The Pagan Lord (12 page)

The dawn showed chaos. Just grey light revealing white horrors on top of short, steep waves, and the light grew greyer to reveal a sea whipped to fury. Our faces stung from the spray, our bodies ached, we wanted nothing but sleep, but still we fought the sea. Twelve men rowed, three fought the loom of the steering oar, and the others used helmets and buckets to empty the boat of the water that crashed over the prow or poured over the side as the hull tipped or a wave suddenly rose like a beast from the deep. When we were at the peak of a wave I could see nothing but turmoil, and then we would plunge into a swirling valley and the wind would vanish for a few heartbeats and the water would reach for us as the next sea roared from ahead and threatened to fall and break us.

I told that bitch Ran that she was beautiful, I told that sea-hag that she was the dream of men and the hope of gods, and perhaps she heard me and looked at her reflection in the silver shield because slowly, imperceptibly, the fury allayed. It did not die. The sea was still ragged ruin and the wind was like a madman, but the waves were lower and men could pause in their bailing, though the oarsmen still had to struggle to keep the bows headed into the anger. ‘Where are we?’ Finan asked. He sounded exhausted.

‘Between the sea and the sky,’ was all the answer I could give. I had a sunstone, which was a slab of glassy pale rock the size of a man’s hand. Such stones come from the land of ice, and it had cost me precious gold, but by holding a sunstone to the sky and sweeping it from horizon to horizon, the stone will betray the sun’s position behind the clouds, and when a man knows where the sun is, whether it is high or low, he can judge which way to travel. The sunstone glimmers when it looks toward the hidden sun, but that day the clouds were too dense and the rain too hard, and so the sunstone stayed sullen and mute. Yet I sensed the wind had shifted eastwards, and, around mid-morning, we half raised the sail and that snarling wind bellied the rope-strengthened cloth so that
Middelniht
raced ahead, crashing her prow into waves, but riding them now instead of fighting them. I blessed the Frisians who had built her, and I wondered how many men had gone to their wet graves that night, and then I turned
Middelniht
’s prow to what I thought was halfway between north and west. I needed to go north and west, always north and west, and I had no idea where we were, or which way to steer, except to follow the whisper of instinct that is a shipmaster’s friend. It is a warrior’s friend too, and as that day passed my mind wandered as a ship wanders in a ship-killing wind. I thought of battles long ago, of shield walls, of the fear, and of the prickling sense that an enemy is near, and I tried to find an omen in every cloud, every sea-bird, and every breaking wave. I thought of Bebbanburg, a fortress that had defied the Danes for all my lifetime, and the madness of planning to capture it with a small band of tired, wet, storm-beaten men, and I prayed to the Norns, those three goddesses who weave our fate at the foot of the world’s tree, to send me a sign, an omen of success.

We sailed and I had no idea where we were, only that my weary men could sleep while I steered, and when I could stay awake no longer Finan took the oar and I slept like the dead. I woke at night and still that sea seethed and the wind screamed, and I struggled forward, past sleeping men and half-woken men, to stand beneath the dragon’s head and peer into the darkness. I was listening rather than looking, listening for the sound of breakers crashing against the land, but all I could hear was the roar of water and wind. I shivered. My clothes were soaked, the wind was cold, I felt old.

The storm still blew in the early grey light, though nowhere near so fiercely as before, and I turned
Middelniht
west as if we fled the dawn. And the Norns loved us because we found land, though whether it was Northumbria or Scotland I had no idea. I was sure it was not East Anglia because I could see high rocky bluffs where breakers splintered into great gouts of spray. We turned northwards, and
Middelniht
battled the waves as we sought some place to rest from the sea’s assault, and then at last we rounded a small headland and I saw a sheltered cove where the water shivered rather than broke and the cove was edged with a great long beach and the gods must have loved me because there was the ship I sought.

She was a trading ship, half
Middelniht
’s length, and she had been driven ashore by the storm, but the impact had not broken her. Instead she stood canted on the beach, and three men were trying to dig a channel through the sand to refloat her. They had already lightened their stranded ship because I could see the unloaded cargo heaped above the high-tide line, and nearby was a great driftwood fire where the crew must have warmed and dried themselves. That crew had seen us, and, as
Middelniht
drew closer, they backed away, retreating to some dunes that overlooked the beach. ‘That’s the ship we need,’ I told Finan.

‘Aye, she’ll do well,’ he said, ‘and those poor bastards have done half the work of salvage already.’

The poor bastards had made a beginning, but it still took most of the day to wrestle the stranded ship off the sand and back into the water. I took twenty men ashore and we ended up emptying the ship of all her ballast, unstepping the mast, and then putting oars beneath the hull to lift her from the sand’s sucking embrace. The impact of her stranding had sprung some of her planks, but we stuffed the seams with seaweed. She would leak like a sieve, but I did not need her to float for long. Just long enough to deceive Ælfric.

The crew of the ship found the courage to come back down to the beach while we were still digging the trenches that would let us slide the lifting oars beneath the hull. There were two men and a small boy, all Frisians. ‘Who are you?’ one of the men asked nervously. He was a big man, broad-shouldered, with the weather-worn face of a sailor. He carried an axe low in one hand, as if to demonstrate that he meant me no harm.

‘I’m no one you know,’ I said, ‘and you are?’

‘Blekulf,’ he growled the name, then nodded at the ship, ‘I built her.’

‘You built her and I need her,’ I said bluntly. I walked to where he had piled his cargo. There were four barrels in which glassware had been packed in straw, two barrels of copper nails, a small box of precious amber, and four heavy quern stones, shaped and finished. ‘You can keep all this,’ I said.

‘For how long?’ Blekulf asked sourly. ‘What good is cargo without a ship?’ He looked inland, though there was little to be seen except rain clouds hanging low over a bleak landscape. ‘The bastards will strip me bare.’

‘What bastards?’ I asked.

‘Scots,’ he said. ‘Savages.’

So that was where we were. ‘Are we north or south of Foirthe?’ I asked him.

‘South,’ he said, ‘I think. We were trying to make the river when the storm came.’ He shrugged.

‘You were taking that cargo to Scotland?’ I asked him.

‘No, to Lundene. There were eight of us.’

‘Eight crew?’ I asked, surprised that so many had been aboard.

‘Eight ships. As far as I know we’re the only one left.’

‘You did well to survive,’ I said.

He had survived through good seamanship. He had realised the sudden storm was going to be brutal so he had taken the sail off the yard, split it so that it could be fitted around the mast, then used the nails from his cargo to fasten the sail to the ship’s sides to fashion a makeshift deck. It had kept the small boat from being swamped, but made it almost impossible to row, and so he had been driven onto this long, lonely strand. ‘There was a savage here this morning,’ he said glumly.

‘Just one?’

‘He had a spear. He watched us, then went.’

‘So he’ll be coming back with his friends,’ I said, then looked at the small boy who I reckoned was eight or nine years old. ‘Your son?’

‘My only son,’ Blekulf said.

I called to Finan. ‘Take the boy on board
Middelniht
,’ I ordered him, then looked back to the Frisian. ‘Your son is my hostage, and you’re coming with me. If you do everything I say then I’ll give you the ship back, with its cargo.’

‘And what must I do?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘For a start,’ I said, ‘keep your ship safe through tonight.’

‘Lord!’ Finan called, and I turned to see him pointing northwards. A dozen men mounted on small ponies had appeared on the dunes. They carried spears. But we outnumbered them and they had the sense to keep their distance as we struggled to relaunch Blekulf’s ship, which he said was named
Reinbôge
. It seemed an odd name to me.

‘It rained all the time we built her,’ he explained, ‘and on the day we launched her there was a double rainbow.’ He shrugged. ‘My wife named her.’

We finally had the
Reinbôge
lifted and could move her. We chanted Ran’s mirror song as we edged her down the beach and into the water. Finan went back aboard
Middelniht
and we fastened a line from the warship’s stern to the
Reinbôge
’s bow, and towed the smaller ship clear of the breaking waves. Then we had to pile ballast and cargo back into her fat belly. We stepped the mast and tensioned it with braided leather lines. The pony-riders watched us, but did not try to interfere. They must have thought the stranded ship would be easy prey, but
Middelniht
’s arrival had spoiled their hopes, and, as dusk fell, they turned and rode away.

I left Finan to command
Middelniht
, while I sailed in
Reinbôge
. She was a good ship, taut and solid, though we needed to bail her constantly because of the sprung planks, but she rode the uneasy sea with competent ease. The wind dropped in the night. It still blew fiercely, but the anger was gone from the waves. The sea was now a confusion of scudding whitecaps that faded into the darkness as we rowed offshore. All night the wind blew, gusting sometimes, but never reaching the rage of the storm’s height, and in the clouded dawn we set
Reinbôge
’s torn sail and surged ahead of
Middelniht
. We went southwards.

And at midday, under a torn sky and on a broken sea, we came to Bebbanburg.

That is where it all began, a lifetime ago.

I had been a child when I saw the three ships.

In my memory they slid from a bank of sea mist, and perhaps they did, but memory is a faulty thing and my other images of that day are of a clear, cloudless sky, so perhaps there was no mist, but it seemed to me that one moment the sea was empty and the next there were three ships coming from the south.

They had been beautiful vessels. They had appeared to rest weightless on the ocean, and when their oars dug into the waves they skimmed the water. Their prows and sterns curled high and were tipped with gilded beasts, with serpents and dragons, and on that far-off summer’s day I thought that the three boats danced on the water, propelled by the rise and fall of their silver winged oar banks. I had stared entranced. They had been Danish ships, the first of the thousands that came to ravage Britain.

‘The devil’s turds,’ my father had growled.

‘And may the devil swallow them,’ my uncle had said. That was Ælfric, and that had been a lifetime ago. Now I sailed to meet my uncle again.

And what did Ælfric see on that morning when the storm was still grumbling and the wind whipping about the wooden ramparts of his stolen fortress? First he saw a small trading ship struggling southwards. The ship was under sail, but it was a sail torn to shreds and tatters that streamed off the yard. He saw two men trying to row the heavy hull, and every few moments they needed to stop rowing to bail water.

Or rather Ælfric’s sentries saw the
Reinbôge
struggling. The current was against her and the ripped sail and twin oars were fighting against it. The men watching from Bebbanburg must have thought she was a tired, battered ship, low in the water and lucky to be afloat, and we made it look as if we were trying to round the shallows off Lindisfarena to bring her safe into the shelter of the shallow harbour behind the fortress. The sentries would have seen that attempt fail, and watched as the wind drove us southwards down the coast, past the high ramparts and through the treacherous gap between the shore and the bird-shrieking Farnea Islands, and all the time the foundering ship came closer to land where the sea exploded in high shattering foam until she vanished behind the southern headland. All that they would have seen, and those men watching from Bebbanburg would have guessed that the
Reinbôge
was being shipwrecked close to Bedehal.

That is what they saw. They saw two men struggling with long oars and a third man steering the ship, but they did not see the seven warriors hidden down with the cargo, all of whom were covered by cloaks. They would have seen plunder, not peril, and they were distracted because, not long after the
Reinbôge
passed their stronghold, they saw a second ship, the
Middelniht
, and she was far more dangerous because the
Middelniht
was a warship, not a trading craft. She too was struggling. Men were bailing water, others were rowing, and the men on the high ramparts would see she had a depleted crew, that she only had ten oars, though those ten were enough to bring her safe around Lindisfarena and across the ragged water to the shallow entrance of the harbour behind Bebbanburg. So perhaps an hour after the
Reinbôge
disappeared, the
Middelniht
slid into Ælfric’s harbour.

So Ælfric’s men saw two ships. They saw two survivors of a terrible storm. They saw two ships seeking shelter. That was what Ælfric’s men saw, and that was what I wanted them to see.

I was still on board
Reinbôge
, while Finan commanded
Middelniht
. He knew that once inside Bebbanburg’s haven he would be questioned, but he had his answers ready. He would say they were Danes going south to East Anglia and were prepared to pay the Lord Ælfric for the privilege of shelter while they repaired their ship from the storm’s ravages. The story would suffice. Ælfric would not question it, but doubtless he would demand a high payment, and Finan had gold coins ready. I did not think Ælfric would want anything more than money. He lived among Danes and, though they were his enemies, he gained nothing by provoking their anger. He would take the gold and lie quiet, and all Finan had to do was tell his tale, pay the coin, and wait. He would have anchored as close to the fortress entrance as he could, and his men would be sprawled in apparent weariness. None wore mail, none had a sword, though both mail and swords were close to hand.