The Pagan Lord

He took a breath and I pressed my knee on Lightning’s flank and the great horse moved a pace closer to the ranting fool. I was as angry as the twins.

‘Curse him, O Lord,’ he shouted, ‘and in thy great mercy bring him low! Curse him and his kin, may they never know grace! Smite him, O Lord, with filth and pain and misery!’

‘Father!’ the man who had been my son shouted.

Æthelstan chuckled. Uhtred, my only son, gasped.

Because I had kicked the ranting fool. I had pulled my right foot from the stirrup and lashed out with the heavy boot and his words stopped abruptly, replaced by blood on his lips. He staggered backwards, his right hand pawing at his shattered mouth. ‘Spit out your teeth,’ I ordered him, and when he disobeyed I half drew Serpent-Breath.

He spat out a mix of blood, spittle and broken teeth. ‘Which one are you?’ I asked the other twin.

He gaped at me, then recovered his wits. ‘Ceolnoth,’ he said.

‘At least I can tell the two of you apart now,’ I said.

I did not look at Father Judas. I just rode away.

I rode home.

Perhaps Ceolberht’s curse had worked, because I came home to death, smoke and ruin.

Cnut Ranulfson had raided my hall. He had burned it. He had killed. He had taken Sigunn captive.

None of it made sense, not then. My estate was close to Cirrenceastre, which was deep inside Mercia. A band of horse-Danes had ridden far, risking battle and capture, to attack my hall. I could understand that. A victory over Uhtred would give a man reputation, it would spur the poets to taunting songs of victory, but they had attacked while the hall was almost empty. They would surely have sent scouts? They would have suborned folk to be spies for them, to discover when I was there and when I was likely to be absent, and such spies would surely have told them that I had been summoned to Lundene to advise King Edward’s men on that city’s defences. Yet they had risked disaster to attack an almost empty hall? It made no sense.

And they had taken Sigunn.

She was my woman. Not my wife. Since Gisela died I had not taken another wife, though I had lovers in those days. Æthelflaed was my lover, but Æthelflaed was another man’s wife and the daughter of the dead King Alfred, and we could not live together as man and wife. Sigunn lived with me instead, and Æthelflaed knew it. ‘If it wasn’t Sigunn,’ she had told me one day, ‘it would be another.’

‘Maybe a dozen others.’

‘Maybe.’

I had captured Sigunn at Beamfleot. She was a Dane, a slender, pale, pretty Dane who had been weeping for her slaughtered husband when she was dragged out of a sea-ditch running with blood. We had lived together almost ten years now and she was treated with honour and hung with gold. She was the lady of my hall and now she was gone. She had been taken by Cnut Ranulfson, Cnut Longsword.

‘It was three mornings ago,’ Osferth told me. He was the bastard son of King Alfred, who had tried to turn him into a priest, but Osferth, even though he had the face and mind of a cleric, preferred to be a warrior. He was careful, precise, intelligent, reliable and rarely impassioned. He resembled his father, and the older he got the more like his father he looked.

‘So it was Sunday morning,’ I said bleakly.

‘Everyone was in the church, lord,’ Osferth explained.

‘Except Sigunn.’

‘Who is no Christian, lord,’ he said, sounding disapproving.

Finan, who was my companion and the man who commanded my troops if I was absent, had taken twenty men to reinforce Æthelflaed’s bodyguard as she toured Mercia. She had been inspecting the burhs that guarded Mercia from the Danes, and doubtless worshipping in churches across the land. Her husband, Æthelred, was reluctant to leave the sanctuary of Gleawecestre and so Æthelflaed did his duty. She had her own warriors who guarded her, but I still feared for her safety, not from the Mercians, who loved her, but from her husband’s followers, and so I had insisted she take Finan and twenty men and, in the Irishman’s absence, Osferth had been in charge of the men guarding Fagranforda. He had left six men to watch over the hall, barns, stables and mill, and six men should have been more than enough because my estate lay a long way from the northern lands where the Danes ruled. ‘I blame myself, lord,’ Osferth said.

‘Six was enough,’ I said. And the six were all dead, as was Herric, my crippled steward, and three other servants. Some forty or fifty horses were gone, while the hall was burned. Some of the walls still stood, gaunt scorched trunks, but the hall’s centre was just a heap of smoking ash. The Danes had arrived fast, broken down the hall door, slaughtered Herric and anyone else who tried to oppose them, then had taken Sigunn and left. ‘They knew you’d all be in the church,’ I said.

‘Which is why they came on Sunday,’ Sihtric, another of my men, finished the thought.

‘And they would have known you wouldn’t be worshipping,’ Osferth said.

‘How many were there?’ I asked Osferth.

‘Forty or fifty,’ he replied patiently. I had asked him the question a dozen times already.

Danes do not make a raid like this for pleasure. There were plenty of Saxon halls and steadings within easy reach of their lands, but these men had risked riding deep into Mercia. For Sigunn? She was nothing to them.

‘They came to kill you, lord,’ Osferth suggested.

Yet the Danes would have scouted the land first, they would have talked to travellers, they would know that I always had at least twenty men with me. I had chosen not to take those twenty into Tofeceaster to punish the man who had been my son because a warrior does not need twenty men to deal with a pack of priests. My son and a boy had been company enough. But the Danes could not have known I was at Tofeceaster, even I had not known I was going there till I heard the news that my damned son was becoming a Christian wizard. Yet Cnut Ranulfson had risked his men in a long, pointless raid, despite the danger of meeting my men. He would have outnumbered me, but he would have taken casualties that he could ill afford, and Cnut Longsword was a calculating man, not given to idiotic risks. None of it made sense. ‘You’re sure it was Cnut Ranulfson?’ I asked Osferth.

‘They carried his banner, lord.’

‘The axe and broken cross?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And where’s Father Cuthbert?’ I asked. I keep priests. I am no Christian, but such is the reach of the nailed god that most of my men are, and in those days Cuthbert was my priest. I liked him. He was the son of a stonemason, gangly and clumsy, married to a freed slave with the strange name of Mehrasa. She was a dark-skinned beauty captured in some weird land far to the south and brought to Britain by a slave-trader who had died on the blade of my sword, and Mehrasa was now wailing and screaming that her husband was gone. ‘Why wasn’t he in church?’ I asked Osferth, to which his only answer was a shrug. ‘He was humping Mehrasa?’ I asked sourly.

‘Isn’t he always?’ Osferth sounded disapproving again.

‘So where is he?’ I asked again.

‘Perhaps they took him?’ Sihtric suggested.

‘They’d rather kill a priest than capture one,’ I said. I walked towards the burned hall. Men were raking at the ashes, dragging charred and smoking timbers aside. Perhaps Cuthbert’s body was there, shrivelled and black. ‘Tell me what you saw,’ I demanded of Osferth again.

He repeated it all patiently. He had been in Fagranforda’s church when he heard shouting coming from my hall, which lay not too far away. He left the church to see the first smoke drifting in the summer sky, but by the time he had summoned his men and mounted his horse the raiders were gone. He had followed them and had caught a glimpse of them and was certain he had seen Sigunn among the dark-mailed horsemen. ‘She was wearing the white dress, lord, the one you like.’

‘But you didn’t see Father Cuthbert?’

‘He was wearing black, lord, but so were most of the raiders, so I might not have noticed him. We never got close. They were riding like the wind.’

Bones appeared among the ash. I walked through the old hall door, which was marked by burned posts, and smelt the stench of roasted flesh. I kicked a charred beam aside and saw a harp in the ashes. Why had that not burned? The strings had shrivelled to black stubs, but the harp frame looked undamaged. I bent to pick it up and the warm wood just crumbled in my hand. ‘What happened to Oslic?’ I asked. He had been the harpist, a poet who chanted war-songs in the hall.

‘They killed him, lord,’ Osferth said.

Mehrasa began wailing louder. She was staring at the bones that a man had raked from the ashes. ‘Tell her to be quiet,’ I snarled.

‘They’re dogs’ bones, lord.’ The man with the rake bowed to me.

The hall dogs, the ones Sigunn loved. They were small terriers, adept at killing rats. The man pulled a melted silver dish from the ash. ‘They didn’t come to kill me,’ I said, staring at the small ribcages.

‘Who else?’ Sihtric asked. Sihtric had been my servant once and was now a house-warrior and a good one.

‘They came for Sigunn,’ I said, because I could think of no other explanation.

‘But why, lord? She’s not your wife.’

‘He knows I’m fond of her,’ I said, ‘and that means he wants something.’

‘Cnut Longsword,’ Sihtric said ominously.

Sihtric was no coward. His father had been Kjartan the Cruel, and Sihtric had inherited his father’s skill with weapons. Sihtric had stood in the shield wall with me and I knew his bravery, but he had sounded nervous when he spoke Cnut’s name. No wonder. Cnut Ranulfson was a legend in the lands where the Danes ruled. He was a slight man, very pale skinned with hair that was bone-white though he was no old man. I guessed he was now close to forty, which was old enough, but Cnut’s hair had been white from the day he was born. And he had been born clever and ruthless. His sword, Ice-Spite, was feared from the northern isles to the southern coast of Wessex, and his renown had attracted oath-men who came from across the sea to serve him. He and his friend, Sigurd Thorrson, were the greatest Danish lords of Northumbria, and their ambition was to be the greatest lords of Britain, but they had an enemy who had stopped them repeatedly.

And now Cnut Ranulfson, Cnut Longsword, the most feared swordsman in Britain, had taken that enemy’s woman. ‘He wants something,’ I said again.

‘You?’ Osferth asked.

‘We’ll find out,’ I said, and so we did.

We discovered what Cnut Ranulfson wanted that evening when Father Cuthbert came home. The priest was brought by a merchant who traded in pelts, and he had Father Cuthbert on his wagon. It was Mehrasa who alerted us. She screamed.

I was in the big barn that the Danes had not had time to burn, and which we could use for a hall until I built another, and I was watching my men make a hearth from stones when I heard the scream and ran out to see the wagon lurching up the lane. Mehrasa was tugging at her husband while Cuthbert was flailing with his long skinny arms. Mehrasa was still screaming. ‘Quiet!’ I shouted.

My men were following me. The pelt-trader had stopped his wagon and fallen to his knees as I approached. He explained that he had found Father Cuthbert to the north. ‘He was at Beorgford, lord,’ he said, ‘by the river. They were throwing stones at him.’

‘Who was throwing stones?’

‘Boys, lord. Just boys playing.’

So Cnut had ridden to the ford where, presumably, he had released the priest. Cuthbert’s long robe was mud-stained and torn, while his scalp was crusted with blood clots. ‘What did you do to the boys?’ I asked the trader.

‘Just chased them away, lord.’

‘Where was he?’

‘In the rushes, lord, by the river. He was crying.’

‘Father Cuthbert,’ I said, walking to the wagon.

‘Lord! Lord!’ he reached a hand for me.

‘He couldn’t cry,’ I told the trader. ‘Osferth! Give the man money.’ I gestured at the priest’s rescuer. ‘We’ll feed you,’ I told the man, ‘and stable your horses overnight.’

‘Lord!’ Father Cuthbert wailed.

I reached into the cart and lifted him. He was tall, but surprisingly light. ‘You can stand?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, lord.’

I put him on the ground, steadied him, then stepped away as Mehrasa embraced him.

‘Lord,’ he said over her shoulder, ‘I have a message.’

He sounded as if he was crying, and perhaps he was, but a man with no eyes cannot cry. A man with two bloody eye-holes cannot cry. A blinded man must cry, and cannot.

Cnut Ranulfson had gouged out his eyes.

Tameworþig. That was where I was to meet Cnut Ranulfson. ‘He said you would know why, lord,’ Father Cuthbert told me.

‘That’s all he said?’

‘You’d know why,’ he repeated, ‘and you will make it good, and you’re to meet him before the moon wanes or he’ll kill your woman. Slowly.’

I went to the barn door and looked up into the night, but the moon was hidden by clouds. Not that I needed to see how slender its crescent glowed. I had one week before it waned. ‘What else did he say?’

‘Just that you’re to go to Tameworþig before the moon dies, lord.’

‘And make good?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘He said you’d know what that means, lord.’

‘I don’t know!’

‘And he said …’ Father Cuthbert said slowly.

‘Said what?’

‘He said he blinded me so I couldn’t see her.’

‘See her? See who?’

‘He said I wasn’t worthy to look on her, lord.’

‘Look on who?’

‘So he blinded me!’ he wailed and Mehrasa started screeching and I could get no sense from either.

But at least I knew Tameworþig, though fate had never taken me to that town, which lay at the edge of Cnut Ranulfson’s lands. It had once been a great town, the capital of the mighty King Offa, the Mercian ruler who had built a wall against the Welsh and dominated both Northumbria and Wessex. Offa had claimed to be the king of all the Saxons, but he was long dead and his powerful kingdom of Mercia was now a sad remnant split between Danes and Saxons. Tameworþig, which had once housed the greatest king of all Britain, the fortress city that had sheltered his feared troops, was now a decayed ruin where Saxons slaved for Danish jarls. It was also the most southerly of all Cnut’s halls, an outpost of Danish power in a disputed borderland.

‘It’s a trap,’ Osferth warned me.

I somehow doubted it. Instinct is everything. What Cnut Ranulfson had done was dangerous, a great risk. He had sent men, or brought men, deep into Mercia where his small raiding band could easily have been cut off and slaughtered to the last man. Yet something had driven him to that risk. He wanted something, and he believed I possessed it, and he had summoned me, not to one of the great halls deep in his own land, but to Tameworþig that lay very close to Saxon territory.

‘We ride,’ I said.

I took every man who could mount a horse. We numbered sixty-eight warriors, mailed and helmeted, carrying shields, axes, swords, spears and war-hammers. We rode behind my banner of the wolf, and we rode northwards through chill summer winds and sudden spiteful showers of rain. ‘The harvest will be poor,’ I told Osferth as we rode.

‘Like last year, lord.’

‘We’d best look to see who’s selling grain.’

‘The price will be high.’

‘Better that than dead children,’ I told him.

‘You’re the hlaford,’ he said.

I turned in my saddle. ‘Æthelstan!’

‘Lord Uhtred?’ The boy quickened his stallion’s pace.

‘Why am I called a hlaford?’

‘Because you guard the loaf, lord,’ he said, ‘and a hlaford’s duty is to feed his people.’

I grunted approval of his answer. Hlaford is a lord, the man who guards the hlaf, the loaf. My duty was to keep my people alive through winter’s harshness and if that took gold, then gold must be spent. I had gold, but never enough. I dreamed of Bebbanburg, of the fortress in the north that had been stolen from me by Ælfric, my uncle. It was the impregnable fort, the last refuge on Northumbria’s coast, so grim and formidable that the Danes had never captured it. They had taken all of northern Britain, from the rich pastures of Mercia to the wild Scottish frontier, but they had never taken Bebbanburg, and if I was to take it back I needed more gold for men, more gold for spears, more gold for axes, more gold for swords, more gold so that we could beat down the kinsmen who had stolen my fortress. But to do that we would have to fight through all the Danish lands, and I had begun to fear I would die before I ever reached Bebbanburg again.

We reached Tameworþig on the second day of our journey. Somewhere we crossed the frontier between the Saxon and the Danish lands, a frontier that was no fixed line, but was a broad stretch of country where the steadings had been burned, the orchards cut down, and where few animals except the wild beasts grazed. Yet some of those old farms had been rebuilt; I saw a new barn, its timber bright, and there were cattle in some of the meadows. Peace was bringing men to the frontier lands. That peace had lasted since the battle in East Anglia that had followed Alfred’s death, though it had ever been an uncomfortable peace. There had been cattle raids, and slave raids, and squabbles over land boundaries, but no armies had been raised. The Danes still wanted to conquer the south, and the Saxons dreamed of taking back the north, but for ten years we had lived in morose quiet. I had wanted to disturb the peace, to lead an army north towards Bebbanburg, but neither Mercia nor Wessex would give me men and so I too had kept the peace.

And now Cnut had disturbed it.

He knew we were coming. He would have posted scouts to watch all the tracks from the south and so we took no precautions. Usually, when we rode the wild border, we had our own scouts far ahead, but instead we rode boldly, keeping to a Roman road, knowing that Cnut was waiting. And so he was.

Tameworþig was built just north of the River Tame. Cnut met us south of the river, and he wanted to overawe us because he had more than two hundred men standing in a shield wall athwart the road. His banner, which showed a war axe shattering a Christian cross, flew at the line’s centre, and Cnut himself, resplendent in mail, cloaked in dark brown with fur shrouding his shoulders, and with his arms bright with gold, waited on horseback a few paces ahead of his men.

I stopped my men and rode forward alone.

Cnut rode towards me.

We curbed our horses a spear’s length from each other. We looked at one another.

His thin face was framed by a helmet. His pale skin looked drawn, and his mouth, which usually smiled so easily, was a grim slash. He looked older than I remembered and it struck me at that moment, watching his grey eyes, that if Cnut Ranulfson were to achieve his life’s dreams then he must do it soon.

We watched each other and the rain fell. A raven flew from some ash trees and I wondered what kind of omen that was. ‘Jarl Cnut,’ I broke the silence.

‘Lord Uhtred,’ he said. His horse, a grey stallion, skittered sideways and he slapped its neck with a gloved hand to still it. ‘I summon you,’ he said, ‘and you come running like a scared child.’

‘You want to trade insults?’ I asked him. ‘You, who were born of a woman who lay with any man who snapped his fingers?’

He was silent for a while. Off to my left, half hidden by trees, a river ran cold in that bleak summer’s rain. Two swans beat up the river, their wings slow in the chill air. A raven and two swans? I touched the hammer about my neck, hoping those omens were good.

‘Where is she?’ Cnut spoke at last.

‘If I knew who she was,’ I said, ‘I might answer you.’

He looked past me to where my men waited on horseback. ‘You didn’t bring her,’ he said flatly.

‘You’re going to talk in riddles?’ I asked him. ‘Then answer me this one. Four dilly-dandies, four long standies, two crooked pandies and a wagger.’

‘Be careful,’ he said.

‘The answer is a goat,’ I said, ‘four teats, four legs, two horns and a tail. An easy riddle, but yours is difficult.’

He stared at me. ‘Two weeks ago,’ he said, ‘that banner was on my land.’ He pointed to my flag.

‘I did not send it, I did not bring it,’ I said.

‘Seventy men, I’m told,’ he ignored my words, ‘and they rode to Buchestanes.’

‘I’ve been there, but not in many years.’

‘They took my wife and they took my son and daughter.’

I gazed at him. He had spoken flatly, but the expression on his face was bitter and defiant. ‘I had heard you have a son,’ I said.

‘He is called Cnut Cnutson and you captured him, with his mother and sister.’

‘I did not,’ I said firmly. Cnut’s first wife had died years before, as had his children, but I had heard of his new marriage. It was a surprising marriage. Men would have expected Cnut to marry for advantage, for land, for a rich dowry, or for an alliance, but rumour said his new wife was some peasant girl. She was reputed to be a woman of extraordinary beauty, and she had given him twin children, a boy and a girl. He had other children, of course, bastards all, but the new wife had given him what he most wanted, an heir. ‘How old is your son?’ I asked.

‘Six years and seven months.’

‘And why was he at Buchestanes?’ I asked. ‘To hear his future?’

‘My wife took him to see the sorceress,’ Cnut answered.

‘She lives?’ I asked, astonished. The sorceress had been ancient when I saw her and I had assumed she was long dead.

‘Pray that my wife and children live,’ Cnut said harshly, ‘and that they are unharmed.’

‘I know nothing of your wife and children,’ I said.

‘Your men took them!’ he snarled. ‘It was your banner!’ He touched a gloved hand to the hilt of his famed sword, Ice-Spite. ‘Return them to me,’ he said, ‘or your woman will be given to my men, and when they have done with her I’ll flay her alive, slowly, and send you her skin for a saddlecloth.’

I turned in the saddle. ‘Uhtred! Come here!’ My son spurred his horse. He stopped beside me, looked at Cnut, then back to me. ‘Dismount,’ I ordered him, ‘and walk to Jarl Cnut’s stirrup.’ Uhtred hesitated a heartbeat, then swung out of the saddle. I leaned over to take his stallion’s bridle. Cnut frowned, not understanding what was happening, then glanced down at Uhtred, who was standing obediently beside the big grey horse. ‘That is my only son,’ I said.

‘I thought …’ Cnut began.

‘That is my only son,’ I said angrily. ‘If I lie to you now then you may take him and do as you wish with him. I swear on my only son’s life that I did not take your wife and children away. I sent no men into your land. I know nothing of any raid on Buchestanes.’

‘They carried your banner.’

‘Banners are easy to make,’ I said.

The rain hardened, driven by gusts of wind that shivered the puddles in the ruts of the nearby fields. Cnut looked down at Uhtred. ‘He looks like you,’ he said, ‘ugly as a toad.’

‘I did not ride to Buchestanes,’ I told him harshly, ‘and I sent no men into your land.’

‘Get on your horse,’ Cnut told my son, then looked at me. ‘You’re an enemy, Lord Uhtred.’

‘I am.’

‘But I suppose you’re thirsty?’

‘That too,’ I said.

‘Then tell your men to keep their blades sheathed, tell them that this is my land and that it will be my pleasure to kill any man who irritates me. Then bring them to the hall. We have ale. It isn’t good ale, but probably good enough for Saxon swine.’

He turned and spurred away. We followed.

The hall was built atop a small hill, and the hill was ringed with an ancient earth wall that I supposed had been made on the orders of King Offa. A palisade topped the wall, and inside that wooden rampart was a high-gabled hall, its timbers dark with age. Some of those timbers had been carved with intricate patterns, but lichen now hid the carvings. The great door was crowned with antlers and wolf skulls, while inside the ancient building the high roof was supported by massive oak beams from which more skulls hung. The hall was lit by a fierce fire spitting in the central hearth. If I had been surprised by Cnut’s offer of hospitality I was even more surprised when I walked into that high hall, for there, waiting on the dais and grinning like a demented weasel, was Haesten.