Oathbreaker (The King's Hounds series) Read online

  “The lives of these Viking warriors is Cnut’s guarantee that he will keep his word,” Uhtred assured Ealdred.

  They were finally ready. The men swung up into their saddles and followed their leader, Uhtred. He in turn followed Ulf, who would lead the way.

  The three Vikings rode in a line behind Uhtred, each flanked by two of Uhtred’s soldiers, spears pointed directly toward the Vikings’ tunic-clad chests, so close that the spear tips would skewer the men before they could get up to any treachery.

  Wiheal was larger than the hamlet where they had met Erik and his companions. From a distance they saw smoke rising from at least five farms, and once closer they could see that the palisade around the village was well maintained and strong.

  Viking guards stood at the gate, which gave Ulf pause, but Uhtred ordered him to proceed with a soft hiss. Ulf breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the Vikings’ swords hanging from the nearest tree trunk in the palisade’s stakewall, so high up that none could pull them down without jumping.

  An unarmed Erik waited in front of the village’s central hall, which was just a farmhouse slightly larger than the others. Uhtred’s seven thanes, who had served as hostages, surrounded Erik. The seven immediately stepped aside so the three Viking chieftains who had come with Uhtred could join them. Another Viking soldier then took up position behind the seven thanes, unsheathing his sword and holding it at the ready in his right hand.

  Uhtred stayed in his saddle and nodded calmly at Ulf, who dismounted and took the same position behind the most powerful of the Viking chieftains, holding his own blade at the ready so he could swing it unimpeded through the Viking’s neck.

  Uhtred then dismounted—with difficulty; the weeks of military campaigning had taken a toll on his body—and his noblemen followed suit, passing their reins to the slaves who came scurrying over. Although the village square in front of the hall was quite large, it resounded with the commotion and noise of the weary horses. Quiet did not return until the slaves took the beasts to the stables outside the palisade.

  Erik stepped toward Uhtred and waited as Uhtred unfastened his sword belt. The Viking then summoned a servant, who deferentially accepted the ealdorman’s weapon before kneeling and vowing that he would guard the sword here until the ealdorman himself needed it back.

  Other servants accepted the swords of the forty noblemen accompanying Uhtred, arranging them carefully in fastidious rows in the grass, and it wasn’t until the swords were all arranged that Erik motioned with his hand for Uhtred to enter the hall.

  It was dark inside.

  Uhtred hadn’t noticed if there were windows in the exterior walls, but if there were, they were closed now to keep out the spring chill. All he could see was dust dancing in the pale light that trickled in between the timbers. The coals of a fire glowed in the hearth in the middle of the hall, but with no flames that might have illuminated the room.

  Uhtred squinted into the smoke, spotting a silhouette on the far side of the hearth—a silhouette that blurred as a draft suddenly rushed through the hall, flapping the tapestries covering the walls and flaring up the fire.

  As the wind receded, Uhtred could make out the silhouette more clearly and was certain that the tall, broad-shouldered man with the prominent, hooked nose was King Cnut, even before he made out the narrow gold crown in the man’s dark-blond hair.

  Uhtred took a step closer and then waited for the king to pay him the courtesy of doing the same.

  The king didn’t move.

  “My lord, I’ve come to pledge my oath to you,” Uhtred said politely and in Danish.

  “Your oath, Uhtred? What is your oath worth to me?” Cnut’s voice was so quiet that at first Uhtred thought he had misheard. But then, from the astonished mumbling behind him, he realized that was not the case.

  Instinctively Uhtred took a step closer, clenching his fists. He was about to ask the king what he had meant when he heard a sound behind him, like a tree trunk being pulled across the floor.

  Surprised, Uhtred looked back to see that the enormous oaken door to the hall had just been closed. He directed his eyes back across the hearth.

  The king’s silhouette was gone.

  Uhtred was looking around to see if Cnut had sat down when an enormous man on a stool by the wall suddenly stood. Uhtred hadn’t noticed the man before, preoccupied as he had been with the king. Then suddenly the tapestries that lined the walls seemed to come to life as men armed with swords poured into the room from where they had hidden behind the wall hangings. It was then that Uhtred recognized the enormous man.

  “This is the end of your road, Uhtred,” Thurbrand the Hold announced.

  “Treachery!” Uhtred’s voice thundered through the hall.

  Thurbrand’s lips curled as he snarled, “Stupidity, Uhtred. Your stupidity led you here today.”

  Uhtred was the first to die, which spared him from seeing his forty noblemen sliced down, their reward for—like him—having taken the king at his word.

  Chapter 1

  Anno Domini 1018

  After a long, sunny summer, the harvest month had arrived. If I’d still held my father’s estate, my mood would have been elevated by the thought of my serfs and tenants toiling away harvesting my crops for me.

  Here in Oxford, on the other hand, the sun made the days unbearable. Heat waves quivered between the walls and woven fences. The only fresh air was down by the river and in the meadows. Everywhere else you inhaled the hot, dusty stink of town with each breath.

  I’ve heard it said that when summer settles over London, the town is a reeking hell of stench. Though Oxford is scarcely a quarter the size of London, it could easily serve as the antechamber for the doomed.

  King Cnut had left Oxford ages ago. The large joint meeting of the Danish Thing and the Angles’ and Saxons’ Witenagemot, along with the Danish chieftains from the Danelaw north of Watling Street, had formally agreed that Cnut would be king and rule England in accordance with the old laws. Cnut then spent a week divvying up the massive heregeld tax he had collected—more than eighty thousand pounds of silver. He distributed this among his jarls, thanes, and chieftains to thank them for their assistance in conquering the nation. After that he rode to Canterbury, where Archbishop Lyfing had been forewarned that the king had several matters to discuss with him.

  The city of Oxford breathed a collective sigh of relief when all the visitors—not only Cnut and his retinue, but also the noblemen from the rest of the country and all who had crossed the sea to earn some silver by serving Cnut—left after the meetings. They left behind a city that, while it had known how to profit from their visit, rejoiced all the same at being able to once again walk the streets without fighting through crowds, enjoy an evening beer in the taverns with room to sit on the benches, and—not least of all—see the inflated prices at all the stands and stalls drop back to normal again.

  Calm presided once again. In fact, it was too calm.

  I had accepted a position working for Winston the Illuminator, a position I had expected to involve a fair amount of travel. When we first met, the good Winston had confided that he generally traveled from monastery to monastery and church to church at the behest of abbots and bishops, doing what he did better than anyone else in the entire land. Namely, he adorned psalters, prayer books, evangeliaries, and biographies with beautifully colored illuminations—which the religious men wanted to enrich their altars and libraries.

  And so what was Winston doing now, that lazybones? Sitting on his behind in Oxford, satisfied to scratch on a little parchment here and a little slate there, while the alewife Alfilda looked after his body’s every need—and I do mean all of them.

  As my brother Harding used to say: If a man can eat his fill and have a willing bedmate in the same place every night, he quickly grows lazy.

  After a few weeks of this idleness, I raised the issue with Winston. Not the part about his sleeping with Alfilda, of course, but his inclination to put down roots in this tow
n by the river ford. His response was a coy look, and a brief smile flashed behind his curly blond beard.

  “Are you dissatisfied in your work for me?” he asked.

  By no means. The short time I’d been in his service we had already solved a murder for King Cnut, which had not only earned me the king’s good graces but also a pound of silver, which I certainly knew how to use. Not that I said that. Instead I hinted that it was time for us to move on, to find a churchman who would pay handsomely for what Winston called work.

  “There’s no hurry,” he mumbled, rubbing his chin.

  “The king’s silver won’t last forever.”

  “Humph,” Winston said. “Are you broke already?”

  I certainly was not! A pound of silver was no small sum. I had bought myself a proper, nicely embellished sword befitting my lineage as son of a Saxon thane, and some new clothes to replace what I’d worn since those Viking brutes seized my inherited estate. The smith had accepted my old sword as part of my payment, and since I’d waited until all the crowds had left town before looking for cloth merchants and needlewomen, I had gotten both the cloth and the sewing for a price that I had all but named myself.

  “My silver will last a while longer,” I said. “But you’re not paying me to sit around in Alfilda’s tavern and drink, are you?”

  Alfilda laughed openly and said, “Well, that’s easy enough to fix. Maybe I should put you to work.”

  That was not my intention. I had no desire to leave Winston’s employ. First of all, we got along well together. Second of all, my other prospects were not very tempting.

  Men like me abounded, landless noblemen willing to serve whoever paid us the best. And thanks to the large number of soldiers looking for work these days, the going rate wasn’t very good.

  I had never felt a desire to be a common soldier. My lineage promised me something more. I was the son of a Saxon family, which had served our own kings well, and a Danish woman, whose family was no lower in rank than my father’s. I was born to give orders. So if I was going to have to obey someone else, let it be a more important man than all the petty chieftains who sought to gather soldiers around themselves. Someone like the king, for example, which was where Winston came in. In his company I had served Cnut so well that—in addition to paying us—he had summoned us before he left for Canterbury and told us he trusted we would serve him again in the future.

  “For a suitable price,” I had said. King Cnut looked me in the eye when I said that, and I looked right back at him.

  The reward I’d requested was an estate of my own. The king had scoffed and offered me silver instead. Very well. I’d understood his message. I would never ask him for an estate again. Though my side had lost, even the conquered have their pride.

  Still, there must have been something in my expression, because the king narrowed his eyes at me.

  “Is my silver not good enough, Halfdan the Half-Saxon?”

  I returned the insult: “When Saxon silver flows through your fingers and ends up in mine, it is back in its proper place, King Cnut.”

  His face grew more serious, and a deep wrinkle appeared over his sharp nose.

  I heard Winston’s breath catch; then a laugh broke the silence. Thane Godskalk, the leader of Cnut’s housecarls, laughed loudly.

  Cnut turned to look at him and then looked back at me, a smile spreading over his thin lips.

  “Then it’s good for both of us, half-Dane half-Saxon, that the English have inexhaustible supplies of silver.”

  Winston reprimanded me later for baiting the king. Before I could retort, he snapped that as long as I was in his service, I would avoid provoking the person who had the power to separate our heads from our bodies.

  “If Godskalk hadn’t found it funny, it is likely that at least one of us would have stained the grass red,” Winston scolded.

  “My brother always said that you’re only inferior to a man if you behave like you are.”

  “Your brother’s body is rotting in Essex.”

  Well, if he thought that remark was going to silence me, he was right.

  So I left it up to Winston to decide when we would leave Oxford. I left him and Alfilda in peace apart from mealtimes, when we ate together. Instead I spent my days in the company of other men like myself, and my nights with a willing Saxon wench with perky breasts and firm buttocks.

  The idleness still perturbed me, however, so I welcomed it when a man approached me one hot afternoon when I’d sought refuge in the shady interior of Alfilda’s tavern.

  The man who leaned over my table wore a leather tunic, wool breeches tied below the knees, and felt shoes. A wide belt held his pants up, and a leather baldric lay over his shoulder. His face was broad beneath his graying hair. His mustache hung down on either side of his mouth, and strong, weather-beaten forearms stuck out of his tunic sleeves.

  “I hear you’re Winston the Saxon’s man.” His voice was rough, with a northern accent.

  “You hear correctly,” I said, then drank and wiped away the beer foam with the back of my left hand.

  One of his eyes twitched, and then he smiled obligingly. “My master would like to speak to him.”

  I straightened up. A master who wanted Winston’s services was as welcome to me as a Saxon victory would have been to King Ethelred. “And your master is…?”

  “Prior Edmund of Peterborough.”

  This was getting better and better: a churchman, just what I’d been hoping for.

  “And where is the prior?” I asked, getting up.

  “He’s waiting outside.”

  So the monk was too good to set foot in Alfilda’s tavern. I quickly finished my drink and adjusted my sword belt.

  The alley outside was so narrow that the sun, which had now passed its zenith, cast a shadow over the entire lane. Four men stood in the middle of the street. Two of them were dressed like the man who had led me outside. One of those held two spears, and he handed one to my escort.

  The other two were clergymen. One, presumably a subprior, wore a Benedictine cowl, held closed by a rope around his waist. The hood was off, hanging down his back, so I saw his chiseled face and his steely eyes watching me.

  The second clergyman also wore a cowl, but his was edged in silk and held closed by a brocade band. His round, rosy face was also exposed. He had friendly gray eyes and a reddish-blond tonsure, which must have been freshly shaved that same morning.

  “Prior Edmund,” I said to him, bowing my head exactly as far as politeness dictated.

  His friendly eyes looked me over.

  “I am Halfdan, Master Winston’s man.”

  “And your master?” Edmund’s voice was gentle and accommodating.

  “I will take you to him, if you will follow me.”

  Winston had gotten into the habit lately of sitting in the meadow north of town, where until recently so many noblemen were camped. He spent these hot days in the shade of the bushes lining a small creek, sketching with graphite on parchment or scratching with the tip of a stylus on his slate.

  I led the prior and his retinue down the lanes and alleys, exited the town’s northern gate unimpeded, the guards nodding at me lazily, and spotted Winston sitting in the distance with Alfilda at his side. After the dinner hour, the redheaded alewife would often leave the operation of her tavern to her buxom assistant, Emma, and join Winston. I had often found them together, she with her head in his lap admiring a drawing of a sheep, a man’s head, a tree, a flower, or countless other things he had felt like sketching.

  Today, too, she sat at his side. She looked up as we approached through the grass. She gave Winston a subtle elbow to the side, and he glanced up quickly but immediately returned his attention to the parchment in front of him.

  I stopped a couple of feet in front of him.

  “What do you think?” Winston asked.

  The drawing was finished. It was Alfilda, as she lived and breathed.

  “I’ve brought Prior Edmund from Peterboro
ugh,” I announced. For goodness’ sake, surely he could see that I wasn’t alone.

  Winston glanced up, squinting into the sun, which was behind my back. “Prior Edmund!”

  The prior, his presence having been acknowledged, cleared his throat and began: “Winston the Illuminator, my abbot, Elsin, asked that I seek you out. He would like you to come to our monastery.”

  Winston filled in a shadow on his drawing. “Peterborough? No, I don’t think that suits me.”

  I caught a flash of surprise in the prior’s face and smiled slightly, despite my irritation at Winston. Here they were, setting a job in the palm of his hand, and he wasn’t even considering what it would entail.

  “We’re otherwise engaged,” Winston said.

  It didn’t seem to please the prior and his brother to be standing in the middle of a meadow talking to an illustrator, so it said something about Winston’s reputation that the monk continued: “A nobleman left us a considerable fortune in his will to create a book about Seaxwulf, the founder of our monastery. It is a… significant… gift, which makes it possible for us to pay for the very finest work.”

  The lead fell from Winston’s hand, which he then entwined in Alfilda’s.

  “There are other good illustrators,” he said.

  The gleam in the prior’s eyes was no longer surprise, but growing rage. “We want you. That must suffice.”

  “Suffice?” Winston said, still holding Alfilda’s hand. “Not for me. I’m not interested.”

  The other monk in Edmund’s retinue took a step forward, but Prior Edmund’s angry voice stopped him: “I am not in the habit of haggling with runaway monks. My abbot wants you.”

  Winston’s upturned face was now every bit as angry as the prior’s.

  “Runaway monks, Edmund?” Winston said. “You’re poorly informed. I did run away, yes, but I was never a monk. Walk away now, and I’m willing to forget about you.”

  This was too much for the monk accompanying Edmund, who stepped out in front of his prior, livid. The man paused briefly, apparently flustered at having stepped so close to Alfilda. Then he regained his composure and addressed Winston: “You’re talking to your superior. Obey him, or I will make sure you never work for another monastery in England again.”