Chapter Text
Someone was watching him.
Some higher power. It had to be so.
Uhtred kept his head down, face hidden by the hood of Aleifr’s cloak as he passed unnoticed through streets and streets of cheerful Vikings, of celebration and debauchery. No stranger to shadow walking, he stepped swiftly - but not too swiftly - and took care to swerve slightly from one side to the other, blending in with the drunken mob.
And yet... It felt too easy.
Entirely unnoticed, he passed through thick crowds that seemed to part before him, and it was as though nobody paid him any attention. Not one Dane gave him so much as a single curious glance, an unbothered brush of eyes. Instead, they looked at everything but him; the floor, their cups, some tits.
No, tonight it felt as though he was invisible, and the feeling was eery. It was as though he had become darkness itself, as though everyone was blind to him, and it made him wonder whether something unearthly had laid a charm over him.
Where the Gods watching him? Had they taken a gamble on his fate?
Or was it that other God… the one without a name?
The thought made Uhtred’s hair stand up on the back of his neck. He thought of the things he’d said tonight, of the times he’d spoken in God’s name and claimed to be a Christian. Was this particular God angered by such things? Uhtred couldn’t say for certain.
He didn’t know enough about him.
And he hated the idea of having to deal with a God he knew nothing about. But then, what had he expected? That Alfred’s God would abandon him, would let Uhtred attempt to rescue him all on his own? Unsupervised and scrambling? No, Finan was right, if the Christian God existed, one thing was clear: Alfred was loved by him.
So of course he’d be at play here.
But then maybe it was nonsense, maybe his closeness to Christians was making him paranoid. Alfred's constant praying, Finan's confidence in divine intervention, the girl in the tattered dress with her desperate focus on her God's forgiveness… these things pressed on him. They stained his mind like ink, insisting on his attention. Too invasive was the memory of Alfred kneeling in the breeze, hair fluttering as he turned to the sky, the way he'd looked as if he was in love…
As if his God is the only one he trusts to save him.
The only one he needs.
Nonsense.
Uhtred tried to shake it off. He tried to stop thinking about Gods, fickle or merciful, manyfold or one and true. This was useless. Spiritual crises weren’t what he needed when he had a very human enemy to fight.
Now was not the time to be jealous of a God, real or imagined.
And yet it seemed that whatever lurked in the darkness stayed at Uhtred's side, because when he reached the sea gate, Hæsten's guards were dull-minded buffoons. Uhtred watched the pair drink and gamble for a while and when they'd finished their game and started arguing, blaring about the silver they owed one another, he knew his time had come. He saw one of them grab the other by the cloth of his collar and used that distraction to swiftly slip by them, cloaked and silent as the night.
Now, he stood on the dark and scrubby slope outside the city walls, looking down on the well-lit scene below.
The very well-lit scene below.
Shit.
How were there still so many people?
At least, the ship that was meant for Alfred was easy to spot. It was fastened to the main dock, and while other ships lay half-concealed in darkness, this one was alight with torches. Half a dozen workers crawled all over it like ants, busily climbed on and off the ship, hurrying to do whatever needed to be done.
The sight made Uhtred sick to the stomach.
Searching his mind for a solution, he found no way to accomplish his mission. Not while they were still working. There were simply too many of them. If he tried to kill them, some would run, some would fight him, and others would scream for help. It would be a disaster.
Could this really be what would do them in? That Dunwhich had too many people working in its harbour?
Uhtred couldn't accept that. He thought about Alfred, waiting in his cell. Thought about how the king had to feel utterly abandoned, had to be terrified.
Similar to how he'd seen him before, he now imagined Alfred on his hands and knees, praying through the night with deep rings under his eyes, preparing for a terrible end. He knew that if he couldn't find a way to do this, to fire the ships and buy them time, he'd have to break into Alfred's cell before first light. He would have to face him, to look into his pain-dulled eyes and explain what he had tried, how he had failed at it, and then he’d have to...
He had to fire the ships.
Determined to get on with it, Uhtred began to scan the wide incline below. He crept from one spot to the next, knowing it had to be there, that hidden carcass, somewhere in a bush or a ditch.
What he had hoped would take a matter of minutes, took him almost an hour.
When he found it, in the end, he discovered it near the place he’d started searching. By that time, he was already half-insane with spiralling anxiety. He couldn’t believe he’d overlooked the carcass so carelessly, and he cursed himself for his stupidity, his mind battering him with one insult after another. During his time-consuming search, he’d feared that Finan hadn’t made it to Dunwhich, had somehow been found out or been stopped on the road. Images had pressed upon his mind that he didn't want to contemplate; of Alfred, abused and bleeding, crying out for mercy, alone in a sea of jeering enemies.
But now there it was, the body of a doe, and he wondered why he hadn’t found it earlier by its smell alone.
The stench was horrible, a vomit-inducing mix of rancid fat and decaying flesh. When he opened the pre-cut belly, flies buzzing around his head in a revolting cloud, he saw that it was filled to the brim with oil-drenched bundles of cloth. Maggots were crawling all over the fatty, cream coloured linen, but thankfully, it hadn’t dried out, and so he carefully took one bundle after the other and laid them onto the grass beside the carcass. Afterwards, he wiped his slick, gory hands on his trousers as well as he could.
He counted twenty bundles, and then he turned, counting the ships.
Thirteen. Some of them bigger than the others.
Not much room for error.
Although Uhtred had lost valuable time, there was an advantage to his hour long search; the main ship had apparently been readied for tomorrow’s journey, and most of the workers had gone. Once more, Uhtred asked himself if Alfred’s God had stalled him, if he had hidden the carcass and its stench from his senses, not trusting Uhtred to wait for the workers to finish.
I wouldn’t have tried anything stupid, Uhtred thought sullenly.
I know he’s too important.
Again, Uhtred realized that in the best case scenario, he was talking to himself like a crazed man, and in the worst case scenario, he was competing with a God... so he stopped himself, tried to simply be grateful for the absence of workers.
The four guards that remained, however, where clearly armed. They sat on barrels near the pier, playing with dice, though they weren’t unwary. One of them especially, the oldest man, regularly let his gaze wander the dark plane above them, and Uhtred was grateful for the dense shrubbery that kept him well hidden.
Frowning, he looked back to his rotten treasure, trying to think of what to do next. It was then that he spotted a thing in the darkness. There, in the bushes above the carcass, lay something else. When Uhtred crept closer he saw that it was another bundle of cloth, clean this time, and when he pulled it out of the leaves, unfolded it in his hands, it took a moment to realize what he was looking at.
It was a bow. A bow and a quiver with seven arrows.
Excited, Uhtred's hands followed the smooth wood of its limbs, heart jumping in his chest. Of course, the situation was still nowhere near perfect, but this definitely made things easier. Finan had to have seen how busy the harbour was and sought to help him with his task. If he survived this, he’d have to buy him rivers of ale.
Not wanting to waste any more time than he already had, Uhtred quickly fastened the quiver to his belt. He then packed the twenty bundles into the cloth that the bow had been wrapped in and slung the self-made sack over his shoulder. After he’d taken up the bow, he slowly stole closer to the ship and its four guards, careful to remain unseen.
By God’s intervention or without it, Uhtred had a plan.
Surrounding the guards and enabling their game of dice, were four torches, fastened to the railings of the pier, and Uhtred intended to use one of them to ignite his missiles. Before he could do that, though, the men had to go, and so he tip-toed further and further, until he didn’t dare to take one more step, too close to the circle of light around them. There, he laid the sack into the grass again and crouched down into the bushes, waiting for the right opportunity.
After what seemed like an eternity, his patience paid off.
The old man, the one that was more watchful than the others, stood up and excused himself. Slowly, feet catching on the thickened underbrush, he made his way towards the darkened slope where Uhtred was lying in wait. His experience meant that he wasn't stupid enough to leave their circle of light, and so the man stopped right at its edge. There, he started busying himself with his fly.
But right when he began to piss, an arrow whooshed passed his head - and one of his friends dropped to the floor like a falling sack of grain. Still pissing, the old man turned, trying to comprehend what had happened, but before he could make sense of it, another arrow sped past him. Open-mouthed, with his hand around his cock, he watched a second man fall from his barrel, an arrow in his heart, and when finally, he turned in panic to see where the attack had come from, Uhtred stepped into the light and rammed a seax into his throat.
He sputtered blood, gripped Uhtred’s hand where it pushed the blade into his flesh, and for only a moment, their eyes met, man recognizing man. Then his fingers slackened and he too fell to the floor.
By now, the fourth man was running up the hill as if the devil was chasing him, screaming from the top of his lungs as he followed the path that led to the gate. Briefly, Uhtred considered to take up the bow again, to try to stop him, but he discarded the idea. Already, the man was almost out of range, must have been heard by a dozen men, and Uhtred’s time was ticking.
Decision made, he grabbed the sack of fat-soaked cloth and ran towards the pier, ripping a torch from its mount as he passed it on his way to the main ship. He threw the sack aboard and climbed after it, grunting as he heaved himself over the railing. His pulse thrummed in his neck as he opened up the sack to take up the first jumble of oil, linen and maggots.
The sweet tension of impending relief was almost unbearable.
Without time to think, he lit the first bundle with the torch in his hand and threw it onto the deck. It landed about fifteen feet away from him, yet he didn’t stop to worry about its proximity. Instead, he did the same with several more bundles, determined to destroy this ship in particular.
Then, with Alfred’s death sentence burning around him, he started to fling his bundles onto the ships that were further away, working quickly. Though he contented himself with one hit for each ship, time was chasing him. With twenty pieces of cloth and thirteen ships, he knew he didn’t have the luxury of aiming carelessly, especially since he’d used the first three bundles on one ship alone. Even focused as he was, his task was difficult, so difficult in fact that when he saw the reinforcements descend from the gate, heard the echo of horns and panicked shouting, there was no time to run.
Well, where are you now? he thought petulantly. Is my life not good enough to save?
He was tackled seconds after he’d thrown the last ball of fire.
Pressing him into the ground, his attacker wasted no time before he punched him in the face, Uhtred’s already broken nose flaring in pain. With his eyes pressed shut in a grimace, he grabbed the man by his shoulders and rolled them over, pinning him under his weight. They fought like this for a while, wrestling on the burning floor, until Uhtred found himself beside the crackling fire, flames reaching for him. The Dane above him snarled, pushing him further towards the blaze, and in the folly of wild instinct, Uhtred headbutted him and pressed him into the flames, hissing as the skin of his own hand melted in the heat.
Cursing, he jumped up and away from the flames, listening to the man’s ear-splitting screams of agonized death. His heartbeat throbbed hotly in the raw flesh of his hand and he spun around, but there were no more attackers waiting for him. Instead, he saw panicked men scurry along the dock, yelling for buckets as they watched the ship go up in flames around him.
As they watched all ships go up in flames around him.
For a moment, Uhtred lost himself in the euphoria of it, in the sight of blazing skies and masts that looked like torches, but then his aching skin and the heat around him brought him back. He needed to get off the ship or he would burn with it. Spinning, there was only one way he could see through the flames, and he took it without hesitation, jumping to safety.
When he hit the water, it flooded his hand with liquid pain.
Under the surface, the world above him turned into a muffled dream, deafening noise nothing but a distorted melody in the calmness of the sea. Above him, the water was an orange dance of lights and shadows, and Uhtred would have liked to stay, felt soothed by it even. But his lungs were screaming for him to take a breath.
When he breached the surface, the Danes had almost reached him, wading towards him with wrath-filled eyes. He thought for a second about trying to escape by swimming out into the sea, but before he could make a decision, hands had grasped him and he was pushed underwater, hurrying to hold his breath. From here, it was a pulling and shoving, an undignified scuffle of fists that left him heaving for air, seawater burning in his throat and nose. At first, he fought two of them, then three, and when they dragged him from the water, half-drowned like a rat, they were six already.
He was dumped onto the sandy shore, and his glorious fantasies of slaying Danes died a sudden death when the onslaught came from every direction, boots trampling his limbs, his head and chest. His attackers didn't leave him time to breathe, to cry out or to moan, much less to fight. Soon, direction wasn't a concept anymore, nor were the parts of his body. He didn't know where his legs began or where his arms ended, it was all just pain, agony melting him whole, and desperate to escape, he curled around his mind’s enclosure, trying to shield it from the raining fire.
Before, at last, the anguish tore his mind apart, his last thought was one of triumph.
But when they threw him into Alfred’s cell, he hit the floor without a sound and didn’t stir.
