head banner that proclaimed our family’s descent from Woden, the ancient Saxon god of battles. The wolf, Ealdwulf the smith had told me, was one of Woden’s three favoured beasts, the others being the eagle and the raven. My mother wanted our banner to show the cross, but my father was proud of his ancestors, though he rarely talked about Woden. Even at nine years old I understood that a good Christian should not boast of being spawned by a pagan god, but I also liked the idea of being a god’s descendant and Ealdwulf often told me tales of Woden, how he had rewarded our people by giving us the land we called England, and how he had once thrown a war spear clear around the moon, and how his shield could darken the midsummer sky and how he could reap all the corn in the world with one stroke of his great sword. I liked those tales. They were better than my stepmother’s stories of Cuthbert’s miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Woden’s worshippers cried much.
We waited in the hall. It was, indeed it still is, a great wooden hall, strongly thatched and stout beamed, with a harp on a dais and a stone hearth in the centre of the floor. It took a dozen slaves a day to keep that great fire going, dragging the wood along the causeway and up through the gates, and at summer’s end we would make a log pile bigger than the church just as a winter store. At the edges of the hall were timber platforms, filled with rammed earth and layered with woollen rugs, and it was on those platforms that we lived, up above the draughts. The hounds stayed on the bracken-strewn floor below, where lesser men could eat at the year’s four great feasts.
There was no feast that night, just bread and cheese and ale, and my father waited for my brother and wondered aloud if the Danes were restless again. ‘They usually come for food and plunder,’ he told me, ‘but in some places they’ve stayed and taken land.’
‘You think they want our land?’ I asked.
‘They’ll take any land,’ he said irritably. He was always irritated by my questions, but that night he was worried and so he talked on. ‘Their own land is stone and ice, and they have giants threatening them.’
I wanted him to tell me more about the giants, but he brooded instead. ‘Our ancestors,’ he went on after a while, ‘took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they’re buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours.’ He was angry, but he was often angry. He glowered at me, as if wondering whether I was strong enough to hold this land of Northumbria that our ancestors had won with sword and spear and blood and slaughter.
We slept after a while, or at least I slept. I think my father paced the ramparts, but by dawn he was back in the hall and it was then I was woken by the horn at the High Gate and I stumbled off the platform and out into the morning’s first light. There was dew on the grass, a sea eagle circling overhead, and my father’s hounds streaming from the hall door in answer to the horn’s call. I saw my father running down to the Low Gate and I followed him until I could wriggle my way through the men who were crowding onto the earthen rampart to stare along the causeway.
Horsemen were coming from the south. There were a dozen of them, their horses’ hooves sparkling with the dew. My brother’s horse was in the lead. It was a brindled stallion, wild-eyed and with a curious gait. It threw its forelegs out as it cantered and no one could mistake that horse, but it was not Uhtred who rode it. The man bestride the saddle had long, long hair the colour of pale gold, hair that tossed like the horses’ tails as he rode. He wore mail, had a flapping scabbard at his side and an axe slung across one shoulder and I was certain he was the same man who had danced the oar shafts the previous day. His companions were in leather or wool and as they neared the fortress the long-haired man signalled that they should curb their horses as he rode ahead alone. He came within bowshot, though none of us on the rampart put an arrow on the string, then he pulled the horse to a stop and looked up at the gate. He stared all along the line of men, a mocking expression on his face, then he bowed, threw something on the path and wheeled the horse away. He kicked his heels and the horse sped back and his ragged men joined him to gallop south.
What he had thrown onto the path was my brother’s severed head. It was brought to my father who stared at it a long time, but betrayed no feelings. He did not cry, he did not grimace, he did not scowl, he just looked at his eldest son’s head and then he looked at me. ‘From this day on,’ he said, ‘your name is Uhtred.’
Which is how I was named.
Father Beocca insisted that I should be baptised again, or else heaven would not know who I was when I arrived with the name Uhtred. I protested, but Gytha wanted it and my father cared more for her contentment than for mine, and so a barrel was carried into the church and half filled with sea water and Father Beocca stood me in the barrel and ladled water over my hair. ‘Receive your servant Uhtred,’ he intoned, ‘into the holy company of the saints and into the ranks of the most bright angels.’ I hope the saints and angels are warmer than I was that day, and after the baptism was done Gytha wept for me, though why I did not know. She might have done better to weep for my brother.
We found out what had happened to him. The three Danish ships had put into the mouth of the River Aln where there was a small settlement of fishermen and their families. Those folk had prudently fled inland, though a handful stayed and watched the river mouth from woods on higher ground and they said my brother had come at nightfall and seen the Vikings torching the houses. They were called Vikings when they were raiders, but Danes or pagans when they were traders, and these men had been burning and plundering so were reckoned to be Vikings. There had seemed very few of them in the settlement, most were on their ships, and my brother decided to ride down to the cottages and kill those few, but of course it was a trap. The Danes had seen his horsemen coming and had hidden a ship’s crew north of the village, and those forty men closed behind my brother’s party and killed them all. My father claimed his eldest son’s death must have been quick, which was a consolation to him, but of course it was not a quick death for he lived long enough for the Danes to discover who he was, or else why would they have brought his head back to Bebbanburg? The fishermen said they tried to warn my brother, but I doubt they did. Men say such things so that they are not blamed for disaster, but whether my brother was warned or not, he still died and the Danes took thirteen fine swords, thirteen good horses, a coat of mail, a helmet and my old name.
But that was not the end of it. A fleeting visit by three ships was no great event, but a week after my brother’s death we heard that a great Danish fleet had rowed up the rivers to capture Eoferwic. They had won that victory on All Saints’ Day, which made Gytha weep for it suggested God had abandoned us, but there was also good news for it seemed that my old namesake, King Osbert, had made an alliance with his rival, the would-be King Ælla, and they had agreed to put aside their rivalry, join forces and take Eoferwic back. That sounds simple, but of course it took time. Messengers rode, advisers confused, priests prayed, and it was not till Christmas that Osbert and Ælla sealed their peace with oaths, and then they summoned my father’s men, but of course we could not march in winter. The Danes were in Eoferwic and we left them there until the early spring when news came that the Northumbrian army would gather outside the city and, to my joy, my father decreed that I would ride south with him.
‘He’s too young,’ Gytha protested.
‘He is almost ten,’ my father said, ‘and he must learn to fight.’
‘He would be better served by continuing his lessons,’ she said.
‘A dead reader is no use to Bebbanburg,’ my father said, ‘and Uhtred is now the heir so he must learn to fight.’
That night he made Beocca show me the parchments kept in the church, the parchments that said we owned the land. Beocca had been teaching me to read for two years, but I was a bad pupil and, to Beocca’s despair, I could make neither head
