came in two lines, swords held like spears, and Finan, my deadly Irishman, knew his business and galloped the first line past the escaping men to cut off their retreat and let his second line crash into the enemy before he turned and led his own men back to the kill.
“Kill them all!” I shouted to him. “Kill every last one!”
A wave of a blood-reddened sword was his reply. I saw Clapa, my big Dane, spearing an enemy in the river’s shallows. Rypere was hacking his sword at a cowering man. Sihtric’s sword hand was red. Cerdic was swinging an ax, shouting incomprehensibly as the blade crushed and pierced a Dane’s helmet to spill blood and brains on the terrified prisoners. I think I killed two more, though my memory is not certain. I do remember pushing a man down onto the deck and, as he twisted around to face me, sliding Serpent-Breath into his gullet and watching his face distort and his tongue protrude from the blood welling past his blackened teeth. I leaned on the blade as the man died and watched as Finan’s men wheeled their horses to come back at the trapped enemy. The horsemen cut and slashed, Vikings screamed and some tried to surrender. One young man knelt on a rower’s bench, ax and shield discarded, and held his hands to me in supplication. “Pick up the ax,” I told him, speaking Danish.
“Lord…” he began.
“Pick it up!” I interrupted him, “and watch for me in the corpse-hall.” I waited till he was armed, then let Serpent-Breath take his life. I did it fast, showing mercy by slicing his throat with one quick scraping drag. I looked into his eyes as I killed him, saw his soul fly, then stepped over his twitching body, which slipped off the rower’s bench to collapse bloodily in the lap of a young woman who began to scream hysterically. “Quiet!” I shouted at her. I scowled at all the other women and children screaming or weeping as they cowered in the bilge. I put Serpent- Breath into my shield hand, took hold of the mail collar of the dying man, and heaved him back onto the bench.
One child was not crying. He was a boy, perhaps nine or ten years old, and he was just staring at me, mouth agape, and I remembered myself at that age. What did that boy see? He saw a man of metal, for I had fought with the face-plates of my helmet closed. You see less with the plates hinged across the cheeks, but the appearance is more frightening. That boy saw a tall man, mail-clad, sword bloody, steel-faced, stalking a boat of death. I eased off my helmet and shook my hair loose, then tossed him the wolf-crested metal. “Look after it, boy,” I told him, then I gave Serpent-Breath to the girl who had been screaming. “Wash the blade in river water,” I ordered her, “and dry it on a dead man’s cloak.” I gave my shield to Sihtric, then stretched my arms wide and lifted my face to the morning sun.
There had been fifty-four raiders, and sixteen still lived. They were prisoners. None had escaped past Finan’s men. I drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword that was so lethal in a shield wall fight when men are pressed close as lovers. “Any of you,” I looked at the women, “who wants to kill the man who raped you, then do it now!”
Two women wanted revenge and I let them use Wasp-Sting. Both of them butchered their victims. One stabbed repeatedly, the other hacked, and both men died slowly. Of the remaining fourteen men, one was not in mail. He was the enemy’s shipmaster. He was gray-haired with a scanty beard and brown eyes that looked at me belligerently. “Where did you come from?” I asked him.
He thought about refusing to answer, then thought better. “Beamfleot,” he said.
“And Lundene?” I asked him. “The old city is still in Danish hands?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, lord,” I corrected him.
“Yes, lord,” he conceded.
“Then you will go to Lundene,” I told him, “and then to Beamfleot, and then to anywhere you wish, and you will tell the Northmen that Uhtred of Bebbanburg guards the River Temes. And you will tell them they are welcome to come here whenever they wish.”
That one man lived. I hacked off his right hand before letting him go. I did it so he could never wield a sword again. By then we had lit a fire and I thrust his bleeding stump into the red-hot embers to seal the wound. He was a brave man. He flinched when we cauterized his stump, but he did not scream as his blood bubbled and his flesh sizzled. I wrapped his shortened arm in a piece of cloth taken from a dead man’s shirt. “Go,” I ordered him, pointing downriver. “Just go.” He walked eastward. If he were lucky he would survive the journey to spread the news of my savagery.
We killed the others, all of them.
“Why did you kill them?” my new wife asked once, distaste for my thoroughness evident in her voice.
“So they would learn to fear,” I answered her, “of course.”
“Dead men can’t fear,” she said.
I try to be patient with her. “A ship left Beamfleot,” I explained, “and it never went back. And other men who wanted to raid Wessex heard of that ship’s fate. And those men decided to take their swords somewhere else. I killed that ship’s crew to save myself having to kill hundreds of other Danes.”
“The Lord Jesus would have wanted you to show mercy,” she said, her eyes wide.
She is an idiot.
Finan took some of the villagers back to their burned homes where they dug graves for their dead while my men hanged the corpses of our enemies from trees beside the river. We made ropes from strips torn from their clothes. We took their mail, their weapons, and their arm rings. We cut off their long hair, for I liked to caulk my ships’ planks with the hair of slain enemies, and then we hanged them and their pale naked bodies twisted in the small wind as the ravens came to take their dead eyes.
Fifty-three bodies hung by the river. A warning to those who might follow. Fifty-three signals that other raiders were risking death by rowing up the Temes.
Then we went home, taking the enemy ship with us.
And Serpent-Breath slept in her scabbard.
PART ONE
THE BRIDE
ONE
The dead speak,” ?thelwold told me. He was sober for once. Sober and awed and serious. The night wind snatched at the house and the rushlights flickered red in the wintry drafts that whipped from the roof’s smoke-hole and through the doors and shutters.
“The dead speak?” I asked.
“A corpse,” ?thelwold said, “he rises from the grave and he speaks.” He stared at me wide-eyed, then nodded as if to stress that he spoke the truth. He was leaning toward me, his clasped hands fidgeting between his knees. “I have seen it,” he added.
“A corpse talks?” I asked.
“He rises!” He wafted a hand to show what he meant.
“He?”
“The dead man. He rises and he speaks.” He still stared at me, his expression indignant. “It’s true,” he added in a voice that suggested he knew I did not believe him.
I edged my bench closer to the hearth. It was ten days after I had killed the raiders and hanged their bodies by the river, and now a freezing rain rattled on the thatch and beat on the barred shutters. Two of my hounds lay in front of the fire and one gave me a resentful glance when I scraped the bench, then rested his head again. The house had been built by the Romans, which meant the floor was tiled and the walls were of stone, though I had thatched the roof myself. Rain spat through the smoke-hole. “What does the dead man say?” Gisela asked. She was my wife and the mother of my two children.
?thelwold did not answer at once, perhaps because he believed a woman should not take part in a serious discussion, but my silence told him that Gisela was welcome to speak in her own house and he was too nervous to insist that I dismiss her. “He says I should be king,” he admitted softly, then gazed at me, fearing my reaction.
“King of what?” I asked flatly.
“Wessex,” he said, “of course.”
“Oh, Wessex,” I said, as though I had never heard of the place.
“And I should be king!” ?thelwold protested. “My father was king!”
“And now your father’s brother is king,” I said, “and men say he is a good king.”
“Do you say that?” he challenged me.
