Sword Song Read online

  So I tell these stories so that my children’s children will know their fate. My wife whimpers, but I make her listen. I tell her how our ship crashed into the enemy’s outside flank, and how the impact drove that other ship’s bows toward the southern bank. That was what I had wanted, and Ralla had achieved it perfectly. Now he scraped his ship down the enemy’s hull, our impetus snapping the Dane’s forward oars as my men jumped aboard, swords and axes swinging. I had staggered after that first cut, but the dead man had fallen off the platform to impede two others trying to reach me, and I shouted a challenge as I leaped down to face them. Serpent-Breath was lethal. She was, she is, a lovely blade, forged in the north by a Saxon smith who had known his trade. He had taken seven rods, four of iron and three of steel, and he had heated them and hammered them into one long two-edged blade with a leaf-shaped point. The four softer iron rods had been twisted in the fire and those twists survived in the blade as ghostly wisps of pattern that looked like the curling flame-breath of a dragon, and that was how Serpent-Breath had gained her name.

  A bristle-bearded man swung an ax at me that I met with my outthrust shield and slid the dragon-wisps into his belly. I gave a fierce twist with my right hand so that his dying flesh and guts did not grip the blade, then I yanked her out, more blood flying, and dragged the ax-impaled shield across my body to parry a sword cut. Sihtric was beside me, driving his short-sword up into my newest attacker’s groin. The man screamed. I think I was shouting. More and more of my men were aboard now, swords and axes glinting. Children cried, women wailed, raiders died.

  The bow of the enemy ship thumped onto the bank’s mud while her stern began to swing outward in the river’s grip. Some of the raiders, sensing death if they stayed aboard, jumped ashore, and that started a panic. More and more leaped for the bank, and it was then Finan came from the west. There was a small mist on the river meadows, just a pearly skein drifting over the iced puddles, and through it came Finan’s bright horsemen. They came in two lines, swords held like spears, and Finan, my deadly Irishman, knew his business and galloped the first line past the escaping men to cut off their retreat and let his second line crash into the enemy before he turned and led his own men back to the kill.

  “Kill them all!” I shouted to him. “Kill every last one!”

  A wave of a blood-reddened sword was his reply. I saw Clapa, my big Dane, spearing an enemy in the river’s shallows. Rypere was hacking his sword at a cowering man. Sihtric’s sword hand was red. Cerdic was swinging an ax, shouting incomprehensibly as the blade crushed and pierced a Dane’s helmet to spill blood and brains on the terrified prisoners. I think I killed two more, though my memory is not certain. I do remember pushing a man down onto the deck and, as he twisted around to face me, sliding Serpent-Breath into his gullet and watching his face distort and his tongue protrude from the blood welling past his blackened teeth. I leaned on the blade as the man died and watched as Finan’s men wheeled their horses to come back at the trapped enemy. The horsemen cut and slashed, Vikings screamed and some tried to surrender. One young man knelt on a rower’s bench, ax and shield discarded, and held his hands to me in supplication. “Pick up the ax,” I told him, speaking Danish.

  “Lord…” he began.

  “Pick it up!” I interrupted him, “and watch for me in the corpse-hall.” I waited till he was armed, then let Serpent-Breath take his life. I did it fast, showing mercy by slicing his throat with one quick scraping drag. I looked into his eyes as I killed him, saw his soul fly, then stepped over his twitching body, which slipped off the rower’s bench to collapse bloodily in the lap of a young woman who began to scream hysterically. “Quiet!” I shouted at her. I scowled at all the other women and children screaming or weeping as they cowered in the bilge. I put Serpent-Breath into my shield hand, took hold of the mail collar of the dying man, and heaved him back onto the bench.

  One child was not crying. He was a boy, perhaps nine or ten years old, and he was just staring at me, mouth agape, and I remembered myself at that age. What did that boy see? He saw a man of metal, for I had fought with the face-plates of my helmet closed. You see less with the plates hinged across the cheeks, but the appearance is more frightening. That boy saw a tall man, mail-clad, sword bloody, steel-faced, stalking a boat of death. I eased off my helmet and shook my hair loose, then tossed him the wolf-crested metal. “Look after it, boy,” I told him, then I gave Serpent-Breath to the girl who had been screaming. “Wash the blade in river water,” I ordered her, “and dry it on a dead man’s cloak.” I gave my shield to Sihtric, then stretched my arms wide and lifted my face to the morning sun.

  There had been fifty-four raiders, and sixteen still lived. They were prisoners. None had escaped past Finan’s men. I drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword that was so lethal in a shield wall fight when men are pressed close as lovers. “Any of you,” I looked at the women, “who wants to kill the man who raped you, then do it now!”

  Two women wanted revenge and I let them use Wasp-Sting. Both of them butchered their victims. One stabbed repeatedly, the other hacked, and both men died slowly. Of the remaining fourteen men, one was not in mail. He was the enemy’s shipmaster. He was gray-haired with a scanty beard and brown eyes that looked at me belligerently. “Where did you come from?” I asked him.

  He thought about refusing to answer, then thought better. “Beamfleot,” he said.

  “And Lundene?” I asked him. “The old city is still in Danish hands?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, lord,” I corrected him.

  “Yes, lord,” he conceded.

  “Then you will go to Lundene,” I told him, “and then to Beamfleot, and then to anywhere you wish, and you will tell the Northmen that Uhtred of Bebbanburg guards the River Temes. And you will tell them they are welcome to come here whenever they wish.”

  That one man lived. I hacked off his right hand before letting him go. I did it so he could never wield a sword again. By then we had lit a fire and I thrust his bleeding stump into the red-hot embers to seal the wound. He was a brave man. He flinched when we cauterized his stump, but he did not scream as his blood bubbled and his flesh sizzled. I wrapped his shortened arm in a piece of cloth taken from a dead man’s shirt. “Go,” I ordered him, pointing downriver. “Just go.” He walked eastward. If he were lucky he would survive the journey to spread the news of my savagery.

  We killed the others, all of them.

  “Why did you kill them?” my new wife asked once, distaste for my thoroughness evident in her voice.

  “So they would learn to fear,” I answered her, “of course.”

  “Dead men can’t fear,” she said.

  I try to be patient with her. “A ship left Beamfleot,” I explained, “and it never went back. And other men who wanted to raid Wessex heard of that ship’s fate. And those men decided to take their swords somewhere else. I killed that ship’s crew to save myself having to kill hundreds of other Danes.”

  “The Lord Jesus would have wanted you to show mercy,” she said, her eyes wide.

  She is an idiot.

  Finan took some of the villagers back to their burned homes where they dug graves for their dead while my men hanged the corpses of our enemies from trees beside the river. We made ropes from strips torn from their clothes. We took their mail, their weapons, and their arm rings. We cut off their long hair, for I liked to caulk my ships’ planks with the hair of slain enemies, and then we hanged them and their pale naked bodies twisted in the small wind as the ravens came to take their dead eyes.

  Fifty-three bodies hung by the river. A warning to those who might follow. Fifty-three signals that other raiders were risking death by rowing up the Temes.

  Then we went home, taking the enemy ship with us.

  And Serpent-Breath slept in her scabbard.

  PART ONE

  THE BRIDE

  ONE

  The dead speak,” Æthelwold told me. He was sober for once. Sober and awed and serious. The night wind sn
atched at the house and the rushlights flickered red in the wintry drafts that whipped from the roof’s smoke-hole and through the doors and shutters.

  “The dead speak?” I asked.

  “A corpse,” Æthelwold said, “he rises from the grave and he speaks.” He stared at me wide-eyed, then nodded as if to stress that he spoke the truth. He was leaning toward me, his clasped hands fidgeting between his knees. “I have seen it,” he added.

  “A corpse talks?” I asked.

  “He rises!” He wafted a hand to show what he meant.

  “He?”

  “The dead man. He rises and he speaks.” He still stared at me, his expression indignant. “It’s true,” he added in a voice that suggested he knew I did not believe him.

  I edged my bench closer to the hearth. It was ten days after I had killed the raiders and hanged their bodies by the river, and now a freezing rain rattled on the thatch and beat on the barred shutters. Two of my hounds lay in front of the fire and one gave me a resentful glance when I scraped the bench, then rested his head again. The house had been built by the Romans, which meant the floor was tiled and the walls were of stone, though I had thatched the roof myself. Rain spat through the smoke-hole. “What does the dead man say?” Gisela asked. She was my wife and the mother of my two children.

  Æthelwold did not answer at once, perhaps because he believed a woman should not take part in a serious discussion, but my silence told him that Gisela was welcome to speak in her own house and he was too nervous to insist that I dismiss her. “He says I should be king,” he admitted softly, then gazed at me, fearing my reaction.

  “King of what?” I asked flatly.

  “Wessex,” he said, “of course.”

  “Oh, Wessex,” I said, as though I had never heard of the place.

  “And I should be king!” Æthelwold protested. “My father was king!”

  “And now your father’s brother is king,” I said, “and men say he is a good king.”

  “Do you say that?” he challenged me.

  I did not answer. It was well enough known that I did not like Alfred and that Alfred did not like me, but that did not mean Alfred’s nephew, Æthelwold, would make a better king. Æthelwold, like me, was in his late twenties, and he had made a reputation as a drunk and a lecherous fool. Yet he did have a claim to the throne of Wessex. His father had indeed been king, and if Alfred had possessed a thimbleful of sense he would have had his nephew’s throat sliced to the bone. Instead Alfred relied on Æthelwold’s thirst for ale to keep him from making trouble. “Where did you see this living corpse?” I asked, instead of answering his question.

  He waved a hand toward the north side of the house. “On the other side of the street,” he said. “Just the other side.”

  “Wæclingastræt?” I asked him, and he nodded.

  So he was talking to the Danes as well as to the dead. Wæclingastræt is a road that goes northwest from Lundene. It slants across Britain, ending at the Irish Sea just north of Wales, and everything to the south of the street was supposedly Saxon land, and everything to the north was yielded to the Danes. That was the peace we had in that year of 885, though it was a peace scummed with skirmish and hate. “Is it a Danish corpse?” I asked.

  Æthelwold nodded. “His name is Bjorn,” he said, “and he was a skald in Guthrum’s court, and he refused to become a Christian so Guthrum killed him. He can be summoned from his grave. I’ve seen it.”

  I looked at Gisela. She was a Dane, and the sorcery that Æthelwold described was nothing I had ever known among my fellow Saxons. Gisela shrugged, suggesting that the magic was equally strange to her. “Who summons the dead man?” she asked.

  “A fresh corpse,” Æthelwold said.

  “A fresh corpse?” I asked.

  “Someone must be sent to the world of the dead,” he explained, as though it were obvious, “to find Bjorn and bring him back.”

  “So they kill someone?” Gisela asked.

  “How else can they send a messenger to the dead?” Æthelwold asked pugnaciously.

  “And this Bjorn,” I asked, “does he speak English?” I put the question for I knew that Æthelwold spoke little or no Danish.

  “He speaks English,” Æthelwold said sullenly. He did not like being questioned.

  “Who took you to him?” I asked.

  “Some Danes,” he said vaguely.

  I sneered at that. “So some Danes came,” I said, “and told you a dead poet wanted to speak to you, and you meekly traveled into Guthrum’s land?”

  “They paid me gold,” he said defensively. Æthelwold was ever in debt.

  “And why come to us?” I asked. Æthelwold did not answer. He fidgeted and watched Gisela, who was teasing a thread of wool onto her distaff. “You go to Guthrum’s land,” I persisted, “you speak to a dead man, and then you come to me. Why?”

  “Because Bjorn said you will be a king too,” Æthelwold said. He had not spoken loudly, but even so I held up a hand to hush him and I looked anxiously at the doorway as if expecting to see a spy listening from the darkness of the next room. I had no doubt Alfred had spies in my household and I thought I knew who they were, but I was not entirely certain that I had identified all of them, which was why I had made sure all the servants were well away from the room where Æthelwold and I talked. Even so it was not wise to say such things too loudly.

  Gisela had stopped spinning the wool and was staring at Æthelwold. I was too. “He said what?” I asked.

  “He said that you, Uhtred,” Æthelwold went on more quietly, “will be crowned King of Mercia.”

  “Have you been drinking?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “only ale.” He leaned toward me. “Bjorn the Dead wishes to speak to you also, to tell you your fate. You and me, Uhtred, will be kings and neighbors. The gods want it and they sent a dead man to tell me so.” Æthelwold was shaking slightly, and sweating, but he was not drinking. Something had scared him into sobriety, and that convinced me he spoke the truth. “They want to know if you are willing to meet the dead,” he said, “and if you are then they will send for you.”

  I looked at Gisela who merely looked back at me, her face expressionless. I stared back at her, not waiting for a response, but because she was beautiful, so beautiful. My dark Dane, my lovely Gisela, my bride, my love. She must have known what I was thinking, for her long, grave face was transformed by a slow smile. “Uhtred is to be king?” she asked, breaking the silence and looking at Æthelwold.

  “The dead say so,” Æthelwold said defiantly. “And Bjorn heard it from the three sisters.” He meant the Fates, the Norns, the three sisters who weave our destiny.

  “Uhtred is to be King of Mercia?” Gisela asked dubiously.

  “And you will be the queen,” Æthelwold said.

  Gisela looked back to me. She had a quizzical look, but I did not try to answer what I knew she was thinking. Instead I was reflecting that there was no king in Mercia. The old one, a Saxon mongrel on a Danish leash, had died, and there was no successor, while the kingdom itself was now split between Danes and Saxons. My mother’s brother had been an ealdorman in Mercia before he was killed by the Welsh, so I had Mercian blood. And there was no king in Mercia.

  “I think you had better hear what the dead man says,” Gisela spoke gravely.

  “If they send for me,” I promised, “I will.” And so I would, because a dead man was speaking and he wanted me to be a king.

  Alfred arrived a week later. It was a fine day with a pale blue sky in which the midday sun hung low above a cold land. Ice edged the sluggish channels where the River Temes flowed about Sceaftes Eye and Wodenes Eye. Coot, moorhen and dabchicks paddled at the edge of the ice, while on the thawing mud of Sceaftes Eye a host of thrush and blackbirds hunted for worms and snails.

  This was home. This had been my home for two years now. Home was Coccham, at the edge of Wessex where the Temes flowed toward Lundene and the sea. I, Uhtred, a Northumbrian lord, an exile and a warrior,
had become a builder, a trader, and a father. I served Alfred, King of Wessex, not because I wished to, but because I had given him my oath.

  And Alfred had given me a task; to build his new burh at Coccham. A burh was a town turned into a fortress and Alfred was riveting his kingdom of Wessex with such places. All around the boundaries of Wessex, on the sea, on the rivers and on the moors facing the wild Cornish savages, the walls were being built. A Danish army could invade between the fortresses, but they would discover still more strongholds in Alfred’s heartland, and each burh held a garrison. Alfred, in a rare moment of savage elation, had described the burhs to me as wasps’ nests from which men could swarm to sting the attacking Danes. Burhs were being made at Exanceaster and Werham, at Cisseceastre and Hastengas, at Æscengum and Oxnaforda, at Cracgelad and Wæced, and at dozens of places between. Their walls and palisades were manned by spears and shields. Wessex was becoming a land of fortresses, and my task was to make the little town of Coccham into a burh.

  The work was done by every West Saxon man over the age of twelve. Half of them worked while the other half tended the fields. At Coccham I was supposed to have five hundred men serving at any one time, though usually there were fewer than three hundred. They dug, they banked, they cut timber for walls, and so we had raised a stronghold on the banks of the Temes. In truth it was two strongholds, one on the river’s southern bank and the other on Sceaftes Eye, which was an island splitting the river into two channels, and in that January of 885 the work was nearly done and no Danish ship could now row upstream to raid the farms and villages along the river’s bank. They could try, but they must pass my new ramparts and know that my troops would follow them, trap them ashore and kill them.

  A Danish trader called Ulf had come that morning, tying his boat at the wharf on Sceaftes Eye where one of my officials prodded through the cargo to assess the tax. Ulf himself, grinning toothlessly, climbed up to greet me. He gave me a piece of amber wrapped in kidskin. “For the Lady Gisela, lord,” he said. “She is well?”