‘Five hundred of them?’ my son suggested.
I turned back to stare at the enemy. I divided the far line into half, then half again and counted horses, then multiplied my answer by four. ‘Six hundred,’ I reckoned. ‘Maybe that’s all the horses he has.’
‘He’ll have more men, though.’
‘Two thousand, at least.’
Six hundred horsemen were no threat to Ceaster, but I still kept the iron bar’s clangour sounding across the town. Men were climbing the ramparts now, and Ragnall would see our spear-points thickening above the high stone walls. I wished he would attack. There is no easier way to kill an enemy than when he is trying to assault a well-defended rampart.
‘He’ll have been to Eads Byrig,’ my son suggested. He was staring eastwards to where the smoke of our corpse-burning fire still smeared the sky. He was thinking that Ragnall would be enraged by the severed heads I had left to greet him and hoping, I think, that those bloodied heads would prompt Ragnall into a foolish assault on the city.
‘He won’t attack today,’ I said. ‘He might be headstrong, but he’s no fool.’
A horn sounded from that long line of men who now advanced slowly across the pastureland. The sound of the horn was as harsh as the clangour of my iron bar. I could see men on foot behind the horsemen, but even so there were not more than seven hundred enemy in sight. That was not nearly enough to assault our walls, but I was not summoning the defenders in expectation of any attack, but rather to show Ragnall that we were ready for him. We were both making a display.
‘I wish he’d make an assault,’ my son said wistfully.
‘Not today.’
‘He’ll lose men if he does!’ He was hoping I was wrong, hoping he would have a chance to kill men trying to scale stone walls.
‘He has men to lose,’ I said drily.
‘If I was him,’ my son began, then checked.
‘Go on.’
‘I wouldn’t want to lose two hundred men on these walls. I’d raid deeper into Mercia. I’d go south. There are rich pickings down south, but here?’
I nodded. He was right, of course. To attack Ceaster was to assault one of Mercia’s strongest fortresses, and the country around Ceaster would be poor territory for plunder or slaves. Folk had gone to their nearest burh, taking their families and livestock with them. We were ready for war, even wanting battle, but a sudden march south into the heartland would find plump farms and easy plunder. ‘He will raid deeper into Mercia,’ I said, ‘but he still wants Ceaster. He won’t attack today, but he will attack.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he can’t be King of Britain without capturing the burhs,’ I said. ‘And because Ceaster is Lady Æthelflaed’s achievement. There are plenty of men who still think a woman shouldn’t rule a land, but they can’t argue with her success. She’s fortified this whole district! Her husband was scared of the place. All he did was piss into the wind, but she drove the Danes out. If she does nothing else, then Ceaster stands as her victory! So take this city from her and you make her look weak. Take Ceaster and you’ve opened up all western Mercia to invasion. If Ragnall wins here he could destroy all Mercia, and he knows it. He won’t just be King of Northumbria, but of Mercia too, and that’s worth losing two hundred men.’
‘But without Eads Byrig …’
‘Losing Eads Byrig has made life difficult for him,’ I interrupted him, ‘but he still needs Ceaster! The Irish are driving the Norse out of Ireland, and where will they go? Here! But they can’t come here if we hold the rivers.’ Indeed it was our failure to hold the rivers that had let Ragnall into Britain in the first place. ‘So, yes,’ I went on, ‘the battle we fight here isn’t just for Ceaster, but for everything! For Mercia and in the end for Wessex too.’
The great line of horsemen had stopped, and a smaller group now rode towards the city. There were perhaps a hundred horsemen in the smaller group, followed by some footmen, all of them beneath two great banners. One showed the red axe of Ragnall, the same symbol that his brother Sigtryggr flew, but the second banner was new to me. It was a flag, a big flag, and it was black. Just that, a black flag, except it was made more sinister because the flag’s trailing edge had been ripped to tattered shreds so that it blew ragged in the sea wind. ‘Whose flag is that?’ I asked.
‘Never seen it,’ my son said.
Finan, Merewalh, and Æthelflaed came to the rampart. None of them recognised the flag. What made it strange was that the flag was every bit as big as Ragnall’s axe, suggesting that whoever marched beneath the ragged black banner was his equal.
‘There’s a woman there,’ Finan said. He had eyes like a falcon.
‘Ragnall’s wife?’ Æthelflaed asked.
‘Could be,’ Merewalh said, ‘they say he has four.’
‘It’s a woman in black,’ Finan said. He was shading his eyes as he peered at the approaching enemy. ‘She’s on the small horse right in front of the flag.’
‘Unless it’s a priest?’ Merewalh suggested uncertainly.
The great line of horsemen had begun beating their swords against their shields, a rhythmic and threatening sound, harsh in the day’s warm sunlight. I could see the woman now. She was swathed in black, with a black hood over her head, and she rode a small black horse that was dwarfed by the stallions of the men who surrounded her. ‘He won’t have a priest with him,’ Finan said, ‘it’s a woman, sure enough.’
‘Or a child,’ I said. The rider of the small horse was also small.
The horsemen stopped. They were some two hundred paces away, well beyond the distance we could hurl a spear or an axe. Some members of the fyrd carried bows, but they were short hunting bows that were not powerful enough to pierce mail. Such bows forced an enemy to keep his exposed face below his shield, and they were useful at very short distances, but to loose an arrow at two hundred paces was a waste, provoking the enemy to jeer. Two archers did loose and I bellowed at them to put their weapons down. ‘They’ve come to talk,’ I shouted, ‘not to fight.’
‘Yet,’ Finan muttered.
I could see Ragnall clearly enough. He was flamboyant as ever, his long hair blowing in the wind and his inked chest bare. He kicked his stallion a few paces forward and stood in his stirrups. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ he shouted, ‘I bring you gifts!’ He turned back towards his standard as the men on foot threaded their way between the horses and came towards the ramparts.
‘Oh no,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘no!’
‘Forty-three,’ I said bitterly. I did not even need to count.
‘Play with the devil,’ Finan said, ‘and you get burned.’
Forty-three men carrying drawn swords were pushing forty-three prisoners towards us. The swordsmen spread into a rough line and stopped, then thrust the prisoners down onto their knees. The prisoners, all of whose hands were bound behind their backs, were mostly men, but there were women among them, women who stared in desperation at our banners that hung from the ramparts. I had no idea who the prisoners were, except they must be Saxon and Christian. They were revenge.
Ragnall must have been told of the forty-three heads waiting on the summit of Eads Byrig and this was his answer. There was nothing we could do. We had manned the walls of Ceaster, but I had not thought to mount men on horses to make any sally out of the gate. We could only listen as the victims wailed and only watch as the swords fell, as the bright blood splashed the morning, and as the heads rolled on the thin turf. Ragnall mocked us with his handsome smile as the swordsmen wiped their blades on the clothes of their victims.
And then there was one last gift, one last prisoner.
That prisoner could not walk. He or she was brought draped over the back of a horse and at first I could not see if it was a man or a woman, I could only see that it was a person dressed in white who was heaved off the horse onto the blood-wet grass. None of us spoke. Then I saw it was a man and I thought him dead until he slowly rolled over and I saw he was dressed in the white robes of a priest, but what was
strange was that the front of his skirt was panelled in bright red.
‘Christ,’ Finan breathed.
Because the skirt was not panelled. It was coloured by blood. The man curled up as if to crush the pain in his groin, and at that moment the black-robed rider spurred her horse forward.
She came close, careless of the threat of our throwing spears, our arrows, or axes. She stopped just yards away from the ditch and pushed back the hood of her cloak and stared up at us. She was an old woman, her face lined and harsh, her hair sparse and white, her lips a thin grimace of hatred. ‘What I did to him,’ she said, pointing at the wounded man lying behind her, ‘I shall do to you! To all of you. One at a time!’ She suddenly produced a small curved knife. ‘I shall geld your boys, your women shall be whores, and your children slaves, because you are cursed. All of you!’ She shrieked those last three words and swept the gelding knife in a curve as if to point to all of us watching from the ramparts. ‘You will all die! You are cursed by day and by night, by fire and by water, by fate!’
She spoke our language, the English tongue.
She rocked backwards and forwards in her saddle as if gathering strength and then she took a deep breath and pointed the knife at me. ‘And you, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, Uhtred of Nothing, will die last and die slowest because you have betrayed the gods. You are cursed. You are all cursed!’ She cackled then, a mad sound, before pointing the blade at me again. ‘The gods hate you, Uhtred! You were their son, you were their favourite, you were loved by them, but you chose to use your gifts for the false god, for the filthy Christian god, and now the real gods hate you and curse you! I speak to the gods, they listen to me, they will give you to me and I will kill you so slowly that your death will last till Ragnarok!’ And with that she hurled the small knife at me. It fell short, clattering on the wall and dropping to the ditch. She turned away, and all the enemy went with her, back to the trees.
‘Who is she?’ Æthelflaed asked, her voice scarce above a whisper.
‘Her name,’ I said, ‘is Brida.’
And the gelded priest turned an agonised face towards me and called for help. ‘Father!’
He was my son.
PART TWO
The Ghost Fence
Seven
Brida.
She was a Saxon who was raised a Christian; a wild-child, my first lover, a girl of passion and fire, and Brida, like me, had found the older gods, but where I have always accepted that the god of the Christians has power like all the other gods, Brida had convinced herself that the Christian god was a demon and that Christianity was an evil that must be eradicated if the world was ever to be good again. She had married my dear friend, Ragnar, she had become more Danish than the Danes, and she had tried to suborn me, to tempt me, to persuade me to fight for the Danes against the Saxons, and she had hated me ever since I had refused. She was a widow now, but she still ruled Ragnar’s great fortress of Dunholm, which, after Bebbanburg, was the most formidable stronghold in Northumbria. She had now sided with Ragnall and, as I was later to learn, her declaration of support was enough to drive poor King Ingver into exile. Brida had brought Ragnar’s army south, she had added her men to Ragnall’s, and the Northmen now had the strength to attack Ceaster and to accept the deaths that would soak the Roman walls with northern blood.
Beware the hatred of a woman.
Love curdles into hate. I had loved Brida, but she possessed an anger I could never match, an anger she believed came directly from the rage of the gods. It had been Brida who gave Serpent-Breath her name, who had cast a spell on the sword because, even as a child, she had believed the gods spoke directly to her. She had been a black-haired girl, thin as a twig, with a fierceness that burned like the fire that had killed the elder Ragnar and which we had watched together from the high trees. The only child Brida ever bore was mine, but the boy was born dead and she had never had another, so now her offspring were the songs she made and the curses she uttered. Ragnar’s father, the blind Ravn, had prophesied that Brida would grow to be a skald and a sorceress, and so she had, but of the bitterest kind. She was an enchantress, white-haired and wizened now, chanting her skald’s songs about dead Christians and of Odin triumphant. Songs of hate.
‘What she wants,’ I told Æthelflaed, ‘is to take your god and nail him back to his tree.’
‘He came back to life once,’ she said piously, ‘and he would rise again.’
I ignored that. ‘And she wants all Britain worshipping the old gods.’
‘A stale old dream,’ Æthelflaed said scornfully.
‘Just because it’s been dreamed before,’ I said, ‘doesn’t mean it can’t come true.’
The old dream was the Northmen’s vision of ruling all Britain. Again and again their armies had marched, they had invaded Mercia and Wessex, they had slaughtered the Saxons in battle, yet they had never succeeded in taking the whole island. Æthelflaed’s father, King Alfred, had defeated them, he had saved Wessex, and ever since we Saxons had been fighting back, thrusting the Northmen ever further northwards. Now a new leader, stronger than any who had come before, threatened us with the old dream.
For me the war was about land. Perhaps that was because my uncle had stolen my land, had stolen the wild country around Bebbanburg, and to take back that land I first needed to defeat the Danes who surrounded it. My whole life has been about that windswept fortress beside the sea, about the land that is mine and was taken from me.
For King Alfred, for his son Edward, and his daughter Æthelflaed, the war was also about land, about the kingdoms of the Saxons. Alfred had saved Wessex, and his daughter was now thrusting the Northmen from Mercia while her brother, Edward of Wessex, took back the lands of East Anglia. But for both of them there was another cause worthy of death, their god. They fought for the Christian god, and in their minds the land belonged to their god and they would only reclaim it by doing his will. ‘Englaland,’ King Alfred had once said, ‘will be God’s land. If it exists it will exist because of Him, because He wishes it.’ For a time he had even called it Godland, but the name had not stuck.
For Brida there was only one cause, her hatred of that Christian god. For her the war was a battle between the gods, between truth and falsehood, and she would happily have allowed the Saxons to kill every Northman if only they would abandon their religion and turn back to the old gods of Asgard. And now, at last, she had found a champion who would use sword and spear and axe to fight for her gods. And Ragnall? I doubt he cared about the gods. He wanted land, all of it, and he had wanted Brida’s hardened warriors to come from their stronghold at Dunholm to add their blades to his army.
And my son?
My son.
I had disowned him, disinherited him, and spurned him, and now he had been returned to me by an enemy and he was no longer a man. He was gelded. The blood on his gown was crusted. ‘He’s dying,’ Bishop Leofstan said sadly and made the sign of the cross over Uhtred’s pale face.
His name had been Uhtred, the name always given to the eldest son of our family, but I had taken the name from him when he became a Christian priest. I had named him Judas instead, though he called himself Oswald. Father Oswald, famous for his honesty and piety, and famous too for being my son. My prodigal son. Now I knelt beside him and called him by his old name. ‘Uhtred? Uhtred!’
But he could not answer. There was sweat on his forehead and he was shivering. After that one despairing cry of ‘Father!’ he seemed unable to speak. He tried, but no words came, just a whimper of excruciating pain. ‘He’s dying,’ Bishop Leofstan said again, ‘he has the death fever, lord.’
‘Then save him,’ I snarled.
‘Save him?’
‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? Heal the god-damned sick? So heal him.’
He stared at me, suddenly frightened. ‘My wife …’ he began, then faltered.
‘What of her?’
‘She heals the sick, lord,’ he said, ‘she has the touch of God in her hands. It is her callin
g, lord.’
‘Then take him to her.’
Folcbald, one of my Frisian warriors and a man of prodigious strength, lifted Uhtred in his arms like a baby and so we took him into the city, following the bishop, who scurried ahead. He led us to one of the more substantial Roman houses on the main street, a house with a deep-arched gateway leading into a pillared courtyard from which a dozen doors led into large rooms. It was not unlike my own house in Ceaster and I was about to make some scornful remark about the bishop’s taste for luxury when I saw that the arcade around the courtyard was filled with sick folk lying on straw pallets. ‘There’s not room for them all inside,’ the bishop explained, then watched as the crippled gatekeeper picked up a short metal bar and struck a second bar that was hanging from the gateway’s ceiling. Like my alarm bell it made a harsh sound and the gatekeeper went on striking it and I saw robed and hooded women scurrying away into the shadowed doorways. ‘The sisters have abjured the company of men,’ the bishop explained, ‘unless the men are sick, dying, or wounded.’
‘They’re nuns?’ I asked.
‘They are a lay sisterhood,’ he said, ‘and one close to my heart! Most are poor women who wish to dedicate their lives to God’s service, while others among them are sinners.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Fallen women,’ he paused as though unable to bring himself to say the next words, ‘women of the streets, lord! Of the alleyways! But all of them dear creatures we have brought back to God’s grace.’
‘Whores, you mean.’
‘Fallen women, lord, yes.’
‘And you live here with them?’ I asked sarcastically.
‘Oh no, lord!’ He was amused rather than offended by the question. ‘That would not be seemly! Dear me, no! My dear wife and I have a small dwelling in the alley behind the smithy. Praise God I am not sick, dying or wounded.’ The gatekeeper finally put the small iron bar down and the last echo of the clangour died away as a tall, gaunt woman stalked across the courtyard. She had broad shoulders, a grim face, and hands like shovels. Leofstan was a tall man, but this woman towered over him.