and muscle, the years of war and readying for war, and I thrust my bent legs and pulled my arms, and I felt the bonds loosening and I was rolling back, throwing the blade off my hip, and I started to shout, a great war shout of a warrior and reached for Serpent-Breath’s hilt.
?lfadell tried to pull the sword away, but she was old and slow, and I was bellowing to fill the cave with echoes and I seized the hilt and swung the blade to drive her back, and Hearberht checked as I rose to my feet. I half stumbled, the bonds still wrapped about my ankles, and Hearberht saw his opening and came in fast, the short blade held low ready to rip up into my naked belly and I swatted it aside and fell on him. He went backwards and I stood again and he hacked the blade at my bare legs, but I parried him and then stabbed down with Serpent- Breath, my sword, my lover, my blade, my war companion, and she gutted that monk like a fish under a razor-edged knife, and his blood spread on his black robe and turned the bat shit black, and I went on ripping her, unaware that I was still shouting to fill the cave with rage.
Hearberht was squealing and shaking and dying, and the other two monks were fleeing. I ripped the bonds off my ankles and pursued them. Serpent-Breath’s hilt was slippery with my blood, and she was hungry.
I caught them in the woods, not fifty paces from the cave’s mouth, and I felled the younger monk with a blow to the back of his head, then caught the older by his robe. I turned him to face me and smelt the fear that fouled his robe. ‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘and who are you?’
‘Abbot Deorlaf, lord,’ he said, falling to his knees and holding his clasped hands towards me, and I held him by the throat and buried Serpent-Breath in his belly, and I sawed her there, opening him up, and he mewed like an animal and wept like a child and called on Jesus the Redeemer as he died in his own dung. I cut the younger monk’s throat, then went back to the cave where I washed Serpent-Breath’s blade in the stream.
‘Erce did not foretell your death,’ ?lfadell said. She had screamed when I tore the bonds off my wrists and seized the sword from her, yet now she was oddly calm. She just watched me and was apparently unafraid.
‘Is that why you didn’t kill me?’
‘She didn’t foretell my death either,’ she said.
‘Then maybe she was wrong,’ I said, and fetched Wasp-Sting from Hearberht’s dead hand.
And that was when I saw her.
From a deeper cave, from a passage that led into the netherworld, Erce came. She was a girl of such beauty that the breath stopped in my lungs. The dark-haired girl who had ridden me in the night, the long-haired girl, slender and pale, so beautiful and calm and as naked as the blade in my hand and all I could do was stare at her. I could not move, and she gazed back at me with grave, large eyes and she said nothing and I said nothing until the breath caught in me again. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘Dress yourself,’ ?lfadell said, whether to me or the girl I could not tell.
‘Who are you?’ I asked the girl, but she was still and silent.
‘Dress yourself, Lord Uhtred!’ ?lfadell ordered, and I obeyed her. I pulled on my jerkin, my boots, my mail and strapped my swords at my waist, and still the girl gazed at me with her quiet, dark eyes. She was as beautiful as the summer dawn and as silent as the winter night. She did not smile, her face showed nothing. I walked towards her and sensed something strange. The Christians say we have a soul, whatever that is, and it seemed to me this girl had no soul. There was an emptiness in her dark eyes. It was frightening, making me approach her slowly.
‘No!’ ?lfadell called. ‘You cannot touch her! You have seen Erce in the daylight. No other man has.’
‘Erce?’
‘Go,’ she said, ‘go.’ She dared to stand in front of me. ‘You dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘and in your dream you found truth. Be content with that, and go.’
‘Speak to me,’ I said to the girl, but she was unmoving and silent and empty, yet I could not take my eyes from her. I would have looked on her for all the rest of my life. The Christians talk of miracles, of men walking on water and raising the dead, and they say those miracles are proofs of their religion, though none of them can do a miracle or show us a miracle, yet here, in this damp cave beneath the hilltop grave, I saw a miracle. I saw Erce.
‘Go,’ ?lfadell said, and though she spoke to me it was the goddess who turned and vanished into the underworld.
I did not kill the old woman. I went. I dragged the dead monks into some brambles where perhaps the wild beasts would feast on them, and then I stooped to the stream and drank like a dog.
‘What did the witch tell you?’ Osferth asked me when I reached the widow’s farm.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and my tone discouraged further questions, all except one. ‘Where are we going, lord?’ Osferth asked.
‘We’re going south,’ I said, still in a daze.
And so we rode towards Sigurd’s land.
Four
I had told ?lfadell my name, and what else? Had I told her my idea for revenge on Sigurd? And why had I talked so much? Ludda gave me an answer as we rode south. ‘There are herbs and mushrooms, lord, and there’s the blight you find on ears of rye, all kinds of things can give men dreams. My mother used them.’
‘She was a sorceress?’
He shrugged. ‘A wise-woman, anyway. She told fortunes and made potions.’
‘And the potion ?lfadell gave me, that made me speak my name?’
‘Maybe it was rye-blight? You’re lucky to be alive if it was. Get it wrong and you kill the dreamer, but if she knew how to make it then you’ll have gabbled like an old woman, lord.’
And who knows what else I had revealed to the agl?cwif? I felt like a fool. ‘Does she really speak to the gods?’ I had told Ludda about ?lfadell, but not about Erce. I wanted to hold that secret close, a memory to haunt me.
‘Some folk claim to talk to the gods,’ Ludda said uncertainly.
‘And see the future?’
He shifted in his saddle. Ludda was not accustomed to riding a horse, and the journey had given him a sore arse and aching thighs. ‘If she really saw the future, lord, would she be in a cave? She’d have a palace. Kings would crawl to her feet.’
‘Maybe the gods only talk to her in the cave,’ I suggested.
Ludda heard the anxiety in my voice. ‘Lord,’ he said earnestly, ‘if you roll the dice often enough you always get the numbers you want. If I tell you the sun will shine tomorrow and that it will rain and there will be snow and that clouds will cover the sky and that the wind will blow and that it will be a calm day and that the thunder will deafen us then one of those things will turn out to be true and you’ll forget the rest because you want to believe that I really can tell the future.’ He gave me a swift smile. ‘Folk don’t buy rusty iron because I’m persuasive, lord, but because they desperately want to believe it will turn to silver.’
And I desperately wanted to believe his doubts about ?lfadell. She had said Wessex was doomed and that seven kings would die, but what did that mean? What kings? Alfred of Wessex, Edward of Cent, Eohric of East Anglia? Who else? And who was the Saxon? ‘She knew who I was,’ I said to Ludda.
‘Because you had drunk her potion, lord. It was as if you were drunk and saying anything that came into your mind.’
‘And she tied me up,’ I told him, ‘but didn’t kill me.’
‘God be praised,’ Ludda said dutifully. I doubted he was a Christian, at least not a good one, but he was too clever to fall foul of the priests. He frowned in puzzlement. ‘I wonder why she didn’t kill you.’
‘She was frightened to,’ I said, ‘and so was the abbot.’
‘She tied you up, lord,’ Ludda said, ‘because someone had told her you were Jarl Cnut’s enemy. So she knew that much, but she didn’t know what Jarl Cnut wanted done with you. So she sent for the monks to find out. And they were too scared to order your death, too. It’s no small thing to kill a lord, especially if his men are close by.’
‘One of them wasn’t scared.’
