Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [40]
Maybe here, maybe now, for I had abandoned the idea of destroying Cytringan’s feasting-hall and instead would attempt a foolish thing, but one that would have my name spoken all across Britain. Reputation. We would rather have reputation than gold, and so I left my men in a steading and rode down the river’s southern bank with just Osferth for company, and I said nothing until we came to the edge of a coppiced wood from where we could see the town across the wide river’s swirls. ‘Snotengaham,’ I said. ‘It was here I first met your father.’
He grunted at that. The town lay on the river’s northern bank and it had grown since I had last seen it. There were buildings outside the ramparts and the air above the roofs was thick with smoke from the kitchen fires. ‘Sigurd’s possession?’ Osferth asked.
I nodded, remembering what Beornnoth had told me, that Sigurd had laid up his war-fleet in Snotengaham. I also remembered Ragnar the Elder’s words that he had spoken to me when I was a child, that Snotengaham would be Danish for ever, yet most of the folk who lived inside the walls were Saxons. This was a Mercian town, right on the northern edge of that kingdom, yet for nearly all my life it had been ruled by the Danes and now its merchants and churchmen, its whores and its tavern-keepers paid silver to Sigurd. He had built a hall on a great rock outcrop in the town’s centre. It was not his main dwelling, which lay far to the south, but Snotengaham was one of Sigurd’s strongholds, a place he felt safe.
To reach Snotengaham from the sea a boat went up the great Humbre, then followed the Trente. That was the voyage I had made as a child in Ragnar’s Wind-Viper and, from the coppice on the southern bank, I could see there were forty or fifty boats drawn onto the far bank. Those were the ships Sigurd had taken south to Wessex the previous year, though in the end he had achieved nothing except to lay waste a few farmsteads outside of Exanceaster. Their presence suggested he did not plan another seaborne invasion. His next attack would be overland, a lunge into Mercia and then Wessex to take the Saxon land.
Yet a man’s pride is not just his land. We measure a lord by the number of crews he leads, and those ships told me Sigurd commanded a horde. I commanded one crew. I dare say I was as famous as Sigurd, yet all my fame had not translated into wealth. I should, I thought, be called Uhtred the Foolish. I had served Alfred all these years, and to show for it I had a borrowed estate, a single crew of men and a reputation. Sigurd owned towns, whole estates and led an army.
It was time to taunt him.
I talked with each of my men. I told them they could become rich by betraying me, that if just one of them told some whore in the town that I was Uhtred then I would probably die, and that most of them would die with me. I did not remind them of the oath they had taken to me because not one of them would need reminding, nor did I think any of them would betray me. I had four Danes and three Frisians in that group, yet they were my men, tied to me as much by friendship as by oath. ‘What we’re about to do,’ I told them, ‘will have men talking all over Britain. It will not make us rich, but I promise you reputation.’
My name, I told them, was Kjartan. It was the name