The Burning Land (26 page)

A man screamed. He was a Frisian lying at the sand’s edge and his legs were thrashing in the shallow, blood-tinged water. He had been wounded, and Skade now knelt beside him and was driving a
dagger slowly into one eye and so through to his brain. “Stop that!” I shouted. The man was mewing in a high, pitiable voice, the ooze of his punctured eye spilling down his blood-laced cheek.

She turned to look at me and there was a wildness in her face like the savagery of a cornered beast. “I hate them,” she said, and edged the dagger in again so that the man screamed and lost control of his bowels.

“Sihtric!” I snarled, and Sihtric stepped to the man and drove his sword hard into his throat to end his misery.

“I want to kill them all,” Skade hissed at me. She was shuddering. “And him!” She pointed to Skirnir. “Especially him!”

“She’s crazed,” Finan said softly. He had jumped down to the beach beside me and now dipped his blade in the water to wash the blood away. “Sweet Jesus Christ,” he said, “she’s as crazy as a bitch in heat.”

My men were staring at Skade in horror. It is one thing to kill in battle, but an enemy is a warrior too, and in defeat he deserves respect. I have killed often, and the killing can go on long after the fighting has finished, but that is the blood lust and battle fear that frenzies men who endure the shield wall, and when the lust dies then mercy takes its place. “You’re not going to let them live!” Skade spat at me.

“Cerdic,” I said, not turning around to look at him, “make it quick!”

I heard, but did not see, Skirnir die. The spear-blade was thrust so hard that it pierced his throat and then drove into the planks of the ship. “I wanted to kill him!” Skade shrieked.

I ignored her. Instead I walked past Rollo to approach the undefeated Frisians. These men were Skirnir’s own crew, maybe sixty in all, who watched me come in silence. I had dropped my shield so they could see the blood spattered on my mail and see the blood streaked across my helmet’s mask and see the blood congealing on Serpent-Breath’s blade. My helmet was surmounted by a silver wolf, my belt had plates of gold, and my arm rings shone through their gloss of blood. They saw a warlord and I walked to within ten paces of them to show that I had no fear of pirates.

“I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said, “and I give you a choice. You can live or you can die.”

Rollo, behind me, had started the shield music. His men were beating blades against linden wood in the dark rhythm of death’s promise.

“We are Danes,” I told the Frisians, “and we are Saxons, and we are warriors who love to fight. In our halls at night we chant the tales of the men we have killed, of the women we have widowed, and of the children we have orphaned. So make your choice! Either give me a new song to sing or else lay down your weapons.”

They laid down their weapons. I made them take off their mail, those that possessed it, or else their leather tunics. I took their boots, their belts, their armor, and their weapons and we piled that plunder in
Seolferwulf
, and then we burned both of Skirnir’s long ships. They burned well, great plumes of flame climbing the masts beneath churning black smoke that drifted up into the low clouds.

Skirnir had come with one hundred and thirty-one men. We had killed twenty-three of those, while another sixteen were grievously wounded. One of Rollo’s men had lost an eye to a spear thrust, and Ælric, a Saxon in my service, lay dying. He had fought beside Finan and had tripped on a rower’s bench and had taken an ax blow in the back, and I knelt beside him on the sand and held his hand firm around his sword’s hilt and promised I would give his widow gold and raise his children as though they were my own. He heard me, though he could not speak back, and I held his hand until the noise rattled in his throat and his body quivered as his soul went to the long darkness. We took his corpse away with us and buried him at sea. He was a Christian, and Osferth said a prayer over the dead Ælric before we tipped him into eternity. We took another corpse with us, Skirnir’s, that we stripped naked and hung from our wolf’s-head prow to show that we had conquered.

We poled
Seolferwulf
back down the creek on the ebbing tide. When the creek widened we turned and rowed her, towing the small fishing craft that I abandoned beside the village. Then we went out to sea and
Seolferwulf
shuddered to the first small waves. The gray clouds that had covered the place of slaughter were at last shredding, letting a watery
sunlight beat down on the choppy sea. “You shouldn’t have let them live,” Skade told me.

“Skirnir’s men?” I asked. “Why kill them? They were beaten.”

“They should all be dead,” she said vengefully, then turned a gaze of utter fury on me. “You left two of his brothers alive! They should be dead!”

“I let them live,” I said. Without Skirnir and his large boats they were harmless, though Skade did not see it that way.

“Milksop!” she spat at me.

I stared at her. “Careful, woman,” I said, and she went sulkily silent.

We had brought just one prisoner with us, the shipmaster from Skirnir’s own vessel. He was an old man, over forty, and years of squinting at the sun-reflecting sea had made his eyes mere crinkled slits in a face beaten dark by salt and weather. He would be our guide. “If my ship so much as touches a sandbank,” I told him, “I’ll let Skade kill you in her own way.”

Seolferwulf
touched no sandbank as we rowed to Zegge. The channel was intricate, and misleading marks had been planted to lure attackers onto shoals, but the prisoner’s pure terror of Skade made him careful. We arrived in the early evening, feeling our way gently, and led by the corpse hanging at the bows. Spray had washed Skirnir’s carcass clean and gulls, smelling him, screamed as they wheeled in hungry frustration around our prow.

Men and women watched us pass through the crooked channel that twisted between two of the inner islands, and then we glided across sheltered water that reflected the settling sun in shivering gold. The watchers were Skirnir’s followers, but these men had not sailed with their lord in the dawn, and now they saw our proud shields that we had hung from
Seolferwulf
’s topmost strakes, and they saw the corpse dangling white from the rope, and none wanted to challenge us.

There were fewer people on Zegge than on the outer islands, because it was from Zegge that the two defeated crews had sailed, and where most of the dead, wounded, or stranded men had lived. A crowd of women came to the gray wooden pier that jutted out be
neath the mound which supported Skirnir’s hall. The women watched our boat approach, then some recognized the body that was our trophy and they all fled, dragging their children by the hands. Eight men, dressed in mail and carrying weapons, came from the hall, but when they saw my crew disembarking they ostentatiously put their weapons down. They knew now their lord was dead, and not one of them was minded to fight for his reputation.

And so, in the twilight of that day, we came to the hall on the mound of Zegge, and I stared up at its black bulk and thought of the dragon sleeping on his hoard of silver and gold. The high-roofed hall had great wooden horns at its eaves, horns that reared into the darkening sky where the first stars pricked the dusk.

I left fifteen men to guard the ship, then climbed the hill, seeing how the mound was made from great baulks of timber planted in a long rectangle that had been filled with sand, and on that first layer another smaller rectangle had been built, and then a third, and at the summit a final layer where a palisade stood, though it offered no defiance now, for its heavy wooden gate stood wide open. There was no fight left in Skirnir’s men. Their lord was dead.

The hall’s door was framed by a pair of vast curved bones that had come from some sea monster. I passed beneath them with a drawn sword with Rollo and Finan flanking me. A fire burned in the central hearth, spitting like a cat as salt-caked driftwood does. Skade came behind us and the waiting servants shivered at the sight of her. Skirnir’s steward, a plump man, bowed low to me. “Where’s the treasure?” I asked harshly.

The steward was too frightened to answer and Skade thrust him aside. “Lanterns!” she called to the servants, and small rushlamps were brought and in their paltry light she led me to a door at the back of the hall which opened onto a small square chamber heaped with sealskins. “He slept here,” she said.

“Above the dragon?”

“He was the dragon,” she said scornfully, “he was a pig and a dragon,” and then she dropped to her knees and scrabbled the stinking skins aside. I called for Skirnir’s plump steward to help her.
Finan looked at me, an eyebrow raised in expectation, and I could not resist a smile.

To take Bebbanburg I needed men. To storm that great stone wall and slaughter my uncle’s warriors, I needed men, and to buy men I needed gold. I needed silver. I needed a treasure guarded by a dragon to make that long dream come true, and so I smiled as Skade and the steward pulled away the high pile of pelts that covered the hiding place.

And then, in the light of the smoking lamps, the door was revealed.

It was a trapdoor of dark heavy wood into which an iron ring was set. I remember Father Beocca, years ago, telling me how he had visited a monastery in Sumorsæte and how the abbot had reverently showed him a crystal vial in which was kept milk from the Virgin Mary’s breasts. “I shivered, Uhtred,” Beocca had told me earnestly, “I shook like a leaf in the wind. I dared not hold the flask for fear of dropping it! I shook!”

I do not think I shook at that moment, but I felt the same awe, the same sense of being close to something inexplicable. My future lay beneath that trapdoor. My hopes, my sons’ futures, my dreams of freedom beneath a northern sky, all lay so close. “Open it,” I ordered, and my voice was hoarse, “open it.”

Rollo and the steward took hold of the ring. The trapdoor was stiff, jammed in its frame, and they needed to tug it hard to move it at all. Then, abruptly, the heavy door came free and the two men staggered as they dragged it aside.

I stepped forward and looked down.

And started laughing.

There was no dragon. I have never seen a dragon, though I am assured they exist and I have heard men describe those awful beasts with their malevolent scarlet eyes, flame-shooting mouths, questing necks, and crackling wings the size of ship sails. They are the beasts of nightmare, and though I have sailed into the distant north, sailed to where the ice blanches the sky with its reflections, I have
never been far enough north to the frost lands where dragons are said to roost.

There was no dragon in Skirnir’s pit, but there was a skeleton and some rats. The rats looked up startled, their tiny eyes winking back the flames of our inadequate lanterns, then they scuttled into cracks between the elm planks that lined the pit. Two rats were inside the ribcage of the dead man and they were the last to leave, first wriggling between the bones then slithering fast into their hiding place.

And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw the coins and the silver shards. I heard them first, chinking under the feet of the rats, then I saw them, dully gleaming, spilling from the leather sacks that had held them. The rotting sacks had been gnawed by rats. “What’s the corpse?” I asked.

“A man who tried to steal Lord Skirnir’s treasure, lord,” the steward answered in a whisper.

“He was left here to die?”

“Yes, lord. He was blinded first, then his sinews were cut, and he was put in the pit to die slowly.”

Skade smiled.

“Bring it all out,” I ordered Finan, then pushed the steward toward the hall. “You feed us tonight,” I ordered him, “all of us.”

I went back into the hall. It had only one table, so that most men would have eaten on the rush-covered floor. It was dark now, the only light coming from the big fire that we fed with logs my men tore from the palisade. I sat at the table and watched as Skirnir’s treasure was laid before me. I had laughed when the pit was first opened, and that laughter had been scornful because, in the feeble light, the treasure had appeared so paltry. What had I expected? A glittering heap of gold, studded with precious stones?

The laughter was sour because Skirnir’s treasure was indeed paltry. He had boasted of his wealth, but the truth was hidden behind those boasts and beneath his stinking bed-skins. He was not poor, true, but his hoard was just what I should have expected from a man who did little except steal scraps of silver from small traders.

My men watched the table. It was important that they saw what they had won so they would know I did not cheat them when I
divided the hoard. They mostly saw silver, but there were two pieces of gold, both thin torques made of twisted strands, and I put one in the pile for Rollo and his men, and kept the other for my followers. Then there were coins, mostly Frankish silver, but there were a few Saxon shillings and a handful of those mysterious coins that have curly writing no one can read and which are rumored to come from some great empire to the east. There were four silver ingots, but the greatest part of the treasure was in silver shards. The northmen have no coinage, other than what they steal, and so they pay for their goods, when they pay at all, with silver scraps. A Viking will steal a silver bracelet, and when he needs to buy something he will hack the bracelet into shards that a merchant will weigh on scales. The steward brought us a scale and we weighed the silver and the coins. There was just over thirty pounds.

That was not to be despised. We would all go home richer. Yet my share of the treasure would hardly raise one crew of men for one season’s fighting. I stared at the divided treasure, the last silver shards still resting in the bowl of the scales, and knew that it would not bring me Bebbanburg. It would not give me an army. It would not buy the fulfillment of my dreams. I felt my spirits sink and thought of Ælfric’s laughter. My uncle would soon enough learn that I had voyaged, captured, and been disappointed, and it was while I was thinking of his enjoyment that Skade chose to speak. “You said you would give me half,” she demanded.