There was silence, except for the rain dripping from leaves and the intermittent burst of birdsong. I edged my horse a few steps closer to Oswald, who gripped his whip’s handle as if readying it to lash out at me. ‘How many?’ I asked.
Oswald said nothing.
‘How many?’ I demanded, louder.
‘Husband,’ Mildrith called.
‘Quiet!’ I shouted at her and Oswald looked from me to her and back to me. ‘And how much has Wigulf paid you?’ I asked. ‘What does a tree like this fetch? Eight shillings? Nine?’
The anger that had made me act so impetuously at the king’s church service rose again. It was plain that Oswald was stealing the timber and being paid for it, and what I should have done was charge him with theft and have him arraigned before a court where a jury of men would decide his guilt or innocence, but I was in no mood for such a process. I just drew Serpent-Breath and kicked my horse forward. Mildrith screamed a protest, but I ignored her. Oswald ran, and that was a mistake, because I caught him easily, and Serpent-Breath swung once and opened up the back of his skull so I could see brains and blood as he fell. He twisted in the leaf mould and I wheeled the horse back and stabbed down into his throat.
‘That was murder!’ Mildrith shouted at me.
‘That was justice,’ I snarled at her, ‘something lacking in Wessex.’ I spat on Oswald’s body, which was still twitching. ‘The bastard’s been stealing from us.’
Mildrith kicked her horse, leading the nurse who carried our child uphill. I let her go. ‘Take the trunk up to the house,’ I ordered the slaves who had been goading the oxen. ‘If it’s too big to drag uphill then split it here and take the planks to the house.’
I searched Oswald’s house that evening and discovered fifty-three shillings buried in the floor. I took the silver, confiscated his cooking pots, spit, knives, buckles and a deerskin cloak, then drove his wife and three children off my land. I had come home.
My anger was not slaked by Oswald’s killing. The death of a dishonest steward was no consolation for what I perceived as a monstrous injustice. For the moment Wessex was safe from the Danes, but it was only safe because I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson and my reward had been humiliation.
Poor Mildrith. She was a peaceable woman who thought well of everyone she met, and now she found herself married to a resentful, angry warrior. She was frightened of Alfred’s wrath, terrified that the church would punish me for disturbing its peace, and worried that Oswald’s relatives would demand a wergild from me. And so they would. A wergild was the blood price that every man, woman and child possessed. Kill a man and you must pay his price or else die yourself, and I had no doubt that Oswald’s family would go to Odda the Younger, who had been named the Ealdorman of Defnascir because his father was too badly wounded to continue as ealdorman, and Odda would instruct the shire reeve to pursue me and place me on trial, but I did not care. I hunted boar and deer, I brooded and waited for news of the negotiations at Exanceaster. I was expecting Alfred to do what he always did which was to make peace with the Danes and so release them, and when he did I would go to Ragnar.
And as I waited I found my first retainer. He was a slave and I discovered him in Exanmynster on a fine spring day. There was a hiring-fair where men looked for employment through the busy days of hay-making and harvest, and like all fairs there were jugglers, storytellers, stiltwalkers, musicians and acrobats. There was also a tall, white-haired man with a lined, serious face, who was selling enchanted leather bags that turned iron into silver. He showed us how it was done, and I saw him place two common nails into the bag and a moment later they were pure silver. He said we had to place a silver crucifix in the bag and then sleep one night with it tied around our necks before the magic worked and I paid him three silver shillings for one bag, and it never worked. I spent months searching for the man, but never found him. Even these days I come across such men and women, selling sorcerous pouches or boxes, and now I have them whipped and run off my land, but I was only twenty then and I believed my own eyes. That man had attracted a large crowd, but there were even more people gathered by the church gate where shouts erupted every few minutes. I pushed my horse into their rear ranks, getting dirty looks from folk who knew I had killed Oswald, but none dared accuse me of the murder for I carried both Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting.
A young man was by the church gate. He was stripped to the waist, barefooted and had a rope around his neck, and the rope was tied to the gatepost. In his hand was a short, stout stave. He had long unbound fair hair, blue eyes, a stubborn face and blood all over his chest, belly and arms. Three men guarded him. They too were fair-haired and blue-eyed, and they shouted in a strange accent. ‘Come and fight the heathen! Three pennies to make the bastard bleed! Come and fight!’
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘A Dane, lord, a pagan Dane.’ The man tugged off his hat when he spoke to me, then turned back to the crowd. ‘Come and fight him! Get your revenge! Make a Dane bleed! Be a good Christian! Hurt a pagan!’
The three men were Frisians. I suspected they had been in Alfred’s army and, now that he was talking to the Danes rather than fighting them, the three had deserted. Frisians come from across the sea and they come for one reason only, money, and this trio had somehow captured the young Dane and were profiting from him so long as he lasted. And that could have been some time, for he was good. A strong young Saxon paid his three pence and was given a sword with which he hacked wildly at the prisoner, but the Dane parried every blow, wood chips flying from his stave, and when he saw an opening he cracked his opponent around the head hard enough to draw blood from his ear. The Saxon staggered away, half stunned, and the Dane rammed the stave into his belly and, as the Saxon bent to gasp for breath, the stave whistled around in a blow that would have cracked his skull open like an egg, but the Frisians dragged on the rope so that the Dane fell backwards. ‘Do we have another hero?’ a Frisian shouted as the young Saxon was helped away. ‘Come on, lads! Show your strength! Beat a Dane bloody!’
‘I’ll beat him,’ I said. I dismounted and pushed through the crowd. I gave my horse’s reins to a boy, then drew Serpent-Breath. ‘Three pence?’ I asked the Frisians.
‘No, lord,’ one of them said.
‘Why not?’
‘We don’t want a dead Dane, do we?’ the man answered.
‘We do!’ someone shouted from the crowd. The folk in the Uisc valley did not like me, but they liked the Danes even less and they relished the prospect of watching a prisoner being slaughtered.
‘You can only wound him, lord,’ the Frisian said. ‘And you must use our sword.’ He held out the weapon. I glanced at it, saw its blunt edge, and spat.
‘Must?’ I asked.
The Frisian did not want to argue. ‘You can only draw blood, lord,’ he said.
The Dane flicked hair from his eyes and watched me. He held the stave low. I could see he was nervous, but there was no fear in his eyes. He had probably fought a hundred battles since the Frisians captured him, but those fights had been against men who were not soldiers, and he must have known, from my two swords, that I was a warrior. His skin was blotched with bruises and laced by blood and scars, and he surely expected another wound from Serpent-Breath, but he was determined to give me a fight.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked in Danish.
He blinked at me, surprised.
‘Your name, boy,’ I said. I called him ‘boy’, though he was not much younger than me.
‘Haesten,’ he said.
‘Haesten who?’
‘Haesten