Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [96]
I carried Lightning’s body to some nearby trees and I used the knife and a shard of stone to make a grave. I laid the hound inside, put the knife beside him, then wished him happy hunting in the next world. I filled in the grave and heaped rocks over it to preserve his body from the carrion-eaters. It was almost dawn by the time I had finished and I was dirty, blood-soaked and miserable.
‘Dear God, what happened?’ Father Cuthbert stared aghast at me.
‘I prayed to Thor,’ I said curtly.
‘The dog?’ he whispered the question.
‘Is hunting in the next world,’ I said.
He shuddered. Some priests would have chided me for sacrificing to false gods, but Cuthbert just made the sign of the cross. ‘The spirits have been quiet,’ he told me.
‘So one of the prayers worked,’ I said, ‘either yours or mine.’
‘Or both, lord,’ he said.
And when the sun rose the slaves came and I had them open the tomb and then move the dead from one of the two deeper chambers. They piled the bones in the opposite chamber, and then we sealed that corpse-crowded space with a slab of rock. We put skulls in the two cavities nearest the entrance, so that any visitor, stooping into the passageway, would be greeted by the grinning dead. The hardest work was disguising the entrance of the northernmost chamber, the one we had cleared of bones, because Ludda needed to be able to get in and out of that artificial cave. Father Cuthbert found the solution. His father had taught him the stonemason’s trade, and Cuthbert clumsily chipped away at a limestone slab until it resembled a thin shield. It took him two days, but he managed it and we balanced the thin slab on a flat rock and Ludda found he could tip it easily enough. He could pull it outwards, crawl past it into the chamber and then another man could push it back upright so that Ludda was hidden behind the shield-like slab. When he spoke from behind the slab his voice was muffled, but audible.
We sealed the grave again, piling earth over the entrance boulder and then went back to Fagranforda. ‘Now we go to Lundene,’ I told Ludda. ‘You, me and Finan.’
‘Lundene!’ He liked that. ‘Why are we going, lord?’
‘To find two whores, of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘I can help!’ Father Cuthbert said eagerly.
‘I thought I’d make you responsible for collecting the goose feathers,’ I told Cuthbert.
‘Goose feathers?’ He stared at me, appalled. ‘Oh, lord, please!’
Whores and goose feathers. Plegmund was praying for peace and I was planning for war.
I took thirty men to Lundene, not because I needed them, but because a lord should travel in style. We found quarters for men and horses in the Roman fort that guarded the old city’s north-western corner, then I walked with Finan and Weohstan along the remnants of the Roman wall. ‘When you commanded here,’ Weohstan asked, ‘did they starve you of money?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I have to beg for every coin,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re building churches, but I can’t persuade them to repair the wall.’
And the wall needed repair more than ever. A great stretch of the Roman battlements between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate had fallen into the stinking ditch beyond. It was not a new problem. Back when I had been commander of the garrison, I had filled the gap with a massive oak palisade, but those trunks were dark now and some of them were rotting. King Eohric had seen this decayed stretch and I did not doubt he had noted it, and after his visit to Lundene I had suggested that repairs be made urgently, but nothing had been done. ‘Just look,’ Weohstan said, and scrambled awkwardly down the slope of rubble that marked the ruined wall’s end. He pushed on an oak trunk and I saw it move