The Burning Land

  There is a joy at being afloat. I was still under the thrall of Gisela’s death, but going to sea brought hope again. Not much, but some. To drive a boat into the gray waves, to watch the wolf’s head dip into the crests and rear in an explosion of white water, to feel the wind hard and cold, to see the sail taut as a pregnant woman’s belly, to hear the hiss of the sea against the hull, and to feel the steering oar tremble in the hand like the very heartbeat of the boat, all that brings joy.

  For five years I had not taken a ship beyond the wide waters of the Temes estuary, but once we had cleared the treacherous shoals at the point of Fughelness we could turn north and there I had hoisted the sail, shipped the long oars, and let Seolferwulf run free. Now we went northward into the wider ocean, into the angry wind- whipped ship- killing sea, and the coast of East Anglia lay low and dull on our left and the gray sea ran into the gray sky to our right, while ahead of me was the unknown.

  Cerdic was with me, and Sihtric, and Rypere, as were most of my best men. What surprised me was that Osferth, Alfred’s bastard, came too. He had stepped silently aboard, almost the last man to make the choice, and I had raised an eyebrow and he had just given a half- smile and taken his place on a rower’s bench. He had been beside me as we lashed the oars to the cradles that usually held the sail on its long yard and I had asked if he was certain about his decision.

  “Why should I not be with you, lord?” he asked.

  “You’re Alfred’s son,” I said, “a West Saxon.”

  “Half these men are West Saxons, lord,” he said, glancing at the crew, “probably more than half.”

  “Your father won’t be pleased you’ve stayed with me.”

  “And what has he done for me?” Osferth asked bitterly. “Tried to make me a monk or priest so he could forget I existed? And if I stayed in Wessex what could I expect? Favor?” he laughed bitterly.

  “You may never see Wessex again,” I said.

  “Then I’ll thank God for that,” he said and then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “There’s no stench, lord,” he added.

  “Stench?”

  “The stink of Lundene,” he explained, “it’s gone.”

  And so it had, because we were at sea and the sewage- soured streets were far behind us. We ran under sail all that day and saw no other ships except a handful of small craft that were fishing and those vessels, seeing our rampant wolf’s head, scattered from our path, their men pulling desperately on oars to escape Seolferwulf ‘s threat. That evening we ran the ship close inshore, lowered the sail, and felt our way under oars into a shallow channel to make a camp. It was late in the year to be voyaging and so the cold dark came early. We had no horses so it was impossible to explore the country about our landing place, but I had no fears because I could see no settlements except for one reed- thatched hovel a long way north, and whoever lived there would fear us far more than we feared them. This was a place of mud and reed and grass and creeks beneath a vast wind- driven sky. I say camp, but all we did was carry cloaks above the thick tideline of weed and driftwood. I left sentries on the boat, and placed others at the small island’s extremities, and then we lit fires and sang songs beneath the night clouds.

  “We need men,” Finan said, sitting next to me.

  “We do,” I agreed.

  “Where do we find them?”

  “In the north,” I said. I was going to Northumbria, going far from Wessex and its priests, going to where my friend had a fortress in the bend of a river and my uncle had a fortress by the sea. I was going home.

  “If we’re attacked,” Finan said, and did not finish the thought.

  “We won’t be,” I said confidently. Any ship at sea was prey to pirates, but Seolferwulf was a warship, not a trader. She was longer than most merchant ships and, though her belly was wide, she had a sleekness that only fighting ships possessed. And from a distance she would appear fully manned because of the number of women aboard. A pair of ships might dare to attack us, but even that was unlikely while there was easier prey afloat. “But we do need men,” I agreed, “and silver.”

  “Silver?” He grinned. “What’s in that big treasure chest?” He jerked his head toward the grounded ship.

  “Silver,” I said, “but I need more. Much more.” I saw the quizzical look on his face. “I am Lord of Bebbanburg,” I explained, “and to take that stronghold I need men, Finan. Three crews at least. And even that might not be enough.”

  He nodded. “And where do we find silver?”

  “We steal it, of course.”

  He watched the brilliant heart of the fire where the driftwood burned brightest. Some folk say that the future can be read from the shifting shapes inside that glowing inferno, and perhaps he was trying to scry what fate held for us, but then he frowned. “Folk have learned to guard their silver,” he said softly. “There are too many wolves and the sheep have become canny.”

  “That’s true,” I said. In my childhood, when the northmen returned to Britain, the plundering was easy. Viking men landed, killed, and stole, but now almost anything of value was behind a palisade guarded by spears, though there were still a few monasteries and churches that trusted their defense to the nailed god.

  “And you can’t steal from the church,” Finan said, thinking the same thoughts.

  “I can’t?”

  “Most of your men are Christians,” he said, “and they’ll follow you, lord, but not into the gates of hell.”

  “Then we’ll steal from the pagans,” I said.

  “The pagans, lord, are the thieves.”

  “Then they have the silver I want.”

  “And what of her?” Finan asked softly, looking at Skade, who crouched close to me, but slightly behind the ring of folk around the fire.

  “What of her?”

  “The women don’t like her, lord. They fear her.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Because she’s a sorceress?” I twisted to look at her. “Skade,” I asked, “do you see the future?”

  She looked at me in silence for a while. A night- bird called in the marsh and perhaps its harsh voice prompted her because she gave a curt nod. “I glimpse it, lord,” she said, “sometimes.”

  “Then say what you see,” I ordered her, “stand up and tell us. Tell us what you see.”

  She hesitated, then stood. She was wearing a black woolen cloak and it shrouded her body so that, with her black hair that she wore unbound like an unmarried girl, she appeared a tall slim night- dark figure in which her pale face shone white. The singing faltered, then died away, and I saw some of my people make the sign of the cross. “Tell us what you see,” I commanded her again.

  She raised her pale face to the clouds, but said nothing for a long while. No one else spoke. Then she shuddered and I was irresistibly reminded of Godwin, the man I had murdered. Some men and women do hear the whisper of the gods, and other folk fear them, and I was convinced Skade saw and heard things hidden from the rest of us. Then, just as it seemed as though she would never speak, she laughed aloud.

  “Tell us,” I said irritably.

  “You will lead armies,” she said, “armies to shadow the land, lord, and behind you the crops will grow tall, fed by the blood of your enemies.”

  “And these people?” I asked, waving at the men and women who listened to her.

  “You are their gold- giver, their lord. You will make them rich.”

  There were murmurs round the fire. They liked what they heard. Men follow a lord because the lord is a gift- giver.

  “And how do we know you do not lie?” I asked her.

  She spread her arms. “If I lie, lord,” she said, “then I will die now.” She waited, as if inviting a blow from Thor’s hammer, but the only sounds were the sighing of wind in the reeds, the crackle of burning driftwood, and the slur of water creeping into the marsh on the night’s tide.

  “And you?” I asked, “what of you?”

  “I am to be greater than you,
lord,” she said, and some of my people hissed, but the words gave me no offense.

  “And what is that, Skade?” I asked.

  “What the Fates decide, lord,” she said, and I waved her to sit down. I was thinking back across the years to another woman who had eavesdropped on the murmurs of the gods, and she had also said I would lead armies. Yet now I was a man who was the most contemptible of men; a man who had broken an oath, a man running from his lord.

  Our peoples are bound by oaths. When a man swears his loyalty to me he becomes closer than a brother. My life is his as his is mine, and I had sworn to serve Alfred. I thought of that as the singing began again and as Skade crouched behind me. As Alfred’s oath- man I owed him service, yet I had run away, and that stripped me of honor and left me despicable.

  Yet we do not control our lives. The three spinners make our threads. Wyrd bid ful araed, we say, and it is true. Fate is inexorable. Yet if fate decrees, and the spinners know what that fate will be, why do we make oaths? It is a question that has haunted me all my life, and the closest I have come to an answer is that oaths are made by men, while fate is decreed by the gods, and that oaths are men’s attempts to dictate fate. Yet we cannot decree what we would wish. Making an oath is like steering a course, but if the winds and tides of fate are too strong, then the steering oar loses its power. So we make oaths, but we are helpless in the face of wyrd. I had lost honor by fleeing from Lundene, but the honor had been taken from me by fate, and that was some consolation in that dark night on the cold East Anglian shore.

  There was another consolation. I woke in the dark and went to the ship. Her stern was rising gently on the incoming tide. “You can sleep,” I told the sentries. Our fires ashore were still glowing, though their flames were low now. “Join your women,” I told them, “I’ll guard the ship.”

  Seolferwulf did not need guarding because there was no enemy, but it is a habit to set sentries, and so I sat in her stern and thought of fate and of Alfred, and of Gisela and of Iseult, of Brida and of Hild, and of all the women I had known and all the twists of life, and I ignored the slight lurch as someone climbed over Seolferwulf’s still- grounded bow. I said nothing as the dark figure threaded the rowers’ benches.

  “I did not kill her, lord,” Skade said.

  “You cursed me, woman.”

  “You were my enemy then,” she said, “what was I supposed to do?”

  “And the curse killed Gisela,” I said.

  “That was not the curse,” she said.

  “Then what was it?”

  “I asked the gods to yield you captive to Harald,” she said.

  I looked at her then for the first time since she had come aboard. “It didn’t work,” I said.

  “No.”

  “So what kind of sorceress are you?”

  “A frightened one,” she said.

  I would flog a man for not keeping alert when he is supposed to be standing watch, but a thousand enemies could have come that night, for I was not doing my duty. I took Skade beneath the steering platform, to the small space there, and I took off her cloak and I lay her down, and when we were done we were both in tears. We said nothing, but lay in each other’s arms. I felt Seolferwulf lift from the mud and pull gently at her mooring line, yet I did not move. I held Skade close, not wanting the night to end.

  I had persuaded myself that I had left Alfred because he would impose an oath on me, an oath I did not want, the oath to serve his son. Yet that had not been the whole truth. There was another of his conditions I could not accept, and now I held her close. “Time to go,” I said at last because I could hear voices. I later learned that Finan had seen us and had held the crew ashore. I loosened my embrace, but Skade held onto me.

  “I know where you can find all the gold in the world,” she said.

  I looked into her eyes. “All the gold?”

  She half smiled. “Enough gold, lord,” she whispered, “more than enough, a dragon- haunted hoard, lord, gold.”

  Wyrd bid ful araed.

  I took a golden chain from my treasure chest and I hung it about Skade’s neck, which was announcement enough, if any announcement were needed, of her new status. I thought that my people would resent her more, but the opposite happened. They seemed relieved. They had seen her as a threat, but now she was one of us, and so we sailed north.

  North along East Anglia’s low coast beneath gray skies and driven by a southerly wind that brought thick and constant fogs. We sheltered in marshy creeks when the fog blew dense above the sea or, if a fog took us by surprise and gave us no time to discover a safe inlet, we steered the ship offshore where there were no mudbanks to wreck us.

  The fog slowed us, so that it took six long days to reach Dumnoc. We arrived at that port on a misted afternoon, rowing Seolferwulf into the river’s mouth between glistening mounds of mud thick with waterfowl. The channel was well marked with withies, though I still had a man in the bows probing with an oar in case the withies betrayed us onto some shipwrecker’s shoal. I had taken down the wolf’s head to show that we came peacefully, but sentries keeping watch from a rickety wooden tower still sent a boy racing to the town to warn of our coming.

  Dumnoc was a good and wealthy port. It was built on the river’s southern bank and a palisade surrounded the town to deter a land attack, though the port was wide open from the water that was studded with piers and thick with fishing and trading boats. The tide was almost at the flood when we arrived and I saw how the sea spread from the muddy banks to drown the lower part of the palisade. Some of the houses nearest the sea were built on short stilts, and all the town’s timbers had been weather- beaten to a silvery gray. It was an attractive place, smelling richly of salt and shellfish. A church tower crowned with a wooden cross was the highest building, a reminder that Guthrum, the Dane who had become King of East Anglia, had converted his realm to Christianity.

  My father had never loved the East Anglians because, years in the past, their kingdom had combined with Mercia to attack Northumbria. Later, much later, during my own childhood, the East Anglians had provided food, horses, and shelter to the Danish army that had conquered Northumbria, though that treachery had rebounded on them when the Danes returned to take East Anglia that still remained a Danish kingdom, though now it was supposedly a Christian kingdom as the church tower attested. Mist blew past the high cross as I steered Seolferwulf to the river’s center, just upstream of the piers. We turned her there, slewing her about by backing one bank of oars, and only when her wolfless bows faced the sea did I take her alongside a fat- bellied merchant ship that was tied to the largest of the piers. Finan grinned. “Ready to make a quick escape to sea, lord?” he asked.

  “Always,” I said. “Remember the Sea- Raven?”

  He laughed. Shortly after we had captured Lundene, the Sea- Raven, a Danish ship, had come to the city and innocently tied to a wharf only to discover that a West Saxon army now occupied the place and was not friendly to Danes. The crew had fled back to their ship, but needed to turn her before they could escape downriver, and panic muddled them so that their oars clashed and she had drifted back to the wharf, where we captured her. She was a horrible boat, leaky and with a stinking bilge, and eventually I broke her up and used her ribs as roofbeams for some cottages we built at Lundene’s eastern side.

  A big- bellied, fat- bearded man in rusty mail clambered from the pier onto the trading boat, then, after receiving permission, hauled himself up and over Seolferwulf ‘s flank. “Guthlac,” he introduced himself, “Reeve of Dumnoc. Who are you?” The question was peremptory, backed by a dozen men who waited on the pier with swords and axes. They looked nervous, and no wonder, for my crew outnumbered them.

  “My name is Uhtred,” I said.

  “Uhtred of where?” Guthlac asked. He spoke Danish and was belligerent, pretending to be unworried by my crew’s formidable appearance. He had long mustaches bound with black- tarred twine that hung well below his clean- shaven chin. He kept tugging on one musta
che, a sign, I deduced, of nervousness.

  “Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said.

  “And where’s Bebbanburg?”

  “Northumbria.”

  “You’re a long way from home, Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” Guthlac said. He was peering into our bilge to see what cargo we carried. “A long way from home,” he repeated. “Are you trading?”

  “Do we look like traders?” I asked. Other men were gathering on the low shore in front of the closest houses. They were mostly unarmed, so their presence was probably explained by curiosity.

  “You look like vagabonds,” Guthlac said. “Two weeks ago there was an attack a few miles south. A steading was burned, men killed, women taken. How do I know that wasn’t you?”

  “You don’t know it,” I said, returning a mild answer to his hostility.

  “Maybe I should hold you here until we can prove it one way or the other?”

  “And maybe you should clean your mail?” I suggested.

  He challenged me with a glare, held my gaze a few heartbeats, then nodded abruptly. “So what’s your business here?” he demanded.

  “We need food, ale.”

  “That we have,” he said, then waited as some gulls screamed above us, “but first you have to pay the king’s wharfage fee.” He held out a hand. “Two shillings.”

  “Two pence, perhaps.”

  We settled on four pence, of which no doubt two went into Guthlac’s pouch, and after that we were free to go ashore, though Guthlac sensibly insisted we were to carry no weapons other than short knives. “The Goose is a good tavern,” he said, pointing to a large building hung with the sign of a painted goose, “and it can sell you dried herring, dried oysters, flour, ale, and Saxon whores.”

  “The tavern is yours?” I asked.

  “What of it?”

  “I just hope its ale is better than its owner’s welcome,” I said.

  He laughed at that. “Welcome to Dumnoc,” he said, climbing back onto the trading ship, “and I give you leave to spend a night here in peace. But if any of you commit a crime I’ll hold you all in custody!” He paused and looked toward Seolferwulf ‘s stern. “Who’s that?”