world. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the man who had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and who had spilled Svein of the White Horse from his saddle at Ethandun. I was the man who had given Alfred his kingdom back and I hated him. So I would leave him. My path was the sword-path, and it would take me home. I would go north.
Lundene is the greatest city in all the island of Britain and I have always loved its ruined houses and feverish alleys, but Hild and I stayed there only two days, lodging in a Saxon tavern in the new town west of the decaying Roman walls. The place was a part of Mercia then and was garrisoned by the Danes. The alehouses were full of traders and foreigners and shipmasters, and it was a merchant called Thorkild who offered us passage to Northumbria. I told him my name was Ragnarson and he neither believed me nor questioned me and he gave us passage in return for two silver coins and my muscle on one of his oars. I was a Saxon, but I had been raised by the Danes so I spoke their tongue and Thorkild assumed I was Danish. My fine helmet, mail coat and two swords told him I was a warrior and he must have suspected I was a fugitive from the defeated army, but what did he care? He needed oarsmen. Some traders used only slaves at their oars, but Thorkild reckoned they were trouble and employed free men.
We left on the ebb-tide, our hull filled with bolts of linen, oil from Frankia, beaver-pelts, scores of fine saddles and leather sacks filled with precious cumin and mustard. Once away from the city and in the estuary of the Temes we were in East Anglia, but we saw little of that kingdom for on our first night a pernicious fog rolled in from the sea and it stayed for days. Some mornings we could not travel at all, and even when the weather was half good we never went far from shore. I had thought to sail home because it would be quicker than travelling by road, but instead we crept mile by foggy mile through a tangle of mudbanks, creeks and treacherous currents. We stopped every night, finding some place to anchor or tie up, and spent a whole week in some godforsaken East Anglian marsh because a bowstrake sprang loose and the water could not be bailed fast enough, and so we were forced to haul the ship onto a muddy beach and make repairs. By the time the hull was caulked the weather had changed and the sun sparkled on a fogless sea and we rowed northwards, still stopping every night. We saw a dozen other ships, all longer and narrower than Thorkild’s craft. They were Danish warships and all were travelling northwards. I assumed they were fugitives from Guthrum’s defeated army and they were going home to Denmark or perhaps to Frisia or wherever there was easier plunder to be had than in Alfred’s Wessex.
Thorkild was a tall, lugubrious man who thought he was thirty-five years old. He plaited his greying hair so that it hung in long ropes to his waist, and his arms were bare of the rings that showed a warrior’s prowess. ‘I was never a fighter,’ he confessed to me. ‘I was raised as a trader and I’ve always been a trader and my son will trade when I’m dead.’
‘You live in Eoferwic?’ I asked.
‘Lundene. But I keep a storehouse in Eoferwic. It’s a good place to buy fleeces.’
‘Does Ricsig still rule there?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Ricsig’s been dead two years now. There’s a man called Egbert on the throne now.’
‘There was a King Egbert in Eoferwic when I was a child.’
‘This is his son, or his grandson? Maybe his cousin? He’s a Saxon, anyway.’
‘So who really rules in Northumbria?’
‘We do, of course,’ he said, meaning the Danes. The Danes often put a tamed Saxon on the thrones of the countries they captured, and Egbert, whoever he was, was doubtless just such a leashed monarch. He gave a pretence of legality to the Danish occupiers, but the real ruler was Earl Ivarr, the Dane who owned most of the land about the city. ‘He’s Ivarr Ivarson,’ Thorkild told me with a touch of pride in his voice, ‘and his father was Ivar Lothbrokson.’
‘I knew Ivar Lothbrokson,’ I said.
I doubt Thorkild believed me, but it was true. Ivar Lothbrokson had been a fearsome warlord, thin and skeletal, savage and ghastly, but he had been a friend to Earl Ragnar who raised me. His brother had been Ubba, the man I had killed by the sea. ‘Ivarr is the real power in Northumbria,’ Thorkild told me, ‘but not in the valley of the River Wiire. Kjartan rules there.’ Thorkild touched his hammer amulet when he spoke Kjartan’s name. ‘He’s called Kjartan the Cruel now,’ he said, ‘and his son is worse.’
‘Sven.’ I said the name sourly. I knew Kjartan and Sven. They were my enemies.
‘Sven the One-Eyed,’ Thorkild said with a grimace and again touched his amulet as if to fend off the evil of the names he had just spoken. ‘And north of them,’ he went on, ‘the ruler is Ælfric of Bebbanburg.’
I knew him too. Ælfric of Bebbanburg was my uncle and thief of my land, but I pretended not to know the name. ‘Ælfric?’ I asked, ‘another Saxon?’
‘A Saxon,’ Thorkild confirmed, ‘but his fortress is too powerful for us,’ he added by way of explanation why a Saxon lord was permitted to stay in Northumbria, ‘and he does nothing to offend us.’
‘A friend of the Danes?’
‘He’s no enemy,’ he said. ‘Those are the three great lords, Ivarr, Kjartan and Ælfric, while beyond the hills in Cumbraland? No one knows what happens there.’ He meant the west coast of Northumbria which faced the Irish Sea. ‘There was a great Danish lord in Cumbraland,’ he went on. ‘Hardicnut, he was called, but I hear he was killed in a squabble. And now?’ He shrugged.
So that was Northumbria, a kingdom of rival lords, none of whom had cause to love me and two of whom wanted me dead. Yet it was home, and I had a duty there and that is why I was following the sword-path.
It was the duty of the bloodfeud. The feud had started five years before when Kjartan and his men had come to Earl Ragnar’s hall in the night. They had burned the hall and they had murdered the folk who tried to flee the flames. Ragnar had raised me, I had loved him like a father, and his murder was unavenged. He had a son, also called Ragnar, and he was my friend, but Ragnar the Younger could not take vengeance for he was now a hostage in Wessex. So I would go north and I would find Kjartan and I would kill him. And I would kill his son, Sven the One-Eyed, who had taken Ragnar’s daughter prisoner. Did Thyra still live? I did not know. I only knew I had sworn to revenge Ragnar the Elder’s death. It sometimes seemed to me, as I hauled on Thorkild’s oar, that I was foolish to be going home because Northumbria was full of my enemies, but fate drove me, and there was a lump in my throat when at last we turned into the wide mouth of the Humber.
There was nothing to see other than a low muddy shore half glimpsed through rain, and withies in the shallows marking hidden creeks, and great mats of oarweed and bladderwrack heaving on the grey water, but this was the river that led into Northumbria and I knew, at that moment, that I had made the right decision. This was home. Not Wessex with its richer fields and gentler hills. Wessex was tamed, harnessed by king and church, but up here there were wilder skeins in the colder air.
‘Is this where you live?’ Hild asked as the banks closed on either side.
‘My land is far to the north,’ I told her. ‘That’s Mercia,’ I pointed to the river’s southern shore, ‘and that’s Northumbria,’ I pointed the other way, ‘and Northumbria stretches up into the barbarous lands.’
‘Barbarous?’
‘Scots,’ I said, and spat over the side. Before the Danes came the Scots had been our chief enemies, ever raiding south into our land, but they, like us, had been assaulted by the Northmen and that had lessened their threat, though it had not ended it.
We rowed up the Ouse
