The Flame Bearer

‘Bluffing?’

‘This isn’t an invasion,’ I said angrily, ‘it’s just a distraction! They wanted your armies in the south while Constantin attacks Bebbanburg. Brunulf isn’t going to attack you here! He doesn’t have enough men. He’s just here to keep you looking south while Constantin besieges Bebbanburg. They’re in league, don’t you see?’ I slapped the garden’s stone parapet. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’

Stiorra knew I meant that I should be at Bebbanburg and touched my arm as if to soothe me. ‘You think you can fight your cousin and the Scots?’

‘I have to.’

‘You can’t, father, not without our army to help.’

‘All my life,’ I said bitterly, ‘I have dreamed of Bebbanburg. Dreamed of taking it back. Dreamed of dying there. And what have I done instead? Helped the Saxons conquer the land, helped the Christians! And how do they repay me? By allying themselves with my enemy.’ I turned on her, my voice savage. ‘You’re wrong!’

‘Wrong?’

‘The West Saxons won’t invade if we attack Brunulf. They’re not ready. They will be one day, but not yet.’ I had no idea if what I said was true, I was just trying to persuade myself it was the truth. ‘They need to be hurt, punished, killed. They need to be frightened.’

‘No, father,’ she was pleading now. ‘Wait to see what Sigtryggr agrees with the Mercians? Please?’

‘We’re not at war with the Mercians,’ I said.

She turned and gazed across the cloud-dappled hills. ‘You know,’ she said, quietly now, ‘that some West Saxons say we should never have made the peace. Half their Witan say Æthelflaed betrayed the Saxons because she loves you, the other half say the peace must be kept until they’re so strong that we’ll never resist them.’

‘So?’

‘So the men who want war are just waiting for a cause. They want us to attack. They want to force King Edward’s hand, and even your Æthelflaed won’t be able to resist the call to fight. We need time, father. Please. Leave them alone. They’ll go away. Go to Ledecestre. Help Sigtryggr there. Æthelflaed will listen to you.’

I thought about what she had said and decided she was probably right. The West Saxons, fresh from their triumph over East Anglia, were spoiling for a war, and it was a war I did not want. I wanted to drive the Scots from Bebbanburg’s land and to do that I needed Northumbria’s army, and Sigtryggr would only help me attack northwards if he was certain that he had peace with the southern Saxons. He had gone to Ledecestre to plead with Æthelflaed, hoping her influence with her brother would secure that peace, but despite my daughter’s urgent pleading my instinct said that the road to Bebbanburg lay through Hornecastre, not through Ledecestre. And I have always trusted instinct. It might defy reason and sense, but instinct is the prickle at the back of the neck that tells you danger is close. So I trust instinct.

So next day, despite all my daughter had said, I rode to Hornecastre.

Hornecastre was a bleak place, though the Romans had valued it enough to build a stone-walled fort just south of the River Beina. They had built no roads, so I assumed the fort had been made to guard against ships coming upriver, and those ships would have belonged to our ancestors, the first Saxons to cross the sea and take a new land. And it was good land, at least to the north where low hills provided rich pasture. Two Danish families and their slaves had settled in nearby steadings, though both had been told to leave as soon as the West Saxons occupied the ancient fort. ‘Why weren’t the Danes living in the fort?’ I asked Egil. He was a sober, middle-aged man with long plaited moustaches who had grown up not far from Hornecastre, though now he served in Lindcolne’s garrison as commander of the night watchmen. When the West Saxons had first occupied Hornecastre’s fort he had been sent with a small force to watch them, which he had done from a safe distance, until Sigtryggr’s caution had caused him to be summoned back again to Lindcolne. I had insisted that he return to Hornecastre with me. ‘If we assault the fort,’ I had told him, ‘it will help to have a man who knows it. I don’t. You do.’

‘A man called Torstein lived there,’ Egil said, ‘but he left.’

‘Why?’

‘It floods, lord. Torstein’s two sons were drowned in a flood, lord, and he reckoned the Saxons had put a curse on the place. So he left. There’s a stream this side of the fort, a big one, and the river beyond? And the walls on that far side have fallen in places. Not on this side, lord,’ we were watching from the north, ‘but on the southern and eastern sides.’

‘It looks formidable enough from here,’ I said. I was staring at the fort, seeing its stone ramparts rearing gaunt above an expanse of rushes. Two banners hung on poles above the northern wall and a sullen wind occasionally lifted one to reveal the dragon of Wessex. The second banner must have been made from heavier cloth because the wind did not stir it. ‘What does the left-hand banner show?’ I asked Egil.

‘We could never make it out, lord.’

I grunted, suspecting that Egil had never tried to get close enough to see that second banner. Smoke from cooking fires drifted up from the ramparts and from the fields to the south where, evidently, a part of Brunulf’s force was camped. ‘How many men are there?’ I asked.

‘Two hundred? Three?’ Egil sounded vague.

‘All warriors?’

‘They have some magicians with them, lord.’ He meant priests.

We were a long way off from the fort, though doubtless the men on its walls had seen us watching from the low hilltop. Most of my men were hidden in the shallow valley behind. ‘Is there anything there besides the fort?’

‘A few houses,’ Egil said dismissively.

‘And the Saxons haven’t tried to come further north?’

‘Not since the first week they were here, lord. Now they’re just sitting there.’ He scratched his beard, trying to pinch a louse. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘they could have been roaming around, but we wouldn’t know. We were ordered to stay away from them, not to upset them.’

‘That was probably wise,’ I said, reflecting that I was about to do the very opposite.

‘So what do they want?’ Egil asked in an annoyed tone.

‘They want us to attack them,’ I said, but if Egil was right and the West Saxons could put two or three hundred men behind the stone walls, then we would need at least four hundred men to storm the ramparts, and for what? To possess the ruins of an old fort that no longer guarded anything of value? Brunulf, the West Saxon commander, would know that too, so why did he stay? ‘How did they get here?’ I asked. ‘By boat?’

‘They rode, lord.’

‘And they’re miles from the nearest West Saxon forces,’ I said, speaking more to myself than to Egil.

‘The nearest are at Steanford, lord.’

‘Which is how far?’

‘A half day’s ride, lord,’ he said vaguely, ‘maybe?’

I was riding Tintreg that day and I spurred him down the long slope, pushed through a hedge, across a ditch, and up the low rise beyond. I took Finan and a dozen men with me, leaving the rest hidden. If the West Saxons had a mind to chase us away then we would have no choice but to flee northwards, but they seemed content to watch from their walls as we drew closer. One of their priests joined the warriors on the ramparts and I saw him lift a cross and hold it in our direction. ‘He’s cursing us,’ I said, amused.

Eadric, a Saxon scout, touched the cross hanging about his neck, but said nothing. I was staring at a stretch of grassland just to the north of the fort. ‘Look at the pasture on this side of the stream,’ I said, ‘what do you see there?’

Eadric had eyes as good as Finan’s and he now stood in his stirrups, shaded his face with a hand and stared. ‘Graves?’ he sounded puzzled.

‘They’re digging something,’ Finan said. There seemed to be several mounds of freshly-turned earth.

‘You want me to look, lord?’ Eadric asked.

‘We all will,’ I said.

We rode slowly towards the fort, leaving our shields behind as a sign we did not want battle, and for a time it seemed the West Saxons were content just to watch as we explored the pasture on our side of the river where I could see the mysterious heaps of earth. As we rode closer I saw that the mounds had not been excavated from graves, but from trenches. ‘Are they building a new fort?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘They’re building something,’ Finan said.

‘Lord,’ Eadric said warningly, but I had already seen the dozen horsemen leave the fort and ride to where a ford crossed the stream.

We numbered fourteen men, and Brunulf, if he was trying to avoid trouble, would bring the same number, and so he did, but when the horsemen were in the centre of the stream where the placid water almost reached up to their horses’ bellies, they all stopped. They bunched there, ignoring us, and it seemed to me that they argued, and then, unexpectedly, two men turned and rode back to the fort. We were at the pasture’s edge by then, the grass lush from the recent rain, and as I spurred Tintreg forward I saw it was no fort they were making, nor graves, but a church. The trench had been dug in the form of a cross. It was meant to be the building’s foundation and it would eventually be half filled with stone to support the wall pillars. ‘It’s big!’ I said, impressed.

‘Big as the church in Wintanceaster!’ Finan said, equally impressed.

The dozen remaining emissaries from the fort were now spurring from the river. Eight were warriors like us, the rest were churchmen, two priests in black robes, and a pair of monks in brown. The warriors wore no helmets, carried no shields, and, apart from their sheathed swords, no weapons. Their leader, on an impressive grey stallion that stepped high through the long grass, wore a dark robe edged with fur above a leather breastplate over which hung a silver cross. He was a young man with a grave face, a short beard, and a high forehead beneath a woollen cap. He reined in his restless horse, then looked at me in silence as if expecting me to speak first. I did not.

‘I am Brunulf Torkelson of Wessex,’ he finally said. ‘And who are you?’