The Burning Land. Bernard Cornwell
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the text with a finger. ‘What year did this happen?’ I asked the copyist.
‘In the year of our Lord 892, lord,’ he said nervously.
‘So what is this?’ I asked, flicking the pages of the parchment from which he copied.
‘They are annals,’ the elderly monk answered for the younger man, ‘the Annals of Mercia. That is the only copy, lord, and we are making another.’
I looked back at the freshly-written page. ‘Æthelred rescued Wessex?’ I asked indignantly.
‘It was so,’ the old monk said, ‘with God’s help’
‘God?’ I snarled. ‘It was with my help! I fought that battle, not Æthelred!’ None of the monks spoke. They just stared at me. One of my men came to the cloister end of the passageway and leaned there, a grin on his half-toothless face. ‘I was at Fearnhamme!’ I added, then snatched up the only copy of the Annals of Mercia and turned its stiff pages. Æthelred, Æthelred, Æthelred, and not a mention of Uhtred, hardly a mention of Alfred, no Æthelflæd, just Æthelred. I turned to the page which told of the events after Fearnhamme. ‘“And in this year,”’ I read aloud, ‘“by God’s good grace, the lord Æthelred and the Ætheling Edward led the men of Mercia to Beamfleot where Æthelred took great plunder and made mighty slaughter of the pagans.”’ I looked at the older monk. ‘Æthelred and Edward led that army?’
‘So it is said, lord.’ He spoke nervously, his earlier defiance completely gone.
‘I led them, you bastard,’ I said. I snatched up the copied pages and took both them and the original annals to the brazier.
‘No!’ the older man protested.
‘They’re lies,’ I said.
He held up a placatory hand. ‘For forty years, lord,’ he said humbly, ‘those records have been compiled and preserved. They are the tale of our people! That is the only copy!’
‘They’re lies,’ I said again. ‘I was there. I was on the hill at Fearnhamme and in the ditch at Beamfleot. Were you there?’
‘I was just a child, lord,’ he said.
He gave an appalled shriek when I tossed the manuscripts onto the brazier. He tried to rescue the parchments, but I knocked his hand away. ‘I was there,’ I said again, staring at the blackening sheets that curled and crackled before the fire flared bright at their edges. ‘I was there.’
‘Forty years’ work!’ the old monk said in disbelief.
‘If you want to know what happened,’ I said, ‘then come to me in Bebbanburg and I’ll tell you the truth.’
They never came. Of course they did not come.
But I was at Fearnhamme, and that was just the beginning of the tale.
Morning, and I was young, and the sea was a shimmer of silver and pink beneath wisps of mist that obscured the coasts. To my south was Cent, to my north lay East Anglia and behind me was Lundene, while ahead the sun was rising to gild the few small clouds that stretched across the dawn’s bright sky.
We were in the estuary of the Temes. My ship, the Seolferwulf, was newly built and she leaked, as new ships will. Frisian craftsmen had made her from oak timbers that were unusually pale, and thus her name, the Silverwolf. Behind me were the Kenelm, named by King Alfred for some murdered saint, and the Dragon-Voyager, a ship we had taken from the Danes. Dragon-Voyager was a beauty, built as only the Danes could build. A sleek killer of a ship, docile to handle yet lethal in battle.
Seolferwulf was also a beauty; long-keeled, wide-beamed and high-prowed. I had paid for her myself, giving gold to Frisian shipwrights, and watching as her ribs grew and as her planking made a skin and as her proud bow reared above the slipway. On that prow was a wolf’s head, carved from oak and painted white with a red lolling tongue and red eyes and yellow fangs. Bishop Erkenwald, who ruled Lundene, had chided me, saying I should have named the ship for some Christian milksop saint, and he had presented me with a crucifix that he wanted me to nail to Seolferwulf’s mast, but instead I burned the wooden god and his wooden cross and mixed their ashes with crushed apples, that I fed to my two sows. I worship Thor.
Now, on that distant morning when I was still young, we rowed eastwards on that pink and silver sea. My wolf’s-head prow was decorated with a thick-leaved bough of oak to show we intended no harm to our enemies, though my men were still dressed in mail and had shields and weapons close to their oars. Finan, my second in command, crouched near me on the steering platform and listened with amusement to Father Willibald, who was talking too much. ‘Other Danes have received Christ’s mercy, Lord Uhtred,’ he said. He had been spouting this nonsense ever since we had left Lundene, but I endured it because I liked Willibald. He was an eager, hard-working and cheerful man. ‘With God’s good help,’ he went on, ‘we shall spread the light of Christ among these heathen!’
‘Why don’t the Danes send us missionaries?’ I asked.
‘God prevents it, lord.’ Willibald said. His companion, a priest whose name I have long forgotten, nodded earnest agreement.
‘Maybe they’ve got better things to do?’ I suggested.
‘If the Danes have ears to hear, lord,’ Willibald assured me, ‘then they will receive Christ’s message with joy and gladness!’
‘You’re a fool, father,’ I said fondly. ‘You know how many of Alfred’s missionaries have been slaughtered?’
‘We must all be prepared for martyrdom, lord,’ Willibald said, though anxiously.
‘They have their priestly guts slit open,’ I said ruminatively, ‘they have their eyes gouged out, their balls sliced off, and their tongues ripped out. Remember that monk we found at Yppe?’ I asked Finan. Finan was a fugitive from Ireland, where he had been raised a Christian, though his religion was so tangled with native myths that it was scarcely recognisable as the same faith that Willibald preached. ‘How did that poor man die?’ I asked.
‘They skinned the poor soul alive,’ Finan said.
‘Started at his toes?’
‘Just peeled it off slowly,’ Finan said, ‘and it must have taken hours.’
‘They didn’t peel it,’ I said, ‘you can’t skin a man like a lamb.’
‘True,’ Finan said. ‘You have to tug it off. Takes a lot of strength!’
‘He was a missionary,’ I told Willibald.
‘And a blessed martyr too,’ Finan added cheerfully. ‘But they must have got bored because they finished him off in the end. They used a tree-saw on his belly.’
‘It was probably an axe,’ I said.
‘No, it was a saw, lord,’ Finan insisted, grinning, ‘and one with savage big teeth. Ripped him into two, it did.’ Father Willibald, who had always been a martyr to seasickness, staggered to the ship’s side.
We turned the ship southwards. The estuary of the Temes is a treacherous place of mudbanks and strong tides, but I had been patrolling these waters for five years now and I scarcely needed to look for my landmarks as we rowed towards the shore of Scaepege. And there, ahead of me, waiting between two beached ships, was the enemy. The Danes. There must have been a hundred or more men, all in chain mail, all helmeted, and all with bright weapons. ‘We could slaughter the whole crew,’ I suggested to Finan. ‘We’ve got enough men.’
‘We agreed to come in peace!’ Father Willibald protested, wiping his mouth with a sleeve.
And so we had, and so we did.
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