Lords of the North

course.” Brida was his woman.

“He kept her?”

“As a hostage for me, I suppose. But he’ll release her and I shall raise money and I shall assemble men and then I shall scrape Dunholm off the face of the earth.”

“You have no money?”

“Not enough.”

So I told him about Sverri’s home in Jutland and how there was money there, or at least we believed there was money there, and Ragnar thought about that and I thought about Alfred.

Alfred did not like me. He had never liked me. At times he hated me, but I had done him service. I had done him great service, and he had been less than generous in rewarding that service. Five hides, he had given me, while I had given him a kingdom. Yet now I owed my freedom to him, and I did not understand why he had done it. Except, of course, that Hild had given him a house of prayer, and he would have wanted that, and he would have welcomed her repentance, and both those things made a twisted kind of sense. Yet he had still rescued me. He had reached out and plucked me from slavery and I decided he was generous after all. But I also knew there would be a price to pay. Alfred would want more than Hild’s soul and a new convent. He would want me. “I hoped I’d never see Wessex again,” I said.

“Well you’re going to see it,” Ragnar said, “because I swore to take you back. Besides, we can’t stay here.”

“No,” I agreed.

“Kjartan will have a hundred men here in the morning,” Ragnar said.

“Two hundred,” I said.

“So we must go,” he said, then looked wistful. “There’s a hoard in Jutland?”

“A great hoard,” Finan said.

“We think it’s buried in a reed hut,” I added, “and guarded by a woman and three children.”

Ragnar stared through the door to where a few sparks of fire showed among the hovels built by the old Roman fort. “I can’t go to Jutland,” he said softly. “I swore an oath that I would take you back as soon as I found you.”

“So someone else can go,” I suggested. “You have two ships now. And Sverri will reveal where his hoard is if he’s frightened enough.”

So next morning Ragnar ordered his twelve Danes to take Trader across the sea. The command of the ship was given to Rollo, Ragnar’s best steersman, and Finan begged to go with Rollo’s crew, and the Scottish girl Ethne went with Finan who now wore mail and a helmet and had a long sword buckled at his waist. Sverri was chained to one of Trader’s oar-benches and, as she left the shore, I saw Finan whipping him with the lash that had scarred our backs for so many months.

Trader left and we then carried the Scottish slaves across the river in the red ship and released them on the northern bank. They were frightened and did not know what to do, so we gave them a handful of the coins we had taken from Sverri’s strongbox and told them to keep walking with the sea always on their right hand and, with a little luck, they might reach home. They would more likely be captured by Bebbanburg’s garrison and sold back into slavery, but we could not help that. We left them, pushed the red ship away from the shore, and turned for the sea.

Behind us, where Gyruum’s hilltop smoked from the remnants of our fires, horsemen in mail and helmets appeared. They lined the crest, and a column of them galloped across the salt-marsh to clatter onto the shingle bank, but they were much too late. We were riding the ebb-tide toward the open sea and I looked behind and saw Kjartan’s men and I knew I would see them again and then the Dragon-Fire rounded the river’s bend and the oars bit the water and the sun glittered like sharpened spear-points on the small waves and an osprey flew overhead and I raised my eyes to the wind and wept.

Pure tears of joy.

It took us three weeks to voyage to Lundene where we paid silver to the Danes who exacted a toll from every ship that rowed upriver, and then it was another two days to Readingum where we beached Dragon-Fire and purchased horses with Sverri’s money. It was autumn in Wessex, a time of mists and fallow fields. The peregrine falcons had returned from wherever they voyage in the high sky during the summer months and the oak leaves were turning a wind-shivered bronze.

We rode to Wintanceaster for we were told that was where Alfred was holding court, but the day we arrived he had ridden to one of his estates and was not expected to return that night and so, as the sun lowered over the scaffolding of the big church Alfred was building, I left Ragnar in the Two Cranes tavern and walked to the northern edge of the town. I had to ask directions and was pointed down a long alley that was choked with muddy ruts. Two pigs rooted in the alley that was bordered on one side by the town’s high palisade and on the other by a wooden wall in which there was a low door marked by a cross. A score of beggars were crouched in the mud and dung outside the door. They were in rags. Some had lost arms or legs, most were covered in sores, while a blind woman held a scarred child. They all shuffled nervously aside as I approached.

I knocked and waited. I was about to knock again when a small hatch was slid aside in the door and I explained my business, then the hatch snapped shut and I waited again. The scarred child cried and the blind woman held a begging bowl toward me. A cat walked along the wall’s top and a cloud of starlings flew westward. Two women with huge loads of firewood strapped on their backs passed me and behind them a man drove a cow. He bobbed his head in deference to me for I looked like a lord again. I was dressed in leather and had a sword at my side, though the sword was not Serpent-Breath. My black cloak was held at my throat with a heavy brooch of silver and amber that I had taken from one of Sverri’s dead crewmen, and that brooch was my only jewel for I had no arm rings.

Then the low door was unbolted and pulled inward on its leather hinges and a small woman beckoned me inside. I ducked through, she closed the door and led me across a patch of grass, pausing there to let me scrape the street dung off my boots before taking me to a church. She ushered me inside, then paused again to genuflect toward the altar. She muttered a prayer, then gestured that I should go through another door into a bare room with walls made of mud and wattle. Two stools were the only furniture and she told me I might sit on one of them, and then she opened a shutter so that the late sun could illuminate the room. A mouse scuttled in the floor rushes and the small woman tutted and then left me alone.

I waited again. A rook cawed on the roof. From some place nearby I could hear the rhythmic squirt of milk going into a pail. Another cow, its udder full, waited patiently just beyond the open shutter. The rook cawed again and then the door opened and three nuns came into the room. Two of them stood against the far wall, while the third just gazed at me and began to weep silently. “Hild,” I said, and I stood to embrace her, but she held a hand out to keep me from touching her. She went on weeping, but she was smiling too, and then she put both her hands over her face and stayed that way for a long while.

“God has forgiven me,” she finally spoke through her fingers.

“I am glad of it,” I said.

She sniffed, took her hands from her face and indicated that I should sit again, and she sat opposite me and for a time we just looked at each other and I thought how I had missed her, not as a lover, but as a friend. I wanted to embrace her, and perhaps she sensed that for she sat straighter and spoke very formally. “I am now the Abbess Hildegyth,” she said.

“I had forgotten your proper name is Hildegyth,” I said.

“And it does my heart good to see you,” she said primly. She was dressed in a coarse gray robe that matched the gowns of her two companions, both of whom were older women. The robes were belted with hemp-rope and had heavy hoods hiding their hair. A plain wooden cross hung at Hild’s neck and she fingered it compulsively. “I have prayed for you,” she went on.

“It seems your prayers worked,” I said awkwardly.

“And I stole all your money,” she said with a touch of her old mischief.

“I give it to you,” I said, “willingly.”

She told me about the nunnery. She had built it with the money from Fifhaden’s hoard and now it housed sixteen sisters and eight laywomen. “Our lives,” she said, “are dedicated to Christ and to Saint Hedda. You know who Hedda was?”