Warriors of the Storm (2015) Read online

  Because, by the gods, the mouse was beautiful.

  Real beauty is rare. Most of us suffer the pox and so have faces dotted with scars, and what teeth we have left go yellow, and our skin has warts, wens, and carbuncles, and we stink like sheep dung. Any girl who survives into womanhood with teeth and a clear skin is accounted a beauty, but this girl had so much more. She had a radiance. I thought of Frigg, the mute girl who had married Cnut Ranulfson and who now lived on my son’s estate, though he thought I did not know. Frigg was glorious and beautiful, but where she was dark and lithe, this girl was fair and generous. She was stark naked, her thighs lifted, and her flawless skin seemed to glow with health. Her breasts were full, but not fallen, her blue eyes lively, her lips plump, and her face full of joy until I hauled the man out from between her thighs. ‘Go and piss it into a ditch,’ I snarled at him. He was one of my men and he pulled up his trews and scuttled out of the shed as if twenty demons were at his arse.

  The mus fell backwards on the hay. She bounced there, giggling and smiling. ‘Welcome again, Lord Uhtred,’ she spoke to my son, who said nothing. There was a shielded lantern perched on a pile of hay and I saw my son blush in its dim and flickering light.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I growled, ‘not him.’

  She stood and brushed pieces of straw from her perfect skin. Not a scar, not a blemish, though when she turned to me I saw there was a birthmark on her forehead, a small red mark shaped like an apple. It was almost a relief to see that she was not perfect, because even her hands were unscarred. Women’s hands grow old fast, burned by pots, worn out by distaffs, and rubbed raw by scrubbing clothes, yet Mus had hands like a baby, soft and flawless. She seemed utterly unworried by her nakedness. She smiled at me and half bobbed down respectfully. ‘Greetings, Lord Uhtred,’ she spoke demurely, her eyes showing amusement at my anger.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m called Mus.’

  ‘What did your parents name you?’

  ‘Trouble,’ she said, still smiling.

  ‘Then listen to me, Trouble,’ I snarled, ‘you have a choice. Either you work for Byrdnoth in the Plover next door, or you leave Ceaster. Do you understand?’

  She frowned and bit her lower lip as she pretended to think, then gave me her bright smile again. ‘I was only celebrating Eostre’s feast,’ she said slyly, ‘as I’m told you like it celebrated.’

  ‘What I don’t like,’ I said, biting back my annoyance at her cleverness, ‘is that a man died fighting over you tonight.’

  ‘I tell them not to fight,’ she said, all wide-eyed and innocent. ‘I don’t want them to fight! I want them to …’

  ‘I know what you want,’ I snarled, ‘but what matters is what I want! And I’m telling you to either work for Byrdnoth or leave Ceaster.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t like Byrdnoth.’

  ‘You’ll like me even less.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, and laughed, ‘oh no, lord, never!’

  ‘You work for Byrdnoth,’ I insisted, ‘or you leave!’

  ‘I won’t work for him, lord,’ she said, ‘he’s so fat and slimy!’

  ‘Your choice, bitch,’ I said, and I was having trouble from keeping my eyes from those beautiful plump breasts and from her small body that was both compact and generous, and she knew I was having trouble and it amused her.

  ‘Why Byrdnoth?’ she asked.

  ‘Because he won’t let you cause trouble,’ I said. ‘You’ll hump who he tells you to hump.’

  ‘Including him,’ she said, ‘and it’s disgusting! It’s like being bounced by a greased pig.’ She gave a shiver of horror.

  ‘If you won’t work at the Plover,’ I ignored her exaggerated shudder, ‘then you’re leaving Ceaster. I don’t care where you go, but you’re leaving.’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ she said meekly, then glanced at Eadith. ‘May I dress, lord?’ she asked me.

  ‘Get dressed,’ I snapped. ‘Sihtric?’

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘You’ll guard her tonight. Lock her up in one of the granaries and see her on the road south tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s Easter tomorrow, lord, no one will be travelling,’ he said nervously.

  ‘Then keep her quiet till someone does go south! Then pack her off and make certain she doesn’t come back.’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

  ‘And tomorrow,’ I turned on my son, ‘you’ll pull down these sheds.’

  ‘Yes, father.’

  ‘And if you do come back,’ I looked back to the girl, ‘I’ll whip the skin off your back till your ribs are showing, you understand?’

  ‘I understand, lord,’ she said in a contrite voice. She smiled at Sihtric, her jailer, then stooped into a gap between the piles of hay. Her clothes had been carelessly dropped into the gap and she went down on all fours to retrieve them. ‘I’ll just get dressed,’ she said, ‘and I won’t cause you any trouble! I promise.’ And with those words she suddenly shot forward and vanished through a hole in the shed’s back wall. A small hand snaked back and snatched a cloak or dress, and then she was gone.

  ‘After her!’ I said. She had wriggled through the mousehole, leaving a small pile of coins and hacksilver beside the lantern. I stooped, but saw the hole was too small for me to negotiate, so I ducked back into the alley. There was no passage to the rear of the shed and by the time we had made our way through the neighbouring house she had long disappeared. I stood at an alley’s mouth, staring down an empty side street, and swore in frustration. ‘Someone must know where the bitch lives,’ I said.

  ‘She’s a mouse,’ my son said, ‘so you need a cat.’

  I growled. At least, I thought, I had scared the girl, so perhaps she’d stop her nonsense. And why did she favour my men over Æthelflaed’s? Mine were no cleaner or richer. I guessed she was just a trouble-maker who enjoyed having men fight over her.

  ‘You pull the sheds down tomorrow,’ I told my son, ‘and look for the bitch. Find her and lock her up.’

  Eadith and I walked back towards our house. ‘She’s beautiful,’ Eadith said wistfully.

  ‘With that birthmark on her forehead?’ I asked in a hopeless attempt to pretend I did not agree.

  ‘She is beautiful,’ Eadith insisted.

  ‘And so are you,’ I said, and so she was.

  She smiled at the compliment, though her smile was dutiful, even touched by sadness. ‘She’s what? Sixteen? Seventeen? When you find her you should marry her off.’

  ‘What man would marry a whore like her?’ I asked savagely, thinking that what I truly wanted was to take the whore to bed and plough her ripe little body.

  ‘Maybe a husband would tame her,’ Eadith said.

  ‘Maybe I should marry you,’ I said impulsively.

  Eadith stopped, looked at me. We were just outside the big church where the Easter vigil was being kept, and a wash of candlelight came through the open door to shadow her face and to glint off the tears on her cheeks. She reached up with both hands and held the cheek-pieces of my helmet, then stood on tiptoe to kiss me.

  God, what fools women make of us.

  I always liked to make something special of Eostre’s feast, hiring jugglers, musicians, and acrobats, but Ragnall’s appearance a few days before the feast had deterred such folk from coming to Ceaster. The same fear meant that many of the guests invited to Leofstan’s enthronement had also failed to appear, though Saint Peter’s church was still full.

  Enthronement? Who in the cloud-filled heavens did these people think they were? Kings sat on thrones. Lady Æthelflaed should have had a throne, and sometimes used her dead husband’s throne in Gleawecestre, and when, as a lord, I sat in judgement I used a throne, not because I was royal, but because I represented royal justice. But a bishop? Why would some weasel-brained bishop need a throne? Wulfheard had a throne larger than King Edward’s, a high-backed chair carved with gormless saints and bellowing angels. I asked the fool once why he needed so large a chair for his skinny backside,
and he told me he was God’s representative in Hereford. ‘It is God’s throne, not mine,’ he had said pompously, though I noted that he screeched in anger if anyone else dared park their bum on the carved seat.

  ‘Does your god ever visit Hereford?’ I asked him.

  ‘He is omnipresent, so yes, he sits on the throne.’

  ‘So you sit on his lap? That’s nice.’

  I somehow doubted that the Christian god would be visiting Ceaster because Leofstan had chosen a milking-stool as his throne. It was a three-legged stool that he had bought at the market, and it now stood waiting for him in front of the altar. I had wanted to sneak into the church the night before Eostre’s feast to saw a finger’s width off two of the legs, but the vigil had thwarted that plan. ‘A stool?’ I had asked Æthelflaed.

  ‘He’s a humble man.’

  ‘But Bishop Wulfheard says it’s your god’s throne.’

  ‘God is humble too.’

  A humble god! You might as well have a toothless wolf! The gods are the gods, ruling thunder and commanding storms, they are the lords of night and day, of fire and ice, the givers of disaster and of triumph. To this day I do not understand why folk become Christians unless it’s simply that the other gods enjoy a joke. I have often suspected that Loki, the trickster god, invented Christianity because it has his wicked stench all over it. I can imagine the gods sitting in Asgard one night, all of them bored and probably drunk, and Loki amuses them with a typical piece of his nonsense, ‘Let’s invent a carpenter,’ he suggests, ‘and tell the fools that he was the son of the only god, that he died and came back to life, that he cured blindness with lumps of clay, and that he walked on water!’ Who would believe that nonsense? But the trouble with Loki is that he always takes his jests too far.

  The street outside the church was piled with weapons, shields, and helmets belonging to the men who attended the enthronement. They needed to be armed, or at least to stay close to their weapons, because our scouts had come back from the upper Mærse to tell us that Ragnall’s army was approaching. They had seen his campfires in the night, and dawn had brought the sight of smoke smeared across the eastern sky. By now, I reckoned, he should be discovering the remnants of Eads Byrig. He would come to Ceaster next, but we would see him approaching, and the neat piles of weapons and shields were ready for the men inside the church. When they heard the alarm they would have to abandon the bishop’s sermon and take to the ramparts.

  There had been some good news that morning. Æthelstan had succeeded in taking two ships from the hulls Ragnall had left on the Mærse’s northern bank. Both were wide-bellied, high-prowed fighting ships, one with benches for sixty oars and the other for forty. ‘The rest of the ships were beached,’ Æthelstan reported to me, ‘and we couldn’t drag them off.’

  ‘They weren’t guarded?’

  ‘Probably sixty or seventy men there, lord.’

  ‘How many did you have?’

  ‘Seven of us crossed the river, lord.’

  ‘Seven!’

  ‘None of the others could swim.’

  ‘You can swim?’

  ‘Like a herring, lord!’

  Æthelstan and his six companions had stripped naked, and, in the dead of night, crossed the river at the height of the tide. They had managed to cut the lines of the two moored boats, which had then drifted down the Mærse and were now safely tied to the remnants of the pier at Brunanburh. I wanted to put Æthelstan back in charge of that fort, but Æthelflaed insisted that Osferth, her half-brother, should command there, and that decision meant that Æthelstan, poor boy, was now condemned to endure the interminable service that turned Father Leofstan into Bishop Leofstan.

  I peered into the church a couple of times. There was the usual chanting, while a dozen priests wafted smoke from swinging censers. An abbot with a waist-length beard gave an impassioned sermon that must have lasted two hours and which drove me to a tavern across the street. When I next looked I saw Leofstan prostrate on the church’s floor with his arms outspread. All his cripples were there, while the moon-touched lunatics gibbered and scratched at the back of the church, and the white-robed orphans fidgeted. Most of the congregation was kneeling, and I could see Æthelflaed next to the bishop’s wife who, as usual, was swathed in layers of clothing and was now rocking backwards and forwards with her clasped hands held high above her head as though she was experiencing an ecstatic vision. It was, I thought, a sad way to celebrate Eostre’s feast.

  I walked to the northern gate, climbed the ramparts, and stared at the empty countryside. My son joined me, but said nothing. He was in command of the guard this morning, which meant he was excused from attending the church service, and the two of us stood in companionable silence. There should have been a busy fair in the strip of pastureland between the city ditch and the Roman cemetery, but instead the few market stalls had been placed in the main street. Eostre would not be pleased, though perhaps she would be forgiving because she was not a vengeful goddess. I had heard stories of her when I was a small child, though the stories had been whispered because we were supposed to be Christians, but I heard how she skipped through the dawn, scattering flowers, and how the animals followed her two by two, and how the elves and sprites gathered around with pipes made from reeds and with drums made of thistle-heads, and played their wild music as Eostre sang the world into a new creation. She would look like Mus, I thought, remembering the firm body, the glow of her skin, the glint of joy in her eyes, and the mischief in her smile. Even the memory of her one flaw, the apple-shaped birthmark, seemed attractive now. ‘Did you find the girl?’ I broke the silence.

  ‘Not yet,’ he sounded disconsolate. ‘We searched everywhere.’

  ‘You’re not keeping her hidden yourself?’

  ‘No, father, I promise.’

  ‘She has to live somewhere!’

  ‘We’ve asked. We’ve looked. She just vanished!’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘I’m thinking she doesn’t really exist. That she’s a night-walker?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I scoffed. ‘Of course she exists! We saw her. And you’ve more than seen her!’

  ‘But no one saw her last night,’ he said, ‘and she was naked when she vanished.’

  ‘She took a cloak.’

  ‘Even so, someone would have seen her! A half-naked girl running through the streets? How could she just disappear? But she did!’ He paused, frowning. ‘She’s a night-walker! A shadow-walker!’

  A shadow-walker? I had scorned the idea, but shadow-walkers did exist. They were ghosts and spirits and goblins, malevolent creatures who only appeared in the night. And Mus, I thought, was truly malevolent, she was causing trouble by setting my men against Æthelflaed’s warriors. And she was too perfect to be real. So was she an apparition sent by the gods to taunt us? To taunt me, anyway, as I remembered the lantern light on her plump breasts. ‘She has to be stopped,’ I said, ‘unless you want a nightly battle between our men and Lady Æthelflaed’s.’

  ‘She won’t appear again tonight,’ my son said uncertainly, ‘she won’t dare.’

  ‘Unless you’re right,’ I said, ‘and she is a shadow-walker,’ I touched the hammer at my neck.

  And then I kept my hand on the talisman.

  Because from the far woods, from the forest that shrouded the land all around distant Eads Byrig, Ragnall’s army was coming.

  Ragnall’s men came in a line, and that was impressive because the line did not trail out of the forest on the Roman road in a long procession, but instead appeared altogether at the edge of the trees and so suddenly filled the land. One moment the fields were empty, then a great line of horsemen emerged from the woodlands. It must have taken time to arrange that display and it was intended to awe us.

  One of my men hammered the iron bar that hung above the gate’s fighting rampart. The bar served as a makeshift alarm bell and its harsh sound was brutal and loud, summoning the defenders to the walls. ‘Keep hitting it,’ I told him. I could see men pouring out of
the church, hurrying to snatch up the shields, helmets, and weapons that were stacked in the street.

  ‘Five hundred of them?’ my son suggested.

  I turned back to stare at the enemy. I divided the far line into half, then half again and counted horses, then multiplied my answer by four. ‘Six hundred,’ I reckoned. ‘Maybe that’s all the horses he has.’

  ‘He’ll have more men, though.’

  ‘Two thousand, at least.’

  Six hundred horsemen were no threat to Ceaster, but I still kept the iron bar’s clangour sounding across the town. Men were climbing the ramparts now, and Ragnall would see our spear-points thickening above the high stone walls. I wished he would attack. There is no easier way to kill an enemy than when he is trying to assault a well-defended rampart.

  ‘He’ll have been to Eads Byrig,’ my son suggested. He was staring eastwards to where the smoke of our corpse-burning fire still smeared the sky. He was thinking that Ragnall would be enraged by the severed heads I had left to greet him and hoping, I think, that those bloodied heads would prompt Ragnall into a foolish assault on the city.

  ‘He won’t attack today,’ I said. ‘He might be headstrong, but he’s no fool.’

  A horn sounded from that long line of men who now advanced slowly across the pastureland. The sound of the horn was as harsh as the clangour of my iron bar. I could see men on foot behind the horsemen, but even so there were not more than seven hundred enemy in sight. That was not nearly enough to assault our walls, but I was not summoning the defenders in expectation of any attack, but rather to show Ragnall that we were ready for him. We were both making a display.

  ‘I wish he’d make an assault,’ my son said wistfully.

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘He’ll lose men if he does!’ He was hoping I was wrong, hoping he would have a chance to kill men trying to scale stone walls.

  ‘He has men to lose,’ I said drily.

  ‘If I was him,’ my son began, then checked.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to lose two hundred men on these walls. I’d raid deeper into Mercia. I’d go south. There are rich pickings down south, but here?’