Viking will steal a silver bracelet, and when he needs to buy something he will hack the bracelet into shards that a merchant will weigh on scales. The steward brought us a scale and we weighed the silver and the coins. There was just over thirty pounds.
That was not to be despised. We would all go home richer. Yet my share of the treasure would hardly raise one crew of men for one season’s fighting. I stared at the divided treasure, the last silver shards still resting in the bowl of the scales, and knew that it would not bring me Bebbanburg. It would not give me an army. It would not buy the fulfillment of my dreams. I felt my spirits sink and thought of ?lfric’s laughter. My uncle would soon enough learn that I had voyaged, captured, and been disappointed, and it was while I was thinking of his enjoyment that Skade chose to speak. “You said you would give me half,” she demanded.
My fist crashed on the table so hard that the small piles of silver shuddered. “I said no such thing,” I snarled.
“You said…”
I pointed at her, silencing her. “You want to go in the hole?” I asked. “You want to live with the rats in the silver vault?”
My men smiled. Since coming to Frisia they had learned to dislike Skade and at that moment she began to hate me. I had begun to hate her earlier, when I saw the cruelty beneath her beauty. She was like a sword haunted by a spirit of greed, like a blade of shining beauty, but with a heart as dark as blood. Later that night she demanded her share again and I reminded her that though she had asked for half her husband’s treasure, I had never promised it. “And don’t think to curse me again,” I told her, “because if you do, woman, I shall sell you into slavery, but not before I disfigure you. You want a scarred face? You want me to make you ugly? Then keep your curses to yourself.”
I do not know where she slept that night, nor did I care.
We left Zegge in the dawn. I burned the six smaller ships Skirnir had left in the harbor, but I did not burn the hall. Wind and tide would take care of it. The islands come and go, the channels change from year to year, and the sand shifts to make new islands. Folk live on those islands for a few years, and then the surging tides dissolve the land again. When I next saw the islands, many years later, Zegge was quite gone, as though it had never existed at all.
We went home, and we had fair weather for the crossing. The sun glinted off the sea, the sky was clear and the air cold. It was only as we approached the coast of Britain that the clouds came and the wind rose. It took me some time to find a landmark I knew, and then we had to row hard into a north wind to find the Tinan’s mouth and it was almost dark as we rowed
I did not know it, but I was never to see
She was a noble ship.
PART THREE
BATTLE’S EDGE
ONE
The deep winter came and with it a fever. I have been lucky, rarely being ill, but a week after we reached Dunholm I began to shiver, then sweat, then feel as though a bear were clawing the insides of my skull. Brida made a bed for me in a small house where a fire burned day and night. That winter was cold, but there were moments when I thought my body was on fire, and then there were times when I shivered as if I were bedded in ice even though the fire roared in its stone hearth so fiercely that it scorched the roof beams. I could not eat. I grew weak. I woke in the night, and sometimes I thought of Gisela and of my lost children, and I wept. Ragnar told me I raved in my sleep, but I do not remember that madness, only that I was convinced I would die and so I made Brida tie my hand to Wasp-Sting’s hilt.
Brida brought me infusions of herbs in mead, she spooned honey into my mouth, and she made certain that the small house was guarded against Skade’s malevolence. “She hates you,” she told me one cold night when the wind pulled at the thatch and bellied the leather curtain which served as a door.
“Because I didn’t give her any silver?”
“Because of that.”
“There was no hoard,” I said, “not as she described it.”
“But she denies cursing you.”
“What else can have caused this?”
“We tied her to a post,” Brida said, “and showed her the whip. She swore she had not cursed you.”
“She would,” I said bitterly.
“And she still denied it when her back was bloody.”
I looked at Brida, dark-eyed, her face shadowed by her wild black hair. “Who used the whip?”
“I did,” she said calmly, “and then I took her to the stone.”
“The stone?”
She nodded eastward. “Across the river, Uhtred, is a hill, and on the hill is a stone. A big one, planted upright. It was put there by the ancient people and it has power. The stone has breasts.”
“Breasts?”
“It’s shaped that way,” she said, momentarily cupping her hands over her own small breasts. “It’s tall,” she went on, “even taller than you, and I took her there at night and lit fires to the gods, and put skulls in a ring, and I told her I would summon the demons to turn her skin yellow and her hair white and to make her face wrinkled and her breasts sag and her back humped. She cried.”
“Could you have done all that?”
“She believed so,” Brida said with a sly smile, “and she promised me on her life she had not cursed you. She spoke true, I’m sure.”
“So it’s just a fever?”
“More than a fever, a sickness. Others have it. Two men died last week.”
A priest came each week and bled me. He was a morose Saxon who preached his gospel in the small town that had appeared just to the south of Ragnar’s fortress. Ragnar had brought prosperity to the local countryside and the town was growing quickly, the smell of newly sawn wood as constant as the stink of sewage flowing downhill to the river. Brida, of course, had objected to the church being constructed, but Ragnar had allowed it. “They’ll worship any god they choose,” he had told me, “whatever I might wish. And the Saxons here were Christians before I arrived. A few have gone back to the real gods. The first priest wanted to pull down Brida’s stone and called me an evil heathen bastard when I stopped him, so I drowned him and this new one is a lot more polite.” The new priest was also reckoned to be a skilled healer, though Brida, who had her own knowledge of herbs, would not let him prescribe any potions for me. He would just open a vein in one of my arms and watch the blood pulse thick and slow into a horn cup. When it was done he was instructed to pour the blood onto the fire, then scour out the cup, which he always did with a scowl because it was a pagan precaution. Brida wanted the blood destroyed so no one could use it to cast a spell on me.
“I’m surprised Brida permits you to come into the fortress,” I told the priest one day as my drawn blood hissed and bubbled on the logs.
“Because she hates Christians, lord?”
“Yes.”
“She was sick three winters ago,” the priest said, “and Jarl Ragnar sent for me when all else failed. I cured
