Abbot Eadred wanted the four men hanged. Or drowned. Or strangled. He wanted them dead, dishonored, and forgotten. “They assaulted our king!” he declared vehemently. “And they must suffer a vile death, a vile death!” He kept repeating those words with a rare relish, and I just shrugged and said I had promised Tekil an honorable death, one that would send him to Valhalla instead of to Niflheim, and Eadred stared at my hammer amulet and screeched that in Haliwerfolkland there could be no mercy for men who attacked Cuthbert’s chosen one.
We were arguing on the slope just beneath the new church and the four prisoners, all in shackles or ropes, were sitting on the ground, guarded by Guthred’s household troops, and many of the folk from the town were there, waiting for Guthred’s decision. Eadred was haranguing the king, saying that a show of weakness would undermine Guthred’s authority. The churchmen agreed with the abbot, which was no surprise, and chief amongst his supporters were two newly-arrived monks who had walked across the hills from eastern Northumbria. They were named J?nberht and Ida, both were in their twenties and both owed obedience to Eadred. They had evidently been across the hills on some mission for the abbot, but now they were back in Cair Ligualid and they were vehement that the prisoners should die ignominiously and painfully. “Burn them!” J?nberht urged, “as the pagans burned so many of the holy saints! Roast them over the flames of hell!”
“Hang them!” Abbot Eadred insisted.
I could sense, even if Eadred could not, that the Cumbraland Danes who had joined Guthred were taking offense at the priests’ vehemence, so I took the king aside. “You think you can stay king without the Danes?” I asked him.
“Of course not.”
“But if you torture fellow Danes to death they’ll not like it. They’ll think you favor the Saxons over them.”
Guthred looked troubled. He owed his throne to Eadred and would not keep it if the abbot deserted him, but nor would he keep it if he lost the support of Cumbraland’s Danes. “What would Alfred do?” he asked me.
“He’d pray,” I said, “and he’d have all his monks and priests praying, but in the end he would do whatever is necessary to keep his kingdom intact.” Guthred just stared at me. “Whatever is necessary,” I repeated slowly.
Guthred nodded, then, frowning, he walked back to Eadred. “In a day or two,” Guthred said loudly enough for most of the crowd to hear him, “we shall march eastward. We shall cross the hills and carry our blessed saint to a new home in a holy land. We shall overcome our enemies, whoever they are, and we shall establish a new kingdom.” He was speaking in Danish, but his words were being translated into English by three or four folk. “This will happen,” he said, speaking more strongly now, “because my friend Abbot Eadred was given a dream sent by God and by the holy Saint Cuthbert, and when we leave here to cross the hills we shall go with God’s blessing and with Saint Cuthbert’s aid, and we shall make a better kingdom, a hallowed kingdom which will be guarded by the magic of Christianity.” Eadred frowned at the word magic, but did not protest. Guthred’s grasp of his new religion was still sketchy, but he was mostly saying what Eadred wanted to hear. “And we shall have a kingdom of justice!” Guthred said very loudly. “A kingdom in which all men will have faith in God and the king, but in which not every man worships the same god.” They were all listening now, listening closely, and J?nberht and Ida half reared as if to protest Guthred’s last proposal, but Guthred kept speaking, “and I will not be king of a land in which I force on men the customs of other men, and it is the custom of these men,” he gestured at Tekil and his companions, “to die with a sword in their hands, and so they shall. And God will have mercy on their souls.”
There was silence. Guthred turned to Eadred and spoke much lower. “There are some folk,” he said in English, “who do not think we can beat the Danes in a fight. So let them see it done now.”
Eadred stiffened, then forced himself to nod. “As you command, lord King,” he said.
And so the hazel branches were fetched.
The Danes understand the rules of a fight inside an area marked by stripped branches of hazel. It is a fight from which only one man can emerge alive, and if either man flees the hazel-marked space then he can be killed by anyone. He has become a nothing. Guthred wanted to fight Tekil himself, but I sensed he was only making the suggestion because it was expected of him and he did not really want to face a seasoned warrior. Besides, I was in no mood to be denied. “I’ll do them all,” I said, and he did not argue.
I am old now. So old. I lose count of how old sometimes, but it must be eighty years since my mother died giving birth to me, and few men live that long, and very few who stand in the shield wall live half that many years. I see folk watching me, expecting me to die, and doubtless I will oblige them soon. They drop their voices when they are near me in case they disturb me, and that is an annoyance for I do not hear as well as I did, and I do not see as well as I did, and I piss all night and my bones are stiff and my old wounds ache and each dusk, when I lie down, I make certain that Serpent-Breath or another of my swords is beside the bed so that I can grip the hilt if death comes for me. And in the darkness, as I listen to the sea beat on the sand and the wind fret at the thatch, I remember what it was like to be young and tall and strong and fast. And arrogant.
I was all those things. I was Uhtred, killer of Ubba, and in 878, the year that Alfred defeated Guthrum and the year in which Guthred came to the throne of Northumbria, I was just twenty-one and my name was known wherever men sharpened swords. I was a warrior. A sword warrior, and I was proud of it. Tekil knew it. He was good, he had fought a score of battles, but when he stepped across the hazel branch he knew he was dead.
I will not say I was not nervous. Men have looked at me on battle-fields across the island of Britain and they wondered that I had no fear, but of course I had fear. We all have fear. It crawls inside you like a beast, it claws at your guts, it weakens your muscles, it tries to loosen your bowels, and it wants you to cringe and weep, but fear must be thrust away and craft must be loosed, and savagery will see you through, and though many men have tried to kill me and so earn the boast that they killed Uhtred, so far that savagery has let me survive and now, I think, I am too old to die in battle and so will dribble away to nothingness instead. Wyrd bi ful ar?d, we say, and it is true. Fate is inexorable.
Tekil’s fate was to die. He fought with sword and shield, and I had given him back his mail and, so that no man would say I had an advantage over him, I fought without any armor at all. No shield either. I was arrogant, and I was conscious that Gisela was watching, and in my head I dedicated Tekil’s death to her. It took scarcely a moment, despite my limp. I have had that slight limp ever since the spear thrust into my right thigh at Ethandun, but the limp did not slow me. Tekil came at me in a rush, hoping to beat me down with his shield and then hack me with his sword, but I turned him neatly and then I kept moving. That is the secret of winning a sword fight. Keep moving. Dance. In the shield wall a man cannot move, only lunge and beat and hack and keep the shield high, but inside the hazel boughs litheness means life. Make the other man respond and keep him off balance, and Tekil was slow because he was in mail and I was unarmored, but even in armor I was fast and he had no chance of matching my speed. He came at me again, and I let him pass me by, then made his death swift. He was turning to face me, but I moved faster and Serpent-Breath took the back of his neck, just above the edge of his mail and, because he had no helmet, the blade broke through his spine and he collapsed in the dust. I killed him quickly and he went to the corpse-hall where one day he will greet me.
The crowd applauded. I think the Saxons among them might have preferred to see the prisoners burned or drowned or trampled by horses, but enough of them appreciated sword work and they clapped me. Gisela was grinning at me. Hild was not watching. She was at the edge of the crowd with Father Willibald. The two spent long hours talking and I knew it was Christian matters they discussed, but that was not my business.
The next two prisoners were terrified. Tekil had been their leader, and a man leads other men because he is the best fighter, and in Tekil’s sudden death they saw their own, and neither put up any real fight. Instead of attacking me they tried to defend themselves, and the second had enough skill to parry me again and again, until I lunged high, his shield went up and I kicked his ankle out from beneath him and the crowd cheered as he died.
That left Sihtric, the boy. The monks, who had wanted to hang these Danes, but who now took an unholy glee in their honorable deaths, pushed him into the hazel ring and I could see that Sihtric did not know how to hold the sword and that his shield was nothing but a burden. His death was a heartbeat away, no more trouble to me than swatting a fly. He knew that too and was weeping.
I needed eight heads. I had seven. I stared at the boy and he could not meet my gaze, but looked away instead and he saw the bloody scrapes in the earth where the first three bodies had been dragged away and he fell to his knees. The crowd jeered. The monks were shouting at me to kill him. Instead I waited to see what Sihtric would do and I saw him conquer his fear. I saw the effort he made to stop blubbering, to control his breath, to force his shaking legs to obey him so that he managed to stand. He hefted the shield, sniffed, then looked me in the eye. I gestured at his sword and he obediently raised it so that he would die like a man. There were bloody scabs on his forehead where I had hit him with the slave shackles.
“What was your mother’s name?” I asked him. He stared at me and seemed incapable of speaking. The
