lord,’ he said, smiling again. ‘I would miss your company,’ he went on, ‘but you would not miss Alfred’s.’
‘No,’ I admitted, and we let the conversation drift away with the wind-blown rain, though Finan’s words lingered in my mind and they troubled me.
We spent that night close to the great shrine of Saint Alban. The Romans had made a town there, though that town had now decayed, and so we stayed at a Danish hall just to the east. Our host was welcoming enough, but he was cautious in conversation. He did admit to hearing that Sigefrid had moved men into Lundene’s old town, but he neither condemned nor praised the act. He wore the hammer amulet, as did I, but he also kept a Saxon priest who prayed over the meal of bread, bacon and beans. The priest was a reminder that this hall was in East Anglia, and that East Anglia was officially Christian and at peace with its Christian neighbours, but our host made certain that his palisade gate was barred and that he had armed men keeping watch through the damp night. There was a shiftless air to this land, a feeling that a storm might break at any time.
The rainstorm ended in the darkness. We left at dawn, riding into a world of frost and stillness, though Wæclingastræt became busier as we encountered men driving cattle to Lundene. The beasts were scrawny, but they had been spared the autumn slaughter so they could feed the city through its winter. We rode past them and the herdsmen dropped to their knees as so many armed men clattered by. The clouds cleared to the east so that, when we came to Lundene in the middle of the day, the sun was bright behind the thick pall of dark smoke that always hangs above the city.
I have always liked Lundene. It is a place of ruins, trade and wickedness that sprawls along the northern bank of the Temes. The ruins were the buildings the Romans left when they abandoned Britain, and their old city crowned the hills at the city’s eastern end and were surrounded by a wall made of brick and stone. The Saxons had never liked the Roman buildings, fearing their ghosts, and so had made their own town to the west, a place of thatch and wood and wattle and narrow alleys and stinking ditches that were supposed to carry sewage to the river, but usually lay glistening and filthy until a downpour of rain flooded them. That new Saxon town was a busy place, stinking with the smoke from smithy fires and raucous with the shouts of tradesmen, too busy, indeed, to bother making a defensive wall. Why did they need a wall, the Saxons argued, for the Danes were content to live in the old city and had showed no desire to slaughter the inhabitants of the new. There were palisades in a few places, evidence that some men had tried to protect the rapidly growing new town, but enthusiasm for the project always died and the palisades rotted, or else their timbers were stolen to make new buildings along the sewage-stinking streets.
Lundene’s trade came from the river and from the roads that led to every part of Britain. The roads, of course, were Roman, and down them flowed wool and pottery, ingots and pelts, while the river brought luxuries from abroad and slaves from Frankia and hungry men seeking trouble. There was plenty of that, because the city, which was built where three kingdoms met, was virtually ungoverned in those years.
To the east of Lundene the land was East Anglia, and so ruled by Guthrum. To the south, on the far bank of the Temes, was Wessex, while to the west was Mercia to which the city really belonged, but Mercia was a crippled country without a king and so there was no reeve to keep order in Lundene, and no great lord to impose laws. Men went armed in the alleyways, wives had bodyguards and great dogs were chained in gateways. Bodies were found every morning, unless the tide carried them downriver towards the sea and past the coast where the Danes had their great camp at Beamfleot from where the Northmen’s ships sailed to demand customs payments from the traders working their way up the wide mouth of the Temes. The Northmen had no authority to impose such dues, but they had ships and men and swords and axes, and that was authority enough.
Haesten had exacted enough of those illegal dues, indeed he had become rich by piracy, rich and powerful, but he was still nervous as we rode into the city. He had talked incessantly as we neared Lundene, mostly about nothing, and he laughed too easily when I made sour comments about his inane words. But then, as we passed between the half-fallen towers either side of a wide gateway, he fell silent. There were sentries on the gate, but they must have recognised Haesten for they did not challenge us, but simply pulled aside the hurdles that blocked the ruined arch. Inside the arch I could see a stack of timbers that meant the gate was being rebuilt.
We had come to the Roman town, the old town, and our horses picked a slow path up the street that was paved with wide flagstones between which weeds grew thick. It was cold. Frost still lay in the dark corners where the sun had not reached the stone all day. The buildings had shuttered windows through which woodsmoke sifted to be whirled down the street. ‘You’ve been here before?’ Haesten broke his silence with the abrupt question.
‘Many times,’ I said. Haesten and I rode ahead now.
‘Sigefrid,’ Haesten said, then found he had nothing to say.
‘Is a Norseman, I hear,’ I said.
‘He is unpredictable,’ Haesten said, and the tone of his voice told me that it was Sigefrid who had made him nervous. Haesten had faced a living corpse without flinching, but the thought of Sigefrid made him apprehensive.
‘I can be unpredictable,’ I said, ‘and so can you.’
Haesten said nothing to that. Instead he touched the hammer hanging at his neck, then turned his horse into a gateway where servants ran forward to greet us. ‘The king’s palace,’ Haesten said.
I knew the palace. It had been made by the Romans and was a great vaulted building of pillars and carved stone, though it had been patched by the kings of Mercia so that thatch, wattle and timber filled the gaps in the half-ruined walls. The great hall was lined with Roman pillars and its walls were of brick, but here and there patches of marble facing had somehow survived. I stared at the high masonry and marvelled that men had ever been able to make such walls. We built in wood and thatch, and both rotted away, which meant we would leave nothing behind. The Romans had left marble and stone, brick and glory.
A steward told us that Sigefrid and his younger brother were in the old Roman arena that lay to the north of the palace. ‘What is he doing there?’ Haesten asked.
‘Making a sacrifice, lord,’ the steward said.
‘Then we’ll join him,’ Haesten said, looking at me for confirmation.
‘We will,’ I said.
We rode the short distance. Beggars shrank from us. We had money, and they knew it, but they dared not ask for it because we were armed strangers. Swords, shields, axes and spears hung beside our horses’ muddy flanks. Shopkeepers bowed to us, while women hid their children in their skirts. Most of the folk who lived in the Roman part of Lundene were Danes, yet even these Danes were nervous. Their city had been occupied by Sigefrid’s crewmen who would be hungry for money and women.
I knew the Roman arena. When I was a child I was taught the fundamental strokes of the sword by Toki the Shipmaster, and he had given me those lessons in the great oval arena that was surrounded by decayed layers of stone where wooden benches had once been placed. The tiered stone layers were almost empty, except for a few idle folk who were watching the men in the centre of the weed-choked arena. There must have been forty or fifty men there, and a score of saddled horses were tethered at the far end, but what surprised me most as I rode through the high walls of the entrance, was a Christian cross planted in the middle of the small crowd.
‘Sigefrid’s a Christian?’ I asked Haesten in astonishment.
‘No!’ Haesten said forcefully.
The men heard our hoofbeats and turned towards us. They were all dressed
