The Lords of the North (6 page)

We met a shepherd who had not heard of the Romans and he told us that giants had built the
wall in the old days and he claimed that when the world ends the wild men of the far north would
flow across its rampart like a flood to bring death and horror. I thought of his prophecy that
afternoon as I watched a she-wolf run along the wall's top, tongue lolling, and she gave us a
glance, leaped down behind our horses and ran off southwards. These days the wall's masonry
has crumbled, flowers blossom between the stones and turf lies thick along the rampart's
wide top, but it is still an astonishing thing. We build a few churches and monasteries of
stone, and I have seen a handful of stone-built halls, but I cannot imagine any man making
such a wall today. And it was not just a wall. Beside it was a wide ditch, and behind that a
stone road, and every mile or so there was a watchtower, and twice a day we would pass
stone-built fortresses where the Roman soldiers had lived. The roofs of their barracks have
long gone now and the buildings are homes for foxes and ravens, though in one such fort we
discovered a naked man with hair down to his waist. He was ancient, claiming to be over
seventy years old, and his grey beard was as long as his matted white hair. He was a filthy
creature, nothing but skin, dirt and bones, but Willibald and the seven churchmen I had
released from Sven all knelt to him because he was a famous hermit.

'He was a bishop.' Willibald told me in awed tones after he had received the scraggy man's
blessing. 'He had wealth, a wife, servants and honour, and he gave them all up to worship God
in solitude. He's a very holy man.'

'Perhaps he's just a mad bastard,' I suggested, 'or else his wife was a vicious bitch who
drove him out.'

'He's a child of God,' Willibald said reprovingly, 'and in time he'll be called a
saint.'

Hild had dismounted and she looked at me as though seeking my permission to approach the
hermit. She plainly wanted the hermit's blessing and so she appealed to me, but it was none
of my business what she did, so I just shrugged and she knelt to the dirty creature. He leered
at her and scratched his crotch and then made the sign of the cross on both her breasts, pushing
hard with his fingers to feel her nipples and all the while pretending to bless her and I was
tempted to kick the old bastard into immediate martyrdom. But Hild was crying with
emotion as he pawed at her hair and then dribbled some kind of prayer and afterwards she
looked grateful. He gave me the evil eye and held out a grubby paw as if expecting me to give
him money, but instead I showed him Thor's hammer and he hissed a curse at me through his two
yellow teeth and then we abandoned him to the moor and to the sky and to his prayers.

I had left Bolti. He was safe enough north of the wall, for he had entered Bebbanburg's
territory where Ælfric's horsemen and the horsemen of the Danes who lived on my land would
be patrolling the roads. We followed the wall westwards and I now led Father Willibald, Hild,
King Guthred and the seven freed churchmen. I had managed to break the chain of Guthred's
manacles so the slave king, who now rode Willibald's mare, wore two iron wristbands from which
dangled short links of rusted chain. He chattered to me incessantly. 'What we shall do,' he
told me on the second day of the journey, 'is raise an army in Cumbraland and then we'll
cross the hills and capture Eoferwic.'

'What then?' I asked drily.

'Go north!' he said enthusiastically. 'North! We shall have to take Dunholm, and after
that we'll capture Bebbanburg. You want me to do that, don't you?'

I had told Guthred my name and that I was the rightful lord of Bebbanburg, and now I told
him that Bebbanburg had never been captured.

'It's a tough place, eh?' Guthred responded. 'Like Dunholm? Well, we shall see about
Bebbanburg. But of course we'll have to finish off Ivarr first.' He spoke as though
destroying the most powerful Dane in Northumbria were a small matter. 'So we'll deal with
Ivarr,' he said, then suddenly brightened. 'Or perhaps Ivarr will accept me as king? He has
a son and I've a sister who must be of marriageable age by now. They could make an
alliance?'

'Unless your sister's already married,' I interrupted.

'Can't think who'd want her,' he said, 'she's got a face like a horse.'

'Horse-faced or not,' I said, 'she's Hardicnut's daughter. There must be an advantage for
someone in marrying her.'

There might have been before my father died,' Guthred said dubiously, 'but now?'

'You're king now.' I reminded him. I did not really believe he was a king, of course, but
he believed it and so I indulged him.

'That's true!' he said. 'So someone will want Gisela, won't they? Despite her face!'

'Does she really look like a horse?'

'Long face,' he said, and grimaced, 'but she's not completely ugly. And it's high time she
married. She must be fifteen or sixteen! I think perhaps we should marry her to Ivarr's son.
That'll make an alliance with Ivarr, and he'll help us deal with Kjartan, and then we'll have
to make sure the Scots don't give us any trouble. And, of course, we'll have to keep those
rascals in Strath Clota from being a nuisance.'

'Of course we must.' I said.

'They killed my father, see? And made me a slave!' He grinned. Hardicnut, Guthred's father,
had been a Danish earl who made his home at Cair Ligualid which was the chief town in
Cumbraland. Hardicnut had called himself king of Northumbria, which was pretentious, but
strange things happen west of the hills and a man there can claim to be king of the moon if he
wants because no one outside of Cumbraland will take the slightest bit of notice.
Hardicnut had posed no threat to the greater lords around Eoferwic, indeed he posed small
threat to anyone, for Cumbraland was a sad and savage place, forever being raided by the
Norsemen from Ireland or by the wild horrors from Strath Clota whose king, Eochaid, called
himself king of Scotland, a title disputed by Æd who was now fighting Ivarr.

Of the insolence of the Scots, my father used to say, there is no end. He had cause to say
that, for the Scots claimed much of Bebbanburg's land and until the Danes came our family was
forever fighting against the northern tribes. I had been taught as a child that there were
many tribes in Scotland, but the two tribes closest to Northumbria were the Scots themselves,
of whom Aed was now king, and the savages of Strath Clota who lived on the western shore and
never came near Bebbanburg. They raided Cumbraland instead and Hardicnut had decided to
punish them and so led a small army north into their hills where Eochaid of Strath Clota
ambushed him and then destroyed him. Guthred had marched with his father and had been
captured and, for two years now, had been a slave.

'Why didn't they kill you?' I asked.

'Eochaid should have killed me,' he admitted cheerfully, 'but he didn't know who I was at
first, and by the time he found out he wasn't really in a killing mood. So he kicked me a few
times, then said I would be his slave. He liked to watch me empty his shit-pail. I was a
household slave, see? It was another insult.'

'Being a household slave?'

'Woman's work,' Guthred explained, 'but that meant I spent my time with the girls. I rather
liked it.'

'So how did you escape Eochaid?'

'I didn't. Gelgill bought me. He paid a lot for me!' He said this proudly.

'And Gelgill was going to sell you to Kjartan?' I asked.

'Oh no! He was going to sell me to the priests from Cair Ligualid!' he nodded towards the
seven churchmen who had been rescued with him. 'They'd agreed the price before, you see, but
Gelgill wanted more money and then they all met Sven, and of course Sven wouldn't let the sale
happen. He wanted me back in Dunholm and Gelgill would have done anything for Sven and his
father, so we were all doomed until you came along.'

Some of this made sense and, by talking to the seven churchmen and questioning Guthred
further, I managed to piece the rest of the story together. Gelgill, known on both sides of
the border as a slave-trader, had purchased Guthred from Eochaid and had paid a vast price,
not because Guthred was worth it, but because the priests had hired Gelgill to make the trade.
'Two hundred pieces of silver, eight bullocks, two sacks of malt and a silver-mounted horn.
That was my price.' Guthred told me cheerfully.

'Gelgill paid that much?' I was astonished.

'He didn't. The priests did. Gelgill just negotiated the sale.'

'The priests paid for you?'

They must have emptied Cumbraland of silver.' Guthred said proudly.

'And Eochaid agreed to sell you?'

'For that price? Of course he did! Why wouldn't he?'

'He killed your father. Your duty is to kill him. He knows that.'

'He rather liked me.' Guthred said, and I found that believable because Guthred was so very
likeable. He faced each day as though it would bring nothing but happiness, and in his
company life somehow seemed brighter. 'He still made me empty his shit-pail,' Guthred
admitted, continuing his story of Eochaid, 'but he stopped kicking me every time I did it.
And he liked to talk to me.'

'About what?'

'Oh, about everything! The gods, the weather, fishing, how to make good cheese, women,
everything. And he reckoned I wasn't a warrior, which I'm not really. Now I'm king, of
course, so I have to be a warrior, but I don't much like it. Eochaid made me swear I'd never go
to war against him.'

'And you swore that?'

'Of course! I like him. I'll raid his cattle, of course, and kill any men he sends into
Cumbraland, but that's not war, is it?'

So Eochaid had taken the church's silver and Gelgill had brought Guthred south into
Northumbria, but instead of giving him to the priests he had taken him eastwards,
reckoning that he could make more money by selling Guthred to Kjartan than by honouring
the contract he had made with the churchmen. The priests and monks followed, begging for
Guthred's release, and it was then they had all met Sven who saw his own chance of profit in
Guthred. The freed slave was Hardicnut's son, which meant he was heir to land in Cumbraland,
and that suggested he was worth a largish bag of silver in ransom. Sven had planned to take
Guthred back to Dunholm where he would doubtless have killed all seven churchmen. Then I had
arrived with my face wrapped in black linen and now Gelgill was dead, Sven had stinking wet
hair and Guthred was free. I understood all that, but what did not make sense was why seven
Saxon churchmen had come from Cair Ligualid to pay a fortune for Guthred who was both a Dane
and a pagan. 'Because I'm their king, of course,' Guthred said, as though the answer were
obvious, 'though I never thought I'd become king. Not after Eochaid took me captive, but
that's what the Christian god wants, so who am I to argue?'

'Their god wants you?' I asked, looking at the seven churchmen who had travelled so far to
free him.

'Their god wants me,' Guthred said seriously, 'because I'm the chosen one. Do you think I
should become a Christian?'

'No.' I said.

'I think I should,' he said, ignoring my answer, 'just to show gratitude. The gods don't
like ingratitude, do they?'

'What the gods like,' I said, 'is chaos.'

The gods were happy.

Cair Ligualid was a sorry place. Norsemen had pillaged and burned it two years before,
just after Guthred's father had been killed by the Scots, and the town had not even been half
rebuilt. What was left of it stood on the south bank of the River Hedene, and that was why the
settlement existed, for it was built at the first crossing place of the river, a river
which offered some protection against marauding Scots. It had offered no protection
against the fleet of Vikings who had sailed up the Hedene, stolen whatever they could, raped
what they wanted, killed what they did not want, and taken away the survivors as slaves. Those
Vikings had come from their settlements in Ireland and they were the enemies of the Saxons,
the Irish, the Scots and even, at times, of their cousins, the Danes, and they had not spared the
Danes living in Cair Ligualid. So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a
broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's rain had finally lifted and a shaft of red
sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we entered the ruined town. We rode
straight into the light of that swollen

sun which reflected from my helm that had the silver wolf on its crest and it shone from my
mail coat and from my arm rings and from the hilts of my two swords, and someone shouted that I
was the king. I looked like a king. I rode Witnere who tossed his great head and pawed at the
ground and I was dressed in my shining war-glory.

Cair Ligualid was crowded. Here and there a house had been rebuilt, but most of the folk
were camping in the scorched ruins, along with their livestock, and there were far too many of
them to be the survivors of the old Norse raids. They were, instead, the people of
Cumbraland who had been brought to Cair Ligualid by their priests or lords because they had
been promised that their new king would come. And now, from the east, his mail reflecting the
brilliance of the sinking sun, came a gleaming warrior on a great black horse. The king!'
another voice shouted, and more voices took up the cry, and from the wrecked homes and the
makeshift shelters folk scrambled to stare at me. Willibald was trying to hush them, but his
West Saxon words were lost in the din. I thought Guthred would also protest, but instead he
pulled his cloak's hood over his head so that he looked like one of the churchmen who struggled
to keep up as the crowd pressed in on us. Folk knelt as we passed, then scrambled to their feet
to follow us. Hild was laughing, and I took her hand so she rode beside me like a queen, and
the growing crowd accompanied us up a long, low hill towards a new hall built on the
summit. As we grew closer I saw it was not a hall, but a church, and that priests and monks
were coming from its door to greet us.