in some meaningless skirmish, so he was matching our force with just enough men to deter either side from attacking the other. I watched the horsemen climb the hill toward us. They were in mail and helmeted, with shields and weapons, but they stopped a good four hundred paces away, all except three men who kept riding, though they ostentatiously laid aside their swords and shields before leaving their companions. They flew no banner.
“They want to talk,” Ragnar said.
“Is that my uncle?”
“Yes.”
The three men had curbed their horses halfway between the two armed bands. “I could kill the bastard now,” I said.
“And his son inherits,” Ragnar said, “and everyone knows you killed an unarmed man who had offered a truce.”
“Bastard,” I said of ?lfric. I unbuckled my two swords and tossed them to Finan, then spurred my borrowed horse. Ragnar came with me. I had half hoped my uncle was accompanied by his two sons, and if he had been I might have been tempted to try and kill all three, but instead his companions were two hard-looking warriors, doubtless his best men.
The three waited close to the rotting carcass of a sheep. I assume a wolf had killed the beast, then been driven off by dogs, and the corpse lay there, crawling with maggots, torn by ravens, and buzzing with flies. The wind blew the stench toward us, which was probably why ?lfric had chosen to stop there.
My uncle looked distinguished. He was slender and narrow-faced with a high hooked nose and dark, guarded eyes. His hair, the little that showed beneath his helmet’s rim, was white. He watched me calmly, showing no fear as I stopped close. “I assume you are Uhtred?” he greeted me.
“Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said.
“Then I should congratulate you,” he said.
“Why?”
“For your victory over Harald. The news of it caused much rejoicing among good Christians.”
“So you didn’t rejoice?” I retorted.
“Jarl Ragnar,” ?lfric ignored my small insult and nodded gravely to my companion, “you do me honor with this visit, lord, but you should have given me warning of your arrival. I would have made a feast for you.”
“We’re just exercising the horses,” Ragnar said cheerfully.
“A long way from your home,” ?lfric observed.
“Not from mine,” I said.
The dark eyes brooded on me. “You are always welcome here, Uhtred,” my uncle said, “any time you wish to come home, then just come. Believe me, I shall be glad to see you.”
“I’ll come,” I promised him.
There was silence for a moment. My horse stamped a mud-clodded foot. The two lines of mail-clad warriors watched us. I could just hear the gulls at the distant shore. Their sound had been my childhood noise, never-ending like the sea. “As a child,” my uncle broke the awkward silence, “you were disobedient, headstrong, and foolish. It seems you haven’t changed.”
“Ask Alfred of Wessex,” I said, “he wouldn’t be king now without my headstrong foolishness.”
“Alfred knew how to use you,” my uncle observed. “You were his dog. He fed you and held you. But like a fool you’ve slipped his lead. Who will feed you now?”
“I will,” Ragnar said happily.
“But you, lord,” ?lfric said respectfully, “don’t have enough men to watch them die against my walls. Uhtred will have to find his own men.”
“There are many Danes in Northumbria,” I said.
“And Danes seek gold,” ?lfric said, “do you really think there’s enough inside my walls to draw the Danes of Northumbria to Bebbanburg?” He half smiled. “You will have to find your own gold, Uhtred.” He paused, expecting me to say something, but I kept quiet. A raven, driven away from the sheep’s carcass by our presence, protested from a bare tree. “Do you think your agl?cwif will lead you to the gold?” ?lfric asked.
An agl?cwif was a fiendish woman, a sorceress, and he meant Skade. “I have no agl?cwif,” I said.
“She tempts you with her husband’s riches,” ?lfric said.
“Does she?”
“What else?” he asked. “But Skirnir knows she does that.”
“Because you told him?”
My uncle nodded. “I saw fit to send him news of his wife. A courtesy, I think, to a neighbor across the sea. Skirnir, no doubt, will greet you in the spring as I would greet you, Uhtred, should you decide to come home.” He stressed the last word, curdling it on his tongue, then gathered his reins. “I have nothing more to say to you.” He nodded at Ragnar, then at his men, and the three turned away.
“I’ll kill you!” I shouted after him, “and your cabbage-shitting sons!”
He just waved negligently and kept riding.
I remember thinking he had won that encounter. ?lfric had come from his fastness and he had treated me like a child, and now he rode back to that beautiful place beside the sea where I could not reach him. I did not move.
“What now?” Ragnar asked.
“I’ll hang him with his son’s intestines,” I said, “and piss on his corpse.”
“And how do you do that?”
“I need gold.”
“Skirnir?”
“Where else?”
Ragnar turned his horse. “There’s silver in Scotland,” he said, “and in Ireland.”
“And hordes of savages protect both,” I said.
“Then Wessex?” he suggested.
I had not moved my horse and Ragnar was forced to turn back to me. “Wessex?” I echoed him.
“They say Alfred’s churches are rich.”
“Oh, they are,” I said. “They’re so rich they can afford to send silver to the Pope. They drip with silver. There’s gold on the altars. There’s money in Wessex, my friend, so much money.”
Ragnar beckoned to his men and two of them rode forward with our swords. We buckled the belts around our waists and no longer felt naked. The two men walked their horses away, leaving us alone again. The sea wind brought the smell of home to lessen the smell of the carcass. “So will you attack next year?” I asked my friend.
He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Brida thinks I’ve grown fat and happy,” he said.
“You have.”
He smiled briefly. “Why do we fight?” he asked.
“Because we were born,” I answered savagely.
“To find a place we call home,” Ragnar suggested. “A place where we don’t need to fight anymore.”
“Dunholm?”
“It’s as safe a fortress as Bebbanburg,” he said, “and I love it.”
“And Brida wants you to leave it?”
He nodded. “She’s right,” he admitted wanly. “If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There’ll be priests everywhere.”
We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate. All my life I have tried to under stand the past because that past was so glorious and we see remnants of that glory all across Britain. We see the great marble halls the Romans made, and we travel the roads they laid and cross the bridges they built, and it is all fading. The marble cracks in the frost and the walls collapse. Alfred and his like believed they were bringing civilization to a wicked, fallen world, but all he did was make rules. So many rules, but the laws were only ever an expression of hope, because the reality was the burhs, the walls, the spears on the ramparts, the glint of helmets in the dawn, the fear of mailed riders, the thump of hoofbeats, and the screams of victims. Alfred was proud of his schools and his monasteries and his silver-rich churches, but those things were protected by blades. And what was Wessex compared to Rome?
