The Burning Land (30 page)

“The boy dies if they so much as piss across the border,” I said.

Haesten grinned. “So I’ll be King of Mercia, Sigurd of Wessex, Cnut of Northumbria, but what of you?”

I poured him mead and paused a moment to watch a man juggle with flaming sticks. “I shall take West Saxon silver,” I said, “and reclaim Bebbanburg.”

“You don’t want to be king of somewhere?” he asked disbelievingly.

“I want Bebbanburg,” I said, “it’s all I’ve ever wanted. I’ll take my children there, raise them, and never leave.”

Haesten said nothing. I did not think he had even heard me. He was staring in awe, and he stared at Skade. She was in drab servant’s dress, yet even so her beauty shone like a beacon in the dark. I think, at that moment, I could have stolen the chains of gold from around Haesten’s neck and he would have been unaware. He just stared and Skade, sensing his gaze, turned to face him. They locked eyes.

“Bebbanburg,” I said again, “it’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“Yes,” he said distractedly, “I heard you.” He still stared at Skade. No other folk existed for them in that roaring hall. Brida, sitting further along the high table, had seen their locked gazes and she turned to me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.

Brida was happy that night. She had arranged Britain’s future, though her influence had been wielded through Ragnar. Yet it was her ambition that had spurred him, and that ambition was to destroy Wessex and, eventually, the power of the priests who spread their gospel so insidiously. In a year, we all believed, the only Christian king in England would be Eohric of East Anglia, and he would change allegiance when he saw how the wind had turned. Indeed, there would be no England at all, just Daneland. It all seemed so simple, so easy, so straightforward and, on that night of harp music and laughter, of ale and comradeship, none of us could anticipate failure. Mercia was weak, Wessex was vulnerable, and we were the Danes, the feared spear-warriors of the north.

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 Alfred. 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.