‘My son is a good boy,’ Kjartan said stoutly, ‘and in time he will serve at your oars and fight in your shield wall.’
‘He has offended me.’
‘He meant no harm, lord.’
‘He has offended me,’ Ragnar repeated harshly. ‘He looked on my daughter’s nakedness and showed her his own.’
‘And he was punished for it,’ Kjartan said, giving me a malevolent glance. ‘Blood was shed.’
Ragnar made an abrupt gesture and the hazel branches were dropped to the ground. That was evidently Ragnar’s answer, which made no sense to me, but Kjartan understood, as did Rorik who leaned over and whispered to me. ‘That means he must fight for Sven now.’
‘Fight for him?’
‘They mark a square on the ground with the branches and they fight inside the square.’
Yet no one moved to arrange the hazel branches into a square. Instead Kjartan walked back to his house and summoned Sven who came limping from under the low lintel, his right leg bandaged. He looked sullen and terrified, and no wonder, for Ragnar and his horsemen were in their war glory, shining warriors, sword-Danes.
‘Say what you have to say,’ Kjartan said to his son.
Sven looked up at Ragnar. ‘I am sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘I can’t hear you,’ Ragnar snarled.
‘I am sorry, lord,’ Sven said, shaking with fear.
‘Sorry for what?’ Ragnar demanded.
‘For what I did.’
‘And what did you do?’
Sven found no answer, or none that he cared to make, and instead he shuffled his feet and looked down at the ground. Cloud shadows raced across the far moor, and two ravens beat up to the head of the valley.
‘You laid hands on my daughter,’ Ragnar said, ‘and you tied her to a tree, and you stripped her naked.’
‘Half naked,’ Sven muttered, and for his pains took a thump on the head from his father.
‘A game,’ Kjartan appealed to Ragnar, ‘just a game, lord.’
‘No boy plays such games with my daughter,’ Ragnar said. I had rarely seen him angry, but he was angry now, grim and hard, no trace of the big-hearted man who could make a hall echo with laughter. He dismounted and drew his sword, his battle-blade called Heart-Breaker, and he held the tip towards Kjartan. ‘Well?’ he asked, ‘do you dispute my right?’
‘No, lord,’ Kjartan said, ‘but he is a good boy, strong and a hard worker, and he will serve you well.’
‘And he has seen things he should not see,’ Ragnar said, and he tossed Heart-Breaker into the air so that her long blade turned in the sun and he caught her by the hilt as she dropped, but now he was holding her backwards, as if she were a dagger rather than a sword. ‘Uhtred!’ Ragnar called, making me jump. ‘He says she was only half naked. Is that true?’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘Then only half a punishment,’ Ragnar said, and he drove the sword forward, hilt first, straight into Sven’s face. The hilts of our swords are heavy, sometimes decorated with precious things, but however pretty they appear, the hilts are still brutal lumps of metal, and Heart-Breaker’s hilt, banded with silver, crushed Sven’s right eye. Crushed it to jelly, blinding it instantly, and Ragnar spat at him then slid his blade back into its fleece-lined scabbard.
Sven was crouching, whimpering, his hands clasped over his ruined eye.
‘It is over,’ Ragnar said to Kjartan.
Kjartan hesitated. He was angry, shamed and unhappy, but he could not win a trial of strength with Earl Ragnar and so, at last, he nodded. ‘It is over,’ he agreed.
‘And you no longer serve me,’ Ragnar said coldly.
We rode home.
The hard winter came, the brooks froze, snow drifted to fill the streambeds, and the world was cold, silent and white. Wolves came to the edge of the woods and the midday sun was pale, as though its strength had been leeched away by the north wind.
Ragnar rewarded me with a silver arm ring, the first I ever received, while Kjartan was sent away with his family. He would no longer command one of Ragnar’s ships and he would no longer receive a share of Ragnar’s generosity, for now he was a man without a lord and he went to Eoferwic where he joined the garrison holding the town. It was not a prestigious job, any Dane with ambition would rather serve a lord like Ragnar who could make him rich, while the men guarding Eoferwic were denied any chance of plunder. Their task was to watch across the flat fields outside the city and to make certain that King Egbert fomented no trouble, but I was relieved that Sven was gone, and absurdly pleased with my arm ring. The Danes loved arm rings. The more a man possessed, the more he was regarded, for the rings came from success. Ragnar had rings of silver and rings of gold, rings carved as dragons and rings inlaid with glittering stones. When he moved you could hear the rings clinking. The rings could be used as money if there were no coins. I remember watching a Dane take off an arm ring and hack it to shreds with an axe, then offer a merchant scraps of the ring until the scales showed he had paid sufficient silver. That was down in the bigger valley, in a large village where most of Ragnar’s younger men had settled and where traders brought goods from Eoferwic. The incoming Danes had found a small English settlement in the valley, but they needed more space for new houses and to make it they had burned down a grove of hazels, and that was what Ragnar called the place, Synningthwait, which meant the place cleared by fire. Doubtless the village had an English name, but it was already being forgotten.
‘We’re in England to stay now,’ Ragnar told me as we went home one day after buying supplies in Synningthwait. The road was a track pounded in the snow and our horses picked a careful path between the drifts through which the black twigs of the hedge-tops just showed. I was leading the two packhorses laden with their precious bags of salt and asking Ragnar my usual questions; where swallows went in winter, why elves gave us hiccups, and why Ivar was called the Boneless. ‘Because he’s so thin, of course,’ Ragnar said, ‘so that he looks as if you could roll him up like a cloak.’
‘Why doesn’t Ubba have a nickname?’
‘He does. He’s called Ubba the Horrible.’ He laughed, because he had made the nickname up, and I laughed because I was happy. Ragnar liked my company and, with my long fair hair, men mistook me for his son and I liked that. Rorik should have been with us, but he was sick that day, and the women were plucking herbs and chanting spells. ‘He’s often sick,’ Ragnar said, ‘not like Ragnar,’ he meant his eldest son who helped hold onto Ivar’s lands in Ireland, ‘Ragnar’s built like an ox,’ he went on, ‘never gets sick! He’s like you, Uhtred.’ He smiled, thinking of his eldest son, who he missed. ‘He’ll take land and thrive. But Rorik? Perhaps I shall have to give him this land. He can’t go back to Denmark.’
‘Why not?’
‘Denmark is bad land,’ Ragnar explained. ‘It’s either flat and sandy and you can’t grow a fart on that sort of field, or across the water it’s great steep hills with little patches of meadow where you work like a dog and starve.’
‘Across the water?’ I asked, and he explained that the Danes came from a country that was divided into two parts, and the two parts were surrounded by countless islands, and that the nearer part, from where he came, was very flat and very sandy, and that the other part, which lay to the east across a great sound of water, was where the mountains were. ‘And there are Svear there too,’ he went on.
‘Svear?’