I laughed at that, then watched a buzzard gliding through the midday sky. ‘I suppose we should move.’
‘Do we go to Heahburh?’ Finan asked.
‘Close,’ I said. I had no desire to return to that place, but if the priest was right then Burgham lay somewhere to the south and so we followed rough tracks across the bare hills and spent that night in the valley of the Tinan, sheltered by deep trees. Next morning, in a small rain, we climbed out of the valley and I saw Heahburh on a distant hilltop. A shaft of sunlight moved across the old fort, shadowing the Roman ditches where so many of my men had died.
Egil rode beside me. He said nothing of the fight at Heahburh. ‘So what do we expect at Burgham?’ he asked me.
‘Unhappiness.’
‘Nothing new there, then,’ he said grimly. He was a tall, good-looking Norseman with long fair hair and a prow of a nose. He was a wanderer who had found a home on my land and rewarded me with both friendship and loyalty. He said he owed me a life because I had rescued his younger brother Berg from a cruel death on a Welsh beach, but I considered that debt long paid. He stayed, I think, because he liked me and I liked him. ‘You say Æthelstan has two thousand men?’ he asked.
‘That’s what we were told.’
‘If he takes a dislike to us,’ he remarked mildly, ‘we’ll be a little outnumbered.’
‘Just a little.’
‘Will it come to that?’
I shook my head. ‘He hasn’t come to make war.’
‘Then what is he doing here?’
‘He’s behaving like a dog,’ I said. ‘He’s pissing on all his boundaries.’ That was why he was in Cumbria, that wild and untamed western part of Northumbria. The Scots wanted it, the Irish Norse claimed it, we had fought for it, and now Æthelstan had come to place his banner on it.
‘So he’ll piss on us?’ Egil asked.
‘That’s what I expect.’
Egil touched the hammer at his breast. ‘But he doesn’t like pagans.’
‘So he’ll piss harder on us.’
‘He wants us gone. They call us strangers. Pagans and strangers.’
‘You live here,’ I said forcefully, ‘you’re a Northumbrian now. You fought for this land, so you have as much right to it as anyone.’
‘But he wants us to be Ænglisc,’ he said the unfamiliar word carefully, ‘and he wants the Ænglisc to be Christians.’
‘If he wants to swallow Northumbria,’ I said savagely, ‘then he’ll have to swallow the gristle along with the flesh. Half of Cumbria is pagan! He needs them as enemies?’
Egil shrugged again. ‘So he just pisses on us and we go home?’
‘If that makes him happy,’ I said, ‘yes.’ And I hoped I was right, though I really suspected I would have to fend off a demand for Bebbanburg.
Late that afternoon, as the road dropped into a wide well-watered valley, we saw a veil of smoke to the south. Not a great dark pillar that might betray a hall or steading being burned, but a drifting mist of smoke hanging over the rich farmland in the river valley. It had to be where men were assembled and so we turned our horses southwards and, next day, came to Burgham.
Folk had been there before, the old people who used vast boulders to make strange circles. I touched my hammer when I saw the circles. The gods must know of those places, but what gods? Older gods than mine and much older than the nailed Christian god, and the Christians I had spoken with said such places were malevolent. The devil’s playgrounds, they claimed, yet Æthelstan had chosen one such circle as the place of meeting.
The circles lay south of a river. I could see two of them, though later I discovered a third nearby. The largest circle lay to the west and that was where Æthelstan’s banners flew amidst hundreds of men, hundreds of tents and hundreds of crude turf shelters, amongst which were campfires and tethered horses. There were banners by the score, a few of them triangular that belonged to Norse jarls, and most of those were to the south beside another river that ran fast and shallow across a stony bed. Closer to the largest circle was a mass of flags that were mostly familiar to me. They were the standards of Wessex; crosses and saints, dragons and rearing horses, the black stag of Defnascir, the crossed swords and the bull’s head flags of Cent, all of which I had seen fly in battle, sometimes on my side of the shield wall and sometimes on the other. The leaping stag of Æthelhelm was there, too, though that house was no longer my enemy. I doubted it was my friend, but the long bloodfeud had died with the death of Æthelhelm the Younger. Mixed among the flags of Wessex were the banners of Mercia and of East Anglia, all now acknowledging the King of Wessex as their overlord. That, then, was the Saxon army come north, and judging by the number of banners, Æthelstan had brought at least a thousand men to Burgham.
To the west, in a smaller and separate encampment, there was a spread of unfamiliar banners, but I saw Domnall’s red hand holding the cross, which suggested that was where the Scottish had pitched their tents or made turf shelters, while to the south, to my surprise, the red dragon banner of Hywel of Dyfed rippled in the breeze. Closest to us, just beyond the river’s ford, lay a dozen tents over which flew Guthfrith’s three-sided flag of the viciously tusked boar. So he was here, and I saw that his small encampment was guarded by mailed warriors carrying Æthelstan’s badge of the dragon and lightning bolt on their iron-rimmed shields. That same badge flew on Æthelstan’s flag, which was carried by a monstrously tall pine trunk placed at the entrance to the largest stone circle, and next to it, on
