Death of Kings (12 page)

The monk was frightened of me because my life and death were beyond his comprehension. ‘Why did you come here?’ he asked.

‘To discover the future,’ I said. I could feel blood between my hands. My rubbing had opened the scabs on the cuts Ælfadell had inflicted on my palm.

‘He learned the future,’ Ælfadell said, ‘the future of dead kings.’

‘Did it tell of my death?’ I asked her, and for the first time saw doubt on that wrinkled-hag face.

‘We must send to Jarl Cnut,’ the monk said.

‘Kill him,’ one of the younger monks said. He was a tall, strongly-built man with a hard long face, a hook of a nose and cruel unforgiving eyes. ‘The jarl will want him dead.’

The older monk was uncertain. ‘We don’t know the jarl’s will, Brother Hearberht.’

‘Kill him! He’ll reward you. Reward us all.’ Brother Hearberht was right, but the gods had filled the others with doubt.

‘The jarl must decide,’ the older monk said.

‘It will take three days to fetch an answer,’ Hearberht said caustically, ‘and what do you do with him for three days? He has his men in the town. Too many men.’

‘We take him to the jarl?’ the older monk suggested. He was desperate for an answer, flailing at any solution that might spare him from making a decision.

‘For the sake of God,’ Hearberht snapped. He strode to the pile of my possessions, stooped, and straightened with Wasp-Sting in his hand. The short blade caught the wan light. ‘What do you do with a cornered wolf?’ he demanded, and came towards me.

And I used all my strength, all that strength that years of sword and shield practice had put into my bones and muscle, the years of war and readying for war, and I thrust my bent legs and pulled my arms, and I felt the bonds loosening and I was rolling back, throwing the blade off my hip, and I started to shout, a great war shout of a warrior and reached for Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

Ælfadell tried to pull the sword away, but she was old and slow, and I was bellowing to fill the cave with echoes and I seized the hilt and swung the blade to drive her back, and Hearberht checked as I rose to my feet. I half stumbled, the bonds still wrapped about my ankles, and Hearberht saw his opening and came in fast, the short blade held low ready to rip up into my naked belly and I swatted it aside and fell on him. He went backwards and I stood again and he hacked the blade at my bare legs, but I parried him and then stabbed down with Serpent-Breath, my sword, my lover, my blade, my war companion, and she gutted that monk like a fish under a razor-edged knife, and his blood spread on his black robe and turned the bat shit black, and I went on ripping her, unaware that I was still shouting to fill the cave with rage.

Hearberht was squealing and shaking and dying, and the other two monks were fleeing. I ripped the bonds off my ankles and pursued them. Serpent-Breath’s hilt was slippery with my blood, and she was hungry.

I caught them in the woods, not fifty paces from the cave’s mouth, and I felled the younger monk with a blow to the back of his head, then caught the older by his robe. I turned him to face me and smelt the fear that fouled his robe. ‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘and who are you?’

‘Abbot Deorlaf, lord,’ he said, falling to his knees and holding his clasped hands towards me, and I held him by the throat and buried Serpent-Breath in his belly, and I sawed her there, opening him up, and he mewed like an animal and wept like a child and called on Jesus the Redeemer as he died in his own dung. I cut the younger monk’s throat, then went back to the cave where I washed Serpent-Breath’s blade in the stream.

‘Erce did not foretell your death,’ Ælfadell said. She had screamed when I tore the bonds off my wrists and seized the sword from her, yet now she was oddly calm. She just watched me and was apparently unafraid.

‘Is that why you didn’t kill me?’

‘She didn’t foretell my death either,’ she said.

‘Then maybe she was wrong,’ I said, and fetched Wasp-Sting from Hearberht’s dead hand.

And that was when I saw her.

From a deeper cave, from a passage that led into the netherworld, Erce came. She was a girl of such beauty that the breath stopped in my lungs. The dark-haired girl who had ridden me in the night, the long-haired girl, slender and pale, so beautiful and calm and as naked as the blade in my hand and all I could do was stare at her. I could not move, and she gazed back at me with grave, large eyes and she said nothing and I said nothing until the breath caught in me again. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘Dress yourself,’ Ælfadell said, whether to me or the girl I could not tell.

‘Who are you?’ I asked the girl, but she was still and silent.

‘Dress yourself, Lord Uhtred!’ Ælfadell ordered, and I obeyed her. I pulled on my jerkin, my boots, my mail and strapped my swords at my waist, and still the girl gazed at me with her quiet, dark eyes. She was as beautiful as the summer dawn and as silent as the winter night. She did not smile, her face showed nothing. I walked towards her and sensed something strange. The Christians say we have a soul, whatever that is, and it seemed to me this girl had no soul. There was an emptiness in her dark eyes. It was frightening, making me approach her slowly.

‘No!’ Ælfadell called. ‘You cannot touch her! You have seen Erce in the daylight. No other man has.’

‘Erce?’

‘Go,’ she said, ‘go.’ She dared to stand in front of me. ‘You dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘and in your dream you found truth. Be content with that, and go.’

‘Speak to me,’ I said to the girl, but she was unmoving and silent and empty, yet I could not take my eyes from her. I would have looked on her for all the rest of my life. The Christians talk of miracles, of men walking on water and raising the dead, and they say those miracles are proofs of their religion, though none of them can do a miracle or show us a miracle, yet here, in this damp cave beneath the hilltop grave, I saw a miracle. I saw Erce.

‘Go,’ Ælfadell said, and though she spoke to me it was the goddess who turned and vanished into the underworld.

I did not kill the old woman. I went. I dragged the dead monks into some brambles where perhaps the wild beasts would feast on them, and then I stooped to the stream and drank like a dog.

‘What did the witch tell you?’ Osferth asked me when I reached the widow’s farm.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and my tone discouraged further questions, all except one. ‘Where are we going, lord?’ Osferth asked.

‘We’re going south,’ I said, still in a daze.

And so we rode towards Sigurd’s land.

Four

I had told Ælfadell my name, and what else? Had I told her my idea for revenge on Sigurd? And why had I talked so much? Ludda gave me an answer as we rode south. ‘There are herbs and mushrooms, lord, and there’s the blight you find on ears of rye, all kinds of things can give men dreams. My mother used them.’

‘She was a sorceress?’

He shrugged. ‘A wise-woman, anyway. She told fortunes and made potions.’

‘And the potion Ælfadell gave me, that made me speak my name?’

‘Maybe it was rye-blight? You’re lucky to be alive if it was. Get it wrong and you kill the dreamer, but if she knew how to make it then you’ll have gabbled like an old woman, lord.’

And who knows what else I had revealed to the aglæcwif? I felt like a fool. ‘Does she really speak to the gods?’ I had told Ludda about Ælfadell, but not about Erce. I wanted to hold that secret close, a memory to haunt me.

‘Some folk claim to talk to the gods,’ Ludda said uncertainly.

‘And see the future?’

He shifted in his saddle. Ludda was not accustomed to riding a horse, and the journey had given him a sore arse and aching thighs. ‘If she really saw the future, lord, would she be in a cave? She’d have a palace. Kings would crawl to her feet.’

‘Maybe the gods only talk to her in the cave,’ I suggested.

Ludda heard the anxiety in my voice. ‘Lord,’ he said earnestly, ‘if you roll the dice often enough you always get the numbers you want. If I tell you the sun will shine tomorrow and that it will rain and there will be snow and that clouds will cover the sky and that the wind will blow and that it will be a calm day and that the thunder will deafen us then one of those things will turn out to be true and you’ll forget the rest because you want to believe that I really can tell the future.’ He gave me a swift smile. ‘Folk don’t buy rusty iron because I’m persuasive, lord, but because they desperately want to believe it will turn to silver.’

And I desperately wanted to believe his doubts about Ælfadell. She had said Wessex was doomed and that seven kings would die, but what did that mean? What kings? Alfred of Wessex, Edward of Cent, Eohric of East Anglia? Who else? And who was the Saxon? ‘She knew who I was,’ I said to Ludda.

‘Because you had drunk her potion, lord. It was as if you were drunk and saying anything that came into your mind.’

‘And she tied me up,’ I told him, ‘but didn’t kill me.’

‘God be praised,’ Ludda said dutifully. I doubted he was a Christian, at least not a good one, but he was too clever to fall foul of the priests. He frowned in puzzlement. ‘I wonder why she didn’t kill you.’

‘She was frightened to,’ I said, ‘and so was the abbot.’

‘She tied you up, lord,’ Ludda said, ‘because someone had told her you were Jarl Cnut’s enemy. So she knew that much, but she didn’t know what Jarl Cnut wanted done with you. So she sent for the monks to find out. And they were too scared to order your death, too. It’s no small thing to kill a lord, especially if his men are close by.’

‘One of them wasn’t scared.’

‘And he’s regretting that now,’ Ludda said happily, ‘but it’s strange, lord, very strange.’

‘What is?’

‘She can talk to the gods. And the gods didn’t tell her to kill you.’

‘Ah,’ I said, seeing what he meant and not knowing what else to say.

‘The gods would have known what to do with you and they would have told her what to do, yet they didn’t. That tells me she’s not taking commands from the gods, lord, but from Jarl Cnut. She’s telling men what he wants them to hear.’ He shifted in the saddle again, trying to relieve the pain in his arse. ‘There’s the road, lord,’ he said, pointing. He was leading us south and east and had been looking for a Roman road that crossed the hills. ‘It goes to some old lead mines,’ he had told me, ‘but once past the mines there’s no road.’ I had told Ludda to take us to Cytringan where Sigurd had a feasting-hall, though I had not said what I planned to do there.

Why had I gone to find Ælfadell? To find a road, of course. The three Norns sit at the roots of Yggdrasil where they weave our fates, and at some time they will take the shears and cut our thread. We all want to know where that thread will end. We want to know the future. We want to know, as Beornnoth had said to me, how the story ends, and that was why I had gone to see Ælfadell. Alfred must die soon, maybe he was already dead, and everything would change, and I was not such a fool as to think that my part in that change would be small. I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Men feared me. In those days I was no great lord in terms of land or wealth or men, but Alfred had known that if he wanted victory he must lend me men, and that was how we had broken Haesten’s power at Beamfleot. His son, Edward, seemed to trust me, and I knew Alfred wanted me to swear loyalty to Edward, but I had gone to Ælfadell to catch a glimpse of the future. Why ally myself to a man destined to fail? Was Edward the man whom Ælfadell called the Saxon and who was doomed to destroy Wessex? What was the safe road? Edward’s sister, Æthelflaed, would never forgive me if I betrayed her brother, but perhaps she was doomed too. All my women would die. There was no great truth in that, we all die, yet why had Ælfadell said those words? Was she warning me against Alfred’s children? Against Æthelflaed and Edward? We live in a world fading to darkness and I had sought a light to shine on a sure road and I had found none, except a vision of Erce, a vision that would not leave my memory, a vision to haunt me. ‘Wyrd bi
ful
ræd,’ I said aloud.

Fate is inexorable.

And under the influence of Ælfadell’s bitter drink I had babbled my name, and what else? I had told none of my men what my plan was, but had I told Ælfadell? And Ælfadell lived on Cnut’s land and under his protection. She had told me that Wessex would be destroyed and that the Danes would win everything, and of course she would say that because that was what Cnut Longsword wanted men to hear. Jarl Cnut wanted every Danish leader to visit the cave and hear that victory would be theirs because men inspired to battle by a foreknowledge of victory fought with a passion that gives them victory. Sigurd’s men, attacking me on the bridge, had really believed they would win and that had encouraged them into a trap.