The Burning Land (7 page)

“God speaks to him,” Alfred said with a quiet assurance.

I almost laughed, but then thought that the gods do speak to us, though usually by signs and portents. “Does he take all your decisions, lord?” I asked sourly.

“God assists me in all things,” Alfred said sharply, then turned away because the bell was summoning the Christians to prayer in Æscengum’s new church.

The gods are capricious, and I was about to amuse them. And Alfred was right. I was a fool.

What did Harald want? Or, for that matter, Haesten? It was simpler to answer for Haesten, because he was the cleverer and more ambitious man, and he wanted land. He wanted to be a king.

The northmen had come to Britain in search of kingdoms, and the lucky ones had found their thrones. A northman reigned in Northumbria, and another in East Anglia, and Haesten wanted to be their equal. He wanted the crown, the treasures, the women, and the status, and there were two places those things could be found. One was Mercia and the other Wessex.

Mercia was the better prospect. It had no king and was riven by warfare. The north and east of the country was ruled by jarls, powerful Danes who kept strong troops of household warriors and barred their gates each night, while the south and east was Saxon land. The Saxons looked to my cousin, Æthelred, for protection and he gave it to them, but only because he had inherited great wealth and enjoyed the firm support of his father-in-law, Alfred. Mercia was not part of Wessex, but it did Wessex’s bidding, and Alfred was the true power behind Æthelred. Haesten might attack Mercia and he would find allies in the north and east, but eventu
ally he would find himself facing the armies of Saxon Mercia and Alfred’s Wessex. And Haesten was cautious. He had made his camp on a desolate shore of Wessex, but he did nothing provocative. He waited, certain that Alfred would pay him to leave, which Alfred had done. He also waited to see what damage Harald might achieve.

Harald probably wanted a throne, but above all he wanted everything that glittered. He wanted silver, gold, and women. He was like a child that sees something pretty and screams until he possesses it. The throne of Wessex might fall into his hands as he greedily scooped up his baubles, but he did not aim for it. He had come to Wessex because it was full of treasures, and now he was ravaging the land, taking plunder, while Haesten just watched. Haesten hoped, I think, that Harald’s wild troops would so weaken Alfred that he could come behind and take the whole land. If Wessex was a bull, then Harald’s men were blood-maddened terriers who would attack in a pack and most would die in the attacking, but they would weaken the bull, and then Haesten, the mastiff, would come and finish the job. So to deter Haesten I needed to crush Harald’s stronger forces. The bull could not be weakened, but the terriers had to be killed, and they were dangerous, they were vicious, but they were also ill-disciplined, and I would now tempt them with treasure. I would tempt them with Skade’s sleek beauty.

The fifty men I had posted in Godelmingum fled from that town next morning, retreating from a larger group of Danes. My men splashed their horses through the river and streamed into Æscengum as the Danes lined the farther bank to stare at the banners hanging bright on the burh’s eastern palisade. Those banners showed crosses and saints, the panoply of Alfred’s state, and to make certain the enemy knew the king was in the burh I made Osferth walk slowly along the wall dressed in a bright cloak and with a circlet of shining bronze on his head.

Osferth, my man, was Alfred’s bastard. Few people knew, even though Osferth’s resemblance to his father was striking. He had been born to a servant girl whom Alfred had taken to his bed in the days before Christianity had captured his soul. Once, in an
unguarded moment, Alfred had confided to me that Osferth was a continual reproof. “A reminder,” he had told me, “of the sinner I once was.”

“A sweet sin, lord,” I had replied lightly.

“Most sins are sweet,” the king said, “the devil makes them so.”

What kind of perverted religion makes pleasures into sins? The old gods, even though they never deny us pleasure, fade these days. Folk abandon them, preferring the whip and bridle of the Christians’ nailed god.

So Osferth, a reminder of Alfred’s sweet sin, played the king that morning. I doubt he enjoyed it, for he resented Alfred, who had tried to turn him into a priest. Osferth had rebelled against that destiny, becoming one of my house-warriors instead. He was not a natural fighter, not like Finan, but he brought a keen intelligence to the business of war, and intelligence is a weapon that has a sharp edge and a long reach.

All war ends with the shield wall, where men hack in drink-sodden rage with axes and swords, but the art is to manipulate the enemy so that when that moment of screaming rage arrives it comes to your advantage. By parading Osferth on Æscengum’s wall I was trying to tempt Harald. Where the king is, I was suggesting to our enemies, there is treasure. Come to Æscengum, I was saying, and to increase the temptation I displayed Skade to the Danish warriors who gathered on the river’s far bank.

A few arrows had been shot at us, but those ended when the enemy recognized Skade. She unwittingly helped me by screaming at the men across the water. “Come and kill them all!” she shouted.

“I’ll shut her mouth,” Steapa volunteered.

“Let the bitch shout,” I said.

She pretended to speak no English, yet she gave me a withering glance before looking back across the river. “They’re cowards,” she shouted at the Danes, “Saxon cowards! Tell Harald they will die like sheep.” She stepped close to the palisade. She could not cross the wall because I had ordered her tied by a rope that was looped about her neck and held by one of Steapa’s men.

“Tell Harald his whore is here!” I called over the river, “and that
she’s noisy! Maybe we’ll cut out her tongue and send it to Harald for his supper!”

“Goat turd,” she spat at me, then reached over the palisade’s top and plucked out an arrow that had lodged in one of the oak trunks. Steapa immediately moved to disarm her, but I waved him back. Skade ignored us. She was gazing fixedly at the arrowhead which, with a sudden wrench, she freed from the feathered shaft, which she tossed over the wall. She gave me a glance, raised the arrowhead to her lips, closed her eyes, and kissed the steel. She muttered some words I could not hear, touched her lips to the steel again, then pushed it beneath her gown, hesitated, then jabbed the point into one of her breasts. She gave me a triumphant look as she brought the bloodstained steel into view, then she flung the arrowhead into the river and lifted her hands and face to the late summer sky. She screamed to get the attention of the gods, and when the scream faded she turned back to me. “You’re cursed, Uhtred,” she said with a tone she might have used to remark on unremarkable weather.

I resisted the impulse to touch the hammer hanging about my neck because to have done so would have shown that I feared her curse, which instead I pretended to dismiss with a sneer. “Waste your breath, whore,” I said, yet I still moved my hand to my sword and rubbed a finger across the silver cross embedded in Serpent-Breath’s hilt. The cross meant nothing to me, except it had been a gift from Hild, once my lover and now an abbess of extraordinary piety. Did I think that touching the cross was a substitute for the hammer? The gods would not think so.

“When I was a child,” Skade said suddenly, and still using a conversational tone as though she and I were old friends, “my father beat my mother senseless.”

“Because she was like you?” I asked.

She ignored that. “He broke her ribs, an arm, and her nose,” she went on, “and later that day he took me to the high pastures to help bring back the herd. I was twelve years old. I remember there were snowflakes flying and I was frightened of him. I wanted to ask why he had hurt my mother, but I didn’t like to speak in case he beat me,
but then he told me anyway. He said he wanted to marry me to his closest friend, and my mother had opposed the idea. I hated it too, but he said I would marry the man anyway.”

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I asked.

“So I pushed him over a bluff,” she said, “and I remember him falling through the snowflakes and I watched him bounce on the rocks and I heard him scream. His back was broken.” She smiled. “I left him there. He was still alive when I brought the herd down. I scrambled down the rocks and pissed on his face before he died.” She looked calmly at me. “That was my first curse, Lord Uhtred, but not my last. I will lift the curse on you if you let me go.”

“You think you can frighten me into giving you back to Harald?” I asked, amused.

“You will,” she said confidently, “you will.”

“Take her away,” I ordered, tired of her.

Harald came at midday. One of Steapa’s men brought me the news and I climbed again to the ramparts to discover that Harald Bloodhair was on the river’s farther bank with fifty companions, all in mail. His banner showed an ax blade and its pole was surmounted by a wolf-skull that had been painted red.

He was a big man. His horse was big too, but even so Harald Bloodhair seemed to dwarf the stallion. He was too distant for me to see him clearly, but his yellow hair, long, thick, and unstained with any blood, was plainly visible, as was his broad beard. For a time he just stared at Æscengum’s wall, then he unbuckled his sword belt, threw the weapon to one of his men, and spurred his horse into the river. It was a warm day, but his mail was still covered by a great cloak of black bear fur that made him appear monstrously huge. He wore gold on his wrists and about his neck, and more gold decorated his horse’s bridle. He urged the stallion to the river’s center where the water surged over his boot tops. Any of the archers on Æscengum’s wall could have shot an arrow, but he had ostenta
tiously disarmed himself, which meant he wanted to talk, and I gave orders that no one was to loose a bow at him. He took off his helmet and searched the men crowding the rampart until he saw Osferth in his circlet. Harald had never seen Alfred and mistook the bastard for the father. “Alfred!” he shouted.

“The king doesn’t talk with brigands,” I called back.

Harald grinned. His face was broad as a barley-shovel, his nose hooked and crooked, his mouth wide, his eyes as feral as any wolf’s. “Are you Uhtred Turdson?” he greeted me.

“I know you’re Harald the Gutless,” I responded with a dutiful insult.

He gazed at me. Now that he was closer I could see that his yellow hair and beard were dirt-flecked, ropy and greasy, like the hair from a corpse buried in dung. The river surged by his stallion. “Tell your king,” Harald called to me, “that he can save himself much trouble by giving me his throne.”

“He invites you to come and take it,” I said.

“But first,” he leaned forward and patted his horse’s neck, “you will return my property.”

“We have nothing of yours,” I said.

“Skade,” he said flatly.

“She’s yours?” I asked, pretending surprise. “But surely a whore belongs to whoever can pay her?”

He gave me a look of instant hatred. “If you have touched her,” he said, pointing a leather-gloved finger at me, “or if any of your men have touched her, then I swear on Thor’s prick I’ll make your deaths so slow that your screams will stir the dead in their caves of ice.” He was a fool, I thought. A clever man would have pretended the woman meant little or nothing to him, but Harald was already revealing his price. “Show her to me!” he demanded.

I hesitated, as if making up my mind, but I wanted Harald to see the bait and so I ordered two of Steapa’s men to fetch Skade. She arrived with the rope still around her neck, yet such was her beauty and her calm dignity that she dominated the rampart. I thought, at that moment, that she was the most queenlike of any woman I had
ever seen. She moved to the palisade and smiled at Harald, who kicked his horse a few paces forward. “Have they touched you?” he shouted up to her.

She gave me a mocking look before answering. “They’re not men enough, my lord,” she called.

“Promise me!” he shouted, and the desperation was plain in his voice.

“I promise you,” she answered, and her voice was a caress.

Harald wheeled his horse so it was sideways to me, then raised his gloved hand to point at me. “You showed her naked, Uhtred Turdson.”

“Would you like me to show her that way again?”

“For that you will lose your eyes,” he said, prompting Skade to laugh. “Let her go now,” Harald went on, “and I won’t kill you! Instead I’ll keep you blind and naked, on a rope’s end, and display you to all the world.”

“You yelp like a puppy,” I called.

“Take the rope from her neck,” Harald ordered me, “and send her to me now!”

“Come and take her, puppy!” I shouted back. I was feeling elated. Harald, I thought, was proving to be a headstrong fool. He wanted Skade more than he wanted Wessex, indeed more than he wanted all the treasures of Alfred’s kingdom. I remember thinking that I had him exactly where I wished him to be, on the end of my lead, but then he turned his horse and gestured toward the growing crowd of warriors on the river bank.

And from the trees that grew thick on that far bank emerged a line of women and children. They were our people, Saxons, and they were roped together because they had been taken for slavery. Harald’s men, as they ravaged through eastern Wessex, had doubtless captured every child and young woman they could find, and, when they had finished amusing themselves, would ship them to the slave markets of Frankia. But these women and infants were brought to the river’s edge where, on an order from Harald, they were made to kneel. The youngest child was about the age of my
own Stiorra, and I can still see that child’s eyes as she stared up at me. She saw a warlord in shining glory and I saw nothing but pitiable despair.

“Start,” Harald called to his men.

One of his warriors, a grinning brute who looked as if he could out-wrestle an ox, stepped behind the woman at the southern end of the line. He was carrying a battle-ax that he swung high, then brought down so that the blade split her skull and buried itself in her trunk. I heard the crunch of the blade in bone over the noise of the river, and saw blood jetting higher than Harald on his horse. “One,” Harald called, and gestured to the blood-spattered axman who stepped briskly to his left to stand behind a child who was screaming because she had just seen her mother murdered. The red-bladed ax rose.