priests and monks and I would have exchanged every one of them for more horses or more warriors. Of the three hundred and eighteen men I doubted that even a hundred were worth putting in a shield wall. In truth we were not an army, but a rabble.
The monks chanted as they walked. I suppose they chanted in Latin, for I did not understand the words. They had draped Saint Cuthbert’s coffin with a fine green cloth embroidered with crosses and that morning a raven had spattered the cloth with shit. At first I took this to be a bad omen, then decided that as the raven was Odin’s bird he was merely showing his displeasure with the dead Christian and so I applauded the god’s joke, thus getting a malignant look from Brothers Ida and J?nberht.
“What do we do,” Hild asked me, “if we get to Eoferwic and find that Ivarr has returned?”
“We run away, of course.”
She laughed. “You’re happy, aren’t you?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m away from Alfred,” I said, and I realized that was true.
“Alfred is a good man,” Hild chided me.
“He is,” I answered, “but do you ever look forward to his company? Do you brew special ale for him? Do you remember a joke to tell him? Does anyone ever sit by a fire and try him with riddles? Do we sing with him? All he ever does is worry about what his god wants, and he makes rules to please his god, and if you do something for him it’s never enough because his wretched god just wants more.”
Hild gave me her customary patient smile when I insulted her god. “Alfred wants you back,” she said.
“He wants my sword,” I said, “not me.”
“Will you go back?”
“No,” I said firmly, and I tried to see into the future to test that answer, but I did not know what the spinners who make our fate planned for me. Somehow, with this rabble of men, I hoped to destroy Kjartan and capture Bebbanburg, and hard sense told me it could not be done, but hard sense would never have imagined that a freed slave would be accepted as king by Saxon and Dane alike.
“You’ll never go back?” Hild asked, skeptical of my first answer.
“Never,” I said, and I could hear the spinners laughing at me and I feared that fate had tied me to Alfred and I resented that because it suggested I was not my own master. Perhaps I was mistletoe too, except I had a duty. I had a bloodfeud to finish.
We followed the Roman roads across the hills. It took us five days, slow going, but we could go no faster than the monks carrying the saint’s corpse on their shoulders. Every night they said prayers, and every day new folk joined us so that as we marched on the last day across the flat plain toward Eoferwic we numbered close to five hundred men. Ulf, who now called himself Earl Ulf, led the march under his banner of an eagle’s head. He had come to like Guthred, and Ulf and I were the king’s closest advisers. Eadred was also close, of course, but Eadred had little to say about matters of war. Like most churchmen he assumed his god would bring us victory, and that was all he had to contribute. Ulf and I, on the other hand, had plenty to say and the gist of it was that five hundred half- trained men were not nearly enough to capture Eoferwic if Egbert had a mind to defend it.
But Egbert was in despair. There is a tale in a Christian holy book about a king who saw some writing on the wall. I have heard the story a few times, but cannot remember the details, except that it was a king and there were words on his wall and they frightened him. I think the Christian god wrote the words, but I am not even sure about that. I could send for my wife’s priest, for I allow her to employ such a creature these days, and I could ask him for the details, but he would only grovel at my feet and beg that I increase his family’s allowance of fish, ale, and firewood, which I do not wish to do, so the details do not matter now. There was a king, his wall had words on it and they frightened him.
It was Willibald who put that story into my head. He was crying as we entered the city, crying tears of joy, and when he learned that Egbert would not resist us, he began shouting that the king had seen the writing on the wall. Over and over he shouted it, and it made no sense to me at the time, but now I know what he meant. He meant that Egbert knew he had lost before he had even begun to fight.
Eoferwic had been expecting Ivarr’s return and many of its citizens, fearing the Dane’s revenge, had left. Egbert had a bodyguard, of course, but most had deserted him so that now his household troops only numbered twenty-eight men and not one of them wanted to die for a king with writing on his wall, and the remaining citizens were in no mood to barricade the gates or man the wall, and so Guthred’s army marched in without meeting any resistance. We were welcomed. I think the folk of Eoferwic thought we had come to defend them against Ivarr rather than take the crown from Egbert, but even when they learned that they had a new king they seemed happy enough. What cheered them most, of course, was the presence of Saint Cuthbert, and Eadred propped the saint’s coffin in the archbishop’s church, opened the lid, and the folk crowded in to see the dead man and say prayers to him.
Wulfhere, the archbishop, was not in the city, but Father Hrothweard was still there and still preaching madness, and he sided instantly with Eadred. I suppose he had seen the writing on the wall too, but the only writing I saw were crosses scratched on doorways. These were supposed to indicate that Christians lived inside, but most of the surviving Danes also displayed the cross as a protection against plunderers, and Guthred’s men wanted plunder. Eadred had promised them lascivious women and heaps of silver, but now the abbot strove mightily to protect the city’s Christians from Guthred’s Danes. There was some trouble, but not much. Folk had the good sense to offer coins, food, and ale rather than be robbed, and Guthred discovered chests of silver inside the palace and he distributed the money to his army and there was plenty of ale in the taverns, so for the moment the men of Cumbraland were happy enough.
“What would Alfred do?” Guthred asked me on that first evening in Eoferwic. It was a question I was getting used to, for somehow Guthred had convinced himself that Alfred was a king worth emulating. This time he asked me the question about Egbert who had been discovered in his bedchamber. Egbert had been dragged to the big hall where he went on his knees to Guthred and swore fealty. It was a strange sight, one king kneeling to another, and the old Roman hall lit by braziers that filled the upper part with smoke, and behind Egbert were his courtiers and servants who also knelt and shuffled forward to promise loyalty to Guthred. Egbert looked old, ill, and unhappy while Guthred was a shining young monarch. I had found Egbert’s mail and given it to Guthred who wore the armor because it made him look regal. He was cheerful with the deposed king, raising him from his knees and kissing him on both cheeks, then courteously inviting him to sit beside him.
“Kill the old bastard,” Ulf said.
“I am minded to be merciful,” Guthred said regally.
“You’re minded to be an idiot,” Ulf retorted. He was in a gloomy mood for Eoferwic had not yielded a quarter of the plunder he had expected, but he had found twin girls who pleased him and they kept him from making too many complaints.
When the ceremonies were over, and after Eadred had bellowed an interminable prayer, Guthred walked with me through the city. I think he wanted to show off his new armor, or perhaps he just wanted to clear his head from the smoke fumes in the palace. He drank ale in every tavern, joking with his men in English and Danish, and he kissed at least fifty girls, but then he led me on to the ramparts and we walked for a time in silence until we came to the city’s eastern side where I stopped and looked across the field to where the river lay like a sheet of beaten silver under a half-moon. “This is where my father died,” I said.
“Sword in hand?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” he said, forgetting for a moment that he was a Christian. “But a sad day for you.”
“It was a good day,” I said, “I met Earl Ragnar. And I never much liked my father.”
“You didn’t?” he sounded surprised. “Why not?”
“He was a grim beast,” I said. “Men wanted his approval, and it was grudging.”
“Like you, then,” he said, and it was my turn to be surprised.
“Me?”
“My grim Uhtred,” he said, “all anger and threat. So tell me what I do about Egbert?”
“What Ulf suggests,” I said, “of course.”
“Ulf would kill everyone,” Guthred said, “because then he’d have no problems. What would Alfred do?”
“It doesn’t matter what Alfred would do.”
