The Pale Horseman (11 page)

'Go!' I shouted, and the oars bit and the Fyrdraca surged out. Some of the oar blades
struck rock as we pulled, but none broke, and I was staring at the ship ahead, so close now,
and her prow was a snarling wolf, and I could see men and women staring at us, not
believing what they saw. They thought they saw a Danish ship, one of their own, yet we were
armed and we were coming for them. A man shouted a warning and they scrambled for their
weapons, and Leofric yelled at our men to put their hearts into the oars, and the long shafts
bent under the strain as Fyrdraca leaped across the small waves and I yelled at the men to
leave the oars, to come to the bows, and Cenwulf and the twelve men he commanded were
already there as our big bows slammed through the enemy oars, snapping them. Haesten had
done well. I had told him to steer for the forward part of the ship, where her freeboard was
low, and our bows rode up across her strakes, plunging her low in the water, and we
staggered with the impact, but then I jumped down into the wolf headed ship's belly.
Cenwulf and his men were behind me, and there we began the killing.

The enemy ship was so loaded with men that they probably outnumbered us, but they were
bone weary from a long day's rowing, they had not expected an attack, and we were hungry
for wealth. We had done this before and the crew was well trained, and they chopped their way
down the boat, swords and axes swinging, and the sea was slopping over the side so that we
waded through water as we clambered over the rowers' benches. The water about our feet
grew red. Some of our victims jumped overboard and clung to shattered oars in an attempt to
escape us.

One man, big-bearded and wild-eyed, came at us with a great sword and Eadric drove a
spear into his chest and Leofric struck the man's head with his axe, struck again, and blood
sprayed up to the sail

that was furled fore and aft on its long yard. The man sank to his knees and Eadric ground
the spear deeper so that blood spilled down to the water.

I almost fell as a wave tilted the half-swamped ship. A man screamed and lunged a spear
at me, I took it on my shield, knocked it aside and rammed Serpent-Breath at his face. He
half fell, trying to escape the lunge, and I knocked him over the side with my shield's heavy
boss. I sensed movement to my right and swung Serpent-Breath like a reaping scythe and
struck a woman in the head. She went down like a felled calf, a sword in her hand. I kicked
the sword away and stamped on the woman's belly.

A child screamed and I shoved her aside, lunged at a man in a leather jerkin, raised my
shield to block his axe blow and then spitted him on Serpent-Breath. The sword went deep
into his belly, so deep that the blade stuck and I had to stand on him to tug it free.

Cenwulf went past me, his snarling face covered in blood, sword swinging. The water was
up to my knees, and then I staggered and almost fell as the whole ship lurched and I
realised we had drifted ashore and struck rocks.

Two horses were tethered in the ship's belly and the beasts screamed at the smell of
blood. One broke its tether and jumped overboard, swimming white-eyed towards the open
sea.

'Kill them! Kill them!' I heard myself shouting. It was the only way to take a ship, to
empty her of fighting men, but she was now emptying herself as the survivors jumped onto
the rocks and clambered away through the sucking backwash of blood-touched water. A
half-dozen men had been left aboard Fyrdraca and they were fending her off the rocks with
oars.

A blade stabbed the back of my right ankle and I turned to see a wounded man trying to
hamstring me with a short knife and I stabbed down again and again, butchering him in the
weltering water, and I think he was the last man to die on board, though a few Danes were
still clinging to the ship's side and those we cut away.

The Fyrdraca was seaward of the doomed ship now, and I shouted at the men aboard to
bring her close. She heaved up and down, much higher than the half-sunk ship, and we threw
our plunder up and over the side. There were sacks, boxes and barrels. Many were heavy, and
some clinked with coin. We stripped the enemy dead of their valuables, taking six coats of
mail and a dozen helmets and we found another three coats of mail in the flooded bilge. I
took eight arm rings off dead men. We tossed weapons aboard Fyrdraca, then cut away the
captured ship's rigging. I loosed the remaining horse that stood shivering as the water
rose. We took the ship's yard and sail, and all the time her survivors watched from the shore
where some had found a precarious refuge above the sea-washed rocks. I went to the space
beneath her sleeping platform and found a great war-helm there, a beautiful thing with a
decorated face-plate and a wolf's head moulded in silver on the crown, and I tossed my old
helmet onto Fyrdraca and donned the new one, and then passed out sacks of coin. Beneath
the sacks was what I thought must be a small shield wrapped in black cloth and I half thought
of leaving it where it was, then threw it into Fyrdraca anyway. We were rich.

'Who are you?' a man shouted from onshore.

'Uhtred,' I called back.

He spat at me and I laughed. Our men were climbing back on board Fyrdraca now. Some were
retrieving oars from the water, and Leofric was pushing Fyrdraca away, fearful that she
would be caught on the rocks. 'Get on board!' he shouted at me, and I saw I was the last man,
and so I took hold of Fyrdraca's stern, put a foot on an oar, and heaved myself over her
side. 'Row!' Leofric shouted, and so we pulled away from the wreck.

Two young women had been thrown up with the plunder and I found them weeping by
Fyrdraca's mast. One spoke no language that I recognised and later we discovered she was
from Ireland, but the other was Danish and, as soon as I squatted beside her, she lashed
out at me and spat in my face. I slapped her back, and that made her lash out again. She was a
tall girl, strong, with a tangled mass of fair hair and bright blue eyes. She tried to claw
her fingers through the eye-holes of my new helmet and I had to slap her again, which made
my men laugh. Some were shouting at her to keep fighting me, but instead she suddenly
burst into tears and leaned back against the mast root. I took off the helmet and asked her
name, and her only answer was to wail that she wanted to die, but when I said she was free
to throw herself off the ship she did not move. Her name was Freyja, she was fifteen years
old, and her father had been the owner of the ship we had sunk. He had been the big man with
the sword, and his name had been Ivar and he had held land at Dyflin, wherever that was, and
Freyja began to weep again when she looked at my new helmet which had belonged to her
father.

‘He died without cutting his nails,' she said accusingly, as if I were responsible
for that ill luck, and it was bad fortune indeed because now the grim things of the
underworld would use Ivar's nails to build the ship that would bring chaos at the world's
end.

'Where were you going?' I asked her.

To Svein, of course. Ivar had been unhappy in Dyflin, which was in Ireland and had more
Norsemen than Danes and also possessed savagely unfriendly native tribes, and he had
been lured by the prospect of land in Wessex and so he had abandoned his Irish steading, put
all his goods and wealth aboard his ships, and sailed eastwards.

'Ships?' I asked her.

'There were three when we left,' Freyja said, 'but we lost the others in the night.'

I guessed they were the two ships we had seen earlier, but the gods had been good to me
for Freyja confirmed that her father had put his most valuable possessions into his own
ship, and that was the one we had captured, and we had struck lucky for there were barrels of
coin and boxes of silver. There was amber, jet and ivory. There were weapons and armour. We
made a rough count as the Fyrdraca wallowed offshore and we could scarce believe our
fortune. One box contained small lumps of gold, roughly shaped as bricks, but best of all
was the wrapped bundle which I had thought was a small shield, but which, when we unwrapped
the cloth, proved to be a great silver plate on which was modelled a crucifixion. All
about the loath scene, ringing the plate's heavy rim, were saints. Twelve of them. I assumed
they were the apostles and that the plate had been the treasure of some Irish church or
monastery before Ivar had captured it. I showed the plate to my men.

'This,' I said reverently, 'is not part of the plunder. This must go back to the
church.'

Leofric caught my eye, but did not laugh.

'It goes back to the church,' I said again, and some of my men, the more pious ones,
muttered that I was doing the right thing. I wrapped the plate and put it under the
steering platform.

'How much is your debt to the church?' Leofric asked me.

'You have a mind like a goat's arsehole,' I told him.

He laughed, then looked past me. 'Now what do we do?' he asked.

I thought he was asking what we should do with the rest of our charmed lives, but instead
he was gazing at the shore where, in the evening light, I could see armed men lining the
cliff top. The Britons of Dyfed had come for us, but too late. Yet their presence meant we
could not go back into our cove, and so I ordered the oars to be manned and for the ship to
row eastwards. The Britons followed us along the shore. The woman who had escaped in the
night must have told them we were Saxons and they must have been praying we would seek refuge
on land so they could kill us. Few ships stayed at sea overnight, not unless they were forced
to, but I dared not seek shelter and so I turned south and rowed away from the shore, while in
the west the sun leaked red fire through rifts in the cloud so that the whole sky glowed as if
a god had bled across the heavens.

'What will you do with the girl?' Leofric asked me.

'Freyja?'

'Is that her name? You want her?'

'No,' I said.

'I do.'

'She'll eat you alive,' I warned him. She was probably a head taller than Leofric.

'I like them like that,' he said.

'All yours,' I said, and such is life. One day Freyja was the pampered daughter of an
earl and the next she was a slave.

I gave the coats of mail to those who deserved them. We had lost two men, and another
three were badly injured, but that was a light cost. We had, after all, killed twenty or
thirty Danes and the survivors were ashore where the Britons might or might not treat them
well. Best of all we had become rich and that knowledge was a consolation as night
fell.

Hoder is the god of the night and I prayed to him. I threw my old helmet overboard as a
gift to him, because all of us were scared of the dark that swallowed us, and it was a
complete dark because clouds had come from the west to smother the sky. No moon, no stars.
For a time there was the gleam of firelight on the northern shore, but that vanished and we
were blind. The wind rose, the seas heaved us, and we brought the oars inboard and let the air
and water carry us for we could neither see nor steer. I stayed on deck, peering into the
dark, and Iseult stayed with me, under my cloak, and I remembered the look of delight on
her face when we had gone into battle.

Dawn was grey and the sea was white-streaked grey and the wind was cold, and there was no
land in sight, but two white birds flew over us and I took them for a sign and rowed in the
direction they had gone, and late that day, in a bitter sea and cold rain, we saw land and
it was the isle of Puffins again where we found shelter in the cove and made fires ashore.

'When the Danes know what we've done …' Leofric said.

'… they'll look for us,' I finished the sentence for him.

'Lots of them will look for us.'

'Then it's time to go home,' I said.

The gods had been good to us and, next dawn, in a calming sea, we rowed south to the land
and followed the coast towards the west. We would go around the wild headlands where the
porpoises swam, turn east and so find home.

Much later I discovered what Svein had done after we parted company and, because
what he did affected my life and made the enmity between me and Alfred worse, I shall
tell it here.

I suspect that the thought of a gold altar at Cynuit had gnawed into his heart, for he
carried the dream back to Glwysing where his men gathered. Glwysing was another kingdom
of the Britons in the south of Wales, a place where there were good harbours and where the
king welcomed the Danes for their presence prevented Guthrum's men from raiding across the
Mercian border.

Svein ordered a second ship and its crew to accompany him and together they attacked
Cynuit. They came in the dawn, hidden by a mist, and I can imagine their beast-headed
ships appearing in the early greyness like monsters from a nightmare. They went up
river, oars splashing, then grounded the boats and the crews streamed ashore, men in mail
and helmets, Spear-Danes, Sword-Danes, and they found the half-built church and
monastery.

Odda the Younger was making the place, but he knew it was too close to the sea and so he
had decided to make it a fortified building. The church's tower was to be of stone, and
high enough for men to keep a watch from its summit, and the priests and monks were to be
surrounded by a palisade and a flooded ditch, but when Svein came ashore none of the work
was finished and so it was indefensible, and besides, there were scarce forty troops
there and those all died or fled within minutes of the Danes landing. The Danes then burned
what work had been done and cut down the high wooden cross which customarily marked a
monastery and which had been the first thing the builders had made.

The builders were monks, many of them novices, and Svein herded them together arid
demanded they show him where the valuables were hidden and promised them mercy if they
told the truth. Which they did. There was not much of value, certainly no altar of gold,
but supplies and timber needed to be purchased and so the monks had a chest of silver
pennies which was reward enough for the Danes, who then pulled down the half-constructed
church tower, wrecked the unfinished palisade and slaughtered some cattle. Then Svein
asked the monks where Ubba was buried and was met by sullen silence, and the swords were
drawn again and the question asked a second time, and the monks were forced to confess that.
the church was being built directly over the dead chieftain's grave. That grave had been an
earth mound, but the monks had dug it tip and thrown the body into the river, and when the
Danes heard that story the mercy fled from their souls.