The Burning Land. Bernard Cornwell

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      And then it was as simple as stealing silver from a church. A hundred of my men crashed from the trees onto the flank of the Danes, who had no chance to escape. Two of the enemy turned their horses too fast and the beasts went down in a screaming chaos of hooves and turf. Others tried to turn back and were caught by spears in their spines. The experienced Danes swerved towards us, hoping to ride straight through our charge, but we were too many, and my men curled around the enemy horsemen so that a dozen were trapped in a circle. I was not there. I was leading the rest of my men to Edwulf’s hall, where the remainder of the Danes were running to mount their horses. One man, bare below the waist, scrambled away from a screaming woman and twisted as he saw me coming. Smoka, my horse, slowed, the man dodged again, but Smoka needed no guidance from me, and Serpent-Breath, my sword, took the man in the skull. The blade lodged there, so that the dying Dane was dragged along as I rode. Blood sprayed up my arm, then at last his twitching body fell away.

      I spurred on, taking most of the men east of the settlement, and so cutting off the retreat of the surviving Danes. Finan had already sent scouts to the southern hill crest. Why, I wondered, had the Danes not posted sentinels on the hilltop from which we had first seen the fugitives?

      There were so many skirmishes in those days. The Danes of East Anglia would raid the farmlands about Lundene, and we would retaliate, taking men deep into Danish territory to burn, kill and plunder. There was officially a peace treaty between Alfred’s Wessex and East Anglia, but a hungry Dane took no notice of words on parchment. A man who wanted slaves, livestock, or simply wanted an adventure, would cross into Mercia and take what he wanted, and we would then ride east and do the same. I liked such raids. They gave me a chance to train my youngest men, to let them see the enemy and cross swords. You can drill a man for a year, practise sword craft and spear skills forever, but he will learn more in just five minutes of battle.

      There were so many skirmishes that I have forgotten most, yet I recall that skirmish at Edwulf’s hall. In reality it was nothing. The Danes had been careless and we took no casualties, yet I remember because, when it was over, and the swords were still, one of my men called me to the church.

      It was a small church, hardly big enough for the fifty or sixty souls who lived or had lived around the hall. The building was made of oak and had a thatched roof on which a wooden cross stood tall. A crude bell hung at the western gable above the only door, while each side wall had two large timber-barred windows through which light streamed to illuminate a fat man who had been stripped naked and tied to a table that I assumed was the church’s altar. He was moaning. ‘Untie him,’ I snarled, and Rypere, who had led the men who captured the Danes inside the church, started forward as if I had just woken him from a trance.

      Rypere had seen much horror in his few years, but he, like the men he led, seemed numbed by the cruelty inflicted on the fat man. His eye sockets were a mess of blood and jelly, his cheeks laced red, his ears sliced off, his manhood cut, his fingers first broken and then chiseled from his palms. Two Danes stood beyond the table, guarded by my men, their reddened hands betraying they had been the torturers. Yet it was the leader of the Danish band who was chiefly responsible for the cruelty, and that is why I remember the skirmish.

      Because that was how I met Skade, and if ever any woman ate the apples of Asgard that gave the gods their eternal beauty, it was Skade. She was tall, almost as tall as I was, with a wiry body disguised by the mail coat she wore. She was maybe twenty years old, her face was narrow, high-nosed, haughty, with eyes as blue as any I have ever seen. Her hair, dark as the feathers of Odin’s ravens, hung long and straight to her slender waist, where a sword belt held an empty scabbard. I stared at her.

      And she stared at me. And what did she see?

      She saw Alfred’s warlord. She saw Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the pagan in service to a Christian king. I was tall, and in those days I had broad shoulders. I was a sword-warrior, spear-warrior, and fighting had made me rich so that my mail shone and my helmet was inlaid with silver and my arm rings glittered above the mail sleeves. My sword belt was decorated with silver wolf-heads, Serpent-Breath’s scabbard was cased with jet slivers, while my belt buckle and cloak clasp were made of heavy gold. Only the small image of Thor’s hammer, hanging around my neck, was cheap, but I had owned that talisman since I was a child. I have it still. The glory of my youth has gone, eroded by time, but that was what Skade saw. She saw a warlord.

      And so she spat at me. The spittle landed on my cheek and I left it there. ‘Who is the bitch?’ I asked.

      ‘Skade,’ Rypere gave me her name, then nodded at the two torturers, ‘they say she’s their leader.’

      The fat man moaned. He had been cut free and now curled his body into a ball. ‘Find someone to tend him,’ I said irritably, and Skade spat again, this time striking my mouth. ‘Who is he?’ I demanded, ignoring her.

      ‘We think he’s Edwulf,’ Rypere said.

      ‘Get him out of here,’ I said, then turned to look at the beauty who spat at me. ‘And who,’ I asked, ‘is Skade?’

      She was a Dane, born to a steading in the northern part of their bleak country, daughter to a man who had no great riches and so left his widow poor. But the widow had Skade, and her beauty was astonishing, and so she had been married to a man willing to pay for that long, lithe body in his bed. The husband was a Frisian chieftain, a pirate, but then Skade had met Harald Bloodhair, and Jarl Harald offered her more excitement than living behind a rotting palisade on some tide-besieged sandbank, and so she had run away with him. All that I was to learn, but for now I just knew she was Harald’s woman, and that Haesten had spoken the truth; to see her was to want her. ‘You will release me,’ she said with an astonishing confidence.

      ‘I’ll do what I choose,’ I told her, ‘and I don’t take orders from a fool.’ She bridled at that, and I saw she was about to spit again, and so raised a hand as if to strike her and she went very still. ‘No lookouts,’ I said to her, ‘what leader doesn’t post sentries? Only a fool.’ She hated that. She hated it because it was true.

      ‘Jarl Harald will give you money for my freedom,’ she said.

      ‘My price for your freedom,’ I said, ‘is Harald’s liver.’

      ‘You are Uhtred?’ she asked.

      ‘I am the Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

      She gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Then Bebbanburg will need a new lord if you don’t release me. I shall curse you. You will know agony, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, even greater agony than him.’ She nodded at Edwulf, who was being carried out of the church by four of my men.

      ‘He’s a fool too,’ I said, ‘because he set no sentries.’ Skade’s raiding party had descended on the village in the morning sunlight and no one saw them coming. Some villagers, those we had seen from the skyline, escaped, but most had been captured, and of those only the young women and the children who might have been sold as slaves still lived.

      We let one Dane live, one Dane and Skade. The rest we killed. We took their horses, their mail and their weapons. I ordered the surviving villagers to drive their livestock north to Suthriganaweorc because Harald’s men had to be denied food, though as the harvest was already in the barns and the orchards were heavy, that would be hard. We were still slaughtering the last of the Danes when Finan’s scouts reported that horsemen were approaching the hill crest to the south.

      I went to meet them, taking seventy men, the one Dane I would spare, Skade and also the long piece of hemp rope that had been attached to the church’s small bell. I joined Finan and we rode to where the hill’s crest was gentle grassland and from where we could look far to the south. New СКАЧАТЬ