‘She had hair dark as night and eyes like stars and a body as graceful as an angel in flight.’
‘And she was called?’ I asked.
He shook his head abruptly, rejecting the question. ‘And God help us we fell in love. We ran away. We took horses and we rode south. Just Conall’s wife and me. We thought we’d ride, we’d hide, and we’d never be found.’
‘And Conall pursued you?’ I guessed.
‘The Uí Néill pursued us. God knows it was a hunt. Every Christian in Ireland knew of us, knew of the gold they would make if they found us, and yes, Conall rode with the men of the Uí Néill.’
I said nothing. I waited.
‘Nothing is hidden in Ireland,’ Finan went on. ‘You can’t hide. The little people see you. Folk see you. Find an island in a lake and they know you’re there. Go to a mountain top and they’ll find you, hide in a cave and they’ll hunt you down. We should have taken ship, but we were young. We didn’t know.’
‘They found you.’
‘They found us, and Conall promised he would make my life worse than death.’
‘By selling you to Sverri?’ Sverri was the slaver who had branded us.
He nodded. ‘I was stripped of my gold, whipped, made to crawl through Uí Néill shit, and then sold to Sverri. I am the king that never was.’
‘And the girl?’
‘And Conall took my Uí Néill wife as his own. The priests allowed it, they encouraged it, and he raised my sons as his own. They cursed me, lord. My own sons cursed me. That one,’ he nodded at the corpse, ‘cursed me just now. I am the betrayer, the cursed.’
‘And he’s your son?’ I asked gently.
‘He wouldn’t say. He could be. Or Conall’s boy. He’s my blood, anyway.’
I walked to the dead man, put my right foot on his belly, and tugged the spear free. It was a struggle and the corpse made an obscene sucking noise as I wrenched the wide blade out. A bloody cross lay on the dead man’s chest. ‘The priests will bury him,’ I said, ‘they’ll say prayers over him.’ I hurled the spear into the shallows and turned back to Finan. ‘What happened to the girl?’
He stared empty-eyed across the river that was smeared dark with the ash of our ships. ‘For one day,’ he said, ‘they let the warriors of the Uí Néill do as they wished with her. They made me watch. And then they were merciful, lord. They killed her.’
‘And your brother,’ I said, ‘has sent men to help Ragnall?’
‘The Uí Néill sent men to help Ragnall. And yes, my brother leads them.’
‘And why would they do that?’ I asked.
‘Because the Uí Néill would be kings of all the north. Of Ireland and of Scotland too, of all the north. Ragnall can have the Saxon lands. That’s the agreement. He helps them, they help him.’
‘And he begins with Northumbria?’
‘Or Mercia,’ Finan suggested with a shrug. ‘But they won’t rest there,’ he went on, ‘because they want everything.’
It was the ancient dream, the dream that had haunted my whole life, the dream of the Northmen to conquer all Britain. They had tried so often and they had come so close to success, yet still we Saxons lived and still we fought back so that now half the island was ours again. Yet we should have lost! The Northmen were savage, they came with fury and anger, and their armies darkened the land, but they had one fatal weakness. They were like dogs that fought each other, and only when one dog was strongest and could snarl and bite and force the others to his bidding were the invasions dangerous. But one defeat shattered their armies. They followed a man so long as he was successful, but if that man showed weakness they deserted in droves to find other, easier prey.
And Ragnall had led an army here. An army of Norsemen and Danes and Irish, and that meant Ragnall had united our enemies. That made him dangerous.
Except he had not whipped all the dogs to his bidding.
I learned one other thing from our prisoners. Sigtryggr, my daughter’s husband, had refused to sail with his brother. He was still in Ireland. Beadwulf would think otherwise because he would see the flag of the red axe and he would think it belonged to Sigtryggr, but two of the prisoners told me that the brothers shared the symbol. It was their dead father’s flag, the bloody red axe of Ivar, but Sigtryggr’s axe, at least for the moment, was resting. Ragnall’s axe had chopped a bloody hole in our defences, but my son-in-law was still in Ireland. I touched my hammer and prayed he stayed there.
‘We must go,’ I told Finan.
Because we had to whip Ragnall into defeat.
And I thought we would ride east.
The priests came to me early next morning. There were four of them, led by the Mercian twins Ceolnoth and Ceolberht who hated me. I had known them since boyhood and had no more love for them than they had for me, but at least I could now tell them apart. For years I had never known which twin I spoke to, they were as alike as two eggs, but one of our arguments had ended with me kicking out Ceolberht’s teeth, so now I knew that he was the one who hissed when he spoke. He dribbled too. ‘Will you be back by Easter, lord?’ he asked me. He was being very respectful, perhaps because he still had one or two teeth left and wanted to keep them.
‘No,’ I said, then urged my horse forward a pace. ‘Godwin! Put the fish in sacks!’
‘Yes, lord!’ Godwin called back. Godwin was my servant, and he and three other men had been rolling barrels from one of Ceaster’s storehouses. The barrels were filled with smoked fish, and the men were trying to make rope slings that would let each packhorse carry two barrels. Godwin frowned. ‘Do we have sacks, lord?’
‘There are twenty-two sacks of fleeces in my storeroom,’ I told him. ‘Tell my steward to empty them!’ I looked back to Father Ceolberht. ‘We won’t get all the wool out of the sacks,’ I told him, ‘and some of the wool will stick to the fish and then get caught in our teeth.’ I smiled at him. ‘If we have teeth.’
‘How many men will be left to defend Ceaster?’ his brother asked sternly.
‘Eighty,’ I said.
‘Eighty!’
‘And half of those are sick,’ I added. ‘So you’ll have forty fit men and the rest will be cripples.’
‘It isn’t enough!’ he protested.
‘Of course it isn’t enough,’ I snarled, ‘but I need an army to finish off Ragnall. Ceaster will have to take its chances.’
‘But if the heathens come …’ Father Wissian suggested nervously.
‘The heathens won’t know how big the garrison is,’ I said, ‘but they will know how strong the walls are. Leaving so few men here is a risk, but it’s a risk I’m taking. And you’ll have men from the fyrd. Godwin! Use the sacks for the bread too!’
I was taking just over three hundred men, leaving behind barely enough troops to defend the ramparts of Ceaster and Brunanburh. It might sound simple to say I was leading three hundred men, as if all we had to do was mount our horses, leave Ceaster and ride eastwards, but it takes time to organise the army. We had to carry our own food. We would be riding into country where food could be bought, but never enough for all of us. The Northmen would steal what they wanted, but we paid because we rode in our own country, and so I had a packhorse laden with silver coins and guarded by two of my warriors. And we would number well over three hundred because many men would take servants, some would take the women they could not bear to leave