shillings, lord.’ She was bright-eyed, brown-haired, with an infectiously cheeky grin.
‘Why did you want to sell him?’
‘Because he’s a turd, lord.’
I laughed. ‘You should have taken the money then. Three shillings is a good price for a turd.’
‘Father wouldn’t let me.’ She pouted, then pretended to have a bright idea. ‘Maybe my brother could serve you, lord?’ She made a ghastly grimace. ‘Then he’d die in a battle?’
‘Go away, you horrible thing,’ her father said.
‘Hanna!’ I called her back. ‘Your father says you’re ready to be married.’
‘Another year, maybe,’ Olla put in quickly.
‘You want to marry this one?’ I asked, pointing to my son.
‘No, lord!’
‘Why not?’
‘He looks like you, lord,’ she said, grinned, and vanished.
I laughed, but my son looked offended. ‘I do not look like you,’ he said.
‘You do,’ Olla said.
‘God help me then.’
And god help Northumbria, I thought. Brunulf? I knew nothing of him, but assumed he was competent enough to be given command of several hundred men, but why had he been sent to Hornecastre? Was King Edward trying to provoke a war? His sister Æthelflaed might have made peace with Sigtryggr, but Wessex had not signed the treaty, and the eagerness of some West Saxons to invade Northumbria was no secret. But sending a few hundred men a small distance into Northumbria, ejecting the nearby Danes without slaughter, and then settling into an old fort did not sound like a savage invasion. Brunulf and his men, I decided, were in Hornecastre as a provocation, designed to make us attack them and so start a war we would lose. ‘Sigtryggr wants me to join him,’ I told Olla.
‘If he can’t talk them out of the fort then he’s hoping you’ll scare them out,’ he said flatteringly.
I tasted the fish stew and discovered I was ravenous. ‘So why is the price of ships going up?’ I asked.
‘You won’t believe this, lord. It’s the archbishop.’
‘Hrothweard?’
Olla shrugged. ‘He says it’s time the monks went back to Lindisfarena.’
I stared at him. ‘He says what?’
‘He wants to rebuild the monastery!’ Olla said.
There had been no monks on Lindisfarena for half a lifetime, not since marauding Danes had killed the last of them. In my father’s time it had been the most important Christian shrine in all Britain, surpassing even Contwaraburg, attracting hordes of pilgrims who came to pray beside Saint Cuthbert’s grave. My father had profited because the monastery was just north of the fortress, on its own island, and the pilgrims spent silver buying candles, food, lodging, and whores in Bebbanburg’s village. I had no doubt that the Christians wanted to rebuild the place, but right now it was in Scottish hands. Olla jerked his head eastwards along the bank. ‘See that pile of timber? It’s all good seasoned oak from Sumorsæte. That’s what the archbishop wants to use. That and some stone, so he needs a dozen ships to carry it all.’
‘King Constantin might not approve,’ I said grimly.
‘What’s it got to do with him?’ Olla asked.
‘You hadn’t heard? The damned Scots have invaded Bebbanburg’s land.’
‘Sweet Christ! Truly, lord?’
‘Truly. That bastard Constantin claims Lindisfarena is part of Scotland now. He’ll want his own monks there, not Hrothweard’s Saxons.’
Olla grimaced. ‘The archbishop won’t like that! The damned Scots in Lindisfarena!’
I had a sudden thought and frowned as I considered it. ‘You know who owns most of the island?’ I asked Olla.
‘Your family, lord,’ he said, which was a tactful answer.
‘The church owns the monastery ruins,’ I said, ‘but the rest of the island belongs to Bebbanburg. Do you think the archbishop asked my cousin’s permission to build there? He doesn’t need it, but life would be easier if my cousin agreed.’
Olla hesitated. He knew how I felt about my cousin. ‘I think the suggestion came from your cousin, lord.’
Which was exactly what I had suddenly suspected. ‘That weasel shit,’ I said. From the moment that Sigtryggr became King of Northumbria my cousin must have known that I would attack him, and he had doubtless made the suggestion to Hrothweard so that the church would support him. He would turn the defence of Bebbanburg into a Christian crusade. Constantin had at least ended that hope, I thought.
‘But before that,’ Olla went on, ‘the mad bishop tried to build a church there. Or he wanted to.’
I laughed. Any mention of the mad bishop always amused me. ‘He did?’
‘So Archbishop Hrothweard wants to stop that nonsense. Of course you never know what to believe about that crazy bastard, but it was no secret that the fool wanted to build a new monastery on the island.’
The mad bishop might have been mad, but he was no bishop. He was a Danish jarl named Dagfinnr who had declared himself the Bishop of Gyruum and given himself a new name, Ieremias. He and his men occupied the old fort at Gyruum, just south of Bebbanburg’s land on the southern bank of the River Tinan. Gyruum was part of Dunholm’s holdings, which made Ieremias my tenant, and the only time I had met him was when he had dutifully come to the larger fortress to pay me rent. He had arrived with a dozen men, who he called his disciples, all of them mounted on stallions except for Ieremias himself, who straddled an ass. He wore a long grubby robe, had greasy white hair hanging to his waist, and a sly look of amusement on his thin, clever face. He had laid fifteen silver shillings on the grass, then hitched up his robe. ‘Behold,’ he announced grandly, then pissed on the coins. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the other one,’ he said as he pissed, then grinned at me. ‘Your rent, lord, a little damp, but blessed by God Himself. See how they sparkle now? A miracle, yes?’
‘Wash them,’ I told him.
‘And your feet too, lord?’
So the crazy Ieremias wanted to build on Lindisfarena? ‘Did he ask my cousin’s permission?’ I asked Olla.
‘I wouldn’t know, lord. I haven’t seen Ieremias or his horrible ship for months.’
The horrible ship was called Guds Moder, a dark, untidy war vessel that Ieremias used to patrol the coast just beyond Gyruum. I shrugged. ‘Ieremias is no threat,’ I decided, ‘if he farts northwards then Constantin will crush him.’
‘Perhaps,’ Olla sounded dubious.
I stared at the river as it slid past the busy wharves, then watched a cat stalk along
