‘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’s enthusiastic account of a gelding he reckoned was the fastest horse in Northumbria.
‘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