War of the Wolf Read online

  “How, father?” I had asked, hiding my eagerness.

  “Some were fed to wild beasts, some were crucified like our Lord, others were burned to death. Women, men, even children. Their screams sanctify this space.” He had made the sign of the cross. “The Romans were cruel until they saw the light of Christ.”

  “And then they stopped being cruel, father?”

  “They became Christians,” he had answered evasively.

  “Is that why they lost their lands?”

  He had hit me again, though not forcefully nor angrily, yet he had sown a seed in me. The Romans! As a child it was their force that impressed me. They were from so far away, yet they had conquered our land. It was not ours then, of course, but it was still a far land. They were winners and fighters, they were heroes to a child, and Beocca’s disdain made them only more heroic to me. At that time, before my father’s death and before Ragnar the Dane adopted me, I thought I was a Christian, but I never had a fantasy of becoming a Christian hero by facing a wild beast in Eoferwic’s decaying arena. Instead, I dreamed of fighting in that arena, and saw myself placing a foot on the bloodied chest of a fallen warrior as thousands cheered me. I was a child.

  Now, old and gray-bearded, I still admire the Romans. How could I not? We could not build an arena, nor make ramparts like those that surrounded Ceaster. Our roads were muddy tracks, theirs were stone-edged and spear-straight. They built temples of marble, we made churches of timber. Our floors were beaten earth and rushes, theirs were marvels of intricate tilework. They had laced the land with wonders, and we, who had taken the land, could only watch the wonders decay, or patch them with wattle and thatch. True, they were a cruel people, but so are we. Life is cruel.

  I was suddenly aware of shrieks coming from the city’s ramparts. I looked to my right and saw helmeted warriors running on the wall’s top. They were keeping pace with us as best they could, and cheering us on. The shrieks sounded like women, but I could only see men there, one of them waving a spear over his head as if encouraging us to kill. I lifted my spear to him, and the man responded by jumping up and down. He had ribbons, white and red, attached to the crown of his helmet. He screeched something at me, but he was too far away, and I could not catch his words, only sense that he was celebrating.

  No wonder the garrison was happy. Their enemy had crumpled, and the siege was lifted, even if most of Cynlæf’s troops were still in their encampment. But those troops had shown no lust to fight. They had run or hidden in their shelters. Only the household troops opposed us, and they were now fleeing toward the dubious safety of the old arena. We caught a few laggards, spearing them in the back as they stumbled southward, while others, more sensible, threw down their weapons and knelt in abject surrender. The light was fading now. The reddish stone of the arena reflected the flames of the nearest campfires, giving the masonry the appearance of being washed in blood. I curbed Tintreg by the arena’s entrance as my men, grinning and elated, reined in around me.

  “There’s only this one way in?” Finan asked me.

  “As I remember, yes, but send a half-dozen men around the back to make sure.”

  The one way in was an arched tunnel that led beneath the tiered seats into the arena itself, and in the fading light I could see men pushing a cart to make a barricade at the tunnel’s far end. They watched us fearfully, but I made no move to attack them. They were fools, and, like fools, they were doomed.

  Doomed because they had trapped themselves. It was true there were other entrances to the arena, but those entrances, which were evenly spaced about the whole building, only led to the tiered seating, not to the fighting space at the arena’s center. Cynlæf’s men had kept their horses in the arena, and that made sense, but in their desperation to escape they had fled to the horses, and so found themselves ringed by stone with just one way to escape, and my men guarded that one tunnel.

  Vidarr Leifson, one of my Norse warriors, had led horsemen around the whole arena and returned to confirm that there was just the one entrance to the fighting level. “So what do we do, lord?” he asked, twisting in his saddle to peer into the tunnel. His breath clouded in the cold evening air.

  “We let them rot.”

  “Can they climb up to the seats?” Berg asked.

  “Probably.” There was a wall a little higher than a tall man that prevented wild beasts from leaping up to maul the spectators, so our enemy could scramble up to the seats and try to escape through one of the stairways, but that meant abandoning their precious horses, and, once out of the building, they would still have to fight past my men. “So block every entrance,” I ordered, “and light fires just outside every stairway.” The barricades would slow any attempt by Cynlæf’s men to escape, and the fires would warm my sentries.

  “Where do we get firewood?” Godric asked. He was young, a Saxon, and had once been my servant.

  “The barricade, you fool,” Finan said, pointing to the besiegers’ makeshift wall that guarded the road leading from the eastern gate.

  And just then, as the day’s last light drained in the west, I saw that men were coming from the city. The eastern gate had been opened, and a dozen horsemen now threaded their way through the narrow gap between the city’s ditch and the abandoned barricade. “Get those barriers built!” I commanded my men, then turned a tired Tintreg and spurred him to meet the men we had rescued.

  We met them beside the city’s deep ditch. I waited there and watched as the horsemen approached. They were led by a tall young man, clad in mail and with a fine helmet decorated with gold that glinted red from the distant fires. The cheek-pieces of his helmet were open to reveal that he had grown a beard since I had last seen him, and the beard, black and clipped short, made him look older. He was, I knew, twenty-five or twenty-six, I could not remember just when he had been born, but now he was a man in his prime, handsome and confident. He was also a fervent Christian, despite all my efforts to persuade him otherwise, and a big gold cross hung at his chest, swinging against the shining links of mail. There was more gold on his scabbard’s throat and on his horse’s bridle, and ringing the brooch that held his dark cloak in place, while a thin circlet of gold ringed his helmet. He reined in close enough to reach out and pat Tintreg’s neck, and I saw he wore two gold rings over the fine black leather of his gloves. He smiled. “You are the very last person I expected, lord,” he said.

  And I swore at him. It was a good oath, brief and brutal.

  “Is that the proper way,” he asked mildly, “to greet a prince?”

  “I owe Finan two shillings,” I explained.

  Because it had just begun to snow.

  It is one of the privileges of age to be in a hall, warmed by a fire, while in the night the snow falls and the sentries shiver as they watch for enemies trying to escape from a trap they have made for themselves. Except now I was not sure who was trapped, or by whom.

  “I never sent Father Swithred to fetch help,” Æthelstan said. “Your monk lied. And Father Swithred is in good health, God be thanked.”

  Prince Æthelstan was King Edward’s eldest son. He had been born to a pretty Centish girl, the daughter of a bishop, and the poor girl had died whelping him and his twin sister, Eadgyth. After the pretty girl’s death Edward had married a West Saxon girl, and had fathered another son, which made Æthelstan an inconvenience. He was the king’s eldest son, the ætheling, but he had a younger half-brother whose vengeful mother wanted Æthelstan dead because he stood between her son and the throne of Wessex, and so she and her supporters spread the rumor that Æthelstan was a bastard because Edward had never married the pretty Centish girl. He had indeed married her, but in secret because his father had not given permission, and over the years the rumor was embellished so that now Æthelstan’s mother was said to be the daughter of a shepherd, a low-born whore, and no prince would ever marry such a girl, and the rumor was believed because truth is ever feeble against passionate falsehood.

  “Truly!” Æthelstan now told me.
“We didn’t need relief, I asked for none.”

  For a moment I just stared at him. I loved Æthelstan like a son. For years I had protected him, fought for him, taught him the ways of the warrior, and when I had heard from Brother Osric that Æthelstan was under siege and hard-pressed, I had ridden to rescue him. It did not matter that saving Æthelstan was against the interests of Northumbria, I had sworn an oath to protect him, and here I was, in the Roman great hall where he had just told me that he had never sought my help. “You didn’t send Father Swithred?” I asked. A log cracked in the fire and spat a bright spark onto the rushes. I ground the spark beneath my foot.

  “Of course not! He’s here.” Æthelstan gestured across the hall to where the tall, stern-faced priest watched me suspiciously. “I have asked Archbishop Athelm to appoint him Bishop of Ceaster.”

  “And you didn’t send him out of the city?”

  “Of course not! I had no need.”

  I looked at Finan, who shrugged. The wind had picked up, driving the smoke back into the great hall, which had been a part of the Roman commandant’s house. The roof was made of sturdy timbers covered with tiles, many of which remained, though at some time a Saxon had hacked a hole in the tiles to let the smoke out. Now the freshening wind gusted the smoke back, swirling it around the blackened rafters. Snowflakes came through the roof-hole, a few even lasting long enough to die on the table where we ate. “So you never sought my help?” I asked Æthelstan yet again.

  “How often do I have to tell you?” he asked, pushing the jug of wine toward me. “And besides, if I’d needed help, why send for you when my father’s forces are closer? You wouldn’t have helped me anyway!”

  I growled at that. “Why would I not help you? I swore an oath to protect you.”

  “But trouble in Mercia,” he said, “is good for Northumbria, yes?”

  I nodded grudgingly. “It is.”

  “Because if we Mercians fight each other,” Æthelstan went on, “we can’t be fighting you.”

  “Do you want to fight us, lord Prince?” Finan asked.

  Æthelstan smiled. “Of course I do. Northumbria is ruled by a pagan, by a Norseman—”

  “By my son-in-law,” I interrupted him harshly.

  “—and it is the fate of the Saxons,” Æthelstan ignored my words, “to be one people, under one king and one God.”

  “Your god,” I snarled.

  “There is no other,” he said gently.

  Everything he said made sense, except for his nonsense about one god, and that good sense meant I had been lured across Britain for no good purpose. “I should have left you here to rot,” I growled.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Your grandfather always said I was a fool.”

  “My grandfather was right about so many things,” Æthelstan said with a smile. His grandfather was King Alfred.

  I stood and walked to the hall door. I pulled it open and just stared at the glow of fire above the eastern ramparts. Much of that glow came from the encampment where Cynlæf’s men sheltered from the snow that was slanting fast from the north. Braziers burned on the ramparts, where cloaked spearmen kept a watch on the cowed enemy. The brighter light of two flaming torches just outside the hall’s great doors showed the new snow piling against the house walls.

  So Brother Osric had lied. We had brought the monk south with us, but I had gotten tired of his endless complaining about the cold and about his saddle sores, and we had let him leave us at Mameceaster, where, he claimed, the church would shelter him. I should have killed the bastard instead. I shivered, suddenly feeling the night’s cold. “Rorik,” I shouted back into the hall, “bring my cloak!”

  Brother Osric had lied. The monk had told me that Æthelstan had fewer than a hundred warriors, but in truth he had twice as many, which was still a very small garrison for a place the size of Ceaster, but enough to stave off the feeble assaults Cynlæf had made. Brother Osric had told me the garrison was starving, but in truth they had storehouses still half-full with last year’s harvest. A lie had brought me to Ceaster, but why?

  “Your cloak, lord,” a mocking voice said, and I turned to see it was Prince Æthelstan himself who had brought me the heavy fur garment. He was cloaked himself. He nodded to one of the sentries to close the hall door behind us, then stood beside me to watch the snow fall soft and relentless. “I didn’t send for you,” he said, draping the thick fur across my shoulders, “but thank you for coming.”

  “So who did send the monk?” I asked.

  “Maybe no one.”

  “No one?”

  Æthelstan shrugged. “Perhaps the monk knew of the siege, wanted to summon help, but knew you’d mistrust him, so he invented the tale of Father Swithred.”

  I shook my head. “He wasn’t that clever. And he was frightened.”

  “You frighten many Christians,” Æthelstan said drily.

  I stared at the snow whirling around the corner of the house opposite. “I should go to Hwite,” I said.

  “Hwite? Why?”

  “Because the monk came from the monastery there.”

  “There’s no monastery at Hwite,” Æthelstan said. “I’d like to build one, but . . .” his voice trailed away.

  “The bastard lied,” I said vengefully. “I should have known!”

  “Known? How?”

  “He said Father Swithred walked south from here. How could he? The bridge was broken. And why send Swithred? You’d have sent a younger man.”

  Æthelstan shivered. “Why would the monk lie? Maybe he just wanted to summon help.”

  “Summon help,” I said scornfully. “No, the bastard wanted to get me away from Bebbanburg.”

  “So someone can attack it?”

  “No. Bebbanburg won’t fall.” I had left my son in command, and he had twice as many warriors as he needed to hold that gaunt and forbidding fortress.

  “So someone wants you away from Bebbanburg,” Æthelstan said firmly, “because so long as you’re in Bebbanburg they can’t reach you, but now? Now they can reach you.”

  “Then why let me come here?” I asked. “If they wanted to kill me, then why wait till I’m among friends?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and neither did I. The monk had lied, but for what reason I could not tell. It was a trap, plainly it was a trap, but who had set it, and why, were mysteries. Æthelstan stamped his feet, then beckoned me to accompany him across the street, where our footsteps made the first marks in the fresh snow. “Still,” he went on, “I’m glad you did come.”

  “I didn’t need to.”

  “We were in no real danger,” he agreed, “and my father would have sent relief in the spring.”

  “Would he?”

  He ignored the savage disbelief in my voice. “Everything has changed in Wessex,” he said mildly.

  “The new woman?” I asked caustically, meaning King Edward’s new wife.

  “Who is my mother’s niece.”

  That I had not known. What I did know was that King Edward had discarded his second wife and married a younger girl from Cent. The older wife was now in a convent. Edward claimed to be a good Christian, and Christians say that marriage is for life, but a hefty payment of gold or royal land would doubtless persuade the church that their doctrine was wrong, and the king could discard one woman and marry another. “So you’re now in favor, lord Prince?” I asked. “You’re the heir again?”

  He shook his head. Our footsteps squeaked in the new snow. He was leading me down an alley that would take us to the eastern gate. Two of his guards followed us, but not close enough to hear our conversation. “My father is still fond of Ælfweard, I’m told.”

  “Your rival,” I said bitterly. I despised Ælfweard, Edward’s second son, who was a petulant piece of weasel shit.

  “My half-brother,” Æthelstan said reprovingly, “whom I love.”

  “You do?” For a moment he did not answer me. We were climbing the Roman steps to the eastern wall, where braziers
warmed the sentries. We paused at the top, staring at the encampment of the defeated enemy. “You really love that little turd?” I asked.

  “We are commanded to love one another.”

  “Ælfweard is despicable,” I said.

  “He might make a good king,” Æthelstan said quietly.

  “And I’ll be the next Archbishop of Contwaraburg.”

  “That would be interesting,” he said, amused. I knew he despised Ælfweard as much as I did, but he was saying what it was his familial duty to say. “Ælfweard’s mother,” he went on, “is out of favor, but her family is still wealthy, still strong, and they’ve sworn loyalty to the new woman.”

  “They have?”

  “Ælfweard’s uncle is the new ealdorman. He took Edward’s side, and did nothing to help his sister.”

  “Ælfweard’s uncle,” I said savagely, “would whore his own mother to make Ælfweard king.”

  “Probably,” Æthelstan agreed mildly.

  I shivered, and it was not the cold. I shivered because in those words I sensed the trap. I still did not know why I had been lured across Britain, but I suspected I knew who had baited the trap. “I’m an old fool,” I said.

  “And the sun will rise tomorrow.”

  “Lord Prince! Lord Prince!” an excited voice interrupted us. A small warrior was running along the ramparts to greet us; a warrior small as a child, but dressed in mail, carrying a spear, and wearing a helmet decorated with red and white ribbons.

  “Sister Sunngifu,” Æthelstan said fondly as the small figure dropped to her knees in front of him. He touched a gloved hand to her helmet and she smiled up at him adoringly. “This is the Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” he introduced me, “and Sister Sunngifu,” he was talking to me now, “raised a band of fifty women who stand guard on the ramparts to give my warriors a chance to rest and to deceive the enemy of our numbers. The deception worked well!”

  Sunngifu moved her gaze to me, offering a dazzling smile. “I know the Lord Uhtred, lord Prince,” she said.

  “Of course you do,” Æthelstan said, “I remember now, you told me.”