The Lords of the North (34 page)

We left Cetreht in a misted late autumn dawn that was laced rain, and Kjartan's
remaining riders, who had returned to the river's northern bank, closed in behind us.
There were eighteen of them now, and we let them follow us and, to confuse them, We did not
stay on the Roman road which led straight across the flatter land towards Dunholm, but after
a few miles turned north and west onto a smaller track which climbed into gentle hills. The
sun broke through the clouds before midday, but it was low in the sky so that the shadows were
long. Redwings flocked beneath the falcon-haunted clouds. This was the time of year that men
culled their livestock. Cattle were being pole-axed, and pigs, fattened on the autumn's
plentiful acorns, were being slaughtered so their meat could be salted into barrels or
hung to dry over smoky fires. The tanning pits stank of dung and urine. The sheep were coming
down from the high pastures to be folded close to steadings, while in the valleys the trees
rang with the noise of axes as men lay in their winter supply of firewood.

The few villages we passed were empty. Folk must have been warned that horsemen were
coming and so they fled before we arrived. They hid in woodlands till we were past, and
prayed we did not stay to plunder. We rode on, still climbing, and I had no doubt that the men
following us would have sent messengers up the Roman road to tell Kjartan that we were
slanting to the west in an attempt to circle Dunholm. Kjartan had to believe that Guthred
was making a desperate attempt to reach Bebbanburg, and if we deceived him into that
belief then I hoped he would send yet more men out of the fortress, men who would bar the
crossings of the Wiire in the western hills. We spent that night in those hills. It rained
again. We had some small shelter from a wood which grew on a south-facing slope and there was
a shepherd's hut where the women could sleep, but the rest of us crouched about fires. I knew
Kjartan's scouts were watching us from across the valley, but I hoped they were now convinced
we were going west. The rain hissed in the fire as Ragnar, Guthred and I talked with Sihtric,
making him remember everything about the place where he had been raised. I doubt I learned
anything new. Sihtric had told me all he knew long before

and I had often thought of it as I rowed Sverri's boat, but I listened again as he
explained that Dunholm's palisade went clear around the crag's summit and was broken only
at the southern end where the rock was too steep for a man to climb. The water came from a well
on the eastern side. 'The well is outside the palisade,' he told us, 'down the slope a
bit.'

'But the well has its own wall?'

'Yes, lord.'

'How steep a slope?' Ragnar asked.

'Very steep, lord,' Sihtric said. 'I remember a boy falling down there and he hit his head
on a tree and became stupid. And there's a second well to the west,' he added, 'but that's not
used much. The water's murky.'

'So he's got food and water,' Guthred said bitterly.

'We can't besiege him,' I said, 'we don't have the men. The eastern well,' I turned back to
Sihtric, 'is among trees. How many?'

'Thick trees, lord,' he said, 'hornbeams and sycamore.'

'And there has to be a gate in the palisade to let men reach the well?'

'To let women go there, lord, yes.'

'Can the river be crossed?'

'Not really, lord.' Sihtric was trying to be helpful, but he sounded despondent as he
described how the Wiire flowed fast as it circled Dunholm's crag. The river was shallow
enough for a man to wade, he said, but it was treacherous with sudden deep pools, swirling
currents and willow-braided fish traps. 'A careful man can cross it in daytime, lord,' he
said, 'but not at night.'

I tried to recall what I had seen when, dressed as the dead swordsman, I had stood so long
outside the fortress. The ground fell steeply to the east, I remembered, and it was ragged
ground, full of tree stumps and boulders, but even at night a man should be able to clamber
down that slope to the river's bank. But I also remembered a steep shoulder of rock hiding
the view downriver, and I just hoped that shoulder was not so steep as the picture
lingering in my head. 'What we must do,' I said, 'is reach Dunholm tomorrow evening. Just
before dark. Then attack in the dawn.'

'If we arrive before dark,' Ragnar pointed out, 'they'll see us, and be ready for us.'

'We can't get there after dark,' I suggested, 'because we'll never find the way.
Besides, I want them to be ready for us.'

'You do?' Guthred sounded surprised.

'If they see men to their north they'll pack their ramparts. They'll have the whole
garrison guarding the gate. But that isn't where we'll attack.' I looked across the fire at
Steapa. 'You're frightened of the dark, aren't you?'

The big face stared back at me across the flames. He did not want to admit that he was
frightened of anything, but honesty overcame his reluctance. 'Yes, lord.'

'But tomorrow night,' I said, 'you'll trust me to lead you through the darkness?'

'I'll trust you, lord.' he said.

'You and ten other men.' I said, and I thought I knew how we could capture the impregnable
Dunholm. Fate would have to be on our side, but I believed, as we sat in that wet cold
darkness, that the three spinners had started weaving a new golden thread into my destiny.
And I had always believed Guthred's fate was golden.

'Just a dozen men?' Ragnar asked.

'A dozen sceadugengan.' I said, because it would be the shadow-walkers who would take
Dunholm. It was time for the strange things that haunt the night, the shape-shifters and
horrors of the dark, to come to our help. And once Dunholm was taken, if it could be taken,
we still had to kill Ivarr. We knew Kjartan would have men guarding the Wiire's upstream
crossings. He would also know that the farther west we went the easier the crossing would
be, and I hoped that belief would persuade him to send his troops a long way upriver. If he
planned to light and stop us he had to send his warriors now, before we

reached the Wiire, and to make it seem even more likely that we were going deep into the
hills we did not head directly for the river next morning, but instead rode north and west
onto the moors. Ragnar and I, pausing on a long windswept crest, saw six of Kjartan's scouts
break from the pursuing group and spur hard eastwards. 'They've gone to tell him where we're
going,' Ragnar said.

'Time to go somewhere else then,' I suggested.

'Soon,' Ragnar said, 'but not yet.'

Sihtric's horse had cast a shoe and we waited while he saddled one of the spare horses,
then we kept going northwest for another hour. We went slowly, following sheep tracks down
into a valley where trees grew thick. Once in the valley we sent Guthred and most of the
riders ahead, still following the tracks west, while twenty of us waited in the trees.
Kjartan's scouts, seeing Guthred and the others climb onto the farther moors, followed
carelessly. Our pursuers were only nine men now, the rest had been sent with messages to
Dunholm, and the nine who remained were mounted on light horses, ideal for scrambling away
from us if we turned on them, but they came unsuspecting into the trees. They were halfway
through the wood when they saw Ragnar waiting ahead and then they turned to spur away, but we
had four groups of men waiting to ambush them. Ragnar was in front of them, I was moving to
bar their retreat, Steapa was on their left and Rollo on their right, and the nine men
suddenly realised they were surrounded. They charged at my group in an attempt to break
free of the thick wood, but the five of us blocked their path and our horses were heavier and
two of the scouts died quickly, one of them gutted by Serpent-Breath, and the other seven
tried to scatter, but they were obstructed by brambles and trees, and our men closed on them.
Steapa dismounted to pursue the last enemy into a bramble thicket. I saw his axe rise and
chop down, then heard a scream that went on and on. I thought it must stop, but on it went and
Steapa paused to sneeze, then his axe rose and fell again and there was sudden silence.

'Are you catching a cold?' I asked him.

'No, lord,' he said, forcing his way out of the brambles and dragging the corpse behind
him. 'His stink got up my nose.'

Kjartan was blind now. He did not know it, but he had lost his scouts, and as soon as the
nine men were dead we sounded a horn to summon Guthred back, and, as we waited for him, we
stripped the corpses of anything valuable. We took their horses, arm rings, weapons, a few
coins, some damp bread and two flasks of birch ale. One of the dead men had been wearing a fine
mail coat, so fine that I suspected it had been made in Frankia, but the man had been so thin
that the coat fitted none of us until Gisela took it for herself. 'You don't need mail,' her
brother said scornfully.

Gisela ignored him. She seemed astonished that so fine a coat of mail could weigh so much,
but she pulled it over her head, freed her hair from the links at her neck and buckled one of
the dead men's swords about her waist. She put on her black cloak and stared defiantly at
Guthred. 'Well?'

'You frighten me,' he said with a smile.

'Good,' she said, then pushed her horse against mine so the mare would stay still as she
mounted, but she had not reckoned with the weight of the mail and had to struggle into the
saddle.

'It suits you,' I said, and it did. She looked like a Valkyrie, those warrior maidens of
Odin who rode the sky in shining armour. We turned east then, going faster now. We rode
through the trees, ducking continually to keep the branches from whipping our eyes, and we
went downhill, following a rain-swollen stream that must lead to the Wiire. By the early
afternoon we were close to Dunholm, probably no more than five or six miles away, and
Sihtric now led us, for he reckoned he knew a place where we could cross the river. The
Wiire, he told us, turned south once it had passed Dunholm, and it widened as it flowed through
pasture-land and there were fords in those gentler valleys. He knew the country well for his
mother's parents had lived there and as a child he had often driven cattle through the
river. Better still those fords were on Dunholm's eastern side, the flank Kjartan would

not be guarding, but there was a risk that the rain, which started to pour again in the
afternoon, would so fill the Wiire that the fords would be impassable.

At least the rain hid us as we left the hills and rode into the river valley. We were now
very close to Dunholm, that lay just to the north, but we were hidden by a wooded spur of high
ground at the foot of which was a huddle of cottages. 'Hocchale,' Sihtric told me nodding
at the settlement, 'it's where my mother was born.'

'Your grandparents are still there?' I asked.

'Kjartan had them killed, lord, when he fed my mother to his dogs.'

'How many dogs does he have?'

There were forty or fifty when I was there, lord. Big things. They only obeyed Kjartan and
his huntsmen. And the Lady Thyra.'

'They obeyed her?' I asked.

'My father wanted to punish her once,' Sihtric said, 'and he set the dogs on her. I don't
think he was going to let them eat her, I think he just wanted to frighten her, but she sang
to them.'

'She sang to them?' Ragnar asked. He had hardly mentioned Thyra in the last weeks. It was
as if he felt guilty that he had left her so long in Kjartan's power. I knew he had tried to
find her in the early days of her disappearance, he had even faced Kjartan once when
another Dane had arranged a truce between them, but Kjartan had vehemently denied that
Thyra was even at Dunholm, and after that Ragnar had joined the Great Army that had invaded
Wessex and then he had become a hostage, and all that while Thyra had been in Kjartan's
power. Now Ragnar looked at Sihtric. 'She sang to them?' he asked again.

'She sang to them, lord,' Sihtric confirmed, 'and they just lay down. My father was angry
with them.' Ragnar frowned at Sihtric as though he did not believe what he heard. Sihtric
shrugged. 'They say she's a sorcerer, lord,' he explained humbly.

'Thyra's no sorcerer,' Ragnar said angrily. 'All she ever wanted was to marry and have
children.'

'But she sang to the dogs, lord,' Sihtric insisted, 'and they lay down.'

'They won't lie down when they see us,' I said. 'Kjartan will loose them on us as soon as he
sees us.'

-He will lord,' Sihtric said, and I could see his nervousness.

-So we'll just have to sing to them,' I said cheerfully. We followed a sodden track
beside a flooded ditch to find the Wiire swirling fast and high. The ford looked impassable.
The rain was getting harder, pounding the river that fretted at the top of its steep banks.
There was a high hill on the far bank and the clouds were low enough to scrape the black, bare
branches at its long summit. 'We'll never cross here,' Ragnar said. Father Beocca, tied to
his saddle and with his priest's robes sodden, shivered. The horsemen milled in the mud,
watching the river that threatened to spill over its banks, but then Steapa, who was mounted
on a huge black stallion, gave a grunt and simply rode down the track into the water. His
horse baulked at the river's hard current, but he forced it onwards until the water was
seething over his stirrups, and then he stopped and beckoned that I should follow.

His idea was that the biggest horses would make a barrier to break the river's force. I
pushed my horse up against Steapa's, then more men came and we held onto each other, making a
wall of horseflesh that slowly reached across the Wiire, that was some thirty or forty paces
wide. We only needed to make our dam at the river's centre where the current was strongest,
and once we had a hundred men struggling to keep their horses still, Ragnar urged the rest
through the calmer water provided by our makeshift dam. Beocca was terrified, poor man, but
Gisela took his reins and spurred her own mare into the water. I hardly dared watch: If her
horse had been swept away then the mail coat would have dragged her under, but she and Beocca
made it safe to the far bank, and two by two the others followed. One woman and one warrior
were swept away, but both scrambled safely across and their horses found footing downstream
and reached the bank. Once the smaller horses were across we slowly unmade our wall and
inched through the rising river to safety. It was already getting dark. It was only mid
afternoon, but the clouds were thick. It was a black, wet, miserable day, and now we had to
climb the escarpment through the dripping trees, and in places the slope was so steep that we
were forced to dismount and lead the horses. Once at the summit we turned north, and I could
see Dunholm when the low cloud allowed it. The fortress showed as a dark smear on its high rock
and above it I could see the smoke from the garrison fires mingling with the rain clouds. It
was possible that men on the southern ramparts could see us now, except that we were riding
through trees and our mail was smeared with mud, but even if they could see us they would surely
not suspect we were enemies. The last they had heard of Guthred was -that he and his
desperate men were riding westwards, looking for a place to cross the Wiire, and now we
were to the east of the fortress and already across the river.