Sword Song (2 page)

T
he dead speak,” Æthelwold told me. He was sober for once. Sober and awed and serious. The night wind snatched at the house and the rushlights flickered red in the wintry drafts that whipped from the roof’s smoke-hole and through the doors and shutters.

“The dead speak?” I asked.

“A corpse,” Æthelwold said, “he rises from the grave and he speaks.” He stared at me wide-eyed, then nodded as if to stress that he spoke the truth. He was leaning toward me, his clasped hands fidgeting between his knees. “I have seen it,” he added.

“A corpse talks?” I asked.

“He rises!” He wafted a hand to show what he meant.

“He?”

“The dead man. He rises and he speaks.” He still stared at me, his expression indignant. “It’s true,” he added in a voice that suggested he knew I did not believe him.

I edged my bench closer to the hearth. It was ten days after I had killed the raiders and hanged their bodies by the river, and now a freezing rain rattled on the thatch and beat on the barred shutters. Two of my hounds lay in front of the fire and one gave me a resentful glance when I scraped the bench, then rested his head again. The
house had been built by the Romans, which meant the floor was tiled and the walls were of stone, though I had thatched the roof myself. Rain spat through the smoke-hole. “What does the dead man say?” Gisela asked. She was my wife and the mother of my two children.

Æthelwold did not answer at once, perhaps because he believed a woman should not take part in a serious discussion, but my silence told him that Gisela was welcome to speak in her own house and he was too nervous to insist that I dismiss her. “He says I should be king,” he admitted softly, then gazed at me, fearing my reaction.

“King of what?” I asked flatly.

“Wessex,” he said, “of course.”

“Oh, Wessex,” I said, as though I had never heard of the place.

“And I should be king!” Æthelwold protested. “My father was king!”

“And now your father’s brother is king,” I said, “and men say he is a good king.”

“Do you say that?” he challenged me.

I did not answer. It was well enough known that I did not like Alfred and that Alfred did not like me, but that did not mean Alfred’s nephew, Æthelwold, would make a better king. Æthelwold, like me, was in his late twenties, and he had made a reputation as a drunk and a lecherous fool. Yet he did have a claim to the throne of Wessex. His father had indeed been king, and if Alfred had possessed a thimbleful of sense he would have had his nephew’s throat sliced to the bone. Instead Alfred relied on Æthelwold’s thirst for ale to keep him from making trouble. “Where did you see this living corpse?” I asked, instead of answering his question.

He waved a hand toward the north side of the house. “On the other side of the street,” he said. “Just the other side.”

“Wæclingastræt?” I asked him, and he nodded.

So he was talking to the Danes as well as to the dead. Wæclingastræt is a road that goes northwest from Lundene. It slants across Britain, ending at the Irish Sea just north of Wales, and everything to the south of the street was supposedly Saxon land, and everything to the north was yielded to the Danes. That was the peace we had in
that year of 885, though it was a peace scummed with skirmish and hate. “Is it a Danish corpse?” I asked.

Æthelwold nodded. “His name is Bjorn,” he said, “and he was a skald in Guthrum’s court, and he refused to become a Christian so Guthrum killed him. He can be summoned from his grave. I’ve seen it.”

I looked at Gisela. She was a Dane, and the sorcery that Æthelwold described was nothing I had ever known among my fellow Saxons. Gisela shrugged, suggesting that the magic was equally strange to her. “Who summons the dead man?” she asked.

“A fresh corpse,” Æthelwold said.

“A fresh corpse?” I asked.

“Someone must be sent to the world of the dead,” he explained, as though it were obvious, “to find Bjorn and bring him back.”

“So they kill someone?” Gisela asked.

“How else can they send a messenger to the dead?” Æthelwold asked pugnaciously.

“And this Bjorn,” I asked, “does he speak English?” I put the question for I knew that Æthelwold spoke little or no Danish.

“He speaks English,” Æthelwold said sullenly. He did not like being questioned.

“Who took you to him?” I asked.

“Some Danes,” he said vaguely.

I sneered at that. “So some Danes came,” I said, “and told you a dead poet wanted to speak to you, and you meekly traveled into Guthrum’s land?”

“They paid me gold,” he said defensively. Æthelwold was ever in debt.

“And why come to us?” I asked. Æthelwold did not answer. He fidgeted and watched Gisela, who was teasing a thread of wool onto her distaff. “You go to Guthrum’s land,” I persisted, “you speak to a dead man, and then you come to me. Why?”

“Because Bjorn said you will be a king too,” Æthelwold said. He had not spoken loudly, but even so I held up a hand to hush him and I
looked anxiously at the doorway as if expecting to see a spy listening from the darkness of the next room. I had no doubt Alfred had spies in my household and I thought I knew who they were, but I was not entirely certain that I had identified all of them, which was why I had made sure all the servants were well away from the room where Æthelwold and I talked. Even so it was not wise to say such things too loudly.

Gisela had stopped spinning the wool and was staring at Æthelwold. I was too. “He said what?” I asked.

“He said that you, Uhtred,” Æthelwold went on more quietly, “will be crowned King of Mercia.”

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “only ale.” He leaned toward me. “Bjorn the Dead wishes to speak to you also, to tell you your fate. You and me, Uhtred, will be kings and neighbors. The gods want it and they sent a dead man to tell me so.” Æthelwold was shaking slightly, and sweating, but he was not drinking. Something had scared him into sobriety, and that convinced me he spoke the truth. “They want to know if you are willing to meet the dead,” he said, “and if you are then they will send for you.”

I looked at Gisela who merely looked back at me, her face expressionless. I stared back at her, not waiting for a response, but because she was beautiful, so beautiful. My dark Dane, my lovely Gisela, my bride, my love. She must have known what I was thinking, for her long, grave face was transformed by a slow smile. “Uhtred is to be king?” she asked, breaking the silence and looking at Æthelwold.

“The dead say so,” Æthelwold said defiantly. “And Bjorn heard it from the three sisters.” He meant the Fates, the Norns, the three sisters who weave our destiny.

“Uhtred is to be King of Mercia?” Gisela asked dubiously.

“And you will be the queen,” Æthelwold said.

Gisela looked back to me. She had a quizzical look, but I did not try to answer what I knew she was thinking. Instead I was reflecting that there was no king in Mercia. The old one, a Saxon mongrel on a Danish
leash, had died, and there was no successor, while the kingdom itself was now split between Danes and Saxons. My mother’s brother had been an ealdorman in Mercia before he was killed by the Welsh, so I had Mercian blood. And there was no king in Mercia.

“I think you had better hear what the dead man says,” Gisela spoke gravely.

“If they send for me,” I promised, “I will.” And so I would, because a dead man was speaking and he wanted me to be a king.

Alfred arrived a week later. It was a fine day with a pale blue sky in which the midday sun hung low above a cold land. Ice edged the sluggish channels where the River Temes flowed about Sceaftes Eye and Wodenes Eye. Coot, moorhen and dabchicks paddled at the edge of the ice, while on the thawing mud of Sceaftes Eye a host of thrush and blackbirds hunted for worms and snails.

This was home. This had been my home for two years now. Home was Coccham, at the edge of Wessex where the Temes flowed toward Lundene and the sea. I, Uhtred, a Northumbrian lord, an exile and a warrior, had become a builder, a trader, and a father. I served Alfred, King of Wessex, not because I wished to, but because I had given him my oath.

And Alfred had given me a task; to build his new burh at Coccham. A burh was a town turned into a fortress and Alfred was riveting his kingdom of Wessex with such places. All around the boundaries of Wessex, on the sea, on the rivers and on the moors facing the wild Cornish savages, the walls were being built. A Danish army could invade between the fortresses, but they would discover still more strongholds in Alfred’s heartland, and each burh held a garrison. Alfred, in a rare moment of savage elation, had described the burhs to me as wasps’ nests from which men could swarm to sting the attacking Danes. Burhs were being made at Exanceaster and Werham, at Cisseceastre and Hastengas, at Æscengum and Oxnaforda, at Cracgelad and Wæced, and at dozens of places between. Their walls and palisades were manned by spears and shields. Wessex was becoming a land of
fortresses, and my task was to make the little town of Coccham into a burh.

The work was done by every West Saxon man over the age of twelve. Half of them worked while the other half tended the fields. At Coccham I was supposed to have five hundred men serving at any one time, though usually there were fewer than three hundred. They dug, they banked, they cut timber for walls, and so we had raised a stronghold on the banks of the Temes. In truth it was two strongholds, one on the river’s southern bank and the other on Sceaftes Eye, which was an island splitting the river into two channels, and in that January of 885 the work was nearly done and no Danish ship could now row upstream to raid the farms and villages along the river’s bank. They could try, but they must pass my new ramparts and know that my troops would follow them, trap them ashore and kill them.

A Danish trader called Ulf had come that morning, tying his boat at the wharf on Sceaftes Eye where one of my officials prodded through the cargo to assess the tax. Ulf himself, grinning toothlessly, climbed up to greet me. He gave me a piece of amber wrapped in kidskin. “For the Lady Gisela, lord,” he said. “She is well?”

“She is,” I said, touching Thor’s hammer that hung around my neck.

“And you have a second child, I hear?”

“A girl,” I said, “and where did you hear of her?”

“Beamfleot,” he said, which made sense. Ulf was a northerner, but no ships were making the voyage from Northumbria to Wessex in the depth of this cold winter. He must have spent the season in southern East Anglia, on the long intricate mudflats of the Temes estuary. “It isn’t much,” he said, gesturing at his cargo. “I bought some hides and ax blades in Grantaceaster and thought I’d come upriver to see if you Saxons have any money left.”

“You came upriver,” I told him, “to see whether we’d finished the fortress. You’re a spy, Ulf, and I think I’ll hang you from a tree.”

“No, you won’t,” he said, unmoved by my words.

“I’m bored,” I said, putting the amber into my pouch, “and watching a Dane twitch on a rope would be amusing, wouldn’t it?”

“You must have been laughing when you hanged Jarrel’s crew then,” he said.

“Was that who it was?” I asked. “Jarrel? I didn’t ask his name.”

“I saw thirty bodies,” Ulf said, jerking his head downstream, “maybe more? All hanging from trees and I thought, that looks like Lord Uhtred’s work.”

“Only thirty?” I said, “there were fifty-three. I should add your miserable corpse, Ulf, to help make up the numbers.”

“You don’t want me,” Ulf said cheerfully, “you want a young one, because young ones twitch more than us old ones.” He peered down at his boat and spat toward a red-haired boy who was staring vacantly across the river. “You could hang that little bastard. He’s my wife’s oldest boy and nothing but a piece of toad gristle. He’ll twitch.”

“So who’s in Lundene these days?” I asked.

“Earl Haesten’s in and out,” Ulf said, “more in than out.”

I was surprised by that. I knew Haesten. He was a young Dane who had once been my oath-man, but who had broken his oath and now aspired to be a warrior lord. He called himself an earl, which amused me, but I was surprised he had gone to Lundene. I knew he had made a walled camp on the coast of East Anglia, but now he had moved much closer to Wessex, which suggested he was looking for trouble. “So what’s he doing?” I asked scornfully, “stealing his neighbors’ ducks?”

Ulf drew in a breath and shook his head. “He’s got allies, lord.”

Something in his tone made me wary. “Allies?”

“The Thurgilson brothers,” Ulf said, and touched his hammer amulet.

The name meant nothing to me then. “Thurgilson?”

“Sigefrid and Erik,” Elf said, still touching the hammer. “Norse earls, lord.”

That was something new. The Norse did not usually come to East Anglia or to Wessex. We often heard tales of their raids in the Scottish
lands and in Ireland, but Norse chieftains rarely came close to Wessex. “What are Norsemen doing in Lundene?” I asked.

“They got there two days ago, lord,” Ulf said, “with twenty-two keels. Haesten went with them, and he took nine ships.”

I whistled softly. Thirty-one ships was a fleet and it meant the brothers and Haesten together commanded an army of at least a thousand men. And those men were in Lundene and Lundene was on the frontier of Wessex.

Lundene was a strange city back then. Officially it was part of Mercia, but Mercia had no king and so Lundene had no ruler. It was neither Saxon nor Dane, but a mix of both, and a place where a man could become rich, dead, or both. It stood where Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex met, a city of merchants, tradesmen, and seafarers. And now, if Ulf was right, it had an army of Vikings within its walls.

Ulf chuckled. “They’ve got you stopped up like a rat in a sack, lord.”

I wondered how a fleet had gathered and ridden the tide upstream to Lundene without my finding out long before it sailed. Coccham was the nearest burh to Lundene and I usually knew what happened there within a day, but now an enemy had occupied the city and I had known nothing about it. “Did the brothers send you to tell me this?” I asked Ulf. I was assuming that the Thurgilson brothers and Haesten had only captured Lundene so that someone, probably Alfred, would pay them to go away. In which case it served their interest to let us know of their arrival.