The Burning Land - v4 by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell [Cornwell, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-10-06T13:29:58.546000+00:00

Nothing great is done without risk, but there are times I look back on those days and am amazed at the risk we ran in Frisia. It was, in its small way, like luring Harald to Fearnhamme, because again I divided my forces, and again I risked everything on the assumption that my enemy would do exactly what I wished him to do. And once again the lure was Skade.

She was so beautiful. It was a sinuous dark beauty. To look at her was to want her, to know her was to distrust her, but the distrust was ever conquered by that extraordinary beauty. Her face was high-boned, smooth-skinned, large-eyed, and full-mouthed. Her black hair was lustrous, her body was languorous. Of course many girls are beautiful, but life is hard on a woman. Childbirth racks her body like storms, and the never-ending work of pounding grains and spinning yarn takes its toll on that early loveliness, yet Skade, even though she had lived longer than twenty years, had kept her fresh beauty. She knew it too, and it mattered to her, for it had carried her from a widow’s poor house to the high tables of long-beamed mead halls. She liked to say that she had been sold to Skirnir, but in truth she had welcomed him, then been disappointed by him because, for all the treasure he amassed, he had no ambitions beyond the Frisian Islands. He had found a plump patch for piracy, and it made no sense to Skirnir to sail far away to seek a plumper patch, and so Skade had found Harald, who promised her Wessex, and now she had found me.

“She’s using you,” Brida had told me in Dunholm.

“I’m using her,” I had answered.

“There are a dozen whores here who’ll prove cheaper,” Brida had retorted scornfully.

So Skade was using me, but for what? She was demanding half her husband’s hoard, but what would she do with it? When I asked her, she shrugged as if the question was unimportant, but late that night, before Osferth’s feigned betrayal, she spoke with me. Why did I want her husband’s money?

“You know why.”

“To take your fortress back?”

“Yes.”

She lay silent for a while. The water made its small noise along Seolferwulf ’s strakes. I could hear the snores of my men, the shifting feet of the sentries in the prow and above our heads on the steering platform. “And what then?” she asked.

“I will be the Lord of Bebbanburg,” I said.

“As Skirnir is Lord of Zegge?”

“There was a time,” I said, “when the Lord of Bebbanburg ruled far into the north and all the way down to the Humbre.”

“They ruled Northumbria?”

“Yes.”

I was bewitched by her. My ancestors had never ruled Northumbria, merely the northern part of that kingdom when it was divided between two thrones, but I was laying imaginary tribute at her feet. I was holding out the prospect of her being a queen, for that was what Skade wanted. She wanted to rule, and for that she needed a man who could lead warriors, and for the moment she believed I was that man.

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