The Pagan Lord (34 page)

‘No.’

‘Then we won’t,’ I said. ‘I want him to think we will, but we won’t.’

‘Then where?’ he asked.

‘You tell me.’

He thought for a while. ‘You don’t want to go back north,’ he said eventually, ‘because that takes us away from King Edward.’

‘If he’s coming,’ I said.

‘And you can’t go south,’ he continued, ignoring my pessimism, ‘and going east puts Cnut between us and Edward, so we have to go west.’

‘You see?’ I said. ‘It’s easy when you think.’

‘And going west takes us towards the Welsh,’ he said.

‘So let’s hope those bastards are sleeping.’

He stared at the long green weeds stirring languidly in the river. He was frowning. ‘But why not go south?’ he asked after a while. ‘Why not try to join Edward’s army?’

‘If it’s coming,’ I said, ‘and we don’t know that.’

‘We have no hope if it isn’t,’ he said grimly, ‘so suppose that it is. Why don’t we join it?’

‘You just said we couldn’t.’

‘But if we leave now? If we travel fast?’

I had thought of doing that. We could indeed hurry southwards, going towards the West Saxon army that I hoped was coming north, but I could not be sure that Cnut had not already blocked the way, or that he would not intercept us on the road, and then I would be forced to fight a battle in a place of his choosing, not mine. So we would go west and hope the Welsh were drunk and sleeping.

The Roman bridge was made of four stone arches and it was in surprisingly good repair. In the centre, built into one of the parapets, was a wide limestone slab cut with words,
pontem perpetui mansurum in saecula
, and again I had no idea what it meant, though the word
perpetui
suggested the bridge was intended to last for ever. If so, it was untrue, because my men broke one of the two centre arches. We used massive hammers and it took most of the day, but eventually the old stones were all on the river’s bed and we bridged the gap with baulks of timber taken from the town. We used more timber to make a barrier at the bridge’s northern end, and behind that barrier we made our shield wall.

And waited.

And next day, as the sun sank scarlet in the west, Cnut came.

Cnut’s scouts came first, riders on small, light horses that could travel fast. They reached the river and just stood there, watching us, all except a small group who rode along the Tame’s bank, presumably to discover whether we had placed men to bar the next crossing place upstream.

The bulk of Cnut’s forces arrived an hour or so after the scouts, and they covered the land, a horde of horsemen in mail and helmets, their round shields decorated with ravens, axes, hammers and hawks. It was impossible to count them because they numbered thousands. And nearly all had sacks or bags hanging from the cantles of their saddles: the plunder of Mercia. Those bags would have the valuable items, the silver, amber and gold, while the rest of the plunder would be on packhorses behind the vast army that threw long shadows as it advanced towards the bridge.

They stopped fifty paces short of the bridge to let Cnut ride forward. He was in a coat of mail polished silver-bright. He wore a white cloak, and rode a grey horse. With him was his close friend, Sigurd Thorrson, and where Cnut was all silver and white, Sigurd was dark. His horse was black, his cloak was black, and his helmet was crested with raven feathers. He hated me and I did not blame him for that hatred. I would hate any man who killed my son. He was a big man, heavily muscled, looming over his powerful horse, and beside him Cnut looked thin and pale. But of the two I feared Cnut more. He was snake-fast, weasel-cunning, and his sword, Ice-Spite, was famous as a drinker of blood.

Behind the two jarls were standard-bearers. Cnut’s flag showed the axe and the broken cross, while Jarl Sigurd’s displayed a flying raven. There were a hundred other standards among the army, but I looked for only one, and saw it. Haesten’s bleached skull-symbol was held aloft on a pole in the army’s centre. So he was here, but he had not been invited to accompany Cnut and Sigurd.

The banners of the broken cross and the flying raven halted at the bridge’s southern end, while the two jarls rode on towards us. They checked their horses just short of the timber roadway. Æthelflaed, standing beside me, shivered. She hated the Danes and now she was within yards of the two most formidable jarls of Britain.

‘This is what I shall do,’ Jarl Cnut said without any greeting or even insult. He spoke in a reasonable voice, as if he merely arranged a feast or a horse race. ‘I shall capture you alive, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and I shall keep you alive. I shall tie you between two posts so that folk can mock you, and I shall have my men use your woman in front of your eyes until there is no use left in her.’ He looked at Æthelflaed with his pale, cold eyes. ‘I will bare you naked, woman, and give you to my men, even to the slaves, and you, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, will hear her sobbing, you will watch her shame and you will see her die. Then I shall begin on you. I have dreamed of it, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. I have dreamed of cutting you piece by piece until you have no hands, no feet, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no manhood. And then we shall peel your skin away, inch by inch, and rub salt on your flesh, and listen to your screams. And men will piss on you and women laugh at you, and all this you will see because I will have left you your eyes. But they will go. And then you will go, and so will end the tale of your miserable life.’

I said nothing when he had finished. The river seethed over the broken stones of the bridge.

‘Lost your tongue already, you shit-slimed bastard?’ Jarl Sigurd snarled.

I smiled at Cnut. ‘Now why would you do that to me?’ I asked. ‘Did I not do your bidding? Didn’t I discover who took your wife and children?’

‘A child,’ Cnut said passionately, ‘a small girl! What had she done? And I will find your daughter, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and when she has pleasured as many of my men who wish to use her I shall kill her as you killed my daughter! And if I find her before your death then you will witness that too.’

‘So you’ll do to her what I did to your daughter?’ I asked.

‘It is a promise,’ Cnut said.

‘Truly?’ I asked.

‘I swear it,’ he said, touching the hammer hanging over his silver-shining mail.

I beckoned. The shield wall behind me parted, and my son brought Cnut’s daughter to the barrier. He held her hand. ‘Father!’ Sigril shouted when she saw Cnut, and Cnut just stared at her in shock. ‘Father!’ Sigril called and tried to pull away from my son.

I took the girl from him. ‘I am sorry about her hair,’ I said to Cnut, ‘and it probably hurt her a little when I cut it because the knife wasn’t nearly as sharp as I’d have liked. But hair does grow again and she’ll be as beautiful as ever in a few months.’ I picked the girl up, lifted her over the barricade and let her go. She ran to Cnut and I saw the joy and relief on his face. He leaned down and extended a hand to her, she gripped it and he raised her up so she could sit on his saddle. He hugged her, then stared at me with puzzlement.

‘Lost your tongue already, you shit-slimed bastard?’ I asked pleasantly, then beckoned again, and this time Frigg was allowed through the shield wall. She ran to the barrier, looked at me, and I nodded. She climbed over it, making an incoherent sobbing noise, and ran to Cnut’s side and he looked even more astonished as she gripped his leg and stirrup leather, clinging to them as if her life depended on it. ‘She wasn’t harmed,’ I said, ‘not even touched.’

‘You …’ he began.

‘Geirmund was easy to fool,’ I said. ‘A piglet and a body were all we needed. And that was enough to clear him away so we could burn your ships. Yours too,’ I added to Sigurd, ‘but I expect you know that.’

‘We know more, you pig-turd,’ Sigurd said. He raised his voice so the men behind me could hear him. ‘Edward of Wessex is not coming,’ he shouted. ‘He has decided to cower behind his town walls. Were you hoping he would come to rescue you?’

‘Rescue?’ I asked. ‘Why would I want to share the glory of victory with Edward of Wessex?’

Cnut was still staring at me. He said nothing. Sigurd did all the talking. ‘Æthelred is still in East Anglia,’ he shouted, ‘because he fears to come out from behind the rivers in case he meets a Dane.’

‘That does sound like Æthelred,’ I said.

‘You’re alone, you shit-slimed bastard.’ Sigurd was almost shaking with his anger.

‘I have my vast army,’ I said, pointing to the small shield wall behind me.

‘Your army?’ Sigurd sneered, then went silent because Cnut had reached out and silenced him by touching his gold-ringed arm.

Cnut still held his daughter tightly. ‘You can go,’ he said to me.

‘Go?’ I asked. ‘Go where?’

‘I give you life,’ he said, and touched Sigurd’s arm again to still the protest.

‘My life is not yours to give,’ I told him.

‘Go, Lord Uhtred,’ Cnut said, almost pleading with me. ‘Go south to Wessex, take all your men, just go.’

‘You can count, Jarl Cnut?’ I asked him.

He smiled. ‘You have fewer than three hundred men,’ he said, ‘and as for me? I cannot count my men. They are as grains of sand on a wide beach.’ He hugged his daughter with one arm and reached down to stroke Frigg’s cheek with his other hand. ‘I thank you for this, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘but just go.’

Sigurd growled. He wanted my death, but he would agree to anything Cnut suggested.

‘I asked if you could count,’ I said to Cnut.

‘I can count,’ he said, puzzled.

‘Then you might remember you had two children. A girl and a boy, remember? And I still have the boy.’ He flinched at that. ‘If you stay in Saxon Mercia or attack Wessex,’ I said, ‘perhaps you will only have a daughter?’

‘I can make more sons,’ he said, though without much conviction.

‘Go back to your lands,’ I told him, ‘and your son will be returned to you.’

Sigurd began to speak, his tone angry, but Cnut checked him. ‘We shall talk in the morning,’ he told me, and turned his horse.

‘We shall speak in the morning,’ I agreed, and watched them ride away with Frigg running between them.

Except we would not speak in the morning, because once they had gone I had my men kick the timber roadway off the bridge, and then we left.

We went west.

And Cnut, I knew, would follow.

Had Edward of Wessex decided to stay behind his burh walls? I could well believe that Æthelred was cowering in East Anglia because if he tried to return to Mercia he would be faced by a much larger enemy and he was probably terrified of facing Danes in open battle, but would Edward just abandon Mercia to Cnut’s forces? It was possible. His advisers were cautious men, frightened of all the Northmen, but confident that the stout burh walls of Wessex could resist any attack. Yet they were not fools. They knew that if Cnut and Sigurd were to capture both Mercia and East Anglia then thousands of warriors would come from across the sea, all of them eager to feast off the carcass of Wessex. If Edward waited behind his walls then his enemies would grow in strength. He would not face four thousand Danes, but ten or twelve. He would be overwhelmed.

Yet it was possible he had decided to stay on the defensive.

On the other hand what else would Jarl Sigurd say to me? He would hardly tell me that the West Saxons were marching. He had wanted to unsettle me, and I knew that, yet I was still unsettled.

And what else could I tell my men except that Sigurd had lied? I could only sound confident. ‘Sigurd has the greased tongue of a weasel,’ I told them, ‘and of course Edward is coming!’

And we were fleeing, riding westwards through the night. When I was young I liked the night. I taught myself not to fear the spirits that haunt the darkness, to walk like a shadow through the shadows, to hear the vixen’s cry and the owl’s call and not tremble. The night is the domain of the dead, and the living fear it, but that night we rode through the dark as if we belonged to it.

We came to Liccelfeld first. I knew the town well. It was here that I had thrown the treacherous Offa’s corpse into a stream. Offa, who had trained his dogs, sold news and posed as a friend, and then had tried to betray me. It was a Saxon town, yet mostly undisturbed by the Danes who lived all around it, and I assumed that most of the Saxons, like the dead Offa, purchased that peace by paying tribute to the Danes. Some of them were probably in Cnut’s army and doubtless they had gone to the grave of Saint Chad in Liccelfeld’s big church and prayed for Cnut’s victory. The Danes permitted Christian churches, but if I had tried to make a shrine to Odin on Saxon land the Christian priests would be sharpening their gutting knives. They worship a jealous god.

Bats wheeled over the town’s roofs. Dogs barked as we passed and were hushed by fearful folk who were wise to be frightened of hoofbeats in the night. Shutters stayed shut. We splashed through the stream where I had thrown Offa and I remembered his widow’s shrill curses. The moon was almost full, silvering the road that now rose into low wooded hills. The trees cast hard black shadows. We rode in silence except for the thud of hooves and jangle of bridles. We were following the Roman road that led westwards from Liccelfeld, a road that ran spear-shaft straight across the low hills and wide valleys. We had ridden this road before, not often, but even by moonlight the land looked familiar.

Finan and I stopped at a bare hilltop from where we gazed southwards as the horsemen passed along the road behind us. A long slope of stubble fell away in front of us, and beyond it were dark woods and more hills, and somewhere far off a small glimmer of firelight. I turned to look eastwards, looking back the way we had come. Was there a glow in the sky? I wanted to see some proof that Cnut had stayed in Tameworþig, that his huge army was waiting for the dawn before marching, but I could see no fires lighting the horizon. ‘The bastard’s following us,’ Finan grunted.

‘Probably.’

But far off to the south there was a glow. At least I thought there was. It was hard to tell because it was so far away, and perhaps it was just a trick of the darkness. A hall burning? Or the camp fires of a distant army? An army I just hoped was there? Finan stared too and I knew what he was thinking, or what he was hoping, and he knew I was thinking and hoping the same, but he said nothing. I thought for a moment the glow lightened, but I could not be sure. Sometimes there are lights in the night sky, great shimmering sheets of brightness that ripple and tremble like water, and I wondered if this was one of those mysterious shinings that the gods cascade through the darkness, but the longer I stared the less I saw. Just night and the horizon and the black trees.