Chapter Twenty-four

Ursula was beginning to get angry. The girl with blind green eyes kept summoning her from her explorations and she hated it. The magic that surged through her had a life of its own and the girl could call to that magic, could draw it like iron to a magnet, and where her power went, Ursula followed.

It took a while for her to discover that she was angry. She had lost so much of her sense of her own self that at first she had thought that the emotion came from the hares leaping across the hillside or from the wolf pack howling at the moon.

Every time the girl brought her back, it was to the sound of the thin, wailing voice chanting incantations. The noise made the skin on Ursula’s real flesh-and-blood body shiver, as if it she’d heard chalk squeaking on a blackboard or a metal knife scraped across a china plate. There was always blood too when she awoke. The girl had killed some small animal and daubed herself and Ursula with gore. In the torchlight the faces of the Danes were fearful as the girl demanded that the Goddess speak.

The girl, who named herself Finna, was all focused will and strange magnetism. When Ursula tried to inhabit her mind, she found it hidden from her, as if the girl had lost herself in thick fog or the total darkness of a deep pit. There was no sense that the girl herself resisted Ursula’s intrusion; she was simply not there. Ursula could have gathered her magic together and blown the girl apart; it was a possibility. Ursula knew that the magic would allow her to kill with ease. She resisted the temptation, not because she thought it wrong – she no longer thought at all in any normal way – but because somehow she knew it would not work, that the girl was hidden from her. When Finna called Ursula back from her travelling with her nasty high-pitched whining, the bonfire that burned outdoors to light the yard in front of the Great Hall blazed so fiercely that Guthrum feared it was out of control and set men with buckets of earth to dampen it. Ursula turned the gentle breeze that fanned the flames of the night torches into a wind fierce enough to snuff them out and set cloaks flapping like sails in a storm.

‘The Goddess is growing angry,’ the girl Finna said, and all present took a step back from Ursula’s recumbent form and Ursula knew that the girl spoke the truth in that at least. Ursula was angry and growing angrier.

‘What must we do to please her?’ Guthrum asked anxiously. Ursula knew that he gained much status from his men by having a goddess at his side. Already the word had spread throughout the country that Freya herself had declared that Guthrum would be victorious, and that had brought many Aenglisc allies who might otherwise have proved troublesome. Ursula knew that he thought that he had won already.

‘Goddess!’ At Finna’s voice Ursula felt herself compelled to open her eyes, so that she saw the green-eyed girl’s small smile of triumph. The fire blazed wildly again but Finna ignored it. She was a plain, undernourished thing and yet her confidence and authority lent her a kind of glamour; Guthrum was utterly in thrall to her.

‘Are you hungry?’ the girl asked. It took a while for Ursula to understand the question; she had shared many meals that night but none had given nourishment to her body. It was hard to think about her body, but when she tried she found that her mouth was dry and tasted bad and that her stomach ached a little. She thought that perhaps that was hunger. Ursula nodded slowly, remembering the taste of hot venison, the way it felt in her mouth, the way it made her body feel well.

‘Then you shall be satisfied,’ the girl said, and turning to the assembled warriors and the battered Aenglisc women who served them she declared: ‘The Goddess hungers and she will be fed. We will prepare a sacrifice fit for her.’

Guthrum looked at Finna. ‘How many will do it?’

‘Twenty,’ she replied firmly as if she spoke for Ursula, but Ursula did not know what she was talking about. She disliked being in the girl’s presence. She disliked being close to Guthrum. There was much ugliness in the camp, too much fear and brutality and wild and dangerous drunkenness. Guthrum had made no effort to rein in the excesses of his troops and conditions in Cippenham were degenerating.

‘I doubt that we have that many Aenglisc men still living and the women are too useful to lose.’

‘Then find some men,’ she answered. ‘It is not wise to upset the Goddess.’