LITMIR.BIZ

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axe. ‘Go to Valhalla, lord,’ I said. He was not dead yet, but he was dying for my last stroke had pierced deep into his neck, and then he gave a great shudder and there was a croaking noise in his throat and I kept on holding his hand tight to the axe as he died.

      A dozen more boats escaped, all crowded with Danes, but the rest of Ubba’s fleet was ours, and while a handful of the enemy fled into the woods where they were hunted down, the remaining Danes were either dead or prisoners, and the raven banner fell into Odda’s hands, and we had the victory that day, and Willibald, spear point reddened, was dancing with delight.

      We took horses, gold, silver, prisoners, women, ships, weapons and mail. I had fought in the shield wall.

      Ealdorman Odda had been wounded, struck on the head by an axe that had pierced his helmet and driven into his skull. He lived, but his eyes were white, his skin pale, his breath shallow and his head matted with blood. Priests prayed over him in one of the small village houses and I saw him there, but he could not see me, could not speak, perhaps could not hear, but I shoved two of the priests aside, knelt by his bed and thanked him for taking the fight to the Danes. His son, unwounded, his armour apparently unscratched in the battle, watched me from the darkness of the room’s far corner.

      I straightened from his father’s low bed. My back ached and my arms were burning with weariness. ‘I am going to Cridianton,’ I told young Odda.

      He shrugged as if he did not care where I went. I ducked under the low door where Leofric waited for me. ‘Don’t go to Cridianton,’ he told me.

      ‘My wife is there,’ I said. ‘My child is there.’

      ‘Alfred is at Exanceaster,’ he said.

      ‘So?’

      ‘So the man who takes news of this battle to Exanceaster gets the credit for it,’ he said.

      ‘Then you go,’ I said.

      The Danish prisoners wanted to bury Ubba, but Odda the Younger had ordered the body to be dismembered and its pieces given to the beasts and birds. That had not been done yet, though the great battle-axe that I had put in Ubba’s dying hand was gone, and I regretted that, for I had wanted it, but I wanted Ubba treated decently as well and so I let the prisoners dig their grave. Odda the Younger did not confront me, but let the Danes bury their leader and make a mound over his corpse and thus send Ubba to his brothers in the corpse-hall.

      And when it was done I rode south with a score of my men, all of us mounted on horses we had taken from the Danes.

      I went to my family.

      These days, so long after that battle at Cynuit, I employ a harpist. He is an old Welshman, blind, but very skilful, and he often sings tales of his ancestors. He likes to sing of Arthur and Guinevere, of how Arthur slaughtered the English, but he takes care not to let me hear those songs, instead praising me and my battles with outrageous flattery by singing the words of my poets who describe me as Uhtred Strong-Sword or Uhtred Death-Giver or Uhtred the Beneficent. I sometimes see the old blind man smiling to himself as his hands pluck the strings and I have more sympathy with his scepticism than I do with the poets who are a pack of snivelling sycophants.

      But in the year 877 I employed no poets and had no harpist. I was a young man who had come dazed and dazzled from the shield wall, and who stank of blood as I rode south and yet, for some reason, as we threaded the hills and woods of Defnascir, I thought of a harp.

      Every lord has a harp in the hall. As a child, before I went to Ragnar, I would sometimes sit by the harp in Bebbanburg’s hall and I was intrigued by how the strings would play themselves. Pluck one string and the others would shiver to give off a tiny music. ‘Wasting your time, boy?’ my father had snarled as I crouched by the harp one day, and I suppose I had been wasting it, but on that spring day in 877 I remembered my childhood’s harp and how its strings would quiver if just one was touched. It was not music, of course, just noise, and scarcely audible noise at that, but after the battle in Pedredan’s valley it seemed to me that my life was made of strings and if I touched one then the others, though separate, would make their sound. I thought of Ragnar the Younger and wondered if he lived, and whether his father’s killer, Kjartan, still lived, and how he would die if he did, and thinking of Ragnar made me remember Brida, and her memory slid on to an image of Mildrith, and that brought to mind Alfred and his bitter wife Ælswith, and all those separate people were a part of my life, strings strung on the frame of Uhtred, and though they were separate they affected each other and together they would make the music of my life.

      Daft thoughts, I told myself. Life is just life. We live, we die, we go to the corpse-hall. There is no music, just chance. Fate is relentless.

      ‘What are you thinking?’ Leofric asked me. We were riding through a valley that was pink with flowers.

      ‘I thought you were going to Exanceaster?’ I said.

      ‘I am, but I’m going to Cridianton first, then taking you on to Exanceaster. So what are you thinking? You look gloomy as a priest.’

      ‘I’m thinking about a harp.’

      ‘A harp!’ He laughed. ‘Your head’s full of rubbish.’

      ‘Touch a harp,’ I said, ‘and it just makes noise, but play it and it makes music.’

      ‘Sweet Christ!’ He looked at me with a worried expression. ‘You’re as bad as Alfred. You think too much.’

      He was right. Alfred was obsessed by order, obsessed by the task of marshalling life’s chaos into something that could be controlled. He would do it by the church and by the law, which are much the same thing, but I wanted to see a pattern in the strands of life. In the end I found one, and it had nothing to do with any god, but with people. With the people we love. My harpist is right to smile when he chants that I am Uhtred the Gift-Giver or Uhtred the Avenger or Uhtred the Widow-Maker, for he is old and he has learned what I have learned, that I am really Uhtred the Lonely. We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.

      ‘It will give you a headache,’ Leofric said, ‘thinking too much.’

      ‘Earsling,’ I said to him.

      Mildrith was well. She was safe. She had not been raped. She wept when she saw me, and I took her in my arms and wondered that I was so fond of her, and she said she had thought I was dead and told me she had prayed to her god to spare me, and she took me to the room where our son was in his swaddling clothes and, for the first time, I looked at Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and I prayed that one day he would be the lawful and sole owner of lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea. I am still the owner of those lands that were purchased with our family’s blood, and I will take those lands back from the man who stole them from me and I will give them to my sons. For I am Uhtred, Earl Uhtred, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and destiny is everything.

       Historical Note

      Alfred, famously, is the only monarch in English history to be accorded the honour of being called ‘the Great’ and this novel, with the ones that follow, will try to show why he gained that title. I do not want to anticipate those other novels, but broadly, Alfred was responsible for saving Wessex and, ultimately, English society from the Danish assaults, and his son Edward, daughter Æthelflaed and grandson Æthelstan finished what he began to create which was, for the first time, a political entity they called ‘Englaland’. I intend Uhtred to be involved in the whole story.

      But the tale begins with Alfred who was, indeed, a very pious man and frequently sick. A recent theory suggests that he suffered from Crohn’s Disease, which causes acute abdominal pains, and from chronic piles, details we can glean from a book written by a man who knew him very well, Bishop Asser, who came into Alfred’s

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