‘No,’ he said, ‘only ale.’ He leaned towards me. ‘Bjorn the Dead wishes to speak to you also, to tell you your fate. You and me, Uhtred, will be kings and neighbours. The gods want it and they sent a dead man to tell me so.’ Æthelwold was shaking slightly, and sweating, but he was not drinking. Something had scared him into sobriety, and that convinced me he spoke the truth. ‘They want to know if you are willing to meet the dead,’ he said, ‘and if you are then they will send for you.’
I looked at Gisela who merely looked back at me, her face expressionless. I stared back at her, not waiting for a response, but because she was beautiful, so beautiful. My dark Dane, my lovely Gisela, my bride, my love. She must have known what I was thinking, for her long, grave face was transformed by a slow smile. ‘Uhtred is to be king?’ she asked, breaking the silence and looking at Æthelwold.
‘The dead say so,’ Æthelwold said defiantly. ‘And Bjorn heard it from the three sisters.’ He meant the Fates, the Norns, the three sisters who weave our destiny.
‘Uhtred is to be King of Mercia?’ Gisela asked dubiously.
‘And you will be the queen,’ Æthelwold said.
Gisela looked back to me. She had a quizzical look, but I did not try to answer what I knew she was thinking. Instead I was reflecting that there was no king in Mercia. The old one, a Saxon mongrel on a Danish leash, had died, and there was no successor, while the kingdom itself was now split between Danes and Saxons. My mother’s brother had been an ealdorman in Mercia before he was killed by the Welsh, so I had Mercian blood. And there was no king in Mercia.
‘I think you had better hear what the dead man says,’ Gisela spoke gravely.
‘If they send for me,’ I promised, ‘I will.’ And so I would, because a dead man was speaking and he wanted me to be a king.
Alfred arrived a week later. It was a fine day with a pale blue sky in which the midday sun hung low above a cold land. Ice edged the sluggish channels where the River Temes flowed about Sceaftes Eye and Wodenes Eye. Coot, moorhen and dabchicks paddled at the edge of the ice, while on the thawing mud of Sceaftes Eye a host of thrush and blackbirds hunted for worms and snails.
This was home. This had been my home for two years now. Home was Coccham, at the edge of Wessex where the Temes flowed towards Lundene and the sea. I, Uhtred, a Northumbrian lord, an exile and a warrior, had become a builder, a trader and a father. I served Alfred, King of Wessex, not because I wished to, but because I had given him my oath.
And Alfred had given me a task; to build his new burh at Coccham. A burh was a town turned into a fortress and Alfred was riveting his kingdom of Wessex with such places. All around the boundaries of Wessex, on the sea, on the rivers and on the moors facing the wild Cornish savages, the walls were being built. A Danish army could invade between the fortresses, but they would discover still more strongholds in Alfred’s heartland, and each burh held a garrison. Alfred, in a rare moment of savage elation, had described the burhs to me as wasps’ nests from which men could swarm to sting the attacking Danes. Burhs were being made at Exanceaster and Werham, at Cisseceastre and Hastengas, at Æscengum and Oxnaforda, at Cracgelad and Wæced, and at dozens of places between. Their walls and palisades were manned by spears and shields. Wessex was becoming a land of fortresses, and my task was to make the little town of Coccham into a burh.
The work was done by every West Saxon man over the age of twelve. Half of them worked while the other half tended the fields. At Coccham I was supposed to have five hundred men serving at any one time, though usually there were fewer than three hundred. They dug, they banked, they cut timber for walls, and so we had raised a stronghold on the banks of the Temes. In truth it was two strongholds, one on the river’s southern bank and the other on Sceaftes Eye, which was an island splitting the river into two channels, and in that January of 885 the work was nearly done and no Danish ship could now row upstream to raid the farms and villages along the river’s bank. They could try, but they must pass my new ramparts and know that my troops would follow them, trap them ashore and kill them.
A Danish trader called Ulf had come that morning, tying his boat at the wharf on Sceaftes Eye where one of my officials prodded through the cargo to assess the tax. Ulf himself, grinning toothlessly, climbed up to greet me. He gave me a piece of amber wrapped in kidskin. ‘For the Lady Gisela, lord,’ he said. ‘She is well?’
‘She is,’ I said, touching Thor’s hammer that hung around my neck.
‘And you have a second child, I hear?’
‘A girl,’ I said, ‘and where did you hear of her?’
‘Beamfleot,’ he said, which made sense. Ulf was a northerner, but no ships were making the voyage from Northumbria to Wessex in the depth of this cold winter. He must have spent the season in southern East Anglia, on the long intricate mudflats of the Temes estuary. ‘It isn’t much,’ he said, gesturing at his cargo. ‘I bought some hides and axe blades in Grantaceaster and thought I’d come upriver to see if you Saxons have any money left.’
‘You came upriver,’ I told him, ‘to see whether we’d finished the fortress. You’re a spy, Ulf, and I think I’ll hang you from a tree.’
‘No, you won’t,’ he said, unmoved by my words.
‘I’m bored,’ I said, putting the amber into my pouch, ‘and watching a Dane twitch on a rope would be amusing, wouldn’t it?’
‘You must have been laughing when you hanged Jarrel’s crew then,’ he said.
‘Was that who it was?’ I asked. ‘Jarrel? I didn’t ask his name.’
‘I saw thirty bodies,’ Ulf said, jerking his head downstream, ‘maybe more? All hanging from trees and I thought, that looks like Lord Uhtred’s work.’
‘Only thirty?’ I said, ‘there were fifty-three. I should add your miserable corpse, Ulf, to help make up the numbers.’
‘You don’t want me,’ Ulf said cheerfully, ‘you want a young one, because young ones twitch more than us old ones.’ He peered down at his boat and spat towards a red-haired boy who was staring vacantly across the river. ‘You could hang that little bastard. He’s my wife’s oldest boy and nothing but a piece of toad gristle. He’ll twitch.’
‘So who’s in Lundene these days?’ I asked.
‘Earl Haesten’s in and out,’ Ulf said, ‘more in than out.’
I was surprised by that. I knew Haesten. He was a young Dane who had once been my oath-man, but who had broken his oath and now aspired to be a warrior lord. He called himself an earl, which amused me, but I was surprised he had gone to Lundene. I knew he had made a walled camp on the coast of East Anglia, but now he had moved much closer to Wessex, which suggested he was looking for trouble. ‘So what’s he doing?’ I asked scornfully, ‘stealing his neighbours’ ducks?’
Ulf drew in a breath and shook his head. ‘He’s got allies, lord.’
Something in his tone made me wary. ‘Allies?’
‘The Thurgilson brothers,’ Ulf said, and touched his hammer amulet.
The name meant nothing to me then. ‘Thurgilson?’
‘Sigefrid and Erik,’ Ulf said, still touching the hammer. ‘Norse earls, lord.’
That was something new. The Norse did not usually come to East Anglia or to Wessex. We often heard tales of their raids in the Scottish lands and in Ireland, but Norse chieftains rarely came close to Wessex. ‘What are Norsemen doing in Lundene?’ I asked.
‘They got there two days ago, lord,’ Ulf said, ‘with twenty-two keels. Haesten went with them, and he took nine ships.’
I whistled softly. Thirty-one ships was a fleet and it meant the brothers and Haesten together commanded an army of at least a thousand men. And those men were in Lundene and Lundene was on the frontier of Wessex.
Lundene