The Lords of the North. Bernard Cornwell

      ‘What would you do in my place?’ Thorkild called back. His men gave their oars small tugs to hold the ship against the river’s flow.

      ‘Go downstream,’ I shouted in Danish, ‘find sword-Danes and wait till you know what is happening.’

      ‘And you?’ he asked.

      ‘I stay here,’ I said.

      He groped in a pouch and threw something towards me. It glittered in the fading light, then vanished among the buttercups that made the darkening pasture yellow. ‘That’s for your advice,’ he called, ‘and may you live long, whoever you are.’

      He turned his ship which was a clumsy manoeuvre for the hull was almost as long as the Ouse was wide, but he managed it skilfully enough and the oars took him downstream and out of my life. I discovered later that his storehouse had been ransacked and the one-armed Dane who guarded it had been slaughtered and his daughter raped, so my advice was worth the silver coin Thorkild had thrown to me.

      ‘You sent him away?’ one of the bearded men asked me resentfully.

      ‘I told you, he was a friend.’ I stooped and found the shilling in the long grass. ‘So how do you know of Alfred’s victory?’ I asked.

      ‘A priest came, lord,’ he said, ‘and he told us.’

      ‘A priest?’

      ‘From Wessex, lord. All the way from Wessex. He carried a message from King Alfred.’

      I should have known Alfred would want the news of his victory over Guthrum to spread throughout Saxon England, and it turned out that he had sent priests to wherever Saxons lived and those priests carried the message that Wessex was victorious and that God and his saints had given them the triumph. One such priest had been sent to King Egbert in Eoferwic, and that priest had reached the city just one day before me, and that was when the stupidity began.

      The priest had travelled on horseback, his clerical frock wrapped in a bundle on the back of his saddle, and he had ridden from Saxon house to Saxon house through Danish-held Mercia. The Mercian Saxons had helped him on his way, providing fresh horses each day and escorting him past the larger Danish garrisons until he had come to Northumbria’s capital to give King Egbert the good news that the West Saxons had defeated the Great Army of the Danes. Yet what appealed even more to the Northumbrian Saxons was the outrageous claim that Saint Cuthbert had appeared to Alfred in a dream and shown him how to gain the victory. The dream was supposed to have come to Alfred during the winter of defeat in Æthelingæg where a handful of fugitive Saxons hid from the conquering Danes, and the story of the dream was aimed at Egbert’s Saxons like a huntsman’s arrow, for there was no saint more revered north of the Humber than Cuthbert. Cuthbert was Northumbria’s idol, the holiest Christian ever to live in the land, and there was not one pious Saxon household that did not pray to him daily. The idea that the north’s own glorious saint had helped Wessex defeat the Danes drove the wits from King Egbert’s skull like partridges fleeing the reapers. He had every right to be pleased at Alfred’s victory, and he doubtless resented ruling on a Danish leash, but what he should have done was thank the priest who brought the news and then, to keep him quiet, shut him up like a dog in a kennel. Instead he had ordered Wulfhere, the city’s archbishop, to hold a service of thanks in the city’s largest church. Wulfhere, who was no fool, had immediately developed an ague and ridden into the country to recover, but a fool called Father Hrothweard took his place and Eoferwic’s big church had resounded to a fiery sermon which claimed Saint Cuthbert had come from heaven to lead the West Saxons to victory, and that idiotic tale had persuaded Eoferwic’s Saxons that God and Saint Cuthbert were about to deliver their own country from the Danes. And so the killing had started.

      All this I learned as we went into the city. I learned too that there had been less than a hundred Danish warriors in Eoferwic because the rest had marched north under Earl Ivarr to confront a Scottish army that had crossed the border. There had been no such invasion in living memory, but the southern Scots had a new king who had sworn to make Eoferwic his new capital, and so Ivarr had taken his army north to teach the fellow a lesson.

      Ivarr was the true ruler of southern Northumbria. If he had wanted to call himself the king then there was no one to stop him, but it was convenient to have a pliable Saxon on the throne to collect the taxes and to keep his fellow-Saxons quiet. Ivarr, meanwhile, could do what his family did best; make war. He was a Lothbrok and it was their boast that no male Lothbrok had ever died in bed. They died fighting with their swords in their hands. Ivarr’s father and one uncle had died in Ireland, while Ubba, the third Lothbrok brother, had fallen to my sword at Cynuit. Now Ivarr, the latest sword-Dane from a war-besotted family, was marching against the Scots and had sworn to bring their king to Eoferwic in slave manacles.

      I thought no Saxon in his right mind would rebel against Ivarr, who was reputed to be as ruthless as his father, but Alfred’s victory and the claim that it was inspired by Saint Cuthbert had ignited the madness in Eoferwic. The flames were fed by Father Hrothweard’s preaching. He bellowed that God, Saint Cuthbert and an army of angels were coming to drive the Danes from Northumbria and my arrival only encouraged the insanity. ‘God has sent you,’ the men who had accosted me kept saying, and they shouted to folk that I was Svein’s killer and by the time we reached the palace there was a small crowd following Hild and me as we pushed through narrow streets still stained with Danish blood.

      I had been to Eoferwic’s palace before. It was a Roman building of fine pale stone with vast pillars holding up a tiled roof that was now patched with blackened straw. The floor was also tiled, and those tiles had once formed pictures of the Roman gods, but they were all torn up now and those that were left were mostly covered by rushes that were stained by the previous day’s blood. The big hall stank like a butcher’s yard and was wreathed with smoke from the blazing torches that lit the cavernous space.

      The new King Egbert turned out to be the old King Egbert’s nephew and he had his uncle’s shifty face and petulant mouth. He looked scared when he came onto the dais at the hall’s end, and no wonder, for the mad Hrothweard had summoned up a whirlwind and Egbert must have known that Ivarr’s Danes would be coming for revenge. Yet Egbert’s followers were caught up in the excitement, sure that Alfred’s victory foretold the final defeat of the Northmen, and my arrival was taken as another sign from heaven. I was pushed forward and the news of my coming was shouted at the king who looked confused, and was even more confused when another voice, a familiar voice, called out my name. ‘Uhtred! Uhtred!’

      I looked for the speaker and saw it was Father Willibald.

      ‘Uhtred!’ he shouted again and looked delighted to see me. Egbert frowned at me, then looked at Willibald. ‘Uhtred!’ the priest said, ignoring the king, and came forward to embrace me.

      Father Willibald was a good friend and a good man. He was a West Saxon who had once been chaplain to Alfred’s fleet, and fate had decreed that he would be the man sent north to carry the good news of Ethandun to the Northumbrian Saxons.

      The clamour in the hall subsided. Egbert tried to take command. ‘Your name is,’ he said, then decided he did not know what my name was.

      ‘Steapa!’ one of the men who had escorted us into the city called out.

      ‘Uhtred!’ Willibald announced, his eyes bright with excitement.

      ‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I confessed, unable to prolong my deception.

      ‘The man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson!’ Willibald announced and tried to hold up my right hand to show I was a champion. ‘And the man,’ he went on, ‘who toppled Svein of the White Horse at Ethandun!’

      In two days, I thought, Kjartan the Cruel would know that I was in Northumbria, and in three my uncle Ælfric would have learned of my coming, and if I had possessed an ounce of sense I would have forced my way out of that hall, taken Hild with me, and headed south as fast as Archbishop Wulfhere had vanished from Eoferwic.

      ‘You were at Ethandun?’ Egbert asked me.

      ‘I was, lord.’

      ‘What