LITMIR.BIZ

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hard frozen again after Yule and I was determined to learn the skill of ice-gliding. For the moment, though, Brida and I were still making charcoal for Ealdwulf who had decided to make Ragnar a sword, the finest he had ever made, and we were charged with turning two wagonloads of alderwood into the best possible fuel.

      We planned to break the pile the day before the feast, but it was bigger than any we had made before and it was still not cool enough, and if you break a pile before it is ready then the fire will flare up with terrible force and burn all the half-made charcoal into ash, and so we made certain every vent was properly sealed and reckoned we would have time to break it on Yule morning before the celebrations began. Most of Ragnar’s men and their families were already at the hall, sleeping wherever they could find shelter and ready for the first meal of the day and for the games that would take place in the meadow before the marriage ceremony, but Brida and I spent that last night up at the pile for fear that some animal would scratch through the turf and so start a draught that would revive the burn. I had Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, for I would go nowhere without them, and Brida had Nihtgenga, for she would go nowhere without him, and we were both swathed in furs because the night was cold. When a pile was burning you could rest on the turf and feel the heat, but not that night because the fire was almost gone.

      ‘If you go very still,’ Brida said after dark, ‘you can feel the spirits.’

      I think I fell asleep instead, but sometime towards dawn I woke and found Brida was also asleep. I sat up carefully, so as not to wake her, and I stared into the dark and I went very still and listened for the sceadugengan. Goblins and elves and sprites and spectres and dwarves, all those things come to Midgard at night and prowl among the trees, and when we guarded the charcoal piles both Brida and I put out food for them so they would leave us in peace. So I woke, I listened, and I heard the small sounds of a wood at night, the things moving, the claws in the dead leaves, the wind’s soft sighs.

      And then I heard the voices.

      I woke Brida and we were both still. Nihtgenga growled softly until Brida whispered that he should be quiet.

      Men were moving in the dark, and some were coming to the charcoal pile and we slipped away into the blackness under the trees. We could both move like shadows and Nihtgenga would make no sound without Brida’s permission. We had gone uphill because the voices were downhill, and we crouched in utter darkness and heard men moving around the charcoal pile, and then there was the crack of flint and iron and a small flame sprung up. Whoever it was searched for the folk they reckoned would be watching the charcoal, but they did not find us, and after a while they moved downhill and we followed.

      Dawn was just leeching the eastern sky with a wolf-grey edge. There was frost on the leaves and a small wind. ‘We should get to Ragnar,’ I whispered.

      ‘We can’t,’ Brida said, and she was right, for there were scores of men in the trees and they were between us and the hall, and we were much too far away to shout a warning to Ragnar, and so we tried to go around the strangers, hurrying along the hill’s ridge so we could drop down to the forge where Ealdwulf slept, but before we had gone halfway the fires burst into life.

      That dawn is seared on my memory, burned there by the flames of a hall-burning. There was nothing we could do except watch. Kjartan and Sven had come to our valley with over a hundred men and now they attacked Ragnar by setting fire to the thatch of his hall. I could see Kjartan and his son, standing amidst the flaming torches that lit the space in front of the door, and as folk came from the hall they were struck by spears or arrows so that a pile of bodies grew in the firelight which became ever brighter as the thatch flared and finally burst into a tumultuous blaze that outshone the light of the grey dawn. We could hear people and animals screaming inside. Some men burst from the hall with weapons in hand, but they were cut down by the soldiers who surrounded the hall, men at every door or window, men who killed the fugitives, though not all of them. The younger women were pushed aside under guard, and Thyra was given to Sven who struck her hard on the head and left her huddled at his feet as he helped kill her family.

      I did not see Ravn, Ragnar or Sigrid die, though die they did, and I suspect they were burned in the hall when the roof collapsed in a roaring gout of flame, smoke and wild sparks. Ealdwulf also died and I was in tears. I wanted to draw Serpent-Breath and rush into those men around the flames, but Brida held me down, and then she whispered to me that Kjartan and Sven would surely search the nearby woods for any survivors, and she persuaded me to pull back into the lightening trees. Dawn was a sullen iron band across the sky and the sun cloud-hidden in shame as we stumbled uphill to find shelter among some fallen rocks deep in the high wood.

      All that day the smoke rose from Ragnar’s hall, and next night there was a glow above the tangled black branches of the trees, and next morning there were still wisps of smoke coming from the valley where we had been happy. We crept closer, both of us hungry, to see Kjartan and his men raking through the embers.

      They pulled out lumps and twists of melted iron, a mail coat fused into a crumpled horror, silver welded into chunks, and they took whatever they found that could be sold or used again. At times they appeared frustrated, as if they had not found enough treasure, though they took enough. A wagon carried Ealdwulf’s tools and anvil down the valley. Thyra had a rope put around her neck, was placed on a horse and led away by one-eyed Sven. Kjartan pissed on a heap of glowing cinders, then laughed as one of his men said something. By afternoon they were gone.

      I was sixteen and no longer a child.

      And Ragnar, my lord, who had made me his son, was dead.

      The bodies were still in the ashes, though it was impossible to tell who was who, or even to tell men from women for the heat had shrunk the dead so they all looked like children and the children like babies. Those who had died outside the hall were recognisable and I found Ealdwulf there, and Anwend, both stripped naked. I looked for Ragnar, but could not identify him. I wondered why he had not burst from the hall, sword in hand, and decided he knew he was going to die and did not want to give his enemy the satisfaction of seeing it.

      We found food in one of the storage pits that Kjartan’s men had missed as they searched the hall. We had to shift hot charred pieces of timber to uncover the pit, and the bread, cheese and meat had all been soured by smoke and ash, but we ate. Neither of us spoke. At dusk some English folk came cautiously to the hall and stared at the destruction. They were wary of me, thinking of me as a Dane, and they dropped to their knees as I approached. They were the lucky ones, for Kjartan had slaughtered every Northumbrian in Synningthwait, down to the last baby, and had loudly blamed them for the hall-burning. Men must have known it was his doing, but his savagery at Synningthwait confused things and, in time, many folk came to believe that the English had attacked Ragnar, and Kjartan had taken revenge for their attack. But these English had escaped his swords. ‘You will come back in the morning,’ I told them, ‘and bury the dead.’

      ‘Yes, lord.’

      ‘You will be rewarded,’ I promised them, thinking I would have to surrender one of my precious arm rings.

      ‘Yes, lord,’ one of them repeated, and then I asked them if they knew why this had happened and they looked nervous, but finally one said he had been told that Earl Ragnar was planning a revolt against Ricsig. One of the Englishmen who served Kjartan had told him that when he went down to their hovels to find ale. He had also told them to hide themselves before Kjartan slaughtered the valley’s inhabitants.

      ‘You know who I am?’ I asked the man.

      ‘The Lord Uhtred, lord.’

      ‘Tell no man I’m alive,’ I said and he just stared at me. Kjartan, I decided, must think that I was dead, that I was one of the shrunken charred bodies in the hall, and while Kjartan did not care about me, Sven did, and I did not want him hunting me. ‘And return in the morning,’ I went on, ‘and you will have silver.’

      There is a thing called the bloodfeud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a bloodfeud on himself. I did not know how,

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