pouch at her belt and, as Eadred chanted his words, she opened the pouch and took out a bundle of runesticks bound with a woolen thread. The sticks were slender and white. She looked at me as if to ask whether she should cast them and I nodded. She held them above the ground, closed her eyes, then let them go.
The sticks fell in their usual disarray. Gisela knelt beside them, her face sharply shadowed by the fire’s dying flames. She stared at the tangled sticks a long time, once or twice looking up at me, and then, quite suddenly, she began to cry. I touched her shoulder. “What is it?” I asked.
Then she screamed. She raised her head to the smoky rafters and wailed. “No!” she called, startling Eadred into silence, “no!” Hild came hurrying around the hearth and put an arm about the weeping girl, but Gisela tore herself free and stooped over the runesticks again. “No!” she shouted a third time.
“Gisela!” Her brother crouched beside her. “Gisela!”
She turned on him and slapped him once, slapped him hard about the face, and then she began gasping as if she could not find breath enough to live, and Guthred, his cheek red, scooped up the sticks.
“They are a pagan sorcery, lord,” Eadred said, “they are an abomination.”
“Take her away,” Guthred said to Hild, “take her to her hut,” and Hild pulled Gisela away, helped by two serving women who had been attracted by her wailing.
“The devil is punishing her for sorcery,” Eadred insisted.
“What did she see?” Guthred asked me.
“She didn’t say.”
He kept looking at me and I thought for a heartbeat that there were tears in his eyes, then he abruptly turned away and dropped the runesticks onto the fire. They crackled fiercely and a searing flame leaped toward the roof- tree, then they dulled into blackened squiggles. “What do you prefer,” Guthred asked me, “falcon or hawk?” I stared at him, puzzled. “When we hunt tomorrow,” he explained, “what do you prefer?”
“Falcon,” I said.
“Then tomorrow you can hunt with Swiftness,” he said, naming one of his birds.
“Gisela’s ill,” Hild told me later that night, “she has a fever. She shouldn’t have eaten meat.”
Next morning I bought a set of runesticks from one of Ulf’s men. They were black sticks, longer than the burned white ones, and I paid well for them. I took them to Gisela’s hut, but one of her women said Gisela was sick with a woman’s sickness and could not see me. I left the sticks for her. They told the future and I would have done better, much better, to have cast them myself. Instead I went hunting.
It was a hot day. There were still dark clouds heaped in the west, but they seemed to be no nearer, and the sun burned fiercely so that only the score of troops who rode to guard us wore mail. We did not expect to meet enemies. Guthred led us, and Ivarr and his son rode, and Ulf was there, and so were the two monks, J?nberht and Ida, who came to say prayers for the monks who had once been massacred at Gyruum. I did not tell them that I had been present at the massacre that had been the work of Ragnar the Elder. He had cause. The monks had murdered Danes and Ragnar had punished them, though these days the story is always told that the monks were innocently at prayer and died as spotless martyrs. In truth they were malevolent killers of women and children, but what chance does truth have when priests tell tales?
Guthred was feverishly happy that day. He talked incessantly, laughed at his own jests, and even tried to stir a smile on Ivarr’s skull face. Ivarr said little except to give his son advice on hawking. Guthred had given me his falcon to fly, but at first we rode through wooded country where a falcon could not hunt, so his goshawk had an advantage and brought down two rooks among the branches. He whooped with each kill. It was not till we reached the open ground by the river that my falcon could fly high and stoop fast to strike at a duck, but the falcon missed and the duck flew into the safety of a grove of alders. “Not your lucky day,” Guthred told me.
“We might all be unlucky soon,” I said, and pointed westward to where the clouds were gathering. “There’s going to be a storm.”
“Maybe tonight,” he said dismissively, “but not till after dark.” He had given his goshawk to a servant and I handed the falcon to another. The river was on our left now and the scorched stone buildings of Gyruum’s monastery were ahead, built on the riverbank where the ground rose above the long salt-marshes. It was low tide and wicker fish traps stretched into the river that met the sea a short distance eastward.
“Gisela has a fever,” Guthred told me.
“I heard.”
“Eadred says he’ll touch her with the cloth that covers Cuthbert’s face. He says it will cure her.”
“I hope it does,” I said dutifully. Ahead of us Ivarr and his son rode with a dozen of their followers in mail. If they turned now, I thought, they could slaughter Guthred and me, so I leaned over and checked his horse so that Ulf and his men could catch up with us.
Guthred let me do that, but was amused. “He’s no enemy, Uhtred.”
“One day,” I said, “you will have to kill him. On that day, lord, you’ll be safe.”
“I’m not safe now?”
“You have a small army, an untrained army,” I said, “and Ivarr will raise men again. He’ll hire sword-Danes, shield-Danes and spear-Danes until he is lord of Northumbria again. He’s weak now, but he won’t always be weak. That’s why he wants Dunholm, because it will make him strong again.”
“I know,” Guthred said patiently. “I know all that.”
“And if you marry Gisela to Ivarr’s son,” I said, “how many men will that bring you?”
He looked at me sharply. “How many men can you bring me?” he asked, but did not wait for my answer. Instead he put spurs to his horse and hurried up the slope to the ruined monastery that Kjartan’s men had used as their hall. They had made a thatched roof between the stone walls, and beneath it was a hearth and a dozen sleeping platforms. The men who had lived here must have gone back to Dunholm before we ever crossed the river on our way north for the hall had long been deserted. The hearth was cold. Beyond the hill, in the wide valley between the monastery and the old Roman fort on its headland, were slave pens that were just wattle hurdles staked into enclosures. All were deserted. Some folk lived up at the old fort and they tended a high beacon which they were supposed to light if raiders came to the river. I doubted if the beacon was ever used for no Dane would raid Kjartan’s land, but there was a single ship beneath the beacon’s hill, anchored where the River Tine made its turn toward the sea. “We’ll see what business he has,” Guthred said grimly, as if he resented the ship’s presence, then he ordered his household troops to pull down the wattle fences and burn them with the thatch roof. “Burn it all!” he ordered. He watched as the work began, then grinned at me. “Shall we see what ship that is?”
“It’s a trader,” I said. It was a Danish ship, for no other kind sailed this coast, but she was plainly no warship for her hull was shorter and her beam wider than any warrior’s boat.
“Then let’s tell him there’s no trade here any more,” Guthred said, “at least none in slaves.”
He and I rode eastward. A dozen men came with us. Ulf was one, Ivarr and his son came too, and tagging behind them was J?nberht who kept urging Guthred to start rebuilding the monastery.
“We must finish Saint Cuthbert’s church first,” Guthred told J?nberht.
“But the house here must be remade,” J?nberht insisted, “it’s a sacred place. The most holy and blessed Bede lived here.”
“It will be rebuilt,” Guthred promised, then he curbed his horse beside a stone cross that had been toppled from its pedestal and now lay half buried in the soil and overgrown with grass and weeds. It was a fine piece of carving, writhing with beasts, plants, and saints. “And this cross shall stand again,” he said and then looked around the wide river bend. “A good place,” he said.
“It is,” I agreed.
“If the monks come back,” he said, “then we can make it prosperous again. Fish, salt, crops, cattle. How does Alfred raise money?”
“Taxes,” I said.
“He taxes the church too?”
“He doesn’t like taxing the church,” I said, “but he does when things are hard. They have to pay to be protected, after all.”
“He mints his own money?”
“Yes, lord.”
He laughed. “It’s complicated, being a king. Maybe I should visit Alfred. Ask his advice.”
“He’d like that,” I said.
