‘I am.’
‘That is not good,’ she said seriously.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘is Gunnald Gunnaldson a pagan?’
She did not answer for a long while, then she shook her head abruptly. ‘He wears the cross.’
‘Does that make him a better man than me?’
She hesitated for a brief moment. ‘No,’ she finally admitted.
‘Then maybe,’ I said, ‘if he’s still in Lundene, I’ll kill him.’
‘No,’ she said firmly.
‘No?’
‘Let me kill him,’ she said and, almost for the first time since I had met her, Benedetta looked happy. We rowed on.
We reached Lundene at dusk, a dusk made darker by the city’s canopy of smoke. At least a score of other ships were lumbering upriver, most laden with the food and supplies that a city’s horde of people and horses need, one ship so heavily laden that it looked like a floating hayrick as it rode the flooding tide about the river’s great bends. We passed the smaller settlements built to Lundene’s east; the shipbuilders with their stacks of timber and the smoking pits where they burned pine to make stinking pitch, and the tanners who made a stink all of their own as they cured pelts with shit. Above it all was Lundene’s own thick stench of woodsmoke and sewage. ‘It’s not a river,’ Finan complained, ‘it’s a cesspool.’
‘You get used to it,’ I said.
‘Who’d want to?’ He looked down at the water flowing past Spearhafoc’s hull. ‘Those are turds!’
We left the marshy banks for the two low hills of Lundene. It was getting dark now, but there was still just enough light to show three spearmen standing on the high stone rampart of the small Roman bastion that guarded the eastern end of the city. None of the three was wearing a dark red cloak and no leaping stag banners hung against the wall. Nor did the three men show any interest as we passed. The wharves, packed with ships, began just beyond the small fort, and in their centre, still downstream of the great bridge, was the stone wall I knew so well. The wall had been made by the Romans and protected a masonry platform on which they had built a lavish house. I had lived there with Gisela.
No ship was tied to the stone wall and so I pushed the steering-oar over and the tired rowers dragged their last strokes. ‘Oars in!’ I called, and Spearhafoc slid gently against the massive stone blocks. Gerbruht threaded the bow line through one of the vast iron rings set in the wall and waited as Spearhafoc coasted the last few yards. Her stern thumped against the stone and Berg seized another of the rings. I tossed him the stern line and our ship was hauled in to grate her hull against the wall. When I had kept a ship here before I had packed canvas sacks with straw to cushion the hull, but that was a task that could wait for the morning.
A narrow flight of steps was inset into the stone to allow folk to climb the wall at low tide. ‘Wait,’ I told my crew and passengers, then Finan and I jumped onto the steps and climbed to the wide river terrace where, on evenings when the wind came from the north to blow away the Temes’s stench, Gisela and I had liked to sit. Night was falling fast now and the house was dark except for a dim light behind one of the shutters and the glimmer of flames in the central courtyard. ‘Someone’s living here,’ Finan said.
‘The house belongs to the king,’ I said. ‘Alfred always gave it to the garrison commander, though most never used it. I did.’
‘But which king?’
‘Æthelstan’s now,’ I said, ‘but the West Saxons will want it back.’ Lundene was valuable, the city’s customs dues alone could finance a small kingdom, and I wondered if Edward, in his will, had declared which of his sons, Ælfweard or Æthelstan, was to rule here. In the end, of course, it was whichever half-brother could muster the most spears.
The house door opened.
Waormund walked out.
I did not recognise him at first, nor did he recognise me. Behind him the passage that led to the courtyard was lit with torches, so his face was in shadow, while I was probably the last person he had ever expected to see in Lundene. At first all I was aware of was the man’s size; a huge man, a head taller than myself, broad-shouldered, shaggy haired, with booted legs like tree trunks. Light from the torches flickered off the links of a mail coat that fell to his thighs. He was eating meat that he tore off the bone with his teeth. ‘You can’t leave your poxy ship there,’ he growled, then went utterly still. ‘Christ!’ he said, threw the bone away and drew his seax, then leaped at me with a surprising speed for such a huge man.
I had not brought Serpent-Breath from the ship, though my own seax, Wasp-Sting, hung at my waist. I stepped fast to my right, away from Finan so that Waormund would have an enemy on two sides, and dragged the short-sword from her scabbard. Waormund’s first slash missed me by a finger’s breadth, I ducked the second, a wild swing aimed at my head, and parried the third with Wasp-Sting, catching his blade at the root of the short-sword. The blow jarred up my arm. His strength was prodigious. Like me, Finan only had a seax, but he moved behind Waormund, who somehow sensed the Irishman’s approach, turned and swept his short blade to drive Finan back. I went to my right, stepping past Waormund and dragging Wasp-Sting’s blade across the back of his left leg. I was trying to slice his hamstring, but Wasp-Sting was a short stabbing weapon, not
