England. They captured Northumbria, took East Anglia, and occupied all of Mercia. Guthrum the Dane had then invaded Wessex, driving Alfred and a handful of men into the marshes of Sumorsæte, but Alfred had won the unlikely victory at Ethandun, and ever since the Saxons had inexorably worked their way northwards. The old kingdom of Mercia was in Saxon hands now, and Edward of Wessex, Alfred’s son and the brother of Æthelflaed of Mercia, had reconquered East Anglia. Alfred’s dream, his passion, had been to unite all the lands where the Saxon tongue was spoken, and of those lands only Northumbria was left. There might be a peace treaty between Northumbria and Mercia, but we all knew the Saxon onslaught would come.
Rorik, the Norse boy whose father I had killed, had been listening as I talked to Father Eadig. ‘Lord,’ he asked nervously, ‘whose side are we on?’
I laughed. I was born a Saxon, but raised by Danes, my daughter had married a Norseman, my dearest friend was Irish, my woman was a Saxon, the mother of my children had been Danish, my gods were pagan, and my oath was sworn to Æthelflaed, a Christian. Whose side was I on?
‘All you need to know, boy,’ Finan growled, ‘is that Lord Uhtred’s side is the one that wins.’
The rain was slashing down now, turning the drove path we followed into thick mud. The rain fell so hard I had to raise my voice to Eadig. ‘You say the Mercians haven’t invaded?’
‘Not as far as we know, lord.’
‘Just West Saxons?’
‘Seems so, lord.’
And that was strange. Before Sigtryggr captured the throne in Eoferwic I had tried to persuade Æthelflaed to attack Northumbria. She had refused, saying she would not start a war unless her brother’s troops were fighting alongside her men. And Edward of Wessex, her brother, had been adamant that she refuse. He insisted Northumbria could only be conquered by the combined armies of Wessex and Mercia, yet now he had marched alone? I knew there was a faction in the West Saxon court that insisted Wessex could conquer Northumbria without Mercian help, but Edward had always been more cautious. He wanted his sister’s army alongside his own. I pressed Eadig, but he was sure there had been no Mercian attack. ‘At least not when I left Eoferwic, lord.’
‘It’s just rumours,’ Finan said scornfully. ‘Who knows what’s happening? We’ll get there and find it’s nothing but a god-damned cattle raid.’
‘Scouts,’ Rorik said. I thought he meant that a handful of West Saxon scouts had been mistaken for an invasion, but instead he was pointing behind us, and I turned to see two of the horsemen watching us from a ridge. They were hard to see through the drenching rain, but they were unmistakable. The same small, fast horses, the same long spears. We had seen no scouts for a couple of days, but they were back now and following us.
I spat. ‘Now my cousin knows we’re leaving.’
‘He’ll be happy,’ Finan said.
‘They look like the men who ambushed us,’ Father Eadig said, staring at the distant scouts and making the sign of the cross. ‘There were six of them on fast horses and carrying spears.’ Sigtryggr had sent the priest with an armed escort who had sacrificed their lives so that Eadig alone could escape.
‘They’re my cousin’s men,’ I told Father Eadig, ‘and if we catch any of them I’ll let you kill them.’
‘I couldn’t do that!’
I frowned at him. ‘You don’t want revenge?’
‘I am a priest, lord, I can’t kill!’
‘I’ll teach you how, if you like,’ I said. I doubt I shall ever understand Christianity. ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ their priests teach, then encourage warriors to give battle against the heathen, or even against other Christians if there is a half-chance of gaining land, slaves, or silver. Father Beocca had taught me the nailed god’s ten commandments, but I had long learned that the chief commandment of the Christians was ‘Thou shalt make my priests wealthy’.
For two more days the scouts followed us southwards until, in a wet evening, we reached the wall. The wall! There are many wonders in Britain; the ancient people left mysterious rings of stone, while the Romans built temples, palaces, and great halls, yet of all those wonders it is the wall that amazes me the most.
The Romans, of course, had made it. They had made a wall across Britain, clear across Northumbria, a wall that stretched from the River Tinan on Northumbria’s eastern coast to the Cumbrian coast on the Irish Sea. It ended close to Cair Ligualid, though much of the wall’s stone there had been pillaged to make steadings, yet still most of the wall existed. And not just a wall, but a massive stone rampart, wide enough for men to walk two abreast on its top, and in front of the wall was a ditch and an earthen bank and behind it was another ditch, while every few miles was a fort like the one we called Weallbyrig. A string of forts! I had never counted them, though once I had ridden the wall from sea to sea, and what amazing forts! There were towers from which sentries could gaze into the northern hills, cisterns to store water, there were barracks, stables, storerooms, all made of stone! I remembered my father frowning at the wall as it twisted its way into a valley and up the further hill, and he had shaken his head in wonder. ‘How many slaves did they need to build this?’
‘Hundreds,’ my elder brother had said, and six months later he was dead, and my father had given me his name, and I became the heir to Bebbanburg.
The wall marked the southern boundary of Bebbanburg’s lands, and my father had always left a score of warriors in Weallbyrig to collect tolls from travellers using the main road that linked Scotland to Lundene. Those men were long gone, of course, driven out when the Danes conquered Northumbria during the invasion that had cost my father his life and left me an orphan with a noble name and no land. No land because my uncle had stolen it. ‘You are lord of nothing,’ King Alfred had once snarled at me, ‘lord of nothing and lord of nowhere. Uhtred the godless, Uhtred the landless, and Uhtred the hopeless.’
He had been right, of course, but now I was Uhtred of Dunholm. I had taken that fort when we defeated Ragnall and killed Brida, and it was a great fort, almost as formidable as Bebbanburg. And Weallbyrig marked the northern limit of Dunholm’s lands, just as it marked the southern edge of Bebbanburg’s domain. If the fort had another name, I did not know it, we called it Weallbyrig, which just means the fort of the wall, and it had been built where the great wall crossed a low hill. The years and the rain had made the ditches shallow, but the wall itself was still strong. The buildings had lost their roofs, but we had cleared the debris from three of them and brought rafters from the woods near Dunholm to make new roofs, which we layered with turf, and then we constructed a new shelter on top of the look-out tower so sentries were protected from wind and rain as they stared northwards.
Always northwards. I thought about that often. I do not know how many years it is since the Romans left Britain. Father Beocca, my childhood tutor, had told me it was over five hundred years, and perhaps he was right, but even back then, however long ago it was, the sentries gazed north. Always north towards the Scots, who must have been as much trouble then as they 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
