The Bone Thief Read online

  ‘We’ll be steering well clear – you don’t want him to catch wind of your being here, not now that you’re leaving without greeting him.’ He jerked a thumb to the north west. ‘He lies yonder. When Hakon took over Leicester, the Grimssons built themselves a longhouse, outside the walls, handy for the river.’

  Still talking, they came through the gateway into the cathedral yard.

  Wulfgar stopped in his tracks.

  Leicester Cathedral. Even in the grey half-light he could see how beautiful the towering building was – or had been. It had been made of golden stone and russet tile, with a broad frieze of carved leaves and flowers around the outside of the building and a fine stone cross standing before the west door.

  But the paint and plaster on the cross were faded and chipped, holes gouged where its gems had been hacked out; the cobbles around the door were matted with new chickweed and goose-grass, and the dried clumps of last year’s weed crop still disfigured the sagging roof. The surround of every window was smoke-blackened still, even after more than thirty years.

  Father Ronan took one look at Wulfgar’s face.

  ‘Go in, why don’t you? I’ll take this back and come to find you.’

  The great door creaked on rusty iron hinges, letting Wulfgar through into darkness. There was just enough light outside to show where the small, high windows were, and more came trickling in through the roof where tiles had fallen.

  Just enough light to show how lovely it once had been, this cavernous shell of scorched and falling plaster. Wulfgar thought at first that he was alone, but there were rushlights burning at makeshift shrines around the walls and as his eyes made sense of the gloom he became aware of the occasional shadowy, kneeling figure. He lit a gift of his own from a light already burning at a shrine too murky to identify. It didn’t matter; he was making his offering to Mary, Queen of Heaven, and her Risen Son, St Oswald, St Modwenna, St Margaret, the nameless saint of the Bishop’s ring, lying against his breast-bone.

  St Oswald …

  King and Martyr.

  When you were alive, he thought, the heathen Mercians were your enemies. You were slain fighting against them. And your death changed everything. The son of the king who killed you was the founder of the Bardney shrine.

  Mercia never looked back, until this last generation.

  That’s the sort of power you had, for over two hundred winters.

  St Oswald, we need you now.

  He was still hoping for a sign.

  But all he got in return for his little, guttering light was silence and an overpowering sense of sadness.

  The words of the psalmist came back to him unbidden: Your foes have made uproar in your house of prayer …

  He didn’t realise he had been singing aloud until he heard a second voice at his shoulder … Their axes have battered the wood of its doors … It was Father Ronan. And together, quietly, they sang the whole psalm: Oh God, they have set your sanctuary on fire … Do not forget the clamour of your foes, the daily growing uproar of your foes.

  Their eyes met.

  ‘I never hoped to meet anyone like you here,’ Wulfgar said.

  ‘Me? I was brought up in this church. My father was one of the canons. And my mother was one of his slaves.’ Father Ronan turned then and walked away, and after a moment’s hesitation Wulfgar followed.

  ‘Look,’ the priest said, ‘This was where the shrine of St Cuthwin used to stand. Our first Bishop, two hundred and fifty years gone.’ He pointed at a battered block of stone, the remains of painted carving just visible, shattered where metal fittings had been hacked out.

  Wulfgar thought he could make out what had once been an angel. There was no sign of the reliquary.

  ‘This is where Uhtsang came from.’

  ‘Your harp?’

  Father Ronan nodded.

  ‘Bishop Cuthwin’s relics. It was one of my jobs to dust them, as a lad. Nobody played her, ever. It used to drive me distracted, her hanging up there, long gone out of tune, the wood thirsty and the silver dull. You could see that she would be the sweetest singer, and I was learning on a dreadful old thing.’

  ‘So you stole her, from the saint?’

  ‘No!’ The priest’s note of outrage rang true. He lowered his voice. ‘Not that I didn’t think of it. I was only a little lad, mind. I still had to learn better. But I didn’t steal her, for all that. I just prayed to St Cuthwin to let me have her, for about ten years.’ He sighed.

  ‘So—’

  ‘So – so, it was after Hakon and Ketil and their army … had arrived, and the Bishop had fled. I wandered into the cathedral after the row had died down a bit, and Uhtsang was gone. The shrine had been smashed, and everything they hadn’t taken, they’d burned. And they’d burned the books. The ashes were still hot. I poked around and found a few scorched pages, but there was nothing much left worth the saving … well, the power and mystery are still here.’

  Wulfgar could only nod.

  ‘But the glory had gone. And the harp.’ The priest shook his head. ‘It was as though someone had gralloched me with a hunting knife. I wandered out of the kirk-garth still clutching those bits of charred vellum.’ He smiled then, but without pleasure. ‘Well, you’ll always find people ready to make money out of an army, and the ale-houses were open. Some of them, anyway. I went into the nearest, and there was a Danish soldier with Uhtsang on his knee. He didn’t know what he’d got, he was all ready to prise off her trinkets and burn the rest.’

  Wulfgar remembered those silver-gilt birds with their fierce garnet eyes, and he felt a shiver of something close to grief.

  ‘So, I offered to buy her, and I ended up winning her at dice. He wasn’t a bad man,’ Father Ronan said. ‘He was a good loser, anyhow. Some of the lads with him would have had me down the alley and taken the harp back with a few of my teeth for good measure, but he wouldn’t let them.’

  ‘The saint wanted you to have his harp after all,’ Wulfgar said.

  ‘But at that price?’ Father Ronan looked down at the scorched and battered tiles and shook his head again. ‘Be careful what you ask the saints for, Wulfgar. Come on, let’s quit this blackened sepulchre.’

  They found Ednoth stirring, just emerging from the cave of his hangover. Father Ronan gave him a bucket of water and told him to get on with it.

  ‘You boys haven’t exactly been going as though the hounds of Hell are on your heels, have you? It’s a matter of another fifty miles to Bardney. Let’s be getting out of town before everyone’s up and going to the football.’

  The sun was lifting clear of the hills to their right.

  ‘Now, let’s ride hard,’ Father Ronan said. ‘I’ll be having no more of your nesh excuses.’

  There was no sign of Gunnvor as they rode a looping road around the outside of Leicester’s walls to pick up the Fosse Way once again. Wulfgar told himself he was relieved, tried to ignore a nagging twinge of disappointment, to stop glancing half-hopefully over his shoulder.

  They stopped mid-afternoon to let the horses breathe, at a crossroads where half a dozen green mounds slept in the sun.

  Wulfgar swung down out of his saddle to have a closer look.

  Father Ronan followed him.

  ‘Old kings.’

  ‘Heathen kings,’ Wulfgar said sadly. ‘Gone under the hills, into the dark.’

  Father Ronan murmured something in Latin: a snatch of prayer.

  ‘Do you pray for the damned?’ Wulfgar asked, not able to stop himself.

  The priest was silent for a moment, looking up at the great green barrows.

  ‘I heard a story once,’ he said. ‘It’s the last day, and all our middle-earth has been rolled up like a scroll and thrown on the fire, and Our Lord is waiting at the gates of Heaven, with St Peter, welcoming in the dead. And in we all come, the saints and the kings, monks and priests and ploughmen, fighting-men and nuns and dairywomen. And then the sinners, the liars and cheats, the adulterers and oath-breakers, the weak and the forgetful �
�� don’t make that face, Wulfgar. Hear me out. And then come the heathens, the sackers of churches, and those who never heard the Holy Name. And still Our Lord waits, looking out over the falling darkness. And St Peter can’t think who might be yet to come. So he asks, “Lord, for whom are you waiting now?” And Our Lord says, “For Judas, Peter. For Judas.”’

  Ednoth was waiting for them at the roadside.

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me going up there.’ He shuddered, and crossed his fingers. ‘My father knew a man once who went poking into a mound.’

  ‘And what happened to him?’ Father Ronan asked.

  ‘My father wouldn’t say.’

  Wulfgar looked at the late daffodils nodding on the shadowed north side of the mounds, and the one big black crow stalking among them, hunting for worms.

  It was a beautiful story that Father Ronan had told; he only wished he could believe it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘WHAT FRONTIER?’ EDNOTH asked, in response to something Father Ronan had shouted.

  ‘The Trent,’ the priest said, gathering his reins in one hand in order to point towards the river with the other. ‘We’re moving from the lands that answer to Leicester into those that look to young Silkbeard.’

  There was that name again: Silkbeard, whom Gunnvor had described as Eirik the Spider’s lord.

  ‘Tell us more,’ Wulfgar called, trying to sound no more than casually curious. ‘About this Silkbeard, I mean.’

  ‘No love lost there! Our old jarl, Hakon the Toad and Silkbeard’s father, Hrafn, were rivals in the bad old days when the Great Army was still in the ascendancy. When the Army divided, Hrafn threw in his lot with the northern troops, the men who took York. So Lincoln still looks north to York and hates Leicester, even though Hrafn’s six months dead, and Hakon Toad’s dead now, too.’

  ‘Slow down!’ Wulfgar was getting lost in the maze of strange names and unfamiliar politics. ‘Do you mean Silkbeard rules Lincoln? I thought Lincoln was held by someone called Toli Hrafnsson?’ It was the name the Atheling had given him. He felt guilty just speaking it aloud.

  ‘That’s right. That’s the man. Little Toli Silkbeard. Hard to think of him in charge of Lincoln.’ Father Ronan laughed. ‘He was knee-high to a handworm when I last saw him.’

  ‘Is there a church in Lincoln now?’

  The priest looked at him. Wulfgar found his gaze hard to fathom.

  ‘No, lad,’ he said, after a pause, ‘there’s no church in Lincoln. Not at all, not now.’ He reined in. ‘And there she is.’

  A distant escarpment had come into view. Even at this distance, buildings could be seen crowning the ridge, though a haze of hearth-smoke smudged the details.

  ‘We’ll be there before dark.’

  ‘Why are we going to Lincoln? We want Bardney,’ Ednoth said. ‘Why waste time?’

  Wulfgar looked at the distant city and felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. He shook his head.

  ‘We need to go to Lincoln,’ he said. ‘We can’t just walk into Bardney and ask to see the reeve. We need to find out if Eirik is there, see if we can get hold of the relics in secret, that sort of thing …’ And I have to deliver the Atheling’s message to ‘little Toli’, he added silently. Somehow the diminutive failed to reassure.

  ‘Wuffa—’ Ednoth began, but Father Ronan was already nodding in agreement.

  ‘You’re right,’ Father Ronan said. We need to sniff around. Cautiously, mind. It’s a rough place, Lincoln. It may be early in the season but there’ll be a few ships in from the Baltic run, and we don’t want to tangle with that lot. They’ll have been sitting on their hands all winter and spoiling for a bit of excitement.’ He looked hard at Ednoth. ‘You don’t want to tweak the wrong tail there, lad.’

  Lincoln was unlike any place Wulfgar had ever seen. The prospect had deceived him: the old city, whose buildings they’d seen on top of the ridge from miles away, was a ghost town now. That was where the cathedral had been, and the royal palace, both within the Romans’ walls. That was the town that the Lord of the Mercians and his Bishop had known as children. Long burnt and left desolate, and up a precipitous rocky slope; Father Ronan told them it was nothing now but a haunt for rats and owls and the restless dead.

  Life in Lincoln these days centred on the foot of the slope, the priest said, on the river Witham and its ford, where the water had cut a steep gash through the hills and opened up into a wide inland harbour. Once across the Bray ford, they dismounted and led their horses through the bustle of a market packing up for the night.

  Looking to right and left, Wulfgar thought, how different this feels from Leicester. Leicester seems like somewhere for Danes who want to settle, and become Englishmen. Lincoln’s for those just passing through. Its ale-houses, warehouses and strand-market echoed with babble in half the tongues of the world, mixing with the cries of a thousand gulls. He overheard Irish and Frankish as well as Danish coming from the merchant crews and their ships with tented awnings, and more languages beside those he recognised. Some English, but not much. Even so, he thought, no one should notice us here, not unless we try very hard to draw attention to ourselves.

  He wondered how he was going to deliver his message to Toli Silkbeard without doing exactly that.

  They got themselves settled in the outer courtyard of an inn Father Ronan knew, with the horses unloaded and safely tethered.

  ‘We may not have earned a rest,’ Father Ronan said, ‘but the nags have.’

  Wulfgar could only think of one thing, here in the enemy’s citadel.

  ‘Tell us more about Toli Silkbeard.’

  ‘Silkiskegg?’ Father Ronan snorted, before glancing around warily. ‘Well, never call him that, for a start. Not to his face, any road. Nor where his men might hear.’

  ‘Why not?’ This, slightly truculent, from Ednoth.

  ‘Well,’ Father Ronan said, looking amused, but Wulfgar noticed he spoke more softly than usual. ‘Skegg – it means beard, you know? But it’s also slang for a Danish axe. You must have seen one? No? You have led a quiet life, Wuffa. Those flared edges their war-axes have, they call them “beards”.’

  ‘Oh,’ Wulfgar said. ‘Yes, I see. Orm Ormsson had a little one at his belt.’ He couldn’t remember asking the priest to call him Wuffa, but he found he was pleased rather than offended.

  ‘Orm who?’ Ednoth looked baffled.

  ‘The Danish trader,’ Wulfgar said. ‘I did tell you.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember now. But I still don’t understand what’s wrong with Silkiskegg?’ Ednoth said.

  ‘Silk-Axe,’ Wulfgar said. ‘Not exactly flattering.’

  Father Ronan nodded. ‘It’s only because he’s so young, mind,’ he said. ‘Hasn’t had much chance to blood his axe.’

  Wulfgar swallowed. ‘And his hall?’ he asked. ‘That’s here in Lincoln?’

  ‘Aye, in Silver Street where his father set up thirty years ago, where else?’ Father Ronan peered at Wulfgar, curious. ‘Don’t fret, lad. We’ll be shaking the dust of Lincoln off our feet before young Toli sniffs us out. Lincoln’s not like Leicester, it’s full of strangers. We shouldn’t be noticed by anyone, let alone the Jarl.’

  Another night, Wulfgar thought, pulling his cloak round him and curling up on the straw-packed pallet. Another strange hearth and a new gang of fleas to get acquainted with. He slept, but badly, and woke far too early, the inn still dark apart from the glowing of the banked hearth and no sound outside but blackbird song.

  He turned over restlessly. Easter Tuesday today. Tuesday, and we’re not even in Bardney yet. Yes, it’s only six miles away, but who knows what obstacles we may yet encounter. The Atheling had sounded as though he knew his way around the Danish lands, Wulfgar thought miserably, but he must have been bluffing. How could he ever have told us this mission would only take a week?

  He rolled over and tried to make himself comfortable, but it was a waste of effort. He found himself counting on his fingers, tallying days and miles, over and o
ver.

  The Atheling must have been reckoning they would cover more than thirty miles every day, he concluded to his perturbation. But that was far more than their little mounts could manage. And he must also have assumed that Wulfgar and Ednoth would meet the reeve – what was his name … Thorvald – with the relics straight away, and be turning right round, and galloping thirty miles a day back again.

  Either the Atheling had been wildly optimistic, or he had been mad.

  Or – and Wulfgar sat bolt upright then, his mind racing – what if he had intended to mislead them? If a week went by, and Ednoth and he hadn’t returned – and Gloucester’s further still, he thought frantically, another thirty miles …

  It could easily take them two weeks to get back with the relics. Two weeks, or more.

  Anything might have happened by then. The Lord could have died …

  Or he could be dead already.

  Dying or dead, the Lady would be in despair, waiting for Wulfgar’s return, her expectations and hopes raised by the Atheling’s breezy prediction – which he would probably be repeating by the hour – waiting and waiting, and more anxious, more vulnerable, more easily preyed on, with every day that passed.

  A great wash of fury flooded through his veins.

  I’m buying his time for him.

  No wonder the Atheling had been so eager to back the Bishop’s plan, and to send Wulfgar off into the wilds. The Lady and the Bishop would be safely distracted with their hopes over the relics, while he made his bid for power …

  And I even agreed to be the Atheling’s errand-boy. What a gullible fool I am, Wulfgar thought despairingly.

  Why had he ever thought he could play this game? He was no politician. He should have stayed in Wessex, he thought, even if he had ended up teaching farmers’ sons like Ednoth their abecedarium in some backwoods minster.

  He bit his lip. Did he really mean it? Give up everything he had been trained to do, destined for since birth? Abandon the thrill of working at the heart of the court, among the rich and great? Relinquish the hopes of a cathedral or at least a great minster of his own?