The Burning Land

I gazed at the Sea-Raven. “You said he had sixteen ships like that?”

“Two years ago,” she said, “he had sixteen about that size, and two larger boats.”

“That was two years ago,” I said grimly. We had come into Skirnir’s lair where we would be grossly outnumbered, but I reckoned he would still be wary of us. He would learn that a Viking ship was in his waters, and he would fear that an attack on us might bring other Vikings to take revenge. Would it cross his mind that Uhtred of Bebbanburg might have risked a winter voyage? Even if not, he would surely be curious about Lief Thorrson, and would not relax till that curiosity had been satisfied.

I ordered the wolf’s head taken from the prow, then turned Seolferwulf toward the mainland shore. The Sea-Raven made no move to intercept us, but she did start to follow us, though when I checked the oars, as if waiting for her to catch up, she veered away. We rowed on and she fell out of sight behind us.

I wanted a place to hide, but there was too much shipping for that to be possible. Wherever we took shelter some local boat would see us, and the report would be passed from ship to ship until it reached Skirnir. If we were indeed a Danish ship on passage, going home for the dark winter nights, he would expect us to be gone from his waters in two or three days, so the longer we lingered, the greater his suspicion. And here, in the treacherous shoal waters of the inner sea, we were the rat and Skirnir the wolf.

We rowed north and east all day. We went slowly. Skirnir would hear that we were doing what he anticipated, making passage, and he would expect us to seek shelter for the night. We found that shelter in a creek on the mainland shore, though the tangle of marsh, sand, and inlets hardly deserved to be called a shore. It was a place of waterfowl, reeds, and hovels. A small village lay on the creek’s southern bank, merely a dozen cottages and a small wooden church. It was a fishing community, and the folk watched Seolferwulf nervously, fearing we might come ashore to steal what little they possessed. Instead we purchased eel and herring from them, paying with Frankish silver, and we carried a barrel of Dunholm’s ale to the village.

I took six men with me, leaving the remainder on Seolferwulf. All the men I took were Ragnar’s Danes and we boasted of a successful summer cruise in the lands far to the south. “Our ship has a belly of gold and silver,” I crowed, and the villagers just stared at us, trying to imagine the life of men who sailed to steal treasure from far shores. I let the ale-loosened conversation turn to Skirnir, though I learned little enough. He had men, he had ships, he had family, and he ruled the inner sea. He was evidently no fool. He would let fighting ships like Seolferwulf pass unmolested, but any other vessel had to pay to use the safe channels inside the islands where he had his lair. If a shipmaster could not pay, then he forfeited his cargo, his ship, and probably his life. “So they all pay,” a man said glumly.

“Who does Skirnir pay?” I demanded.

“Lord?” he asked, not understanding the question.

“Who allows him to be here?” I asked, but they did not know the answer. “There must be a lord of this land,” I explained, gesturing at the darkness beyond the fire, but if there was such a lord who permitted Skirnir to rule the sea then these villagers did not know of him. Even the village priest, a fellow as hairy and dirt-matted as his parishioners, did not know if there was a lord of the marshes. “So what does Skirnir want of you?” I asked him.

“We have to give him food, lord,” the priest said.

“And men,” one of the villagers added.

“Men?”

“The young men go to him, lord. They serve on his ships.”

“They go willingly?”

“He pays silver,” a villager said grudgingly.

“He takes girls too,” the priest said.

“So he pays his men with silver and women?”

“Yes, lord.”

They did not know how many ships Skirnir possessed, though the priest was certain he only had two the size of Seolferwulf. We heard the same things the next night when we stopped at another village in another creek on that treeless shore. We had rowed all day, the mainland to our right and the islands to our north and west. Skade had pointed to Zegge, but from our distance it looked little different from any other island. Many of them had mounds, the terpen, but we were so far off that we could see no detail. Sometimes only the shimmering dark shape of a terpen showing at the sea’s edge betrayed that there was an island just beyond the horizon.

“So what do we do?” Finan asked me that night.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

He grinned. The water lapped at Seolferwulf ’s hull. We slept aboard her and most of the crew had already swathed themselves in cloaks and had lain down between the benches while Skade, Finan, Osferth, and Rollo, who was the leader of Ragnar’s men, talked with me on the steering platform.

“Skirnir has around four hundred men,” I said.

“Maybe four hundred and fifty,” Skade said.

“So we kill six men apiece,” Rollo said. He was an easygoing man like Ragnar, with a round and guileless face, though that was deceiving for, though he was young, he had already earned a reputation as a formidable fighter. He was called Rollo the Hairy, not just because he wore his fair hair down to his waist, but because he had woven the locks of hair cut from his dead enemies into a thick sword belt. “I wish Saxons would grow their hair longer,” he had grumbled to me as we crossed the sea.

“If they did,” I had said, “you’d have ten sword belts.”

“I already have seven,” he said, and grinned.

“How many men on Zegge?” I now asked Skade.

“No more than a hundred.”

Osferth spat out a fish bone. “You’re thinking of attacking Zegge directly, lord?”

“It won’t work,” I said, “we won’t find our way through the shoals.” One thing I had learned from the villagers was that Zegge was surrounded by shallow waters, that the channels shifted with the sand and tide, and that none of the passages was marked.

“What then?” Osferth asked.

A star fell. It scratched a flicker of light across the darkness and was gone, and with its fall the answer came to me. I had been thinking that I would attack Skirnir’s ships one by one, destroying the small ships and so weakening him, but within a day or two he would realize what was happening and he would use his larger ships to destroy us. There was no safe way to attack Skirnir. He had found a perfect refuge in the islands, and I would need ten ships like Seolferwulf to challenge him there.

So I had to lure him out of his perfect refuge. I smiled. “You’re going to betray me,” I told Osferth.

“I am?”

“Who’s your father?”

“You know who my father is,” he said resentfully. He never liked being reminded that he was Alfred’s bastard.

“And your father is old,” I said, “and his chosen heir is scarcely weaned, and you are a warrior. You want gold.”

“I do?”

“You want gold to raise men, because you want to be King of Wessex.”

Osferth snorted at that. “I don’t,” he said.

“You do now,” I said, “because you’re the bastard son of a king and you have a warrior’s reputation. And tomorrow you betray me.”

I told him how.

Nothing great is done without risk, but there are times I look back on those days and am amazed at the risk we ran in Frisia. It was, in its small way, like luring Harald to Fearnhamme, because again I divided my forces, and again I risked everything on the assumption that my enemy would do exactly what I wished him to do. And once again the lure was Skade.

She was so beautiful. It was a sinuous dark beauty. To look at her was to want her, to know her was to distrust her, but the distrust was ever conquered by that extraordinary beauty. Her face was high-boned, smooth- skinned, large-eyed, and full-mouthed. Her black hair was lustrous, her body was languorous. Of course many girls