covered the place of slaughter were at last shredding, letting a watery sunlight beat down on the choppy sea. “You shouldn’t have let them live,” Skade told me.
“Skirnir’s men?” I asked. “Why kill them? They were beaten.”
“They should all be dead,” she said vengefully, then turned a gaze of utter fury on me. “You left two of his brothers alive! They should be dead!”
“I let them live,” I said. Without Skirnir and his large boats they were harmless, though Skade did not see it that way.
“Milksop!” she spat at me.
I stared at her. “Careful, woman,” I said, and she went sulkily silent.
We had brought just one prisoner with us, the shipmaster from Skirnir’s own vessel. He was an old man, over forty, and years of squinting at the sun-reflecting sea had made his eyes mere crinkled slits in a face beaten dark by salt and weather. He would be our guide. “If my ship so much as touches a sandbank,” I told him, “I’ll let Skade kill you in her own way.”
Men and women watched us pass through the crooked channel that twisted between two of the inner islands, and then we glided across sheltered water that reflected the settling sun in shivering gold. The watchers were Skirnir’s followers, but these men had not sailed with their lord in the dawn, and now they saw our proud shields that we had hung from
There were fewer people on Zegge than on the outer islands, because it was from Zegge that the two defeated crews had sailed, and where most of the dead, wounded, or stranded men had lived. A crowd of women came to the gray wooden pier that jutted out be neath the mound which supported Skirnir’s hall. The women watched our boat approach, then some recognized the body that was our trophy and they all fled, dragging their children by the hands. Eight men, dressed in mail and carrying weapons, came from the hall, but when they saw my crew disembarking they ostentatiously put their weapons down. They knew now their lord was dead, and not one of them was minded to fight for his reputation.
And so, in the twilight of that day, we came to the hall on the mound of Zegge, and I stared up at its black bulk and thought of the dragon sleeping on his hoard of silver and gold. The high-roofed hall had great wooden horns at its eaves, horns that reared into the darkening sky where the first stars pricked the dusk.
I left fifteen men to guard the ship, then climbed the hill, seeing how the mound was made from great baulks of timber planted in a long rectangle that had been filled with sand, and on that first layer another smaller rectangle had been built, and then a third, and at the summit a final layer where a palisade stood, though it offered no defiance now, for its heavy wooden gate stood wide open. There was no fight left in Skirnir’s men. Their lord was dead.
The hall’s door was framed by a pair of vast curved bones that had come from some sea monster. I passed beneath them with a drawn sword with Rollo and Finan flanking me. A fire burned in the central hearth, spitting like a cat as salt-caked driftwood does. Skade came behind us and the waiting servants shivered at the sight of her. Skirnir’s steward, a plump man, bowed low to me. “Where’s the treasure?” I asked harshly.
The steward was too frightened to answer and Skade thrust him aside. “Lanterns!” she called to the servants, and small rushlamps were brought and in their paltry light she led me to a door at the back of the hall which opened onto a small square chamber heaped with sealskins. “He slept here,” she said.
“Above the dragon?”
“He was the dragon,” she said scornfully, “he was a pig and a dragon,” and then she dropped to her knees and scrabbled the stinking skins aside. I called for Skirnir’s plump steward to help her. Finan looked at me, an eyebrow raised in expectation, and I could not resist a smile.
To take Bebbanburg I needed men. To storm that great stone wall and slaughter my uncle’s warriors, I needed men, and to buy men I needed gold. I needed silver. I needed a treasure guarded by a dragon to make that long dream come true, and so I smiled as Skade and the steward pulled away the high pile of pelts that covered the hiding place.
And then, in the light of the smoking lamps, the door was revealed.
It was a trapdoor of dark heavy wood into which an iron ring was set. I remember Father Beocca, years ago, telling me how he had visited a monastery in Sumors?te and how the abbot had reverently showed him a crystal vial in which was kept milk from the Virgin Mary’s breasts. “I shivered, Uhtred,” Beocca had told me earnestly, “I shook like a leaf in the wind. I dared not hold the flask for fear of dropping it! I shook!”
I do not think I shook at that moment, but I felt the same awe, the same sense of being close to something inexplicable. My future lay beneath that trapdoor. My hopes, my sons’ futures, my dreams of freedom beneath a northern sky, all lay so close. “Open it,” I ordered, and my voice was hoarse, “open it.”
Rollo and the steward took hold of the ring. The trapdoor was stiff, jammed in its frame, and they needed to tug it hard to move it at all. Then, abruptly, the heavy door came free and the two men staggered as they dragged it aside.
I stepped forward and looked down.
And started laughing.
There was no dragon. I have never seen a dragon, though I am assured they exist and I have heard men describe those awful beasts with their malevolent scarlet eyes, flame-shooting mouths, questing necks, and crackling wings the size of ship sails. They are the beasts of nightmare, and though I have sailed into the distant north, sailed to where the ice blanches the sky with its reflections, I have never been far enough north to the frost lands where dragons are said to roost.
There was no dragon in Skirnir’s pit, but there was a skeleton and some rats. The rats looked up startled, their tiny eyes winking back the flames of our inadequate lanterns, then they scuttled into cracks between the elm planks that lined the pit. Two rats were inside the ribcage of the dead man and they were the last to leave, first wriggling between the bones then slithering fast into their hiding place.
And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw the coins and the silver shards. I heard them first, chinking under the feet of the rats, then I saw them, dully gleaming, spilling from the leather sacks that had held them. The rotting sacks had been gnawed by rats. “What’s the corpse?” I asked.
“A man who tried to steal Lord Skirnir’s treasure, lord,” the steward answered in a whisper.
“He was left here to die?”
“Yes, lord. He was blinded first, then his sinews were cut, and he was put in the pit to die slowly.”
Skade smiled.
“Bring it all out,” I ordered Finan, then pushed the steward toward the hall. “You feed us tonight,” I ordered him, “all of us.”
I went back into the hall. It had only one table, so that most men would have eaten on the rush-covered floor. It was dark now, the only light coming from the big fire that we fed with logs my men tore from the palisade. I sat at the table and watched as Skirnir’s treasure was laid before me. I had laughed when the pit was first opened, and that laughter had been scornful because, in the feeble light, the treasure had appeared so paltry. What had I expected? A glittering heap of gold, studded with precious stones?
The laughter was sour because Skirnir’s treasure was indeed paltry. He had boasted of his wealth, but the truth was hidden behind those boasts and beneath his stinking bed-skins. He was not poor, true, but his hoard was just what I should have expected from a man who did little except steal scraps of silver from small traders.
My men watched the table. It was important that they saw what they had won so they would know I did not cheat them when I divided the hoard. They mostly saw silver, but there were two pieces of gold, both thin torques made of twisted strands, and I put one in the pile for Rollo and his men, and kept the other for my followers. Then there were coins, mostly Frankish silver, but there were a few Saxon shillings and a handful of those mysterious coins that have curly writing no one can read and which are rumored to come from some great empire to the east. There were four silver ingots, but the greatest part of the treasure was in silver shards. The northmen have no coinage, other than what they steal, and so they pay for their goods, when they pay at all, with silver scraps. A
