The Burning Land

blown westward so that Skirnir’s sea was in deep shadow, while to the east the land glowed beneath the dying sun. I could see the smoke of three settlements and, far on the horizon, some low hills where the tangle of marsh and sand ended and the higher land began. I assumed the monastery was in those hills, but it was too far away to be seen. Then the sun slid below the rain clouds and everything was in shadow, but a call from Rollo made me turn to see ships approaching the coast in the last of the daylight. Two large ships came first. They came from the direction of the islands, and then a third ship, paler than the first two and travelling much slower because she had fewer oarsmen.

Seolferwulf was the last of the three ships, while the darker pair belonged to Skirnir.

The wolf had come for his bitch.

FOUR

I had told Finan to play the madman, a thing he could do well. Not mad as in moon-touched, but dangerously mad as though one wrong word could send him into a welter of killing. Finan, if you did not know him well, was frightening. He was small and wiry, his strength tensed in a thin frame, while his face was all bone and scar. To look at Finan was to see a man who had endured battle and slavery and extreme hardship, a man who might have nothing to lose, and I counted on that to persuade Skirnir to treat Seolferwulf ’s crew with caution. There was very little to stop Skirnir simply taking Seolferwulf and slaughtering its men, except the possibility that he might lose his own men in the capture. True, he would not lose many, but even twenty or thirty casualties would hurt him. Besides, Osferth and Finan brought him a gift and, as far as Skirnir knew, they were ready to help deliver that gift. I did not doubt that Skirnir would want to take Seolferwulf for his own, but guessed he would wait until he had gained Skade and my death before he made that attempt. So I told Finan to frighten him.

Osferth and Finan, once they left the creek, took Seolferwulf up the coast and then, as if they did not know what to do, rowed to the center of the inner sea and there let the ship roll on the small waves. “We saw the fishing boats racing over the water,” Finan told me later, “and knew they were going to Zegge.”

Skirnir, of course, heard about the fight in the creek and how the Viking ship was now wallowing aimlessly, and curiosity made him send one of his two large ships to investigate, though he did not go himself. His youngest brother talked with Finan and Osferth, and heard how they had mutinied against Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and heard too that Uhtred had Skade, and that now Uhtred, Skade, and a small group of men were stranded among the tangle of islands and creeks. “I let the brother come aboard,” Finan told me later, “and I showed him the heap of mail and weapons. I said they were all yours.”

“So he thought we were weaponless?”

“I told him you had a wee sword,” Finan said, “but just a wee one.” Grageld, Skirnir’s brother, did not count the heaped coats, nor even the tangle of swords, spears, and axes. If he had, he might have suspected Finan’s lies, because there were only enough mail coats and weapons to equip Finan’s shrunken crew. Instead he simply believed what the Irishman told him. “So then,” Finan went on, “we spun him our tale.”

That tale began with truth. Finan told Grageld that we had sailed to the Frisian Islands in an attempt to rob Skirnir, but then he decorated the truth with fantasy. “I said we learned the gold was too well guarded, so we insisted you sold Skade back to her husband. But you wouldn’t agree to that. I said we all hated the bitch, and he said we were right to hate her.”

“Grageld didn’t like her?”

“None of them liked her, lord, but Skirnir was stricken by her. The brother thought she’d cast a spell on Skirnir.”

Finan told me this tale in Skirnir’s hall, and I remember looking across at Skade in the light of the great fire that burned in the central hearth. She was an agl?cwif, I thought, a sorceress. Years ago Father Beocca told me a story from the olden days, from the far-off days when men built in shining marble, the days before the world turned dark and dirty. For once it was not a tale about God or his prophets, but about a queen who ran away from her husband because she fell in love with another man, and the husband took a great fleet of ships to get her back, and in the end a whole city was burned and all its men were killed, and all because of that long-dead agl?cwif. The poets say we fight for glory, for gold, for reputation, and for our homes, but in my life I have just as often fought for a woman. They have the power. I frequently heard ?lswith, Alfred’s sour wife who resented that Wessex never granted the title of queen, complain that it was a man’s world. So it may be, but women have power over men. It is for women that the long fleets cross the salt seas, and for women that the proud halls burn, and for women that the sword-warriors are buried.

“Well, of course, Grageld wanted us to go to Skirnir,” Finan said, “but we said no. He asked what we wanted, and we said we’d come for the reward because we wanted to make Osferth king and needed silver to do that.”

“He believed that?”

“Do you need a reason to want silver?” Finan asked, then shrugged. “He believed us, lord, and Osferth was persuasive.”

“When I told the story,” Osferth put in wryly, “I found myself believing it.”

I laughed at that. “You want to be king, Osferth?”

He smiled, and when he smiled he resembled his father so much that it was uncanny. “No, lord,” he said gently.

“And I’m not really sure Grageld knew who Alfred was,” Finan went on. “He knew the name well enough, and he knew his coins, of course, but he seemed to think Wessex was a way off. So I said it was a country where the silver grew on the ash trees, and that its king was old and tired, and that Osferth would be the new king and he would be a friend to Skirnir.”

“He believed all this?”

“He must have done! The brother wanted us to go to Zegge, but I said no. I was not taking Seolferwulf through those channels, lord, for her to be trapped inside, and so we waited outside and Skirnir came out with the second ship and they put the boats either side of us and I could see they were thinking of capturing us.”

Which is what I had feared. I imagined Seolferwulf with her shrunken crew flanked by Skirnir’s two long ships packed with men.

“But we’d thought about that,” Finan said happily, “and we’d hoisted the anchor stone on the sail yard.” Our anchor stones are huge round wheels, the size of millstones, with a hole carved in their center, and Finan had hoisted Seolferwulf ’s anchor by using the sail yard as a crane, and the message of that poised boulder was plain enough. If either of Skirnir’s ships attacked, then the stone would be swung over that ship, the line holding it would be cut by an ax, and the stone would fall to crash through the attacking ship’s bilge. Skirnir would gain one ship and lose another, and so, sensibly, he had pulled his ships away and pretended he had never even thought about capturing Seolferwulf.

“The anchor stone was a good idea,” I said.

“Oh it was Osferth who thought of it, lord,” Finan admitted, “and we had the thing ready before they even came out to us.”

“And Skirnir believed your tale?”

“He wanted to believe it, lord, so he did! He wanted Skade, lord. He saw nothing but Skade, sir, you could see it in his eyes.”

“And so you sailed to capture her.”

“And so we did, lord,” Finan said with a smile.

The three ships reached the creek as both the day and the tide ebbed. I knew Skirnir would not come till the morning flood had deepened the water in the creek, but I still posted sentries. Nothing disturbed them. We slept, though it seemed we did not. I remember lying awake, thinking I would never sleep, but dreams came all the same.