Lords of the North Read online

  We rowed up the Ouse and our songs accompanied the oar strokes as we glided beneath willow and alder, past meadows and woods, and Thorkild, now that we had entered Northumbria, took the carved dog’s head from his boat’s prow so that the snarling beast would not scare the spirits of the land. And that evening, under a washed sky, we came to Eoferwic, the chief city of Northumbria and the place where my father had been slaughtered and where I had been orphaned and where I had met Ragnar the Elder who had raised me and given me my love of the Danes.

  I was not rowing as we approached the city for I had pulled an oar all day and Thorkild had relieved me, and so I was standing in the bow, staring at the smoke sifting up from the city’s roofs, and then I glanced down at the river and saw the first corpse. It was a boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old, and he was naked except for a rag about his waist. His throat had been cut, though the great wound was bloodless now because it had been washed clean by the Ouse. His long fair hair drifted like weed under water.

  We saw two more floating bodies, then we were close enough to see men on the city’s ramparts and there were too many men there, men with spears and shields, and there were more men by the river quays, men in mail, men watching us warily, men with drawn swords and Thorkild called an order and our oars lifted and water dripped from the motionless blades. The boat slewed in the current and I heard the screams from inside the city.

  I had come home.

  ONE

  Thorkild let the boat drift downstream a hundred paces, then rammed her bows into the bank close to a willow. He jumped ashore, tied a sealhide line to tether the boat to the willow’s trunk, and then, with a fearful glance at the armed men watching from higher up the bank, scrambled hurriedly back on board. “You,” he pointed at me, “find out what’s happening.”

  “Trouble’s happening,” I said. “You need to know more?”

  “I need to know what’s happened to my storehouse,” he said, then nodded toward the armed men, “and I don’t want to ask them. So you can instead.”

  He chose me because I was a warrior and because, if I died, he would not grieve. Most of his oarsmen were capable of fighting, but he avoided combat whenever he could because bloodshed and trading were bad partners. The armed men were advancing down the bank now. There were six of them, but they approached very hesitantly, for Thorkild had twice their number in his ship’s bows and all those seamen were armed with axes and spears.

  I pulled my mail over my head, unwrapped the glorious wolf-crested helmet I had captured from a Danish boat off the Welsh coast, buckled on Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting and, thus dressed for war, jumped clumsily ashore. I slipped on the steep bank, clutched at nettles for support and then, cursing because of the stings, clambered up to the path. I had been here before, for this was the wide riverside pasture where my father had led the attack on Eoferwic. I pulled on the helmet and shouted at Thorkild to throw me my shield. He did and, just as I was about to start walking toward the six men who were now standing and watching me with swords in their hands, Hild jumped after me. “You should have stayed on the boat,” I told her.

  “Not without you,” she said. She was carrying our one leather bag in which was little more than a change of clothes, a knife and a whetstone. “Who are they?” she asked, meaning the six men who were still fifty paces away and in no hurry to close the distance.

  “Let’s find out,” I said, and drew Serpent-Breath.

  The shadows were long and the smoke of the city’s cooking fires was purple and gold in the twilight. Rooks flew toward their nests and in the distance I could see cows going to their evening milking. I walked toward the six men. I was in mail, I had a shield and two swords, I wore arm rings and a helmet that was worth the value of three fine mail coats and my appearance checked the six men, who huddled together and waited for me. They all had drawn swords, but I saw that two of them had crucifixes about their necks and that made me suppose they were Saxons. “When a man comes home,” I called to them in English, “he does not expect to be met by swords.”

  Two of them were older men, perhaps in their thirties, both of them thick-bearded and wearing mail. The other four were in leather coats and were younger, just seventeen or eighteen, and the blades in their hands looked as unfamiliar to them as a plow handle would to me. They must have assumed I was a Dane because I had come from a Danish ship and they must have known that six of them could kill one Dane, but they also knew that one war-Dane, dressed in battle-splendor, was likely to kill at least two of them before he died and so they were relieved when I spoke to them in English. They were also puzzled. “Who are you?” one of the older men called.

  I did not answer, but just kept walking toward them. If they had decided to attack me then I would have been forced to flee ignominiously or else die, but I walked confidently, my shield held low and with Serpent-Breath’s tip brushing the long grass. They took my reluctance to answer for arrogance, when in truth it was confusion. I had thought to call myself by any name other than my own, for I did not want Kjartan or my traitorous uncle to know I had returned to Northumbria, but my name was also one to be reckoned with and I was foolishly tempted to use it to awe them, but inspiration came just in time. “I am Steapa of Defnascir,” I announced, and just in case Steapa’s name was unknown in Northumbria, I added a boast. “I am the man who put Svein of the White Horse into his long home in the earth.”

  The man who had demanded my name stepped a pace backward. “You are Steapa? The one who serves Alfred?”

  “I am.”

  “Lord,” he said, and lowered his blade. One of the younger men touched his crucifix and dropped to a knee. A third man sheathed his sword and the others, deciding that was prudent, did the same.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “We serve King Egbert,” one of the older men said.

  “And the dead?” I asked, gesturing toward the river where another naked corpse circled slow in the current, “who are they?”

  “Danes, lord.”

  “You’re killing Danes?”

  “It’s God’s will, lord,” he said.

  I gestured toward Thorkild’s ship. “That man is a Dane and he is also a friend. Will you kill him?”

  “We know Thorkild, lord,” the man said, “and if he comes in peace he will live.”

  “And me?” I demanded, “what would you do with me?”

  “The king would see you, lord. He would honor you for the great slaughter of the Danes.”

  “This slaughter?” I asked scornfully, pointing Serpent-Breath toward a corpse floating downriver.

  “He would honor the victory over Guthrum, lord. Is it true?”

  “It is true,” I said, “I was there.” I turned then, sheathed Serpent-Breath, and beckoned to Thorkild who untied his ship and rowed it upstream. I shouted to him across the water, telling him that Egbert’s Saxons had risen against the Danes, but that these men promised they would leave him in peace if he came in friendship.

  “What would you do in my place?” Thorkild called back. His men gave their oars small tugs to hold the ship against the river’s flow.

  “Go downstream,” I shouted in Danish, “find sword-Danes and wait till you know what is happening.”

  “And you?” he asked.

  “I stay here,” I said.

  He groped in a pouch and threw something toward me. It glittered in the fading light, then vanished among the buttercups that made the darkening pasture yellow. “That’s for your advice,” he called, “and may you live long, whoever you are.”

  He turned his ship which was a clumsy maneuver for the hull was almost as long as the Ouse was wide, but he managed it skillfully enough and the oars took him downstream and out of my life. I discovered later that his storehouse had been ransacked and the one-armed Dane who guarded it had been slaughtered and his daughter raped, so my advice was worth the silver coin Thorkild had thrown to me.

  “You sent him away?” one of the bearded men asked me resentfully.<
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  “I told you, he was a friend.” I stooped and found the shilling in the long grass. “So how do you know of Alfred’s victory?” I asked.

  “A priest came, lord,” he said, “and he told us.”

  “A priest?”

  “From Wessex, lord. All the way from Wessex. He carried a message from King Alfred.”

  I should have known Alfred would want the news of his victory over Guthrum to spread throughout Saxon England, and it turned out that he had sent priests to wherever Saxons lived and those priests carried the message that Wessex was victorious and that God and his saints had given them the triumph. One such priest had been sent to King Egbert in Eoferwic, and that priest had reached the city just one day before me, and that was when the stupidity began.

  The priest had traveled on horseback, his clerical frock wrapped in a bundle on the back of his saddle, and he had ridden from Saxon house to Saxon house through Danish-held Mercia. The Mercian Saxons had helped him on his way, providing fresh horses each day and escorting him past the larger Danish garrisons until he had come to Northumbria’s capital to give King Egbert the good news that the West Saxons had defeated the Great Army of the Danes. Yet what appealed even more to the Northumbrian Saxons was the outrageous claim that Saint Cuthbert had appeared to Alfred in a dream and shown him how to gain the victory. The dream was supposed to have come to Alfred during the winter of defeat in Æthelingæg where a handful of fugitive Saxons hid from the conquering Danes, and the story of the dream was aimed at Egbert’s Saxons like a huntsman’s arrow, for there was no saint more revered north of the Humber than Cuthbert. Cuthbert was Northumbria’s idol, the holiest Christian ever to live in the land, and there was not one pious Saxon household that did not pray to him daily. The idea that the north’s own glorious saint had helped Wessex defeat the Danes drove the wits from King Egbert’s skull like partridges fleeing the reapers. He had every right to be pleased at Alfred’s victory, and he doubtless resented ruling on a Danish leash, but what he should have done was thank the priest who brought the news and then, to keep him quiet, shut him up like a dog in a kennel. Instead he had ordered Wulfhere, the city’s archbishop, to hold a service of thanks in the city’s largest church. Wulfhere, who was no fool, had immediately developed an ague and ridden into the country to recover, but a fool called Father Hrothweard took his place and Eoferwic’s big church had resounded to a fiery sermon which claimed Saint Cuthbert had come from heaven to lead the West Saxons to victory, and that idiotic tale had persuaded Eoferwic’s Saxons that God and Saint Cuthbert were about to deliver their own country from the Danes. And so the killing had started.

  All this I learned as we went into the city. I learned too that there had been fewer than a hundred Danish warriors in Eoferwic because the rest had marched north under Earl Ivarr to confront a Scottish army that had crossed the border. There had been no such invasion in living memory, but the southern Scots had a new king who had sworn to make Eoferwic his new capital, and so Ivarr had taken his army north to teach the fellow a lesson.

  Ivarr was the true ruler of southern Northumbria. If he had wanted to call himself the king then there was no one to stop him, but it was convenient to have a pliable Saxon on the throne to collect the taxes and to keep his fellow-Saxons quiet. Ivarr, meanwhile, could do what his family did best; make war. He was a Lothbrok and it was their boast that no male Lothbrok had ever died in bed. They died fighting with their swords in their hands. Ivarr’s father and one uncle had died in Ireland, while Ubba, the third Lothbrok brother, had fallen to my sword at Cynuit. Now Ivarr, the latest sword-Dane from a war-besotted family, was marching against the Scots and had sworn to bring their king to Eoferwic in slave manacles.

  I thought no Saxon in his right mind would rebel against Ivarr, who was reputed to be as ruthless as his father, but Alfred’s victory and the claim that it was inspired by Saint Cuthbert had ignited the madness in Eoferwic. The flames were fed by Father Hrothweard’s preaching. He bellowed that God, Saint Cuthbert, and an army of angels were coming to drive the Danes from Northumbria and my arrival only encouraged the insanity. “God has sent you,” the men who had accosted me kept saying, and they shouted to folk that I was Svein’s killer and by the time we reached the palace there was a small crowd following Hild and me as we pushed through narrow streets still stained with Danish blood.

  I had been to Eoferwic’s palace before. It was a Roman building of fine pale stone with vast pillars holding up a tiled roof that was now patched with blackened straw. The floor was also tiled, and those tiles had once formed pictures of the Roman gods, but they were all torn up now and those that were left were mostly covered by rushes that were stained by the previous day’s blood. The big hall stank like a butcher’s yard and was wreathed with smoke from the blazing torches that lit the cavernous space.

  The new King Egbert turned out to be the old King Egbert’s nephew and he had his uncle’s shifty face and petulant mouth. He looked scared when he came onto the dais at the hall’s end, and no wonder, for the mad Hrothweard had summoned up a whirlwind and Egbert must have known that Ivarr’s Danes would be coming for revenge. Yet Egbert’s followers were caught up in the excitement, sure that Alfred’s victory foretold the final defeat of the Northmen, and my arrival was taken as another sign from heaven. I was pushed forward and the news of my coming was shouted at the king who looked confused, and was even more confused when another voice, a familiar voice, called out my name. “Uhtred! Uhtred!”

  I looked for the speaker and saw it was Father Willibald.

  “Uhtred!” he shouted again and looked delighted to see me. Egbert frowned at me, then looked at Willibald. “Uhtred!” the priest said, ignoring the king, and came forward to embrace me.

  Father Willibald was a good friend and a good man. He was a West Saxon who had once been chaplain to Alfred’s fleet, and fate had decreed that he would be the man sent north to carry the good news of Ethandun to the Northumbrian Saxons.

  The clamor in the hall subsided. Egbert tried to take command. “Your name is,” he said, then decided he did not know what my name was.

  “Steapa!” one of the men who had escorted us into the city called out.

  “Uhtred!” Willibald announced, his eyes bright with excitement.

  “I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I confessed, unable to prolong my deception.

  “The man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson!” Willibald announced and tried to hold up my right hand to show I was a champion. “And the man,” he went on, “who toppled Svein of the White Horse at Ethandun!”

  In two days, I thought, Kjartan the Cruel would know that I was in Northumbria, and in three my uncle Ælfric would have learned of my coming, and if I had possessed an ounce of sense I would have forced my way out of that hall, taken Hild with me, and headed south as fast as Archbishop Wulfhere had vanished from Eoferwic.

  “You were at Ethandun?” Egbert asked me.

  “I was, lord.”

  “What happened?”

  They had already heard the tale of the battle from Willibald, but his was a priest’s version, heavy with prayers and miracles. I gave them what they wanted which was a warrior’s story of dead Danes and sword-slaughter, and all the while a fierce-eyed priest with bristly hair and an unruly beard interrupted me with shouts of hallelujah. I gathered this was Father Hrothweard, the priest who had roused Eoferwic to slaughter. He was young, scarce older than I was, but he had a powerful voice and a natural authority that was given extra force by his passion. Every hallelujah was accompanied by a shower of spittle, and no sooner had I described the defeated Danes spilling down the great slope from Ethandun’s summit than Hrothweard leaped forward and harangued the crowd. “This is Uhtred!” he shouted, poking me in my mail-clad ribs, “Uhtred of Northumbria, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a killer of Danes, a warrior of God, a sword of the Lord! And he has come to us, just as the blessed Saint Cuthbert visited Alfred in his time of tribulation! These are signs from the Almighty!” The crowd cheered
, the king looked scared, and Hrothweard, ever ready to launch into a fiery sermon, began frothing at the mouth as he described the coming slaughter of every Dane in Northumbria.

  I managed to sidle away from Hrothweard, making my way to the back of the dais where I took Willibald by the scruff of his skinny neck and forced him into a passage which led to the king’s private chambers. “You’re an idiot,” I growled at him, “you’re an earsling. You’re a witless dribbling turd, that’s what you are. I should slit your useless guts here and now and feed them to the pigs.”

  Willibald opened his mouth, closed it, and looked helpless.

  “The Danes will be back here,” I promised him, “and there’s going to be a massacre.”

  His mouth opened and closed again, and still no sound came.

  “So what you’re going to do,” I said, “is cross the Ouse and go south as fast as your legs will carry you.”

  “But it’s all true,” he pleaded.

  “What’s all true?”

  “That Saint Cuthbert gave us victory!”

  “Of course it isn’t true!” I snarled. “Alfred made it up. You think Cuthbert came to him in Æthelingæg? Then why didn’t he tell us about the dream when it happened? Why does he wait till after the battle to tell us?” I paused and Willibald made a strangled noise. “He waited,” I answered myself, “because it didn’t happen.”

  “But…”

  “He made it up!” I growled, “because he wants Northumbrians to look to Wessex for leadership against the Danes. He wants to be king of Northumbria, don’t you understand that? And not just Northumbria. I’ve no doubt he’s got fools like you telling the Mercians that one of their damned saints appeared to him in a dream.”

  “But he did,” he interrupted me, and when I looked bemused, he explained further. “You’re right! Saint Kenelm spoke to Alfred in Æthelingæg. He came to him in a dream and he told Alfred that he would win.”