The Burning Land sc-5 Read online

  “Your wife has expensive tastes, doesn’t she?” I asked. Sihtric had married a whore, Ealhswith, much against my advice and without my permission, but I had forgiven him and then been surprised that the marriage was happy. They had two children now, both sturdy little boys. “Take it away,” I said.

  “Thank you, lord.” Sihtric scooped up the mail coat.

  Time slows.

  It is strange how I have forgotten some things. I cannot truly re member the moment when I led the swine head into Harald’s line. Was I looking into his face? Do I truly remember the horse’s fresh blood flicking from his beard as his head turned? Or was I looking at the man to his left whose shield half protected Harald? I forget so much, but not that moment as Sihtric picked up the mail coat. I saw a man leading a dozen captured horses across the flooded ford. Two other men were tugging bodies free of the corpse-dam at the ruined bridge. One of the men had red curly hair and the other was doubled over in laughter at some jest. Three other men were tossing corpses into the river, adding to the blockage of bodies faster than the pair could relieve it. A thin dog was scratching itself on the street where Osferth, Alfred’s bastard, was talking to the Lady Æthelflæd, and I was surprised that she was not in the church with her father, brother, and husband, and surprised that she and her half-brother appeared to have struck up a friendly relationship so soon. I remember Oswi, my new servant lad, leading Smoka into the street and pausing to talk to a woman, and I realized that Fearnhamme’s townsfolk were returning already. I supposed they must have hidden in the nearby woods as soon as they saw armed men across the river. Another woman, wearing a dull yellow cloak, was using a paring knife to cut a ring-circled finger from a dead Dane’s hand. I remember a raven, circling blue-black in the blood-smelling sky, and I felt a sharp elation as I stared at the bird. Was that one of Odin’s two ravens? Would the gods themselves hear of this carnage? I laughed aloud, the sound incongruous because in my memory there was just silence at that moment.

  Till Æthelflæd spoke. “Lord?” She had come close and was staring at me. “Uhtred?” she said gently. Finan was a couple of paces behind her, and with him was Cerdic, and that was when I knew. I knew, but I said nothing, and Æthelflæd walked to me and laid a hand on my arm. “Uhtred?” she said again. I think I just stared into her face. Her blue eyes were bright with tears. “Childbirth,” she said gently.

  “No,” I said, quite quietly, “no.”

  “Yes,” she said simply. Finan was looking at me, pain on his face.

  “No,” I said louder.

  “Mother and child,” Æthelflæd said very softly.

  I closed my eyes. My world went dark, had gone dark, for my Gisela was dead.

  Wyn eal gedreas. That is from another poem I sometimes hear chanted in my hall. It is a sad poem, and thus a true poem. Wyrd bið ful ãræd, it says. Fate is inexorable. And wyn eal gedreas. All the joy has died.

  All my joy had died and I had gone into the dark. Finan said I howled like a wolf, and perhaps I did, though I do not remember that. Grief must be hidden. The man who first chanted that fate is inexorable went on to say that we must bind our inmost thoughts in chains. A saddened mind does no good, he said, and its thoughts must be hidden, and maybe I did howl, but then I shook off Æthelflæd’s hand and snarled at the men heaving corpses into the river, ordering that two of them should help the men trying to clear the bodies from between the ruined bridge piers. “Make sure all our horses are down from the hilltop,” I told Finan.

  I did not think of Skade at that moment, or else I might have let Serpent-Breath take her rotten soul. It was her curse, I realized later, that killed Gisela, because she had died on the same morning that Harald had forced me to free Skade. Cerdic had ridden to tell me, his heart heavy as he took his horse through Dane-infested country to Æscengum, only to find us gone.

  Alfred, when he heard, came to me, took my arm and walked down Fearnhamme’s street. He was limping and men stepped aside to give us room. He gripped my elbow, and seemed about to speak a dozen times, yet the words always died on his lips. Finally he checked me and looked into my eyes. “I have no answer why God inflicts such grief,” he said, and I said nothing. “Your wife was a jewel,” Alfred went on. He frowned, and his next words were as generous as they were difficult for him to say. “I pray your gods give you comfort, Lord Uhtred.” He led me to the Roman house which had been sequestered as the royal hall, and there Æthelred looked uncomfortable, while Father Beocca, dear man, embarrassed me by clinging to my sword hand and praying aloud that his god should treat me with mercy. He was crying. Gisela might have been a pagan, but Beocca had loved her. Bishop Asser, who hated me, nevertheless spoke gentle words, while Brother Godwin, the blind monk who eavesdropped on God, made a plangent moaning sound until Asser led him away. Finan, later that day, brought me a jar of mead and sang his sad Irish songs until I was too drunk to care. He alone saw me weep that day, and he told no one.

  “We’re ordered back to Lundene,” Finan told me next morning. I just nodded, too oblivious of the world to care what my orders were. “The king returns to Wintanceaster,” Finan went on, “and the Lords Æthelred and Edward are to pursue Harald.”

  Harald, badly wounded, had been taken by the remnants of his army north across the Temes until, in too much agony to continue, he ordered them to find refuge, which they did on a thorn-covered island called, naturally enough, Torneie. The island was in the River Colaun, not far from where it joins the Temes, and Harald’s men fortified Torneie, first making a great palisade with the plentiful thorn bushes, then throwing up earthworks. Lord Æthelred and the Ætheling Edward caught up with them there and laid siege. Alfred’s household troops, under Steapa, swept eastward through Cent, driving out the last of Harald’s men and recovering vast quantities of plunder. Fearnhamme was a magnificent victory, leaving Harald stranded on a fever-infested island, while the remainder of his men fled to their boats and abandoned Wessex, though many of the crews joined Haesten, who was still camped on Cent’s northern shore.

  And I was in Lundene. Tears still come to my eyes when I remember greeting Stiorra, my daughter, my little motherless daughter who clung to me and would not let go. And she was crying and I was crying, and I held her as though she was the only thing that could ever keep me alive. Osbert, the youngest, wept and clung to his nurse, while Uhtred, my eldest son, might have wept for all I know, but never in front of me, and that was not an admirable reticence, but rather because he feared me. He was a nervous, fussy child and I found him irritating. I insisted he learned sword craft, but he had no skill with a blade, and when I took him downriver in Seolferwulf, he showed no enthusiasm for ships or the sea.

  He was with me aboard Seolferwulf on the day that I next saw Haesten. We had left Lundene in the dark, feeling our way downriver on the tide and beneath a paling moon. Alfred had passed a law, he loved making laws, which said that the sons of ealdormen and thegns must go to school, but I refused to allow Uhtred the Younger to attend the school which Bishop Erkenwald had established in Lundene. I did not care whether he learned to read and write, both skills are much overrated, but I did care that he should not be exposed to the bishop’s preaching. Erkenwald tried to insist I send the boy, but I argued that Lundene was really part of Mercia, which in those days it was, and that Alfred’s laws did not apply. The bishop glowered at me, but was helpless to force the boy’s attendance. I preferred to train my son as a warrior and, that day on the Seolferwulf, I had dressed him in a leather coat and given him a boy’s sword belt so he would become accustomed to wearing war-gear, but instead of showing pride he just looked abashed. “Put your shoulders back,” I snarled, “stand straight. You’re not a puppy!”

  “Yes, Father,” he whined. He was slouch-shouldered, just staring at the deck.

  “When I die you’ll be Lord of Bebbanburg,” I said, and he said nothing.

  “You must show him Bebbanburg, lord,” Finan suggested.

  “Maybe I will,” I said.

>   “Take the ship north,” Finan said enthusiastically, “a proper sea voyage!” He slapped my son’s shoulder. “You’ll like that, Uhtred! Maybe we’ll see a whale!”

  My son just stared at Finan and said nothing. “Bebbanburg is a fortress beside the sea,” I told my son, “a great fortress. Windswept, sea-washed, invincible.” And I felt the prick of tears, for I had so often dreamed of making Gisela the Lady of Bebbanburg.

  “Not invincible, lord,” Finan said, “because we’ll take it.”

  “We will,” I said, though I could feel no enthusiasm, not even for the prospect of storming my own stronghold and slaughtering my uncle and his men. I turned from my pale son and stood in the ship’s prow, beneath the wolf’s head, and gazed east to where the sun was rising, and there, in the haze beneath the rising sun, in the mist of sea and air, in the shimmer of light above the slow-swelling sea, I saw the ships. A fleet. “Slow!” I called.

  Our oar-banks rose and fell gently, so it was mostly the ebbing tide that swept us toward that fleet, which rowed northward across our path. “Back oars!” I called, and we slowed, stopped, and slewed broadside to the current. “That must be Haesten,” Finan said. He had come to stand beside me.

  “He’s leaving Wessex,” I said. I was certain it was Haesten, and so it was, for a moment later a single ship turned from the fleet and I saw the flash of its oar-blades as the rowers pulled hard toward us. Beyond it the other ships went on northward and there were many more than the eighty that Haesten had brought to Cent, because his fleet had been swollen by the fugitives from Harald’s army. The approaching ship was close now. “That’s Dragon-Voyager,” I said, recognizing the ship, the same one we had given to Haesten on the day he took Alfred’s treasure and gave us the valueless hostages.

  “Shields?” Finan asked.

  “No,” I said. If Haesten wanted to attack me he would have brought more than one ship, and so our shields stayed in Seolferwulf ’s bilge.

  Dragon-Voyager backed her oars a ship’s half-length away. She lay close, heaving on the water’s slow swell, and for a moment her crew stared at my crew, and then I saw Haesten climbing up to the steering platform. He waved. “Can I come aboard?” he shouted.

  “You can come aboard,” I called back, and watched as his aftermost oarsmen expertly turned Dragon-Voyager so her stern came close to ours. The long oars were shipped as the two vessels closed, then Haesten leaped. Another man was waving to me from Dragon-Voyager’s steering platform, and I saw it was Father Willibald. I waved back, then worked my way aft to greet Haesten.

  He was bareheaded. He spread his hands as I approached, a gesture that spoke of helplessness, and he seemed to have difficulty speaking, but he finally found his voice. “I am sorry, lord,” he said, and his tone was humble, convincing. “There are no words, Lord Uhtred,” he said.

  “She was a good woman,” I said.

  “Famously,” he said, “and I do feel sorrow, lord.”

  “Thank you.”

  He glanced at my oarsmen, doubtless casting an eye on their weaponry, then looked back to me. “That sad news, lord,” he said, “shadowed the reports of your victory. It was a great triumph, lord.”

  “It seems to have persuaded you to leave Wessex,” I said drily.

  “I always intended to leave, lord,” he said, “once we had our agreement, but some of our ships needed repair.” He noticed Uhtred then, and saw the silver plates sewn onto the boy’s sword belt. “Your son, lord?” he asked.

  “My son,” I said, “Uhtred.”

  “An impressive boy,” Haesten lied.

  “Uhtred,” I called, “come here!”

  He approached nervously, his eyes darting left and right as if expecting an attack. He was about as impressive as a duckling. “This is the Jarl Haesten,” I told him, “a Dane. One day I’ll kill him, or he’ll kill me.” Haesten chuckled, but my son just looked at the deck. “If he kills me,” I went on, “your duty is to kill him.”

  Haesten waited for some response from Uhtred the Younger, but the boy just looked embarrassed. Haesten grinned wickedly. “And my own son, Lord Uhtred?” he asked innocently, “he thrives, I trust, as a hostage?”

  “I drowned the little bastard a month ago,” I said.

  Haesten laughed at the lie. “There was no need for hostages anyway,” he said, “as I shall keep our agreement. Father Willibald will confirm that.” He gestured toward Dragon-Voyager. “I was going to send Father Willibald to Lundene,” he went on, “with a letter. You might take him there yourself, lord?”

  “Just Father Willibald?” I asked. “Didn’t I bring you two priests?”

  “The other one died,” Haesten said carelessly, “after eating too many eels. You’ll take Willibald?”

  “Of course,” I said and glanced at the fleet that still rowed northward. “Where do you go?”

  “North,” Haesten said airily, “East Anglia. Somewhere. Not Wessex.”

  He did not want to tell me his destination, but it was plain that his ships were heading toward Beamfleot. We had fought there five years before and Haesten might have had bad memories of the place, yet Beamfleot, on the northern bank of the Temes estuary, offered two priceless assets. First was the creek called Hothlege, tucked behind the island of Caninga, and that creek could shelter three hundred ships, while above it, rearing high on a green hill, was the old fort. It was a place of great safety, much safer than the encampment Haesten had made on the shore of Cent, but he had only made that to entice Alfred to pay him to leave. Now he was leaving, but going to a place far more dangerous to Wessex. In Beamfleot he would have an almost unassailable fortress, yet still be within easy striking distance of Lundene and Wessex. He was a serpent.

  That was not Father Willibald’s opinion. We had to bring the two ships within touching distance so the priest could clamber from one to the other. He sprawled clumsily onto Seolferwulf ’s deck, then bade a friendly farewell to Haesten, who gave me a parting grin before leaping back aboard his own ship.

  Father Willibald looked at me with confusion. One moment his face was all concern, the next it was excitement, both expressions accompanied by an impatient fidgeting as he tried to find words for one mood or the other. Concern won. “Lord,” he said, “tell me, tell me it isn’t true.”

  “It’s true, father.”

  “Dear God!” he shook his head and made the sign of the cross. “I shall pray for her soul, lord. I shall pray for her soul nightly, lord, and for the souls of your dear children.” His voice trailed away under my baleful gaze, but then his excitement got the better of him. “Such news, lord,” he said, “such news I have!” Then, despairing of my expression, he turned to pick up his pathetic sack of belongings that had been tossed from the Dragon-Voyager.

  “What news?” I asked.

  “The Jarl Haesten, lord,” Willibald said eagerly. “He’s requesting that his wife and two sons be baptized, lord!” He smiled as if expecting me to share his joy.

  “He’s what?” I asked in surprise.

  “He seeks baptism for his family! I wrote the letter for him, addressed to our king! It seems our preaching bore fruit, lord. The jarl’s wife, God bless her soul, has seen the light! She seeks our Lord’s redemption! She has come to love our Savior, lord, and her husband has approved of her conversion.”

  I just looked at him, corroding his joy with my sour face, but Willibald was not to be so easily discouraged. He gathered his enthusiasm again. “Don’t you see, lord?” he asked. “If she converts then he will follow! It’s often thus, lord, that the wife first finds salvation, and when wives lead, husbands follow!”

  “He’s lulling us to sleep, father,” I said. Dragon-Voyager had rejoined the fleet by now and was rowing steadily north.

  “The jarl is a troubled soul,” Willibald said, “he talked to me often.” He raised his hands to the sky where a myriad waterfowl beat south on throbbing wings. “There is rejoicing in heaven, lord, when just one sinner repents. And he is so close to redempt
ion! And when a chieftain converts, lord, then his people follow him to Christ.”

  “Chieftain?” I sneered. “Haesten’s just an earsling. He’s a turd. And he’s not troubled, father, except by greed. We’ll have to kill him yet.”

  Willibald despaired of my cynicism and went to sit beside my son. I watched the two of them talk and wondered why Uhtred never showed any enthusiasm for my conversation, though he seemed fascinated by Willibald’s. “I hope you’re not poisoning the boy’s brain,” I called.

  “We’re talking about birds, lord,” Willibald explained brightly, “and where they go in winter.”

  “Where do they go?”

  “Beneath the sea?” he suggested.

  The tide slackened, stilled, and turned, and we rode the flood back up the river. I sat brooding on the steering platform while Finan tended the big steering oar. My men rowed gently, content to let the tide do the work, and they sang the song of Ægir, god of the sea, and of Rán, his wife, and of his nine daughters, all of whom must be flattered if a ship is to be safe on the wild waters. They sang the song because they knew I liked it, but the tune seemed empty and the words meaningless, and I did not join in. I just gazed at the smoke haze above Lundene, the darkness darkening a summer sky, and wished I were a bird, high in that nothingness, vanishing.

  Haesten’s letter stirred Alfred to a new liveliness. The letter, he said, was a sign of God’s grace, and Bishop Erkenwald, of course, agreed. God, the bishop preached, had slaughtered the heathen at Fearnhamme and now had worked a miracle in the heart of Haesten. Willibald was sent to Beamfleot with an invitation for Haesten to bring his family to Lundene where both Alfred and Æthelred would stand as godfathers to Brunna, Haesten the Younger, and the real Horic. No one now bothered to pretend that the deaf and dumb hostage was Haesten’s son, but the deception was forgiven in the ebullience that marked Wessex as that summer faded into autumn.

  The deaf and dumb hostage, I gave him the name Harald, was sent to my household. He was a bright lad and I set him to work in the armory where he showed a skill with the sharpening stone and an eagerness to learn weapons. I also had custody of Skade, because no one else seemed to want her. For a time I displayed her in a cage beside my door, but that humiliation was small consolation for her curse. She was valueless as a hostage now, for her lover was mewed up on Torneie Island and one day I took her upriver in one of the smaller boats we kept above Lundene’s broken bridge.