against Guthred’s return, and though Guthred made a great fuss of the girl I sensed that he had no great regrets at leaving her. Osburh was an anxious woman, as prone to tears as my wife Mildrith and, also like Mildrith, a great lover of priests. Hrothweard was her confessor and I supposed that she preached the wild man’s message in Guthred’s bed. Guthred assured her that no roving Danes would come near Cetreht once we had left, but he could not be certain of that. There was always a chance that we would return to find them all slaughtered or taken prisoner, but if we stood any hope of taking Dunholm then we had to move fast.
Was there any hope? Dunholm was a place where a man could grow old and defy his enemies in safety. And we were fewer than two hundred men, along with a score of women who insisted on coming. Gisela was one of those, and she, like the other women, wore breeches and a leather jerkin. Father Beocca also joined us. I told him he could not ride fast enough and that, if he fell behind, we would abandon him, but he would not hear of staying in Cetreht. “As ambassador,” he announced grandly, “my place is with Guthred.”
“Your place is with the other priests,” I said.
“I shall come,” he said stubbornly and would not be dissuaded. He made us tie his legs to his saddle-girth so he could not fall off and then he endured the hard pace. He was in agony, but he never complained. I suspect he really wanted to see the excitement. He might have been a squint-eyed cripple and a club-footed priest and an ink- spattered clerk and a pedantic scholar, but Beocca had the heart of a warrior.
We left Cetreht in a misted late autumn dawn that was laced with rain, and Kjartan’s remaining riders, who had returned to the river’s northern bank, closed in behind us. There were eighteen of them now, and we let them follow us and, to confuse them, we did not stay on the Roman road which led straight across the flatter land toward Dunholm, but after a few miles turned north and west onto a smaller track which climbed into gentle hills. The sun broke through the clouds before midday, but it was low in the sky so that the shadows were long. Redwings flocked beneath the falcon-haunted clouds. This was the time of year that men culled their livestock. Cattle were being pole-axed, and pigs, fattened on the autumn’s plentiful acorns, were being slaughtered so their meat could be salted into barrels or hung to dry over smoky fires. The tanning pits stank of dung and urine. The sheep were coming down from the high pastures to be folded close to steadings, while in the valleys the trees rang with the noise of axes as men lay in their winter supply of firewood.
The few villages we passed were empty. Folk must have been warned that horsemen were coming and so they fled before we arrived. They hid in woodlands till we were past, and prayed we did not stay to plunder. We rode on, still climbing, and I had no doubt that the men following us would have sent messengers up the Roman road to tell Kjartan that we were slanting to the west in an attempt to circle Dunholm. Kjartan had to believe that Guthred was making a desperate attempt to reach Bebbanburg, and if we deceived him into that belief then I hoped he would send yet more men out of the fortress, men who would bar the crossings of the Wiire in the western hills.
We spent that night in those hills. It rained again. We had some small shelter from a wood which grew on a south-facing slope and there was a shepherd’s hut where the women could sleep, but the rest of us crouched about fires. I knew Kjartan’s scouts were watching us from across the valley, but I hoped they were now convinced we were going west. The rain hissed in the fire as Ragnar, Guthred, and I talked with Sihtric, making him remember everything about the place where he had been raised. I doubt I learned anything new. Sihtric had told me all he knew long before and I had often thought of it as I rowed Sverri’s boat, but I listened again as he explained that Dunholm’s palisade went clear around the crag’s summit and was broken only at the southern end where the rock was too steep for a man to climb. The water came from a well on the eastern side. “The well is outside the palisade,” he told us, “down the slope a bit.”
“But the well has its own wall?”
“Yes, lord.”
“How steep a slope?” Ragnar asked.
“Very steep, lord,” Sihtric said. “I remember a boy falling down there and he hit his head on a tree and became stupid. And there’s a second well to the west,” he added, “but that’s not used much. The water’s murky.”
“So he’s got food and water,” Guthred said bitterly.
“We can’t besiege him,” I said, “we don’t have the men. The eastern well,” I turned back to Sihtric, “is among trees. How many?”
“Thick trees, lord,” he said, “hornbeams and sycamore.”
“And there has to be a gate in the palisade to let men reach the well?”
“To let women go there, lord, yes.”
“Can the river be crossed?”
“Not really, lord,” Sihtric was trying to be helpful, but he sounded despondent as he described how the Wiire flowed fast as it circled Dunholm’s crag. The river was shallow enough for a man to wade, he said, but it was treacherous with sudden deep pools, swirling currents and willow-braided fish traps. “A careful man can cross it in daytime, lord,” he said, “but not at night.”
I tried to recall what I had seen when, dressed as the dead swordsman, I had stood so long outside the fortress. The ground fell steeply to the east, I remembered, and it was ragged ground, full of tree stumps and boulders, but even at night a man should be able to clamber down that slope to the river’s bank. But I also remembered a steep shoulder of rock hiding the view downriver, and I just hoped that shoulder was not so steep as the picture lingering in my head. “What we must do,” I said, “is reach Dunholm tomorrow evening. Just before dark. Then attack in the dawn.”
“If we arrive before dark,” Ragnar pointed out, “they’ll see us, and be ready for us.”
“We can’t get there after dark,” I suggested, “because we’ll never find the way. Besides, I want them to be ready for us.”
“You do?” Guthred sounded surprised.
“If they see men to their north they’ll pack their ramparts. They’ll have the whole garrison guarding the gate. But that isn’t where we’ll attack.” I looked across the fire at Steapa. “You’re frightened of the dark, aren’t you?”
The big face stared back at me across the flames. He did not want to admit that he was frightened of anything, but honesty overcame his reluctance. “Yes, lord.”
“But tomorrow night,” I said, “you’ll trust me to lead you through the darkness?”
“I’ll trust you, lord,” he said.
“You and ten other men,” I said, and I thought I knew how we could capture the impregnable Dunholm. Fate would have to be on our side, but I believed, as we sat in that wet cold darkness, that the three spinners had started weaving a new golden thread into my destiny. And I had always believed Guthred’s fate was golden.
“Just a dozen men?” Ragnar asked.
“A dozen sceadugengan,” I said, because it would be the shadow-walkers who would take Dunholm. It was time for the strange things that haunt the night, the shape-shifters and horrors of the dark, to come to our help.
And once Dunholm was taken, if it could be taken, we still had to kill Ivarr.
We knew Kjartan would have men guarding the Wiire’s upstream crossings. He would also know that the farther west we went the easier the crossing would be, and I hoped that belief would persuade him to send his troops a long way upriver. If he planned to fight and stop us he had to send his warriors now, before we reached the Wiire, and to make it seem even more likely that we were going deep into the hills we did not head directly for the river next morning, but instead rode north and west onto the moors. Ragnar and I, pausing on a long windswept crest, saw six of Kjartan’s scouts break from the pursuing group and spur hard eastward. “They’ve gone to tell him where we’re going,” Ragnar said.
“Time to go somewhere else then,” I suggested.
“Soon,” Ragnar said, “but not yet.”
Sihtric’s horse had cast a shoe and we waited while he saddled one of the spare horses, then we kept going northwest for another hour. We went slowly, following sheep tracks down into a valley where trees grew thick. Once in the valley we sent Guthred and most of the riders ahead, still following the tracks west, while twenty of us waited in the trees. Kjartan’s scouts, seeing Guthred and the others climb onto the farther moors, followed carelessly. Our pursuers were only nine men now, the rest had been sent with messages to Dunholm, and the nine
