The Lords of the North. Bernard Cornwell
dropped to his knees. I wanted to kill Sven there and then, and perhaps I should have done, but it would only have taken one man to break the web of magical nonsense I had spun for them. What I needed at that moment was not Sven’s soul, but our safety, and so I would trade the one for the other. ‘I shall let this worm go,’ I said, ‘to carry news of my coming to his father, but you will go first. All of you! Go back beyond the village and I shall release him. You will leave your captives here.’ They just stared at me and I twitched the blade so that Sven yelped again. ‘Go!’ I shouted.
They went. They went fast, filled with dread. Bolti was gazing at his beloved daughters with awe. I told each girl they had done well, and that they should take a handful of coins from the table, and then they went back to their mother, both clutching silver and bloody blades. ‘They’re good girls,’ I told Bolti and he said nothing, but hurried after them.
‘I couldn’t kill him,’ Hild said. She seemed ashamed of her squeamishness.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. I kept the sword at Sven’s throat until I was sure all his men had retreated a good distance eastwards. The folk who had been their captives, mostly young boys and girls, stayed in the village, but none dared approach me.
I was tempted then to tell Sven the truth, to let him know that he had been humiliated by an old enemy, but the tale of Thorkild the Leper was too good to waste. I was also tempted to ask about Thyra, Ragnar’s sister, but I feared that if she did live and that if I betrayed an interest in her, then she would not live much longer, and so I said nothing of her. Instead I gripped Sven’s hair and pulled his head back so that he was staring up at me. ‘I have come to this middle earth,’ I told him, ‘to kill you and your father. I shall find you again, Sven Kjartanson, and I will kill you next time. I am Thorkild, I walk at night and I cannot be killed because I am already a corpse. So take my greetings to your father and tell him the dead swordsman has been sent for him and we shall all three sail in Skidbladnir back to Niflheim.’ Niflheim was the dreadful pit of the dishonoured dead, and Skidbladnir was the ship of the gods that could be folded and concealed in a pouch. I let go of Sven then and kicked him hard in the back so he sprawled onto his face. He could have crawled away, but he dared not move. He was a whipped dog now, and though I still wanted to kill him I reckoned it would be better to let him carry my eery tale to his father. Kjartan would doubtless learn that Uhtred of Bebbanburg had been seen in Eoferwic, but he would also hear of the corpse warrior come to kill him, and I wanted his dreams to be wreathed with terror.
Sven still did not move as I stooped to his belt and pulled away a heavy purse. Then I stripped him of his seven silver arm rings. Hild had cut off part of Gelgill’s robe and was using it to make a bag to hold the coins in the slave-trader’s tray. I gave her my father’s helmet to carry, then climbed back into Witnere’s saddle. I patted his neck and he tossed his head extravagantly as though he understood he had been a great fighting stallion that day.
I was about to leave when that weird day became stranger still. Some of the captives, as if realising that they were truly freed, had started towards the bridge, while others were so confused or lost or despairing that they had followed the armed men eastwards. Then, suddenly, there was a monkish chanting and out of one of the low, turf-roofed houses where they had been imprisoned, came a file of monks and priests. There were seven of them, and they were the luckiest men that day, for I was to discover that Kjartan the Cruel did indeed have a hatred of Christians and killed every priest or monk he captured. These seven escaped him now, and with them was a young man burdened with slave shackles. He was tall, well-built, very good-looking, dressed in rags and about my age. His long curly hair was so golden that it looked almost white and he had pale eyelashes and very blue eyes and a sun-darkened skin unmarked by disease. His face might have been carved from stone, so pronounced were his cheekbones, nose and jaw, yet the hardness of the face was softened by a cheerful expression that suggested he found life a constant surprise and a continual amusement. When he saw Sven cowering beneath my horse he left the chanting priests and ran towards us, stopping only to pick up the sword of the man I had killed. The young man held the sword awkwardly, for his hands were joined by links of chain, but he carried it to Sven and held it poised over Sven’s neck.
‘No,’ I said.
‘No?’ The young man smiled up at me and I instinctively liked him. His face was open and guileless.
‘I promised him his life,’ I said.
The young man thought about that for a heartbeat. ‘You did,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t.’ He spoke in Danish.
‘But if you take his life,’ I said, ‘then I shall have to take yours.’
He considered that bargain with amusement in his eyes. ‘Why?’ he asked, not in any alarm, but as if he genuinely wished to know.
‘Because that is the law,’ I said.
‘But Sven Kjartanson knows no law,’ he pointed out.
‘It is my law,’ I said, ‘and I want him to take a message to his father.’
‘What message?’
‘That the dead swordsman has come for him.’
The young man cocked his head thoughtfully as he considered the message and he evidently approved of it for he tucked the sword under an armpit and then clumsily untied the rope belt of his breeches. ‘You can take a message from me too,’ he said to Sven, ‘and this is it.’ He pissed on Sven. ‘I baptise you,’ the young man said, ‘in the name of Thor and of Odin and of Loki.’
The seven churchmen, three monks and four priests, solemnly watched the baptism, but none protested the implied blasphemy or tried to stop it. The young man pissed for a long time, aiming his stream so that it thoroughly soaked Sven’s hair, and when at last he finished he retied the belt and offered me another of his dazzling smiles. ‘You’re the dead swordsman?’
‘I am,’ I said.
‘Stop whimpering,’ the young man said to Sven, then smiled up at me again. ‘Then perhaps you will do me the honour of serving me?’
‘Serve you?’ I asked. It was my turn to be amused.
‘I am Guthred,’ he said, as though that explained everything.
‘Guthrum I have heard of,’ I said, ‘and I know a Guthwere and I have met two men named Guthlac, but I know of no Guthred.’
‘I am Guthred, son of Hardicnut,’ he said.
The name still meant nothing to me. ‘And why should I serve Guthred,’ I asked, ‘son of Hardicnut?’
‘Because until you came I was a slave,’ he said, ‘but now, well, because you came, now I’m a king!’ He spoke with such enthusiasm that he had trouble making the words come out as he wanted.
I smiled beneath the linen scarf. ‘You’re a king,’ I said, ‘but of what?’
‘Northumbria, of course,’ he said brightly.
‘He is, lord, he is,’ one of the priests said earnestly.
And so the dead swordsman met the slave king, and Sven the One-Eyed crawled to his father, and the weirdness that infected Northumbria grew weirder still.
At sea, sometimes, if you take a ship too far from land and the wind rises and the tide sucks with a venomous force and the waves splinter white above the shield-pegs, you have no choice but to go where the gods will. The sail must be furled before it rips and the long oars would pull to no effect and so you lash the blades and bail the ship and say your prayers and watch the darkening sky and listen to the wind howl and suffer the rain’s sting, and you hope that the tide and waves and wind will not drive you onto rocks.
That was how I felt in Northumbria. I had escaped Hrothweard’s madness in Eoferwic, only to humiliate