Free The Flame Bearer (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 10) by Bernard Cornwell Page B

Sigtryggr would only help me attack northwards if he was certain that he had peace with the southern Saxons. He had gone to Ledecestre to plead with Æthelflaed, hoping her influence with her brother would secure that peace, but despite my daughter’s urgent pleading my instinct said that the road to Bebbanburg lay through Hornecastre, not through Ledecestre. And I have always trusted instinct. It might defy reason and sense, but instinct is the prickle at the back of the neck that tells you danger is close. So I trust instinct.
    So next day, despite all my daughter had said, I rode to Hornecastre.
    Hornecastre was a bleak place, though the Romans had valued it enough to build a stone-walled fort just south of the River Beina. They had built no roads, so I assumed the fort had been made to guard against ships coming upriver, and those ships would have belonged to our ancestors, the first Saxons to cross the sea and take a new land. And it was good land, at least to the north where low hills provided rich pasture. Two Danish families and their slaves had settled in nearby steadings, though both had been told to leave as soon as the West Saxons occupied the ancient fort. ‘Why weren’t the Danes living in the fort?’ I asked Egil. He was a sober, middle-aged man with long plaited moustaches who had grown up not far from Hornecastre, though now he served in Lindcolne’s garrison as commander of the night watchmen. When the West Saxons had first occupied Hornecastre’s fort he had been sent with a small force to watch them, which he had done from a safe distance, until Sigtryggr’s caution had caused him to be summoned back again to Lindcolne. I had insisted that he return to Hornecastre with me. ‘If we assault the fort,’ I had told him, ‘it will help to have a man who knows it. I don’t. You do.’

    ‘A man called Torstein lived there,’ Egil said, ‘but he left.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘It floods, lord. Torstein’s two sons were drowned in a flood, lord, and he reckoned the Saxons had put a curse on the place. So he left. There’s a stream this side of the fort, a big one, and the river beyond? And the walls on that far side have fallen in places. Not on this side, lord,’ we were watching from the north, ‘but on the southern and eastern sides.’
    ‘It looks formidable enough from here,’ I said. I was staring at the fort, seeing its stone ramparts rearing gaunt above an expanse of rushes. Two banners hung on poles above the northern wall and a sullen wind occasionally lifted one to reveal the dragon of Wessex. The second banner must have been made from heavier cloth because the wind did not stir it. ‘What does the left-hand banner show?’ I asked Egil.
    ‘We could never make it out, lord.’
    I grunted, suspecting that Egil had never tried to get close enough to see that second banner. Smoke from cooking fires drifted up from the ramparts and from the fields to the south where, evidently, a part of Brunulf’s force was camped. ‘How many men are there?’ I asked.
    ‘Two hundred? Three?’ Egil sounded vague.
    ‘All warriors?’
    ‘They have some magicians with them, lord.’ He meant priests.
    We were a long way off from the fort, though doubtless the men on its walls had seen us watching from the low hilltop. Most of my men were hidden in the shallow valley behind. ‘Is there anything there besides the fort?’
    ‘A few houses,’ Egil said dismissively.
    ‘And the Saxons haven’t tried to come further north?’
    ‘Not since the first week they were here, lord. Now they’re just sitting there.’ He scratched his beard, trying to pinch a louse. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘they could have been roaming around, but we wouldn’t know. We were ordered to stay away from them, not to upset them.’

    ‘That was probably wise,’ I said, reflecting that I was about to do the very opposite.
    ‘So what do they want?’ Egil asked in an annoyed tone.
    ‘They want us to attack them,’ I said,