see if you capture Dunholm. She says she’s prayed for that and it will be a sign from her god if you succeed.”
“She said that?”
“She said it would be a sign that she must go back to her convent. She told me that tonight.”
I suspected that was true. I stroked Gisela’s face. “Then we should wait till after Dunholm is taken,” I said, and it was not what I wanted to say.
“My brother says I have to be a peace cow,” she said bitterly. A peace cow was a woman married to a rival family in an attempt to bring friendship, and doubtless Guthred had in mind Ivarr’s son or else a Scottish husband. “But I won’t be a peace cow,” she said harshly. “I cast the runesticks and learned my fate.”
“What did you learn?”
“I am to have two sons and a daughter.”
“Good,” I said.
“They will be your sons,” she said defiantly, “and your daughter.”
For a moment I did not speak. The night suddenly seemed fragile. “The runesticks told you that?” I managed to say after a few heartbeats.
“They have never lied,” she said calmly. “When Guthred was taken captive the runesticks told me he would come back, and they told me my husband would arrive with him. And you came.”
“But he wants you to be a peace cow,” I said.
“Then you must carry me off,” she said, “in the old way.” The old Danish way of taking a bride was to kidnap her, to raid her household and snatch her from her family and carry her off to marriage. It is still done occasionally, but in these softer days the raid usually follows formal negotiations and the bride has time to pack her belongings before the horsemen come.
“I will carry you off,” I promised her, and I knew I was making trouble, and that Hild had done nothing to deserve the trouble, and that Guthred would feel betrayed, but even so I tipped Gisela’s face up and kissed her.
She clung to me and then the shouting started. I held Gisela tight and listened. The shouts were from the camp and I could see, through the trees, folk running past fires toward the road. “Trouble,” I said, and I seized her hand and ran with her to the monastery where Clapa and the guards had drawn swords. I pushed Gisela toward the door and drew Serpent-Breath.
But there was no trouble. Not for us. The newcomers, attracted by the light of our campfires, were three men, one of them badly wounded, and they brought news. Within an hour the monastery’s small church blazed with fire and the priests and monks were singing God’s praises, and the message the three men had brought from the north went all through our camp so that newly-woken folk came to the monastery to hear the news again and to be assured that it was true.
“God works miracles!” Hrothweard shouted at the crowd. He had used a ladder to climb onto the monastery roof. It was dark, but some people had brought flaming torches and in their light Hrothweard looked huge. He raised his arms so that the crowd fell silent. He let them wait as he stared down at their upturned faces, and from behind him came the solemn chanting of the monks, and somewhere in the night an owl called, and Hrothweard clenched his fists and reached higher still as though he could touch heaven in the moonlight. “Ivarr is defeated!” he finally shouted. “Praise God and the saints, the tyrant Ivarr Ivarson is defeated! He has lost his army!”
And the people of Haliwerfolkland, who had feared to fight the mighty Ivarr, cheered themselves hoarse because the biggest obstacle to Guthred’s rule in Northumbria had been swept away. He could truly call himself king at last and so he was. King Guthred.
FOUR
There had been a battle, we heard, a slaughter battle, a fight of horror in which a dale had reeked of blood, and Ivarr Ivarson, the most powerful Dane of Northumbria, had been defeated by Aed of Scotland.
The killing on both sides had been awesome. We heard more about the fight next morning when nearly sixty new survivors arrived. They had traveled in a band large enough to be spared Kjartan’s attention, and they were still reeling from the butcher’s work they had endured. Ivarr, we learned, had been lured across a river and into a valley where he believed Aed had taken refuge, but it was a trap. The hills on either side of the valley were thick with tribesmen who came howling through the mist and heather to hack into the Danish shield walls. “There were thousands of them,” one man said and he was still shaking as he spoke.
Ivarr’s shield wall held, but I could imagine the ferocity of that battle. My father had fought the Scots many times and he had always described them as devils. Mad devils, he said, sword devils, howling devils, and Ivarr’s Danes told us how they had rallied from that first assault, and used sword and spear to cut the devils down, and still the shrieking hordes came, climbing over their own dead, their wild hair red with blood, their swords hissing, and Ivarr tried to climb north out of the dale to reach the high ground. That meant cutting and slashing a path through flesh, and he failed. Aed had then led his household troops against Ivarr’s best men and the shields clashed and the blades rang and one by one the warriors died. Ivarr, the survivors said, fought like a fiend, but he took a sword thrust to the chest and a spear cut in his leg and his household troops dragged him back from the shield wall. He raved at them, demanding to die in the face of his enemies, but his men held him back and fought off the devils and by then night was falling.
The rearmost part of the Danish column still held, and the survivors, almost all of them bleeding, dragged their leader south toward the river. Ivarr’s son, Ivar, just sixteen years old, assembled the least wounded warriors and they made a charge and broke through the encircling Scots, but scores more died as they tried to cross the river in the dark. Some, weighed down by their mail, drowned. Others were butchered in the shallows, but perhaps a sixth of Ivarr’s army made it through the water and they huddled on the southern bank where they listened to the cries of the dying and the howling of the Scots. In the dawn they made a shield wall, expecting the Scots to cross the river and complete the slaughter, but Aed’s men were almost as bloodied and wearied as the defeated Danes. “We killed hundreds,” a man said bleakly, and later we heard that was true and that Aed had limped back north to lick his wounds.
Earl Ivarr lived. He was wounded, but he lived. He was said to be hiding in the hills, fearful of being captured by Kjartan, and Guthred sent a hundred horsemen north to find him and they discovered that Kjartan’s troops were also scouring the hills. Ivarr must have known he would be found, and he preferred being Guthred’s captive to being Kjartan’s prisoner, and so he surrendered to a troop of Ulf’s men who brought the injured earl back to our camp just after midday. Ivarr could not ride a horse so he was being carried on a shield. He was accompanied by his son, Ivar, and by thirty other survivors, some of them as badly wounded as their leader, but when Ivarr realized he must confront the man who had usurped Northumbria’s throne he insisted that he did so on his own two feet. He walked. I do not know how he did it for he must have been in agony, but he forced himself to limp and every few steps he paused to lean on the spear he used as a crutch. I could see the pain, but I could also see the pride that would not let him be carried into Guthred’s presence.
So he walked to us. He flinched with every step, but he was defiant and angry. I had never met him before because he had been raised in Ireland, but he looked just like his father. He had Ivar the Boneless’s skeletal appearance. He had the same skull-like face with its sunken eyes, the same yellow hair drawn back to the nape of his neck and the same sullen malevolence. He had the same power.
Guthred waited at the monastery entrance and his household troops made two lines through which Ivarr had to walk. Guthred was flanked by his chief men and attended by Abbot Eadred, Father Hrothweard and all the other churchmen. When Ivarr was a dozen paces away he stopped, leaned on the spear and gave us all a scathing look. He mistook me for the king, perhaps because my mail and helmet were so much finer than Guthred’s. “Are you the boy who calls himself king?” he demanded.
“I’m the boy who killed Ubba Lothbrokson,” I answered. Ubba had been Ivarr’s uncle, and the taunt made Ivarr jerk up his face and I saw a strange green glint in his eyes. They were serpent’s eyes in a skull face. He might have been wounded and he might have had his power broken, but all he wanted at that moment was to kill me.
“And you are?” he demanded of me.
“You know who I am,” I said scornfully. Arrogance is all in a young warrior.
Guthred gripped my arm as if to tell me to be quiet, then stepped forward. “Lord Ivarr,” he said, “I am sorry to see you wounded.”
