as one of his men said something. By afternoon they were gone.
I was sixteen and no longer a child.
And Ragnar, my lord, who had made me his son, was dead.
The bodies were still in the ashes, though it was impossible to tell who was who, or even to tell men from women for the heat had shrunk the dead so they all looked like children and the children like babies. Those who had died outside the hall were recognisable and I found Ealdwulf there, and Anwend, both stripped naked. I looked for Ragnar, but could not identify him. I wondered why he had not burst from the hall, sword in hand, and decided he knew he was going to die and did not want to give his enemy the satisfaction of seeing it.
We found food in one of the storage pits that Kjartan’s men had missed as they searched the hall. We had to shift hot charred pieces of timber to uncover the pit, and the bread, cheese and meat had all been soured by smoke and ash, but we ate. Neither of us spoke. At dusk some English folk came cautiously to the hall and stared at the destruction. They were wary of me, thinking of me as a Dane, and they dropped to their knees as I approached. They were the lucky ones, for Kjartan had slaughtered every Northumbrian in Synningthwait, down to the last baby, and had loudly blamed them for the hall-burning. Men must have known it was his doing, but his savagery at Synningthwait confused things and, in time, many folk came to believe that the English had attacked Ragnar, and Kjartan had taken revenge for their attack. But these English had escaped his swords. ‘You will come back in the morning,’ I told them, ‘and bury the dead.’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘You will be rewarded,’ I promised them, thinking I would have to surrender one of my precious arm rings.
‘Yes, lord,’ one of them repeated, and then I asked them if they knew why this had happened and they looked nervous, but finally one said he had been told that Earl Ragnar was planning a revolt against Ricsig. One of the Englishmen who served Kjartan had told him that when he went down to their hovels to find ale. He had also told them to hide themselves before Kjartan slaughtered the valley’s inhabitants.
‘You know who I am?’ I asked the man.
‘The Lord Uhtred, lord.’
‘Tell no man I’m alive,’ I said and he just stared at me. Kjartan, I decided, must think that I was dead, that I was one of the shrunken charred bodies in the hall, and while Kjartan did not care about me, Sven did, and I did not want him hunting me. ‘And return in the morning,’ I went on, ‘and you will have silver.’
There is a thing called the bloodfeud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a bloodfeud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.
And I became rich that night. Brida waited until the English folk were gone and then she led me to the burned remnants of Ealdwulf’s forge and she showed me the vast piece of scorched elm, a section of a tree’s trunk, that had held Ealdwulf’s anvil. ‘We must move that,’ she said.
It took both of us to tip over that monstrous piece of elm, and beneath it was nothing but earth, but Brida told me to dig there and, for want of other tools, I used Wasp-Sting and had only gone down a hand’s breadth when I struck metal. Gold. Real gold. Coins and small lumps. The coins were strange, incised with a writing I had never seen before, neither Danish runes nor English letters, but something weird which I later learned came from the people far away who live in the desert and worship a god called Allah who I think must be a god of fire because al, in our English tongue, means burning. There are so many gods, but those folk who worshipped Allah made good coin and that night we unearthed forty-eight of them, and as much again in loose gold, and Brida told me she had watched Ragnar and Ealdwulf bury the hoard one night. There was gold, silver pennies, and four pieces of jet, and doubtless this was the treasure Kjartan had expected to find, for he knew Ragnar was wealthy, but Ragnar had hidden it well. All men hide a reserve of wealth for the day when disaster comes. I have buried hoards in my time, and even forgotten where one was and perhaps, years from now, some lucky man will find it. That hoard, Ragnar’s hoard, belonged to his eldest son, but Ragnar, it was strange to think he was just Ragnar now, no longer Ragnar the Younger, was far away in Ireland and I doubted he was even alive, for Kjartan would surely have sent men to kill him. But alive or dead he was not here and so we took the hoard.
‘What do we do?’ Brida asked that night. We were back in the woods.
I already knew what we would do, perhaps I had always known. I am an Englishman of England, but I had been a Dane while Ragnar was alive for Ragnar loved me and cared for me and called me his son, but Ragnar was dead and I had no other friends among the Danes. I had no friends among the English, for that matter, except for Brida of course, and unless I counted Beocca who was certainly fond of me in a complicated way, but the English were my folk and I think I had known that ever since the moment at Æsc’s Hill where for the first time I saw Englishmen beat Danes. I had felt pride then. Destiny is all, and the spinners touched me at Æsc’s Hill and now, at last, I would respond to their touch.
‘We go south,’ I said.
‘To a nunnery?’ Brida asked, thinking of Ælswith and her bitter ambitions.
‘No.’ I had no wish to join Alfred and learn to read and bruise my knees with praying. ‘I have relatives in Mercia,’ I said. I had never met them, knew nothing of them, but they were family and family has its obligations, and the Danish hold on Mercia was looser than elsewhere and perhaps I could find a home and I would not be a burden because I carried gold.
I had said I knew what I would do, but that is not wholly true. The truth is that I was in a well of misery, tempted to despair and with tears ever close to my eyes. I wanted life to go on as before, to have Ragnar as my father, to feast and to laugh. But destiny grips us and, next morning, in a soft winter rain, we buried the dead, paid silver coins, and then walked southwards. We were a boy on the edge of being a grown man, a girl and a dog, and we were going to nowhere.
I settled in southern Mercia. I found another uncle, this one called Ealdorman Æthelred, son of Æthelred, brother of Æthelwulf, father of Æthelred, and brother to another Æthelred who had been the father of Ælswith who was married to Alfred, and Ealdorman Æthelred, with his confusing family, grudgingly acknowledged me as a nephew, though the welcome became slightly warmer when I presented him with two gold coins and swore on a crucifix that it was all the money I possessed. He assumed Brida was my lover, in which he was right, and thereafter he ignored her.
The journey south was wearisome, as all winter journeys are. For a time we sheltered at an upland homestead near Meslach and the folk there took us for outlaws. We arrived at their hovel in an evening of sleet and wind, both of us half frozen, and we paid for food and shelter with a few links from the
