The Pagan Lord (25 page)

‘It’ll be a hard winter.’

‘God help us,’ he said grimly and made the sign of the cross. ‘So what are we doing?’

‘Travelling to Buchestanes.’

‘To see the sorceress?’

I shook my head and wished I had not because the motion let rainwater trickle down inside my jerkin. ‘To see her granddaughter perhaps,’ I said, smiling. ‘Cnut says the sorceress still lives, but she must be older than time.’ The sorceress’s name was Ælfadell and she was reputed to have greater powers than any other aglæcwif in Britain. I had visited her and drunk her potion and dreamed the dreams and been told my future. Seven kings would die, she had said, seven kings in one great battle.

‘To see her granddaughter?’ Finan asked. ‘Is she the one who’s deaf and dumb?’

‘And the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen,’ I said wistfully.

Finan smiled. ‘So if we’re not going to see this creature,’ he said after a pause, ‘why are we going there?’

‘Because it’s on the way to Ceaster.’

‘Just that?’

I shook my head. ‘Cnut said his wife and son were captured while they were travelling to Buchestanes. And that old fellow yesterday said Cnut has a hall there, a fine hall.’

‘So?’

‘So he didn’t have a hall there ten years ago. It’s new.’

‘If I remember,’ Finan said, ‘there’s no wall at Buchestanes.’

I knew what he was saying. I was suggesting that the new hall was important to Cnut, and Finan was suggesting it was undefended and therefore not as important as I thought. ‘There wasn’t a wall ten years ago,’ I said, ‘but there could be now.’

‘And you think his wife is there?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

He frowned, then flinched as a gust of wind drove rain into our faces. ‘Maybe?’

‘We know Cnut went to Ceaster,’ I said, ‘and she probably went with him, but she wouldn’t have sailed with him. Her children are too young. You don’t take small children to war, so either she’s still at Ceaster, or Cnut sent her somewhere further from Mercia.’

‘Could be anywhere.’

‘I’m groping in the dark,’ I admitted.

‘But you are always lucky.’

‘Sometimes I’m lucky,’ I said, and thought of the wheel of fate. Thor was in the sky and the wind bitter in my face. The omens were bad. ‘Sometimes,’ I said again.

We waited till the rain eased, then rode on.

Groping in the dark.

We reached Buchestanes the next day. I dared not enter the town for fear of being recognised and so I sent Rolla, Eldgrim and Kettil, three Danes, down into the hollow where the small town was cradled by hills. I could see that Cnut had made a palisade around the place, though it was hardly formidable, merely a wall the height of a man and better suited to keep cattle out than to deter enemies.

It was still raining. The clouds were low, the ground soaked, the rain persistent, but the wind had eased. I led my horsemen to the wood close to the cave where the sorceress wove her spells, then took my son, Finan and Merewalh up to the great limestone crag that was streaming with water. The rock was slashed with a crevice where ferns and moss grew thick, and the crevice led into the cave. I hesitated at the entrance, remembering my fear.

Caves are the entrances to the netherworld, to the dark places where the Corpse-Ripper lurks and where Hel, the grim goddess, rules. These are the lands of the dead where even most gods walk warily, where silence is a howl, where all the memories of all the living are endlessly echoed in misery, and where the three Norns weave our fates and play their jests. This is the netherworld.

It was dark beyond the low, narrow entrance, but the sound of my boots suddenly echoed loud and I knew I had come into the larger chamber. Water dripped. I waited. Finan blundered into me, I heard my son breathing. Slowly, so slowly, my eyes became accustomed to the dark, helped by what small grey light leaked from the crevice, and I saw the flat rock where the sorceress had worked her magic. ‘Is anyone here?’ I shouted and the echo of my voice was the only answer.

‘What happened here?’ my son asked in an awed tone.

‘This was where Ælfadell the sorceress told the future,’ I said, ‘and maybe still does.’

‘And you came here?’ Merewalh asked.

‘Just once,’ I said, as if it were no great thing. Something moved in the back of the cave, a scrabbling noise, and the three Christians touched their crosses as I fingered Thor’s hammer. ‘Is anyone there?’ I called, and again there was no answer.

‘A rat,’ Finan suggested.

‘And what future did you discover, lord?’ Merewalh asked.

I hesitated. ‘It was nonsense,’ I said harshly. Seven kings will die, she had said, seven kings and the women you love. And Alfred’s son will not rule and Wessex will die and the Saxon will kill what he loves and the Danes will gain everything, and all will change and all will be the same. ‘It was nonsense,’ I said again, and I lied when I said it, though I did not know it. I know now, because everything she said came true except one thing, and perhaps that one thing still lies in the future.

And Alfred’s son did rule, so was that wrong? In time I saw her meaning, but back then, standing on a floor made slippery with bat-shit and listening to the water run underground, I did not know the significance of what I had been told. Instead I was thinking of Erce.

Erce was the aglæcwif’s granddaughter. I did not know her real name, only that she was called Erce after the goddess, and in my trance I had seen what I thought was the goddess come to me. She had been naked and beautiful, pale as ivory, lithe as a willow-wand, a dark-haired girl who had smiled as she rode me, her light hands touching my face as my fingers caressed her small breasts. Had she been real? Or a dream? Men said she was real, that she was deaf and dumb, but ever after that night I doubted their tales. Perhaps there was a granddaughter who could neither hear nor speak, but it was surely not the lovely creature I remembered from this dank cave. She had been a goddess, come to our middle earth to touch our souls with sorcery, and it was the memory of her that had drawn me to this cave. Did I expect to see her again? Or did I just want to remember that strange night?

Uhtred, my son, walked to the pale flat stone and ran his hand over its table-like surface. ‘I’d like to hear the future,’ he said wistfully.

‘There’s a sorceress in Wessex,’ Finan said, ‘and men say she speaks true.’

‘The woman in Ceodre?’ I asked.

‘That’s the one.’

‘But she’s a pagan,’ my son said disapprovingly.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I snarled. ‘You think the gods speak only to Christians?’

‘But a sorceress …’ he began.

‘Some folk are better than others at knowing what the gods are doing. Ælfadell was one of them. She talked to them in here; they used her. And yes, she was, is, a pagan, but that doesn’t mean she can’t see farther than the rest of us.’

‘So what did she see?’ my son asked. ‘What did she tell of your future?’

‘That I whelped idiots who would ask stupid questions.’

‘So she really did see the future!’ Uhtred said, and laughed. Finan and Merewalh laughed too.

‘She said there would be a great battle and seven kings would die.’ I spoke bleakly. ‘It was like I said, just nonsense.’

‘There aren’t seven kings in Britain,’ my son said.

‘There are,’ Merewalh said. ‘The Scots have three at least, and God alone knows how many men call themselves king in Wales. Then there are the Irish kings.’

‘A battle which everyone joins in?’ Finan said lightly. ‘We can’t miss that.’

Rolla and his companions returned late in the afternoon, bringing bread and lentils. The rain had eased and they found us in the wood where we had lit a fire and were trying to dry our clothes. ‘The woman’s not there,’ Rolla told me, meaning Cnut’s wife.

‘So who is there?’

‘Thirty, forty men,’ he said dismissively, ‘most of them too old to go to war, and Cnut’s steward. I told him what you told me to say.’

‘He believed you?’

‘He was impressed!’ I knew that the folk inside Buchestanes’s palisade would be curious, even suspicious, because we had not ridden into the town, but had stayed outside, so I had told Rolla to say I had sworn an oath to pass through no town walls until I assaulted a Saxon stronghold. ‘I told him you were Wulf Ranulfson, out of Haithabu,’ Rolla went on, ‘and he said Cnut would welcome us.’

‘But where?’

‘He said to go to Ceaster, then just ride south if there are no ships.’

‘Just south?’

‘That’s all he said, yes.’

And south could be either Mercia or Wessex, but instinct, that voice of the gods which we so often mistrust, told me it was Mercia. Cnut and Sigurd had attacked Wessex ten years before and had achieved nothing. They had landed their forces on the banks of the Uisc and marched two miles to Exanceaster where the walls of that burh had defeated them, and Wessex was full of such burhs, the fortified towns that Alfred had made and in which folk could shelter as the Danes roamed impotently outside. Mercia had burhs too, but fewer, and the Mercian army, which should have been prepared to attack the Danes as they besieged a burh, was a long way away in East Anglia.

‘Then we’ll do what he suggested,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to Ceaster.’

‘Why not head directly south?’ Merewalh asked.

I knew what was in his mind. By going south we would reach Mercia far more quickly than by travelling to Britain’s west coast and, once at Ceaster, we would be on the very edge of Mercia, in a region already dominated by the Danes. Merewalh wanted to get back to his country fast, to find out what had happened, and perhaps to reunite his men with Æthelred’s forces. Æthelred would be annoyed that Merewalh had accompanied me, and that worry was nagging at the Mercian.

‘You’ll gain nothing by going south now,’ I explained.

‘We save time.’

‘I don’t want to save time. I need time. I need time for Edward of Wessex and for Æthelred to join forces.’

‘Then go back to East Anglia,’ Merewalh said, but without much conviction.

‘Cnut wants Æthelred in East Anglia,’ I said, ‘so why should we do what Cnut wants? He wants Æthelred to come to him and he’ll wait for him on a hill or beside a river, and Æthelred will have to fight uphill or through deep water, and at the end of the day Æthelred will be dead and Cnut will be boiling his skull to make a drinking cup. Is that what you want?’

‘Lord,’ Merewalh protested.

‘We have to make Cnut do what we want,’ I said, ‘so we go to Ceaster.’

So we rode to Ceaster. The countryside was strangely empty. There were harvesters in the fields and cowherds in the pastures, there were shepherds and woodsmen, but the warriors were gone. There were no men hawking, no men practising the shield wall or exercising horses, because the warriors were all gone southwards, leaving the halls protected only by old and injured men. We should have been challenged a hundred times on that journey, but the road had seen countless bands pass and folk assumed we were just another group seeking Jarl Cnut’s generosity.

We followed a Roman road out of the hills. The fields either side were churned by hoofprints, all going west. The stones counted the miles down to Deva, because that was what the Romans had called Ceaster. I knew the place, as did Finan and Merewalh, indeed most of our men had spent time to the south of the town, riding the woods and fields on the southern bank of the River Dee and watching the Danes on Ceaster’s ramparts. Those walls, and the river, protected the town, and if we had ever wanted to attack from the south we would have had to cross the Roman bridge that led to the town’s southern gate, but now we came from the east and the road took us north of the river. We rode through heathland where a few scattered trees bent to the west wind. I could smell the sea. The rain had stopped and the sky was thronged with fast-moving clouds that threw vast scudding shadows across the lower country ahead of us. The river’s coils glinted in that landscape, which, beyond the heath, was marsh and, way beyond that and nothing but a hazed glimmer on the skyline, was the sea.

I rode ahead with Finan, Merewalh, and my son. We slanted left, going to a stand of trees on a small hillock, and from there we could see Ceaster itself. Smoke rose from thatched roofs inside the walls. A few roofs were tile, and some buildings rose higher than others, and the stone of those high walls looked pale gold in the patchy sunlight. The town’s defences were formidable. It was fronted with a ditch flooded by the river, and behind the ditch was an earthen bank topped by stone ramparts. Some of the stone had fallen, but timber palisades filled those gaps. There were stone towers studding the long walls, and timber towers stood above the four gateways, one gate in the centre of each long wall, but we had watched Ceaster long enough to learn that two of those gates were never used. The north gate and south gate had usually been busy, but none of us had ever seen men or horses use the east and west entrances, and I suspected they had been blocked up. Just outside the walls was a stone arena where the Romans had staged fights and slaughters, but cattle now grazed beneath the decaying arches. There were four ships downstream of the bridge, only four, but there must have been two or three hundred before Cnut left. Those ships would have rowed out through the river curves, past the wild sea-birds of the Dee’s estuary to the open sea, and then where?

‘That’s a burh,’ Finan said admiringly. ‘Be a right bastard of a place to capture.’

‘Æthelred should have captured it ten years ago,’ I said.

‘Æthelred couldn’t capture a flea if it was biting his cock,’ Finan said scornfully.

Merewalh cleared his throat as a mild protest against this insult to his sworn lord.

A banner flew above the gate-tower in the southern wall. We were too far away to see what was embroidered or daubed on the cloth, but I knew anyway. It would show Cnut’s emblem of the axe and the shattered cross, and that flag was on the southern ramparts, facing Saxon country, the direction from which the garrison could expect an attack. ‘How many men can you see?’ I asked Finan, knowing his eyes were better than mine.

‘Not many,’ he said.

‘Cnut told me the garrison was a hundred and fifty men.’ I was remembering our conversation in Tameworþig. ‘He could have been lying, of course.’