‘You can’t take them!’ An irate elderly man stormed out of a house built next to a vast open shed where timbers were seasoning. He spoke Danish. ‘You can’t take them!’ he repeated.
‘Are you going to stop us?’ It was Wihtgar who snarled that response, and in Danish too, which surprised me.
The man took one look into Wihtgar’s scarred face and all defiance fled. ‘How do I get them back?’ he pleaded.
I ignored the question. ‘Lord Æthelhelm needs them,’ I said, ‘and doubtless he’ll return them.’
‘Lord Æthelhelm?’ The elderly man was confused now.
‘I’m his cousin, Æthelwulf,’ I said, using the name of Æthelhelm’s younger brother who I hoped was still a prisoner in Bebbanburg, then had an impulse to touch my hammer to ward off the thoughts of plague in the north. I had no hammer, but I did have my pouch of money that Finan had returned, and so I gave the man hacksilver. ‘We’re joining my cousin in Lundene,’ I told him, ‘so look for your ships there.’ I saw a thin silver chain under his jerkin, reached out to free it, and found he was wearing a silver hammer. He edged back, alarmed. Our shields were burned with crosses and he plainly feared Christian vengeance. ‘How much?’ I asked.
‘Much, lord?’
‘For the hammer?’
‘Two shillings, lord.’
I gave him three, then hung the hammer around my neck and touched it with a forefinger. It was a consolation.
One of the barges was half loaded with stacks of split timber and we unloaded it, then waited for the tide to turn. I sat on a thick oak trunk, gazing across the river, which swirled slow and sluggish. Two swans drifted upstream on the flood tide. I was thinking of Eadith and of Benedetta when a voice interrupted my thoughts. ‘You said we were Lord Æthelhelm’s men, lord?’ Wihtgar was standing over me.
‘I didn’t want him complaining to Æthelhelm,’ I explained. Not that the elderly man was likely to send a messenger to Lundene, but nor did I want news spreading through the neighbourhood of a Mercian force taking boats. ‘Besides,’ I went on, ‘we are Æthelhelm’s men now, or we are until we start killing them.’ We had plenty of captured red cloaks, and we had the charred crosses on our shields. I looked up at Wihtgar. ‘So you speak Danish?’ That was unusual for a Saxon.
He gave me a lopsided grin. ‘Married to one, lord.’ He touched the wrinkled scar where his left ear had been. ‘Her husband did this. He got my ear, I got his woman. A fair exchange.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Did he live?’
‘Not long, lord.’ He patted the hilt of his sword. ‘Flæscmangere saw to that.’
I half smiled. Flæscmangere was a good name for a sword, and the butcher’s blade, I thought, would soon be busy in Lundene.
It was midday before the ebb started, but even before the tide turned, when it was slack water, we untied the ships, poled them off the wharf, and started downriver. It was another bright summer’s day, too hot to wear mail. The sun dazzled from the river’s ripples, a lazy west wind stirred the willow leaves, and slowly, slowly, we lumbered downstream. We used the oars, but clumsily, because the Mercians were not used to rowing. I had put Gerbruht on the second barge and Beornoth on the third because they were both Frisian seamen and both knew boats. Their barges lumbered behind ours, the oars splashing and clashing, and mostly it was the river’s current and the fall of the quickening tide that took us southwards.
We reached the Temes in the late afternoon and it was there that I discovered the purpose of the four great posts buried in the river bed where the Ligan’s channels joined the greater river. A hay barge was moored to one of the posts. The crew, just three men, were waiting for the tide to turn and, rather than run aground, they were floating, tethered to the post, which meant they did not have to wait for the flood tide to lift them from the mud, but could take advantage of the first strong tidal surge to carry them towards Lundene. We moored with them, then waited again.
The sun blazed. There was hardly a breath of wind now. No clouds. Yet to the west there was a great dark smear in the sky, ominous as any thunderhead. That was the smoke of Lundene. It was a city, I thought, of darkness. I wondered if the smoke lingered above Bebbanburg, or whether a sea breeze was blowing it inland, and then I touched my new hammer to avert the curse of plague. I closed my eyes and gripped the hammer so tightly that it hurt my fingers. I prayed to Thor. I prayed that my lacerations would heal, that my ribs would stop hurting with every breath, and that my torn shoulder would let me wield a sword. I prayed for Bebbanburg, for Northumbria, for my son, for all the folk at home. I thought of Berg, with his strange cargo of a fugitive queen and her children. I prayed there was no plague.
‘You’re praying,’ Finan accused me.
‘That the sky stays cloudless,’ I said, opening my eyes.
‘You’re worrying about rain?’
‘I want moonlight,’ I said. ‘We’ll be going upriver after sundown.’
It was still full daylight when the tethered boats swung ponderously to the new tide. We unmoored from the massive posts and used the big oars to take us into the Temes, then let the tide carry us. The sinking sun was hazed by the great smear of smoke as slowly the western
