The Pagan Lord. Bernard Cornwell

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      And they had taken Sigunn.

      She was my woman. Not my wife. Since Gisela died I had not taken another wife, though I had lovers in those days. Æthelflaed was my lover, but Æthelflaed was another man’s wife and the daughter of the dead King Alfred, and we could not live together as man and wife. Sigunn lived with me instead, and Æthelflaed knew it. ‘If it wasn’t Sigunn,’ she had told me one day, ‘it would be another.’

      ‘Maybe a dozen others.’

      ‘Maybe.’

      I had captured Sigunn at Beamfleot. She was a Dane, a slender, pale, pretty Dane who had been weeping for her slaughtered husband when she was dragged out of a sea-ditch running with blood. We had lived together almost ten years now and she was treated with honour and hung with gold. She was the lady of my hall and now she was gone. She had been taken by Cnut Ranulfson, Cnut Longsword.

      ‘It was three mornings ago,’ Osferth told me. He was the bastard son of King Alfred, who had tried to turn him into a priest, but Osferth, even though he had the face and mind of a cleric, preferred to be a warrior. He was careful, precise, intelligent, reliable and rarely impassioned. He resembled his father, and the older he got the more like his father he looked.

      ‘So it was Sunday morning,’ I said bleakly.

      ‘Everyone was in the church, lord,’ Osferth explained.

      ‘Except Sigunn.’

      ‘Who is no Christian, lord,’ he said, sounding disapproving.

      Finan, who was my companion and the man who commanded my troops if I was absent, had taken twenty men to reinforce Æthelflaed’s bodyguard as she toured Mercia. She had been inspecting the burhs that guarded Mercia from the Danes, and doubtless worshipping in churches across the land. Her husband, Æthelred, was reluctant to leave the sanctuary of Gleawecestre and so Æthelflaed did his duty. She had her own warriors who guarded her, but I still feared for her safety, not from the Mercians, who loved her, but from her husband’s followers, and so I had insisted she take Finan and twenty men and, in the Irishman’s absence, Osferth had been in charge of the men guarding Fagranforda. He had left six men to watch over the hall, barns, stables and mill, and six men should have been more than enough because my estate lay a long way from the northern lands where the Danes ruled. ‘I blame myself, lord,’ Osferth said.

      ‘Six was enough,’ I said. And the six were all dead, as was Herric, my crippled steward, and three other servants. Some forty or fifty horses were gone, while the hall was burned. Some of the walls still stood, gaunt scorched trunks, but the hall’s centre was just a heap of smoking ash. The Danes had arrived fast, broken down the hall door, slaughtered Herric and anyone else who tried to oppose them, then had taken Sigunn and left. ‘They knew you’d all be in the church,’ I said.

      ‘Which is why they came on Sunday,’ Sihtric, another of my men, finished the thought.

      ‘And they would have known you wouldn’t be worshipping,’ Osferth said.

      ‘How many were there?’ I asked Osferth.

      ‘Forty or fifty,’ he replied patiently. I had asked him the question a dozen times already.

      Danes do not make a raid like this for pleasure. There were plenty of Saxon halls and steadings within easy reach of their lands, but these men had risked riding deep into Mercia. For Sigunn? She was nothing to them.

      ‘They came to kill you, lord,’ Osferth suggested.

      Yet the Danes would have scouted the land first, they would have talked to travellers, they would know that I always had at least twenty men with me. I had chosen not to take those twenty into Tofeceaster to punish the man who had been my son because a warrior does not need twenty men to deal with a pack of priests. My son and a boy had been company enough. But the Danes could not have known I was at Tofeceaster, even I had not known I was going there till I heard the news that my damned son was becoming a Christian wizard. Yet Cnut Ranulfson had risked his men in a long, pointless raid, despite the danger of meeting my men. He would have outnumbered me, but he would have taken casualties that he could ill afford, and Cnut Longsword was a calculating man, not given to idiotic risks. None of it made sense. ‘You’re sure it was Cnut Ranulfson?’ I asked Osferth.

      ‘They carried his banner, lord.’

      ‘The axe and broken cross?’

      ‘Yes, lord.’

      ‘And where’s Father Cuthbert?’ I asked. I keep priests. I am no Christian, but such is the reach of the nailed god that most of my men are, and in those days Cuthbert was my priest. I liked him. He was the son of a stonemason, gangly and clumsy, married to a freed slave with the strange name of Mehrasa. She was a dark-skinned beauty captured in some weird land far to the south and brought to Britain by a slave-trader who had died on the blade of my sword, and Mehrasa was now wailing and screaming that her husband was gone. ‘Why wasn’t he in church?’ I asked Osferth, to which his only answer was a shrug. ‘He was humping Mehrasa?’ I asked sourly.

      ‘Isn’t he always?’ Osferth sounded disapproving again.

      ‘So where is he?’ I asked again.

      ‘Perhaps they took him?’ Sihtric suggested.

      ‘They’d rather kill a priest than capture one,’ I said. I walked towards the burned hall. Men were raking at the ashes, dragging charred and smoking timbers aside. Perhaps Cuthbert’s body was there, shrivelled and black. ‘Tell me what you saw,’ I demanded of Osferth again.

      He repeated it all patiently. He had been in Fagranforda’s church when he heard shouting coming from my hall, which lay not too far away. He left the church to see the first smoke drifting in the summer sky, but by the time he had summoned his men and mounted his horse the raiders were gone. He had followed them and had caught a glimpse of them and was certain he had seen Sigunn among the dark-mailed horsemen. ‘She was wearing the white dress, lord, the one you like.’

      ‘But you didn’t see Father Cuthbert?’

      ‘He was wearing black, lord, but so were most of the raiders, so I might not have noticed him. We never got close. They were riding like the wind.’

      Bones appeared among the ash. I walked through the old hall door, which was marked by burned posts, and smelt the stench of roasted flesh. I kicked a charred beam aside and saw a harp in the ashes. Why had that not burned? The strings had shrivelled to black stubs, but the harp frame looked undamaged. I bent to pick it up and the warm wood just crumbled in my hand. ‘What happened to Oslic?’ I asked. He had been the harpist, a poet who chanted war-songs in the hall.

      ‘They killed him, lord,’ Osferth said.

      Mehrasa began wailing louder. She was staring at the bones that a man had raked from the ashes. ‘Tell her to be quiet,’ I snarled.

      ‘They’re dogs’ bones, lord.’ The man with the rake bowed to me.

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