Next day I helped Ragnar relaunch Wind-Viper. She had been dragged ashore so her timbers could be caulked, and we stowed her bilges with the stones that served as ballast and rigged her mast and afterwards killed a hare that we had trapped in the fields where the horses tried to graze, and Ragnar poured the hare’s blood on the Wind-Viper’s stem and called on Thor to send her fair winds and for Odin to send her great victories. We ate the hare that night and drank the last of the ale, and next morning a dragon boat arrived, coming from the sea, and I was amazed that Alfred had not ordered our fleet to patrol the waters off the Poole’s mouth, but none of our boats was there, and so that single Danish ship came upriver and brought a message for Guthrum.
Ragnar was vague about the ship. It came from East Anglia, he said, which turned out to be untrue, and merely brought news of that kingdom, which was equally untrue. It had come from the west, around Cornwalum, from the lands of the Welsh, but I only learned that later and, at the time, I did not care, because Ragnar also told me that we should be leaving soon, very soon, and I only had thoughts for the son I had not seen. Uhtred Uhtredson.
That night Guthrum gave the hostages a feast, a good feast too, with food and ale that had been brought on the newly arrived dragon ship, and Guthrum praised us for being good guests and he gave each of us an arm ring, and promised we would all be free soon. ‘When?’ I asked.
‘Soon!’ His long face glistened in the firelight as he raised a horn of ale to me. ‘Soon! Now drink!’
We all drank, and after the feast we hostages went to the nunnery’s hall where Guthrum insisted we slept. In the daytime we were free to roam wherever we wanted inside the Danish lines, and free to carry weapons if we chose, but at night he wanted all the hostages in one place so that his black-cloaked guards could keep an eye on us, and it was those guards who came for us in the night’s dark heart. They carried flaming torches and they kicked us awake, ordering us outside, and one of them kicked Serpent-Breath away when I reached for her. ‘Get outside,’ he snarled, and when I reached for the sword again a spear stave cracked across my skull and two more spears jabbed my arse, and I had no choice but to stumble out of the door into a gusting wind that was bringing a cold, spitting rain, and the wind tore at the flaming torches which lit the street where at least a hundred Danes waited, all armed, and I could see they had saddled and bridled their thin horses and my first thought was that these were the men who would escort us back to the West Saxon lines.
Then Guthrum, cloaked in black, pushed through the helmeted men. No words were spoken. Guthrum, grim-faced, the white bone in his hair, just nodded, and his black-cloaked men drew their swords and poor Wælla, Alfred’s cousin, was the first hostage to die. Guthrum winced slightly at the priest’s death, for I think he had liked Wælla, but by then I was turning, ready to fight the men behind me even though I had no weapon and knew that fight could only end with my death. A sword was already coming for me, held by a Dane in a leather jerkin that was studded with metal rivets, and he was grinning as he ran the blade towards my unprotected belly and he was still grinning as the throwing axe buried its blade between his eyes. I remember the thump of that blade striking home, the spurt of blood in the flamelight, the noise as the man fell onto the flint and shingle street, and all the while the frantic protests from the other hostages as they were murdered, but I lived. Ragnar had hurled the axe and now stood beside me, sword drawn. He was in his war gear, in polished chain mail, in high boots and a helmet which he had decorated with a pair of eagle wings, and in the raw light of the wind-fretted fires he looked like a god come down to Midgard.
‘They must all die,’ Guthrum insisted. The other hostages were dead or dying, their hands bloodied from their hopeless attempts to ward off the blades, and a dozen war Danes, swords red, now edged towards me to finish the job.
‘Kill this one,’ Ragnar shouted, ‘and you must kill me first.’ His men came out of the crowd to stand beside their lord. They were outnumbered by at least five to one, but they were Danes and they showed no fear.
Guthrum stared at Ragnar. Hacca was still not dead and he twitched in his agony and Guthrum, irritated that the man lived, drew his sword and rammed it into Hacca’s throat. Guthrum’s men were stripping the arm rings from the dead, rings that had been gifts from their master just hours before. ‘They all must die,’ Guthrum said when Hacca was still. ‘Alfred will kill our hostages now, so it must be man for man.’
‘Uhtred is my brother,’ Ragnar said, ‘and you are welcome to kill him, lord, but you must first kill me.’
Guthrum stepped back. ‘This is no time for Dane to fight Dane,’ he said grudgingly, and sheathed his sword to show that I could live. I stepped across the street to find the man who had stolen Serpent-Breath, Wasp-Sting and my armour, and he gave them to me without protest.
Guthrum’s men were mounting their horses. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Ragnar.
‘What do you think?’ he asked truculently.
‘I think you’re breaking the truce.’
‘We did not come this far,’ he said, ‘to march away like beaten dogs.’ He watched as I buckled Serpent-Breath’s belt. ‘Come with us,’ he said.
‘Come with you where?’
‘To take Wessex, of course.’
I do not deny that there was a tug on my heart strings, a temptation to join the wild Danes in their romp across Wessex, but the tug was easily resisted. ‘I have a wife,’ I told him, ‘a child.’
He grimaced. ‘Alfred has trapped you, Uhtred.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘the spinners did that.’ Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld, the three women who spin our threads at the foot of Yggdrasil, had decided my fate. Destiny is all. ‘I shall go to my woman,’ I said.
‘But not yet,’ Ragnar said with a half-smile, and he took me to the river where a small boat carried us to where the newly launched Wind-Viper was anchored. A half-crew was already aboard, as was Brida, who gave me a breakfast of bread and ale. At first light, when there was just enough grey in the sky to reveal the glistening mud of the river’s banks, Ragnar ordered the anchor raised and we drifted downstream on current and tide, gliding past the dark shapes of other Danish ships until we came to a reach wide enough to turn Wind-Viper and there the oars were fitted, men tugged and she swivelled gracefully, both oar banks began to pull and she shot out into the Poole where most of the Danish fleet rode at anchor. We did not go far, just to the barren shore of a big island that sits in the centre of the Poole, a place of squirrels, seabirds and foxes. Ragnar let the ship glide towards the shore and, when her prow touched the beach, he embraced me. ‘You are free,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ I said fervently, remembering those bloodied corpses by Werham’s nunnery.
He held onto my shoulders. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘are tied as brothers. Don’t forget that. Now go.’
I splashed through the shallows as the Wind-Viper, a ghostly grey in the dawn, backed away. Brida called a farewell, I heard the oars bite and the ship was gone.
That island was a forbidding place. Fishermen and fowlers had lived there once, and an anchorite, a monk who lives by himself, had occupied a hollow tree in the island’s centre, but the coming of the Danes had driven them all away and the remnants of the fishermen’s houses were nothing but charred timbers on blackened ground. I had the island to myself, and it was from its shore that I watched the vast Danish fleet row towards the Poole’s entrance, though they stopped there rather than go to sea because the wind, already brisk, had freshened even more and now it was a half-gale