‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘that the rest of the English do not want us to stay here.’ I used the word ‘us’ deliberately.
He laughed at that. ‘The English can want what they like! But you saw what happened at Yorvik.’ That was how the Danes pronounced Eoferwic. For some reason they found that name difficult, so they said Yorvik instead. ‘Who was the bravest English fighter at Yorvik?’ Ragnar asked. ‘You! A child! You charged me with that little sax! It was a gutting knife, not a sword, and you tried to kill me! I almost died laughing.’ He leaned over and cuffed me affectionately. ‘Of course the English don’t want us here,’ he went on, ‘but what can they do? Next year we’ll take Mercia, then East Anglia and finally Wessex.’
‘My father always said Wessex was the strongest kingdom,’ I said. My father had said nothing of the sort, indeed he despised the men of Wessex because he thought them effete and over-pious, but I was trying to provoke Ragnar.
I failed. ‘It’s the richest kingdom,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t make it strong. Men make a kingdom strong, not gold.’ He grinned at me. ‘We’re the Danes. We don’t lose, we win, and Wessex will fall.’
‘It will?’
‘It has a new weak king,’ he said dismissively, ‘and if he dies then his son is a mere child, so perhaps they’d put the new king’s brother on the throne instead. We’d like that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the brother is another weakling. He’s called Alfred.’
Alfred. That was the first time I ever heard of Alfred of Wessex. I thought nothing of it at the time. Why should I have done?
‘Alfred,’ Ragnar continued scathingly. ‘All he cares about is rutting girls, which is good! Don’t tell Sigrid I said that, but there’s nothing wrong with unsheathing the sword when you can, but Alfred spends half his time rutting and the other half praying to his god to forgive him for rutting. How can a god disapprove of a good hump?’
‘How do you know about Alfred?’ I asked.
‘Spies, Uhtred, spies. Traders, mostly. They talk to folk in Wessex, so we know all about King Æthelred and his brother Alfred. And Alfred’s sick as a stoat half the time.’ He paused, perhaps thinking of his younger son who was ill. ‘It’s a weak house,’ he went on, ‘and the West Saxons should get rid of them and put a real man on the throne, except they won’t, and when Wessex falls there will be no more England.’
‘Perhaps they’ll find their strong king,’ I said.
‘No,’ Ragnar said firmly. ‘In Denmark,’ he went on, ‘our kings are the hard men, and if their sons are soft, then a man from another family becomes king, but in England they believe the throne passes through a woman’s legs. So a feeble creature like Alfred could become king just because his father was a king.’
‘You have a king in Denmark?’
‘A dozen. I could call myself king if I fancied, except Ivar and Ubba might not like it, and no man offends them lightly.’
I rode in silence, listening to the horses’ hooves crunching and squeaking in the snow. I was thinking of Ragnar’s dream, the dream of no more England, of her land given to the Danes. ‘What happens to me?’ I finally blurted out.
‘You?’ He sounded surprised that I had asked. ‘What happens to you, Uhtred, is what you make happen. You will grow, you will learn the sword, you will learn the way of the shield wall, you will learn the oar, you will learn to give honour to the gods, and then you will use what you have learned to make your life good or bad.’
‘I want Bebbanburg,’ I said.
‘Then you must take it. Perhaps I will help you, but not yet. Before that we go south, and before we go south we must persuade Odin to look on us with favour.’
I still did not understand the Danish way of religion. They took it much less seriously than we English, but the women prayed often enough and once in a while a man would kill a good beast, dedicate it to the gods, and mount its bloody head above his door to show that there would be a feast in Thor or Odin’s honour in his house, but the feast, though it was an act of worship, was always the same as any other drunken feast.
I remember the Yule feast best because that was the week Weland came. He arrived on the coldest day of the winter when the snow was heaped in drifts, and he came on foot with a sword by his side, a bow on his shoulder and rags on his back and he knelt respectfully outside Ragnar’s house. Sigrid made him come inside and she fed him and gave him ale, but when he had eaten he insisted on going back into the snow and waiting for Ragnar who was up in the hills, hunting.
Weland was a snake-like man, that was my very first thought on seeing him. He reminded me of my uncle Ælfric, slender, sly and secretive, and I disliked him on sight and I felt a flicker of fear as I watched him prostrate himself in the snow when Ragnar returned.
‘My name is Weland,’ he said, ‘and I am in need of a lord.’
‘You are not a youth,’ Ragnar said, ‘so why do you not have a lord?’
‘He died, lord, when his ship sank.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Snorri, lord.’
‘Which Snorri?’
‘Son of Eric, son of Grimm, from Birka.’
‘And you did not drown?’ Ragnar asked as he dismounted and gave me the reins of his horse.
‘I was ashore, lord, I was sick.’
‘Your family? Your home?’
‘I am son of Godfred, lord, from Haithabu.’
‘Haithabu!’ Ragnar said sourly. ‘A trader?’
‘I am a warrior, lord.’
‘So why come to me?’
Weland shrugged. ‘Men say you are a good lord, a ring-giver, but if you turn me down, lord, I shall try other men.’
‘And you can use that sword, Weland Godfredson?’
‘As a woman can use her tongue, lord.’
‘You’re that good, eh?’ Ragnar asked, as ever unable to resist a jest. He gave Weland permission to stay, sending him to Synningthwait to find shelter, and afterwards, when I said I did not like Weland, Ragnar just shrugged and said the stranger needed kindness. We were sitting in the house, half choking from the smoke that writhed about the rafters. ‘There is nothing worse, Uhtred,’ Ragnar said, ‘than for a man to have no lord. No ring-giver,’ he added, touching his own arm rings.
‘I don’t trust him,’ Sigrid put in from the fire where she was making bannocks on a stone. Rorik, recovering from his sickness, was helping her, while Thyra, as ever, was spinning. ‘I think he’s an outlaw,’ Sigrid said.
‘He probably is,’ Ragnar allowed, ‘but my ship doesn’t care if its oars are pulled by outlaws.’ He reached for a bannock and had his hand slapped away by Sigrid who said the cakes were for Yule.
The Yule feast was the biggest celebration of the year, a whole week of food and ale and mead and fights and laughter and drunken men vomiting in the snow. Ragnar’s men gathered at Synningthwait and there were horse races, wrestling matches, competitions in throwing spears, axes and rocks, and, my favourite, the tug of war where two teams of men or boys tried to pull the other into a cold stream. I saw Weland watching me as I wrestled with a boy a year older than me. Weland already looked more prosperous. His rags were gone and he wore a cloak of fox fur. I got drunk that Yule for the first time, helplessly drunk so that my legs would not work and I lay moaning with a throbbing head and Ragnar roared with laughter and made