Serpent-Breath took him in the throat. Hard and fast. I felt her tip pierce muscle and tough tissue. Saw the blood. Saw his arm falter and the blade drop back into its scabbard, and I reached out with my left hand to grip his sword hand and hold it over his hilt. I made sure that he kept hold of his sword as he died, for then he would be taken to the feasting hall of the dead. I held his hand tight and let him collapse onto my chest where his blood ran down my mail. “Go to Odin’s hall,” I told him softly, “and save a place for me.”
He could not speak. He choked as blood spilled down his windpipe.
“My name is Uhtred,” I said, “and one day I will feast with you in the corpse-hall and we shall laugh together and drink together and be friends.”
I let his body drop, then knelt and found his amulet, Thor’s hammer, which I cut from his neck with Serpent- Breath. I put the hammer in a pouch, cleaned my sword’s tip on the dead man’s cloak, then slid the blade back into her fleece-lined scabbard. I took my shield from Sihtric, my servant.
“Let’s go ashore,” I said, “and take a city.”
Because it was time to fight.
FIVE
Then all, suddenly, was quiet.
Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled, and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city, and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet. Dawn was now a paler yellow, half concealed by dark clouds.
“And now?” Finan appeared beside me. Steapa loomed beside him, but said nothing.
“We go to the gate,” I said, “Ludd’s Gate.” But I did not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to be back at Coccham with Gisela. It was not cowardice. Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear. It was tiredness that made me reluctant to move, but not a physical tiredness. I was young then and the wounds of war had yet to sap my strength. I think I was tired of Wessex, tired of fighting for a king I did not like, and, standing on that Lundene wharf, I did not understand why I fought for him. And now, looking back over the years, I wonder if that lassitude was caused by the man I had just killed and whom I had promised to join in Odin’s hall. I believe the men we kill are inseparably joined to us. Their life threads, turned ghostly, are twisted by the Fates around our own thread and their burden stays to haunt us till the sharp blade cuts our life at last. I felt remorse for his death.
“Are you going to sleep?” Father Pyrlig asked me. He had joined Finan.
“We’re going to the gate,” I said.
It seemed like a dream. I was walking, but my mind was somewhere else. This, I thought, was how the dead walked our world, for the dead do come back. Not as Bjorn had pretended to come back, but in the darkest nights, when no one alive can see them, they wander our world. They must, I thought, only half see it, as if the places they knew were veiled in a winter mist, and I wondered if my father was watching me. Why did I think that? I had not been fond of my father, nor he of me, and he had died when I was young, but he had been a warrior. The poets sang of him. And what would he think of me? I was walking through Lundene instead of attacking Bebbanburg, and that was what I should have done. I should have gone north. I should have spent my whole hoard of silver on hiring men and leading them in an assault across Bebbanburg’s neck of land and up across the walls to the high hall where we could make great slaughter. Then I could live in my own home, my father’s home, forever. I could live near Ragnar and be far from Wessex.
Except my spies, for I employed a dozen in Northumbria, had told me what my uncle had done to my fortress. He had closed the landside gates. He had taken them away altogether and in their place were ramparts, newly built, high and reinforced with stone, and now, if a man wished to get inside the fortress, he needed to follow a path that led to the northern end of the crag on which the fortress stood. And every step of that path would be under those high walls, under attack, and then, at the northern end, where the sea broke and sucked, there was a small gate. Beyond that gate was a steep path leading to another wall and another gate. Bebbanburg had been sealed, and to take it I would need an army beyond even the reach of my hoarded silver.
“Be lucky!” a woman’s voice startled me from my thoughts. The folk of the old city were awake and they saw us pass and took us for Danes because I had ordered my men to hide their crosses.
“Kill the Saxon bastards!” another voice shouted.
Our footsteps echoed from the high houses that were all at least three stories tall. Some had beautiful stonework over their bricks and I thought how the world had once been filled with these houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole world rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve. “Thirty years,” I said aloud.
“Is that how old you are?” Father Pyrlig asked me.
“It’s how long a hall lasts,” I said, “unless you keep repairing it. Our world is falling apart, father.”
“My God, you’re gloomy,” Pyrlig said, amused.
“And I watch Alfred,” I went on, “and see how he tries to tidy our world. Lists! Lists and parchment! He’s like a man putting wattle hurdles in the face of a flood.”
“Brace a hurdle well,” Steapa was listening to our conversation and now intervened, “and it’ll turn a stream.”
“And better to fight a flood than drown in it,” Pyrlig commented.
“Look at that!” I said, pointing to the carved stone head of a beast that was fixed to a brick wall. The beast was like none I had ever seen, a shaggy great cat, and its open mouth was poised above a chipped stone basin suggesting that water had once flowed from mouth to bowl. “Could we make that?” I asked bitterly.
“There are craftsmen who can make such things,” Pyrlig said.
“Then where are they?” I demanded angrily, and I thought that all these things, the carvings and bricks and marble, had been made before Pyrlig’s religion came to the island. Was that the reason for the world’s decay? Were the true gods punishing us because so many men worshipped the nailed god? I did not make the suggestion to Pyrlig, but kept silent. The houses loomed above us, except where one had collapsed into a heap of rubble. A dog rooted along a wall, stopped to cock its leg, then turned a snarl on us. A baby cried in a house. Our footsteps echoed from the walls. Most of my men were silent, wary of the ghosts they believed inhabited these relics of an older time.
The baby wailed again, louder. “Be a young mother in there,” Rypere said happily. Rypere was his nickname and meant “thief,” and he was a skinny Angle from the north, clever and sly, and he at least was not thinking of ghosts.
“I should stick to goats, if I were you,” Clapa said, “they don’t mind your stink.” Clapa was a Dane, one who had taken an oath to me and served me loyally. He was a hulking great boy raised on a farm, strong as an ox, ever cheerful. He and Rypere were friends who never stopped goading each other.
“Quiet!” I said before Rypere could make a retort. I knew we had to be getting close to the western walls. At the place where we had come ashore, the city climbed the wide terraced hill to the palace at the top, but that hill was flattening now, which meant we were nearing the valley of the Fleot. Behind us the sky was lightening to morning and I knew ?thelred would think I had failed to make my feint attack just before the dawn and that belief, I feared, might have persuaded him to abandon his own assault. Perhaps he was already leading his men back to the island? In which case we would be alone, surrounded by our enemies, and doomed.
“God help us,” Pyrlig suddenly said.
I held up my hand to stop my men because, in front of us, in the last stretch of the street before it passed under the stone arch called Ludd’s Gate, was a crowd of men. Armed men. Men whose helmets, ax blades, and spear-points caught and reflected the dull light of the clouded and newly-risen sun.
“God help us,” Pyrlig said again and made the sign of the cross. “There must be two hundred of them.”
“More,” I said. There were so many men that they could not all stand in the street, forcing some into the alleyways on either side. All the men we could see were facing the gate, and that made me understand what the enemy was doing and my mind cleared at that instant as if a fog had lifted. There was a courtyard to my left and I pointed through its gateway. “In there,” I ordered.
