The Burning Land Read online

  Saxon 5 - The Burning Land

  Saxon 5 - The Burning Land

  PART ONE

  THE WARLORD

  Saxon 5 - The Burning Land

  ONE

  Not long ago I was in some monastery. I forget where except that it was in the lands that were once Mercia. I was traveling home with a dozen men, it was a wet winter’s day, and all we needed was shelter, food, and warmth, but the monks behaved as though a band of Norsemen had arrived at their gate. Uhtred of Bebbanburg was within their walls and such is my reputation that they expected me to start slaughtering them. “I just want bread,” I finally made them understand, “cheese if you have it, and some ale.” I threw money on the hall floor. “Bread, cheese, ale, and a warm bed. Nothing more!”

  Next morning it was raining like the world was ending and so I waited until the wind and weather had done their worst. I roamed the monastery and eventually found myself in a dank corridor where three miserable- looking monks were copying manuscripts. An older monk, white- haired, sour- faced and resentful, supervised them. He wore a fur stole over his habit, and had a leather quirt with which he doubtless encouraged the industry of the three copyists. “They should not be disturbed, lord,” he dared to chide me. He sat on a stool beside a brazier, the warmth of which did not reach the three scribblers.

  “The latrines haven’t been licked clean,” I told him, “and you look idle.”

  So the older monk went quiet and I looked over the shoulders of the ink- stained copyists. One, a slack- faced youth with fat lips and a fatter goiter on his neck, was transcribing a life of Saint Ciaran, which told how a wolf, a badger, and a fox had helped build a church in Ireland, and if the young monk believed that nonsense then he was as big a fool as he looked. The second was doing something useful by copying a land grant, though in all probability it was a forgery. Monasteries are adept at inventing old land grants, proving that some ancient half- forgotten king has granted the church a rich estate, thus forcing the rightful owner to either yield the ground or pay a vast sum in compensation. They tried it on me once. A priest brought the documents and I pissed on them, and then I posted twenty sword- warriors on the disputed land and sent word to the bishop that he could come and take it whenever he wished. He never did. Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much nonsense as supposing that a badger, a fox, and a wolf could build a church. The way to wealth is to become a Christian bishop or a monastery’s abbot and thus be imbued with heaven’s permission to lie, cheat, and steal your way to luxury.

  The third young man was copying a chronicle. I moved his quill aside so I could see what he had just written. “You can read, lord?” the old monk asked. He made it sound like an innocent inquiry, but the sarcasm was unmistakable.

  “‘In this year,’” I read aloud, “‘the pagans again came to Wessex, in great force, a horde as had never been seen before, and they ravaged all the lands, causing mighty distress to God’s people, who, by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, were rescued by the Lord AEthelred of Mercia who came with his army to Fearnhamme, in which place he did utterly destroy the heathen.’” I prodded the text with a finger. “What year did this happen?” I asked the copyist.

  “In the year of our Lord 892, lord,” he said nervously.

  “So what is this?” I asked, flicking the pages of the parchment from which he copied.

  “They are annals,” the elderly monk answered for the younger man, “the Annals of Mercia. That is the only copy, lord, and we are making another.”

  I looked back at the freshly written page. “AEthelred rescued Wessex?” I asked indignantly.

  “It was so,” the old monk said, “with God’s help”

  “God?” I snarled. “It was with my help! I fought that battle, not AEthelred!” None of the monks spoke. They just stared at me. One of my men came to the cloister end of the passageway and leaned there, a grin on his half- toothless face. “I was at Fearnhamme!” I added, then snatched up the only copy of the Annals of Mercia and turned its stiff pages. AEthelred, AEthelred, AEthelred, and not a mention of Uhtred, hardly a mention of Alfred, no AEthelflaed, just AEthelred. I turned to the page which told of the events after Fearnhamme. “‘And in this year,’” I read aloud, “‘by God’s good grace, the lord AEthelred and the AEtheling Edward led the men of Mercia to Beamfleot where AEthelred took great plunder and made mighty slaughter of the pagans.’” I looked at the older monk. “AEthelred and Edward led that army?”

  “So it is said, lord.” He spoke nervously, his earlier defiance completely gone.

  “I led them, you bastard,” I said. I snatched up the copied pages and took both them and the original annals to the brazier.

  “No!” the older man protested.

  “They’re lies,” I said.

  He held up a placatory hand. “For forty years, lord,” he said humbly, “those records have been compiled and preserved. They are the tale of our people! That is the only copy!”

  “They’re lies,” I said again. “I was there. I was on the hill at Fearnhamme and in the ditch at Beamfleot. Were you there?”

  “I was just a child, lord,” he said.

  He gave an appalled shriek when I tossed the manuscripts onto the brazier. He tried to rescue the parchments, but I knocked his hand away. “I was there,” I said again, staring at the blackening sheets that curled and crackled before the fire flared bright at their edges. “I was there.”

  “Forty years’ work!” the old monk said in disbelief.

  “If you want to know what happened,” I said, “then come to me in Bebbanburg and I’ll tell you the truth.”

  They never came. Of course they did not come.

  But I was at Fearnhamme, and that was just the beginning of the tale.

  Saxon 5 - The Burning Land

  TWO

  Morning, and I was young, and the sea was a shimmer of silver and pink beneath wisps of mist that obscured the coasts. To my south was Cent, to my north lay East Anglia, and behind me was Lundene, while ahead the sun was rising to gild the few small clouds that stretched across the dawn’s bright sky.

  We were in the estuary of the Temes. My ship, the Seolferwulf, was newly built and she leaked, as new ships will. Frisian craftsmen had made her from oak timbers that were unusually pale, and thus her name, the Silverwolf. Behind me were the Kenelm, named by King Alfred for some murdered saint, and the Dragon- Voyager, a ship we had taken from the Danes. Dragon- Voyager was a beauty, built as only the Danes could build. A sleek killer of a ship, docile to handle yet lethal in battle.

  Seolferwulf was also a beauty; long- keeled, wide- beamed, and high- prowed. I had paid for her myself, giving gold to Frisian shipwrights, and watching as her ribs grew and as her planking made a skin and as her proud bow reared above the slipway. On that prow was a wolf’s head, carved from oak and painted white with a red lolling tongue and red eyes and yellow fangs. Bishop Erkenwald, who ruled Lundene, had chided me, saying I should have named the ship for some Christian milksop saint, and he had presented me with a crucifix that he wanted me to nail to Seolferwulf ‘s mast, but instead I burned the wooden god and his wooden cross and mixed their ashes with crushed apples, that I fed to my two sows. I worship Thor.

  Now, on that distant morning when I was still young, we rowed eastward on that pink and silver sea. My wolf’s- head prow was decorated with a thick- leaved bough of oak to show we intended no harm to our enemies, though my men were still dressed in mail and had shields and weapons close to their oars. Finan, my second in command, crouched near me on the steering platform and listened with amusement to Father Willibald, who was talking too much. “Other Danes have received Christ’s mercy, Lord Uhtred,” he said. He had been spouti
ng this nonsense ever since we had left Lundene, but I endured it because I liked Willibald. He was an eager, hardworking, and cheerful man. “With God’s good help,” he went on, “we shall spread the light of Christ among these heathen!”

  “Why don’t the Danes send us missionaries?” I asked.

  “God prevents it, lord,” Willibald said. His companion, a priest whose name I have long forgotten, nodded earnest agreement.

  “Maybe they’ve got better things to do?” I suggested.

  “If the Danes have ears to hear, lord,” Willibald assured me, “then they will receive Christ’s message with joy and gladness!”

  “You’re a fool, father,” I said fondly. “You know how many of Alfred’s missionaries have been slaughtered?”

  “We must all be prepared for martyrdom, lord,” Willibald said, though anxiously.

  “They have their priestly guts slit open,” I said ruminatively, “they have their eyes gouged out, their balls sliced off, and their tongues ripped out. Remember that monk we found at Yppe?” I asked Finan. Finan was a fugitive from Ireland, where he had been raised a Christian, though his religion was so tangled with native myths that it was scarcely recognizable as the same faith that Willibald preached. “How did that poor man die?” I asked.

  “They skinned the poor soul alive,” Finan said.

  “Started at his toes?”

  “Just peeled it off slowly,” Finan said, “and it must have taken hours.”

  “They didn’t peel it,” I said, “you can’t skin a man like a lamb.”

  “True,” Finan said. “You have to tug it off. Takes a lot of strength!”

  “He was a missionary,” I told Willibald.

  “And a blessed martyr too,” Finan added cheerfully. “But they must have got bored because they finished him off in the end. They used a tree- saw on his belly.”

  “It was probably an ax,” I said.

  “No, it was a saw, lord,” Finan insisted, grinning, “and one with savage big teeth. Ripped him into two, it did.” Father Willibald, who had always been a martyr to seasickness, staggered to the ship’s side.

  We turned the ship southward. The estuary of the Temes is a treacherous place of mudbanks and strong tides, but I had been patrolling these waters for five years now and I scarcely needed to look for my landmarks as we rowed toward the shore of Scaepege. And there, ahead of me, waiting between two beached ships, was the enemy. The Danes. There must have been a hundred or more men, all in chain mail, all helmeted, and all with bright weapons. “We could slaughter the whole crew,” I suggested to Finan. “We’ve got enough men.”

  “We agreed to come in peace!” Father Willibald protested, wiping his mouth with a sleeve.

  And so we had, and so we did.

  I ordered Kenelm and Dragon- Voyager to stay close to the muddy shore, while we drove Seolferwulf onto the gently shelving mud between the two Danish boats. Seolferwulf ‘s bows made a hissing sound as she slowed and stopped. She was firmly grounded now, but the tide was rising, so she was safe for a while. I jumped off the prow, splashing into deep wet mud, then waded to firmer ground where our enemies waited.

  “My Lord Uhtred,” the leader of the Danes greeted me. He grinned and spread his arms wide. He was a stocky man, golden- haired and square- jawed. His beard was plaited into five thick ropes fastened with silver clasps. His forearms glittered with rings of gold and silver, and more gold studded the belt from which hung a thick- bladed sword. He looked prosperous, which he was, and something about the openness of his face made him appear trustworthy, which he was not. “I am so overjoyed to see you,” he said, still smiling, “my old valued friend!”

  “Jarl Haesten,” I responded, giving him the title he liked to use, though in my mind Haesten was nothing but a pirate. I had known him for years. I had saved his life once, which was a bad day’s work, and ever since that day I had been trying to kill him, yet he always managed to slither away. He had escaped me five years before and, since then, I had heard how he had been raiding deep inside Frankia. He had amassed silver there, had whelped another son on his wife, and had attracted followers. Now he had brought eighty ships to Wessex.

  “I hoped Alfred would send you,” Haesten said, holding out a hand.

  “If Alfred hadn’t ordered me to come in peace,” I said, taking the hand, “I’d have cut that head off your shoulders by now.”

  “You bark a lot,” he said, amused, “but the louder a cur barks, lord, the weaker its bite.”

  I let that pass. I had not come to fight, but to do Alfred’s bidding, and the king had ordered me to bring missionaries to Haesten. Willibald and his companion were helped ashore by my men, then came to stand beside me, where they smiled nervously. Both priests spoke Danish, which is why they had been chosen. I had also brought Haesten a message gilded with treasure, but he feigned indifference, insisting I accompany him to his encampment before Alfred’s gift was delivered.

  Scaepege was not Haesten’s main encampment, that was some distance to the east where his eighty ships were drawn up on a beach protected by a newly made fort. He had not wanted to invite me into that fastness, and so he had insisted Alfred’s envoys meet him among the wastes of Scaepege which, even in summer, is a place of dank pools, sour grass, and dark marshes. He had arrived there two days before, and had made a crude fort by surrounding a patch of higher ground with a tangled wall of thorn bushes, inside which he had raised two sailcloth tents. “We shall eat, lord,” he invited me grandly, gesturing to a trestle table surrounded by a dozen stools. Finan, two other warriors, and the pair of priests accompanied me, though Haesten insisted the priests should not sit at the table. “I don’t trust Christian wizards,” he explained, “so they can squat on the ground.” The food was a fish stew and rock- hard bread, served by half- naked slave women, none more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and all of them Saxons.

  Haesten was humiliating the girls as a provocation and he watched for my reaction. “Are they from Wessex?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he said, pretending to be offended by the question. “I took them from East Anglia. You want one of them, lord? There, that little one has breasts firm as apples!”

  I asked the apple- breasted girl where she had been captured, and she just shook her head dumbly, too frightened to answer me. She poured me ale that had been sweetened with berries. “Where are you from?” I asked her again.

  Haesten looked at the girl, letting his eyes linger on her breasts. “Answer the lord,” he said in English.

  “I don’t know, lord,” she said.

  “Wessex?” I demanded. “East Anglia? Where?”

  “A village, lord,” she said, and that was all she knew, and I waved her away.

  “Your wife is well?” Haesten asked, watching the girl walk away.

  “She is.”

  “I am glad,” he said convincingly enough, then his shrewd eyes looked amused. “So what is your master’s message to me?” he asked, spooning fish broth into his mouth and dripping it down his beard.

  “You’re to leave Wessex,” I said.

  “I’m to leave Wessex!” He pretended to be shocked and waved a hand at the desolate marshes. “Why would a man want to leave all this, lord?”

  “You’re to leave Wessex,” I said doggedly, “agree not to invade Mercia, give my king two hostages, and accept his missionaries.”

  “Missionaries!” Haesten said, pointing his horn spoon at me. “Now you can’t approve of that, Lord Uhtred! You, at least, worship the real gods.” He twisted on the stool and stared at the two priests. “Maybe I’ll kill them.”

  “Do that,” I said, “and I’ll suck your eyeballs out of their sockets.”

  He heard the venom in my voice and was surprised by it. I saw a flicker of resentment in his eyes, but he kept his voice calm. “You’ve become a Christian, lord?”

  “Father Willibald is my friend,” I said.

  “You should have said,” he reproved me, “and I would not hav
e jested. Of course they will live and they can even preach to us, but they’ll achieve nothing. So, Alfred instructs me to take my ships away?”

  “Far away,” I said.

  “But where?” he asked in feigned innocence.

  “Frankia?” I suggested.

  “The Franks have paid me to leave them alone,” Haesten said, “they even built us ships to hasten our departure! Will Alfred build us ships?”

  “You’re to leave Wessex,” I said stubbornly, “you’re to leave Mercia untroubled, you’re to accept missionaries, and you are to give Alfred hostages.”

  “Ah.” Haesten smiled. “The hostages.” He stared at me for a few heartbeats, then appeared to forget the matter of hostages, waving seaward instead. “And where are we to go?”

  “Alfred is paying you to leave Wessex,” I said, “and where you go is not my concern, but make it very far from the reach of my sword.”

  Haesten laughed. “Your sword, lord,” he said, “rusts in its scabbard.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the south. “Wessex burns,” he said with relish, “and Alfred lets you sleep.” He was right. Far to the south, hazed in the summer sky, were pyres of smoke from a dozen or more burning villages, and those plumes were only the ones I could see. I knew there were more. Eastern Wessex was being ravaged, and, rather than summon my help to repel the invaders, Alfred had ordered me to stay in Lundene to protect that city from attack. Haesten grinned. “Maybe Alfred thinks you’re too old to fight, lord?”

  I did not respond to the taunt. Looking back down the years I think of myself as young back then, though I must have been all of thirty- five or thirty- six years old that year. Most men never live that long, but I was fortunate. I had lost none of my sword- skill or strength, I had a slight limp from an old battle- wound, but I also had the most golden of all a warrior’s attributes; reputation. But Haesten felt free to goad me, knowing that I came to him as a supplicant.