“Sixty?” Guthred asked.
“Sixty men could defend a wall here,” I said. The great mass of rock on which Dunholm stood was shaped like a pear, its lower narrow end forming the neck of land from where we stared at the high walls. The river ran to our right, swept about the great bulge of stone, then reappeared to our left, and just here the distance between the river banks was a little less than three hundred paces. It would take us a week to clear those three hundred paces of trees, and another week to dig a ditch and throw up a palisade, and a third week to strengthen that palisade so that sixty men would be sufficient to defend it. The neck was not a flat strip of land, but an uneven hump of rock, so the palisade would have to climb across the hump. Sixty men could never defend three hundred paces of wall, but much of the neck was impassable because of stone bluffs where no attack could ever come, so in truth the sixty would only have to defend the palisade in three or four places.
“Sixty,” Ivarr had been silent, but now spat that word like a curse. “You’ll need more than sixty. The men will have to be relieved at night. Other men have to fetch water, herd cattle, and patrol the river’s bank. Sixty men might hold the wall, but you’ll need two hundred more to hold those sixty men in place.” He gave me a scathing look. He was right, of course. And if two to three hundred men were occupied at Dunholm, then that was two to three hundred men who could not guard Eoferwic or patrol the frontiers or grow crops.
“But a wall here,” Guthred said, “would defeat Dunholm.”
“It would,” Ivarr agreed, though he sounded dubious.
“So I just need men,” Guthred said. “I need more men.”
I walked Witnere to the east as if I were exploring where the wall might be made. I could see men on Dunholm’s high gate watching us. “Maybe it won’t take a year,” I called back to Guthred. “Come and look at this.”
He urged his horse toward me and I thought I had never seen him so out of spirits. Till now everything had come easily to Guthred, the throne, Eoferwic, and Ivarr’s homage, but Dunholm was a great raw block of brute power that defied his optimism. “What are you showing me?” he asked, puzzled that I had brought him away from the path.
I glanced back, making sure that Ivarr and his son were out of earshot, then I pointed to the river as if I were discussing the lie of the land. “We can capture Dunholm,” I told Guthred quietly, “but I won’t help you if you give it as a reward to Ivarr.” He bridled at that, then I saw a flicker of guile on his face and knew he was tempted to deny he had ever considered giving Dunholm to Ivarr. “Ivarr is weak,” I told him, “and so long as Ivarr is weak he will be your friend. Strengthen him and you make an enemy.”
“What use is a weak friend?” he asked.
“More use than a strong enemy, lord.”
“Ivarr doesn’t want to be king,” he said, “so why should he be my enemy?”
“What Ivarr wants,” I said, “is to control the king like a puppy on his leash. Is that what you want? To be Ivarr’s puppy?”
He stared up at the high gate. “Someone has to hold Dunholm,” he said weakly.
“Then give it to me,” I said, “because I’m your friend. Do you doubt that?”
“No, Uhtred,” he said, “I do not doubt it.” He reached over and touched my elbow. Ivarr was watching us with his snake-like eyes. “I have made no promises,” Guthred went on, but he looked troubled as he said it. Then he forced a smile. “Can you capture the place?”
“I think we can get Kjartan out of there, lord.”
“How?” he asked.
“I work sorcery tonight, lord,” I told him, “and tomorrow you talk with him. Tell him that if he stays here then you will destroy him. Tell him you’ll start by firing his steadings and burning his slave pens at Gyruum. Promise that you’ll impoverish him. Let Kjartan understand that nothing but death, fire, and misery wait for him so long as he stays here. Then you offer him a way out. Let him go across the seas.” That was not what I wanted, I wanted Kjartan the Cruel writhing under Serpent-Breath, but my revenge was not so important as getting Kjartan out of Dunholm.
“So work your sorcery,” Guthred told me.
“And if it works, lord, you promise you won’t give the place to Ivarr?”
He hesitated, then held his hand to me. “If it works, my friend,” he said, “then I promise I will give it to you.”
“Thank you, lord,” I said, and Guthred rewarded me with his infectious smile.
Kjartan’s watching men must have been puzzled when we rode away late in the afternoon. We did not go far, but made a camp on a hillside north of the fortress and we lit fires to let Kjartan know that we were still close. Then, in the darkness, I rode back to Dunholm with Sihtric. I went to work my sorcery, to scare Kjartan, and to do that I needed to be a sceadugengan, a shadow-walker. The sceadugengan walk at night, when honest men fear to leave their houses. The night is when strange things stalk the earth, when shape-shifters, ghosts, wild men, elves, and beasts roam the land.
But I had ever been comfortable with the night. From a child I had practiced shadow-walking until I had become one of the creatures men fear, and that night I took Sihtric up the path toward Dunholm’s high gate. Sihtric led our horses and they, like him, were scared. I had trouble keeping to the path for the moon was hidden by newly arrived clouds, so I felt my way, using Serpent-Breath as a stick to find bushes and rocks. We went slowly with Sihtric holding onto my cloak so that he did not lose me. It became easier as we went higher, for there were fires inside the fortress and the glow of their flames above the palisade acted as a beacon. I could see the shadowed outlines of sentries on the high gate, but they could not see us as we reached a shelf of land where the path dropped a few feet before climbing the last long stretch to the gate. The whole slope between the brief shelf and the palisade had been cleared of trees so that no enemy could creep unseen to the defenses and attempt a sudden assault.
“Stay here,” I told Sihtric. I needed him to guard the horses and to carry my shield, helmet, and the bag of severed heads which I now took from him. I told him to hide behind the trees and wait there.
I placed the heads on the path, the closest less than fifty paces from the gate, the last very near to the trees which grew at the lip of the shelf. I could feel maggots squirming under my hands as I lifted the heads from the sack. I made the dead eyes look toward the fortress, positioning the rotting skulls by feel so that my hands were slimy when at last I was finished. No one heard me, no one saw me. The dark wrapped about me and the wind sighed across the hill and the river ran noisily over the rocks below. I found Sihtric, who was shivering, and he gave me the black scarf that I wrapped about my face, knotting it at the nape of my neck, and then I forced my helmet over the linen and took my shield. Then I waited.
The light comes slowly in a clouded dawn. First there is just a shiver of grayness that touches the sky’s eastern rim, and for a time there is neither light nor dark, nor any shadows, just the cold gray filling the world as the bats, the shadow-fliers, skitter home. The trees turn black as the sky pales the horizon, and then the first sunlight skims the world with color. Birds sang. Not as many as sing in spring and early summer, but I could hear wrens, chiff-chaffs, and robins greeting the day’s coming, and below me in the trees a woodpecker rattled at a trunk. The black trees were dark green now and I could see the bright red berries of a rowan bush not far away. And it was then that the guards saw the heads. I heard them shout, saw more men come to the rampart, and I waited. The banner was raised over the high gate, and still more men came to the wall and then the gate opened and two men crept out. The gate closed behind them and I heard a dull thud as its great locking bar was dropped into place. The two men looked hesitant. I was hidden in the trees, Serpent-Breath drawn, my cheek-pieces open so that the black linen filled the space between the helmet’s edges. I wore a black cloak over my mail that Hild had brightened by scrubbing it with river-sand. I wore high black boots. I was the dead swordsman again and I watched as the two men came cautiously down the path toward the line of heads. They reached the first blood-matted head and one of them shouted up to the fortress that it was one of Tekil’s men. Then he asked what he should do.
Kjartan answered. I was sure it was him, though I could not see his face, but his voice was a roar. “Kick them away!” he shouted, and the two men obeyed, kicking the heads off the path so that they rolled down into the long grass where the trees had been felled.
They came closer until there was only one of the seven heads left and, just as they reached it, I stepped from the trees.
They saw a shadow-faced warrior, gleaming and tall, with sword and shield in hand. They saw the dead swordsman, and I just stood there, ten paces from them, and I did not move and I did not speak, and they gazed at
