever, have ever been defeated?

  Finan and my son were with me. Merewalh and his men were on the ramparts, giving the impression that we numbered far more than a hundred and thirty-three men. Most of the defeated garrison was now outside the walls, gathered in the vast arena where the Romans had amused themselves with death, but we had captured their horses, almost all their supplies, and many of their women.

  ‘So you were left to guard Frigg?’ I asked Leiknir.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Jarl Cnut won’t be happy with you,’ I said, amused. ‘If I were you, Leiknir, I’d find somewhere a very long way away and hide there.’ He said nothing to that. ‘Haesten sailed with Jarl Cnut?’ I asked.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We were standing in a pottery. The furnace, made of thin Roman bricks, was still burning. There were shelves of finished bowls and jugs, and a wheel on which a lump of clay had sagged. ‘You don’t know?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t say, lord,’ Leiknir said humbly.

  I prodded the clay on the potter’s wheel. The lump had hardened. ‘Finan?’

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘There’s firewood for that furnace?’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘Why don’t you make it really hot and we’ll put Leiknir’s hands and feet inside. We’ll start with his left foot.’ I turned on the captured Dane. ‘Take your boots off. You won’t be needing them again.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ he said frantically. Finan had tossed firewood into the furnace mouth.

  ‘You were left to guard Jarl Cnut’s most precious possession,’ I said, ‘and the Jarl Cnut wouldn’t have just vanished. He would have told you how to send him news.’ I watched as the fire roared. The sudden heat made me take a pace backwards. ‘You’ll be left with no hands and no feet,’ I said, ‘but I suppose you can shuffle around on your knees and wrist-stumps.’

  ‘They went to the Sæfern,’ he said desperately.

  And I believed him. He had just revealed what Cnut was doing and it made sense. Cnut could have taken his fleet south around Cornwalum and attacked Wessex’s southern coast, but that had been tried before and it had failed. So instead he was using the River Sæfern to take his army deep into Mercia, and the first great obstacle he would encounter was Gleawecestre. Gleawecestre was Æthelred’s home, the most important town of Mercia, and it was a well-defended burh with high Roman walls, but how many men were left to defend those ramparts? Had Æthelred stripped his country of men for his invasion of East Anglia? And I felt a sudden fear, because Æthelflaed would surely have taken refuge in Gleawecestre. The moment folk heard that the Danes were in the river, that thousands of men and horses were being landed on the Sæfern’s bank, they would flee to the nearest, strongest burh, but if that burh was inadequately defended it would become a trap for them.

  ‘So what would you do if you needed to send a message to Cnut?’ I asked Leiknir, who was watching the furnace fearfully.

  ‘He said to send horsemen south, lord. He said they’d find him.’

  And that was probably true. Cnut’s army would be spreading through Saxon Mercia, burning halls, churches and villages, and the smoke of those fires would be beacons for any messenger. ‘How many men does Cnut have?’ I asked.

  ‘Nearly four thousand.’

  ‘How many ships sailed from here?’

  ‘A hundred and sixty-eight, lord.’

  That many ships could easily have carried five thousand men, but they had also taken horses and servants and baggage, so four thousand was probably accurate. That was a large army, and Cnut had been clever. He had lured Æthelred away to East Anglia and now he was deep inside Æthelred’s land. What was Wessex doing? Edward would surely be gathering his army, but he would also be putting warriors into his burhs, fearing that the Danes might strike south across the Temes. My guess was that Edward would think of defending Wessex, which left Cnut free to ravage Mercia and to defeat Æthelred when that fool finally decided to march home. In another month all Mercia would be Danish.

  Except I possessed Frigg. That was not her real name, but who knew what that was? She could not tell and, because she was deaf, she might not even know. Ælfadell had called her granddaughter Erce, but that goddess’s name was just to impress the gullible. ‘Jarl Cnut is fond of Frigg,’ I suggested to Leiknir.

  ‘He’s like a man with a new sword,’ he said, ‘he can’t bear to be out of her sight.’

  ‘You can’t blame him,’ I said, ‘she’s a rare beauty. So why didn’t she go south with him?’

  ‘He wanted her kept safe.’

  ‘And left just two hundred men to guard her?’

  ‘He thought that was enough,’ Leiknir said, then paused. ‘He said there was only one man who was shrewd enough to attack Ceaster and that man was dead.’

  ‘And here I am,’ I said, ‘back from Hel’s kingdom.’ I kicked the furnace’s iron door shut. ‘You can keep your hands and feet,’ I said.

  It was dusk. We left the pottery and walked towards the town’s centre, and I was surprised to see a small building decorated with a cross. ‘Haesten’s wife,’ Leiknir explained.

  ‘He doesn’t mind she’s a Christian?’

  ‘He says he might as well have the Christian god on his side as well.’

  ‘That sounds like Haesten,’ I said, ‘dancing with two different women to two different tunes.’

  ‘I doubt he likes dancing with Brunna,’ Leiknir said.

  I laughed. She was a vixen, that one, a stout, vicious-tempered, barrel-shaped vixen with a chin like a ship’s prow and a tongue sharp as any blade. ‘You can’t keep us prisoner!’ she told me when we were back inside the great pillared hall. I ignored her.

  The building had been a hall once, and a magnificent hall. Perhaps it had been a temple, or even the palace of a Roman governor, but someone, I assumed Haesten, had divided the great chamber into separate rooms. The walls, made of wood, only reached halfway up and, in the daytime, lig
ht would stream in through the high windows, which were barred with iron. At night there were lamps and, in the big room where the women and children lived, an open fire that had stained the painted stonework of the high ceiling with soot and smoke. The floor was made of thousands upon thousands of small tiles arranged to make a pattern that showed some strange sea creature with a curling tail being hunted by three naked men with tridents. Two naked women rode giant scallop shells on a cresting wave to watch the hunt.

  Brunna went on haranguing me and I went on ignoring her. The four women servants crouched with Frigg’s twins at the edge of the room and watched me nervously. Frigg was wearing a cloak of feathers and was seated in a wooden chair at the room’s centre. She also watched me, not with fear now, but with a childlike curiosity, her big eyes following me about the room as I examined the weird picture on the floor. ‘They must have giant scallops in Rome,’ I said, and no one answered. I walked to Frigg’s chair and looked down at her and she gazed calmly back. Her cloak was made of thousands of feathers sewn into a linen cape. The feathers had been plucked from jays and ravens so that it seemed to shimmer blue and black. Beneath the strange feathered cloak she was hung with gold. Her slender wrists were ringed with gold, her fingers were bright with stones set in gold, her neck was hung with gold chains and her hair, black as one of Odin’s ravens, was piled on her head and held in place by a net of gold.

  ‘Touch her,’ Brunna hissed, ‘and you’re a dead man!’

  I had taken Brunna prisoner before, but Alfred, convinced she had become a true Christian, had insisted on releasing her. He had even stood as godfather to her two sons, Haesten the Younger and Horic, and I remembered the day she had been dunked in the holy water in the Lundene church where she had been given a new Christian name, Æthelbrun. Now, though still calling herself Brunna, she wore a big silver cross at her breasts. ‘My husband will kill you,’ she spat at me.

  ‘Your husband has tried many times,’ I said, ‘and I still live.’

  ‘We could kill her instead,’ Rolla said. He looked tired of guarding the women, or at least of guarding Brunna. No man could tire of looking at Frigg.

  I crouched in front of Frigg’s chair and stared into her eyes. She smiled at me. ‘Do you remember me?’ I asked.

  ‘She can’t hear,’ Leiknir said.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but does she understand?’

  He shrugged. ‘As well as a dog? Sometimes you think she knows everything, and at others?’ He shrugged again.

  ‘And the children?’ I asked, glancing at the twins who watched me silent and wide-eyed from the edge of the chamber. They looked to be about six or seven years old, a boy and a girl, and both with their mother’s dark hair.

  ‘They can talk,’ Leiknir said, ‘and hear.’

  ‘What are their names?’ I asked.

  ‘The girl is Sigril, the boy is Cnut Cnutson.’

  ‘And they talk well enough?’

  ‘They never stop usually,’ Leiknir said.

  And the twins could indeed talk because something strange happened at that moment, something I did not immediately understand. Merewalh came into the chamber, and with him was Father Wissian with his prematurely white hair and his long black cloak belted so it looked like a priest’s robe and the small boy’s face lit up. ‘Uncle Wihtred!’ Cnut Cnutson said. ‘Uncle Wihtred!’

  ‘Uncle Wihtred!’ the girl echoed happily.

  Wissian walked out of shadow into the firelight. ‘My name’s Wissian,’ he said, and the twins’ faces fell.

  At the time I did not think about it because I was staring at Frigg, and the sight of that loveliness was enough to drive all sense from a man’s head. I was still crouching, and I took one of her pale hands and it felt so light in mine, so light and fragile, like a bird held in a fist. ‘Do you remember me?’ I asked again. ‘I met you and Ælfadell.’

  She just smiled. She had been frightened when we first came, but now she seemed happy enough. ‘You remember Ælfadell?’ I asked, and of course she said nothing. I squeezed her hand very gently. ‘You are coming with me,’ I told her, ‘you and your children, but I promise no harm will come to you. None.’

  ‘Jarl Cnut will kill you!’ Brunna screeched.

  ‘One more word from you,’ I said, ‘and I’ll cut your tongue out.’

  ‘You dare …’ she began, then screamed because I had stood and drawn a knife from my belt. And, to my surprise, Frigg laughed. There was no sound to the laughter, other than a guttural choking noise, but her face was lit with sudden amusement.

  I crossed to Brunna, who shrank away. ‘You can ride a horse, woman?’ I asked her. She just nodded. ‘Then in the morning,’ I said, ‘you will ride south. You will go to that miserable wormcast you call a husband and tell him Uhtred of Bebbanburg has Jarl Cnut’s wife and children. And you will tell him that Uhtred of Bebbanburg is in a mood to kill.’

  I sheathed the knife and looked at Rolla. ‘Have they eaten?’

  ‘Not while I’ve been here.’

  ‘Make sure they’re fed. And safe.’

  ‘Safe,’ he said the word bleakly.

  ‘Touch her,’ I warned him, ‘and you fight me.’

  ‘They’re safe, lord,’ he promised.

  Æthelred had started this war and Cnut had fooled him and now Cnut was loose in Mercia and convinced that his enemies were in disarray. The old dream of the Danes was coming true, the conquest of Saxon Britain.

  Except I was still alive.

  That night we hardly slept. There was work to do.

  Finan found the best of the captured horses, for they would come with us. My son led search parties through the town, looking for hidden coins or anything of value that we could carry, while half of Merewalh’s men guarded the walls and the rest tore apart buildings to make kindling and firewood.

  The southern gates had burned and my son had blocked the entrance with two heavy carts. The Danes outside the town outnumbered us, though they did not know that, and I feared an attack in the night, but none came. I could see fires flickering in the old arena, and more by the bridge that lay a short ride to the south. There would be more fires soon.

  Merewalh’s men were laying the kindling and firewood beside every stretch of wooden palisade. Wherever the wall had been repaired we would set a fire. We would burn the gates of the town, we would burn the walls, and we would leave it stripped of any defence that was not made of stone.

  I could not hold Ceaster. I would need ten times as many men and so I would abandon it, and doubtless the Danes would move back inside the Roman walls, but at least I could make it easier for a Saxon force to attack those walls. It would take six months to repair the damage I planned to do, six months of chopping down trees and trimming the trunks and burying them in the rubble of the broken ramparts. I hoped the Danes would not be given six months. And so, as the night wore on, we lit the fires, starting on the northern side of the town. Blaze after blaze brightened the late summer night, their flames beating up towards the stars, their smoke smearing the wide heaven. Ceaster was ringed with fire, loud with it, and the sparks from the fires blew onto thatch inside the town and that started burning too, but by the time the last fire was lit and much of the town was blazing, we were mounted and ready to leave. By then the last star was in the sky. Earendel, that star is called, the star of the morning, and Earendel still shone as we dragged the two carts aside and rode out through the southern gate.

  We drove every horse out with us so that the watching Danes would see a horde erupting from the burning town. We took Haesten’s wife, Cnut’s wife and both her children, all of them close-guarded by my men, and we took the Danes who had surrendered to us. We were in war gear, dressed in mail and carrying shields, our naked blades reflecting the flames, and we galloped down the long straight road and I could see men waiting at the bridge, but those men were chilled, nervous and hugely outnumbered. They did not even try to stop us, instead they fled along the river’s banks, and my horse’s hooves suddenl
y thundered loud on the bridge’s timber roadway. We stopped on the Dee’s southern bank. ‘Axes,’ I said.

  Beyond the river the fortress town of Ceaster burned. Thatch and timber flared and was consumed, turned into smoke, sparks and embers. The town itself, I thought, would live. It would be scorched, and the paved streets would be silted with ash, but what the Romans had made would still be there long after we were gone. ‘We don’t build,’ I said to my son, ‘we just destroy.’

  He looked at me as if I was mad, but I just nodded towards our axemen who were destroying the bridge’s roadway. I was making sure that the remaining Danes in Ceaster did not pursue us, and the quickest way to do that was to deny them the bridge. ‘It’s time you were married,’ I told Uhtred.

  He looked at me in surprise, then he grinned. ‘Frigg will be a widow soon.’

  ‘You don’t need a deaf, dumb widow. But I’ll find you someone.’

  The last plank connecting two of the stone arches fell into the river. It was dawn and the rising sun was gilding the east, rifting low clouds with scarlet and gold. Men watched us from across the river.

  The prisoners had ridden with us, each man with a noose about his neck, but now I ordered the nooses taken off. ‘You’re free to go,’ I told them, ‘but if I see you again, I’ll kill you all. You take her with you.’ I nodded towards Brunna who sat like a sack of oats on a stout mare.

  ‘Lord,’ Leiknir edged his horse towards me, ‘I would come with you.’

  I looked at him, so grey-haired and so beaten down, ‘You’re sworn to Jarl Cnut’s service,’ I said harshly.

  ‘Please, lord,’ he begged.

  One of the other prisoners, a young man, kicked his horse next to Leiknir. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘may we have one sword?’

  ‘You may borrow one sword,’ I said.

  ‘Please, lord!’ Leiknir said. He knew what was about to happen.

  ‘Two swords,’ I said.

  Leiknir had failed. He had been given a task and he had failed. If he returned to Cnut he would be punished for that failure and I did not doubt the punishment would be long, agonising and deadly. Yet I did not want him. He was a failure. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked the young man.