The Flame Bearer

‘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 Christians,’ my father explained curtly, and so we had taken their long-haired cattle, burned most of their houses, and ridden home with ladles, spits, and cooking pots, indeed with anything that our smithy could melt down, but we had not entered the church. ‘Because they’re Christians,’ my father had explained again, ‘don’t you understand, you stupid boy?’

I did not understand, and then, of course, the Danes had come, and they tore the churches apart to steal the silver from the altars. I remember Ragnar laughing one day. ‘It is so kind of the Christians! They put their wealth in one building and mark it with a great cross! It makes life so easy.’

So I learned that the Scots were Christians, but they were also the enemy, just as they had been the enemy when thousands of Roman slaves had dragged stones across Northumbria’s hills to make the wall. In my childhood I was a Christian too, I knew no better, and I remember asking Father Beocca how other Christians could be our enemies.

‘They are indeed Christians,’ Father Beocca had explained to me, ‘but they are savages too!’ He had taken me to the monastery on Lindisfarena and he had begged the abbot, who was to be slaughtered by the Danes within half a year, to show me one of the monastery’s six books. It was a huge book with crackling pages, and Beocca turned them reverently, tracing the lines of crabbed handwriting with a dirty fingernail. ‘Ah!’ he had said. ‘Here it is!’ He turned the book so I could see the writing, though because it was in Latin it meant nothing at all to me. ‘This is a book,’ Beocca told me, ‘written by Saint Gildas. It’s a very rare book. Saint Gildas was a Briton, and his book tells of our coming! The coming of the Saxons! He did not like us,’ he had chuckled when he said that, ‘for of course we were not Christians then. But I want you to see this because Saint Gildas came from Northumbria, and he knew the Scots well!’ He turned the book and bent over the page. ‘Here it is! Listen! “As soon as the Romans returned home,”’ he translated as his finger scratched along the lines, ‘“there eagerly emerged the foul hordes of Scots like dark swarms of worms who wriggle out of cracks in the rocks. They had a greed for bloodshed, and were more ready to cover their villainous faces with hair than cover their private parts with clothes.”’ Beocca had made the sign of the cross after he closed the book. ‘Nothing changes! They are thieves and robbers!’

‘Naked thieves and robbers?’ I had asked. The passage about private parts had interested me.

‘No, no, no. They’re Christians now. They cover their shameful parts now, God be praised.’

‘So they’re Christians,’ I said, ‘but don’t we raid their land too?’

‘Of course we do!’ Beocca had said. ‘Because they must be punished.’

‘For what?’

‘For raiding our land, of course.’

‘But we raid their land,’ I insisted, ‘so aren’t we thieves and robbers too?’ I rather liked the idea that we were just as wild and lawless as the hated Scots.

‘You will understand when you are grown up,’ Beocca had said, as he always did when he did not know the answer. And now that I was grown up I still did not understand Beocca’s argument that our war against the Scots was righteous punishment. King Alfred, who was nobody’s fool, often said that the war that raged across Britain was a crusade of Christianity against the pagans, but whenever that war crossed into Welsh or Scottish territory it suddenly became something else. Then it became Christian against Christian, and it was just as savage, just as bloody, and we were told by the priests that we did the nailed god’s will, while the priests in Scotland said exactly the same thing to their warriors when they attacked us. The truth, of course, was that it was a war about land. There were four tribes in one island, the Welsh, the Scots, the Saxons, and the Northmen, and all four of us wanted the same land. The priests preached incessantly that we had to fight for the land because it had been given to us as a reward by the nailed god, but when we Saxons had first captured the land we had all been pagans. So presumably Thor or Odin gave us the land.

‘Isn’t that true?’ I asked Father Eadig that night. We were sheltering in one of Weallbyrig’s fine stone buildings, protected from the relentless wind and rain by Roman walls, and warmed by a great fire in the hearth.

Eadig gave me a nervous smile. ‘It’s true, lord, that God sent us to this land, but it wasn’t the old gods, it was the one true God. He sent us.’

‘The Saxons? He sent the Saxons?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘But we weren’t Christians then,’ I pointed out. My men, who had heard it all before, grinned.

‘We weren’t Christians then,’ Eadig agreed, ‘but the Welsh who had this land before us were Christians. Except they were bad Christians, so God sent the Saxons as a punishment.’

‘What had they done?’ I asked. ‘The Welsh, I mean. How were they bad?’

‘I don’t know, lord, but God wouldn’t have sent us unless they deserved it.’

‘So they were bad,’ I said, ‘and God preferred to have bad pagans in Britain instead of bad Christians? That’s like killing a cow because it has a lame hoof and replacing it with a cow that has the staggers!’

‘Oh, but God converted us to the true faith as a reward for punishing the Welsh!’ he said brightly. ‘We’re a good cow now!’

‘So why did God send the Danes?’ I asked him. ‘Was he punishing us for being bad Christians?’

‘That is a possibility, lord,’ he said uncomfortably, as if he was not quite sure of his answer.

‘So where does it end?’ I asked.

‘End, lord?’

‘Some Danes are converting,’ I said, ‘so who does your god send to punish them when they become bad Christians? The Franks?’

‘There’s a fire,’ my son interrupted us. He had drawn aside a leather curtain and was staring north.

‘In this rain?’ Finan asked.

I went to stand beside my son, and, sure enough, somewhere in the far northern hills, a great blaze made a glow in the sky. Fires mean trouble, but I could not imagine any raiding party being loose in this night of rain and wind. ‘It’s probably a steading that caught fire,’ I suggested.