The Flame Bearer (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 10) (5 page)

‘Hundreds,’ my elder brother had said, and six months later he was dead, and my father had given me his name, and I became the heir to Bebbanburg.

The wall marked the southern boundary of Bebbanburg’s lands, and my father had always left a score of warriors in Weallbyrig to collect tolls from travellers using the main road that linked Scotland to Lundene. Those men were long gone, of course, driven out when the Danes conquered Northumbria during the invasion that had cost my father his life and left me an orphan with a noble name and no land. No land because my uncle had stolen it. ‘You are lord of nothing,’ King Alfred had once snarled at me, ‘lord of nothing and lord of nowhere. Uhtred the godless, Uhtred the landless, and Uhtred the hopeless.’

He had been right, of course, but now I was Uhtred of Dunholm. I had taken that fort when we defeated Ragnall and killed Brida, and it was a great fort, almost as formidable as Bebbanburg. And Weallbyrig marked the northern limit of Dunholm’s lands, just as it marked the southern edge of Bebbanburg’s domain. If the fort had another name, I did not know it, we called it Weallbyrig, which just means the fort of the wall, and it had been built where the great wall crossed a low hill. The years and the rain had made the ditches shallow, but the wall itself was still strong. The buildings had lost their roofs, but we had cleared the debris from three of them and brought rafters from the woods near Dunholm to make new roofs, which we layered with turf, and then we constructed a new shelter on top of the look-out tower so sentries were protected from wind and rain as they stared northwards.

Always northwards. I thought about that often. I do not know how many years it is since the Romans left Britain. Father Beocca, my childhood tutor, had told me it was over five hundred years, and perhaps he was right, but even back then, however long ago it was, the sentries gazed north. Always north towards the Scots, who must have been as much trouble then as they are now. I remember my father cursing them, and his priests praying that the nailed god would humble them, and that always puzzled me because the Scots were Christians too. When I was just eight years old my father had allowed me to ride with his warriors on a punitive cattle raid into Scotland, and I remember a small town in a wide valley where the women and children had crowded into a church. ‘You don’t touch them!’ my father had commanded, ‘they have sanctuary!’

‘They’re the enemy,’ I protested, ‘don’t we want slaves?’

‘They’re Christians,’ my father explained curtly, and so we had taken their long-haired cattle, burned most of their houses, and ridden home with ladles, spits, and cooking pots, indeed with anything that our smithy could melt down, but we had not entered the church. ‘Because they’re Christians,’ my father had explained again, ‘don’t you understand, you stupid boy?’

I did not understand, and then, of course, the Danes had come, and they tore the churches apart to steal the silver from the altars. I remember Ragnar laughing one day. ‘It is so kind of the Christians! They put their wealth in one building and mark it with a great cross! It makes life so easy.’

So I learned that the Scots were Christians, but they were also the enemy, just as they had been the enemy when thousands of Roman slaves had dragged stones across Northumbria’s hills to make the wall. In my childhood I was a Christian too, I knew no better, and I remember asking Father Beocca how other Christians could be our enemies.

‘They are indeed Christians,’ Father Beocca had explained to me, ‘but they are savages too!’ He had taken me to the monastery on Lindisfarena and he had begged the abbot, who was to be slaughtered by the Danes within half a year, to show me one of the monastery’s six books. It was a huge book with crackling pages, and Beocca turned them reverently, tracing the lines of crabbed handwriting with a dirty fingernail. ‘Ah!’ he had said. ‘Here it is!’ He turned the book so I could see the writing, though because it was in Latin it meant nothing at all to me. ‘This is a book,’ Beocca told me, ‘written by Saint Gildas. It’s a very rare book. Saint Gildas was a Briton, and his book tells of our coming! The coming of the Saxons! He did not like us,’ he had chuckled when he said that, ‘for of course we were not Christians then. But I want you to see this because Saint Gildas came from Northumbria, and he knew the Scots well!’ He turned the book and bent over the page. ‘Here it is! Listen! “As soon as the Romans returned home,”’ he translated as his finger scratched along the lines, ‘“there eagerly emerged the foul hordes of Scots like dark swarms of worms who wriggle out of cracks in the rocks. They had a greed for bloodshed, and were more ready to cover their villainous faces with hair than cover their private parts with clothes.”’ Beocca had made the sign of the cross after he closed the book. ‘Nothing changes! They are thieves and robbers!’

‘Naked thieves and robbers?’ I had asked. The passage about private parts had interested me.

‘No, no, no. They’re Christians now. They cover their shameful parts now, God be praised.’

‘So they’re Christians,’ I said, ‘but don’t we raid their land too?’

‘Of course we do!’ Beocca had said. ‘Because they must be punished.’

‘For what?’

‘For raiding our land, of course.’

‘But we raid their land,’ I insisted, ‘so aren’t we thieves and robbers too?’ I rather liked the idea that we were just as wild and lawless as the hated Scots.

‘You will understand when you are grown up,’ Beocca had said, as he always did when he did not know the answer. And now that I was grown up I still did not understand Beocca’s argument that our war against the Scots was righteous punishment. King Alfred, who was nobody’s fool, often said that the war that raged across Britain was a crusade of Christianity against the pagans, but whenever that war crossed into Welsh or Scottish territory it suddenly became something else. Then it became Christian against Christian, and it was just as savage, just as bloody, and we were told by the priests that we did the nailed god’s will, while the priests in Scotland said exactly the same thing to their warriors when they attacked us. The truth, of course, was that it was a war about land. There were four tribes in one island, the Welsh, the Scots, the Saxons, and the Northmen, and all four of us wanted the same land. The priests preached incessantly that we had to fight for the land because it had been given to us as a reward by the nailed god, but when we Saxons had first captured the land we had all been pagans. So presumably Thor or Odin gave us the land.

‘Isn’t that true?’ I asked Father Eadig that night. We were sheltering in one of Weallbyrig’s fine stone buildings, protected from the relentless wind and rain by Roman walls, and warmed by a great fire in the hearth.

Eadig gave me a nervous smile. ‘It’s true, lord, that God sent us to this land, but it wasn’t the old gods, it was the one true God. He sent us.’

‘The Saxons? He sent the Saxons?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘But we weren’t Christians then,’ I pointed out. My men, who had heard it all before, grinned.

‘We weren’t Christians then,’ Eadig agreed, ‘but the Welsh who had this land before us were Christians. Except they were bad Christians, so God sent the Saxons as a punishment.’

‘What had they done?’ I asked. ‘The Welsh, I mean. How were they bad?’

‘I don’t know, lord, but God wouldn’t have sent us unless they deserved it.’

‘So they were bad,’ I said, ‘and God preferred to have bad pagans in Britain instead of bad Christians? That’s like killing a cow because it has a lame hoof and replacing it with a cow that has the staggers!’

‘Oh, but God converted us to the true faith as a reward for punishing the Welsh!’ he said brightly. ‘We’re a good cow now!’

‘So why did God send the Danes?’ I asked him. ‘Was he punishing us for being bad Christians?’

‘That is a possibility, lord,’ he said uncomfortably, as if he was not quite sure of his answer.

‘So where does it end?’ I asked.

‘End, lord?’

‘Some Danes are converting,’ I said, ‘so who does your god send to punish them when they become bad Christians? The Franks?’

‘There’s a fire,’ my son interrupted us. He had drawn aside a leather curtain and was staring north.

‘In this rain?’ Finan asked.

I went to stand beside my son, and, sure enough, somewhere in the far northern hills, a great blaze made a glow in the sky. Fires mean trouble, but I could not imagine any raiding party being loose in this night of rain and wind. ‘It’s probably a steading that caught fire,’ I suggested.

‘And it’s a long way away,’ Finan said.

‘God’s punishing someone,’ I said, ‘but which god?’

Father Eadig made the sign of the cross. We watched the distant blaze for a short while, but no more fires showed, then the rain damped the far flames and the sky darkened again.

We changed the sentries in the high tower, then slept.

And in the morning the enemy came.

‘You, Lord Uhtred,’ my enemy commanded, ‘will go south.’

He had come with the morning rain and the first I knew of his arrival was when the sentries in the look-out tower clanged the iron bar that served as our alarm bell. It was an hour or so after dawn, though the only hint of the sun was a ghostly paleness in the eastern clouds. ‘There are people out there,’ one of the sentries told me, pointing north, ‘on foot.’

I leaned on the tower’s parapet and stared into the patchy mist and rain as Finan climbed the ladder behind me. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Maybe shepherds?’ I suggested. I could see nothing. The rain was less violent now, just a steady drenching.

‘They were running towards us, lord,’ the sentry said.

‘Running?’

‘Stumbling anyway.’

I stared, but saw nothing.

‘There were horsemen too,’ Godric, who was the second sentry, said. He was young and not too clever. Until a year before he had been my servant and he was liable to see enemies in any shadow.

‘I didn’t see horsemen, lord,’ the first sentry, a reliable man called Cenwulf, said.

Our horses were being saddled ready for the day’s journey. I wondered if it was worth taking scouts north to discover if there really were men out there and who they were and what they wanted. ‘How many men did you see?’ I asked.

‘Three,’ Cenwulf said.

‘Five,’ Godric said at the same time, ‘and two horsemen.’

I gazed north and saw nothing except the rain falling on bracken. Drifts of ragged mist hid some of the further swells in the land. ‘Probably shepherds,’ I said.

‘There were horsemen, lord,’ Godric said uncertainly, ‘I saw them.’

No shepherd would ride a horse. I gazed into the rain and mist. Godric’s eyes were younger than Cenwulf’s, but his imagination was also a lot more fanciful.

‘Who in Christ’s name would be out there at this time of morning?’ Finan grumbled.

‘No one,’ I said, straightening up, ‘Godric’s imagining things again.’

‘I’m not, lord!’ he said earnestly.

‘Dairymaids,’ I said, ‘he thinks of nothing else.’

‘No, lord!’ he blushed.

‘How old are you now?’ I asked him. ‘Fourteen? Fifteen? That’s all I ever thought about at your age. Tits.’

‘You haven’t changed much,’ Finan muttered.

‘I did see them, lord,’ Godric protested.

‘You were dreaming of tits again,’ I said, then stopped. Because there were men on the rain-soaked hills.

Four men appeared from a fold in the ground. They were running towards us, running desperately, and a moment later I saw why, because six horsemen came out of the mist, galloping to cut the fugitives off. ‘Open the gate!’ I shouted to the men at the tower’s foot. ‘Get out there! Bring those men here!’

I scrambled down the ladder, arriving just as Rorik brought Tintreg. I had to wait as the girth was tightened, then I hauled myself into the saddle and followed a dozen mounted men out onto the hillside. Finan was not far behind me. ‘Lord!’ Rorik was shouting at me as he ran from the fort. ‘Lord!’ He was holding my heavy sword belt with the scabbarded Serpent-Breath.

I turned, leaned from the saddle and just drew the sword, leaving belt and scabbard in Rorik’s hands. ‘Go back to the fort, boy.’

‘But …’

‘Go back!’

The dozen men who had been already mounted ready to leave the fort were well ahead of me, all riding to cut off the horsemen who pursued the four men. Those horsemen, seeing they were outnumbered, sheered away and just then a fifth fugitive appeared. He must have been hiding in the bracken beyond the skyline and now ran into view, leaping down the slope. The horsemen saw him and turned again, this time towards the fifth man, who, hearing their hooves, twisted away, but the leading rider slowed, calmly levelled a spear, then thrust its blade into the fugitive’s spine. For a heartbeat the man arched his back, staying on his feet, then the second rider overtook him, back-swung an axe and I saw the bright sudden mist of blood. The man collapsed instantly, but his death had distracted and delayed his pursuers and so saved his four companions, who were now guarded by my men.

‘Why didn’t that stupid fool stay hidden?’ I asked, nodding to where the six horsemen had surrounded the fallen man.

‘That’s why,’ Finan answered, and pointed towards the northern skyline where a crowd of horsemen was appearing from the mist. ‘God save us,’ he said, making the sign of the cross, ‘but it’s a god-damned army.’

Behind me the sentries on the tower were clanging the iron bar to bring the rest of my men to the fort’s ramparts. A gust of rain blew heavy and sudden, lifting the cloaks of the horsemen who lined the skyline. There were dozens of them. ‘No banner,’ I said.

‘Your cousin?’

I shook my head. In the grey and rain-smeared light it was hard to see the distant men, but I doubted my cousin would have had the courage to bring his garrison this far south through a dark night. ‘Einar, perhaps?’ I asked, but in that case who had they been chasing? I spurred Tintreg towards my men, who guarded the four fugitives.

‘They’re Norsemen, lord!’ Gerbruht shouted as I approached.

The four were soaked through, shaking with cold, and terrified. They were all young, fair-haired, and had inked faces. When they saw my drawn sword they dropped to their knees. ‘Lord, please!’ one of them said.