‘Some forty or fifty live in the fortress. He has other warriors, of course, but they plough his land or live in halls of their own.’ And that I knew too. My uncle could summon a formidable war-band, but most of them lived on outlying farms. It would take at least a day or two for those hundreds of men to assemble, which meant I had to deal with the housecarls, the forty or fifty trained warriors whose job was to keep Ælfric’s nightmare from coming true. I was the nightmare. ‘You’ll be going north soon then?’ Father Byrnjolf asked.
I ignored the question. ‘And the Lord Ælfric needs ships,’ I asked, ‘to protect his traders?’
‘Wool, barley and pelts,’ Father Byrnjolf said. ‘They’re sent south to Lundene or else across the sea to Frisia, so yes, they need protection.’
‘And he pays well.’
‘He’s renowned for his generosity.’
‘You’ve been helpful, father,’ I said, and flicked the coin across the table.
‘God be with you, my son,’ the priest said, scrambling for the coin that had fallen among the floor rushes. ‘And your name?’ he asked when he had retrieved the gold.
‘Wulf Ranulfson.’
‘God bless your northward voyage, Wulf Ranulfson.’
‘We may not go north,’ I said as the priest stood. ‘I hear there’s trouble brewing in the south.’
‘I pray not,’ he sounded hesitant, ‘trouble?’
‘In Lundene they said that the Lord Æthelred thinks East Anglia is there for the taking.’
Father Byrnjolf made the sign of the cross. ‘I pray not, I pray not,’ he said.
‘There’s profit in trouble,’ I said, ‘so I pray for war.’
He said nothing, but hurried away. I had my back to him. ‘What’s he doing?’ I asked Finan.
‘Talking to his two fellows. Looking at us.’
I cut a piece of cheese. ‘Why does Ælfric pay to keep a priest in Grimesbi?’
‘Because he’s a good Christian?’ Finan suggested blandly.
‘Ælfric’s a treacherous piece of slug-shit,’ I said.
Finan glanced towards the priest and looked back to me. ‘Father Byrnjolf takes your uncle’s silver.’
‘And in return,’ I said, ‘he tells Ælfric who moves through Grimesbi. Who comes, who goes.’
‘And who asks questions about Bebbanburg.’
‘Which I just did.’
Finan nodded. ‘You just did. And you paid the bastard too much, and you asked too many questions about the defences. You might just as well have told him your real name.’
I scowled, but Finan was right. I had been too eager to get information, and Father Byrnjolf must be more than suspicious. ‘So how does he get news to Ælfric?’ I asked.
‘The fishermen?’
‘And in this wind,’ I suggested, looking towards a shutter that banged and rattled against its latches, ‘it will be two days’ sailing? Or a day and a half if they use something the size of Middelniht.’
‘Three days if they put ashore at night.’
‘And did the bastard tell me the truth?’ I wondered aloud.
‘About your uncle’s garrison?’ Finan asked, then used a forefinger to trace a pattern with spilled ale on the table top. ‘It sounded likely enough.’ He half smiled. ‘Fifty men? If we can get inside we should be able to kill the bastards.’
‘If we can get inside,’ I said, then turned and pretended to look towards the big central hearth where flames leaped up to meet the rain spitting through the roof-hole. Father Byrnjolf was deep in conversation with his two big companions, but even as I watched they turned and hurried towards the tavern door.
‘What’s the tide?’ I asked Finan, still watching the priest.
‘Be high tonight, ebbing at dawn.’
‘Then we leave at dawn,’ I said.
Because the Middelniht was going hunting.
We left at dawn on the ebbing tide. The world was sword grey. Grey sea, grey sky and a grey mist, and the Middelniht slid through that greyness like a sleek and dangerous beast. We were only using twenty oars and they rose and fell almost silently, just a creak from the tholes and sometimes a splash as a blade dipped. The wake rippled behind us, black and silver, widening and fading as the Middelniht slipped between the withies marking the channel.
We let the tide take us to sea. The mist thickened, but the tide would carry us safely, and it was not till the bows bucked to bigger waves that I turned our course northwards. We rowed slowly. I could hear the distant sound of seas breaking on the Raven’s Beak and steered away from it, waiting till it faded, and by then the grey mist had thickened but grown brighter. The rain had stopped. The sea was idle, lazy, slapping petulantly against the hull, the small waves remnants of the bad weather, but I sensed a wind would come again and hoisted the damp sail to be ready.
The wind came, still from the east, and the sail bellied and the oars were stowed and the Middelniht surged northwards. The mist lifted and I could see fishing boats inshore of us, but I ignored them, heading north, and the gods were with me for the wind swung a little southwards as the sun climbed through ragged clouds. Sea-birds shrieked at us.
We made good progress so that by late afternoon we were in sight of the chalk cliffs of Flaneburg. That was a famous landmark. How often I’ve sailed by that great promontory with its cave-riddled white cliffs. I could see the waves breaking white on those cliffs and, as we drew nearer, hear the boom of water crashing into the caves. ‘Flaneburg,’ I told my son, ‘remember the place!’
He was gazing at the turmoil of water and stone. ‘It’s hard to forget.’
‘It’s best to sail well away from it,’ I told him. ‘The currents run hard around the cliffs, but it’s easier offshore. And if you’re running from a northerly gale don’t look for shelter on its south side.’
‘No?’
‘The water’s shallow,’ I said, pointing to the dark bones of ships showing above the fretting waves. ‘Flaneburg takes ships and men. Avoid it.’
The tidal current had turned and was against us now. Middelniht buffeted the waves and I ordered the sail dropped and the men to the oars. The sea was trying to drive us south, and I needed to shelter on Flaneburg’s northern side where the water was deeper and where any boat coming from the south would not see us. I steered close to the cliffs. Gannets wheeled about our mast and puffins flew fast and low above the broken water. The waves shattered on the rocks and seethed across ledges, draining back into an angry confusion of swirling white. High up, where I could see wind-flattened grass on the cliff top, two men stared down at us. They were watching to see if we landed, but I had never tried grounding a boat in the tiny cove on Flaneburg’s northern flank and I was not going to try now.
Instead we turned the bows into the sea’s current and held her there with the oars. There had been five fishing craft close to the great chalk head when we arrived. Two had been east of the cliffs and three to the north, but all of them fled our coming. We were a wolf, and the sheep knew their place and so, as the shadows lengthened across the sea, we were left alone. The wind dropped, though that did nothing to lessen the churning sea. The current was running stronger so that my men had to pull hard on the oars to hold Middelniht in place. The shadows turned to gathering darkness, the sea from grey to near black, though the blackness was rifted with breaking white water. The sky was grey again, but luminous. ‘Maybe they won’t come tonight.’ Finan joined me by the steering oar.
‘They can’t go by land,’ I said, ‘and they’ll be in a hurry.’
‘Why not by land?’ my son asked.
‘Don’t ask stupid questions,’ I said angrily.
He glared at me. ‘They’re Danes,’ he said forcefully. ‘Didn’t you say the priest was Danish?’ He did not wait for me to answer. ‘The two fishermen might be Christians and Saxons,’ he went on, ‘but the Jarl Sigurd tolerates their religion. They could ride through Northumbria without being harassed.’
‘He’s right,’ Finan said.
/>
‘He’s wrong,’ I insisted. ‘Going by horse will take too long.’
I hoped I was right. I knew Father Byrnjolf would much rather have travelled to Bebbanburg on horseback, but the need to take his news quickly should force him into seasickness. My guess was that the fishermen would carry him close to the coast and, should some savage ship of hungry spear-Danes appear, they could run for a harbour or, if there was none, ground their boat on a beach. Travelling on a small boat close to shore was safer than riding the long northern roads.
I looked westwards. The first stars pricked between dark clouds. It was almost night, but a moon was rising. ‘They know we left Grimesbi,’ my son said, ‘and they must worry we’re waiting for them.’
‘Why should they worry?’ I asked.
‘Because you asked about Bebbanburg,’ Finan said drily.
‘And they counted us,’ I said, ‘thirty-six of us. What hope do thirty-six men have against Bebbanburg?’
‘They’ll think none,’ Finan said. ‘And perhaps they believed your tale. Perhaps Father Byrnjolf isn’t sending a warning?’
It was night now. The sea was moon-washed but the land was dark. Somewhere far to the north a fire glimmered on the shore, but all the rest was black; even the chalk cliffs were black. The sea was black, rilled with silver, grey and white. We pulled Middelniht a few boat lengths north to hold her off the night cliffs. Any ship out at sea would not see her against the land. The wolf was hidden.
Then, quite suddenly, the prey was there.
She appeared from the south, a small ship with a square sail, and it was the dark sail I saw first. She was perhaps half a mile from Flaneburg’s eastern tip, and I instinctively pushed the steering oar away from me, and Finan gave the order for the oars to bite, and Middelniht slid out of her shadowed hiding place.
‘Row hard,’ I growled at Finan.
‘Hard as we can,’ he said. A wave broke at the bow and slung water down the deck. The men were hauling on the looms, the oars were bending, the ship was moving fast. ‘Faster!’ Finan called and stamped his foot to call the rhythm.
‘How do you know it’s them?’ Uhtred asked me.
‘I don’t.’
They had seen us. Perhaps it was the white water at our bows or the sound of our heavy oars splashing, but I saw the short hull turn partly away from us and saw a man scrambling to haul on a line to tighten the sail, and then they must have realised there was no escape by fleeing from us and so they turned their boat towards us. Their sail flapped for a heartbeat, was tightened again, and the small ship was bows on to us. ‘What he wants to do,’ I told Uhtred, ‘is veer off course at the last moment and shatter one of our oar banks. The man’s no fool.’
‘Which oar bank though?’
‘If I knew that …’ I said, and left the rest unsaid.
There was more than one man in the approaching craft. Two maybe? Three? It was a fishing boat, wide-hulled, stable and slow, but heavy enough to splinter our oars.
‘He’ll go that side,’ I said, pointing southwards. Uhtred looked at me, his face pale in the moonlight. ‘Look at him,’ I said, ‘the steersman is standing beside the steering oar. He hasn’t got room to pull the oar towards him, not enough room anyway, so he’ll push it away.’
‘Row, you bastards!’ Finan shouted.
A hundred paces, fifty, and the fishing boat held its course, bows to bows, and now I could see there were three men aboard, and the ship came closer, closer, until I lost the hull under our bows and could only see the dark sail getting still closer, and then I hauled the steering oar towards me, hauled it hard and saw their boat turn at the same moment, but I had anticipated them and they turned the way I had expected and our beast-headed prow rode up over their low hull. I felt Middelniht shiver, heard a shout, heard the sound of wood shattering, saw the mast and sail vanish and then our oars bit again and something scraped down our hull and the water was full of broken timbers. ‘Stop rowing!’ I shouted.
We had dragged the swamped boat with us, though most of the broken hull, weighted down by ballast stones, had gone to the sea’s bed where the monsters lurk. The sail was gone; there was only shattered wood, an empty wicker fish basket, and one man splashing desperately, flailing in the heaving seas to reach Middelniht’s side.
‘He’s one of the men who was with Father Byrnjolf,’ Finan said.
‘You recognise him?’
‘That flattened nose?’
The man reached up to grasp an oar, then pulled himself towards our flank, and Finan stooped to pick up an axe. He looked at me, I nodded, and the axe blade caught the moonlight as it slashed down. There was the butcher’s sound and a spray of blood, black as the land, from the shattered skull, then the man drifted away.
‘Hoist the sail,’ I said, and, when the oars were stowed and the sail drawing, I turned Middelniht’s bows north again.
The Middelniht had killed our enemies in the middle of the night, and now we were going to Bebbanburg. Ælfric’s nightmare was coming true.
Four
The weather calmed in the night and that was not what I wanted.
Nor did I want to remember the face of that fisherman with his flattened nose and the scars on his sun-darkened cheek, and how his eyes had looked up, desperate, pleading and vulnerable, and how we had killed him, and how his black blood had sprayed the black night and vanished in the swirl of black water beside Middelniht’s hull. We are cruel people.
Hild, whom I had loved and who had been an abbess in Wessex and a good Christian, had so often spoken wistfully of peace. She had called her god the ‘prince of peace’ and tried to persuade me that if only the worshippers of the real gods would acknowledge her nailed prince then there would be perpetual peace. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ she liked to tell me, and she would have been pleased these last few years because Britain had known its uneasy peace. The Danes had done little more than raid for cattle, sometimes for slaves, and the Welsh and Scots had done the same, but there had been no war. That was why my son had not stood in the shield wall, because there had been no shield walls. He had practised time and again, day after day, but practice is not the real thing, practice is not the bowel-loosening terror of facing a mead-crazed maniac who is within arm’s length and carrying a lead-weighted war axe.
And some men had preached that the peace of these last few years was the Christian god’s will, and that we should be glad because our children could grow without fear and what we sowed we could harvest, and that it was only during a time of peace that the Christian priests could preach their message to the Danes, and that when that work was done we would all live in a Christian world of love and friendship.
But it had not been peace.
Some of it was exhaustion. We had fought and fought, and the last battle, a welter of blood-letting in the winter marshland of East Anglia, where King Eohric had died and Æthelwold the Pretender had died and Sigurd Thorrson’s son had died, that battle had been a slaughter so great it had slaked the appetite for more battle. Yet it had changed little. The north and east were still Danish, and the south and west still Saxon. All those graves had yielded little land for either side. And Alfred, who wanted peace, but had known there could be no peace while two tribes fought for the same pastures, had died. Edward, his son, was king in Wessex, and Edward was content to let the Danes live in peace. He wanted what his father had wanted, all the Saxons living under one crown, but he was young, he was nervous of failure, and he was wary of those older men who had advised his father, and so he listened to the priests who told him to hold hard to what he possessed and to let the Danes stay where they were. In the end, the priests said, the Danes would become Christians and we should all love one another. Not all the Christian priests preached that message. Some, like the abbot I had killed, urged the Saxons to war, claiming that the body of Saint Oswald would be a sign of victory.
Those belligerent priests were right. Not about Saint Oswald, at least I doubted that, but they were surely r
ight to preach that there never could be a lasting peace while the Danes occupied lands that had once been Saxon. And those Danes still wanted it all; they wanted the rest of Mercia and all of Wessex. It did not matter what banner they fought under, whether it was the hammer or the cross, the Danes were still hungry. And they were powerful again. The losses of the wars had been made good, they were restless, and so was Æthelred, Lord of Mercia. He had lived all his life under the thrall of Wessex, but now he had a new woman and he was getting old and he wanted reputation. He wanted the poets to sing of his triumphs, he wanted the chronicles to write his name in history, and so he would start a war, and that war would be Christian Mercia against Christian East Anglia, and it would draw in the rest of Britain and there would be shield walls again.
Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win. Even the nailed god cannot change that truth. And I was a warrior, and in a world at war the warrior must be cruel.
The fisherman had looked up and there had been pleading in his eyes, but the axe had fallen and he had gone to his sea grave. He would have betrayed me to Ælfric.
I told myself there would be an end to the cruelty. I had fought for Wessex all my life. I had given the nailed god his victories, and the nailed god had turned around and spat in my face, so now I would go to Bebbanburg and, once I had captured it, I would stay there and let the two tribes fight. That was my plan. I would go home and I would stay at home and I would persuade Æthelflaed to join me, and then not even the nailed god could prise me out of Bebbanburg because that fortress is invincible.
And in the morning I told Finan how we would capture it.
He laughed when he heard. ‘It could work,’ he said.
‘Pray to your god to send the right weather,’ I said. I sounded gloomy, and no wonder. I wanted hard weather, ship-threatening weather, and instead the sky was suddenly blue and the air warm. The wind had turned light and southerly so that our sail flapped at times, losing all power and causing Middelniht to slop lazily in a sun-glittering sea. Most of my men were sleeping, and I was content to let them rest rather than take to the oars. We had steered well offshore and were alone under that empty sky.