The Flame Bearer (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 10) (2 page)

They came from the north, and anything that comes from the north is bad news. The north brings frost and ice, Norsemen and Scots. It brings enemies, and I had enemies enough already because I had come to Northumbria to recapture Bebbanburg. I had come to kill my cousin who had usurped my place. I had come to take my home back.

Bebbanburg lay to the south. I could not see the ramparts from where our horses stood because the dunes were too high, but I could see smoke from the fortress’s hearths being snatched westward by the wild wind. The smoke was being blown inland, melding with the low grey clouds that scudded towards Northumbria’s dark hills.

It was a sharp wind. The sand flats that stretched towards Lindisfarena were riotous with breaking waves that seethed white and fast towards the shore. Further out the waves were foam-capped, their spume flying, turbulent. It was also bitterly cold. Summer might have just come to Britain, but winter still wielded a keen-edged knife on the Northumbrian coast and I was glad of my bearskin cloak.

‘A bad day for sailors,’ Berg called to me. He was one of my younger men, a Norse who revelled in his skill as a swordsman. He had grown his long hair even longer in the last year until it flared out like a great horsetail beneath the rim of his helmet. I had once seen a Saxon seize a man’s long hair and drag him backwards from his saddle, then spear him while he was still flailing on the turf.

‘You should cut your hair,’ I told him.

‘In battle I tie it up!’ he called back, then nodded seawards. ‘They will be wrecked! They’re too close to shore!’

The four ships were following the shore but struggling to stay at sea. The wind wanted to drive them ashore, to strand them on the flats, to tip them there and break them apart, but the oarsmen were hauling on their looms as the steersmen tried to force the bows away from the breakers. Seas shattered on their bows and spewed white along their decks. The beam wind was too strong to carry yards or sailcloth aloft and so their heavy sails were stowed on deck.

‘Who are they?’ my son asked, spurring his horse alongside mine. The wind lifted his cloak and whipped his horse’s mane and tail.

‘How would I know?’ I asked.

‘You’ve not seen them before?’

‘Never,’ I said. I knew most of the ships that prowled the Northumbrian coast, but these four were strangers to me. They were not trading vessels, but had the high prows and low freeboard of fighting ships. There were beast-heads on their prows, marking them as pagans. The ships were large. Each, I reckoned, held forty or fifty men who now rowed for their lives in spiteful seas and bitter wind. The tide was rising, which meant the current was running strongly northwards and the ships were battling their way south, their dragon-crested prows bursting into spray as the cross-seas smashed into their hulls. I watched the nearest ship rear to a wave and half vanish behind the cold seas that shattered about her cutwater. Did they know there was a shallow channel that curled behind Lindisfarena and offered shelter? That channel was easily visible at low tide, but now, in a flooding sea that was being wind-churned to frenzy, the passage was hidden by scudding foam and seething waves, and the four ships, oblivious of the safety the channel offered, rowed past its entrance to struggle on towards the next anchorage that would give them safety.

They were heading for Bebbanburg.

I turned my horse southwards and led my sixty men along the beach. The wind was stinging sand against my face.

I did not know who they were, but I knew where the four ships were going. They were heading for Bebbanburg, and life, I thought, had suddenly become more difficult.

It took us only moments to reach the Bebbanburg channel. The breaking waves pounded the beach and seethed into the harbour mouth, filling the narrow entrance with a swirling grey foam. That entrance was not wide, as a child I had often swum across it, though never when an ebbing tide ran strong. One of my earliest memories was of watching a boy drown as the tide swept him from the harbour channel. His name had been Eglaf, and he must have been six or seven years old when he died. He was the son of a priest, the only son. Strange how names and faces from the distant past come to mind. He had been a small, slight boy, dark-haired and funny, and I had liked him. My elder brother had dared him to swim the channel, and I remember my brother laughing as Eglaf vanished in the welter of dark sea and whipping white caps. I had been crying, and my brother had slapped me around the head. ‘He was weak,’ my brother said.

How we despise weakness! Only women and priests are allowed to be weak. Poets too, perhaps. Poor Eglaf had died because he wanted to appear as fearless as the rest of us, and in the end he had merely proved he was just as stupid. ‘Eglaf,’ I said his name aloud as we cantered down the sand-blown beach.

‘What?’ my son shouted.

‘Eglaf,’ I said again, not bothering to explain, but I think that so long as we remember names, so long those people live. I am not sure how they live; whether they are spirits drifting like clouds or whether they live in an afterworld. Eglaf could not have gone to Valhalla because he did not die in battle, but of course he was a Christian too, so he must have gone to their heaven, which made me feel even more sorry for him. Christians tell me they spend the rest of time singing praises to their nailed god. The rest of time! Eternity! What kind of swollen-headed god wants to hear himself being praised for ever? Which thought put me in mind of Barwulf, a West Saxon thegn who had paid four harpists to chant songs of his battle-deeds, which were next to none. Barwulf had been a fat, selfish, greedy pig of a man; just the sort who would want to hear himself being praised for ever. I imagined the Christian god as a fat, scowling thegn brooding in his mead hall and listening to lackeys telling him how great he was.

‘They’re turning!’ my son called, breaking my thoughts, and I looked to my left and saw the first ship turning towards the channel. It was a straightforward entrance, though an inexperienced shipmaster could be fooled by the strong tidal currents close inshore, but this man was experienced enough to anticipate the danger and he drove his long hull straight and true. ‘Count the men on board,’ I ordered Berg.

We reined the horses on the channel’s northern bank where the sand was heaped with dark bladderwrack, sea shells, and bleached scraps of wood. ‘Who are they?’ Rorik asked me. He was a boy, my new servant.

‘They’re probably Norse,’ I said, ‘like you.’ I had killed Rorik’s father and wounded Rorik in a messy battle that had driven the pagans from Mercia. I had felt remorse at injuring a child, he had been only nine when I struck him with my sword, Wasp-Sting, and my guilt had driven me to adopt the boy, just as Ragnar the Elder had adopted me so long ago. Rorik’s left arm had healed, though it would never be as strong as his right, but he could hold a shield and he seemed happy. I liked him.

‘They’re Norse!’ he echoed happily.

‘I think so,’ I said. I was not certain, but there was something about the ships that suggested they were Norse rather than Danish. The great beasts on the prow were more flamboyant, and the short masts were raked further aft than on most Danish ships. ‘Don’t go too deep!’ I called to Berg, who had spurred his horse up to its fetlocks in the swirling shallows.

The tide surged through the channel, the waves flicked white by the wind, but I was staring at the further shore that lay just fifty or sixty yards away. There was a small strip of sand on that far shore that would soon be covered by the flooding tide, then dark rocks that climbed to a high wall. It was a stone wall, which, like so much else in Bebbanburg, had been built since my father’s time, and in the centre of that wall was the Sea Gate. Years before, terrified that I would attack him, my uncle had sealed both the Low Gate and the High Gate, which together formed the main entrance to the fortress, and he had built the Sea Gate, which could only be approached by ship or by a path along the beach that led beneath the seaward ramparts. In time his terror had subsided, and, because supplying Bebbanburg through the Sea Gate was both inconvenient and time-consuming, he had reopened the two southern gates, but the Sea Gate still existed. Behind it was a steep path climbing to a higher gate that pierced the wooden palisade surrounding the whole long summit of the rock on which Bebbanburg was built.

Men were gathering on the fighting platform of the high palisade. They waved, not to us, but to the arriving ships, and I thought I heard a cheer from those high ramparts, but perhaps that was my imagination.

I did not imagine the spear. A man hurled it from the palisade, and I watched it fly dark against the dark clouds. For a heartbeat it seemed to hang in the air, and then, like a stooping falcon, it plummeted to thump hard into the shallow water just four or five paces short of Berg’s horse. ‘Get it,’ I told Rorik.

I could hear jeers from the ramparts now. The spear might have fallen short, but it had been a mighty throw all the same. Two more spears fell, both splashing uselessly into the channel’s centre. Then Rorik brought me the first spear. ‘Hold the blade low,’ I said.

‘Low?’

‘Close to the sand.’

I dismounted, hauled up the heavy mail coat, pulled open the laces, and took aim. ‘Hold it still,’ I ordered Rorik, and then, when I was sure the men in the bows of the leading ship were watching, I pissed on the blade. My son chuckled, and Rorik laughed. ‘Now give it to me,’ I ordered the boy, and took the ash-haft from him. I waited. The leading ship was racing into the channel now, the breaking waves seething along her hull as the oarsmen dragged on their blades. Her high prow, a dragon with open mouth and glaring eyes, reared above the white water. I drew my arm back, waited. It would be a difficult throw, made even more difficult by the force of the wind and by the weight of the bearskin cloak that tried to drag my arm down, but I had no time to unclasp the heavy fur. ‘This,’ I shouted at the ship, ‘is Odin’s curse!’

Then I hurled the spear.

Twenty paces.

And the piss-soaked blade struck true, just as I had aimed it. It struck the dragon’s eye, and the shaft quivered there as the ship slid past us, tide-driven, going into the calm inner waters of the wide shallow harbour that lay sheltered from the storm by the great rock on which the fortress stood.

My fortress. Bebbanburg.

Bebbanburg.

From the day it was stolen from me I had dreamed of recapturing Bebbanburg. My uncle had been the thief, and now his son, who dared call himself Uhtred, held the great fort. Men said it could not be taken except by treachery or by starvation. It was massive, it was built on the great rock that was almost an island, it could only be approached on land by a single narrow track, and it was mine.

I had once come so close to recapturing the fort. I had taken my men through the Low Gate, but the High Gate had been closed just in time, and so my cousin still ruled in the great fort beside the turbulent sea. His wolf’s head banner flew there, and his men jeered from the ramparts as we rode away, and as the four ships coursed through the channel to find safe anchorage in the shallow harbour.

‘A hundred and fifty men,’ Berg told me, then added, ‘I think.’

‘And some women and children,’ my son said.

‘Which means they’ve come to stay,’ I said, ‘whoever they are.’

We skirted the harbour’s northern edge where the beach was hazy from the fires on which my cousin’s tenants smoked herrings or made salt by boiling sea-water. Those tenants now cowered in their small houses that edged the harbour’s inland shore. They were frightened of us, and of the newly arrived ships, which were dropping anchor stones amidst the smaller fishing craft that rode out the vicious wind in Bebbanburg’s safe water. A dog barked in one of the turf-roofed cottages and was immediately silenced. I spurred my horse between two of the houses and up onto the slope beyond. Goats fled our approach, and the goatherd, a small girl perhaps five or six years old, whimpered and hid her head in her hands. I turned at the low crest to see the crews of the four ships were wading ashore with heavy bundles on their shoulders. ‘We could slaughter them as they come ashore,’ my son suggested.

‘We can’t now,’ I said, and pointed to the Low Gate, which barred the narrow isthmus leading to the fort. Horsemen were appearing there, emerging from the skull-decorated arch and galloping towards the harbour.

Berg chuckled and pointed to the nearest ship. ‘Your spear is still there, lord!’

‘That was a lucky throw,’ my son said.

‘It was not luck,’ Berg said reprovingly, ‘Odin guided the weapon.’ He was a pious young man.

The horsemen were directing the newly arrived sea-warriors towards the hovels of the village rather than towards the great stronghold on its high rock. The crews of the ships dumped their bundles on the shore and added sheaves of spears, piles of shields, and heaps of axes and swords. Women carried small children ashore. The wind brought snatches of voices and of laughter. The newcomers had plainly come to stay, and, as if to show that they now possessed the land, a man planted a flag on the foreshore, grinding its staff into the shingle. It was a grey flag, snapping in the cold wind. ‘Can you see what’s on it?’ I asked.

‘A dragon’s head,’ Berg answered.

‘Who flies a dragon’s head?’ my son asked.

I shrugged. ‘No one I know.’

‘I would like to see a dragon,’ Berg said wistfully.

‘It might be the last thing you ever see,’ my son remarked.

I do not know if there are dragons. I have never seen one. My father told me they lived in the high hills and fed on cattle and sheep, but Beocca, who had been one of my father’s mass priests and my childhood tutor, was certain that all the dragons are sleeping deep in the earth. ‘They are Satan’s creatures,’ he had told me, ‘and they hide deep underground waiting for the last days. And when the horn of heaven sounds to announce Christ’s return they will burst from the ground like demons! They will fight! Their wings will shadow the sun, their breath will scorch the earth, and their fire will consume the righteous!’

‘So we all die?’