who remained were mounted on light horses, ideal for scrambling away from us if we turned on them, but they came unsuspecting into the trees. They were halfway through the wood when they saw Ragnar waiting ahead and then they turned to spur away, but we had four groups of men waiting to ambush them. Ragnar was in front of them, I was moving to bar their retreat, Steapa was on their left and Rollo on their right, and the nine men suddenly realized they were surrounded. They charged at my group in an attempt to break free of the thick wood, but the five of us blocked their path and our horses were heavier and two of the scouts died quickly, one of them gutted by Serpent-Breath, and the other seven tried to scatter, but they were obstructed by brambles and trees, and our men closed on them. Steapa dismounted to pursue the last enemy into a bramble thicket. I saw his ax rise and chop down, then heard a scream that went on and on. I thought it must stop, but on it went and Steapa paused to sneeze, then his ax rose and fell again and there was sudden silence.
“Are you catching a cold?” I asked him.
“No, lord,” he said, forcing his way out of the brambles and dragging the corpse behind him. “His stink got up my nose.”
Kjartan was blind now. He did not know it, but he had lost his scouts, and as soon as the nine men were dead we sounded a horn to summon Guthred back, and, as we waited for him, we stripped the corpses of anything valuable. We took their horses, arm rings, weapons, a few coins, some damp bread, and two flasks of birch ale. One of the dead men had been wearing a fine mail coat, so fine that I suspected it had been made in Frankia, but the man had been so thin that the coat fitted none of us until Gisela took it for herself. “You don’t need mail,” her brother said scornfully.
Gisela ignored him. She seemed astonished that so fine a coat of mail could weigh so much, but she pulled it over her head, freed her hair from the links at her neck and buckled one of the dead men’s swords about her waist. She put on her black cloak and stared defiantly at Guthred. “Well?”
“You frighten me,” he said with a smile.
“Good,” she said, then pushed her horse against mine so the mare would stay still as she mounted, but she had not reckoned with the weight of the mail and had to struggle into the saddle.
“It suits you,” I said, and it did. She looked like a Valkyrie, those warrior maidens of Odin who rode the sky in shining armor.
We turned east then, going faster now. We rode through the trees, ducking continually to keep the branches from whipping our eyes, and we went downhill, following a rain-swollen stream that must lead to the Wiire. By the early afternoon we were close to Dunholm, probably no more than five or six miles away, and Sihtric now led us, for he reckoned he knew a place where we could cross the river. The Wiire, he told us, turned south once it had passed Dunholm, and it widened as it flowed through pastureland and there were fords in those gentler valleys. He knew the country well for his mother’s parents had lived there and as a child he had often driven cattle through the river. Better still those fords were on Dunholm’s eastern side, the flank Kjartan would not be guarding, but there was a risk that the rain, which started to pour again in the afternoon, would so fill the Wiire that the fords would be impassable.
At least the rain hid us as we left the hills and rode into the river valley. We were now very close to Dunholm, that lay just to the north, but we were hidden by a wooded spur of high ground at the foot of which was a huddle of cottages. “Hocchale,” Sihtric told me, nodding at the settlement, “it’s where my mother was born.”
“Your grandparents are still there?” I asked.
“Kjartan had them killed, lord, when he fed my mother to his dogs.”
“How many dogs does he have?”
“There were forty or fifty when I was there, lord. Big things. They only obeyed Kjartan and his huntsmen. And the Lady Thyra.”
“They obeyed her?” I asked.
“My father wanted to punish her once,” Sihtric said, “and he set the dogs on her. I don’t think he was going to let them eat her, I think he just wanted to frighten her, but she sang to them.”
“She sang to them?” Ragnar asked. He had hardly mentioned Thyra in the last weeks. It was as if he felt guilty that he had left her so long in Kjartan’s power. I knew he had tried to find her in the early days of her disappearance, he had even faced Kjartan once when another Dane had arranged a truce between them, but Kjartan had vehemently denied that Thyra was even at Dunholm, and after that Ragnar had joined the Great Army that had invaded Wessex and then he had become a hostage, and all that while Thyra had been in Kjartan’s power. Now Ragnar looked at Sihtric. “She sang to them?” he asked again.
“She sang to them, lord,” Sihtric confirmed, “and they just lay down. My father was angry with them.” Ragnar frowned at Sihtric as though he did not believe what he heard. Sihtric shrugged. “They say she’s a sorcerer, lord,” he explained humbly.
“Thyra’s no sorcerer,” Ragnar said angrily. “All she ever wanted was to marry and have children.”
“But she sang to the dogs, lord,” Sihtric insisted, “and they lay down.”
“They won’t lie down when they see us,” I said. “Kjartan will loose them on us as soon as he sees us.”
“He will, lord,” Sihtric said, and I could see his nervousness.
“So we’ll just have to sing to them,” I said cheerfully.
We followed a sodden track beside a flooded ditch to find the Wiire swirling fast and high. The ford looked impassable. The rain was getting harder, pounding the river that fretted at the top of its steep banks. There was a high hill on the far bank and the clouds were low enough to scrape the black, bare branches at its long summit. “We’ll never cross here,” Ragnar said. Father Beocca, tied to his saddle and with his priest’s robes sodden, shivered. The horsemen milled in the mud, watching the river that threatened to spill over its banks, but then Steapa, who was mounted on a huge black stallion, gave a grunt and simply rode down the track into the water. His horse baulked at the river’s hard current, but he forced it onward until the water was seething over his stirrups, and then he stopped and beckoned that I should follow.
His idea was that the biggest horses would make a barrier to break the river’s force. I pushed my horse up against Steapa’s, then more men came and we held onto each other, making a wall of horseflesh that slowly reached across the Wiire, that was some thirty or forty paces wide. We only needed to make our dam at the river’s center where the current was strongest, and once we had a hundred men struggling to keep their horses still, Ragnar urged the rest through the calmer water provided by our makeshift dam. Beocca was terrified, poor man, but Gisela took his reins and spurred her own mare into the water. I hardly dared watch: If her horse had been swept away then the mail coat would have dragged her under, but she and Beocca made it safe to the far bank, and two by two the others followed. One woman and one warrior were swept away, but both scrambled safely across and their horses found footing downstream and reached the bank. Once the smaller horses were across we slowly unmade our wall and inched through the rising river to safety.
It was already getting dark. It was only midafternoon, but the clouds were thick. It was a black, wet, miserable day, and now we had to climb the escarpment through the dripping trees, and in places the slope was so steep that we were forced to dismount and lead the horses. Once at the summit we turned north, and I could see Dunholm when the low cloud allowed it. The fortress showed as a dark smear on its high rock and above it I could see the smoke from the garrison fires mingling with the rain clouds. It was possible that men on the southern ramparts could see us now, except that we were riding through trees and our mail was smeared with mud, but even if they could see us they would surely not suspect we were enemies. The last they had heard of Guthred was that he and his desperate men were riding westward, looking for a place to cross the Wiire, and now we were to the east of the fortress and already across the river.
Sihtric still led us. We dropped east off the hill’s summit, hiding ourselves from the fortress, then rode into a valley where a stream foamed westward. We forded it easily enough, climbed again, and all the time we pounded past miserable hovels where frightened folk peered from low doorways. They were Kjartan’s own slaves, Sihtric told me, their job to raise pigs and cut firewood and grow crops for Dunholm.
Our horses were tiring. They had been ridden hard across soft ground and they carried men in mail with heavy shields, but our journey was almost done. It did not matter now if the garrison saw us, because we had come to the hill on which the fortress stood and no one could leave Dunholm without fighting their way past us. If Kjartan had sent warriors west to find us then he could no longer send a messenger to summon those men back because we now controlled the only road that led to his fastness.
And so we came to the neck where the ridge dropped slightly and the road turned south before climbing to the massive gatehouse, and we stopped there and our horses spread along the higher ground and, to the men on
