The Burning Land (22 page)

I was thinking that Bebbanburg was impregnable. “I’m wondering who has Smoka now.” I said.

“Smoka?”

“Best horse I ever owned.”

Ragnar chuckled and nodded at the fort. “It’s a brute, isn’t it?” he said.

“Land ships at the northern end,” I suggested. If ships came ashore where the new gate was built then the attackers would have no need to fight through the Low Gate.

“The beach is narrow there,” Ragnar warned, though I probably knew the waters about Bebbanburg better than he did, “and you can’t get ships into the harbor,” he added, pointing to where the fishing boats were moored. “Little ships, yes, but anything bigger than a wash tub? Maybe at a spring high tide, but only for an hour or so, and that channel is a bitch when tide and wind are running. Waves build there. You’d be lucky to make it in one piece.”

And even if I could land a dozen crews close to the new gate,
what was to stop the defenders sending a force along the new path to trap the attackers? That would only happen if my uncle had warning of an attack and could assemble enough men to spare a force to make that counterattack. So the answer, I thought, was a surprise attack. But a surprise attack would be difficult. The sentries would see the ships approaching and call the garrison to arms, and the attacking crews would have to clamber ashore in the surf, then carry ladders and weapons over a hundred rocky paces to where the new stone wall barred them. It would hardly be a surprise by then, and the defenders would have plenty of time to assemble at the new gate. So two attacks? That meant starting a formal siege, using three or four hundred men to seal off the strip of land leading to the Low Gate. That would prevent reinforcements reaching the garrison and those besiegers could assault the Low Gate while the ships approached the new. That would split the defenders, but I would need at least as many men to attack the new gate, which meant I was looking for a thousand men, say twenty crews, and they would bring wives, servants, slaves, and children, so I would be feeding at least three thousand. “It has to be done,” I said quietly.

“No one has ever captured Bebbanburg,” Ragnar said.

“Ida did.”

“Ida?”

“My ancestor. Ida the Flamebearer. One of the first Saxons in Britain.”

“What kind of fort did he capture?”

I shrugged. “Probably a small one.”

“Maybe nothing but a thorn fence guarded by half-naked savages,” Ragnar said. “The best way to capture that place is to starve the bastards.”

That was a possibility. A small army could seal off the landward approach, and ships could patrol the waters to stop supplies reaching my uncle, but bad weather would drive those ships away, leaving an opportunity for small local vessels to reach the fortress. It would take at least six months to starve Bebbanburg into surrender. Six months of feeding an army and persuading restless Danes to stay and fight. I stared at the Farnea Islands where the sea fret
ted white on rocks. Gytha, my stepmother, used to tell me tales of how Saint Cuthbert preached to the seals and the puffins on those rocks. He had lived on the islands as a hermit, eating barnacles and fern fronds, scratching his lice, and so the islands were sacred to Christians, but they were of little practical use. I could not shelter a blockading fleet there, for the scatter of islets offered no shelter, nor did Lindisfarena, that lay to the north. That island was much larger. I could see the remnants of the monastery there, but Lindisfarena offered no decent harbor.

I was still gazing at Lindisfarena, remembering how Ragnar the Elder had slaughtered the monks there. I had been a child, and that same day Ragnar the Elder had let me kill Weland, a man sent by my uncle to murder me, and I had hacked at him with my sword, cutting and slicing him, bleeding him to death in writhing agony. I stared at the island, remembering the death of enemies, when Ragnar touched my elbow. “They’re curious about us,” he said.

Horsemen were riding from the Low Gate. I counted them, reckoning there to be around seventy, which suggested my uncle was not looking for a fight. A man with a hundred household warriors does not want to lose ten in some meaningless skirmish, so he was matching our force with just enough men to deter either side from attacking the other. I watched the horsemen climb the hill toward us. They were in mail and helmeted, with shields and weapons, but they stopped a good four hundred paces away, all except three men who kept riding, though they ostentatiously laid aside their swords and shields before leaving their companions. They flew no banner.

“They want to talk,” Ragnar said.

“Is that my uncle?”

“Yes.”

The three men had curbed their horses halfway between the two armed bands. “I could kill the bastard now,” I said.

“And his son inherits,” Ragnar said, “and everyone knows you killed an unarmed man who had offered a truce.”

“Bastard,” I said of Ælfric. I unbuckled my two swords and tossed them to Finan, then spurred my borrowed horse. Ragnar came with me. I had half hoped my uncle was accompanied by his two sons,
and if he had been I might have been tempted to try and kill all three, but instead his companions were two hard-looking warriors, doubtless his best men.

The three waited close to the rotting carcass of a sheep. I assume a wolf had killed the beast, then been driven off by dogs, and the corpse lay there, crawling with maggots, torn by ravens, and buzzing with flies. The wind blew the stench toward us, which was probably why Ælfric had chosen to stop there.

My uncle looked distinguished. He was slender and narrow-faced with a high hooked nose and dark, guarded eyes. His hair, the little that showed beneath his helmet’s rim, was white. He watched me calmly, showing no fear as I stopped close. “I assume you are Uhtred?” he greeted me.

“Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said.

“Then I should congratulate you,” he said.

“Why?”

“For your victory over Harald. The news of it caused much rejoicing among good Christians.”

“So you didn’t rejoice?” I retorted.

“Jarl Ragnar,” Ælfric ignored my small insult and nodded gravely to my companion, “you do me honor with this visit, lord, but you should have given me warning of your arrival. I would have made a feast for you.”

“We’re just exercising the horses,” Ragnar said cheerfully.

“A long way from your home,” Ælfric observed.

“Not from mine,” I said.

The dark eyes brooded on me. “You are always welcome here, Uhtred,” my uncle said, “any time you wish to come home, then just come. Believe me, I shall be glad to see you.”

“I’ll come,” I promised him.

There was silence for a moment. My horse stamped a mud-clodded foot. The two lines of mail-clad warriors watched us. I could just hear the gulls at the distant shore. Their sound had been my childhood noise, never-ending like the sea. “As a child,” my uncle broke the awkward silence, “you were disobedient, headstrong, and foolish. It seems you haven’t changed.”

“Ask Alfred of Wessex,” I said, “he wouldn’t be king now without my headstrong foolishness.”

“Alfred knew how to use you,” my uncle observed. “You were his dog. He fed you and held you. But like a fool you’ve slipped his lead. Who will feed you now?”

“I will,” Ragnar said happily.

“But you, lord,” Ælfric said respectfully, “don’t have enough men to watch them die against my walls. Uhtred will have to find his own men.”

“There are many Danes in Northumbria,” I said.

“And Danes seek gold,” Ælfric said, “do you really think there’s enough inside my walls to draw the Danes of Northumbria to Bebbanburg?” He half smiled. “You will have to find your own gold, Uhtred.” He paused, expecting me to say something, but I kept quiet. A raven, driven away from the sheep’s carcass by our presence, protested from a bare tree. “Do you think your aglæcwif will lead you to the gold?” Ælfric asked.

An aglæcwif was a fiendish woman, a sorceress, and he meant Skade. “I have no aglæcwif,” I said.

“She tempts you with her husband’s riches,” Ælfric said.

“Does she?”

“What else?” he asked. “But Skirnir knows she does that.”

“Because you told him?”

My uncle nodded. “I saw fit to send him news of his wife. A courtesy, I think, to a neighbor across the sea. Skirnir, no doubt, will greet you in the spring as I would greet you, Uhtred, should you decide to come home.” He stressed the last word, curdling it on his tongue, then gathered his reins. “I have nothing more to say to you.” He nodded at Ragnar, then at his men, and the three turned away.

“I’ll kill you!” I shouted after him, “and your cabbage-shitting sons!”

He just waved negligently and kept riding.

I remember thinking he had won that encounter. Ælfric had come from his fastness and he had treated me like a child, and now he rode back to that beautiful place beside the sea where I could not reach him. I did not move.

“What now?” Ragnar asked.

“I’ll hang him with his son’s intestines,” I said, “and piss on his corpse.”

“And how do you do that?”

“I need gold.”

“Skirnir?”

“Where else?”

Ragnar turned his horse. “There’s silver in Scotland,” he said, “and in Ireland.”

“And hordes of savages protect both,” I said.

“Then Wessex?” he suggested.

I had not moved my horse and Ragnar was forced to turn back to me. “Wessex?” I echoed him.

“They say Alfred’s churches are rich.”

“Oh, they are,” I said. “They’re so rich they can afford to send silver to the Pope. They drip with silver. There’s gold on the altars. There’s money in Wessex, my friend, so much money.”

Ragnar beckoned to his men and two of them rode forward with our swords. We buckled the belts around our waists and no longer felt naked. The two men walked their horses away, leaving us alone again. The sea wind brought the smell of home to lessen the smell of the carcass. “So will you attack next year?” I asked my friend.

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Brida thinks I’ve grown fat and happy,” he said.

“You have.”

He smiled briefly. “Why do we fight?” he asked.

“Because we were born,” I answered savagely.

“To find a place we call home,” Ragnar suggested. “A place where we don’t need to fight anymore.”

“Dunholm?”

“It’s as safe a fortress as Bebbanburg,” he said, “and I love it.”

“And Brida wants you to leave it?”

He nodded. “She’s right,” he admitted wanly. “If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There’ll be priests everywhere.”

We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate. All my life I have tried to under
stand the past because that past was so glorious and we see remnants of that glory all across Britain. We see the great marble halls the Romans made, and we travel the roads they laid and cross the bridges they built, and it is all fading. The marble cracks in the frost and the walls collapse. Alfred and his like believed they were bringing civilization to a wicked, fallen world, but all he did was make rules. So many rules, but the laws were only ever an expression of hope, because the reality was the burhs, the walls, the spears on the ramparts, the glint of helmets in the dawn, the fear of mailed riders, the thump of hoofbeats, and the screams of victims. Alfred was proud of his schools and his monasteries and his silver-rich churches, but those things were protected by blades. And what was Wessex compared to Rome?

It is hard to bring thoughts into order, but I sense, I have always sensed, that we slide from light to darkness, from glory to chaos, and perhaps that is good. My gods tell us that the world will end in chaos, so perhaps we are living the last days and even I might survive long enough to see the hills crack and the sea boil and the heavens burn as the great gods fight. And in the face of that great doom, Alfred built schools. His priests scurried like mice in rotting thatch, imposing their rules as if mere obedience could stop the doom. Thou shalt not kill, they preached, then screamed at us warriors to slaughter the pagans. Thou shalt not steal, they preached, and forged charters to take men’s lands. Thou shalt not commit adultery, they preached, and rutted other men’s wives like besotted hares in springtime.

There is no sense. The past is a ship’s wake etched on a gray sea, but the future has no mark. “What are you thinking?” Ragnar asked, amused.

“That Brida is right.”

“I must go to Wessex?”

I nodded, yet I knew he did not want to go where so many had failed. All my life till that moment had been spent, one way or another, in attacking or defending Wessex. Why Wessex? What was Wessex to me? It was the bastion of a dark religion in Britain, it was a place of rules, a Saxon place, and I worshiped the older gods, the gods the Saxons themselves had worshiped before the missionaries
came from Rome and gave them their new nonsense. Yet I had fought for Wessex. Time and again the Danes tried to capture Wessex, and time and again Uhtred of Bebbanburg had helped the West Saxons. I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea, I had screamed in the shield wall that broke Guthrum’s great army, and I had destroyed Harald. So many Danes had tried, and so many had failed, and I had helped them fail because fate had made me fight for the side with the priests. “Do you want to be King of Wessex?” I asked Ragnar.

He laughed. “No! Do you?”

“I want to be Lord of Bebbanburg.”

“And I want to be Lord of Dunholm.” He paused. “But.”

“But if we don’t stop them,” I finished for him, “they’ll come here.”

“That’s worth fighting for,” Ragnar said reluctantly, “or else our children will be Christians.”

I grimaced, thinking of my own children in Æthelflæd’s household. They would be learning about Christianity. Maybe, by now, they had already been baptized, and that thought gave me a surge of anger and guilt. Should I have stayed in Lundene and meekly accepted the fate Alfred wanted for me? But Alfred had humiliated me once before, forcing me to crawl on my knees to one of his damned altars, and I would not do it again. “We’ll go to Wessex,” I said, “and make you king, and I’ll defend you like I defended Alfred.”