“What is it?” ?thelfl?d asked.
“Haesten,” I said, my son’s idiocy forgotten. “It has to be Haesten.” I could think of no other explanation.
The war had started.
THREE
Seventy of us rode toward the pyre of smoke that now appeared as a dark slow-moving smudge on the hazed horizon. Half the seventy were my men and half were Mercians. I had left my children in the village where Osferth and Beornoth were under orders to wait for our return.
?thelfl?d insisted on riding with us. I tried to stop her, but she would take no orders from me. “This is my country,” she said firmly, “and my people, and I need to see what is being done to them.”
“Probably nothing,” I said. Fires were frequent. Houses had thatched roofs and open hearths, and sparks and straw go ill together, but I still had a sense of foreboding that had made me dress in mail before we started this return journey. My first response on seeing the smoke had been to suspect Haesten and, though reflection made that explanation seem ever more unlikely, I could not lose the suspicion.
“There’s no other smoke,” Finan noted when we had retraced half our steps. Usually, if an army scavenges through a land, it fires every village, yet only the one dark smoke plume drifted skyward. “And Lecelad’s a far way from East Anglia,” he went on, “if that fire is in Lecelad.”
“True enough,” I grunted. Lecelad was a long way from Haesten’s camp in Beamfleot, indeed so deep in Saxon country that any Danish army marching straight on Lecelad was putting itself in danger. None of it made sense, unless, as both Finan and I wanted to believe, it was simply an errant spark and dry thatch.
The fire was indeed at Lecelad. It took some time to be certain of that for the land was flat and our view was obscured by trees, but we had no doubts once we were close enough to see the heat shimmering amidst the smoke. We were following the river, but now I turned away so that we could approach the village from the north. That, I believed, would be the direction in which any Danes retreated and we might have a chance to intercept them. Reason still said this had to be a simple house fire, but my instincts were also prickling uncomfortably.
We reached the northward road to see it had been churned by hooves. The weather had been dry, so the hoofprints were not distinct, but even at a glance I could tell they had not been left by Aldhelm’s men who, just the day before, had used this same track to approach Lecelad. There were too many prints, and those that pointed northward had mostly obliterated the ones going south. That meant whoever had ridden to Lecelad had already ridden away.
“Been and gone,” Father Pyrlig said. He was in his priestly robes, but had a big sword strapped at his waist.
“At least a hundred of them,” Finan said, looking at the hoofprints that spread either side of the track.
I gazed northward, but could see nothing. If the raiding horsemen had still been close I would have seen dust hanging in the air, but the country was calm and green. “Let’s see what the bastards did,” I said, and turned southward.
Whoever had come and gone, and I was certain it was Haesten’s men, they had been swift. I guessed they had arrived at Lecelad at dusk, had done whatever damage they wanted and then left in the dawn. They knew they were dangerously deep in Saxon Mercia and so they had not lingered. They had struck fast, and even now they were hurrying back to safer ground while we rode into the ever thickening smell of wood smoke. Of wood smoke and of burning flesh.
The convent was gone, or rather it had been reduced to a blazing framework of oak beams that, as we approached, finally collapsed with a great crash that made my stallion rear in fright. Embers whirled upward in a great gout of wind-billowed smoke. “Oh, dear God,” ?thelflaed said, making the sign of the cross. She was gazing in horror at one section of the convent’s palisade that had been spared the fire, and there, on the timbers, pinioned with widespread arms, was a small naked body. “No!” ?thelfl?d said and spurred her horse through the hot ash that had spread from the fire.
“Come back!” I shouted, but ?thelfl?d had thrown herself from her saddle to kneel at the foot of the corpse, a woman. It was Werburgh, the abbess, and she had been crucified on the palisade. Her hands and feet were pierced by great dark nails. Her small weight had torn the flesh, sinews, and bones about the great nails so that the wounds were stretched and rivulets of drying blood laced her pitifully thin arms. ?thelfl?d was kissing the abbess’s nailed feet and resisted when I tried to pull her away. “She was a good woman, Uhtred,” ?thelfl?d protested, and just then Werburgh’s torn right hand ripped itself free of the nail and the corpse lurched and its arm swung down to strike ?thelfl?d’s head. ?thelfl?d gave a small scream, then seized the ragged bloody hand and kissed it. “She blessed me, Uhtred. She was dead, but she blessed me! Did you see?”
“Come away,” I said gently.
“She touched me!”
“Come away,” I said again, and this time she let me draw her from the corpse and away from the heat of the fire just beyond.
“She must be buried properly,” ?thelfl?d insisted and tried to pull from me to return to the corpse.
“She will be,” I said, holding her.
“Don’t let her burn!” ?thelfl?d said through tears, “she mustn’t taste the fires of hell, Uhtred! Let me spare her the fire!”
Werburgh was very close to the furnace heat that was scorching the farther side of the palisade that I knew would ignite at any moment. I pushed ?thelfl?d away, stepped back to Werburgh, and dragged her small body free of the remaining two nails. I draped her over my shoulder just as a gust of wind dipped a thick cloud of dark smoke to envelop me. I felt sudden heat on my back and knew the palisade had burst into flames, but Werburgh’s body was safe. I laid her facedown on the river bank and ?thelfl?d covered the corpse with a cloak. The West Saxon troops, reinforced now to around forty men, gaped at us from the southern bank.
“Jesus, Patrick, and Joseph,” Finan said as he approached me. He glanced at ?thelfl?d who was kneeling by the abbess’s body and I sensed Finan did not want ?thelfl?d to hear whatever he had to say, so I led him down the river toward the mill that was also burning. “The bastards dug up Aldhelm’s grave,” Finan said.
“I put him there,” I said, “so I should worry what they did?”
“They mutilated him,” Finan said angrily. “Took all his clothes, his mail, and cut up his corpse. There were pigs eating him when we found him.” He made the sign of the cross.
I stared at the village. The church, convent, and mill had all been fired, but only two of the cottages had been burned, though doubtless all had been ransacked. The raiders had been in a hurry and had fired what was most valuable, but had not had the time to destroy the whole of Lecelad. “Haesten’s a nasty creature,” I said, “but mutilating a corpse and crucifying a woman? That isn’t like him.”
“It was Skade, lord,” Finan said. He beckoned to a man dressed in a short mail coat and wearing a helmet that had rust on its riveted joints. “You! Come here!” he called.
The man knelt to me and clawed off his helmet. “My name’s Cealworth, lord,” he said, “and I serve Ealdorman ?thelnoth.”
“You’re one of the sentries across the river?” I asked.
“Yes, lord.”
“We brought him across the river in a boat,” Finan explained. “Now tell the Lord Uhtred what you saw.”
“It was a woman, lord,” Cealworth said nervously, “a tall woman with long black hair. The same woman, lord,” he stopped, then decided he had nothing more to say.
“Go on,” I said.
“The same woman I saw at Fearnhamme, lord. After the battle.”
“Stand up,” I told him. “Are any villagers alive?” I asked Finan.
“Some,” he said bleakly.
“A few swam the river, lord,” Cealworth said.
“And the ones that live,” Finan said, “all tell the same tale.”
