are now. I remember my father cursing them, and his priests praying that the nailed god would humble them, and that always puzzled me because the Scots were Christians too. When I was just eight years old my father had allowed me to ride with his warriors on a punitive cattle raid into Scotland, and I remember a small town in a wide valley where the women and children had crowded into a church. ‘You don’t touch them!’ my father had commanded, ‘they have sanctuary!’
‘They’re the enemy,’ I protested, ‘don’t we want slaves?’
‘They’re Christians,’ my father explained curtly, and so we had taken their long-haired cattle, burned most of their houses, and ridden home with ladles, spits, and cooking pots, indeed with anything that our smithy could melt down, but we had not entered the church. ‘Because they’re Christians,’ my father had explained again, ‘don’t you understand, you stupid boy?’
I did not understand, and then, of course, the Danes had come, and they tore the churches apart to steal the silver from the altars. I remember Ragnar laughing one day. ‘It is so kind of the Christians! They put their wealth in one building and mark it with a great cross! It makes life so easy.’
So I learned that the Scots were Christians, but they were also the enemy, just as they had been the enemy when thousands of Roman slaves had dragged stones across Northumbria’s hills to make the wall. In my childhood I was a Christian too, I knew no better, and I remember asking Father Beocca how other Christians could be our enemies.
‘They are indeed Christians,’ Father Beocca had explained to me, ‘but they are savages too!’ He had taken me to the monastery on Lindisfarena and he had begged the abbot, who was to be slaughtered by the Danes within half a year, to show me one of the monastery’s six books. It was a huge book with crackling pages, and Beocca turned them reverently, tracing the lines of crabbed handwriting with a dirty fingernail. ‘Ah!’ he had said. ‘Here it is!’ He turned the book so I could see the writing, though because it was in Latin it meant nothing at all to me. ‘This is a book,’ Beocca told me, ‘written by Saint Gildas. It’s a very rare book. Saint Gildas was a Briton, and his book tells of our coming! The coming of the Saxons! He did not like us,’ he had chuckled when he said that, ‘for of course we were not Christians then. But I want you to see this because Saint Gildas came from Northumbria, and he knew the Scots well!’ He turned the book and bent over the page. ‘Here it is! Listen! “As soon as the Romans returned home,”’ he translated as his finger scratched along the lines, ‘“there eagerly emerged the foul hordes of Scots like dark swarms of worms who wriggle out of cracks in the rocks. They had a greed for bloodshed, and were more ready to cover their villainous faces with hair than cover their private parts with clothes.”’ Beocca had made the sign of the cross after he closed the book. ‘Nothing changes! They are thieves and robbers!’
‘Naked thieves and robbers?’ I had asked. The passage about private parts had interested me.
‘No, no, no. They’re Christians now. They cover their shameful parts now, God be praised.’
‘So they’re Christians,’ I said, ‘but don’t we raid their land too?’
‘Of course we do!’ Beocca had said. ‘Because they must be punished.’
‘For what?’
‘For raiding our land, of course.’
‘But we raid their land,’ I insisted, ‘so aren’t we thieves and robbers too?’ I rather liked the idea that we were just as wild and lawless as the hated Scots.
‘You will understand when you are grown up,’ Beocca had said, as he always did when he did not know the answer. And now that I was grown up I still did not understand Beocca’s argument that our war against the Scots was righteous punishment. King Alfred, who was nobody’s fool, often said that the war that raged across Britain was a crusade of Christianity against the pagans, but whenever that war crossed into Welsh or Scottish territory it suddenly became something else. Then it became Christian against Christian, and it was just as savage, just as bloody, and we were told by the priests that we did the nailed god’s will, while the priests in Scotland said exactly the same thing to their warriors when they attacked us. The truth, of course, was that it was a war about land. There were four tribes in one island, the Welsh, the Scots, the Saxons, and the Northmen, and all four of us wanted the same land. The priests preached incessantly that we had to fight for the land because it had been given to us as a reward by the nailed god, but when we Saxons had first captured the land we had all been pagans. So presumably Thor or Odin gave us the land.
‘Isn’t that true?’ I asked Father Eadig that night. We were sheltering in one of Weallbyrig’s fine stone buildings, protected from the relentless wind and rain by Roman walls, and warmed by a great fire in the hearth.
Eadig gave me a nervous smile. ‘It’s true, lord, that God sent us to this land, but it wasn’t the old gods, it was the one true God. He sent us.’
‘The Saxons? He sent the Saxons?’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘But we weren’t Christians then,’ I pointed out. My men, who had heard it all before, grinned.
‘We weren’t Christians then,’ Eadig agreed, ‘but the Welsh who had this land before us were Christians. Except they were bad Christians, so God sent the Saxons as a punishment.’
‘What had they done?’ I asked. ‘The Welsh, I mean. How were they bad?’
‘I don’t know, lord, but God wouldn’t have sent us unless they deserved it.’
‘So they were bad,’ I said, ‘and God preferred to have bad pagans in Britain instead of bad Christians? That’s like killing a cow because it has a lame hoof and replacing it with a cow that has the staggers!’
‘Oh, but God converted us to the true faith as a reward for punishing the Welsh!’ he said brightly. ‘We’re a good cow now!’
‘So why did God send the Danes?’ I asked him. ‘Was he punishing us for being bad Christians?’
‘That is a possibility, lord,’ he said uncomfortably, as if he was not quite sure of his answer.
‘So where does it end?’ I asked.
‘End, lord?’
‘Some Danes are converting,’ I said, ‘so who does your god send to punish them when they become bad Christians? The Franks?’
‘There’s a fire,’ my son interrupted us. He had drawn aside a leather curtain and was staring north.
‘In this rain?’ Finan asked.
I went to stand beside my son, and, sure enough, somewhere in the far northern hills, a great blaze made a glow in the sky. Fires mean trouble, but I could not imagine any raiding party being loose in this night of rain and wind. ‘It’s probably a steading that caught fire,’ I suggested.
‘And it’s a long way away,’ Finan said.
‘God’s punishing someone,’ I said, ‘but which god?’
Father Eadig made the sign of the cross. We watched the distant blaze for a short while, but no more fires showed, then the rain damped the far flames and the sky darkened again.
We changed the sentries in the high
