The Burning Land

  “She’s using you,” Brida had told me in Dunholm.

  “I’m using her,” I had answered.

  “There are a dozen whores here who’ll prove cheaper,” Brida had retorted scornfully.

  So Skade was using me, but for what? She was demanding half her husband’s hoard, but what would she do with it? When I asked her, she shrugged as if the question was unimportant, but late that night, before Osferth’s feigned betrayal, she spoke with me. Why did I want her husband’s money?

  “You know why.”

  “To take your fortress back?”

  “Yes.”

  She lay silent for a while. The water made its small noise along Seolferwulf ‘s strakes. I could hear the snores of my men, the shifting feet of the sentries in the prow and above our heads on the steering platform. “And what then?” she asked.

  “I will be the Lord of Bebbanburg,” I said.

  “As Skirnir is Lord of Zegge?”

  “There was a time,” I said, “when the Lord of Bebbanburg ruled far into the north and all the way down to the Humbre.”

  “They ruled Northumbria?”

  “Yes.”

  I was bewitched by her. My ancestors had never ruled Northumbria, merely the northern part of that kingdom when it was divided between two thrones, but I was laying imaginary tribute at her feet. I was holding out the prospect of her being a queen, for that was what Skade wanted. She wanted to rule, and for that she needed a man who could lead warriors, and for the moment she believed I was that man.

  “Guthred rules Northumbria now?” she asked.

  “And he’s mad,” I said, “and he’s sick.”

  “And when he dies?”

  “Another man will be king,” I said.

  She slid a long thigh up mine, caressed a hand across my chest and kissed my shoulder. “Who?” she asked.

  “Whoever is strongest,” I said.

  She kissed me again, then she lay still, dreaming. And I dreamed of Bebbanburg, of its windswept halls, its small fields and its tough, dour people. And I thought of the risk we must run in the dawn.

  Earlier that night, under the cover of darkness, we had loaded a small boat with mail coats, weapons, helmets, and my iron- bound chest. We had carried that precious cargo to the uninhabited northern side of the creek and hidden it among reeds. Two men stayed to guard it, and their orders were to stay concealed.

  In the morning, as the fishermen waded to their moored ships, we began the argument. We shouted, we bellowed insults, and then, as the villagers paused in their tasks to watch Seolferwulf, we began to fight. Swords clashed, there was the thump of steel on shield- wood, the screams of injured men, though none was really hurt. Some of my men were laughing at the pretense, but from the creek’s shore it would have all looked real, and slowly a part of the crew was driven to Seolferwulf ‘s stern where they began to leap to safety. I was one of them. I wore no mail and the only weapon I had was Wasp- Sting and I held onto her as I leaped. Skade jumped with me. Our ship was anchored on the creek’s southern side, away from the deeper water in the channel’s center, and none of us needed to swim. I floundered for a moment, then my feet found the muddy bottom and I grabbed hold of Skade and dragged her toward the village. The men remaining on Seolferwulf jeered at us, and Osferth hurled a spear that came perilously close to me. “Go and die!” Osferth shouted.

  “And take your whore with you!” Finan added. Another spear splashed into the creek, and I seized it as we struggled up the shelving beach.

  There were thirty- two of us, just under half the crew, while the rest had stayed aboard Seolferwulf. We came ashore soaking wet, none of us in mail and some without even a weapon. The villagers gaped at us. The fishermen had paused to watch the fight, but now some headed out to sea, but not before I made certain they had a good view of Skade. She wore a thin linen shift that clung wetly to her shivering body, and she had gold at her neck and on her wrists. The villagers might not have recognized her, but they would remember her.

  A pair of fishing boats still lay at their moorings and I waded out to one and hauled myself aboard. Back on the beach my small band was gathering round a herring- smoking fire to dry themselves. I had Rollo and ten of his men, the rest were my warriors.

  We watched as Osferth’s men hauled up the stone anchor, then took Seolferwulf out of the creek. She used ten oars on each side, and she went slowly. I felt a moment of alarm as she turned northeast and her pale hull was hidden from me by the intervening dunes. A ship is a kind of fortress, and I had abandoned her, and I touched Thor’s hammer in a silent plea that the gods would preserve us.

  Skirnir, I knew, would hear of the fight. He would learn that Seolferwulf was half- crewed, and he would hear of the tall, black- haired, gold- draped girl. He would know that we had been abandoned without mail and with few weapons. Thus I baited him. I had thrown down the raw meat and now waited for the wolf to come to the trap.

  We used the fishing boat to cross the creek and made a driftwood fire on the beach. We stayed all day, like men who had no plan. It began to rain in the late morning, and after a while the rain became harder, crashing down from a low gray sky. We piled wood on the fire, the flames fighting the downpour that hid us as we brought back the weapons and mail we had hidden the night before. I now had thirty- four men, and I sent two of them to explore the creek’s higher reaches. Both men had been raised on the banks of the Temes where it widens into the sea, and the coast there is not unlike the shore where we were stranded. They could both swim, both were at ease in the marshes, and I told them what I wanted and they set off to find it. They came back in the late afternoon, just as the rain was easing.

  In the early evening, when the fishing boats returned on an incoming tide, I took six men over the creek and used a handful of silver scraps to buy fish. We all had swords, and the villagers treated us with a cautious respect. “What lies that way?” I asked them, pointing up the creek.

  They knew there was a monastery inland, but it was far off, and only three of the men had ever seen the place. “It’s a whole day’s journey,” they said with awe.

  “Well I can’t go to sea,” I said, “or Skirnir will catch us.”

  They said nothing to that. The very name of Skirnir was frightening.

  “I hear he’s a rich man,” I remarked.

  One of the old men made the sign of the cross. I had seen wooden idols in the village, but the folk knew of Christianity too, and his quick gesture told me that I had frightened him. “His treasure, lord,” he told me quietly, “is in a great mound, and a huge dragon guards it.”

  “A dragon?”

  “A fire dragon, lord, with black wings to shadow the moon.” He made the sign of the cross again, then, to make certain, tugged a hammer amulet from beneath his filthy shirt and kissed it.

  We took the food back to our side of the creek and then, on the last of the flood, we rowed the fishing boat inland. It was crowded and our small boat floated low. The villagers watched until we vanished, and still we rowed, gliding between reed beds and mudbanks until we reached the place that my two scouts had chosen. They had done well. The place was exactly what I wanted, an island of dunes isolated in a tangle of water, and accessible only in two places. We grounded the boat and lit another driftwood fire. The day was ending. The dark clouds had blown westward so that Skirnir’s sea was in deep shadow, while to the east the land glowed beneath the dying sun. I could see the smoke of three settlements and, far on the horizon, some low hills where the tangle of marsh and sand ended and the higher land began. I assumed the monastery was in those hills, but it was too far away to be seen. Then the sun slid below the rain clouds and everything was in shadow, but a call from Rollo made me turn to see ships approaching the coast in the last of the daylight. Two large ships came first. They came from the direction of the islands, and then a third ship, paler than the first two and travelling much slower because she had fewer oarsmen.

  Seolferwulf was the last of the three ships
, while the darker pair belonged to Skirnir.

  The wolf had come for his bitch.

  Saxon 5 - The Burning Land

  FOUR

  I had told Finan to play the madman, a thing he could do well. Not mad as in moon- touched, but dangerously mad as though one wrong word could send him into a welter of killing. Finan, if you did not know him well, was frightening. He was small and wiry, his strength tensed in a thin frame, while his face was all bone and scar. To look at Finan was to see a man who had endured battle and slavery and extreme hardship, a man who might have nothing to lose, and I counted on that to persuade Skirnir to treat Seolferwulf ‘s crew with caution. There was very little to stop Skirnir simply taking Seolferwulf and slaughtering its men, except the possibility that he might lose his own men in the capture. True, he would not lose many, but even twenty or thirty casualties would hurt him. Besides, Osferth and Finan brought him a gift and, as far as Skirnir knew, they were ready to help deliver that gift. I did not doubt that Skirnir would want to take Seolferwulf for his own, but guessed he would wait until he had gained Skade and my death before he made that attempt. So I told Finan to frighten him.

  Osferth and Finan, once they left the creek, took Seolferwulf up the coast and then, as if they did not know what to do, rowed to the center of the inner sea and there let the ship roll on the small waves. “We saw the fishing boats racing over the water,” Finan told me later, “and knew they were going to Zegge.”

  Skirnir, of course, heard about the fight in the creek and how the Viking ship was now wallowing aimlessly, and curiosity made him send one of his two large ships to investigate, though he did not go himself. His youngest brother talked with Finan and Osferth, and heard how they had mutinied against Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and heard too that Uhtred had Skade, and that now Uhtred, Skade, and a small group of men were stranded among the tangle of islands and creeks. “I let the brother come aboard,” Finan told me later, “and I showed him the heap of mail and weapons. I said they were all yours.”

  “So he thought we were weaponless?”

  “I told him you had a wee sword,” Finan said, “but just a wee one.” Grageld, Skirnir’s brother, did not count the heaped coats, nor even the tangle of swords, spears, and axes. If he had, he might have suspected Finan’s lies, because there were only enough mail coats and weapons to equip Finan’s shrunken crew. Instead he simply believed what the Irishman told him. “So then,” Finan went on, “we spun him our tale.”

  That tale began with truth. Finan told Grageld that we had sailed to the Frisian Islands in an attempt to rob Skirnir, but then he decorated the truth with fantasy. “I said we learned the gold was too well guarded, so we insisted you sold Skade back to her husband. But you wouldn’t agree to that. I said we all hated the bitch, and he said we were right to hate her.”

  “Grageld didn’t like her?”

  “None of them liked her, lord, but Skirnir was stricken by her. The brother thought she’d cast a spell on Skirnir.”

  Finan told me this tale in Skirnir’s hall, and I remember looking across at Skade in the light of the great fire that burned in the central hearth. She was an aglaecwif, I thought, a sorceress. Years ago Father Beocca told me a story from the olden days, from the far- off days when men built in shining marble, the days before the world turned dark and dirty. For once it was not a tale about God or his prophets, but about a queen who ran away from her husband because she fell in love with another man, and the husband took a great fleet of ships to get her back, and in the end a whole city was burned and all its men were killed, and all because of that long- dead aglaecwif. The poets say we fight for glory, for gold, for reputation, and for our homes, but in my life I have just as often fought for a woman. They have the power. I frequently heard AElswith, Alfred’s sour wife who resented that Wessex never granted the title of queen, complain that it was a man’s world. So it may be, but women have power over men. It is for women that the long fleets cross the salt seas, and for women that the proud halls burn, and for women that the sword- warriors are buried.

  “Well, of course, Grageld wanted us to go to Skirnir,” Finan said, “but we said no. He asked what we wanted, and we said we’d come for the reward because we wanted to make Osferth king and needed silver to do that.”

  “He believed that?”

  “Do you need a reason to want silver?” Finan asked, then shrugged. “He believed us, lord, and Osferth was persuasive.”

  “When I told the story,” Osferth put in wryly, “I found myself believing it.”

  I laughed at that. “You want to be king, Osferth?”

  He smiled, and when he smiled he resembled his father so much that it was uncanny. “No, lord,” he said gently.

  “And I’m not really sure Grageld knew who Alfred was,” Finan went on. “He knew the name well enough, and he knew his coins, of course, but he seemed to think Wessex was a way off. So I said it was a country where the silver grew on the ash trees, and that its king was old and tired, and that Osferth would be the new king and he would be a friend to Skirnir.”

  “He believed all this?”

  “He must have done! The brother wanted us to go to Zegge, but I said no. I was not taking Seolferwulf through those channels, lord, for her to be trapped inside, and so we waited outside and Skirnir came out with the second ship and they put the boats either side of us and I could see they were thinking of capturing us.”

  Which is what I had feared. I imagined Seolferwulf with her shrunken crew flanked by Skirnir’s two long ships packed with men.

  “But we’d thought about that,” Finan said happily, “and we’d hoisted the anchor stone on the sail yard.” Our anchor stones are huge round wheels, the size of millstones, with a hole carved in their center, and Finan had hoisted Seolferwulf ‘s anchor by using the sail yard as a crane, and the message of that poised boulder was plain enough. If either of Skirnir’s ships attacked, then the stone would be swung over that ship, the line holding it would be cut by an ax, and the stone would fall to crash through the attacking ship’s bilge. Skirnir would gain one ship and lose another, and so, sensibly, he had pulled his ships away and pretended he had never even thought about capturing Seolferwulf.

  “The anchor stone was a good idea,” I said.

  “Oh it was Osferth who thought of it, lord,” Finan admitted, “and we had the thing ready before they even came out to us.”

  “And Skirnir believed your tale?”

  “He wanted to believe it, lord, so he did! He wanted Skade, lord. He saw nothing but Skade, sir, you could see it in his eyes.”

  “And so you sailed to capture her.”

  “And so we did, lord,” Finan said with a smile.

  The three ships reached the creek as both the day and the tide ebbed. I knew Skirnir would not come till the morning flood had deepened the water in the creek, but I still posted sentries. Nothing disturbed them. We slept, though it seemed we did not. I remember lying awake, thinking I would never sleep, but dreams came all the same. I saw Gisela smiling, then had a waking dream of men with shields and of spears flying from their hands. I lay for a moment in the sand, watching the stars, then I stood, stretching the stiffness from my arms and legs. “How many men does he have, lord?” Cerdic asked me. He was reviving the fire, and the driftwood flamed bright. Cerdic did not lack bravery, but in the night he had been haunted by the memory of those large ships coming to the coast.

  “He has two crews,” I said. I saw that I had been the last to wake and men now drew toward the fire to listen to me. “Two crews,” I said, “so he has at least one hundred men, maybe a hundred and fifty?”

  “Jesus,” Cerdic said quietly, touching the cross he wore.

  “But they’re pirates,” Rollo said loudly.

  “Tell them,” I ordered, pleased that Ragnar’s man understood what we faced.

  Rollo stood in the flamelight. “Skirnir’s men are like wild dogs,” he said, “and they hunt what is weak, never what is strong. They don’t figh
t on land and they don’t know the shield wall. We do.”

  “He calls himself the Sea- Wolf,” I said, “but Rollo is right. He’s a dog, not a wolf. We’re the wolves! We’ve faced the best warriors of Denmark and Britain and we’ve sent them to their graves! We are men of the shield wall, and before the sun climbs to its highest Skirnir will be in his grave!”

  Not that we saw any sun because the day clouded over with the gray dawn. The clouds ran swift and low toward the sea, shrouding the marshes. The water rose with the tide, flooding the margins of the land where we had our refuge. I climbed to the top of the dune from where I watched the three ships come slowly up the creek. Skirnir was riding the flooding tide, rowing till his beast- headed ship grounded, then waiting for more water to carry him a few oar strokes farther. His two ships led and Seolferwulf followed, and I laughed at that. Skirnir, confident in his numbers and blinded by the prospect of regaining Skade, did not think for a moment that he had enemies behind him.

  And what did Skirnir see? He was in the prow of the leading ship and he saw only five men standing on the dune, and none of the five was in mail. He thought he came to capture a bedraggled band of fugitives and so he was confident, and, as he drew closer, I called for Skade to stand beside me. “If he captured you,” I asked her, “what would he do?”

  “Humiliate me,” she said, “shame me, then kill me.”

  “And that’s worth silver to him?” I asked, thinking of the reward he had offered for Skade’s return.

  “Pride is expensive,” she said.

  “Why wouldn’t he just keep you as a slave?”

  “Because of that pride,” she said. “He once had a slave girl killed because she betrayed him. He gave her to his men first, let them enjoy her, then he tied her to a stake and skinned her alive. He made her mother listen to her screams as she died.”