More Danes arrived before winter. Thirty-six ships came, each with its contingent of warriors, and the ships were pulled onto the riverbank for the winter while the crews, laden with shields and weapons, marched to wherever they would spend the next few months. The Danes were casting a net over eastern Northumbria, a light one, but still a net of scattered garrisons. Yet they could not have stayed if we had not let them, but those Ealdormen and thegns who had not died at Eoferwic had bent the knee and so we were a Danish kingdom now, despite the leashed Egbert on his pathetic throne. It was only in the west, in the wilder parts of Northumbria, that no Danes ruled, but nor were there any strong forces in those wild parts to challenge them.
Ragnar took land west of Eoferwic, up in the hills. His wife and family joined him there, and Ravn and Gudrun came, plus all Ragnar’s ships’ crews who took over homesteads in the nearby valleys. Our first job was to make Ragnar’s house larger. It had belonged to an English thegn who had died at Eoferwic, but it was no grand hall, merely a low wooden building thatched with rye straw and bracken on which grass grew so thickly that, from a distance, the house looked like a long hummock. We built a new part, not for us, but for the few cattle, sheep and goats who would survive the winter and give birth in the new year. The rest were slaughtered. Ragnar and the men did most of the killing, but as the last few beasts came to the pen, he handed an axe to Rorik, his younger son. ‘One clean, quick stroke,’ he ordered, and Rorik tried, but he was not strong enough and his aim was not true and the animal bellowed and bled and it took six men to restrain it while Ragnar did the job properly. The skinners moved onto the carcass and Ragnar held the axe to me. ‘See if you can do better.’
A cow was pushed towards me, a man lifted her tail, she obediently lowered her head and I swung the axe, remembering exactly where Ragnar had hit each time, and the heavy blade swung true, straight into the spine just behind the skull and she went down with a crash. ‘We’ll make a Danish warrior of you yet,’ Ragnar said, pleased.
The work lessened after the cattle slaughter. The English who still lived in the valley brought Ragnar their tribute of carcasses and grain, just as they would have delivered the supplies to their English lord. It was impossible to read from their faces what they thought of Ragnar and his Danes, but they gave no trouble, and Ragnar took care not to disturb their lives. The local priest was allowed to live and give services in his church that was a wooden shed decorated with a cross, and Ragnar sat in judgment on disputes, but always made certain he was advised by an Englishman who was knowledgeable in the local customs. ‘You can’t live somewhere,’ he told me, ‘if the people don’t want you to be there. They can kill our cattle or poison our streams, and we would never know who did it. You either slaughter them all or learn to live with them.’
The sky grew paler and the wind colder. Dead leaves blew in drifts. Our main work now was to feed the surviving cattle and to keep the log pile high. A dozen of us would go up into the woods and I became proficient with an axe, learning how to bring a tree down with an economy of strokes. We would harness an ox to the bigger trunks to drag them down to the shieling, and the best trees were put aside for building, while the others were split and chopped for burning. There was also time for play and so we children made our own hall high up in the woods, a hall of unsplit logs with a thatch of bracken and a badger’s skull nailed to the gable in imitation of the boar’s skull that crowned Ragnar’s home, and in our pretend hall Rorik and I fought over who would be king, though Thyra, his sister, who was eight years old, was always the lady of the house. She would spin wool there, because if she did not spin enough thread by winter’s end she would be punished, and she would watch while we boys fought our mock battles with toy wooden swords. Most of the boys were servants’ sons, or slave children, and they always insisted I was the English chief while Rorik was the Danish leader, and my war-band only received the smallest, weakest boys and so we nearly always lost, and Thyra, who had her mother’s pale gold hair, would watch and spin, ever spinning, the distaff in her left hand while her right teased the thread out of the sheared fleece.
Every woman had to spin and weave. Ragnar reckoned it took five women or a dozen girls a whole winter to spin enough thread to make a new sail for a boat, and boats were always needing new sails, and so the women worked every hour the gods sent. They also cooked, boiled walnut shells to dye the new thread, picked mushrooms, tanned the skins of the slaughtered cattle, collected the moss we used for wiping our arses, rolled beeswax into candles, malted the barley and placated the gods. There were so many gods and goddesses, and some were peculiar to our own house and those the women celebrated in their own rites, while others, like Odin and Thor were mighty and ubiquitous, but they were rarely treated in the same way that the Christians worshipped their God. A man would appeal to Thor, or to Loki, or to Odin, or to Vikr, or to any of the other great beings who lived in Asgard, which seemed to be the heaven of the gods, but the Danes did not gather in a church as we had gathered every Sunday and every saint’s day in Bebbanburg, and just as there were no priests among the Danes, nor were there any relics or sacred books. I missed none of it.
I wish I had missed Sven, but his father, Kjartan, had a home in the next valley and it did not take long for Sven to discover our hall in the woods and, as the first winter frosts crisped the dead leaves and the berries shone on hawthorn and holly, we found our games turning savage. We no longer split into two sides, because we now had to fight off Sven’s boys who would come stalking us, but for a time no great damage was done. It was a game, after all, just a game, but one Sven won repeatedly. He stole the badger’s skull from our gable, which we replaced with a fox’s head and Thyra shouted at Sven’s boys, skulking in the woods, that she had smeared the fox skull with poison, and we thought that very clever of her, but next morning we found our pretend hall burned to the ground.
‘A hall-burning,’ Rorik said bitterly.
‘Hall-burning?’
‘It happens at home,’ Rorik explained. ‘You go to an enemy’s hall and burn it to the ground. But there’s one thing about a hall-burning. You have to make sure everyone dies. If there are any survivors then they’ll take revenge, so you attack at night, surround the hall, and kill everyone who tries to escape the flames.’
But Sven had no hall. There was his father’s house, of course, and for a day we plotted revenge on that, discussing how we would burn it down and spear the family as they ran out, but it was only boastful boy talk and of course nothing came of it. Instead we built ourselves a new hall, higher in the woods. It was not as fanciful as the old, not nearly so weathertight, really nothing more than a crude shelter of branches and bracken, but we nailed a stoat’s skull to its makeshift gable and assured ourselves that we still had our kingdom in the hills.
But nothing short of total victory would satisfy Sven and, a few days later, when our chores were done, just Rorik, Thyra and I went up to our new hall. Thyra span while Rorik and I argued over where the best swords were made, he saying it was Denmark and I claiming the prize for England, neither of us old enough or sensible enough to know that the best blades come from Frankia, and after a while we got tired of arguing and picked up our sharpened ash poles that served as play spears and decided to look for the wild boar that sometimes trampled through the wood at nightfall. We would not have dared try to kill a boar, they were much too big, but we pretended we were great hunters, and just as we two great hunters were readying to go into the woods, Sven attacked. Just him and two of his followers, but Sven, instead of carrying a wooden sword, swung a real blade, long as a man’s arm, the steel glittering in the winter light, and he ran at us, bellowing like a madman. Rorik and I, seeing the fury in his eyes, ran away. He followed us, crashing through the wood like the wild boar we had wanted to stalk, and it was only because we were much faster that we got away from that wicked blade, and then a moment later we heard Thyra scream.
We crept back, cautious of the sword that Sven must have taken from his father’s house and, when we reached our pathetic hut, found that Thyra was gone. Her distaff was on the floor and her wool was all speckled with dead leaves and pieces of twig.
Sven had always been clumsy in his strength and he had left a trail through the woods that was easy enough to follow and after a while we heard voices. We kept following, crossing the ridge-top where beeches grew, then down into our enemy’s valley, and Sven did not have the sense