The Pagan Lord. Bernard Cornwell

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      The hall dogs, the ones Sigunn loved. They were small terriers, adept at killing rats. The man pulled a melted silver dish from the ash. ‘They didn’t come to kill me,’ I said, staring at the small ribcages.

      ‘Who else?’ Sihtric asked. Sihtric had been my servant once and was now a house-warrior and a good one.

      ‘They came for Sigunn,’ I said, because I could think of no other explanation.

      ‘But why, lord? She’s not your wife.’

      ‘He knows I’m fond of her,’ I said, ‘and that means he wants something.’

      ‘Cnut Longsword,’ Sihtric said ominously.

      Sihtric was no coward. His father had been Kjartan the Cruel, and Sihtric had inherited his father’s skill with weapons. Sihtric had stood in the shield wall with me and I knew his bravery, but he had sounded nervous when he spoke Cnut’s name. No wonder. Cnut Ranulfson was a legend in the lands where the Danes ruled. He was a slight man, very pale skinned with hair that was bone-white though he was no old man. I guessed he was now close to forty, which was old enough, but Cnut’s hair had been white from the day he was born. And he had been born clever and ruthless. His sword, Ice-Spite, was feared from the northern isles to the southern coast of Wessex, and his renown had attracted oath-men who came from across the sea to serve him. He and his friend, Sigurd Thorrson, were the greatest Danish lords of Northumbria, and their ambition was to be the greatest lords of Britain, but they had an enemy who had stopped them repeatedly.

      And now Cnut Ranulfson, Cnut Longsword, the most feared swordsman in Britain, had taken that enemy’s woman. ‘He wants something,’ I said again.

      ‘You?’ Osferth asked.

      ‘We’ll find out,’ I said, and so we did.

      We discovered what Cnut Ranulfson wanted that evening when Father Cuthbert came home. The priest was brought by a merchant who traded in pelts, and he had Father Cuthbert on his wagon. It was Mehrasa who alerted us. She screamed.

      I was in the big barn that the Danes had not had time to burn, and which we could use for a hall until I built another, and I was watching my men make a hearth from stones when I heard the scream and ran out to see the wagon lurching up the lane. Mehrasa was tugging at her husband while Cuthbert was flailing with his long skinny arms. Mehrasa was still screaming. ‘Quiet!’ I shouted.

      My men were following me. The pelt-trader had stopped his wagon and fallen to his knees as I approached. He explained that he had found Father Cuthbert to the north. ‘He was at Beorgford, lord,’ he said, ‘by the river. They were throwing stones at him.’

      ‘Who was throwing stones?’

      ‘Boys, lord. Just boys playing.’

      So Cnut had ridden to the ford where, presumably, he had released the priest. Cuthbert’s long robe was mud-stained and torn, while his scalp was crusted with blood clots. ‘What did you do to the boys?’ I asked the trader.

      ‘Just chased them away, lord.’

      ‘Where was he?’

      ‘In the rushes, lord, by the river. He was crying.’

      ‘Father Cuthbert,’ I said, walking to the wagon.

      ‘Lord! Lord!’ he reached a hand for me.

      ‘He couldn’t cry,’ I told the trader. ‘Osferth! Give the man money.’ I gestured at the priest’s rescuer. ‘We’ll feed you,’ I told the man, ‘and stable your horses overnight.’

      ‘Lord!’ Father Cuthbert wailed.

      I reached into the cart and lifted him. He was tall, but surprisingly light. ‘You can stand?’ I asked him.

      ‘Yes, lord.’

      I put him on the ground, steadied him, then stepped away as Mehrasa embraced him.

      ‘Lord,’ he said over her shoulder, ‘I have a message.’

      He sounded as if he was crying, and perhaps he was, but a man with no eyes cannot cry. A man with two bloody eye-holes cannot cry. A blinded man must cry, and cannot.

      Cnut Ranulfson had gouged out his eyes.

      Tameworþig. That was where I was to meet Cnut Ranulfson. ‘He said you would know why, lord,’ Father Cuthbert told me.

      ‘That’s all he said?’

      ‘You’d know why,’ he repeated, ‘and you will make it good, and you’re to meet him before the moon wanes or he’ll kill your woman. Slowly.’

      I went to the barn door and looked up into the night, but the moon was hidden by clouds. Not that I needed to see how slender its crescent glowed. I had one week before it waned. ‘What else did he say?’

      ‘Just that you’re to go to Tameworþig before the moon dies, lord.’

      ‘And make good?’ I asked, puzzled.

      ‘He said you’d know what that means, lord.’

      ‘I don’t know!’

      ‘And he said …’ Father Cuthbert said slowly.

      ‘Said what?’

      ‘He said he blinded me so I couldn’t see her.’

      ‘See her? See who?’

      ‘He said I wasn’t worthy to look on her, lord.’

      ‘Look on who?’

      ‘So he blinded me!’ he wailed and Mehrasa started screeching and I could get no sense from either.

      But at least I knew Tameworþig, though fate had never taken me to that town, which lay at the edge of Cnut Ranulfson’s lands. It had once been a great town, the capital of the mighty King Offa, the Mercian ruler who had built a wall against the Welsh and dominated both Northumbria and Wessex. Offa had claimed to be the king of all the Saxons, but he was long dead and his powerful kingdom of Mercia was now a sad remnant split between Danes and Saxons. Tameworþig, which had once housed the greatest king of all Britain, the fortress city that had sheltered his feared troops, was now a decayed ruin where Saxons slaved for Danish jarls. It was also the most southerly of all Cnut’s halls, an outpost of Danish power in a disputed borderland.

      ‘It’s a trap,’ Osferth warned me.

      I somehow doubted it. Instinct is everything. What Cnut Ranulfson had done was dangerous, a great risk. He had sent men, or brought men, deep into Mercia where his small raiding band could easily have been cut off and slaughtered to the last man. Yet something had driven him to that risk. He wanted something, and he believed I possessed it, and he had summoned me, not to one of the great halls deep in his own land, but to Tameworþig that lay very close to Saxon territory.

      ‘We ride,’ I said.

      I took every man who could mount СКАЧАТЬ