The Flame Bearer

  ‘His three walls now,’ I said. We would have to cross the new palisade, then the formidable ramparts of the Low Gate, and there would still be the big wall pierced by the High Gate.

  But that new wall was not the worst news. The two new ships in Bebbanburg’s harbour were what made my heart sink. One was a fighting ship, smaller than the four we had watched arrive but, like them, flying Einar’s banner of the dragon’s head, and alongside her was a fat-bellied trading ship. Men were carrying barrels ashore, wading through the shallow water to dump the supplies on the beach just outside the Low Gate.

  ‘Einar’s bringing him food,’ I said bleakly. Finan said nothing. He knew what I was feeling; despair. My cousin now had more men, and a fleet to bring his garrison food. ‘I can’t starve them now,’ I said, ‘not while those bastards are there.’

  Now, late in the afternoon and under a glowering sky, a priest came to Ætgefrin, and I assumed he had been sent by my cousin with a gloating message. He was close enough now for me to see that he had long black hair that hung greasily either side of a pale, anxious face that stared up at our earthen wall. He waved, probably wanting a return wave that would reassure him that he would be welcome, but none of my men responded. We just watched as his weary gelding finished the climb and carried him over the turf rampart. The priest staggered slightly when he dismounted. He looked around him and shuddered at what he saw. My men. Men in mail and leather, hard men, men with swords. None spoke to him, we all just waited for him to explain his arrival. He finally caught sight of me, saw the gold at my throat and on my forearms, and he walked to me and dropped to his knees. ‘You’re Lord Uhtred?’

  ‘I’m Lord Uhtred.’

  ‘My name is Eadig, Father Eadig. I’ve been looking for you, lord.’

  ‘I told Waldhere where he could find me,’ I said harshly.

  Eadig looked up at me, puzzled. ‘Waldhere, lord?’

  ‘You’re from Bebbanburg?’

  ‘Bebbanburg?’ He shook his head. ‘No, lord, we come from Eoferwic.’

  ‘Eoferwic!’ I could not hide my surprise. ‘And “we”? How many of you are there?’ I looked southwards but saw no more riders.

  ‘Five of us left Eoferwic, lord, but we were attacked.’

  ‘And you alone lived?’ Finan said accusingly.

  ‘The others drew the attackers away, lord.’ Father Eadig spoke to me rather than to Finan, ‘they wanted me to reach you. They knew it was important.’

  ‘Who sent you?’ I demanded.

  ‘King Sigtryggr, lord.’

  I felt a cold pulse shiver around my heart. For a moment I dared not speak, frightened of what this young priest would say. ‘Sigtryggr,’ I finally said, and wondered what crisis would provoke my son-in-law to send a messenger. I feared for my daughter. ‘Is Stiorra ill?’ I asked urgently. ‘The children?’

  ‘No, lord, the queen and her children are well.’

  ‘Then …’

  ‘The king requests your return, lord,’ Eadig blurted out, and took a rolled parchment from inside his robe. He held it out to me.

  I took the crushed parchment, but did not unroll it. ‘Why?’

  ‘The Saxons have attacked, lord. Northumbria is at war.’ He was still on his knees, gazing up at me. ‘The king wants your troops, lord. And he wants you.’

  I cursed. So Bebbanburg must wait. We would ride south.

  Two

  We rode next morning. I led one hundred and ninety-four men, together with a score of boys who were servants, and we rode south through rain and wind and beneath clouds as dark as Father Eadig’s robe. ‘Why did my son-in-law send a priest?’ I asked him. Sigtryggr, like me, worshipped the old gods, the real gods of Asgard.

  ‘We do his clerical work, lord.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘We priests, lord. There are six of us who serve King Sigtryggr by writing his laws and charters. Most …’ he hesitated, ‘it’s because we can read and write.’

  ‘And most pagans can’t?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, lord.’ He blushed. He knew that those of us who worshipped the old gods disliked being called pagans, which is why he had hesitated.

  ‘You can call me a pagan,’ I said, ‘I’m proud of it.’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ he said uneasily.

  ‘And this pagan can read and write,’ I told him. I had the skills because I had been raised as a Christian, and the Christians value writing, which is, I suppose, a useful thing. King Alfred had established schools throughout Wessex where boys were molested by monks when they were not being forced to learn their letters. Sigtryggr, curious about how the Saxons ruled in southern Britain, had once asked me whether he should do the same, but I had told him to teach boys how to wield a sword, hold a shield, guide a plough, ride a horse, and butcher a carcass. ‘And you don’t need schools for that,’ I had told him.

  ‘And he sent me, lord,’ Father Eadig went on, ‘because he knew you would have questions.’

  ‘Which you can answer?’

  ‘As best I can, lord.’

  Sigtryggr’s message on the parchment merely said that West Saxon forces had invaded southern Northumbria and that he needed my forces in Eoferwic as soon as I could reach that city. The message had been signed with a scrawl that might have belonged to my son-in-law, but also bore his seal of the axe. The Christians claim that the one great advantage of reading and writing is that we can be sure a message is real, but they fake documents all the time. There is a monastery in Wiltunscir that has the skill to produce charters that look as if they are two or three hundred years old. They scrape old parchments, but leave just enough of the original writing visible so that the new words, written over the old in weak ink, are hard to read, and they carve copies of seals, and the faked charters all claim that some ancient king granted the church valuable lands or the income from customs’ dues. Then the abbots and bishops who paid the monks for the forged documents take them to the royal court to have some family thrown out of its homestead so that the Christians can get richer. So I suppose reading and writing really are useful skills.

  ‘West Saxon forces,’ I asked Father Eadig, ‘not Mercians?’

  ‘West Saxons, lord. They have an army at Hornecastre, lord.’

  ‘Hornecastre? Where’s that?’

  ‘East of Lindcolne, lord, on the River Beina.’

  ‘And that’s Sigtryggr’s land?’

  ‘Oh yes, lord. The frontier’s not far away, but the land is Northumbrian.’

  I had not heard of Hornecastre, which suggested it was not an important town. The important towns were those built on the Roman roads, or those which had been fortified into burhs, but Hornecastre? The only explanation I could think of was that the town made a convenient place to assemble forces for an attack on Lindcolne. I said as much to Father Eadig, who nodded eager agreement. ‘Yes, lord. And if the king isn’t in Eoferwic then he requests that you join him in Lindcolne.’

  That made sense. If the West Saxons wanted to capture Eoferwic, Sigtryggr’s capital city, then they would advance north up the Roman road and would need to storm the high walls of Lindcolne before they could approach Eoferwic. But what did not make sense was why there was war at all.

  It made no sense because there was a treaty of peace between the Saxons and the Danes. Sigtryggr, my son-in-law and King of Eoferwic and of Northumbria, had made the treaty with Æthelflaed of Mercia, and he had surrendered land and burhs as the price for that peace. Some men despised him for that, but Northumbria was a weak kingdom, and the Saxon realms of Mercia and Wessex were strong. Sigtryggr needed time, men, and money if he was to withstand the Saxon onslaught he knew was coming.

  It was coming because King Alfred’s dream was turning into reality. I am old enough to remember a time when the Danes ruled almost all of what is now England. They captured Northumbria, took East Anglia, and occupied all of Mercia. Guthrum the Dane had then invaded Wessex, driving Alfred and a handful of men into the marshes of Sumorsæte, but Alfred had won the unlike
ly victory at Ethandun, and ever since the Saxons had inexorably worked their way northwards. The old kingdom of Mercia was in Saxon hands now, and Edward of Wessex, Alfred’s son and the brother of Æthelflaed of Mercia, had reconquered East Anglia. Alfred’s dream, his passion, had been to unite all the lands where the Saxon tongue was spoken, and of those lands only Northumbria was left. There might be a peace treaty between Northumbria and Mercia, but we all knew the Saxon onslaught would come.

  Rorik, the Norse boy whose father I had killed, had been listening as I talked to Father Eadig. ‘Lord,’ he asked nervously, ‘whose side are we on?’

  I laughed. I was born a Saxon, but raised by Danes, my daughter had married a Norseman, my dearest friend was Irish, my woman was a Saxon, the mother of my children had been Danish, my gods were pagan, and my oath was sworn to Æthelflaed, a Christian. Whose side was I on?

  ‘All you need to know, boy,’ Finan growled, ‘is that Lord Uhtred’s side is the one that wins.’

  The rain was slashing down now, turning the drove path we followed into thick mud. The rain fell so hard I had to raise my voice to Eadig. ‘You say the Mercians haven’t invaded?’

  ‘Not as far as we know, lord.’

  ‘Just West Saxons?’

  ‘Seems so, lord.’

  And that was strange. Before Sigtryggr captured the throne in Eoferwic I had tried to persuade Æthelflaed to attack Northumbria. She had refused, saying she would not start a war unless her brother’s troops were fighting alongside her men. And Edward of Wessex, her brother, had been adamant that she refuse. He insisted Northumbria could only be conquered by the combined armies of Wessex and Mercia, yet now he had marched alone? I knew there was a faction in the West Saxon court that insisted Wessex could conquer Northumbria without Mercian help, but Edward had always been more cautious. He wanted his sister’s army alongside his own. I pressed Eadig, but he was sure there had been no Mercian attack. ‘At least not when I left Eoferwic, lord.’

  ‘It’s just rumours,’ Finan said scornfully. ‘Who knows what’s happening? We’ll get there and find it’s nothing but a god-damned cattle raid.’

  ‘Scouts,’ Rorik said. I thought he meant that a handful of West Saxon scouts had been mistaken for an invasion, but instead he was pointing behind us, and I turned to see two of the horsemen watching us from a ridge. They were hard to see through the drenching rain, but they were unmistakable. The same small, fast horses, the same long spears. We had seen no scouts for a couple of days, but they were back now and following us.

  I spat. ‘Now my cousin knows we’re leaving.’

  ‘He’ll be happy,’ Finan said.

  ‘They look like the men who ambushed us,’ Father Eadig said, staring at the distant scouts and making the sign of the cross. ‘There were six of them on fast horses and carrying spears.’ Sigtryggr had sent the priest with an armed escort who had sacrificed their lives so that Eadig alone could escape.

  ‘They’re my cousin’s men,’ I told Father Eadig, ‘and if we catch any of them I’ll let you kill them.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that!’

  I frowned at him. ‘You don’t want revenge?’

  ‘I am a priest, lord, I can’t kill!’

  ‘I’ll teach you how, if you like,’ I said. I doubt I shall ever understand Christianity. ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ their priests teach, then encourage warriors to give battle against the heathen, or even against other Christians if there is a half-chance of gaining land, slaves, or silver. Father Beocca had taught me the nailed god’s ten commandments, but I had long learned that the chief commandment of the Christians was ‘Thou shalt make my priests wealthy’.

  For two more days the scouts followed us southwards until, in a wet evening, we reached the wall. The wall! There are many wonders in Britain; the ancient people left mysterious rings of stone, while the Romans built temples, palaces, and great halls, yet of all those wonders it is the wall that amazes me the most.

  The Romans, of course, had made it. They had made a wall across Britain, clear across Northumbria, a wall that stretched from the River Tinan on Northumbria’s eastern coast to the Cumbrian coast on the Irish Sea. It ended close to Cair Ligualid, though much of the wall’s stone there had been pillaged to make steadings, yet still most of the wall existed. And not just a wall, but a massive stone rampart, wide enough for men to walk two abreast on its top, and in front of the wall was a ditch and an earthen bank and behind it was another ditch, while every few miles was a fort like the one we called Weallbyrig. A string of forts! I had never counted them, though once I had ridden the wall from sea to sea, and what amazing forts! There were towers from which sentries could gaze into the northern hills, cisterns to store water, there were barracks, stables, storerooms, all made of stone! I remembered my father frowning at the wall as it twisted its way into a valley and up the further hill, and he had shaken his head in wonder. ‘How many slaves did they need to build this?’

  ‘Hundreds,’ my elder brother had said, and six months later he was dead, and my father had given me his name, and I became the heir to Bebbanburg.

  The wall marked the southern boundary of Bebbanburg’s lands, and my father had always left a score of warriors in Weallbyrig to collect tolls from travellers using the main road that linked Scotland to Lundene. Those men were long gone, of course, driven out when the Danes conquered Northumbria during the invasion that had cost my father his life and left me an orphan with a noble name and no land. No land because my uncle had stolen it. ‘You are lord of nothing,’ King Alfred had once snarled at me, ‘lord of nothing and lord of nowhere. Uhtred the godless, Uhtred the landless, and Uhtred the hopeless.’

  He had been right, of course, but now I was Uhtred of Dunholm. I had taken that fort when we defeated Ragnall and killed Brida, and it was a great fort, almost as formidable as Bebbanburg. And Weallbyrig marked the northern limit of Dunholm’s lands, just as it marked the southern edge of Bebbanburg’s domain. If the fort had another name, I did not know it, we called it Weallbyrig, which just means the fort of the wall, and it had been built where the great wall crossed a low hill. The years and the rain had made the ditches shallow, but the wall itself was still strong. The buildings had lost their roofs, but we had cleared the debris from three of them and brought rafters from the woods near Dunholm to make new roofs, which we layered with turf, and then we constructed a new shelter on top of the look-out tower so sentries were protected from wind and rain as they stared northwards.

  Always northwards. I thought about that often. I do not know how many years it is since the Romans left Britain. Father Beocca, my childhood tutor, had told me it was over five hundred years, and perhaps he was right, but even back then, however long ago it was, the sentries gazed north. Always north towards the Scots, who must have been as much trouble then as they are now. I remember my father cursing them, and his priests praying that the nailed god would humble them, and that always puzzled me because the Scots were Christians too. When I was just eight years old my father had allowed me to ride with his warriors on a punitive cattle raid into Scotland, and I remember a small town in a wide valley where the women and children had crowded into a church. ‘You don’t touch them!’ my father had commanded, ‘they have sanctuary!’

  ‘They’re the enemy,’ I protested, ‘don’t we want slaves?’

  ‘They’re Christians,’ my father explained curtly, and so we had taken their long-haired cattle, burned most of their houses, and ridden home with ladles, spits, and cooking pots, indeed with anything that our smithy could melt down, but we had not entered the church. ‘Because they’re Christians,’ my father had explained again, ‘don’t you understand, you stupid boy?’

  I did not understand, and then, of course, the Danes had come, and they tore the churches apart to steal the silver from the altars. I remember Ragnar laughing one day. ‘It is so kind of the Christians! They put their wealth in one building and mark it with a great cross! It makes life so easy.’

  So I l
earned that the Scots were Christians, but they were also the enemy, just as they had been the enemy when thousands of Roman slaves had dragged stones across Northumbria’s hills to make the wall. In my childhood I was a Christian too, I knew no better, and I remember asking Father Beocca how other Christians could be our enemies.

  ‘They are indeed Christians,’ Father Beocca had explained to me, ‘but they are savages too!’ He had taken me to the monastery on Lindisfarena and he had begged the abbot, who was to be slaughtered by the Danes within half a year, to show me one of the monastery’s six books. It was a huge book with crackling pages, and Beocca turned them reverently, tracing the lines of crabbed handwriting with a dirty fingernail. ‘Ah!’ he had said. ‘Here it is!’ He turned the book so I could see the writing, though because it was in Latin it meant nothing at all to me. ‘This is a book,’ Beocca told me, ‘written by Saint Gildas. It’s a very rare book. Saint Gildas was a Briton, and his book tells of our coming! The coming of the Saxons! He did not like us,’ he had chuckled when he said that, ‘for of course we were not Christians then. But I want you to see this because Saint Gildas came from Northumbria, and he knew the Scots well!’ He turned the book and bent over the page. ‘Here it is! Listen! “As soon as the Romans returned home,”’ he translated as his finger scratched along the lines, ‘“there eagerly emerged the foul hordes of Scots like dark swarms of worms who wriggle out of cracks in the rocks. They had a greed for bloodshed, and were more ready to cover their villainous faces with hair than cover their private parts with clothes.”’ Beocca had made the sign of the cross after he closed the book. ‘Nothing changes! They are thieves and robbers!’

  ‘Naked thieves and robbers?’ I had asked. The passage about private parts had interested me.

  ‘No, no, no. They’re Christians now. They cover their shameful parts now, God be praised.’

  ‘So they’re Christians,’ I said, ‘but don’t we raid their land too?’