The Pagan Lord

‘You want Serpent-Breath down your throat?’ I shouted. ‘If you want to be my son you take off that damned black frock, put on mail and do what I tell you.’

‘I serve God.’

‘Then choose your own damned name. You are not Uhtred Uhtredson.’ I twisted in the saddle. ‘Osbert!’

My younger son kicked his stallion towards me. He looked nervous. ‘Father?’

‘From this day on your name is Uhtred.’

He glanced at his brother, then back to me. He nodded reluctantly.

‘What is your name?’ I demanded.

He still hesitated, but saw my anger and nodded again. ‘My name is Uhtred, Father.’

‘You are Uhtred Uhtredson,’ I said, ‘my only son.’

It had happened to me once, long ago. I had been named Osbert by my father, who was called Uhtred, but when my elder brother, also Uhtred, was slaughtered by the Danes my father had renamed me. It is always thus in our family. The eldest son carries on the name. My stepmother, a foolish woman, even had me baptised a second time because, she said, the angels who guard the gates of heaven would not know me by my new name, and so I was dipped in the water barrel, but Christianity washed off me, thank Christ, and I discovered the old gods and have worshipped them ever since.

The five older priests caught up with me. I knew two of them, the twins Ceolnoth and Ceolberht who, some thirty years before, had been hostages with me in Mercia. We had been boys captured by the Danes, a fate I had welcomed and the twins had hated. They were old now, two identical priests with stocky builds, greying beards and anger livid on their round faces. ‘You’ve killed the Abbot Wihtred!’ one of the twins challenged me. He was furious, shocked, almost incoherent with rage. I had no idea which twin he was because I could never tell them apart.

‘And Father Burgred’s face is ruined!’ the other twin said. He moved as if to take Lightning’s bridle and I turned the horse fast, letting him threaten the twins with the big yellow teeth that had bitten off the newly ordained priest’s face. The twins stepped back.

‘The Abbot Wihtred!’ the first twin repeated the name. ‘A saintlier man never lived!’

‘He attacked me,’ I said. In truth I had not meant to kill the old man, but there was small point in telling that to the twins.

‘You’ll suffer!’ one of the twins yelped. ‘You will be cursed for all time!’

The other held a hand towards the wretched boy in the dung-heap. ‘Father Uhtred,’ he said.

‘His name is not Uhtred,’ I snarled, ‘and if he dares call himself Uhtred,’ I looked at him as I spoke, ‘then I will find him and I will cut his belly to the bone and I will feed his lily-livered guts to my swine. He is not my son. He’s not worthy to be my son.’

The man who was not worthy to be my son clambered wetly from the dung-heap, dripping filth. He looked up at me. ‘Then what am I called?’ he asked.

‘Judas,’ I said mockingly. I was raised as a Christian and had been forced to hear all their stories, and I recalled that a man named Judas had betrayed the nailed god. That never made any sense to me. The god had to be nailed to a cross if he was to become their saviour, and then the Christians blame the man who made that death possible. I thought they should worship him as a saint, but instead they revile him as a betrayer. ‘Judas,’ I said again, pleased I had remembered the name.

The boy who had been my son hesitated, then nodded. ‘From now on,’ he said to the twins, ‘I am to be called Father Judas.’

‘You cannot call yourself …’ either Ceolnoth or Ceolberht began.

‘I am Father Judas,’ he said harshly.

‘You will be Father Uhtred!’ one of the twins shouted at him, then pointed at me. ‘He has no authority here! He is a pagan, an outcast, loathed of God!’ He was shaking with anger, hardly able to speak, but he took a deep breath, closed his eyes and raised both hands towards that dark sky. ‘O God,’ he shouted, ‘bring down your wrath on this sinner! Punish him! Blight his crops and strike him with sickness! Show your power, O Lord!’ His voice rose to a shriek. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I curse this man and all his kin.’

He took a breath and I pressed my knee on Lightning’s flank and the great horse moved a pace closer to the ranting fool. I was as angry as the twins.

‘Curse him, O Lord,’ he shouted, ‘and in thy great mercy bring him low! Curse him and his kin, may they never know grace! Smite him, O Lord, with filth and pain and misery!’

‘Father!’ the man who had been my son shouted.

Æthelstan chuckled. Uhtred, my only son, gasped.

Because I had kicked the ranting fool. I had pulled my right foot from the stirrup and lashed out with the heavy boot and his words stopped abruptly, replaced by blood on his lips. He staggered backwards, his right hand pawing at his shattered mouth. ‘Spit out your teeth,’ I ordered him, and when he disobeyed I half drew Serpent-Breath.

He spat out a mix of blood, spittle and broken teeth. ‘Which one are you?’ I asked the other twin.

He gaped at me, then recovered his wits. ‘Ceolnoth,’ he said.

‘At least I can tell the two of you apart now,’ I said.

I did not look at Father Judas. I just rode away.

I rode home.

Perhaps Ceolberht’s curse had worked, because I came home to death, smoke and ruin.

Cnut Ranulfson had raided my hall. He had burned it. He had killed. He had taken Sigunn captive.

None of it made sense, not then. My estate was close to Cirrenceastre, which was deep inside Mercia. A band of horse-Danes had ridden far, risking battle and capture, to attack my hall. I could understand that. A victory over Uhtred would give a man reputation, it would spur the poets to taunting songs of victory, but they had attacked while the hall was almost empty. They would surely have sent scouts? They would have suborned folk to be spies for them, to discover when I was there and when I was likely to be absent, and such spies would surely have told them that I had been summoned to Lundene to advise King Edward’s men on that city’s defences. Yet they had risked disaster to attack an almost empty hall? It made no sense.

And they had taken Sigunn.

She was my woman. Not my wife. Since Gisela died I had not taken another wife, though I had lovers in those days. Æthelflaed was my lover, but Æthelflaed was another man’s wife and the daughter of the dead King Alfred, and we could not live together as man and wife. Sigunn lived with me instead, and Æthelflaed knew it. ‘If it wasn’t Sigunn,’ she had told me one day, ‘it would be another.’

‘Maybe a dozen others.’

‘Maybe.’

I had captured Sigunn at Beamfleot. She was a Dane, a slender, pale, pretty Dane who had been weeping for her slaughtered husband when she was dragged out of a sea-ditch running with blood. We had lived together almost ten years now and she was treated with honour and hung with gold. She was the lady of my hall and now she was gone. She had been taken by Cnut Ranulfson, Cnut Longsword.

‘It was three mornings ago,’ Osferth told me. He was the bastard son of King Alfred, who had tried to turn him into a priest, but Osferth, even though he had the face and mind of a cleric, preferred to be a warrior. He was careful, precise, intelligent, reliable and rarely impassioned. He resembled his father, and the older he got the more like his father he looked.

‘So it was Sunday morning,’ I said bleakly.

‘Everyone was in the church, lord,’ Osferth explained.

‘Except Sigunn.’

‘Who is no Christian, lord,’ he said, sounding disapproving.

Finan, who was my companion and the man who commanded my troops if I was absent, had taken twenty men to reinforce Æthelflaed’s bodyguard as she toured Mercia. She had been inspecting the burhs that guarded Mercia from the Danes, and doubtless worshipping in churches across the land. Her husband, Æthelred, was reluctant to leave the sanctuary of Gleawecestre and so Æthelflaed did his duty. She had her own warriors who guarded her, but I still feared for her safety, not from the Mercians, who loved her, but from her husband’s followers, and so I had insisted she take Finan and twenty men and, in the Irishman’s absence, Osferth had been in charge of the men guarding Fagranforda. He had left six men to watch over the hall, barns, stables and mill, and six men should have been more than enough because my estate lay a long way from the northern lands where the Danes ruled. ‘I blame myself, lord,’ Osferth said.

‘Six was enough,’ I said. And the six were all dead, as was Herric, my crippled steward, and three other servants. Some forty or fifty horses were gone, while the hall was burned. Some of the walls still stood, gaunt scorched trunks, but the hall’s centre was just a heap of smoking ash. The Danes had arrived fast, broken down the hall door, slaughtered Herric and anyone else who tried to oppose them, then had taken Sigunn and left. ‘They knew you’d all be in the church,’ I said.

‘Which is why they came on Sunday,’ Sihtric, another of my men, finished the thought.

‘And they would have known you wouldn’t be worshipping,’ Osferth said.