green hill, was the old fort. It was a place of great safety, much safer than the encampment Haesten had made on the shore of Cent, but he had only made that to entice Alfred to pay him to leave. Now he was leaving, but going to a place far more dangerous to Wessex. In Beamfleot he would have an almost unassailable fortress, yet still be within easy striking distance of Lundene and Wessex. He was a serpent.
That was not Father Willibald’s opinion. We had to bring the two ships within touching distance so the priest could clamber from one to the other. He sprawled clumsily onto
Father Willibald looked at me with confusion. One moment his face was all concern, the next it was excitement, both expressions accompanied by an impatient fidgeting as he tried to find words for one mood or the other. Concern won. “Lord,” he said, “tell me, tell me it isn’t true.”
“It’s true, father.”
“Dear God!” he shook his head and made the sign of the cross. “I shall pray for her soul, lord. I shall pray for her soul nightly, lord, and for the souls of your dear children.” His voice trailed away under my baleful gaze, but then his excitement got the better of him. “Such news, lord,” he said, “such news I have!” Then, despairing of my expression, he turned to pick up his pathetic sack of belongings that had been tossed from the
“What news?” I asked.
“The Jarl Haesten, lord,” Willibald said eagerly. “He’s requesting that his wife and two sons be baptized, lord!” He smiled as if expecting me to share his joy.
“He’s what?” I asked in surprise.
“He seeks baptism for his family! I wrote the letter for him, addressed to our king! It seems our preaching bore fruit, lord. The jarl’s wife, God bless her soul, has seen the light! She seeks our Lord’s redemption! She has come to love our Savior, lord, and her husband has approved of her conversion.”
I just looked at him, corroding his joy with my sour face, but Willibald was not to be so easily discouraged. He gathered his enthusiasm again. “Don’t you see, lord?” he asked. “If she converts then he will follow! It’s often thus, lord, that the wife first finds salvation, and when wives lead, husbands follow!”
“He’s lulling us to sleep, father,” I said.
“The jarl is a troubled soul,” Willibald said, “he talked to me often.” He raised his hands to the sky where a myriad waterfowl beat south on throbbing wings. “There is rejoicing in heaven, lord, when just one sinner repents. And he is so close to redemption! And when a chieftain converts, lord, then his people follow him to Christ.”
“Chieftain?” I sneered. “Haesten’s just an earsling. He’s a turd. And he’s not troubled, father, except by greed. We’ll have to kill him yet.”
Willibald despaired of my cynicism and went to sit beside my son. I watched the two of them talk and wondered why Uhtred never showed any enthusiasm for my conversation, though he seemed fascinated by Willibald’s. “I hope you’re not poisoning the boy’s brain,” I called.
“We’re talking about birds, lord,” Willibald explained brightly, “and where they go in winter.”
“Where do they go?”
“Beneath the sea?” he suggested.
The tide slackened, stilled, and turned, and we rode the flood back up the river. I sat brooding on the steering platform while Finan tended the big steering oar. My men rowed gently, content to let the tide do the work, and they sang the song of ?gir, god of the sea, and of Ran, his wife, and of his nine daughters, all of whom must be flattered if a ship is to be safe on the wild waters. They sang the song because they knew I liked it, but the tune seemed empty and the words meaningless, and I did not join in. I just gazed at the smoke haze above Lundene, the darkness darkening a summer sky, and wished I were a bird, high in that nothingness, vanishing.
Haesten’s letter stirred Alfred to a new liveliness. The letter, he said, was a sign of God’s grace, and Bishop Erkenwald, of course, agreed. God, the bishop preached, had slaughtered the heathen at Fearnhamme and now had worked a miracle in the heart of Haesten. Willibald was sent to Beamfleot with an invitation for Haesten to bring his family to Lundene where both Alfred and ?thelred would stand as godfathers to Brunna, Haesten the Younger, and the real Horic. No one now bothered to pretend that the deaf and dumb hostage was Haesten’s son, but the deception was forgiven in the ebullience that marked Wessex as that summer faded into autumn.
The deaf and dumb hostage, I gave him the name Harald, was sent to my household. He was a bright lad and I set him to work in the armory where he showed a skill with the sharpening stone and an eagerness to learn weapons. I also had custody of Skade, because no one else seemed to want her. For a time I displayed her in a cage beside my door, but that humiliation was small consolation for her curse. She was valueless as a hostage now, for her lover was mewed up on Torneie Island and one day I took her upriver in one of the smaller boats we kept above Lundene’s broken bridge.
Torneie was close to Lundene and, with thirty men on the oars, we reached the River Colaun before midday. We rowed slowly up the smaller river, but there was little to be seen. Harald’s men, they numbered fewer than three hundred, had made an earth wall topped by a thick thorn palisade. Spears showed above that spiny obstacle, but no roofs, because Torneie had no timber with which to make houses. The river flowed sluggish either side of the island, and was edged by marshland, beyond which I could see the twin camps of the Saxon forces that besieged the island. Two ships were moored in the river, both manned by Mercians, their job to prevent any supplies reaching the trapped Danes. “There’s your lover,” I told Skade, pointing to the thorns.
I ordered Ralla, who was steering the ship, to take us as close as he could to the island, and, when our bows were almost touching the reeds, I dragged Skade to the bows. “There’s your one-legged, impotent lover,” I told Skade. A handful of Danes had deserted, and they reported that Harald had been wounded in the left leg and groin. Wasp-Sting had evidently struck him beneath the skirt of his mail, and I remembered the blade striking bone and how I had forced it harder so that the steel had slid up his thigh, ripping muscles and opening blood vessels, and ended in his groin. The leg had turned rotten and had been cut off. He still lived, and perhaps it was his hatred and fervor that gave life to his men, who now faced the bleakest of futures.
Skade said nothing. She gazed at the thorn wall above which a few spear-points showed. She was dressed in a slave’s tunic, belted tight around her thin waist.
“They’ve eaten their horses,” I told her, “and they catch eels, frogs, and fish.”
“They will live,” she said dully.
“They’re trapped,” I said scornfully, “and this time Alfred won’t pay bright gold for them to go away. When they starve this winter, they’ll surrender, and Alfred will kill them all. One by one, woman.”
“They will live,” she insisted.
“You see the future?”
“Yes,” she said, and I touched Thor’s hammer.
I hated her, and I found it hard to take my eyes from her. She had been given the gift of beauty, yet it was the beauty of a weapon. She was sleek, hard and shining. Even as a degraded captive, unwashed and dressed in rags, she shone. Her face was bony, but softened by lips and by the thickness of her hair. My men gazed at her. They wanted me to give her to them as a plaything, and then kill her. She was reckoned to be a Danish sorceress, as dangerous as she was desirable, and I knew it was her curse that had killed my Gisela, and Alfred would not have objected had I executed her, yet I could not kill her. She fascinated me.
“You can go to them,” I said.
She turned her big, dark eyes onto me, said nothing.
“Jump overboard,” I said. We were not that far from Torneie’s shelving bank. She might have to swim a couple of paces, but then she would be able to wade ashore. “Can you swim?”
“Yes.”
“Then go to him,” I said, and waited. “Don’t you want to be Queen of Wessex?” I sneered.
She looked back to the bleak island. “I dream,” she told me quietly, “and in my dreams Loki comes to me.”
Loki was the trickster god, the nuisance in Asgard, the god who deserved death. The Christians talk of the serpent in paradise, and that was Loki. “He talks evil to you?” I asked.
“He is sad,” she said, “and he talks. I comfort him.”
“What has that to do with you jumping overboard?”
“It is not my fate,” she said.
