The Pagan Lord (7 page)

‘Maybe they dug the man up,’ Finan said, ‘and maybe they didn’t. But sometimes madness works.’

‘What does that mean?’

He shrugged. ‘I remember in Ireland there was a holy fellow preaching that if we could only play a drum with the thigh bone of Saint Athracht, poor woman, then the rain would stop. There were floods then, you see. Never seen rain like it. Even the ducks were tired of it.’

‘What happened?’

‘They dug the creature up, hammered a drum with her long bone, and the rain stopped.’

‘It would have stopped anyway,’ I snarled.

‘Aye, probably, but it was either that or build an ark.’

‘Well, I killed the bastard by mistake,’ I said, ‘and now the Christians want my skull as a drinking bowl.’

It was morning, a grey morning. The clouds had thinned during the night, but now they closed down again and spat showers. We rode on tracks that led through damp fields where the rye, barley and wheat had been beaten down by rain. We rode towards Lundene, and off to my right I caught glimpses of the Temes flowing slow and sullen towards the far-off sea. ‘The Christians have been looking for a reason to be rid of you,’ Finan said.

‘You’re a Christian,’ I said, ‘so why did you stay with me?’

He gave a lazy grin. ‘What one priest decrees another priest denies. So if I stay with you I go to hell? I’m probably going anyway, but I’ll easily find a priest who’ll tell me different.’

‘Why didn’t Sihtric think that?’

‘It’s the womenfolk. They’re more scared of the priests.’

‘And your woman isn’t?’

‘I love the creature, but she doesn’t rule me. Mind you, she’ll wear her knees out with praying, though,’ he said, grinning again. ‘And Father Cuthbert wanted to come with us, poor man.’

‘A blind priest?’ I asked. ‘What use is a blind priest? He’s better off with Æthelflaed.’

‘But he wanted to stay with you,’ Finan said, ‘so if a priest wanted that then how sinful is it for me to want the same thing?’ He hesitated. ‘So what are we doing?’

I did not want to tell Finan the truth, that I was going to Bebbanburg. Did I even believe that myself? To take Bebbanburg I needed gold and hundreds of men, and I was leading thirty-three. ‘We’re going viking,’ I said instead.

‘I thought as much. And we’ll be back.’

‘We will?’

‘It’s fate, isn’t it? One moment we’re in the sunlight, and the next every dark cloud in Christendom is pissing all over us. So Lord Æthelred wants to go to war?’

‘So I hear.’

‘His woman and her brother want it. And when he’s driven Mercia into chaos they’ll be screaming for us to come back and save their miserable lives.’ Finan sounded so confident. ‘And when we do come back they’ll forgive us. The priests will be putting wet kisses all over our arses, so they will.’

I smiled at that. Finan and I had been friends for so many years. We had shared slavery together, and then stood shoulder to shoulder in the shield wall, and I glanced at him and saw the grey hair showing beneath his woollen cap. His grizzled beard was grey too. I supposed I was the same. ‘We get old,’ I said.

‘We do, but no wiser, eh?’ he laughed.

We rode through villages and two small towns and I was wary, wondering if the priests had sent word that we were to be attacked, but instead we were ignored. The wind turned east and cold, bringing more rain. I glanced behind often, wondering if Lord Æthelred had sent men in pursuit, but none appeared and I assumed he was content to have driven me from Mercia. He was my cousin, my lover’s husband, and my enemy, and in that dank summer he had finally won the victory over me that he had sought so long.

It took us five days to reach Lundene. Our journey had been slow, not just because the roads were waterlogged, but because we did not have enough horses to carry wives, children, armour, shields and weapons.

I have always liked Lundene. It is a vile, smoky, stinking place, the streets thick with sewage. Even the river smells, yet the river is why Lundene exists. Go west and a man can row deep into Mercia and Wessex, go east and the rest of the world lies before his prow. Traders come to Lundene with shiploads of oil or pelts, wheat or hay, slaves or luxuries. It is supposed to be a Mercian city, but Alfred had made sure it was garrisoned by West Saxon troops, and Æthelred had never dared challenge that occupation. It was really two towns. We came to the new town first, built by the Saxons and spreading along the northern bank of the wide, sluggish Temes, and we threaded the long street, finding our way past carts and herds, through the slaughter district where the alleys were puddled in blood. The tanners’ pools lay just to the north and gave off their stench of urine and shit, and then we dropped down to the river that lay between the new and old towns, and I was assailed by memories. I had fought here. In front of us was the Roman wall and the Roman gate where I had repelled a Danish attack. Then up the hill and the guards on the gate stood aside, recognising me. I had half expected to be challenged, but instead they bowed their heads and welcomed me back, and I ducked under the Roman arch and rode into the old city, the city on its hill, a city made by the Romans in stone and brick and tile.

We Saxons never liked living in the old city. It made us nervous. There were ghosts there, strange ghosts we did not understand because they had come from Rome. Not the Rome of the Christians; that was no mystery. I knew a dozen men who had made that pilgrimage and they had all come back to talk of a marvellous place of columns and domes and arches, all in ruins, and of wolves among the broken stones and of the Christian pope who spread his poison from some decayed palace beside a rancid river, and that was all understandable. Rome was just another Lundene, only bigger, but the ghosts of Lundene’s old town had come from a different Rome, a city of enormous power, a city that had ruled all the world. Its warriors had marched from the deserts to the snow and they had crushed tribes and countries, and then, for no reason that I knew, their power had fled. The great legions had become weak, the beaten tribes revived, and the glory of that great city had become ruin. That was true in Lundene too. You could see it! There were magnificent buildings falling into decay, and I was assailed, as I always was, by the sense of waste. We Saxons built in wood and thatch, our houses rotted in the rain and were torn by the wind, and there was no man alive who could remake the Roman glory. We descend towards chaos. The world will end in chaos when the gods fight each other, and I was convinced, I still am, that the inexplicable rise of Christianity is the first sign of that encroaching ruin. We are children’s toys swept along a river towards a killing pool.

I went to a tavern beside the river. It was properly named Wulfred’s Tavern, though everyone called it the Dead Dane because the tide had dropped one day to reveal a Danish warrior impaled on one of the many rotting stakes that stab the mud where once there were wharves. Wulfred knew me, and if he was surprised that I wanted space in his cavernous buildings, he had the grace to hide it. I was usually a guest in the royal palace that was built on the hill’s top, but here I was, offering him coins. ‘I’m here to buy a ship,’ I told him.

‘Plenty of those.’

‘And find men,’ I said.

‘No end of men will want to follow the great Lord Uhtred,’ he said.

I doubted that. There had been a time when men begged to give me their oath, knowing that I was a generous lord, but the church would have spread the message that I was cursed now, and the fear of hell would keep men away.

‘But that’s good,’ Finan said that night.

‘Why?’

‘Because the bastards who want to join us won’t be frightened of hell.’ He grinned, showing three yellow teeth in his empty gums. ‘We need bastards who’ll fight through hell.’

‘We do too,’ I said.

‘Because I know what’s in your mind,’ he said.

‘You do?’

He stretched on the bench, casting an eye across the great room where men drank. ‘How many years have we been together?’ he asked, but did not wait for an answer. ‘And what have you dreamed of all those years? And what better time than now?’

‘Why now?’

‘Because it’ll be the last thing the bastards expect, of course.’

‘I’ll have fifty men, if I’m lucky,’ I said.

‘And how many does your uncle have?’

‘Three hundred? Maybe more?’

He looked at me, smiling. ‘But you’ve thought of a way in, haven’t you?’

I touched the hammer hanging about my neck and hoped that the old gods still had power in this mad, declining world. ‘I have.’

‘Then Christ help the three hundred,’ he said, ‘because they’re doomed.’

It was madness.

And, as Finan had said, sometimes madness works.

She was called
Middelniht
, a strange name for a war boat, but Kenric, the man selling her, said she had been built from trees cut down at midnight. ‘It gives a boat good luck,’ he explained.

Middelniht
had benches for forty-four oarsmen, an unstepped mast made of spruce, a mud-coloured sail reinforced by hemp ropes, and a high prow with a dragon’s head. A previous owner had painted the head red and black, but the paint had faded and peeled so the dragon looked as if it suffered from scurvy.

‘She’s a lucky boat,’ Kenric told me. He was a short wide man, bearded and bald, who built ships in a yard just to the east of the Roman city’s walls. He had forty or fifty workers, some of them slaves, who used adzes and saws to make merchant ships that were fat, heavy and slow, but
Middelniht
was of a different breed. She was long, and her midships were wide, flat and lay low in the water. She was a sleek beast.

‘You built her?’ I asked.

‘She was wrecked,’ Kenric said.

‘When?’

‘A year ago on Saint Marcon’s day. Wind blew up from the north, drove her onto Sceapig Sands.’

I walked along the wharf, looking down into
Middelniht
. Her timbers had darkened, but that was likely to have been the recent rain. ‘She doesn’t look damaged,’ I said.

‘Couple of bow strakes were stove in,’ Kenric said. ‘Nothing that a man couldn’t make good in a day or two.’

‘Danish?’

‘Frisian built,’ Kenric said. ‘Good tight oak, better than the Danish crap.’

‘So why didn’t the crew salvage her?’

‘Silly bastards went ashore, made a camp and got caught by Centish men.’

‘Then why didn’t the Centish men keep her?’

‘Because the silly bastards fought each other to a standstill. I went down and found six Frisians still alive, but two of them died, poor bastards.’ He made the sign of the cross.

‘And the other four?’

He jerked a thumb towards his slaves working on a new boat. ‘They told me her name. If you don’t like it you can always change it.’

‘It’s bad luck to change a boat’s name,’ I said.

‘Not if you get a virgin to piss in the bilge,’ Kenric said, then paused. ‘Well, that might be difficult.’

‘I’ll keep her name,’ I said, ‘if I buy her.’

‘She’s well made,’ Kenric said grudgingly, as if he doubted that any Frisian could build ships as well as he did.

But the Frisians were renowned shipbuilders. Saxon boats tended to be heavy, almost as if we were frightened of the sea, but the Frisians and the Northmen built lighter ships that did not plough through the waves, but seemed to skim across them. That was a nonsense, of course; even a sleek ship like
Middelniht
was laden with stone ballast and could no more skim than I could fly, but there was some magic in her construction that made her appear light. ‘I planned to sell her to King Edward,’ Kenric said.

‘He didn’t want her?’

‘Not big enough.’ Kenric spat in disgust. ‘West Saxons have always been the same. They want big boats, then they wonder why they can’t catch the Danes. So where are you going?’

‘Frisia,’ I said, ‘maybe. Or south.’

‘Go north,’ Kenric said.

‘Why?’

‘Not so many Christians up north, lord,’ he said slyly.

So he knew. He might call me ‘lord’ and be respectful, but he knew my fortunes were at a low ebb. That would affect the price. ‘I’m getting too old for sleet, snow and ice,’ I said, then jumped down onto
Middelniht
’s foredeck. She shivered beneath my feet. She was a war boat, a predator, built of fine-grained Frisian oak. ‘When was she last caulked?’ I asked Kenric.

‘When I repaired her strakes.’

I pulled out two of the deck boards and peered down at the ballast stones. There was water there, but that was hardly surprising in a boat that had been left unused. What mattered was whether it was rainwater or the saltwater brought upriver on the tide. The water lay too low to be reached and so I spat and watched as the blob of spittle floated on the dark water, suggesting it was fresh. Spittle spreads and vanishes in saltwater. So she was a tight boat. If the water in her bilge was fresh then it had come from the clouds above, not from the sea below.

‘She’s staunch,’ Kenric said.

‘Her hull needs cleaning.’

He shrugged. ‘I can do it, but the yard’s busy. I’ll charge.’

I could find a beach and do the job myself between the tides. I looked across Kenric’s slipways to where a small, dark merchant ship was moored. She was half the size of
Middelniht
, but every bit as wide. She was a tub, made for carrying heavy cargo up and down the coast. ‘You want that instead?’ Kenric asked, amused.

‘One of yours?’

‘I don’t build shit like that. No, she belonged to an East Saxon. Bastard owed me money. I’ll break it up and use the timber.’

‘So how much for
Middelniht
?’

We haggled, but Kenric knew he had the whip and I paid too much. I needed oars and lines too, but we agreed a price and Kenric spat on his hand and held it out to me. I hesitated, then took his hand. ‘She’s yours,’ he said, ‘and may she bring you fortune, lord.’

I owned
Middelniht
, a ship built from timbers cut in darkness.

I was a shipmaster again. And I was going north.