had escaped past Finan’s men. I drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword that was so lethal in a shield wall fight when men are pressed close as lovers. ‘Any of you,’ I looked at the women, ‘who wants to kill the man who raped you, then do it now!’
Two women wanted revenge and I let them use Wasp-Sting. Both of them butchered their victims. One stabbed repeatedly, the other hacked, and both men died slowly. Of the remaining fourteen men, one was not in mail. He was the enemy’s shipmaster. He was grey-haired with a scanty beard and brown eyes that looked at me belligerently. ‘Where did you come from?’ I asked him.
He thought about refusing to answer, then thought better. ‘Beamfleot,’ he said.
‘And Lundene?’ I asked him. ‘The old city is still in Danish hands?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, lord,’ I corrected him.
‘Yes, lord,’ he conceded.
‘Then you will go to Lundene,’ I told him, ‘and then to Beamfleot, and then to anywhere you wish, and you will tell the Northmen that Uhtred of Bebbanburg guards the River Temes. And you will tell them they are welcome to come here whenever they wish.’
That one man lived. I hacked off his right hand before letting him go. I did it so he could never wield a sword again. By then we had lit a fire and I thrust his bleeding stump into the red-hot embers to seal the wound. He was a brave man. He flinched when we cauterised his stump, but he did not scream as his blood bubbled and his flesh sizzled. I wrapped his shortened arm in a piece of cloth taken from a dead man’s shirt. ‘Go,’ I ordered him, pointing downriver. ‘Just go.’ He walked eastwards. If he were lucky he would survive the journey to spread the news of my savagery.
We killed the others, all of them.
‘Why did you kill them?’ my new wife asked once, distaste for my thoroughness evident in her voice.
‘So they would learn to fear,’ I answered her, ‘of course.’
‘Dead men can’t fear,’ she said.
I try to be patient with her. ‘A ship left Beamfleot,’ I explained, ‘and it never went back. And other men who wanted to raid Wessex heard of that ship’s fate. And those men decided to take their swords somewhere else. I killed that ship’s crew to save myself having to kill hundreds of other Danes.’
‘The Lord Jesus would have wanted you to show mercy,’ she said, her eyes wide.
She is an idiot.
Finan took some of the villagers back to their burned homes where they dug graves for their dead while my men hanged the corpses of our enemies from trees beside the river. We made ropes from strips torn from their clothes. We took their mail, their weapons and their arm rings. We cut off their long hair, for I liked to caulk my ships’ planks with the hair of slain enemies, and then we hanged them and their pale naked bodies twisted in the small wind as the ravens came to take their dead eyes.
Fifty-three bodies hung by the river. A warning to those who might follow. Fifty-three signals that other raiders were risking death by rowing up the Temes.
Then we went home, taking the enemy ship with us.
And Serpent-Breath slept in her scabbard.
‘The dead speak,’ Æthelwold told me. He was sober for once. Sober and awed and serious. The night wind snatched at the house and the rushlights flickered red in the wintry draughts that whipped from the roof’s smoke-hole and through the doors and shutters.
‘The dead speak?’ I asked.
‘A corpse,’ Æthelwold said, ‘he rises from the grave and he speaks.’ He stared at me wide-eyed, then nodded as if to stress that he spoke the truth. He was leaning towards me, his clasped hands fidgeting between his knees. ‘I have seen it,’ he added.
‘A corpse talks?’ I asked.
‘He rises!’ He wafted a hand to show what he meant.
‘He?’
‘The dead man. He rises and he speaks.’ He still stared at me, his expression indignant. ‘It’s true,’ he added in a voice that suggested he knew I did not believe him.
I edged my bench closer to the hearth. It was ten days after I had killed the raiders and hanged their bodies by the river, and now a freezing rain rattled on the thatch and beat on the barred shutters. Two of my hounds lay in front of the fire and one gave me a resentful glance when I scraped the bench, then rested his head again. The house had been built by the Romans, which meant the floor was tiled and the walls were of stone, though I had thatched the roof myself. Rain spat through the smoke-hole. ‘What does the dead man say?’ Gisela asked. She was my wife and the mother of my two children.
Æthelwold did not answer at once, perhaps because he believed a woman should not take part in a serious discussion, but my silence told him that Gisela was welcome to speak in her own house and he was too nervous to insist that I dismiss her. ‘He says I should be king,’ he admitted softly, then gazed at me, fearing my reaction.
‘King of what?’ I asked flatly.
‘Wessex,’ he said, ‘of course.’
‘Oh, Wessex,’ I said, as though I had never heard of the place.
‘And I should be king!’ Æthelwold protested. ‘My father was king!’
‘And now your father’s brother is king,’ I said, ‘and men say he is a good king.’
‘Do you say that?’ he challenged me.
I did not answer. It was well enough known that I did not like Alfred and that Alfred did not like me, but that did not mean Alfred’s nephew, Æthelwold, would make a better king. Æthelwold, like me, was in his late twenties, and he had made a reputation as a drunk and a lecherous fool. Yet he did have a claim to the throne of Wessex. His father had indeed been king, and if Alfred had possessed a thimbleful of sense he would have had his nephew’s throat sliced to the bone. Instead Alfred relied on Æthelwold’s thirst for ale to keep him from making trouble. ‘Where did you see this living corpse?’ I asked, instead of answering his question.
He waved a hand towards the north side of the house. ‘On the other side of the street,’ he said. ‘Just the other side.’
‘Wæclingastræt?’ I asked him, and he nodded.
So he was talking to the Danes as well as to the dead.
