looking. He sighed. ‘The Witan believes Eohric will prove an ally.’
‘Your father-in-law believes that?’
Edward nodded. ‘We’ve had war for three generations,’ he said sternly, ‘and still it has not brought peace. Plegmund says we must try prayer and preaching. My mother agrees.’
I laughed at that. So we were to defeat our enemies with prayer? Cnut and Sigurd, I thought, would welcome that tactic. ‘And what does Eohric want from us?’ I asked.
‘Nothing!’ Edward seemed surprised by the question.
‘He wants nothing, lord?’
‘He wants the archbishop’s blessing.’
Edward, in those first years of his reign, was under the influence of his mother, his father-in-law, and the archbishop, and all three resented the cost of war. Building the burhs and equipping the fyrd had taken huge sums of silver, while to put an army into the field cost even more, and that money came from the church and from the ealdormen. They wanted to keep their silver. War is expensive, but prayer is free. I scoffed at the idea, and Edward cut me off with an abrupt gesture. ‘Tell me about the twins,’ he said.
‘They thrive,’ I said.
‘My sister said the same, but I heard ?thelstan won’t suckle?’ he sounded anguished.
‘?thelstan sucks like a bull calf,’ I said. ‘I started a rumour that he’s weak. It’s what your mother and your father-in-law want to hear.’
‘Ah,’ Edward said, and smiled. ‘I’m forced to deny their legitimacy,’ he went on, ‘but they are dear to me.’
‘They’re safe and well, lord,’ I assured him.
He touched my forearm. ‘Keep them that way! And Lord Uhtred,’ his hand tightened on my forearm to emphasise his next words, ‘I don’t want the Danes provoked! You understand me?’
‘Yes, lord King.’
He suddenly realised he was gripping my arm and pulled his hand away. He was awkward with me, I assumed because he was embarrassed that he had made me nursemaid to his royal bastards, or perhaps because I was his sister’s lover, or perhaps because he had ordered me to keep the peace when he knew I believed that peace was fraudulent. But the Danes were not to be provoked, and I was sworn to obey Edward.
So I set out to provoke the Danes.
PART THREE
Angels
Nine
‘Edward’s under the thumb of the priests,’ I grumbled to Ludda, ‘and his damned mother is worse. Stupid bitch.’ We had returned to Fagranforda and I had taken him northwards to the edge of the hills from where a man can stare across the wide S?fern into the hills of Wales. It was raining in that far west, but a watery sun reflected like beaten silver from the river in the valley beneath us. ‘They think they can avoid war by praying,’ I went on, ‘and all because of that fool Plegmund. He thinks God will geld the Danes.’
‘Prayer might work, lord,’ Ludda said cheerfully.
‘Of course it won’t work,’ I snarled, ‘if your god wanted it to work then why didn’t he do it twenty years ago?’
Ludda was too sensible to offer an answer. There were just the two of us. I was seeking something, and I did not want folk to know what I sought, and so Ludda and I rode the crestline alone. We were searching, talking to slaves in the fields and to thegns in their halls, and on the third day I found what I sought. It was not perfect. It was too near to Fagranforda for my liking and not close enough to Danish land.
‘But there’s nothing like this to the north,’ Ludda said, ‘not that I know of. There are plenty of weird stones up north, but not any buried stones.’
Weird stones are strange circles of great boulders placed by the old people, presumably in honour of their gods. Usually, when we find such a place, we dig at the base of the stones and I have found treasure at one or two. The buried stones are in mounds, some of which are round heaps and some like long ridges, and both are the old people’s graves. We dig into them too, though some folk believe the skeletons inside are protected by spirits or even by dragons with fiery breath, but I once uncovered a jar filled with jet, amber and golden ornaments inside just such a grave. The mound we discovered that day was on a high ridge with views stretching all around. Looking north we could see into the far-off Danish land, though that was a long way off, too far-off, but nevertheless I thought this ancient tomb would suit us.
The place was called Natangrafum and it belonged to a Mercian thegn named ?lwold, who was happy that I should dig into his mound. ‘I’ll lend you slaves to do the work,’ he told me, ‘bastards don’t have enough to do until the harvest.’
‘I’ll use my own,’ I said.
?lwold was immediately suspicious, but I was Uhtred and he did not want to antagonise me. ‘You’ll share anything you find?’ he asked anxiously.
‘I will,’ I said, then put gold on his table. ‘That gold,’ I said, ‘is for your silence. No one knows I’m here and you tell no one. If I find you break that silence I’ll come back and I’ll bury you in that mound.’
‘I’ll say nothing, lord,’ he promised. He was older than I, with pendulous jowls and long grey hair. ‘God knows I don’t want trouble,’ he went on, ‘last year’s harvest was bad, the Danes aren’t that far away, and I just pray for a quiet life.’ He took the gold. ‘But you’ll find nothing in that mound, lord. My father dug it out years ago and there’s nothing there but skeletons. Not even a bead.’
There were two graves on the ridge top, one built upon the other. A circular mound lay in the centre and athwart it and beneath it, running east and west, was a long mound some ten feet high and over sixty paces long. Much of that long mound was just that, a mound of earth and chalk, but at its eastern end were man-made caves that were entered through a boulder-clad doorway that faced towards the rising sun.
I sent Ludda to fetch a dozen slaves from Fagranforda and they moved the boulder, and cleared the entrance of earth so that we were able to stoop into the long, stone-lined passageway. Four chambers, two on either side, opened from that tunnel. We lit the tomb with pitch-soaked torches and pulled down the heavy rocks that blocked the chamber entrances and found, as ?lwold had said, nothing but skeletons.
‘Will it do?’ I asked Ludda.
He did not answer at first. He was staring at the skeletons and there was fear on his face. ‘They’ll come back to haunt us, lord,’ he said softly.
‘No,’ I said, yet felt a cold shiver in my blood. ‘No,’ I said again, though I did not believe it.
‘Don’t touch them, lord,’ he pleaded.
‘?lwold said his father disturbed them,’ I said, trying to convince myself, ‘so we should be safe.’
‘He disturbed them, lord, and that means he woke them. Now they’re waiting to take revenge.’ The skeletons lay in untidy heaps, adults and children together. Their skulls grinned at us. One bony head had a great gash in its left side and there were vestiges of hair on another. A child lay curled in a skeleton’s lap. Another corpse reached a bony arm towards us, its finger bones spread on the stony floor. ‘Their spirits are here,’ Ludda whispered, ‘I can feel them, lord.’
I felt the cold shiver again. ‘Ride back to Fagranforda,’ I told Ludda, ‘and bring Father Cuthbert and my best hound.’
