Warriors of the Storm (26 page)

‘No,’ Sigtryggr agreed.

‘I was to be his wife,’ Stiorra said, ‘his fifth wife.’

‘He told you that?’ I asked.

‘Fulla told me,’ she said. ‘Fulla is his first wife. She showed me her scars too.’ She spoke very calmly. ‘Did you ever beat your wives, father?’

I smiled at her through the flames. ‘I’m weak that way, no.’

She smiled back. ‘I remember you telling us that a man does not beat a woman. You said it often.’

‘Only a weak man beats a woman,’ I said. Some of the listening men looked uncomfortable, but none of them argued. ‘But it might take a strong man to have more than one wife?’ I went on, looking at Sigtryggr, who laughed.

‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he said, ‘she’d beat me to a pulp.’

‘So Ragnall demanded Stiorra?’ I prompted him.

‘He brought his whole fleet to take her! Hundreds of men! It was his right, he said. And so we came here.’

‘Fled here,’ Stiorra said drily.

‘We had six ships,’ Sigtryggr explained, ‘and he had thirty-six.’

‘What happened to the six ships?’

‘We bribed the Irish with them, exchanged them for grain and ale.’

‘The same Irish who were paid to kill you?’ I asked. Sigtryggr nodded. ‘So why haven’t they killed you?’

‘Because they don’t want to die on these rocks,’ Sigtryggr said, ‘and because of your daughter.’

I looked at her. ‘Because of your sorcery?’

Stiorra nodded, then stood, her face cast into stern shadows by the flames. ‘Come with me, father,’ she said and I saw that Sigtryggr’s men were grinning, enjoying some secret jest. ‘Father?’ Stiorra beckoned westwards. ‘It’s time, anyway.’

‘Time?’

‘You’ll see.’

I followed her westwards. She gave me her hand to guide me down the slope because the night was dark and the path off the hilltop was steep. We went slowly, our eyes adjusting to the night’s blackness. ‘It’s me,’ she called softly as we reached the foot of the hill.

‘Mistress,’ a voice acknowledged from the dark. There were evidently sentries beside the crude stone wall that had been built to bar the narrow neck of land that led away from the fort. I could see fires now, campfires, a long way off on the mainland.

‘How many men around those fires?’ I asked.

‘Hundreds,’ Stiorra said calmly. ‘Enough to overwhelm us, so we needed to use other methods to keep them away.’ She climbed onto the wall’s top and let go of my hand. I could hardly see her now. She wore a cloak as black as the night, as black as her hair, but I was aware of her standing straight and tall, facing the distant enemy.

And then she began to sing.

Or rather she crooned and she moaned, her voice sliding up and down eerily, crying in the darkness, and sometimes pausing to yelp like a vixen. Then she would stop and there would be silence in the night except for the sigh of wind across the land. She started again, yelping again, short sharp barks that she spat westwards before letting her voice slide up into a desperate scream that slowly, slowly faded into a whimper and then to nothing.

And then, as if in answer, the western horizon was lit by lightning. Not the sharp stabs of Thor’s thunderbolts, not the jagged streaks of anger that split the sky, but flickering sheets of silent summer lightning. They showed, distant and bright, then went, leaving darkness again and a stillness that felt full of menace. There was one last burst of far light and I saw the white skulls of the death fence arrayed along the wall where Stiorra stood.

‘There, father,’ she held out a hand, ‘they’re cursed again.’

I took her hand and helped her down from the wall. ‘Cursed?’

‘They think I’m a sorceress.’

‘And are you?’

‘They fear me,’ she said. ‘I call the spirits of the dead to haunt them and they know I speak to the gods.’

‘I thought they were Christians?’

‘They are, but they fear the older gods, and I keep them frightened.’ She paused, staring up into the dark. ‘There’s something different here in Ireland,’ she said, sounding puzzled, ‘as if the old magic still clings to the earth. You can feel it.’

‘I can’t.’

She smiled. I saw the white of her teeth. ‘I learned the runesticks. Fulla taught me.’

I had given her the runesticks that her mother had used, the slender polished shafts that, when cast, made intricate patterns that were said to tell the future. ‘Do they speak to you?’ I asked.

‘They said you’d come, and they said Ragnall will die. They said a third thing …’ she stopped abruptly.

‘A third thing?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘Sometimes they’re hard to read,’ she said dismissively, taking my arm and leading me back towards the fire on the hilltop. ‘In the morning the Christian sorcerers will try to undo my magic. They’ll fail.’

‘Christian sorcerers?’

‘Priests,’ she said dismissively.

‘And did the runesticks tell you that your eldest brother would be gelded?’

She stopped and looked up at me in the darkness. ‘Gelded?’

‘He almost died.’

‘No!’ she said. ‘No!’

‘Brida did it.’

‘Brida?’

‘A hell-bitch,’ I said bitterly, ‘who has joined Ragnall.’

‘No!’ she protested again. ‘But Uhtred was here! He went to Ragnall in peace!’

‘He’s called Father Oswald now,’ I said, ‘and that’s what he’ll never be, a father.’

‘This Brida,’ she asked fiercely, ‘is she an enchantress?’

‘She thinks so, she says so.’

She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘And that was the third thing the runesticks said, father, that an enchantress must die.’

‘The runesticks said that?’

‘It must be her,’ she said vengefully. She had plainly feared the sticks had foretold her own death. ‘It will be her,’ she said.

And I followed her back to the fire.

In the morning three Irish priests approached the narrow neck of land where the skulls stood on the low stone wall. They stopped at least fifty paces from the skulls, where they held their hands in the air and chanted prayers. One of them, a wild-haired man, danced in circles as he chanted. ‘What do they hope to do?’ I asked.

‘They’re praying that God will destroy the skulls,’ Finan said. He made the sign of the cross.

‘They really fear them,’ I said in wonder.

‘You wouldn’t?’

‘They’re just skulls.’

‘They’re the dead!’ he said fiercely. ‘Didn’t you know that when you put the heads around Eads Byrig?’

‘I just wanted to horrify Ragnall,’ I said.

‘You gave him a ghost fence,’ Finan said, ‘and it’s no wonder he left the place. And this one?’ He nodded downhill to where Stiorra had arranged the skulls to face the mainland. ‘This ghost fence has power!’

‘Power?’

‘Let me show you.’ He led me across the hilltop to a stone-lined pit. It was not large, perhaps six feet square, but every inch of space had been crammed with bones. ‘God knows how long they’ve been there,’ Finan said, ‘they were covered with that slab.’ He pointed to a stone slab that had been shoved away from the pit. The surface of the slab had a cross scratched into it, the cross now filled with lichen. The bones had been sorted so that the long yellowed leg bones were all stacked together and the ribs carefully piled. There were pelvises, knucklebones, arm bones, but no skulls. ‘I reckon the skulls were the top layer,’ Finan said.

‘Who were they?’ I stooped to look into the pit.

‘Monks probably. Maybe slaughtered when the first Norsemen came?’ He turned and stared westwards. ‘And those poor bastards are terrified of them. It’s an army of the dead, their own dead! They’ll be wanting more gold before they cross this ghost fence.’

‘More gold?’

Finan half smiled. ‘Ragnall paid the Uí Néill gold to capture Stiorra. But if they have to fight the dead as well as the living they’ll want a lot more than the gold he’s given them so far.’

‘The dead don’t fight,’ I said.

Finan scorned that. ‘You Saxons! I sometimes think you know nothing! No, the dead don’t fight, but they take revenge! You want your milk sour from the udder? You want your crops to shrivel? Your cattle to have the staggers? Your children sick?’

I could hear the Irish priests making yelping noises and I wondered if the air was filled with unseen spirits fighting a battle of magic. The thought made me touch the hammer about my neck, then I forgot the phantoms as my son shouted from down the hill. ‘Father!’ he called. ‘The ships!’

I saw that the last two ships were coming from the south, which meant Orvar had talked their crews into betraying Ragnall. I had my fleet now and the beginnings of an army. ‘We have to rescue Orvar’s family,’ I said.

‘We made that promise,’ Finan agreed.

‘Ragnall won’t have them with his horsemen,’ I guessed. ‘You don’t want women and children slowing you down when you’re raiding deep in hostile country.’

‘But he’ll have them kept safe,’ Finan said.

Which meant, I thought, that they were in Eoferwic. That city was Ragnall’s base, his stronghold. We knew he had sent part of his army back there, presumably to hold the Roman walls while the rest of his men ravaged Mercia. ‘Let’s just hope they’re not in Dunholm,’ I said. Brida’s fortress was formidable, perched on its crag above the river.

‘That place would be a bitch to capture again,’ Finan said.

‘They’ll be in Eoferwic,’ I said, praying I was right.

And Eoferwic, I thought, was where my story had all begun. Where my father had died. Where I had become the Lord of Bebbanburg. Where I had met Ragnar and learned of the ancient gods.

And it was time to go back.

I have endured nightmare voyages. I was a slave once, pulling a heavy oar in tumbling seas, freezing in the spray, fighting waves and wind, dragging a boat towards a rock-bound shore rimmed with ice. I had almost wished that the sea would take us. We were whimpering with fear and cold.

This was worse.

I had been aboard Alfred’s ship
Heahengel
when Guthrum’s fleet had died in a sudden storm that whipped the sea off the West Saxon coast to frenzy. The wind had shrieked, the waves were white devils, masts went overboard, sails were ripped to crazed tatters, and the great boats had sunk one after the other. The cries of the drowning had lived with me for days.

But this was worse.

This was worse even though the sea was calm, the waves placid and what small wind did blow wafted gently from the west. We saw no enemies. We crossed a sea as tame as a duck pond, yet every moment of that voyage was terrifying.

We left the lough at high water when the savage currents that streamed through the narrows were sullen and still. We had five ships now. All of Ragnall’s crews in Loch Cuan had sworn their loyalty to Sigtryggr, but that meant we had their families and all Sigtryggr’s people and all my men. Ships that were meant to carry no more than seventy crew had close to two hundred people aboard. They rode low in the water, the small waves constantly slopping over the upper strakes so that those men not rowing had to bail. We had thrown some of the ballast stones overboard, but that made the ships perilously top heavy so they rocked alarmingly whenever an errant breath of wind came from the north or south, and even the smallest cross-sea threatened to sink us. We crept across that gentle sea, but never for one moment did I feel out of danger. Even in the worst storm men can row, they can fight the gods, but those fragile five ships in a calm sea felt so vulnerable. The worst moments were in the night-time. The wind dropped to nothing, which might have been our salvation, but in the dark we could not see the small waves, only feel them as they spilled over the boats’ sides. We pulled slow and steady through the darkness and we hammered the ears of the gods with prayers. We watched for oar-splashes, straining to stay close to the other ships, and still we prayed to every god known to us.

The gods must have listened because next day all five ships came safely to Britain’s coast. There was a mist on the beach, just thick enough to shroud the headlands north and south so that Dudda frowned in puzzlement. ‘God knows where we are,’ he finally admitted.

‘Wherever it is,’ I said, ‘we’re going ashore.’ And so we rowed the boats straight at the beach where small waves slopped and the sound of the keel grating on sand was the sweetest sound I ever heard. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Finan said. He had leaped ashore and now dropped to his knees. He crossed himself. ‘I pray to God I never see another ship.’

‘Just pray we’re not in Strath Clota,’ I said. All I knew was that by rowing eastwards we had crossed the sea to where Northumbria bordered Scotland, and that the coast of Scotland was inhabited by savages who called their country Strath Clota. This was wild country, a place of raiding parties, grim forts, and pitiless skirmishes. We had more than enough men to fight our way south if we had landed on Scottish soil, but I did not want to be pursued by wild-haired tribesmen wanting revenge, plunder, and slaves.

I gazed into the mist, seeing grass on dunes and the dim slopes of a hill beyond, and I thought this was how my ancestor must have felt when he brought his ship across the North Sea and landed on a strange beach in Britain, not knowing where he was or what dangers waited for him. His name was Ida, Ida the Flamebearer, and it was Ida who had captured the great crag beside the grey sea where Bebbanburg would be built. And his men, like the men who now landed from the five ships, must have waded through the small surf to bring their weapons to a strange land and gazed inland wondering what enemies waited for them. They had defeated those enemies, and the land Ida’s warriors had conquered was now our land. Ida the Flamebearer’s enemies had been driven from their pastures and valleys, hunted to Wales, to Scotland, or to Cornwalum, and the land they left behind was now ours, the land we wanted one day to be called Englaland.

Sigtryggr leaped ashore. ‘Welcome to your kingdom, lord,’ I said, ‘at least I hope it’s your kingdom.’

He gazed at the dunes where pale grass grew. ‘This is Northumbria?’

‘I hope so.’

He grinned. ‘Why not your kingdom, lord?’

I confess I had been tempted. To be King of Northumbria? To be lord of the lands that had once been my family’s kingdom? Because my family had been kings once. Ida the Flamebearer’s descendants had been rulers of Bernicia, a kingdom that embraced Northumbria and the southern parts of Scotland, and it had been a king of Bernicia who had reared Bebbanburg on its grim rock beside the sea. For a moment, standing on that mist-shrouded beach beside the slow breaking waves, I imagined a crown on my head, and then I thought of Alfred.

I had never liked him any more than he had liked me, but I was not such a fool as to think him a bad king. He had been a good king, but being a king meant nothing but duty and responsibility, and those had weighed Alfred down and put furrows on his face and callouses on his knees worn out by praying. My temptation came from a child’s view of kingship, as if by being king I could do whatever I wished, and for some reason I had a vision of Mus, the night-child in Ceaster, and I must have smiled and Sigtryggr mistook the smile for acceptance of his suggestion. ‘You should be king, lord,’ he said.

‘No,’ I responded firmly, and for a heartbeat I was tempted to tell him the truth, but I could not make him King of Northumbria and tell him, at the same instant, that Northumbria was doomed.

We cannot know the future. Perhaps some, like my daughter, can read the runesticks and find prophecies in their tangle, and others, like the bitch-hag in the cave who had once foretold my life, might get dreams from the gods, but for most of us the future is a mist and we only see as far ahead as the mist allows, yet I was certain Northumbria was doomed. To its north was Scotland, and the people of that land are wild, savage, and proud. We are fated to fight them, probably for ever, but I had no wish to lead an army into their bitter hills. To stay in the valleys of Scotland meant ambush, while to march on the heights meant starvation. The Scots were welcome to their land, and if they thought to take ours then we would kill them as we always did just as they slaughtered us if we invaded their hills.

And to the south of Northumbria were the Saxons and they had a dream, Alfred’s dream, the dream I had served for almost my whole life, and that dream was to unite the kingdoms where Saxons lived and call it one country, and Northumbria was the last part of that dream, and Æthelflaed passionately wanted that dream to come true. I have broken many oaths in my life, but I had never broken an oath to Æthelflaed. I would make Sigtryggr king, but the condition was that he lived in peace with Æthelflaed’s Mercia. I would make him king to destroy his brother and to give me a chance to attack Bebbanburg, and I would make him king even as I sowed the seeds of his kingdom’s destruction, because while he must swear to live in peace with Mercia I could not and would not demand that Æthelflaed live in peace with him. Sigtryggr’s Northumbria would be trapped between the savagery of the north and the ambitions of the south.

And I told Sigtryggr none of that. Instead I put my arm around his shoulder and walked him to the top of a dune from where we watched men and women come ashore. The mist was lifting, and all along the beach I could see weapons and shields being carried through the low surf. Children, released from the tightly-packed ships, raced about the sand shrieking and tumbling. ‘We’ll march under your banner,’ I told Sigtryggr.

‘The red axe.’

‘Because men will think you serve your brother.’

‘And we go to Jorvik,’ he said.

‘To Eoferwic, yes.’

He frowned, thinking. A sea breeze had started and it stirred his fair hair. He gazed at the ships and I knew he was thinking that it would be a pity to abandon them, but there was no choice. A small boy climbed the dune and stared open-mouthed at Sigtryggr. I growled and the child looked terrified, then ran away. ‘You don’t like children?’ Sigtryggr asked, amused.

‘Hate them. Noisy little bastards.’

He laughed. ‘Your daughter says you were a good father.’

‘That’s because she hardly ever saw me,’ I said. I felt a slight pang. I had been fortunate in my children. Stiorra was a woman any man would be proud to call his daughter, while Uhtred, who was carrying spears through the shallows and laughing with his companions, was a fine man and a good warrior, but my eldest? My gelded son? He, I thought, was the cleverest of my three, and perhaps the best of them, but we would never be friends. ‘My father never liked me,’ I said.

‘Nor did mine,’ Sigtryggr said, ‘not till I was a man, anyway.’ He turned and looked inland. ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked.

‘We find out where we are. With any luck we’re close to Cair Ligualid, so we’ll go there first and find places for the families. Then we march on Eoferwic.’

‘How far’s that?’

‘Without horses? It’ll take us a week.’

‘Is it defensible?’

‘It has good walls,’ I said, ‘but it lies in flat land. It needs a large garrison.’

He nodded. ‘And if my brother’s there?’

‘We’ll have a fight on our hands,’ I said, ‘but we have that anyway. You’re not safe till he’s dead.’

I doubted that Ragnall would have returned to Eoferwic. Despite his defeat at Eads Byrig he still possessed a large army, and he needed to give that army plunder. I suspected he was still ravaging Mercia, but I also suspected he would have sent a force back to Eoferwic to hold the city till he returned. I also suspected I could be wrong. We were marching blind, but at least our ships had landed in Northumbria because late that morning, when the mist had cleared entirely, I climbed a nearby hill and saw smoke rising from a substantial town to our north. It could only be Cair Ligualid, for there was no other large settlement in Cumbraland.

Cumbraland was that part of Northumbria west of the mountains. It had always been a wild and lawless place. The kings who ruled in Eoferwic might claim to rule in Cumbraland, but few would travel there without a large army, and even fewer would see any advantage in making the journey at all. It was a region of hills and lakes, deep valleys, and deeper woods. The Danes and the Norse had settled it, building steadings protected by stout palisades, but it was no land to make a man rich. There were sheep and goats, a few paltry fields of barley, and enemies everywhere. The old inhabitants, small and dark, still lived in the high valleys where they worshipped gods that had been forgotten elsewhere, and always there were Scots crossing the River Hedene to steal cattle and slaves. Cair Ligualid guarded that river, and even that town would not have existed if it had not been for the Romans who had built it, fortified it, and left a great church at its centre.

It might have been a daunting fortress once, as formidable as Ceaster or Eoferwic, but time had not been kind to Cair Ligualid. The stone walls had partly fallen, the Roman buildings had mostly collapsed, and what was left was an untidy collection of timber huts with roofs of mossy thatch. The church still stood, though almost all of its walls had fallen to be replaced with timber, and the old tiled roof had long gone. Yet I loved that church because it was there that I had first seen Gisela. I felt the pang of her loss as we came into Cair Ligualid, and I stole a glance at Stiorra who so resembled her mother.

There were still monks in the town, though at first I thought they were beggars or vagabonds in strange robes. The brown cloth was patched, the hems tattered, and it was only the tonsures and the heavy wooden crosses that betrayed the half-dozen men as monks. The oldest, who had a wispy beard stretching almost to his waist, strode to meet us. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘What do you want? When are you leaving?’

‘Who are you?’ I retorted.

‘I am Abbot Hengist,’ he said in a tone that suggested I should recognise the name.

‘Who rules here?’ I asked.

‘Almighty God.’

‘He’s the jarl?’

‘He is the mighty jarl of all the earth and everything in it. He is the jarl of creation!’

‘Then why hasn’t he repaired the walls here?’

Abbot Hengist frowned at that, not sure what to answer. ‘Who are you?’

‘The man who’s going to pull the guts out of your arsehole if you don’t tell me who rules in Cair Ligualid,’ I said pleasantly.

‘I do!’ Hengist said, backing away.

‘Good!’ I said briskly. ‘We’re staying two nights. Tomorrow we’ll help repair your wall. I don’t suppose you have enough food for all of us, but you’ll supply us with ale. We’ll be leaving the women and children here under your protection, and you will feed them till we send for them.’

Abbot Hengist gaped at the crowd who had come into his town. ‘I can’t feed that …’

‘You’re a Christian?’

‘Of course!’

‘You believe in miracles?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘Then you’d better fetch your five loaves and two fishes,’ I went on, ‘and pray that your wretched god provides the rest. I’m leaving some warriors here too, they need feeding as well.’

‘We can’t …’

‘Yes, you can,’ I growled. I walked up to him and seized the front of his grubby robe, grabbing a handful of white beard at the same time. ‘You will feed them, you horrible little man,’ I said, ‘and you will protect them,’ I shook him as I spoke, ‘and if I find one child missing or one child hungry when I send for them I’ll strip the flesh off your scrawny bones and feed it to the dogs. You have fish traps? You have seed grain? You have livestock?’ I waited until he gave a reluctant nod to each question. ‘Then you will feed them!’ I shook him again, then let him go. He staggered and fell back on his arse. ‘There,’ I said happily, ‘that’s agreed.’ I waited till he had scrambled to his feet. ‘We’ll also need timber to repair the walls,’ I told him.

‘There is none!’ he whined.