Then something solid crashed into me from behind, and I fell forward, face down into the sun-baked ground. I caught a whiff of sweat and greased leather mixed with the sweet smell of bruised grass as a heavy weight dropped on my shoulders. Someone was kneeling on my back. My helmet flew off and rolled clear. A hand was grasping my hair, pulling my head upward; for a ghastly moment I thought the Mercian was stretching my throat ready to cut it. Then his hand pushed forward sharply and my forehead slammed down on to the earth. Pain jolted through me. I tried to feebly squirm away, but the grip on my hair held fast, and the Mercian raised my head and battered it against the ground a second time. This time I did not resist. I welcomed the wave of blackness that engulfed me.
For more than a month I had known that this would happen.
I came to my senses, still lying face down. Someone had lashed my wrists together with a strip of rawhide. My face was now pressed against cracked and hardened mud. The slime on my cheek had the smell of chicken droppings. I stifled a groan and raised my head to look around. It was mid-afternoon, the sky had clouded over, and I was sprawled in the yard in front of my father’s great hall, my own home. A large group of Mercians was clustered in front of the building, still dressed in their war gear. They were joking amongst themselves and taking turns to step forward and pick up an item from a pile of goods heaped on the ground. I recognized the helmet I had been wearing at the battle and, with a lurch in my stomach, my father’s long ornate sword. To my right was the man supervising the division of the booty. He was seated on a tall carved wooden seat, which had once been my father’s place of honour. The Mercians must have dragged the better furniture outside when they looted the hall. The man sitting in my father’s place was middle-aged with a thick powerful body and heavy rounded shoulders. His hair was curled and greased and elaborately piled up on his head. Even without the crown that he wore for his image on the coins from his royal mint I had no difficulty in recognizing Offa, King of Mercia. I lowered my head back into the farmyard filth and lay still, gathering my thoughts. The sight of my father’s sword confirmed that he must have perished on the battlefield. I doubted that my two brothers had survived. My gold torc was gone, of course. I could feel the bruise around my throat where my captor had wrenched it away; doubtless it was now hidden in his clothing. I toyed with the idea of denouncing him but decided it would serve no purpose. To the victor, the spoils. Last autumn, Offa had sent a message to my father, demanding to be acknowledged as his overlord and a payment of tribute. When the demand had been rebuffed, Offa had used the excuse to invade. Our battered little kingdom would first be raped, then either become a tributary of Mercia or absorbed directly into Offa’s domain, which already included much of England.
I had already dreamed it in vivid detaiclass="underline" an antlered stag was grazing peacefully on a lush meadow when a huge dangerous-looking bull, led by a vixen, emerged from the dark forest in the distance. With the vixen scuttling a few paces ahead, the bull advanced. Too late, the stag raised its head and confronted the intruder with its antlers. The bull charged and gored its victim to death while the vixen screamed her encouragement. I had woken, drenched with cold sweat, realizing the screams were my own.
Rough hands were hauling me to my feet. Someone — I presumed he was the Mercian warrior who had captured me — took me by the elbow and marched me over towards King Offa. The pile of booty was gone. Now it was time to dispose of the prisoners of war.
A group of well-dressed men stood behind the royal seat: the royal councillors. To my shock and utter disgust my uncle Cyneric was among them. He must have surrendered very early in the fight and been spared. The look he gave me, a mixture of shame and arrogance, told me all I needed to know — he was now King Offa’s man.
‘This is the only surviving son, my lord,’ said my escort.
Offa looked me up and down with hard, grey eyes. He saw a raw-boned young man of ordinary height, dishevelled and filthy, dressed in a tunic and leggings, strands of lank yellow hair flopping over his dung-streaked face.
‘What is your name?’ Offa asked. His voice was gravelly, and he spoke with the thick vowels of his own dialect.
‘Sigwulf, my lord.’
The royal mouth twisted into a sardonic smile.
‘Victorious Wolf. Not very appropriate.’
My turncoat uncle stepped forward from the councillors.
‘He is the youngest son. There was another. .’
A raised hand cut his sentence short. Cyneric was already being treated like the vassal he had become.
‘So what are we to do with you?’ Offa asked me.
I stared down at the ground and said nothing. We both knew that the sensible step was to put me to death, ensuring the direct bloodline of the kingship died with me. I wondered if my uncle had been dealing in secret with the Mercians before the invasion. His wife was one of Offa’s distant cousins. The marriage was meant to be a bond-weaver, one of those alliances that cement friendships between neighbouring kingdoms. In this case it had been the reverse. Perhaps the screaming vixen had been her.
‘Stand closer, lad. And let me see your face,’ growled Offa.
I shuffled forward and raised my head, flicking aside my long hair. At that precise moment the sun broke through a gap in the clouds and lit up the farmyard. The light fell full on my face as I found myself staring directly into the grim countenance of the man who was bold and ambitious enough to style himself Rex Anglorum, King of the English.
He flinched, just briefly, and then made a small movement as if to cross himself before he stayed his hand.
I was born with dark-blue eyes. This is quite normal among my people, and usually the colour of a baby’s eyes changes to a lighter shade of blue when they are a few months old. Sometimes their eyes turn to grey, and very occasionally to brown. But something different happened to me. The colour of my right eye did alter, gradually becoming a greenish hazel, while the left eye faded to the normal pale blue. By contrast my twin brother — of whom I shall write later — underwent the opposite. His left eye changed colour, and his right eye remained the same. To many in our community these were certain signs of the Devil, all the more so because in the pain and difficulty of giving birth to twins, our mother died.
Whatever fate King Offa had in mind for me changed in the instant that he saw my mismatched eyes.
I sensed the hesitation in the king’s manner as he tried to devise a way of eliminating me without doing me an injury. He was thinking that harming anyone who bore the Devil’s mark would invite trouble from the Wicked One.
He turned to question my uncle.
‘What do we know about this youth?’
‘His father’s pet, my lord,’ answered my uncle. I could hear his bitter dislike of me in his voice. ‘Too precious to be sent away for fostering like his older brothers. Taught how to read and write instead of how to hunt and make war.’
‘Not dangerous then?’ Offa raised an eyebrow.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ my uncle replied hastily. ‘He is slippery, not to be trusted.’ He produced a sycophant’s smile, nastily deferential. ‘Maybe Your Majesty should have him tonsured and shut up in a monastery.’
Incarcerating an unwanted person in a monastery was an effective way of putting them out of sight and mind.