Bernard Cornwell - The Burning Land

‘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.

I ordered Kenelm and Dragon-Voyager to stay close to the muddy shore, while we drove Seolferwulf onto the gently shelving mud between the two Danish boats. Seolferwulf ’s bows made a hissing sound as she slowed and stopped. She was firmly grounded now, but the tide was rising, so she was safe for a while. I jumped off the prow, splashing into deep wet mud, then waded to firmer ground where our enemies waited.

‘My Lord Uhtred,’ the leader of the Danes greeted me. He grinned and spread his arms wide. He was a stocky man, golden-haired and square-jawed. His beard was plaited into five thick ropes fastened with silver clasps. His forearms glittered with rings of gold and silver, and more gold studded the belt from which hung a thick-bladed sword. He looked prosperous, which he was, and something about the openness of his face made him appear trustworthy, which he was not. ‘I am so overjoyed to see you,’ he said, still smiling, ‘my old valued friend!’

‘Jarl Haesten,’ I responded, giving him the title he liked to use, though in my mind Haesten was nothing but a pirate. I had known him for years. I had saved his life once, which was a bad day’s work, and ever since that day I had been trying to kill him, yet he always managed to slither away. He had escaped me five years before and, since then, I had heard how he had been raiding deep inside Frankia. He had amassed silver there, had whelped another son on his wife, and had attracted followers. Now he had brought eighty ships to Wessex.

‘I hoped Alfred would send you,’ Haesten said, holding out a hand.

‘If Alfred hadn’t ordered me to come in peace,’ I said, taking the hand, ‘I’d have cut that head off your shoulders by now.’

‘You bark a lot,’ he said, amused, ‘but the louder a cur barks, lord, the weaker its bite.’

I let that pass. I had not come to fight, but to do Alfred’s bidding, and the king had ordered me to bring missionaries to Haesten. Willibald and his companion were helped ashore by my men, then came to stand beside me, where they smiled nervously. Both priests spoke Danish, which is why they had been chosen. I had also brought Haesten a message gilded with treasure, but he feigned indifference, insisting I accompany him to his encampment before Alfred’s gift was delivered.

Scaepege was not Haesten’s main encampment, that was some distance to the east where his eighty ships were drawn up on a beach protected by a newly-made fort. He had not wanted to invite me into that fastness, and so he had insisted Alfred’s envoys meet him among the wastes of Scaepege which, even in summer, is a place of dank pools, sour grass and dark marshes. He had arrived there two days before, and had made a crude fort by surrounding a patch of higher ground with a tangled wall of thorn bushes, inside which he had raised two sailcloth tents. ‘We shall eat, lord,’ he invited me grandly, gesturing to a trestle table surrounded by a dozen stools. Finan, two other warriors and the pair of priests accompanied me, though Haesten insisted the priests should not sit at the table. ‘I don’t trust Christian wizards,’ he explained, ‘so they can squat on the ground.’ The food was a fish stew and rock-hard bread, served by half-naked slave women, none more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and all of them Saxons.

Haesten was humiliating the girls as a provocation and he watched for my reaction. ‘Are they from Wessex?’ I asked.

‘Of course not,’ he said, pretending to be offended by the question. ‘I took them from East Anglia. You want one of them, lord? There, that little one has breasts firm as apples!’

I asked the apple-breasted girl where she had been captured, and she just shook her head dumbly, too frightened to answer me. She poured me ale that had been sweetened with berries. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked her again.

Haesten looked at the girl, letting his eyes linger on her breasts. ‘Answer the lord,’ he said in English.

‘I don’t know, lord,’ she said.

‘Wessex?’ I demanded. ‘East Anglia? Where?’

‘A village, lord,’ she said, and that was all she knew, and I waved her away.

‘Your wife is well?’ Haesten asked, watching the girl walk away.

‘She is.’

‘I am glad,’ he said convincingly enough, then his shrewd eyes looked amused. ‘So what is your master’s message to me?’ he asked, spooning fish broth into his mouth and dripping it down his beard.

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said.

‘I’m to leave Wessex!’ He pretended to be shocked and waved a hand at the desolate marshes, ‘why would a man want to leave all this, lord?’

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said doggedly, ‘agree not to invade Mercia, give my king two hostages, and accept his missionaries.’

‘Missionaries!’ Haesten said, pointing his horn spoon at me. ‘Now you can’t approve of that, Lord Uhtred! You, at least, worship the real gods.’ He twisted on the stool and stared at the two priests. ‘Maybe I’ll kill them.’

‘Do that,’ I said, ‘and I’ll suck your eyeballs out of their sockets.’

He heard the venom in my voice and was surprised by it. I saw a flicker of resentment in his eyes, but he kept his voice calm. ‘You’ve become a Christian, lord?’

‘Father Willibald is my friend,’ I said.

‘You should have said,’ he reproved me, ‘and I would not have jested. Of course they will live and they can even preach to us, but they’ll achieve nothing. So, Alfred instructs me to take my ships away?’

‘Far away,’ I said.

‘But where?’ he asked in feigned innocence.

‘Frankia?’ I suggested.

‘The Franks have paid me to leave them alone,’ Haesten said, ‘they even built us ships to hasten our departure! Will Alfred build us ships?’

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said stubbornly, ‘you’re to leave Mercia untroubled, you’re to accept missionaries, and you are to give Alfred hostages.’

‘Ah,’ Haesten smiled, ‘the hostages.’ He stared at me for a few heartbeats, then appeared to forget the matter of hostages, waving seawards instead. ‘And where are we to go?’

‘Alfred is paying you to leave Wessex,’ I said, ‘and where you go is not my concern, but make it very far from the reach of my sword.’