Stiorra was avenged.

I think of my daughter every day. I have watched her children grow and wept that she would not see them become a man and a woman. I tell them of their mother and sometimes tears still glint in my eyes when I speak of her. The waves roll on Bebbanburg’s long beach and the wind comes across the wild waters and I know she is somewhere in the afterlife. Not in Niflheim, nor in the Christian heaven, but somewhere. Ieremias tells me there is a blessed place for good pagans, a vale of soft grass and clear streams. “She’s happy there, lord,” he tells me, and I try to tell myself that he is not mad and that he speaks the truth. He goes nowhere without his small white dog that he calls Scarioðe, “Like Judas, lord, who betrayed his master.”

I have added Sköll’s flensed skull and Snorri’s wolf skull to the masonry niches in Bebbanburg’s Skull Gate. The skulls gaze blindly southward to where Northumbria’s enemies will gather. The Norse still live in Cumbraland, but have sworn oaths to Sigtryggr. He is king of all Northumbria, but Egil Skallagrimmrson, whom I have come to treasure as a companion, tells me the Norse cannot be trusted. “Can I trust you then?” I asked him.

“Of course not!”

“But I do.”

“That, lord, is because you are a fool. But I am a poet, and poets love fools.”

I gave Egil and his brother good land north of Bebbanburg. They gave me their oaths because, Egil said, I had saved the life of his youngest brother. “We shall keep our oaths, lord,” he promised me as we rode home from Heahburh. “Not that I care about Berg, of course. He’s so ugly!”

I had laughed. Berg was a good-looking boy, while Egil was extraordinarily ugly, yet women seemed attracted to him like flies to blood, and soon there will be babies born in Bebbanburg with ears like bat wings and chins like ship prows.

And still the waves roll in and the wind blows, and one day, I know, a horseman will ride up the coast road and he will bring me news from far away, of the death of a king, and of an oath to be kept.

Wyrd bið ful āræd.

HISTORICAL NOTE

There was unrest in Mercia following Æthelflaed’s death, though the siege of Chester (Ceaster) is fictional. Æthelflaed had wanted her daughter, Ælfwynn, to succeed her, but Æthelflaed’s brother, King Edward of Wessex, swiftly placed Ælfwynn in a West Saxon convent and took the Mercian throne for himself. By then he had put aside his second wife (if we believe that he had a brief first marriage to Æthelstan’s mother) and married Eadgifu, who gave him yet more sons, and thus, eventually, more possible claimants to his throne.

Æthelstan did have a twin sister, Eadgyth, and she did marry Sigtryggr. I confess to some regret for killing off the fictional Stiorra, but her death was necessary to bring Eadgyth into her proper place as Queen of Northumbria. That country, still independent, was troubled by Norse settlers on the western coast. Sköll is fictional, Ingilmundr and the brothers Egil and Thorolf Skallagrimmrson are not. “Heahburh” is Whitley Castle in Northumberland, and the battle I describe there is wholly fictional. Whitley Castle (sometimes known as Epiacum) is the highest fort built in Britain by the Romans and lies north of Alston just off the A689 close to Kirkhaugh (or you can reach it by following the wonderfully named hiking path Isaac’s Tea Trail). All that remains of the fort are the earth walls and the extraordinary array of ditches that the Romans dug to protect the ramparts. All Roman forts were built to a pattern, it’s sometimes called the “playing-card” design because the regulation shape of Roman forts was that of a playing-card, but to fit Whitley Castle to its high spur of land the Romans squeezed the playing-card into a lozenge shape, another feature that, with the outlying ditches, makes Whitley Castle unique. The fort was doubtless built to protect the lead and silver works among the adjacent hills.