while we had gone to Dunholm. They had seen mounted Danes on the southern hills, but none of those riders had approached the fort. The horsemen had watched, counted heads, and ridden away, and I assumed those men were Ivarr’s scouts.
Father Hrothweard and Abbot Eadred seemed unimpressed that we had captured Dunholm. All they cared about was the corpse of the saint and the other precious relics which they dug up from the graveyard that same evening and carried in solemn procession to the church. It was there that I confronted Aidan, the steward of Bebbanburg, and his score of men who had stayed in the village. “It’s safe for you to ride home now,” I told them, “because Kjartan is dead.”
I do not think Aidan believed me at first. Then he understood what we had achieved and he must have feared that the men who had captured Dunholm would march on Bebbanburg next. I wanted to do that, but I was sworn to return to Alfred before Christmas and that left me no time to confront my uncle.
“We shall leave in the morning,” Aidan said.
“You will,” I agreed, “and when you reach Bebbanburg you will tell my uncle that he is never far from my thoughts. You will tell him I have taken his bride. You will promise him that one day I shall slit his belly, and if he dies before I can fulfill that oath then promise him I shall slice the guts out of his sons instead, and if his sons have sons I shall kill them too. Tell him those things, and tell him that folk thought Dunholm was like Bebbanburg, impregnable, and that Dunholm fell to my sword.”
“Ivarr will kill you,” Aidan said defiantly.
“You had better pray as much,” I said.
All the Christians prayed that night. They gathered in the church and I thought they might be asking their god to give us victory over the approaching forces of Ivarr, but instead they were giving thanks that the precious relics had survived. They placed Saint Cuthbert’s body before the altar on which they put Saint Oswald’s head, the gospel book, and the reliquary with the hairs of Saint Augustine’s beard and they chanted, they prayed, they chanted again, and I thought they would never stop praying, but at last, in the night’s dark heart, they fell silent.
I walked the fort’s low wall, watching the Roman road stretch south through the fields beneath the waning moon. It was from there that Ivarr would come and I could not be sure he would not send a band of picked horsemen to attack in the night and so I had a hundred men waiting in the village street. But no attack came, and in the darkness a small mist rose to blur the fields as Ragnar came to relieve me. “There’ll be a frost by morning,” he greeted me.
“There will,” I agreed.
He stamped his feet to make them warm. “My sister,” he said, “tells me she’s going to Wessex. She says she’ll be baptized.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No,” he said. He gazed down the long straight road. “It’s for the best,” he spoke bleakly, “and she likes your Father Beocca. So what will happen to her?”
“I suppose she’ll become a nun,” I said, for I could not think what other fate would wait for her in Alfred’s Wessex.
“I let her down,” he said, and I said nothing because it was true. “Must you go back to Wessex?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m sworn.”
“Oaths can be broken,” he said quietly, and that was true, but in a world where different gods ruled and fate is known only to the three spinners, oaths are our one certainty. If I broke an oath then I could not expect men to keep their oaths to me. That I had learned.
“I won’t break my oath to Alfred,” I said, “but I will make another oath to you. That I will never fight you, that what I have is yours to share, and that if you need help I will do all I can to bring it.”
Ragnar said nothing for a while. He kicked at the turf on the wall’s top and looked into the mist. “I swear the same,” he said quietly and he, like me, was embarrassed and so he kicked at the turf again. “How many men will Ivarr bring?”
“Eight hundred?”
He nodded. “And we have fewer than three hundred.”
“There won’t be a fight,” I said.
“No?”
“Ivarr will die,” I said, “and that will be the end of it.” I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt for luck and felt the slightly raised edges of Hild’s cross. “He will die,” I said, still touching the cross, “and Guthred will rule, and he will do what you tell him to do.”
“You want me to tell him to attack ?lfric?” he asked.
I thought about it. “No,” I said.
“No?”
“Bebbanburg’s too strong,” I said, “and there’s no back gate as there was at Dunholm. Besides, I want to kill ?lfric myself.”
“Will Alfred let you do that?”
“He will,” I said, though in truth I doubted Alfred ever would allow me such a luxury, but I was certain that my fate was to go back to Bebbanburg and I had faith in that destiny. I turned and stared at the village. “All quiet there?”
“All quiet,” he said. “They’ve given up praying and are sleeping instead. You should sleep too.”
I walked back up the street, but before joining Gisela I quietly opened the church door and saw priests and monks sleeping in the small light of the few candles guttering on the altar. One of them snored and I closed the door as silently as I had opened it.
I was woken in the dawn by Sihtric who banged on the door lintel. “They’re here, lord!” he shouted. “They’re here!”
“Who’s here?”
“Ivarr’s men, lord.”
“Where?”
“Horsemen, lord, across the river!”
There were only a hundred or so riders, and they made no attempt to cross the ford and I guessed they had only been sent to the Swale’s northern bank to cut off our escape. Ivarr’s main force would appear to the south, though that prospect was not the chief excitement in that misted dawn. Men were shouting in the village. “What is it?” I asked Sihtric.
“Christians are upset, lord,” he said.
I walked to the church to discover that the golden reliquary of Saint Augustine’s beard, the precious gift from Alfred to Guthred, had been stolen. It had been on the altar with the other relics, but during the night it had vanished, and Father Hrothweard was wailing beside a hole scratched and torn into the wall of wattle and daub behind the altar. Guthred was there, listening to Abbot Eadred who was declaring the theft a sign of God’s disapproval.
“Disapproval of what?” Guthred asked.
“The pagans, of course,” Eadred spat.
Father Hrothweard was rocking back and forth, wringing his hands and shouting at his god to bring vengeance on the heathens who had desecrated the church and stolen the holy treasure. “Reveal the culprits, lord!” he shouted, then he saw me and evidently decided the revelation had come, for he pointed at me. “It was him!” he spat.
“Was it you?” Guthred asked.
“No, lord,” I said.
“It was him!” Hrothweard said again.
“You must search all the pagans,” Eadred told Guthred, “for if the relic isn’t found, lord, then our defeat is certain. Ivarr will crush us for this sin. It will be God’s chastisement on us.”
It seemed a strange punishment, to allow a pagan Dane to defeat a Christian king because a relic had been stolen, but as a prophecy it seemed safe enough, for in the mid-morning, while the church was still being searched in a vain attempt to find the reliquary, one of Ragnar’s men brought word that Ivarr’s army had appeared. They were marching from the south and already forming their shield wall a half-mile from Ragnar’s small force.
