The Empty Throne (The Warrior Chronicles, Book 8) (32 page)

So I set my course northwards. Ahead of us were Sigtryggr’s ships, which meant over twenty crews to make an army of at least five hundred men. Five hundred hungry men seeking land. And how many men did Æthelflaed have at Ceaster? I called my son back to the steering-oar and asked him.

‘There were just over three hundred when I was there,’ he said.

‘Including your men?’

‘Including thirty-eight of us,’ he said.

‘So you left, and Æthelflaed also took thirty-two men south. So Ceaster was garrisoned by what? Two hundred and fifty men?’

‘Maybe a few more.’

‘Or a few less. Men get sick.’ I stared at the distant shore and saw unfriendly hills beneath heaping clouds. The wind was fretting the waves, shivering them with whitecaps, but also driving our ship hard north. ‘We know she’s just sent fifty men north, so there should still be around three hundred men there. And Merewalh commands.’

My son nodded. ‘He’s a good man.’

‘He’s a good man,’ I agreed.

My son heard the hesitation in my voice. ‘But not good enough?’

‘He’ll fight like a bull,’ I said, ‘and he’s honest. But does he think like a wildcat?’ I liked Merewalh, and trusted him. I had no doubt that Æthelflaed would raise him, maybe make him an ealdorman, and I had even thought of Merewalh as a husband for Stiorra. That might still happen, I supposed, but for now Merewalh had to defend Ceaster, and his three hundred men should be more than enough for that task. The burh’s walls were made of stone, and its ditch was deep. The Romans had built well, but I assumed Sigtryggr knew of Ceaster’s strength and my fear was that the young Norseman had a wildcat’s cunning. ‘So what was the Lady Æthelflaed doing when you left Ceaster?’ I asked Uhtred.

‘Making a new burh.’

‘Where?’

‘On the bank of the Mærse.’

That made sense. Ceaster was a fortress that guarded the Dee, the southernmost river, but the Mærse was an open path. Put a burh there, and enemies could not use the river to pierce deep into the heartland. ‘So Merewalh needs men to finish the new burh,’ I said, ‘and to garrison it, and he needs more men to protect Ceaster. He can’t do all that with three hundred men.’

‘And Osferth is going there with the families,’ my son said grimly.

‘With Stiorra too,’ I said, and felt a pang of guilt. I have been a careless father. My eldest son was an outlaw to me because of his damned religion, Uhtred had turned out well, but none of that was my doing, while Stiorra was a mystery to me. I loved her, but now I had sent her into danger.

‘The families,’ my son said, ‘and your money.’

Fate is a bitch. I’d sent Osferth north because Ceaster had seemed a safer destination than Gleawecestre, but unless I was wrong about the Norsemen, then I had sent Osferth, my daughter, our families, and all our fortune straight towards a horde of enemies. And worse. Eardwulf might have joined Sigtryggr, and I was certain that Eardwulf was as sly as a spinney of wildcats.

‘Suppose Eardwulf goes to Ceaster,’ I suggested. My son looked at me in puzzlement. ‘Do they know he’s a traitor?’ I asked.

He understood my fear. ‘If they don’t know yet …’ he said slowly.

‘They’ll open the gates to him,’ I interrupted.

‘But they will know by now,’ my son insisted.

‘They’ll know about Eardwulf,’ I agreed. The reinforcements Æthelflaed had sent from Gleawecestre would have carried that news. ‘But do they know all his followers?’

‘Oh God,’ he said, thinking about what I had said and realising the danger. ‘Jesus!’

‘Much help he is,’ I snarled.

The
Ðrines
slammed into a steeper wave, drenching the deck with cold spray. The wind had been freshening all day and the waves were now fierce and quick, but as night fell the wind died and the sea settled. We had lost sight of the land because we were crossing the vast bay that is the west coast of Wales, though I feared the northern side of that bay, which juts like a rocky arm to trap unwary ships. We lowered the sail, took to the oars, and steered by the infrequent glimpses of the stars. I took the oar and headed the ship slightly west of north. We rowed slowly, and I watched the water sparkle from the strange glowing lights that sometimes twinkle in the sea at night. We call them Ran’s jewels, the eerie glitter of the precious stones that are draped around that jealous goddess’s neck.

‘Where are we going?’ Finan asked me some time in the jewelled darkness.

‘Wirhealum.’

‘North or south?’

It was a good question and I did not know the answer. If we used the Dee, the southern river, we could row almost to Ceaster’s gates, but if Sigtryggr had made the same choice then we would simply find ourselves facing his men. If we chose the northern river, we would beach the ship a fair way from Ceaster and in all likelihood avoid Sigtryggr’s fleet, but it would take us much longer to reach the burh. ‘I’ll guess Sigtryggr wants to capture Ceaster,’ I said.

‘If he’s gone to Wirhealum, yes.’

‘If,’ I said sourly. Instinct is a strange thing. You cannot touch it, feel it, smell it, or hear it, but you must trust it, and that night, as we listened to the slap of the waves and the creak of the oars, I was as certain as I could be that my fears were justified. Somewhere ahead of us was a fleet of Norsemen intent on capturing Æthelflaed’s city of Ceaster. But how would he do it? My instinct was not giving me an answer. ‘He’ll want to capture the city quickly,’ I suggested.

‘He will,’ Finan agreed. ‘If he delays, then the garrison only gets stronger.’

‘So he’ll take the faster route.’

‘The Dee.’

‘So we’ll go north,’ I decided, ‘to the Mærse. And in the dawn we take that damned cross off the prow.’

The cross on the
Ðrines
’s high bow proclaimed us to be a Christian ship and invited any Dane or Norseman to attack us. A Danish ship would have a proud figure at the bows, a dragon or a serpent or an eagle, but such carvings could always be lifted off the prow timber. The carved and painted beasts were never displayed in home waters, for those waters were friendly and did not need the threat of the beast to tame the unfriendly spirits, but the threat was always needed off enemy coasts. But the cross on the
Ðrines
’s bow was fixed. The upright was simply the prow timber extended a few feet above the deck which meant my men would have to use axes to cut the thing down, but once it was gone we would no longer be inviting attack. I was sure there were no Christian ships ahead of us, only enemies.

The axes did their work in the grey light of a limpid dawn. Some of the Christians flinched when the big cross finally splashed overboard, bumped hard against the hull, and was left behind. A flutter of wind rippled the sea and our sail was hoisted again, the oars shipped, and we let the small wind carry us northwards. Far off to the east I saw a scatter of dark sails, and guessed they were Welsh fishing craft. A cloud of gulls whirled about the ships, which, seeing us, hurried back towards the land, and that land showed an hour or so after dawn.

And so we sailed. But to what? I did not know. I touched the hammer hanging about my neck and prayed to Thor that my instincts were wrong, that we would reach the Mærse and find nothing but peace.

But my instincts were not wrong. We sailed towards trouble.

Next night we sheltered against the northern Welsh coast, anchored in a cove while the wind howled above us. Rain pelted down. Lightning struck ashore, each flash showing gaunt hills and sleeting rain. The storm came fast and passed quickly. Long before dawn it had gone, a sudden anger of the gods. What it meant I did not know and could only fear, yet by dawn the wind was calm again, the clouds had scattered, and the rising sun was flickering from the settling waves as we hauled the stone and thrust oars into tholes.

I took one of the oars. There was no pain, though after an hour my body ached from the exertion. We chanted the song of Beowulf, an ancient song telling how that hero swam for a whole day to reach the bottom of a great lake, there to fight Grendel’s dam, the monstrous hag. ‘Wearp ð
ā
wunden-mæl,’ we bellowed as the oar blades bit, ‘wrættum gebunden,’ as we hauled on the looms, ‘yrre oretta, þæt hit on eorðan læg,’ as we dragged the hull through the glittering sea, ‘stið ond styl-ecg,’ as we recovered the oars and swung them back. The words told how Beowulf, realising his sword could not bite through the monster’s thick hide, had hurled the blade away, had hurled away his blade which had smoke-like curling patterns traced through its steel, just as Serpent-Breath did, and instead he had wrestled with the hag, forcing her to the floor. He took her blows and returned them, and finally snatched one of her own swords, a brutal blade from the days when giants strode the earth, a sword so heavy that only a hero could wield it, and Beowulf chopped the blade into the monster’s neck and the shrieks of her dying echoed to the roof of the sky. It is a good tale, taught to me by Ealdwulf the smith when I was a child, though he chanted the old version, not the new one that my men bellowed as the
Ðrines
clove the morning sea. They shouted that ‘H
ā
lig God’ gave Beowulf the victory, but in Ealdwulf’s telling it had been Thor, not holy God, who gave the hero the strength to overcome the vile creature.

And I prayed to Thor to give me strength, which is why I hauled on that oar’s loom. A man needs strength to wield a sword, to hold a shield, to thrust at the enemy. I was going to battle and I was weak, so weak that after an hour of rowing I gave up the oar to Eadric and joined my son on the steering boards at the stern. My arms ached, but there was no pain in my side.

All day we rowed, and as the sun sank behind us we came to the great mud flats that stretch out from Wirhealum, to the place where the rivers and the land and the sea all mingle, and where the tides race across the rippled flats and the seabirds flock thick as snow. To our south was the mouth of the Dee, wider than the Mærse, and I wondered if I was making the wrong choice and that we should be rowing into the Dee to take our ship straight to Ceaster, but instead we pulled into the enclosing banks of the Mærse. I feared that Sigtryggr, if he had come at all, would already have used the Dee to storm ashore and capture Ceaster. I touched the hammer about my neck and prayed.

The mud gave way to grass and reeds, then to pastureland and heath, to low woods and gentle hills covered in the bright yellow blaze of broom. To our south, on Wirhealum, an occasional trace of smoke showed where a hall or steading stood among the trees but no great smear of fire smirched the evening sky. It looked peaceful. Cows grazed a meadow, and there were sheep on the higher land. I was looking for Æthelflaed’s new burh, but saw no sign of it. I knew she was building it to guard this river, which meant it must be close to the bank, and she was no fool, which meant it had to be on the southern bank so that men could easily reach it from Ceaster, but as our shadow grew longer on the water, I saw no wall, no palisade.

The
Ðrines
drifted on. We were using the oars only to keep her headed upriver, letting the strong tide carry us. We went slowly because the river was treacherous with shallows. Mudbanks showed on either side, but the swirl of the darkening water hinted where the channel lay, and so we crept inland. A small boy was digging in the mud of the northern bank and he paused to wave to us. I waved back and wondered whether he was Dane or Norse. I doubted he was Saxon. This land had been ruled by the Northmen for years, but our capture of Ceaster meant we could now take the surrounding land back and fill it with Saxons.

‘There,’ Finan said, and I looked away from the boy to gaze upriver and saw a thicket of masts showing above a copse. At first I took the masts to be trees, then saw how straight and bare they stood, stark lines against the darkening sky, and the tide was carrying us and I dared not turn for fear of grounding the
Ðrines
on some unseen shallow. It would have been prudent to turn because those masts showed that Sigtryggr had come here, to the Mærse, and that all his ships were beached on Wirhealum, not at Ceaster, and that an army of Norsemen waited for us, but the tide was like fate. It carried us. And just inland of the masts was smoke, not a great smear of destruction, but the mist of cooking fires sifting the twilight above the low trees, and I guessed we had found Æthelflaed’s new burh.

And so, for the first but not for the last time in my life, I came to Brunanburh.

We rounded a gentle curve and saw the Norsemen’s ships. They were mostly beached, but a few were still afloat, moored close to the muddy shore. I began counting. ‘Twenty-six,’ Finan said. Some of the beached ships had been dismasted, evidence that Sigtryggr planned a long stay.

It was almost low water. The river looked wide enough, but that was deceptive because there were shallows all around us. ‘What do we do?’ my son asked.

‘I’ll tell you when I know,’ I grunted, then leaned on the steering-oar so that we went closer to Sigtryggr’s fleet. The sun had almost gone and twilight was melding the shadows that stretched dark across the land.

‘There’s enough of the bastards,’ Finan said quietly. He was gazing ashore.

I kept glancing ashore, but mostly I watched the river, intent on keeping the
Ðrines
from grounding. My men were gazing southwards, forgetting their oars, and I shouted at them to row, and, when the boat was gently moving again, I gave my son the steering-oar and stared at Æthelflaed’s new burh. So far her builders had made an earthen wall on a rise of land close to the river. That wall was little more than a mound, perhaps the height of a man and over two hundred paces long. A hall had been built alongside two smaller buildings, perhaps stables, but there was no palisade yet. That wooden wall would need hundreds of stout trunks, oak or elm, and there were no large trees close to the new earthen wall to provide such massive trunks. ‘She’ll have to bring the timbers here,’ I said.

‘If she ever finishes it,’ Finan remarked.

I assumed the burh was square in shape, but from the deck of the
Ðrines
it was impossible to tell. The hall was not large, and its new timbers showed bright in the fading light. I guessed it was there to shelter Æthelflaed’s builders and, once the burh was finished, a larger hall would be made. Then I saw the cross on the hall’s gable and almost laughed aloud. ‘That’s a church,’ I said, ‘not a hall!’