They were runesticks. Many Danes consulted the runesticks, but Storri’s skill at reading the signs was famous, and Ubba was a man so riddled with superstition that he would do nothing unless he believed the gods were on his side. ‘Well?’ he asked impatiently.
Storri ignored Ubba, instead he stared at the score of sticks, seeing if he could detect a rune letter or a significant pattern in their random scatter. He moved around the small pile, still peering, then nodded slowly. ‘It could not be better,’ he said.
‘The boy told the truth?’
‘The boy told the truth,’ Storri said, ‘but the sticks talk of today, not of last night, and they tell me all is well.’
‘Good.’ Ubba stood and took his sword from a peg on the wall. ‘No ladders,’ he said to Ragnar, ‘so no assault. We shall go.’
They had been worried that the Mercians and West Saxons would launch an attack on the walls while they made a raid across the river. The southern bank was lightly garrisoned by the besiegers, holding little more than a cordon of men to deter forage parties crossing the Trente, but that afternoon Ubba led six ships across the river and attacked those Mercians, and the runesticks had not lied, for no Danes died and they brought back horses, weapons, armour and prisoners.
Twenty prisoners.
The Mercians had beheaded two of our men, so now Ubba killed twenty of theirs, and did it in their sight so they could see his revenge. The headless bodies were thrown into the ditch in front of the wall and the twenty heads were stuck on spears and mounted above the northern gate.
‘In war,’ Ragnar told me, ‘be ruthless.’
‘Why did you send Weland to follow me?’ I asked him, hurt.
‘Because Ubba insisted on it,’ he said.
‘Because you didn’t trust me?’
‘Because Ubba trusts no one except Storri,’ he said. ‘And I trust you, Uhtred.’
The heads above Snotengaham’s gate were pecked by birds till they were nothing but skulls with hanks of hair that stirred in the summer wind. The Mercians and the West Saxons still did not attack. The sun shone. The river rippled prettily past the town where the ships were drawn up on the bank.
Ravn, though he was blind, liked to come to the ramparts where he would demand that I describe all I could see. Nothing changes, I would say, the enemy are still behind their hedge of felled trees, there are clouds above the distant hills, a hawk hunts, the wind ripples the grass, the swifts are gathering in groups, nothing changes, and tell me about the runesticks, I begged him.
‘The sticks!’ he laughed.
‘Do they work?’
He thought about it. ‘If you can read them, yes. I was good at reading the runes before I lost my eyes.’
‘So they do work,’ I said eagerly.
Ravn gestured towards the landscape he could not see. ‘Out there, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘there are a dozen signs from the gods, and if you know the signs then you know what the gods want. The runesticks give the same message, but I have noticed one thing.’ He paused and I had to prompt him, and he sighed as though he knew he should not say more. But he did. ‘The signs are best read by a clever man,’ he went on, ‘and Storri is clever. I dare say I am no fool.’
I did not really understand what he was saying. ‘But Storri is always right?’
‘Storri is cautious. He won’t take risks, and Ubba, though he doesn’t know it, likes that.’
‘But the sticks are messages from the gods?’
‘The wind is a message from the gods,’ Ravn said, ‘as is the flight of a bird, the fall of a feather, the rise of a fish, the shape of a cloud, the cry of a vixen, all are messages, but in the end, Uhtred, the gods speak in only one place.’ He tapped my head. ‘There.’
I still did not understand and was obscurely disappointed. ‘Could I read the sticks?’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but it would be sensible to wait till you’re older. What are you now?’
‘Eleven,’ I said, tempted to say twelve.
‘Maybe you’d best wait a year or two before reading the sticks. Wait till you’re old enough to marry, four or five years from now?’
That seemed an unlikely proposition for I had no interest in marriage back then. I was not even interested in girls, though that would change soon enough.
‘Thyra, perhaps?’ Ravn suggested.
‘Thyra!’ I thought of Ragnar’s daughter as a playmate, not as a wife. Indeed, the very idea of it made me laugh.
Ravn smiled at my amusement. ‘Tell me, Uhtred, why we let you live.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When Ragnar captured you,’ he said, ‘he thought you could be ransomed, but he decided to keep you. I thought he was a fool, but he was right.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said, meaning it.
‘Because we need the English,’ Ravn went on. ‘We are few, the English are many, despite which we shall take their land, but we can only hold it with the help of Englishmen. A man cannot live in a home that is forever besieged. He needs peace to grow crops and raise cattle, and we need you. When men see that Earl Uhtred is on our side then they won’t fight us. And you must marry a Danish girl so that when your children grow they will be both Dane and English and see no difference.’ He paused, contemplating that distant future, then chuckled. ‘Just make sure they’re not Christians, Uhtred.’
‘They will worship Odin,’ I said, again meaning it.
‘Christianity is a soft religion,’ Ravn said savagely, ‘a woman’s creed. It doesn’t ennoble men, it makes them into worms. I hear birds.’
‘Two ravens,’ I said, ‘flying north.’
‘A real message!’ he said delightedly, ‘Huginn and Muminn are going to Odin.’
Huginn and Muminn were the twin ravens that perched on the god’s shoulders where they whispered into his ear. They did for Odin what I did for Ravn, they watched and told him what they saw. He sent them to fly all over the world and to bring back news, and the news they carried back that day was that the smoke from the Mercian encampment was less thick. Fewer fires were lit at night. Men were leaving that army.
‘Harvest time,’ Ravn said in disgust.
‘Does that matter?’
‘They call their army the fyrd,’ he explained, forgetting for a moment that I was English, ‘and every able man is supposed to serve in the fyrd, but when the harvest ripens they fear hunger in the winter so they go home to cut their rye and barley.’
‘Which we then take?’
He laughed. ‘You’re learning, Uhtred.’
Yet the Mercians and West Saxons still hoped they could starve us and, though they were losing men every day, they did not give up until Ivar loaded a cart with food. He piled cheeses, smoked fish, newly baked bread, salted pork and a vat of ale onto the cart and, at dawn, a dozen men dragged it towards the English camp. They stopped just out of bowshot and shouted to the enemy sentries that the food was a gift from Ivar the Boneless to King Burghred.
Next day a Mercian horseman rode towards the town carrying a leafy branch as a sign of truce. The