The Flame Bearer by Bernard Cornwell
‘Brunulf didn’t?’
‘They said he was courteous! But the whole village had to leave. Of course they lost their livestock.’
‘And their homes.’
‘And their homes, lord, but not one of them was so much as scratched! Not a child taken as a slave, not a woman raped, nothing.’
‘Gentle invaders,’ I said.
‘So your son-in-law,’ Olla went on, ‘took over four hundred men south, but I hear he wants to be gentle too. He’d rather talk the bastards out of Hornecastre than start a war.’
‘So he’s become sensible?’
‘Your daughter is, lord. She’s the one who insists we don’t prod the wasps’ nest.’
‘And here’s your daughter,’ I said, as Hanna brought a tray laden with bowls and jugs.
‘Put it there, darling,’ Olla said, tapping the table top.
‘So how much did Haruld offer you for your brother?’ I asked her.
‘Three shillings, lord.’ She was bright-eyed, brown-haired, with an infectiously cheeky grin.
‘Why did you want to sell him?’
‘Because he’s a turd, lord.’
I laughed. ‘You should have taken the money then. Three shillings is a good price for a turd.’
‘Father wouldn’t let me.’ She pouted, then pretended to have a bright idea. ‘Maybe my brother could serve you, lord?’ She made a ghastly grimace. ‘Then he’d die in a battle?’
‘Go away, you horrible thing,’ her father said.
‘Hanna!’ I called her back. ‘Your father says you’re ready to be married.’
‘Another year, maybe,’ Olla put in quickly.
‘You want to marry this one?’ I asked, pointing to my son.
‘No, lord!’
‘Why not?’
‘He looks like you, lord,’ she said, grinned, and vanished.
I laughed, but my son looked offended. ‘I do not look like you,’ he said.
‘You do,’ Olla said.
‘God help me then.’
And god help Northumbria, I thought. Brunulf? I knew nothing of him, but assumed he was competent enough to be given command of several hundred men, but why had he been sent to Hornecastre? Was King Edward trying to provoke a war? His sister Æthelflaed might have made peace with Sigtryggr, but Wessex had not signed the treaty, and the eagerness of some West Saxons to invade Northumbria was no secret. But sending a few hundred men a small distance into Northumbria, ejecting the nearby Danes without slaughter, and then settling into an old fort did not sound like a savage invasion. Brunulf and his men, I decided, were in Hornecastre as a provocation, designed to make us attack them and so start a war we would lose. ‘Sigtryggr wants me to join him,’ I told Olla.
‘If he can’t talk them out of the fort then he’s hoping you’ll scare them out,’ he said flatteringly.
I tasted the fish stew and discovered I was ravenous. ‘So why is the price of ships going up?’ I asked.
‘You won’t believe this, lord. It’s the archbishop.’
‘Hrothweard?’
Olla shrugged. ‘He says it’s time the monks went back to Lindisfarena.’
I stared at him. ‘He says what?’
‘He wants to rebuild the monastery!’ Olla said.
There had been no monks on Lindisfarena for half a lifetime, not since marauding Danes had killed the last of them. In my father’s time it had been the most important Christian shrine in all Britain, surpassing even Contwaraburg, attracting hordes of pilgrims who came to pray beside Saint Cuthbert’s grave. My father had profited because the monastery was just north of the fortress, on its own island, and the pilgrims spent silver buying candles, food, lodging, and whores in Bebbanburg’s village. I had no doubt that the Christians wanted to rebuild the place, but right now it was in Scottish hands. Olla jerked his head eastwards along the bank. ‘See that pile of timber? It’s all good seasoned oak from Sumorsæte. That’s what the archbishop wants to use. That and some stone, so he needs a dozen ships to carry it all.’
‘King Constantin might not approve,’ I said grimly.
‘What’s it got to do with him?’ Olla asked.
‘You hadn’t heard? The damned Scots have invaded Bebbanburg’s land.’
‘Sweet Christ! Truly, lord?’
‘Truly. That bastard Constantin claims Lindisfarena is part of Scotland now. He’ll want his own monks there, not Hrothweard’s Saxons.’
Olla grimaced. ‘The archbishop won’t like that! The damned Scots in Lindisfarena!’
I had a sudden thought and frowned as I considered it. ‘You know who owns most of the island?’ I asked Olla.
‘Your family, lord,’ he said, which was a tactful answer.
‘The church owns the monastery ruins,’ I said, ‘but the rest of the island belongs to Bebbanburg. Do you think the archbishop asked my cousin’s permission to build there? He doesn’t need it, but life would be easier if my cousin agreed.’
Olla hesitated. He knew how I felt about my cousin. ‘I think the suggestion came from your cousin, lord.’
Which was exactly what I had suddenly suspected. ‘That weasel shit,’ I said. From the moment that Sigtryggr became King of Northumbria my cousin must have known that I would attack him, and he had doubtless made the suggestion to Hrothweard so that the church would support him. He would turn the defence of Bebbanburg into a Christian crusade. Constantin had at least ended that hope, I thought.
‘But before that,’ Olla went on, ‘the mad bishop tried to build a church there. Or he wanted to.’
I laughed. Any mention of the mad bishop always amused me. ‘He did?’
‘So Archbishop Hrothweard wants to stop that nonsense. Of course you never know what to believe about that crazy bastard, but it was no secret that the fool wanted to build a new monastery on the island.’
The mad bishop might have been mad, but he was no bishop. He was a Danish jarl named Dagfinnr who had declared himself the Bishop of Gyruum and given himself a new name, Ieremias. He and his men occupied the old fort at Gyruum, just south of Bebbanburg’s land on the southern bank of the River Tinan. Gyruum was part of Dunholm’s holdings, which made Ieremias my tenant, and the only time I had met him was when he had dutifully come to the larger fortress to pay me rent. He had arrived with a dozen men, who he called his disciples, all of them mounted on stallions except for Ieremias himself, who straddled an ass. He wore a long grubby robe, had greasy white hair hanging to his waist, and a sly look of amusement on his thin, clever face. He had laid fifteen silver shillings on the grass, then hitched up his robe. ‘Behold,’ he announced grandly, then pissed on the coins. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the other one,’ he said as he pissed, then grinned at me. ‘Your rent, lord, a little damp, but blessed by God Himself. See how they sparkle now? A miracle, yes?’
‘Wash them,’ I told him.
‘And your feet too, lord?’
So the crazy Ieremias wanted to build on Lindisfarena? ‘Did he ask my cousin’s permission?’ I asked Olla.
‘I wouldn’t know, lord. I haven’t seen Ieremias or his horrible ship for months.’
The horrible ship was called Guds Moder, a dark, untidy war vessel that Ieremias used to patrol the coast just beyond Gyruum. I shrugged. ‘Ieremias is no threat,’ I decided, ‘if he farts northwards then Constantin will crush him.’
‘Perhaps,’ Olla sounded dubious.
I stared at the river as it slid past the busy wharves, then watched a cat stalk along the rail of a moored ship before leaping down to hunt rats in the bilge. Olla was telling my son about the horse races that had to be postponed because Sigtryggr had led most of Eoferwic’s garrison south, but I was not listening, I was thinking. Plainly the permission to build the new monastery must have been given weeks ago, before even Constantin had led his invasion. How else would the archbishop have his piles of wood and masonry ready to be shipped?
‘When did Brunulf occupy Hornecastre?’ I asked, interrupting Olla??
‘Let me think,’ he frowned, pausing a few heartbeats, ‘must be the last new moon? Yes, it was.’
‘And the moon’s almost full,’ I said.
‘So …’ my son began, then went silent.
‘So the Scots invaded a few days ago!’ I said angrily. ‘Suppose Sigtryggr hadn’t been distracted by the West Saxons, what would he have done when he heard about Constantin?’
‘Marched north,’ my son said.
‘But he can’t, because the West Saxons are pissing all over his land to the south. They’re allied!’
‘The Scots and the West Saxons?’ my son sounded incredulous.
‘They made a secret treaty weeks ago! The Scots get Bebbanburg, and the West Saxon church gets Lindisfarena,’ I said, and I was sure I was right. ‘They get a new monastery, relics, pilgrims, silver. The Scots get land, and the church gets rich.’
I was sure I was right, though in fact I was wrong. Not that it mattered in the end.
Olla and my son were silent until my son shrugged. ‘So what do we do?’
‘We start killing,’ I said vengefully.
And next day we rode south.
‘No killing,’ my daughter said firmly.
I growled.
Sigtryggr was no longer in Lindcolne. He had left most of his army to defend the walls and had ridden with fifty men to Ledecestre, a burh he had ceded to Mercia, to plead with Æthelflaed. He wanted her to influence her brother, the King of Wessex, to withdraw his troops from Hornecastre.
‘The West Saxons want us to start a war,’ my daughter said. She had been left in command of Lindcolne, leading a garrison of almost four hundred men. She could have confronted Brunulf with that army, but she insisted on leaving the West Saxons undisturbed. ‘You probably outnumber the bastards in Hornecastre,’ I pointed out.
‘I probably don’t,’ she said patiently, ‘and there are hundreds more West Saxons waiting across the border, just looking for an excuse to invade us.’
And that was true. The Saxons in southern Britain wanted more than an excuse, they wanted everything. In my lifetime I had seen almost all of what is now called Englaland in Danish hands. The long ships had rowed up the rivers, piercing the land, and the warriors had conquered Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia. Their armies had overrun Wessex, and it had seemed inevitable that the country would be called Daneland, but fate had decreed otherwise and the West Saxons and Mercians had fought their way northwards, fought bitterly and suffered mightily, so that now only Sigtryggr’s Northumbria stood in their way. When Northumbria fell, and eventually it would, then all the folk who spoke the English tongue would live in one kingdom. Englaland.
The irony, of course, was that I had fought on the side of the Saxons all the way from the south coast to the edge of Northumbria, but now, thanks to my daughter’s marriage, I was their enemy. Such is fate! And fate now decreed that I was being told what to do by my daughter!
‘Whatever you do, father,’ she said strictly, ‘don’t stir them up! We haven’t confronted them, talked to them, or threatened them! We don’t want to provoke them!’
I looked across at her brother, who was playing with his nephew and niece. We were in a great Roman house built at the very summit of Lindcolne’s hill, and from the eastern edge of its wide garden we could see for miles across a sunlit country. Brunulf and his men were out there somewhere. My son, I thought, would like nothing better than to fight them. He was blunt, cheerful, and headstrong, while my daughter, so dark compared to her brother’s fair complexion, was subtle and secretive. She was clever too, like her mother, but that did not make her right.
‘You’re frightened of the West Saxons,’ I said.
‘I respect their strength.’
‘They’re bluffing,’ I said, and hoped I was right.
‘Bluffing?’
‘This isn’t an invasion,’ I said angrily, ‘it’s just a distraction! They wanted your armies in the south while Constantin attacks Bebbanburg. Brunulf isn’t going to attack you here! He doesn’t have enough men. He’s just here to keep you looking south while Constantin besieges Bebbanburg. They’re in league, don’t you see?’ I slapped the garden’s stone parapet. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
Stiorra knew I meant that I should be at Bebbanburg and touched my arm as if to soothe me. ‘You think you can fight your cousin and the Scots?’
‘I have to.’
‘You can’t, father, not without our army to help.’
‘All my life,’ I said bitterly, ‘I have dreamed of Bebbanburg. Dreamed of taking it back. Dreamed of dying there. And what have I done instead? Helped the Saxons conquer the land, helped the Christians! And how do they repay me? By allying themselves with my enemy.’ I turned on her, my voice savage. ‘You’re wrong!’
‘Wrong?’
‘The West Saxons won’t invade if we attack Brunulf. They’re not ready. They will be one day, but not yet.’ I had no idea if what I said was true, I was just trying to persuade myself it was the truth. ‘They need to be hurt, punished, killed. They need to be frightened.’
‘No, father,’ she was pleading now. ‘Wait to see what Sigtryggr agrees with the Mercians? Please?’
‘We’re not at war with the Mercians,’ I said.
She turned and gazed across the cloud-dappled hills. ‘You know,’ she said, quietly now, ‘that some West Saxons say we should never have made the peace. Half their Witan say Æthelflaed betrayed the Saxons because she loves you, the other half say the peace must be kept until they’re so strong that we’ll never resist them.’
‘So?’
‘So the men who want war are just waiting for a cause. They want us to attack. They want to force King Edward’s hand, and even your Æthelflaed won’t be able to resist the call to fight. We need time, father. Please. Leave them alone. They’ll go away. Go to Ledecestre. Help Sigtryggr there. Æthelflaed will listen to you.’
I thought about what she had said and decided she was probably right. The West Saxons, fresh from their triumph over East Anglia, were spoiling for a war, and it was a war I did not want. I wanted to drive the Scots from Bebbanburg’s land and to do that I needed Northumbria’s army, and Sigtryggr would only help me attack northwards if he was certain that he had peace with the southern Saxons. He had gone to Ledecestre to plead with Æthelflaed, hoping her influence with her brother would secure that peace, but despite my daughter’s urgent pleading my instinct said that the road to Bebbanburg lay through Hornecastre, not through Ledecestre. And I have always trusted instinct. It might defy reason and sense, but instinct is the prickle at the back of the neck that tells you danger is close. So I trust instinct.
So next day, despite all my daughter had said, I rode to Hornecastre.
Hornecastre was a bleak place, though the Romans had valued it enough to build a stone-walled fort just south of the River Beina. They had built no roads, so I assumed the fort had been made to guard against ships coming upriver, and those ships would have belonged to our ancestors, the first Saxons to cross the sea and take a new land. And it was good land, at least to the north where low hills provided rich pasture. Two Danish families and their slaves had settled in nearby steadings, though both had been told to leave as soon as the West Saxons occupied the ancient fort. ‘Why weren’t the Danes living in the fort?’ I asked Egil. He was a sober, middle-aged man with long plaited moustaches who had grown up not far from Hornecastre, though now he served in Lindcolne’s garrison as commander of the night watchmen. When the West Saxons had first occupied Hornecastre’s fort he had been sent with a small force to watch them, which he had done from a safe distance, until Sigtryggr’s caution had caused him to be summoned back again to Lindcolne. I had insisted that he return to Hornecastre with me. ‘If we assault the fort,’ I had told him, ‘it will help to have a man who knows it. I don’t. You do.’
‘A man called Torstein lived there,’ Egil said, ‘bu
‘Why?’
‘It floods, lord. Torstein’s two sons were drowned in a flood, lord, and he reckoned the Saxons had put a curse on the place. So he left. There’s a stream this side of the fort, a big one, and the river beyond? And the walls on that far side have fallen in places. Not on this side, lord,’ we were watching from the north, ‘but on the southern and eastern sides.’
‘It looks formidable enough from here,’ I said. I was staring at the fort, seeing its stone ramparts rearing gaunt above an expanse of rushes. Two banners hung on poles above the northern wall and a sullen wind occasionally lifted one to reveal the dragon of Wessex. The second banner must have been made from heavier cloth because the wind did not stir it. ‘What does the left-hand banner show?’ I asked Egil.
‘We could never make it out, lord.’
I grunted, suspecting that Egil had never tried to get close enough to see that second banner. Smoke from cooking fires drifted up from the ramparts and from the fields to the south where, evidently, a part of Brunulf’s force was camped. ‘How many men are there?’ I asked.
‘Two hundred? Three?’ Egil sounded vague.
‘All warriors?’
‘They have some magicians with them, lord.’ He meant priests.
We were a long way off from the fort, though doubtless the men on its walls had seen us watching from the low hilltop. Most of my men were hidden in the shallow valley behind. ‘Is there anything there besides the fort?’
‘A few houses,’ Egil said dismissively.
‘And the Saxons haven’t tried to come further north?’
‘Not since the first week they were here, lord. Now they’re just sitting there.’ He scratched his beard, trying to pinch a louse. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘they could have been roaming around, but we wouldn’t know. We were ordered to stay away from them, not to upset them.’
‘That was probably wise,’ I said, reflecting that I was about to do the very opposite.