Death of Kings (29 page)

The place was called Natangrafum and it belonged to a Mercian thegn named Ælwold, who was happy that I should dig into his mound. ‘I’ll lend you slaves to do the work,’ he told me, ‘bastards don’t have enough to do until the harvest.’

‘I’ll use my own,’ I said.

Ælwold was immediately suspicious, but I was Uhtred and he did not want to antagonise me. ‘You’ll share anything you find?’ he asked anxiously.

‘I will,’ I said, then put gold on his table. ‘That gold,’ I said, ‘is for your silence. No one knows I’m here and you tell no one. If I find you break that silence I’ll come back and I’ll bury you in that mound.’

‘I’ll say nothing, lord,’ he promised. He was older than I, with pendulous jowls and long grey hair. ‘God knows I don’t want trouble,’ he went on, ‘last year’s harvest was bad, the Danes aren’t that far away, and I just pray for a quiet life.’ He took the gold. ‘But you’ll find nothing in that mound, lord. My father dug it out years ago and there’s nothing there but skeletons. Not even a bead.’

There were two graves on the ridge top, one built upon the other. A circular mound lay in the centre and athwart it and beneath it, running east and west, was a long mound some ten feet high and over sixty paces long. Much of that long mound was just that, a mound of earth and chalk, but at its eastern end were man-made caves that were entered through a boulder-clad doorway that faced towards the rising sun.

I sent Ludda to fetch a dozen slaves from Fagranforda and they moved the boulder, and cleared the entrance of earth so that we were able to stoop into the long, stone-lined passageway. Four chambers, two on either side, opened from that tunnel. We lit the tomb with pitch-soaked torches and pulled down the heavy rocks that blocked the chamber entrances and found, as Ælwold had said, nothing but skeletons.

‘Will it do?’ I asked Ludda.

He did not answer at first. He was staring at the skeletons and there was fear on his face. ‘They’ll come back to haunt us, lord,’ he said softly.

‘No,’ I said, yet felt a cold shiver in my blood. ‘No,’ I said again, though I did not believe it.

‘Don’t touch them, lord,’ he pleaded.

‘Ælwold said his father disturbed them,’ I said, trying to convince myself, ‘so we should be safe.’

‘He disturbed them, lord, and that means he woke them. Now they’re waiting to take revenge.’ The skeletons lay in untidy heaps, adults and children together. Their skulls grinned at us. One bony head had a great gash in its left side and there were vestiges of hair on another. A child lay curled in a skeleton’s lap. Another corpse reached a bony arm towards us, its finger bones spread on the stony floor. ‘Their spirits are here,’ Ludda whispered, ‘I can feel them, lord.’

I felt the cold shiver again. ‘Ride back to Fagranforda,’ I told Ludda, ‘and bring Father Cuthbert and my best hound.’

‘Your best hound?’

‘Lightning, bring him. I’ll expect you tomorrow.’

We crept back out of the passage and the slaves put back the great boulder that sealed the dead from the living, and that night the sky was lit with great curtains of pale blue and glowing white that shivered high to hide the stars. I have seen those lights before, usually in the depths of winter and always in the northern sky, but it was surely no coincidence that they shimmered the heavens on the day I had let light fall on the dead beneath the earth.

I had rented a house from Ælwold. It was a Roman house, mostly in ruins, which lay a small distance from a village called Turcandene, which was a short ride south of the tomb. Brambles choked most of the house and ivy wriggled up its broken walls, but the two largest rooms, from where the Romans had once lorded the nearby countryside, had been used as a cattle shed and were protected by crude rafters and stinking thatch. We cleared those rooms and I slept under the thatch that night and next morning went back to the tomb. A mist hovered about the long mound. I waited there with the slaves squatting a few paces away. Ludda returned about midday and the mist still lingered. He had Lightning, my good deerhound, on a leash, and with him was Father Cuthbert. I took Lightning’s leash from Ludda. The hound whimpered and I ruffled his ears. ‘What you have to do now,’ I told Cuthbert, ‘is make certain that the spirits in this grave don’t interfere with us.’

‘May I ask, lord, what it is you do here?’

‘What did Ludda tell you?’

‘Just that you needed me, and to bring the doggy.’

‘Then that’s all you need to know. And make sure you drive those spirits away.’

We took the great entrance stone away and Cuthbert went into the grave where he chanted prayers, sprinkled water and planted a cross he made from tree branches. ‘We must wait till the night’s heart, lord,’ he told me, ‘to make sure the prayers have worked.’ He looked distraught and waved his hands in gestures that suggested hopelessness. He had the hugest hands and never seemed to know quite what to do with them. ‘Will the spirits obey me?’ he asked, ‘I don’t know! They sleep during the day and should wake to find themselves chained and helpless, but perhaps they’re stronger than we know? We’ll discover tonight.’

‘Why tonight? Why not now?’

‘They sleep in the daytime, lord, then they’ll wake tonight and scream like souls in torment. If they break the chains?’ He shuddered. ‘But I shall stay through the night and summon angels.’

‘Angels?’

He nodded seriously. ‘Yes, lord, angels.’ He saw my puzzlement and smiled. ‘Oh don’t think of angels as pretty girls, lord. Simple folk believe angels are lovely bright things with wonderful,’ he paused, his huge hands fluttering over his chest, ‘fawns,’ he finally said, ‘but in truth they’re the shield-warriors of God. Fiercely formidable creatures!’ He flapped his hands, to suggest wings, then went very still as he became aware of my gaze. I stared at him so long that he became nervous. ‘Lord?’ he asked tremulously.

‘You’re clever, Cuthbert,’ I said.

He looked pleased and bashful. ‘I am indeed, lord.’

‘Saint Cuthbert the Clever,’ I said in admiration. ‘A fool,’ I went on, ‘but such a clever fool!’

‘Thank you, lord, you’re so kind.’

That night Cuthbert and I stayed in the tomb’s entrance and watched the stars grow bright. Lightning lay with his head on my lap as I stroked him. He was a great hound, full of running, fierce as a warrior, and fearless. A quarter moon climbed above the hills. The night was filled with noises, the rustle of creatures in nearby woods, the haunting call of a hunting owl, the cry of a vixen far away. When the moon had climbed to its height Father Cuthbert faced the tomb, went to his knees, and began to pray silently, his lips moving and his hands clasping the broken cross. If angels came, I did not see them, but perhaps they were there; the bright-winged and beautiful shield-warriors of the Christian god.

I let Cuthbert pray as I took Lightning to the top of the mound where I knelt and cuddled the hound. I told him how good he was, how loyal and how brave. I stroked his coarse pelt and I buried my head in his fur and I told him he was the greatest hound I had ever known, and I was still cuddling him as I cut his throat with one hard tug of a knife I had sharpened that afternoon. I felt his huge body struggle and lurch, the sudden howl fading fast, the blood soaking my mail and knees, and I was crying because of his death, and I held his shivering body and I told Thor I had made the sacrifice. I did not want to, but it is the sacrifice of things dear to us that touches the minds of the gods, and I held Lightning until he died. It was mercifully swift. I begged Thor to accept the sacrifice and in return to keep the dead silent in their grave.

I carried Lightning’s body to some nearby trees and I used the knife and a shard of stone to make a grave. I laid the hound inside, put the knife beside him, then wished him happy hunting in the next world. I filled in the grave and heaped rocks over it to preserve his body from the carrion-eaters. It was almost dawn by the time I had finished and I was dirty, blood-soaked and miserable.

‘Dear God, what happened?’ Father Cuthbert stared aghast at me.

‘I prayed to Thor,’ I said curtly.

‘The dog?’ he whispered the question.

‘Is hunting in the next world,’ I said.

He shuddered. Some priests would have chided me for sacrificing to false gods, but Cuthbert just made the sign of the cross. ‘The spirits have been quiet,’ he told me.

‘So one of the prayers worked,’ I said, ‘either yours or mine.’

‘Or both, lord,’ he said.

And when the sun rose the slaves came and I had them open the tomb and then move the dead from one of the two deeper chambers. They piled the bones in the opposite chamber, and then we sealed that corpse-crowded space with a slab of rock. We put skulls in the two cavities nearest the entrance, so that any visitor, stooping into the passageway, would be greeted by the grinning dead. The hardest work was disguising the entrance of the northernmost chamber, the one we had cleared of bones, because Ludda needed to be able to get in and out of that artificial cave. Father Cuthbert found the solution. His father had taught him the stonemason’s trade, and Cuthbert clumsily chipped away at a limestone slab until it resembled a thin shield. It took him two days, but he managed it and we balanced the thin slab on a flat rock and Ludda found he could tip it easily enough. He could pull it outwards, crawl past it into the chamber and then another man could push it back upright so that Ludda was hidden behind the shield-like slab. When he spoke from behind the slab his voice was muffled, but audible.

We sealed the grave again, piling earth over the entrance boulder and then went back to Fagranforda. ‘Now we go to Lundene,’ I told Ludda. ‘You, me and Finan.’

‘Lundene!’ He liked that. ‘Why are we going, lord?’

‘To find two whores, of course.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘I can help!’ Father Cuthbert said eagerly.

‘I thought I’d make you responsible for collecting the goose feathers,’ I told Cuthbert.

‘Goose feathers?’ He stared at me, appalled. ‘Oh, lord, please!’

Whores and goose feathers. Plegmund was praying for peace and I was planning for war.

I took thirty men to Lundene, not because I needed them, but because a lord should travel in style. We found quarters for men and horses in the Roman fort that guarded the old city’s north-western corner, then I walked with Finan and Weohstan along the remnants of the Roman wall. ‘When you commanded here,’ Weohstan asked, ‘did they starve you of money?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I have to beg for every coin,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re building churches, but I can’t persuade them to repair the wall.’

And the wall needed repair more than ever. A great stretch of the Roman battlements between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate had fallen into the stinking ditch beyond. It was not a new problem. Back when I had been commander of the garrison, I had filled the gap with a massive oak palisade, but those trunks were dark now and some of them were rotting. King Eohric had seen this decayed stretch and I did not doubt he had noted it, and after his visit to Lundene I had suggested that repairs be made urgently, but nothing had been done. ‘Just look,’ Weohstan said, and scrambled awkwardly down the slope of rubble that marked the ruined wall’s end. He pushed on an oak trunk and I saw it move like a dead tooth. ‘They won’t pay to replace them,’ Weohstan said gloomily. He kicked the base of the trunk and soft dark lumps of fungus-ridden wood exploded from his boot.

‘We’re at peace,’ I said sarcastically, ‘hadn’t you heard?’

‘Tell that to Eohric,’ Weohstan said, climbing back to join me. All the land to the north-east was Eohric’s land, and Weohstan told of Danish patrols coming close to the city. ‘They’re watching us,’ he said, ‘and all I’m allowed to do is wave at them.’

‘They don’t need to come close,’ I said, ‘their traders will have told them everything they want to know.’ Lundene was always busy with traders, Danish, Saxon, Frankish and Frisian, and such merchants carried news back to their homelands. Eohric, I was certain, knew just how vulnerable Lundene’s defences were, indeed he had seen them for himself. ‘But Eohric’s a cautious bastard,’ I said.

‘Sigurd isn’t.’

‘He’s still sick.’

‘Pray God he dies,’ Weohstan said savagely.

I learned more news in the city’s taverns. There were shipmasters from the whole coast of Britain who, for the price of an ale, offered rumours, some of them true. And not one rumour spoke of war. Æthelwold was still sheltered in Eoferwic, and still claimed to be King of Wessex, but he had no power until the Danes gave him an army. Why were they so quiet? It puzzled me. I had been so confident they would attack at the news of Alfred’s death, but instead they did nothing. Bishop Erkenwald knew the answer. ‘It’s God’s will,’ he told me. We had met by chance in a street. ‘God commanded us to love our enemies,’ he explained, ‘and by love we shall make them Christian and peaceable.’

I remember staring at him. ‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked.

‘We must have faith,’ he said fiercely. He made the sign of the cross towards a woman who had curtseyed to him. ‘So,’ he asked me, ‘what brings you to Lundene?’

‘We’re looking for whores,’ I said. He blinked. ‘Do you know any good ones, bishop?’ I asked.

‘Oh, dear God,’ he hissed, and went on his way.

In truth I had decided against finding whores in Lundene’s taverns because there was always a chance that the girls might be recognised, and so I led Finan, Ludda and Father Cuthbert down to the slave dock that lay upriver of the old Roman bridge. Lundene had never possessed a thriving slave market, but there was always some small trade in young folk captured from Ireland or Wales or Scotland. The Danes kept more slaves than the Saxons, and those that we did possess were usually farm labourers. A man who cannot afford an ox could harness a pair of slaves to a plough, though the furrow would never be as deep as that made by an ox-drawn blade. Oxen were less trouble too, though in the old days a man could kill a slave who proved a nuisance, and face no penalty. Alfred’s laws changed that. And many men liked to release their slaves, believing it earned them God’s approval, and so there was no great demand in Lundene, though there were usually a few slaves for sale at the dock beside the Temes. The traders came from Ratumacos, a town in Frankia, and almost all those traders were Northmen because the Viking crews had conquered all the region about that town. They came to buy the young folk captured in our border skirmishes, and some also brought slaves to sell, knowing that the wealthy men of Wessex and Mercia appreciated an exotic girl. The church frowned on that trade, but it thrived anyway.