The Bone Thief (15 page)

‘The horses could do with a rest,’ he said. ‘Shelter. A hot mash.’ Fallow nuzzled at the boy’s hair, whickering.

They looked all right to Wulfgar, sturdy and shaggy and soft-eyed as ever. A bit muddy, perhaps. But he knew so little about horses.

‘It’s Sunday today, anyway,’ Wulfgar said, folding his damp cloak away, and sighing. ‘Easter Sunday, and Leicester.’ He suppressed a shudder. He had heard too many songs about the fall of Leicester, and the ignominious flight south of its bishop. The Danes of the Great Army had tried to take Leicester, and had failed many times, defeated by those famous walls, before they had at last succeeded. What would he and Ednoth find? If the songs he’d been taught were anything to go by, they would walk into a burnt-out city, black smoke billowing to Heaven, the eyeless corpses of women and children in the streets, glutted crows with bloody beaks, and the godless victors swilling communion wine from stolen chalices.

Smoke still rising after thirty years?

Perhaps not.

A lot must have changed since the Great Army wielded the killing-fields of eastern Mercia, he thought. Heremod said there’s law in Leicester now, didn’t he?

‘Did Heremod say they
are
pagans?’

Was Ednoth reading his mind?

‘Not exactly.’

‘I’ve never met a pagan.’ Ednoth’s brown eyes were eager.

Wulfgar could almost admire his ability to see every threat as a new adventure.

‘That’ll be something to tell my little brothers,’ Ednoth said. ‘I play Christians and Pagans with them – it’s great fun the way they scream when I get one on the ground and tell him I’m going to cut the blood eagle on his back—’

Wulfgar cut him short.

‘I know the sort of thing.’ Only too well, he thought, his shoulder blades twitching in memory. Great fun, did he call it?
We’re going to flay you alive, and hack your ribs open, and pull your lungs out
… It’s fun for the bullies, but no one asks the victims what they think.

‘I’m looking forward to that ale-house,’ Ednoth said. ‘What did Heremod say it was called?’

‘The Wave-Serpent. It’s a Danish word for ship,’ he said, remembering some of the songs the hostage boys had taught him, back in Winchester. He wondered what he and Ednoth would find there.

They smelt Leicester long before they saw it. But it wasn’t the sickly carrion stench of Wulfgar’s imagination. The air had much the same reek as Worcester: damp thatch, hearth-smoke and cooking fires overlying the rotting detritus of the city ditch. Cautious, they reined in their horses some distance from the southern gatehouse.

Leicester’s ancient stone walls were every bit as massive as Wulfgar had heard, and greater than any he’d ever seen: their beautifully shaped limestone shone white in the late morning sun, banded with broad stripes of red tile, the old gatehouse still arching over the road. At the city’s heart, the tower of the cathedral overlooked the sea of smoke-hung thatch, and at the sight Wulfgar’s own heart lifted. Whatever horrors Leicester might contain, he thought suddenly, he could face them as long
as
he was privileged to make his devotions at the cathedral. Just once.

‘Do we just walk in?’ The hesitancy was unlike Ednoth. ‘Can’t we go round?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Ednoth frowned. ‘Shouldn’t we just press on to Bardney as quickly as we can?’

Wulfgar sighed, his ribs tight with anxiety. Whatever had the Atheling been thinking? He said this business would only take us a week, and look at us, he thought in frustration. Three nights on the road already, and we’re barely halfway to Bardney. And I’ve got to deliver his wretched message to Leicester’s Jarl, this Hakon Grimsson, which will slow us down even further.

‘We need food,’ he told the boy. ‘A fire to dry our cloaks. You said yourself that the horses need a rest. I’m probably too late for Mass, but I should go to the cathedral, anyway. Have you got our story straight?’

Ednoth nodded and sighed heavily, rolling his eyes.

‘Merchants from the south, looking into the pottery trade,’ he recited, sing-song.

The gates stood open and there were no guards. Even so, they rode under the archway warily, looking to right and left. Closely packed timber buildings, many of them workshops, lined the street and huddled close to the great stone walls. They could hear the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer – on Easter Sunday! – and Wulfgar felt his nostrils tightening against the acrid stench of a tannery. Ahead of them, the street widened out, and a group of men clustered to one side of what looked like the market square. Wulfgar wondered whether to go over and ask the way through the maze of streets to the cathedral, or the Wave-Serpent, but
there
was something unwelcoming about the men, the way they were huddled, talking in low voices, glancing over their shoulders.

‘Where are we going?’ Ednoth still sounded unhappy.

‘The cathedral. We’ve got to start somewhere.’

Down an alleyway to their left, there was a gang of children dodging among the puddles and rubbish, pursuing errant chickens.

‘I know, I’ll ask one of those young ones.’

‘Not the cathedral. It’s no good to me, is it? Ask where that ale-house is. Will they speak English?’

‘How should I know?’
Where’s the Wave-Serpent?
He practised
hvar er
a couple of times under his breath, the foreign sounds uncomfortable on his tongue, then dismounted shakily, and, with as much confidence as he could muster, stopped one bright-looking lad, his dog panting at his feet.

‘
Ungr mathr
, um,
hvar er Wave-Serpentinn?
’

Oh, the boy had understood all right.

‘Wave-Serpent,
herra
? Outwith walls, till nor-east.’ He pointed. ‘In Dench town.’

Wulfgar blinked. The words made no sense to him at first. Then he pulled himself together, realisation seeping through.

‘Dench – oh,
Danish
town. Right. Thank you. How do we get there?’

The boy pointed back towards the gate.

‘Through bar, follow walls till Margaret-kirk, along Gallowtree-gate. Wave-Serpent’s gainhand in garth.’

Wulfgar blinked again. It might not be Danish, but it certainly wasn’t any variety of English he was familiar with.

‘Margaret-kirk? Do you mean the cathedral?’ But the boy had been pointing in the opposite direction.

‘Nay, nay. Margaret-kirk.’ The child grinned. ‘It’s right by Mam’s. I’d put you on right gate myself?’ He indicated Wulfgar’s saddle hopefully.

‘That would be very kind.’

He wasn’t sure how to get the boy up on his crupper, but before he knew it the child had scrambled up like a cat.

‘Back through bar, first on.’ He whistled, and the dog ran up beside.

Wulfgar had the uncomfortable feeling that Ednoth was laughing at him.

They rode back under the double arches of the gate. The horses picked their way through a landscape of stinking ditches and pits, middens and market garden trash, keeping the bulk of the walls on their left. The boy chattered away in his near-incomprehensible dialect but his gestures were clear enough.

‘What’s your name, young man?’ Wulfgar had been wondering if the lad would have an English name or a Danish one. But the answer came as a surprise.

‘Kevin,
herra
.’

Kevin
? What sort of a name was that? Irish? Wulfgar thought back to the huddled groups of men in the market square, gossiping like so many fishwives.

‘What’s going on, Kevin?’ Wulfgar asked. ‘What was everyone talking about?’

‘Don’t tha ken?’ The lad twisted round to stare up at Wulfgar in wide-eyed disbelief. ‘Our Jarl’s dead. Three days gone. Arval ended at dawn.’

‘Jarl? Arval?’ Wulfgar found the hair rising on the back of his neck.
Three days?
The Jarl of Leicester must have been dying, maybe even dead already, when the Atheling had entrusted him
with
the message. He wondered fleetingly how his own Lord was faring, and his Lady, and how he would know if the worst had happened.

The boy stared at him even harder.

‘The Jarl. His lyke-wake. Hakon Grimsson, tha ken? Hakon
Toad
.’ He said the name slowly and clearly, as though he thought Wulfgar were daft.

Ednoth, riding a few feet away, hadn’t been able to hear much of their exchange. ‘Can you understand him? What’s he saying?’

‘I – I’ll tell you in a moment.’

Wulfgar was finding it hard to think clearly. I can’t take a message to a dead man. What am I going to do? He could see the Atheling’s dark, smiling face, feel the warm pressure of his hand on his upper arm. What was he going to say? It’s the best possible excuse, he thought. The man’s dead and buried. I’m reprieved, from half my burden, at least.

‘Kirk’s yon,’ Kevin said.

Wulfgar hadn’t known what to expect from the Danish quarter outside the walls, but it seemed little different from the English town within them: the same sort of mongrel dogs barking; similar children charging headlong through a flurry of squawking geese, with their mothers’ voices wrathful in their wake – and
come here and help me
, he thought, sounds much the same in both languages. There were the familiar smells of privy and hearth-fire. He was very aware, however, that heads were turning, curious eyes following the strangers on their horses.

Wulfgar found his voice again.

‘So, Kevin, there’s a new lord – a new
jarl
– in Leicester now?’

‘Now arval’s done,
já
. Old Jarl’s little brother.’

Wulfgar remembered what Heremod had told him.

‘Is that Ketil Scar?’

The boy turned his head away and spat.

‘There’s Mam,
herra
. Wave-Serpent’s down the ginnel. Let me down?’

A sturdy woman stood in a low doorway, arms akimbo. The boy ran towards her, shouting with excitement and pointing at the horses. Wulfgar winced. They were attracting far too much interest.

He told Ednoth what the boy had said.

‘Nothing we need worry about, then. We’re not here to see the Jarl, are we?’ Ednoth was still smirking. ‘You should have seen your face when he jumped up into your saddle! Now, where’s that ale-house?’

‘I would like to go to the church the boy mentioned, first.’ His voice was wistful. ‘Margaret-kirk. He said it was just here.’ Another church, he thought. Not just the cathedral, then. Leicester promised to be full of surprises.

Ednoth looked at the expression on Wulfgar’s face and shrugged.

The little church was easy to find, its lime-washed walls dazzling among the cob and timber houses, the shingled roof standing proud of the thatched buildings around it, with a sunlit wooden cross fixed to one gable end. But Margaret-kirk was no new, wooden church for the new Danish settlement: it was as ancient-looking as the city walls, stone and tile exposed in the walls where patches of plaster had flaked and fallen. The door in the west wall stood ajar, luring him in.

He slid down from Fallow and handed her reins to Ednoth.

‘I won’t be long.’

An alcove by the door held a battered and faded painting, a lamp guttering before it. He could just make out the lineaments
of
a young woman, one foot resting casually on a terrible fanged serpent. St Margaret. The Martyr of Antioch, so beloved of women in childbirth.

‘
St Margaret
,’ he whispered, ‘
pray for me, too
…’

The door creaked on its iron hinges. After the bright daylight, the church seemed all fire and darkness. A pair of candles in sconces flanking the door gave off a smoky yellow flame and the reek of tallow. Someone had kindled these lights recently but there was no sign of life now. Wulfgar stepped over the threshold and let the door swing to behind him.

‘Hallo?’ No more than a whisper; his voice was caught in his throat. He felt his hackles rise.

The building had two cells, the nave in which he stood and the chancel ahead of him, hardly wide enough to contain its altar. A third light, a little oil-lamp, glimmered there, hinting at the solemn presences of the saints painted on the chancel walls. The pungent scent of tallow mingled with damp, and he could see on the walls the tracks of water. A draft had followed him in and sent the flames leaping, starting dizzying shadows. The green-tinged saints danced in the candlelight. He noticed with a shiver that most of them had had their eyes scratched out. Was that the work of the Danes?

‘Hallo?’

He took a step towards the chancel, but no one was there. Was this still a church? The blinded saints made him nervous. From force of habit, he bowed to the altar and turned to take his leave.

As he turned, he froze.

Something was emerging from the far side of the altar.

Something dark, shapeless, lurching, shuffling out of the shadows.

Wulfgar took a step backwards and crossed himself, his hand
clutching
at last the Bishop’s reliquary ring on its thong around his neck.

‘
Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven
—’

‘Who’s that, there? Did I startle you?’ came a muffled voice.