Saxon: The Book of Dreams (Saxon 1) (2 page)

For more than a month I had known that this would happen.

*

I came to my senses, still lying face down. Someone had lashed my wrists together with a strip of rawhide. My face was now pressed against cracked and hardened mud. The slime on
my cheek had the smell of chicken droppings. I stifled a groan and raised my head to look around. It was mid-afternoon, the sky had clouded over, and I was sprawled in the yard in front of my
father’s great hall, my own home. A large group of Mercians was clustered in front of the building, still dressed in their war gear. They were joking amongst themselves and taking turns to
step forward and pick up an item from a pile of goods heaped on the ground. I recognized the helmet I had been wearing at the battle and, with a lurch in my stomach, my father’s long ornate
sword. To my right was the man supervising the division of the booty. He was seated on a tall carved wooden seat, which had once been my father’s place of honour. The Mercians must have
dragged the better furniture outside when they looted the hall. The man sitting in my father’s place was middle-aged with a thick powerful body and heavy rounded shoulders. His hair was
curled and greased and elaborately piled up on his head. Even without the crown that he wore for his image on the coins from his royal mint I had no difficulty in recognizing Offa, King of Mercia.
I lowered my head back into the farmyard filth and lay still, gathering my thoughts. The sight of my father’s sword confirmed that he must have perished on the battlefield. I doubted that my
two brothers had survived. My gold torc was gone, of course. I could feel the bruise around my throat where my captor had wrenched it away; doubtless it was now hidden in his clothing. I toyed with
the idea of denouncing him but decided it would serve no purpose. To the victor, the spoils. Last autumn, Offa had sent a message to my father, demanding to be acknowledged as his overlord and a
payment of tribute. When the demand had been rebuffed, Offa had used the excuse to invade. Our battered little kingdom would first be raped, then either become a tributary of Mercia or absorbed
directly into Offa’s domain, which already included much of England.

I had already dreamed it in vivid detail: an antlered stag was grazing peacefully on a lush meadow when a huge dangerous-looking bull, led by a vixen, emerged from the dark forest in the
distance. With the vixen scuttling a few paces ahead, the bull advanced. Too late, the stag raised its head and confronted the intruder with its antlers. The bull charged and gored its victim to
death while the vixen screamed her encouragement. I had woken, drenched with cold sweat, realizing the screams were my own.

Rough hands were hauling me to my feet. Someone – I presumed he was the Mercian warrior who had captured me – took me by the elbow and marched me over towards King Offa. The pile of
booty was gone. Now it was time to dispose of the prisoners of war.

A group of well-dressed men stood behind the royal seat: the royal councillors. To my shock and utter disgust my uncle Cyneric was among them. He must have surrendered very early in the fight
and been spared. The look he gave me, a mixture of shame and arrogance, told me all I needed to know – he was now King Offa’s man.

‘This is the only surviving son, my lord,’ said my escort.

Offa looked me up and down with hard, grey eyes. He saw a raw-boned young man of ordinary height, dishevelled and filthy, dressed in a tunic and leggings, strands of lank yellow hair flopping
over his dung-streaked face.

‘What is your name?’ Offa asked. His voice was gravelly, and he spoke with the thick vowels of his own dialect.

‘Sigwulf, my lord.’

The royal mouth twisted into a sardonic smile.

‘Victorious Wolf. Not very appropriate.’

My turncoat uncle stepped forward from the councillors.

‘He is the youngest son. There was another . . .’

A raised hand cut his sentence short. Cyneric was already being treated like the vassal he had become.

‘So what are we to do with you?’ Offa asked me.

I stared down at the ground and said nothing. We both knew that the sensible step was to put me to death, ensuring the direct bloodline of the kingship died with me. I wondered if my uncle had
been dealing in secret with the Mercians before the invasion. His wife was one of Offa’s distant cousins. The marriage was meant to be a bond-weaver, one of those alliances that cement
friendships between neighbouring kingdoms. In this case it had been the reverse. Perhaps the screaming vixen had been her.

‘Stand closer, lad. And let me see your face,’ growled Offa.

I shuffled forward and raised my head, flicking aside my long hair. At that precise moment the sun broke through a gap in the clouds and lit up the farmyard. The light fell full on my face as I
found myself staring directly into the grim countenance of the man who was bold and ambitious enough to style himself Rex Anglorum, King of the English.

He flinched, just briefly, and then made a small movement as if to cross himself before he stayed his hand.

I was born with dark-blue eyes. This is quite normal among my people, and usually the colour of a baby’s eyes changes to a lighter shade of blue when they are a few months old. Sometimes
their eyes turn to grey, and very occasionally to brown. But something different happened to me. The colour of my right eye did alter, gradually becoming a greenish hazel, while the left eye faded
to the normal pale blue. By contrast my twin brother – of whom I shall write later – underwent the opposite. His left eye changed colour, and his right eye remained the same. To many in
our community these were certain signs of the Devil, all the more so because in the pain and difficulty of giving birth to twins, our mother died.

Whatever fate King Offa had in mind for me changed in the instant that he saw my mismatched eyes.

I sensed the hesitation in the king’s manner as he tried to devise a way of eliminating me without doing me an injury. He was thinking that harming anyone who bore the Devil’s mark
would invite trouble from the Wicked One.

He turned to question my uncle.

‘What do we know about this youth?’

‘His father’s pet, my lord,’ answered my uncle. I could hear his bitter dislike of me in his voice. ‘Too precious to be sent away for fostering like his older brothers.
Taught how to read and write instead of how to hunt and make war.’

‘Not dangerous then?’ Offa raised an eyebrow.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ my uncle replied hastily. ‘He is slippery, not to be trusted.’ He produced a sycophant’s smile, nastily deferential. ‘Maybe Your
Majesty should have him tonsured and shut up in a monastery.’

Incarcerating an unwanted person in a monastery was an effective way of putting them out of sight and mind.

A more thoughtful expression appeared on Offa’s face.

‘What are his manners like?’ he asked, as though he was enquiring about the training and discipline of a house dog he was considering buying.

‘He should know his place among his betters,’ my uncle admitted grudgingly. ‘He was brought up in the great hall.’

‘Languages?’ This time the royal question was addressed directly to me.

My tongue felt thick and dry in my mouth.

‘Only Latin,’ I mumbled.

There was a long pause as Offa regarded me seriously.

‘Clean him up and find him some decent clothes,’ he announced finally. ‘Mercia has a better use for him.’

‘And what has the king decided?’ The question came from one of the royal councillors, a greybeard with the air of someone long in the royal service. His obsequious tone indicated
that his query was a customary one, designed to allow Offa to show off his wisdom.

‘He’ll go to live with the Franks. Their king has been asking for someone to be sent from Mercia as an earnest of our good relations. If he’s as educated and personable as is
claimed, he’ll make a good impression. Well scrubbed, he could even be quite good-looking. That should keep the Franks off our backs.’

Offa was cleverer than I had given him credit for. It was the custom for rulers to send family members to live in other courts. Officially they went as guests and as a gesture of trust and
friendship between kingdoms, but in reality they were kept as hostages. They lived in their new homes until they died or were recalled. Should war break out, they were killed out of hand. As the
only surviving scion of a noble family, I could be passed off as a suitable pledge of Mercia’s good neighbourliness as long as my Frankish hosts did not enquire too closely. If they did
discover I was not as important as had been made out, they would put an end to me and that would suit Offa just as well.

The king turned towards me again.

‘You will not come back,’ he said flatly. He did not need to say that if I did return, I would forfeit my life.

I kept my expression neutral but, strange to say, his judgement caused a sudden thrill of excitement to run through me. I was to be an exile without hope of return, a wanderer. Offa had not
demanded my allegiance, and therefore I no longer had a lord. To many in our close-knit society, this would have been a terrible sentence. There is a special term for such an outcast. I would be
winelas guma
, a ‘friendless man’, living without protection, prey to all who would harm or exploit him. Yet for as long as I could remember, I had wanted to travel to foreign
lands and see how others lived. Here was my chance. Perhaps I would even find a place where I would feel less of an outsider and my mismatched eyes would not arouse such unease.

The court of the Frankish king was as promising a destination as I could have wished for. Even our rustic villeins had heard of Carolus. For more than a decade he had ruled Europe from the dark
forests beyond the Rhine to the sunlit plains of Lombardy and west to the ocean. It was such an enormous area that there were rumours that one day he would be crowned the emperor of Europe, the
first true emperor since the days of Rome. His court must surely attract all manner of exotic and unusual folk. Perhaps I would blend in with them despite my unusual appearance.

‘You have three days for the funeral rites,’ Offa grunted. With a twinge of conscience I realized that I had been thinking only of myself. My father and two brothers had been proud
of their warrior heritage. They would want that I gave them a fitting burial rather than lament their passing.

‘A request,’ I said.

Offa’s chin came up as he glared at me. A scruffy and defeated youth whose life he had just spared was not expected to make requests.

‘What is it?’ His tone was truculent. For a moment I thought he was going to change his mind about my exile and order my execution instead.

‘That my personal slave goes with me,’ I said.

Once again Offa glanced towards my uncle.

‘Is this slave of any value?’

‘Hardly, my lord,’ answered Cyneric. He did not bother to keep the sneer from his face. ‘He’s a defective cripple. An out-lander who can barely string two words
together.’

‘He looked after me throughout my childhood,’ I interrupted. ‘I am in his debt.’

‘And you in mine,’ said Offa coldly. ‘Take your worn-out slave with you, but he has cost you a day’s grace. The day after tomorrow you will be escorted to the coast and
put on the first ship sailing for Frankia.’

O
SRIC, MY BODY SLAVE,
had been to sea before, that I knew. My father had bought him from a travelling dealer who must have heard that the woman looking
after my brother and me was refusing to touch us after she noticed something strange about our eyes. The other household servants had been equally frightened.

‘Make a good babysitter, he would. He’s quiet and gentle and, with that gammy pin, not likely to run away,’ the slaver had said as he showed off a battered-looking, scrawny
man, perhaps thirty years old with skin the colour of a fallen autumn leaf. The unfortunate man had evidently been in a very bad accident, for his head was permanently canted over on a slant and
his left leg broken and set so badly that it was crooked.

‘Where does he come from?’ my father had asked.

The dealer had shrugged.

‘I got him down in the west country, part exchange for a couple of brawny lasses fit for mine work. Locals found him washed up on the rocks, like a half-dead mackerel. Probably off a tin
ship that wrecked.’

My father had looked doubtful.

‘Worth owning someone as hardy as that,’ the slave dealer had wheedled. ‘Any other man would have died. Besides, he doesn’t understand any speech so he won’t be
taking up any wild ideas and gossip.’

My father had allowed himself to be persuaded. He’d paid a few coins and named his new slave Osric as a joke; his namesake was a rival kinglet in neighbouring Wessex, a man famously vain
of his good looks.

Over the years Osric became an essential, silent member of our household. He spoke so rarely that many visitors thought he was a mute. Growing up in his care, however, I knew that he learned our
language in secret. When alone with his two charges, he would talk with us, though only a few words at a time. As I grew older I came to the conclusion that he preferred to stay withdrawn, locked
away in his battered body.