The Empty Throne (The Warrior Chronicles, Book 8) by Bernard Cornwell Page A

church, and we didn’t like to disturb them.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Ghosts, lord,’ he explained.
    ‘Sell them as relics,’ I said, ‘and use the money to buy a new bell.’
    ‘But they could be heathens!’ He sounded shocked.
    ‘So?’ I asked, then straightened, wincing at the inevitable pain. For now the foul-smelling cellar would be a prison for Brice and his men. They deserved worse. They had ransacked Æthelflaed’s house, making a pile of her most precious possessions; her clothes, tapestries, jewels, kitchen pots, and lamps. ‘It all belongs to her husband,’ Brice had told me sullenly, ‘and she won’t be needing finery in a nunnery.’
    So that, too, was part of the bargain Æthelhelm had made with Æthelred, that the powerful West Saxon would somehow force Æthelflaed into a convent. Would her brother approve of that? I wondered. But Edward, I realised, was probably jealous of his sister’s reputation. He was constantly being compared with his father and found wanting, and now, even worse, he was reckoned to be a lesser warrior than his sister. Kings, even decent ones like Edward, have pride. He might accept that he could never rival his father, but it must gall him to hear his sister praised. He would gladly see her retired to a convent.
    Father Aldwyn’s body had been brought into the church. Finan had dressed the corpse in the torn black robe, but there was no hiding the violence of the priest’s end. ‘What happened?’ Father Creoda had asked in an appalled whisper.
    ‘He killed himself out of remorse,’ I had told him.
    ‘He …’
    ‘Killed himself,’ I had growled.
    ‘Yes, lord.’
    ‘So as a suicide,’ I said, ‘he can’t be buried in hallowed ground. I don’t know why Finan even brought him into the church!’
    ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ Finan said, grinning.
    ‘So you’d best dig the bastard a deep grave somewhere out of town,’ I advised.
    ‘At a crossroads,’ Finan said.
    ‘A crossroads?’ Father Creoda asked.
    ‘So his soul gets confused,’ Finan explained. ‘He won’t know which way to go. You don’t want his spirit coming back here, God forbid, so plant him at a crossroads and confuse him.’
    ‘Confuse him,’ Father Creoda repeated, staring in horror at the grimace on the dead priest’s savaged face.
    Brice and his men were thrust down into the darkness of the shit-stinking cellar. They had all been stripped of their mail, their boots, their jewellery, and their sword belts. ‘You can let them out in two days,’ I told the town’s reeve. ‘Throw down some bread for the bastards, give them some buckets of water, then leave them for two whole days. They’ll try to persuade you to let them out sooner, they’ll try to bribe you, but don’t release them.’
    ‘I won’t, lord.’
    ‘If you do,’ I said, ‘you make an enemy of me and of Lady Æthelflaed.’ There had been a time, I thought, when that threat carried real weight.
    ‘And of me,’ Finan put in.
    The reeve shuddered at Finan’s soft words. ‘They’ll stay two days, lord, I promise. I swear it on our Lord’s body.’ He turned and bowed to the altar, where feathers from the geese expelled from the cornfield by Saint Werburgh were encased in silver.
    ‘Let them out sooner,’ Finan added, ‘and the ghosts of the bones will come for you.’
    ‘I swear it, lord!’ the reeve said in desperation.
    ‘I suppose they’ll bury me at a crossroads,’ I said to Finan as we walked back to Æthelflaed’s house.
    He grinned. ‘We’ll give you a proper funeral. We’ll light a fire big enough to dim the sun. Trust me, your gods will know you’re coming.’
    I smiled, but I was thinking of the crossroads, of all the roads that the Romans had made, and which crumbled across Britain. Parts were washed away by floods, sometimes the stones were stolen because the big flat slabs made good field markers or foundations for pilings. As often as not when we travelled across country we