And next day, as the sun sank scarlet in the west, Cnut came.
Cnut’s scouts came first, riders on small, light horses that could travel fast. They reached the river and just stood there, watching us, all except a small group who rode along the Tame’s bank, presumably to discover whether we had placed men to bar the next crossing place upstream.
The bulk of Cnut’s forces arrived an hour or so after the scouts, and they covered the land, a horde of horsemen in mail and helmets, their round shields decorated with ravens, axes, hammers and hawks. It was impossible to count them because they numbered thousands. And nearly all had sacks or bags hanging from the cantles of their saddles: the plunder of Mercia. Those bags would have the valuable items, the silver, amber and gold, while the rest of the plunder would be on packhorses behind the vast army that threw long shadows as it advanced towards the bridge.
They stopped fifty paces short of the bridge to let Cnut ride forward. He was in a coat of mail polished silver-bright. He wore a white cloak, and rode a grey horse. With him was his close friend, Sigurd Thorrson, and where Cnut was all silver and white, Sigurd was dark. His horse was black, his cloak was black, and his helmet was crested with raven feathers. He hated me and I did not blame him for that hatred. I would hate any man who killed my son. He was a big man, heavily muscled, looming over his powerful horse, and beside him Cnut looked thin and pale. But of the two I feared Cnut more. He was snake-fast, weasel-cunning, and his sword, Ice-Spite, was famous as a drinker of blood.
Behind the two jarls were standard-bearers. Cnut’s flag showed the axe and the broken cross, while Jarl Sigurd’s displayed a flying raven. There were a hundred other standards among the army, but I looked for only one, and saw it. Haesten’s bleached skull-symbol was held aloft on a pole in the army’s centre. So he was here, but he had not been invited to accompany Cnut and Sigurd.
The banners of the broken cross and the flying raven halted at the bridge’s southern end, while the two jarls rode on towards us. They checked their horses just short of the timber roadway. Æthelflaed, standing beside me, shivered. She hated the Danes and now she was within yards of the two most formidable jarls of Britain.
‘This is what I shall do,’ Jarl Cnut said without any greeting or even insult. He spoke in a reasonable voice, as if he merely arranged a feast or a horse race. ‘I shall capture you alive, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and I shall keep you alive. I shall tie you between two posts so that folk can mock you, and I shall have my men use your woman in front of your eyes until there is no use left in her.’ He looked at Æthelflaed with his pale, cold eyes. ‘I will bare you naked, woman, and give you to my men, even to the slaves, and you, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, will hear her sobbing, you will watch her shame and you will see her die. Then I shall begin on you. I have dreamed of it, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. I have dreamed of cutting you piece by piece until you have no hands, no feet, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no manhood. And then we shall peel your skin away, inch by inch, and rub salt on your flesh, and listen to your screams. And men will piss on you and women laugh at you, and all this you will see because I will have left you your eyes. But they will go. And then you will go, and so will end the tale of your miserable life.’
I said nothing when he had finished. The river seethed over the broken stones of the bridge.
‘Lost your tongue already, you shit-slimed bastard?’ Jarl Sigurd snarled.
I smiled at Cnut. ‘Now why would you do that to me?’ I asked. ‘Did I not do your bidding? Didn’t I discover who took your wife and children?’
‘A child,’ Cnut said passionately, ‘a small girl! What had she done? And I will find your daughter, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and when she has pleasured as many of my men who wish to use her I shall kill her as you killed my daughter! And if I find her before your death then you will witness that too.’
‘So you’ll do to her what I did to your daughter?’ I asked.
‘It is a promise,’ Cnut said.
‘Truly?’ I asked.
‘I swear it,’ he said, touching the hammer hanging over his silver-shining mail.
I beckoned. The shield wall behind me parted, and my son brought Cnut’s daughter to the barrier. He held her hand. ‘Father!’ Sigril shouted when she saw Cnut, and Cnut just stared at her in shock. ‘Father!’ Sigril called and tried to pull away from my son.
I took the girl from him. ‘I am sorry about her hair,’ I said to Cnut, ‘and it probably hurt her a little when I cut it because the knife wasn’t nearly as sharp as I’d have liked. But hair does grow again and she’ll be as beautiful as ever in a few months.’ I picked the girl up, lifted her over the barricade and let her go. She ran to Cnut and I saw the joy and relief on his face. He leaned down and extended a hand to her, she gripped it and he raised her up so she could sit on his saddle. He hugged her, then stared at me with puzzlement.
‘Lost your tongue already, you shit-slimed bastard?’ I asked pleasantly, then beckoned again, and this time Frigg was allowed through the shield wall. She ran to the barrier, looked at me, and I nodded. She climbed over it, making an incoherent sobbing noise, and ran to Cnut’s side and he looked even more astonished as she gripped his leg and stirrup leather, clinging to them as if her life depended on it. ‘She wasn’t harmed,’ I said, ‘not even touched.’
‘You …’ he began.
‘Geirmund was easy to fool,’ I said. ‘A piglet and a body were all we needed. And that was enough to clear him away so we could burn your ships. Yours too,’ I added to Sigurd, ‘but I expect you know that.’
‘We know more, you pig-turd,’ Sigurd said. He raised his voice so the men behind me could hear him. ‘Edward of Wessex is not coming,’ he shouted. ‘He has decided to cower behind his town walls. Were you hoping he would come to rescue you?’
‘Rescue?’ I asked. ‘Why would I want to share the glory of victory with Edward of Wessex?’
Cnut was still staring at me. He said nothing. Sigurd did all the talking. ‘Æthelred is still in East Anglia,’ he shouted, ‘because he fears to come out from behind the rivers in case he meets a Dane.’
‘That does sound like Æthelred,’ I said.
‘You’re alone, you shit-slimed bastard.’ Sigurd was almost shaking with his anger.
‘I have my vast army,’ I said, pointing to the small shield wall behind me.
‘Your army?’ Sigurd sneered, then went silent because Cnut had reached out and silenced him by touching his gold-ringed arm.
Cnut still held his daughter tightly. ‘You can go,’ he said to me.
‘Go?’ I asked. ‘Go where?’
‘I give you life,’ he said, and touched Sigurd’s arm again to still the protest.
‘My life is not yours to give,’ I told him.
‘Go, Lord Uhtred,’ Cnut said, almost pleading with me. ‘Go south to Wessex, take all your men, just go.’
‘You can count, Jarl Cnut?’ I asked him.
He smiled. ‘You have fewer than three hundred men,’ he said, ‘and as for me? I cannot count my men. They are as grains of sand on a wide beach.’ He hugged his daughter with one arm and reached down to stroke Frigg’s cheek with his other hand. ‘I thank you for this, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘but just go.’
Sigurd growled. He wanted my death, but he would agree to anything Cnut suggested.
‘I asked if you could count,’ I said to Cnut.
‘I can count,’ he said, puzzled.
‘Then you might remember you had two children. A girl and a boy, remember? And I still have the boy.’ He flinched at that. ‘If you stay in Saxon Mercia or attack Wessex,’ I said, ‘perhaps you will only have a daughter?’
‘I can make more sons,’ he said, though without much conviction.
‘Go back to your lands,’ I told him, ‘and your son will be returned to you.’
Sigurd began to speak, his tone angry, but Cnut checked him. ‘We shall talk in the morning,’ he told me, and turned his horse.
‘We shall speak in th
e morning,’ I agreed, and watched them ride away with Frigg running between them.
Except we would not speak in the morning, because once they had gone I had my men kick the timber roadway off the bridge, and then we left.
We went west.
And Cnut, I knew, would follow.
Twelve
Had Edward of Wessex decided to stay behind his burh walls? I could well believe that Æthelred was cowering in East Anglia because if he tried to return to Mercia he would be faced by a much larger enemy and he was probably terrified of facing Danes in open battle, but would Edward just abandon Mercia to Cnut’s forces? It was possible. His advisers were cautious men, frightened of all the Northmen, but confident that the stout burh walls of Wessex could resist any attack. Yet they were not fools. They knew that if Cnut and Sigurd were to capture both Mercia and East Anglia then thousands of warriors would come from across the sea, all of them eager to feast off the carcass of Wessex. If Edward waited behind his walls then his enemies would grow in strength. He would not face four thousand Danes, but ten or twelve. He would be overwhelmed.
Yet it was possible he had decided to stay on the defensive.
On the other hand what else would Jarl Sigurd say to me? He would hardly tell me that the West Saxons were marching. He had wanted to unsettle me, and I knew that, yet I was still unsettled.
And what else could I tell my men except that Sigurd had lied? I could only sound confident. ‘Sigurd has the greased tongue of a weasel,’ I told them, ‘and of course Edward is coming!’
And we were fleeing, riding westwards through the night. When I was young I liked the night. I taught myself not to fear the spirits that haunt the darkness, to walk like a shadow through the shadows, to hear the vixen’s cry and the owl’s call and not tremble. The night is the domain of the dead, and the living fear it, but that night we rode through the dark as if we belonged to it.
We came to Liccelfeld first. I knew the town well. It was here that I had thrown the treacherous Offa’s corpse into a stream. Offa, who had trained his dogs, sold news and posed as a friend, and then had tried to betray me. It was a Saxon town, yet mostly undisturbed by the Danes who lived all around it, and I assumed that most of the Saxons, like the dead Offa, purchased that peace by paying tribute to the Danes. Some of them were probably in Cnut’s army and doubtless they had gone to the grave of Saint Chad in Liccelfeld’s big church and prayed for Cnut’s victory. The Danes permitted Christian churches, but if I had tried to make a shrine to Odin on Saxon land the Christian priests would be sharpening their gutting knives. They worship a jealous god.
Bats wheeled over the town’s roofs. Dogs barked as we passed and were hushed by fearful folk who were wise to be frightened of hoofbeats in the night. Shutters stayed shut. We splashed through the stream where I had thrown Offa and I remembered his widow’s shrill curses. The moon was almost full, silvering the road that now rose into low wooded hills. The trees cast hard black shadows. We rode in silence except for the thud of hooves and jangle of bridles. We were following the Roman road that led westwards from Liccelfeld, a road that ran spear-shaft straight across the low hills and wide valleys. We had ridden this road before, not often, but even by moonlight the land looked familiar.
Finan and I stopped at a bare hilltop from where we gazed southwards as the horsemen passed along the road behind us. A long slope of stubble fell away in front of us, and beyond it were dark woods and more hills, and somewhere far off a small glimmer of firelight. I turned to look eastwards, looking back the way we had come. Was there a glow in the sky? I wanted to see some proof that Cnut had stayed in Tameworþig, that his huge army was waiting for the dawn before marching, but I could see no fires lighting the horizon. ‘The bastard’s following us,’ Finan grunted.
‘Probably.’
But far off to the south there was a glow. At least I thought there was. It was hard to tell because it was so far away, and perhaps it was just a trick of the darkness. A hall burning? Or the camp fires of a distant army? An army I just hoped was there? Finan stared too and I knew what he was thinking, or what he was hoping, and he knew I was thinking and hoping the same, but he said nothing. I thought for a moment the glow lightened, but I could not be sure. Sometimes there are lights in the night sky, great shimmering sheets of brightness that ripple and tremble like water, and I wondered if this was one of those mysterious shinings that the gods cascade through the darkness, but the longer I stared the less I saw. Just night and the horizon and the black trees.
‘We’ve come a long way since that slave ship,’ Finan said wistfully.
I wondered what had made him remember those far-off days, then realised he was thinking that all his days would end soon, and a man facing death does well to look back on life. ‘You make it sound like the end,’ I chided him.
He smiled. ‘What is it you like to say? Wyrd bið ful āræd?’
‘Wyrd bið ful āræd,’ I repeated.
Fate is inexorable. And right at that moment, as we gazed forlornly towards the darkness where we hoped to see the light, the three Norns were weaving my life’s threads at the foot of the great tree. And one held a pair of shears. Finan still gazed south, hoping against hope that there was a glow in the sky that would announce the presence of another army, but that southern horizon was dark beneath the stars. ‘The West Saxons have always been cautious,’ Finan said ruefully, ‘unless you were leading them.’
‘And Cnut isn’t cautious.’
‘And he’s coming for us,’ Finan said. He looked back to the east. ‘They’ll be an hour behind us?’
‘Their scouts will be, yes,’ I said, ‘but it will take Cnut the best part of the night to get his army across the river.’
‘But once he’s across …’ Finan began and did not finish.
‘We can’t run for ever,’ I said, ‘but we’ll slow them down.’
‘We’ll still have two or three hundred men biting our arses by dawn,’ Finan said.
‘We will,’ I agreed, ‘and whatever happens, it happens tomorrow.’
‘So we have to find somewhere to fight.’
‘That, and slow them down tonight.’ I gave the south one last look, but decided the glow had been in my dreams.
‘If I remember right,’ Finan turned his horse towards the west, ‘there’s an old fort on this road.’
‘There is,’ I said, ‘but it’s too big for us.’ The fort was Roman, four earth walls enclosing a great square space where two roads met. I could remember no settlement at the crossroads, just the remnants of the mighty fortress. Why had they built it? Had their roads been haunted by thieves?
‘It’s too big for us to defend,’ Finan agreed, ‘but we can slow the bastards there.’
We followed the column west. I twisted constantly in my saddle, looking for pursuers, but seeing none. Cnut must have known we would try to escape and he would have sent men on light horses across the river with orders to find us. Their job was to track us so that Cnut could follow and crush us. He was in a hurry, and he would also be angry, not with me, but with himself. He had abandoned his hunting of Æthelred and by now he must know that had been a bad decision. His army had been rampaging in Mercia for days, but it had yet to defeat any Saxon army, and those armies were getting stronger, perhaps even marching, and time was running out for him. But I had distracted him. I had taken his family, burned his ships and destroyed his halls, and he had turned on me in rage, only to discover he had been tricked and that his wife and children lived. If he had any sense he would abandon me because I was not the enemy he needed to defeat. He needed to massacre Æthelred’s army and then go south to slaughter Edward’s West Saxons, but I suspected he would still pursue me. I was too close, too tempting, and killing me would give Cnut even more reputation, and he knew our small war-band was easy prey. Kill us, rescue his son, then turn south to fight the real war. It would take him one day to crush us, then he could deal with the larger enemy.
And my only hope of living was
if that larger enemy was not being cautious, but marching to help me.
The great fort was black with mooncast shadow. It was an immense place, an earthwork built on low land where the two roads crossed. I supposed it had once held wooden buildings where the Roman soldiers were quartered, but now the grass-grown walls enclosed nothing but a wide pasture inhabited by a herd of cows. I spurred through the shallow ditch and over the low rampart to be met by two howling dogs that were instantly silenced by the cowherd. He dropped to his knees when he saw my helmet and mail. He bowed his head, put his hands on the necks of his growling hounds and shivered with fear. ‘What do you call this place?’ I asked him.
‘The old fort, master,’ he said, not raising his head.
‘There’s a village?’
‘Up yonder.’ He jerked his head northwards.
‘Its name?
‘We calls it Pencric, master.’
I remembered the name when he said it. ‘And there’s a river here?’ I asked, recalling the last time I had been on this road.
‘Over yonder,’ he said, jerking his bowed head westwards.
I tossed him a scrap of hacksilver. ‘Keep your hounds quiet,’ I said.
‘Not a sound, master.’ He gazed at the silver in the moonlit grass, then lifted his face to look at me. ‘God bless you, master,’ he said, then saw my hammer. ‘The gods protect you, master.’
‘Are you a Christian?’ I asked him.
He frowned. ‘I think so, master.’
‘Then your god hates me,’ I said, ‘and you will too if your dogs make any noise.’
‘Quiet as mouses they’ll be, master, like little mouses. No noises, I swear.’
I sent most of my men on westwards, but with orders to turn south when they reached the nearby river, which, if I remembered rightly, was neither deep nor wide. ‘Just follow the river south,’ I told them, ‘and we’ll find you.’
I wanted Cnut to think we were fleeing westwards, aiming for the dubious sanctuary of the Welsh hills, but in truth the hoofmarks would betray our southerly turn. Still, if it gave him even a short pause that would help because I needed all the time I could gain, and so my horsemen vanished west towards the river while I stayed with fifty of my men behind the grassy ramparts of the ancient fort. We were lightly armed, carrying spears or swords, though Wibrund, the Frisian, carried an axe on my orders. ‘Hard to fight on horseback with an axe, lord,’ he had grumbled.