The Flame Bearer (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 10) (11 page)

‘Which you’re going to give them?’

‘Am I?’

‘If you fight,’ Finan said suspiciously, ‘then yes.’

‘I’ll tell you what I plan,’ I said. ‘On Wednesday we rid ourselves of these bastards, then we go south and smack King Edward to stop any similar nonsense, and after that we capture Bebbanburg.’

‘That simple?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that simple.’

Finan laughed, then saw my face in the moonlight. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you’re going to fight Constantin and your cousin? How in hell do we do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I’m going back to Bebbanburg this year. And I’m going to capture it.’ I gripped my hammer and saw Finan put a finger on the cross he wore. I had no idea how I would capture the fortress, I just knew my enemies believed they had scared me away from my father’s lands, and I would let them believe that until my swords turned that land red.

We had reached the gaunt stone that stood tall beside the path. I touched it, wondering if it still possessed some dark power. ‘He was very specific,’ I said.

‘The priest?’

‘About meeting us here. Why not meet us by the woodland?’ I asked. ‘Or closer to the fort?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He wants us to be here,’ I said, still touching the great stone pillar, ‘so that we can’t see what happens on the other side of the trees.’

Finan still looked puzzled, but I gave him no time to ask questions. Instead I walked on south towards the trees and whistled through my fingers. I heard a brief answering whistle, then Eadric appeared at the woodland’s edge. He was probably the best of my scouts, an older man with a poacher’s uncanny ability to move silently through tangled woods. He carried a horn, which he would blow if the West Saxons came from the fort, but he said all had been quiet since sundown. ‘They haven’t even sent out scouts, lord,’ he said, evidently disgusted by the enemy’s lack of precautions.

‘If I’m right …’ I began.

‘… which he always is,’ Finan put in.

‘There’ll be men leaving the fort tomorrow. I want you to watch for them.’

Eadric scratched his beard, then grimaced. ‘What if they leave from the far side?’

‘They will,’ I said confidently. ‘Can you find a place to watch the southern walls?’

He hesitated. The land around the fort was mostly flat with few coppices or other hiding places. ‘There’s bound to be a ditch,’ he finally allowed.

‘I need to know how many men leave,’ I said, ‘and which direction they take. You’ll have to bring the news back after dark tomorrow.’

‘I’ll have to find a place tonight then,’ he said cautiously, meaning that he would be seen if he tried to find a hiding place in the daylight, ‘and if they find me tomorrow …’ he left the sentence unfinished.

‘Say you’re a deserter, show them your cross, and tell them you’re tired of serving a pagan bastard.’

‘Well, that’s true enough,’ he said, making Finan laugh.

The three of us followed the track through the wood till I could see the fort’s ramparts outlined by the glow of the fires burning in its courtyard. The cattle path led gently downhill for over a mile, running straight as a Roman road across the pastureland. Two mornings from now Brunulf would follow that path, bringing eleven men and, doubtless, an apologetic refusal to pay any gold to Sigtryggr. ‘If Brunulf has any sense,’ I said, ‘and I suspect he does, he’ll send scouts to make sure we’re not ambushing the path in the wood.’ The woodland was the key. It was a massive tract of old trees, of fallen trunks, of tangling ivy, and thorny undergrowth. I wondered why it was not being tended, why no foresters had thinned out the brush or pollarded the trees, and why no charcoal was being made here, or great oaks turned into valuable timber. Probably, I thought, because there was a dispute about ownership, and, until a law court gave a judgement, no one could claim rights over the wood. ‘And if we do set an ambush here,’ I went on, ‘and Brunulf sends scouts first, he’ll find it.’

‘So no ambush,’ Finan said.

‘It’s the only place,’ I said, ‘so it has to be here.’

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Finan swore in frustration.

Eadric grunted. ‘If you asked me to scout it, lord, I wouldn’t search the whole wood. It’s too big. I’d just search maybe a bowshot either side of the path?’

‘And if I was Brunulf,’ Finan added, ‘I wouldn’t fear an ambush here at all.’

‘No?’ I asked. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s in full view of the fort! When he’s riding to the place where he knows we’re meeting him? If we wanted to kill him why wouldn’t we wait till he reaches the stone? Why kill him in view of the fort?’

‘You’re probably right,’ I said, and that thought gave me a little comfort even as it mystified Finan even further. ‘But tomorrow he’ll probably send scouts here,’ I was talking to Eadric now, ‘just to look at the land before Woden’s day, so tell your men to get out of here before dawn.’

I sounded certain, but of course the doubts harried me. On Woden’s day would Brunulf search the wood before riding through it? Eadric was right, it was a large wood, but a horseman could gallop along the edges quickly enough, even if searching the thick undergrowth would take time. But I could see nowhere else that would serve as well for an ambush. ‘And why,’ Finan asked me again, ‘do you want to ambush him here at all? You’ll just attract three hundred angry Saxons from the fort! If you wait till he’s at the stone,’ he jerked his head back towards the steading, ‘we can slaughter the lot of them and no one in the fort will know a thing. They won’t see it!’

‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘that’s very true.’

‘So why?’ he asked.

I grinned at him. ‘I’m thinking like my enemy. You should always plan your battles from the enemy’s point of view.’

‘But …’

I hushed him. ‘Not so loud. You might wake three hundred angry Saxons.’ There was no chance of waking men so far away, but I was enjoying mystifying Finan. ‘Let’s go this way,’ I said, and led my companions westwards, walking on the open ground beside the tree line. By daylight we would have been seen from the fort’s walls, but I doubted our dark clothing would show against the black loom of the dense wood. The ground sloped towards the river, and it was a deceptive slope, steeper than it appeared. If one of Brunulf’s scouts rode this way he would soon lose sight of the track and would surely conclude that no one planning an ambush against men on the road would wait in this lower wood, simply because they could not see their prey. That gave me some hope. ‘We won’t need more than fifty men,’ I said, ‘all of them mounted. We’ll conceal them in these lower trees and have some scouts higher up the slope to tell us when Brunulf is almost at the wood.’

‘But …’ Finan began again.

‘Fifty should be enough,’ I interrupted him, ‘but that really depends on how many men leave the fort tomorrow.’

‘Fifty men!’ Finan protested. ‘And the West Saxons have over three hundred.’ He jerked his head southwards. ‘Three hundred! And only a mile away.’

‘Poor innocent bastards,’ I said, ‘and they have no idea what’s about to happen to them!’ I turned back towards the track. ‘Let’s try and sleep.’

Instead I lay awake, worrying I might be wrong.

Because if I was, Northumbria was doomed.

I grew angry the next day.

The Lady Æthelflaed, ruler of Mercia, had made peace with Sigtryggr, and Sigtryggr had yielded valuable land and formidable burhs to secure that peace. That surrender of land had offended some of the powerful Danish jarls in southern Northumbria, and those men were now refusing to serve him, though whether that meant they would refuse to fight when the invasion came was something we did not yet know. What I did know was that West Saxon envoys had witnessed the treaty, they had travelled to Ledecestre’s church to see the oaths taken, and they had brought written approval from King Edward for the peace his sister had negotiated.

No one was fooled, of course. Sigtryggr might have purchased peace, but only for a while. The West Saxons had conquered East Anglia, making that once proud country part of Wessex, while Æthelflaed had restored the frontier of Mercia to where it had been before the Danes came to ravage Britain. Yet the years of war had left the armies of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria blood-battered, and so the peace treaty had been largely welcomed because it gave all three countries a chance to train new young warriors, to repair walls, to forge spear-blades, and to bind the willow shields with iron. And it gave Mercia and Wessex the time to create new and bigger armies that would eventually surge northwards and so unite the Saxon people into one new land called Englaland.

Now Wessex wanted to break the peace, and that made me angry.

Or rather, a faction in the West Saxon court wanted the peace broken. I knew because my people in Wintanceaster kept me informed. Two priests, a tavern-keeper, one of the household warriors, King Edward’s wine steward, and a dozen other folk sent messages that were carried north by merchants. Some of the messages were written, others were whispered quietly and retold to me weeks later, but in the last year all confirmed that Æthelhelm, Edward’s chief advisor and father-in-law, was pushing for a swift invasion of Northumbria. Frithestan, the Bishop of Wintanceaster and a fierce supporter of Æthelhelm, had preached a vituperous Christmas sermon complaining that the north still lay under pagan power, and demanding to know why Wessex’s Christian warriors were not doing the nailed god’s will by destroying Sigtryggr and every other Dane or Norse south of the Scottish border. Edward’s wife, Ælflæd, had rewarded the bishop’s Christmas sermon by giving him an elaborately embroidered stole, a maniple hemmed with garnets, and two tail-feathers from the cockerel that had crowed three times when someone said something that the nailed god did not like. Edward gave the bishop nothing, which confirmed rumours that Edward and his wife disagreed, not only about the desirability of invading Northumbria, but just about everything else. Edward was no coward, he had led his armies well in East Anglia, but he wanted time to impose his authority on the lands he had conquered; there were bishops to appoint, churches to build, land to be given to his followers, and walls to be strengthened around his newly captured towns. ‘In time,’ he had promised his council, ‘in time we will take the north. But not yet.’

Except Æthelhelm did not want to wait.

I could not blame him for that. Before my son-in-law became king in Eoferwic, I had urged the same thing on Æthelflaed, telling her time after time that the northern Danes were disorganised, vulnerable, and ripe for conquest. But she, like Edward, wanted more time, and she wanted the security of larger armies, and so we had been patient. Now I was the vulnerable one. Constantin was stealing much of the north, and Æthelhelm, the most powerful ealdorman in Wessex, wanted an excuse to invade the south. In one way he was right; Northumbria was ripe for conquest, but Æthelhelm wanted a victory over Sigtryggr for one reason only; to make certain that his grandson would be king of a united Englaland.

Edward, King of Wessex and Æthelhelm’s son-in-law, had secretly married a Centish girl long before he became king. They had a son, Æthelstan, whose mother had died at birth. Edward then married Æthelhelm’s daughter, Ælflæd the feather-giver, and had more children, one of whom, Ælfweard, was widely regarded as the ætheling, the crown prince, of Wessex. Except, in my view, he was not. Æthelstan was older, he was a legitimate son despite the rumours of bastardy, and he was a stalwart, brave, and impressive young man. Edward’s sister Æthelflaed, like me, supported Æthelstan’s claim to be the heir, but we were opposed by the richest, most influential ealdorman in Wessex. And I had no doubt that Brunulf and his men were in Northumbria to provoke the war that Æthelhelm wanted. Which meant that the peace party in Wessex would be proved wrong and Æthelhelm right, and he would gain the renown of being the man who united the Saxons into one nation, and that renown would make him unassailable. His grandson would be the next king, and Æthelstan, like Northumbria, would be doomed.

So I had to stop Brunulf and defeat Æthelhelm.

With fifty men.

Hidden in a wood.

At dawn.

We were among the lower trees long before the first light leaked in the east. Birds flapped among the leaves in panic when we arrived and I feared the West Saxon scouts would realise we had caused the disturbance, but if Brunulf had scouts in the wood they raised no alarm. He had sent horsemen to explore the trees before nightfall, a task they had done in a desultory way, and, because I had withdrawn my scouts, they found nothing, but I worried he might have left sentries to watch the woods all night. It seemed he had not, and, as far as I could tell, only the panicked birds and the beasts of the dark were aware of our arrival. We dismounted, forced our way through the thick undergrowth, and, once we were close to the southern edge of the trees, we waited as the wood settled.

I knew it would be a long wait because Brunulf would not leave the fort till full daylight, but I had not wanted to reach the wood after the dawn in case the sight of birds fleeing the trees alerted the West Saxons. Finan, still puzzled as to what I planned, had given up pressing me and now sat with his back against the moss-covered trunk of a fallen oak and stroked a stone down a sword already as sharp as the shears wielded by the three fates. My son played dice with two of his men, and I took Berg aside. ‘I need to talk,’ I told him.

‘I’ve done something bad?’ he asked anxiously.

‘No! I have a job for you.’

I led him to a place where we would not be overheard. I liked Berg Skallagrimmrson and trusted him totally. He was a young Norseman, strong, loyal, and skilled. I had saved his life, which gave him reason to be grateful to me, but his loyalty went far beyond gratitude. He was proud to be one of my men, so proud that he had tried to ink my wolf’s head badge on his cheek, and was always offended when folk asked him why he was wearing pig heads on his face and that had given me pause before speaking to him, but he was thorough, dependable, and, despite his slow manner, clever. ‘When we’ve finished today,’ I told him, ‘I’ll have to go south.’

‘South, lord?’