LITMIR.BIZ

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he was not certain where that was. They wore thick robes, had curved swords, and were talking to a slave dealer whose premises were full of captured English folk who would be shipped to the mysterious Blaland. The dealer called to us. ‘You three belong to anyone?’ He was only half joking.

      ‘To Earl Ragnar,’ Brida said, ‘who would love to pay you a visit.’

      ‘Give his lordship my respects,’ the dealer said, then spat, and eyed us as we walked away.

      The buildings of the old city were extraordinary. They were Roman work, high and stout, and even though their walls were broken and their roofs had fallen in they still astonished. Some were three or even four floors high and we chased each other up and down their abandoned stairways. Few English folk lived here, though many Danes were now occupying the houses as the army assembled. Brida said that sensible people would not live in a Roman town because of the ghosts that haunted the old buildings, and maybe she was right though I had seen no ghosts in Eoferwic, but her mention of spectres made us all nervous as we peered down a flight of steps into a dark, pillared cellar.

      We stayed in Lundene for weeks and even when Halfdan’s army reached us we did not move west. Mounted bands did ride out to forage, but the Great Army still gathered and some men grumbled we were waiting too long, that the West Saxons were being given precious time to ready themselves, but Halfdan insisted on lingering. The West Saxons sometimes rode close to the city, and twice there were fights between our horsemen and their horsemen, but after a while, as Yule approached, the West Saxons must have decided we would do nothing till winter’s end and their patrols stopped coming close to the city.

      ‘We’re not waiting for spring,’ Ragnar told me, ‘but for deep winter.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because no army marches in winter,’ he said wolfishly, ‘so the West Saxons will all be at home, sitting around their fires and praying to their feeble god. By spring, Uhtred, all England will be ours.’

      We all worked that early winter. I hauled firewood, and when I was not hauling logs from the wooded hills north of the city, I was learning the skills of the sword. Ragnar had asked Toki, his new shipmaster, to be my teacher and he was a good one. He watched me rehearse the basic cuts, then told me to forget them. ‘In a shield wall,’ he said, ‘it’s savagery that wins. Skill helps, and cunning is good, but savagery wins. Get one of these,’ he held out a sax with a thick blade, much thicker than my old sax. I despised the sax for it was much shorter than Serpent-Breath and far less beautiful, but Toki wore one beside his proper sword, and he persuaded me that in the shield wall the short, stout blade was better. ‘You’ve no room to swing or hack in a shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you can thrust, and a short blade uses less room in a crowded fight. Crouch and stab, bring it up into their groins.’ He made Brida hold a shield and pretend to be the enemy, and then, with me on his left, he cut at her from above and she instinctively raised the shield. ‘Stop!’ he said, and she froze into stillness. ‘See?’ he told me, pointing at the raised shield, ‘your partner makes the enemy raise their shield, then you can slice into their groin.’ He taught me a dozen other moves, and I practised because I liked it and the more I practised the more muscle I grew and the more skilful I became.

      We usually practised in the Roman arena. That is what Toki called it, the arena, though what the word meant neither he nor I had any idea, but it was, in a place of extraordinary things, astonishing. Imagine an open space as large as a field surrounded by a great circle of tiered stone where weeds now grew from the crumbling mortar. The Mercians, I later learned, had held their folkmoots here, but Toki said the Romans had used it for displays of fighting in which men died. Maybe that was another of his fantastic stories, but the arena was huge, unimaginably huge, a thing of mystery, the work of giants, dwarfing us, so big that all the Great Army could have collected inside and there would still have been room for two more armies just as big on the tiered seats.

      Yule came, and the winter feast was held and the army vomited in the streets and still we did not march, but shortly afterwards the leaders of the Great Army met in the palace next to the arena. Brida and I, as usual, were required to be Ravn’s eyes and he, as usual, told us what we were seeing.

      The meeting was held in the church of the palace, a Roman building with a roof shaped like a half-barrel on which the moon and stars were painted, though the blue and golden paint was peeling and discoloured now. A great fire had been lit in the centre of the church and it was filling the high roof with swirling smoke. Halfdan presided from the altar, and around him were the chief Earls. One was an ugly man with a blunt face, a big brown beard and a finger missing from his left hand. ‘That is Bagseg,’ Ravn told us, ‘and he calls himself a king, though he’s no better than anyone else.’ Bagseg, it seemed, had come from Denmark in the summer, bringing eighteen ships and nearly six hundred men. Next to him was a tall, gloomy man with white hair and a twitching face. ‘Earl Sidroc,’ Ravn told us, ‘and his son must be with him?’

      ‘Thin man,’ Brida said, ‘with a dripping nose.’

      ‘Earl Sidroc the Younger. He’s always sniffing. My son is there?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘next to a very fat man who keeps whispering to him and grinning.’

      ‘Harald!’ Ravn said. ‘I wondered if he would turn up. He’s another king.’

      ‘Really?’ Brida asked.

      ‘Well, he calls himself king, and he certainly rules over a few muddy fields and a herd of smelly pigs.’

      All those men had come from Denmark, and there were others besides. Earl Fraena had brought men from Ireland, and Earl Osbern who had provided the garrison for Lundene while the army gathered, and together these kings and Earls had assembled well over two thousand men.

      Osbern and Sidroc proposed crossing the river and striking directly south. This, they argued, would cut Wessex in two and the eastern part, which used to be the Kingdom of Kent, could then be taken quickly. ‘There has to be much treasure in Contwaraburg,’ Sidroc insisted, ‘it’s the central shrine of their religion.’

      ‘And while we march on their shrine,’ Ragnar said, ‘they will come up behind us. Their power is not in the east, but in the west. Defeat the west and all Wessex falls. We can take Contwaraburg once we’ve beaten the west.’

      This was the argument. Either take the easy part of Wessex or else attack their major strongholds that lay to the west, and two merchants were asked to speak. Both men were Danes who had been trading in Readingum only two weeks before. Readingum lay a few miles upriver and was on the edge of Wessex, and they claimed to have heard that King Æthelred and his brother, Alfred, were gathering the shire forces from the west and the two merchants reckoned the enemy army would number at least three thousand.

      ‘Of whom only three hundred will be proper fighting men,’ Halfdan interjected sarcastically, and was rewarded by the sound of men banging swords or spears against their shields. It was while this noise echoed under the church’s barrel roof that a new group of warriors entered, led by a very tall and very burly man in a black tunic. He looked formidable, clean-shaven, angry and very rich for his black cloak had an enormous brooch of amber mounted in gold, his arms were heavy with golden rings and he wore a golden hammer on a thick golden chain about his neck. The warriors made way for him, his arrival causing silence among the crowd nearest to him, and the silence spread as he walked up the church until the mood, that had been of celebration, suddenly seemed wary.

      ‘Who is it?’ Ravn whispered to me.

      ‘Very tall,’ I said, ‘many arm rings.’

      ‘Gloomy,’ Brida put in, ‘dressed in black.’

      ‘Ah! The Earl Guthrum,’ Ravn said

      ‘Guthrum?’

      ‘Guthrum the Unlucky,’ Ravn said.

      ‘With all those arm rings?’

      ‘You could give Guthrum the world,’ Ravn said, ‘and he would still believe you had cheated him.’

      ‘He has

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