previous evening, earning a chill reception from Brida, but enchanting Ragnar with his exaggerated tales of battle. He had been drunk by the time Ragnar went to bed, so I had found very little chance to talk with my old friend.
I took a cloak from a peg and clasped it around my throat. The wool was damp. “Does your god love you?” I asked Pyrlig.
He laughed at that. “My God, what a question, lord! Well, he keeps me miles away from my wife, so he does, and what greater blessing can a man ask? And he fills my belly and he keeps me amused! Did I tell you about the slave girl that died of drinking milk?”
“The cow collapsed on her,” I said flatly.
“He’s a funny man, that Cnut,” Pyrlig said, “I’ll regret it when you kill him.”
“I kill him?” I asked. The girl stared at me.
“You’ll probably have to,” Pyrlig said.
“Don’t listen to him,” I told the girl, “he’s raving.”
“I’m Welsh, my darling,” he explained to her, then turned back to me, “and can you tell me, lord, why a good Welshman should be doing Saxon business?”
“Because you’re an interfering earsling,” I said, “and god knows what arse you dropped out of, but here you are.”
“God uses strange instruments for his wondrous purposes,” Pyrlig said. “Why don’t you dress and watch the dawn with me?”
Father Pyrlig, like Bishop Asser, was a Welshman who had found employment in Alfred’s service, though he told me he had not come to Dunholm from Wessex, but rather from Mercia. “I was last in Wintanceaster at Christmas,” he told me, “and my God, poor Alfred is sick! He looks like a warmed-up corpse, he does, and not very well warmed-up either.”
“What were you doing in Mercia?”
“Smelling the place,” he said mysteriously, then, just as mysteriously, added, “it’s that wife of his.”
“Whose wife?”
“?lswith. Why did Alfred marry her? She should feed the poor man some butter and cream, make him eat some good beef.”
Father Pyrlig had eaten his share of butter and cream. He was big-bellied, broad-shouldered, and eternally cheerful. His hair was a tangled mess, his grin was infectious, and his religion was carried lightly, though never shallowly. He stood beside me above Dunholm’s south gate and I told him how Ragnar and I had captured the fortress. Pyrlig, before he became a priest, had been a warrior and he appreciated the tale of how I had sneaked inside Dunholm by a water-gate on the west side, and how we had survived long enough to open the gate above which we now stood, and how Ragnar had led his flame-bearing sword-Danes through the gate and into the fortress where we had fought Kjartan’s men to defeat and death. “Ah,” he said when the tale was finished, “I should have been here. It sounds like a rare fight!”
“So what brings you here now?”
He grinned at me. “A man can’t just visit an old friend?”
“Alfred sent you,” I said sourly.
“I told you, I came here from Mercia, not Wessex.” He leaned on the palisade’s top. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “the night before you captured Lundene?”
“I do remember,” I said, “that you told me you were dressed for prayer that night. You were in mail and carried two swords.”
“What better time to pray than before a battle?” he asked. “And that was another rare fight, my friend.”
“It was.”
“And before it, lord,” he said, “you made an oath.”
My anger rose as swiftly as the river had been swollen by the storm’s sudden rain. “Damn Alfred and his oaths,” I said, “damn him to his hell. I gave that bastard the best years of my life! He wouldn’t even sit on the throne of Wessex if I hadn’t fought for him! Harald Bloodhair would be king now, and Alfred would be rotting in his tomb, and does he thank me? Once in a while he’d pat me on the head like a damned dog, but then he lets that turd-brained monk insult Gisela and he expects me to crawl to him for forgiveness after I kill the bastard. Yes,” I said, turning to look into Pyrlig’s broad face, “I took an oath. Then let me tell you I am breaking it. It is broken. The gods can punish me for that and Alfred can rot in hell’s depth for all I care.”
“I doubt it will be him in hell,” Pyrlig said mildly.
“You think I’d want to be in your heaven?” I demanded. “All those priests and monks and dried-up nuns? I’d rather risk hell. No, father, I am not keeping my oath to Alfred. You can ride back and you can tell him that I have no oath to him, no allegiance, no duty, no loyalty, nothing! He’s a scabby, ungrateful, cabbage-farting, squint-eyed bastard!”
“You know him better than I do,” Pyrlig said lightly.
“He can take his oath and shit on it,” I snarled. “Go back to Wessex and give him that answer.” A shout made me turn, but it was only a servant bellowing at a protesting horse. One of the lords was leaving and evidently making an early start. A group of warriors, helmeted and in mail, were already mounted, while two horses waited with empty saddles. A pair of Ragnar’s men ran to the gate beneath us and I heard the bar being lifted.
“Alfred didn’t send me,” Pyrlig said.
“You mean this is all your idea? To come and remind me of my oath? I don’t need reminding.”
“To break an oath is a…”
“I know!” I shouted.
“Yet men break oaths all the time,” Pyrlig went on calmly, gazing south to where the first gray light of dawn was touching the crests of the hills. “Maybe that’s why we hedge oaths with harsh law and strict custom, because we know they will be broken. I think Alfred knows you will not return. He is sad about that. If Wessex is attacked then he will lack his sharpest sword, but even so he didn’t send me. He thinks Wessex is better without you. He wants a godly country and you were a thorn in that ambition.”
“He might need some thorns if the Danes return to Wessex,” I snarled.
“He trusts in God, Lord Uhtred, he trusts in God.”
I laughed at that. Let the Christian god defend Wessex against the Northumbrian Danes when they stormed ashore in the summer. “If Alfred doesn’t want me back,” I said, “then why are you wasting my time?”
“Because of the oath you made on the eve of the battle for Lundene,” Pyrlig said, “and it was the person to whom you made that promise who asked me to come here.”
I stared at him and fancied I heard the laughter of the Norns. The three spinners. The busy-fingered Norns who weave our fate. “No,” I said, but without anger or force.
“She sent me.”
“No,” I said again.
“She wants your help.”
“No!” I protested.
“And she asked me to remind you that you once swore to serve her.”
I closed my eyes. It was true, all true. Had I forgotten that oath I made in the night before we attacked Lundene? I had not forgotten it, but nor had I ever thought that oath would harness me. “No,” I said again, this time a mere whisper of denial.
“We are all sinners, lord,” Pyrlig said gently, “but even the church recognizes that some sins are worse than others. The oath you made to Alfred was duty and it should have been rewarded with gratitude, land, and silver. It is wrong of you to break that oath and I cannot approve, but I understand that Alfred was careless in his duty toward you. But the oath you made to the lady was sworn in love, and that oath you cannot break without destroying your soul.”
“Love?” I made the query sound like a challenge.
“You loved Gisela, I know, and you did not break the oaths you gave to her, but you love the lady who sent me. You always have. I see it in your face, and I see it in hers. You are blind to it, but it dazzles the rest of us.”
“No,” I said.
“She is in trouble,” Pyrlig said.
“Trouble?” I asked dully.
