Blood Feud (2 page)

I have wondered, since, what shape my life would have taken if the wind had been blowing from the east, in that grey dawn.

Later, I came to a place where the track forked, and took the left-hand branch for the very good reason that, at least on that first stretch, it led downhill. My memory of the days that followed is blurred, as though I looked back through a moorland mist. For the most part, I must have lived off the country, though it was growing late in the year for birds’ eggs. Once or twice I think I begged from a woman at a steading gate; once I know I helped a man droving cattle, whose dog had gone lame, and shared his supper and his fire at the day’s end. And then one day, towards evening, I came, with the shoes worn off my feet, round the shoulder of a wooded ridge, and saw – away to my left – a narrow combe running down to something shimmering sword-grey between two juts of land, that I knew from listening to the tales of travelling men must be the sea.

I headed towards it, and lost it as I dropped downhill. Instead, the combe widened before me. Behind me were the high moors and the wild wind-stunted oak woods; below, I saw rough pasture that men had in-taken from the wilds; and in the small fields across the valley, below the turf-and-thatch huddle of a village, they were getting in the harvest. I stood looking across to the homely pattern of fields, and knew suddenly that I was tired and hungry. It was the first time I had thought clearly about anything since the night my mother died. I thought, ‘It may be that in this place they will give me
work and food and a night’s shelter,’ and I walked on downhill, forded the little stream at the bottom where it ran bright and shallow over speckled stones, and came up the far side to the in-fields, where the men were cutting the last swathes of the evening.

I checked among the hawthorns of a wind-break, and stood looking on, wishing that I had been there earlier, when the women would have been bringing out the great noon-time jars of butter-milk to set in the shade. And as I stood there, I heard a low growl behind me, and swung round, to see a man with a couple of leashed deerhounds standing not a spear’s length away. He stood leaning on his hunting spear and looking down at me. He was hard-faced and weather-beaten, and wore a rough woollen tunic like any of the men in the fields; but it was strapped round his waist by a belt of fine crimson leather, and by this, and by the fact that he walked abroad with his hounds while everyone else slaved at the harvest. I guessed that he must be the chief. A Thane, my mother would have called him.

I made the sign for coming in peace, with open hands to show that there were no weapons in them; and he grinned. ‘You ease my mind. For if you had been the leader of a warband in disguise, surely we should all have had cause to tremble in our shoes! Where are you from, skinned rabbit?’ He spoke in the Saxon tongue, and I knew that I had come back into my mother’s world.

‘From further west,’ I said, too weary even to resent the jibe. ‘Along the trade road.’

‘And where do you go?’

I hunched a shoulder. ‘I do not know.’

‘Alone?’

‘Aye.’

‘You haven’t the look of a wandering beggar-cub. Have you run away from your village?’

It is ill-mannered to ask such questions of a stranger before he has eaten; at any rate of a grown man, but I was only twelve, and anyway I was past caring. I wanted food and shelter and I was most likely to get it if I told the man with the deerhounds what he wanted to know. ‘My mother died, and there was no place for me in the hut of the man she was wedded to.’

‘And so you went on your travels. Is it in your mind to spend your life wandering up and down the world claiming Guest-Right at every hall you come to?’

‘I can work,’ I said. ‘I can set my hand to most things, and I’m good with cattle.’

‘Are you so? Well, come you up to the village with the rest. Food and shelter for the night, you shall have; and in the morning it may be that we will see as to this cattle skill of yours.’ And with his hounds at heel, he went on, up towards the village, where the bracken-thatched roof of the Hall rose whale-backed among the clustering bothies.

So that night I ate my fill of kale broth and cheese and barley bannock, squatting in the Guest Place nearest to the door of the Chief’s Fire Hall, and slept warm between the peat stack and the pig-pen hurdles. And next morning I was shaken into wakefulness by a man with a small red angry eye, who demanded if I meant to sleep all day while the cattle waited.

That was my first encounter with old Gyrth the cattleherd, who was to be my master for the next five years.

I WAS QUITE
happy, in the five years that I spent with Gyrth. I made no friends; that was nothing new, for I had always been something of a lone wolf. But I had the cattle and I had the two big savage cattle-dogs, above all, the bitch, Brindle. I got into the way of talking to Brindle in the British tongue, as my mother had talked to me in the Saxon; and I suppose for the same reason. The life was hard, and there were bad times in it: the winter nights spent hunting for a strayed cow; the feast days when as soon as our prayers were said in the little wattle church, and the merrymaking began, Gyrth got drunk and beat me – though before I was fifteen, the beatings came to an end because by then I was taller and stronger than he was. But there were the good times too: long lazy days spent lying up among the furze on the headlands above a crooning summer sea, with Brindle beside me alert for any beast that strayed from the slow-grazing drift of the herd, and a kestrel hovering high overhead; calving time, and the little leggy calves still wet from their birth to be lifted up to the cows’ flanks and coaxed to suck. The only time I ever knew Gyrth gentle was in the calving season, especially with a cow in trouble and needing help to bring her calf into the world. He was the best cattleman and the best cattle doctor in five manors; and if he beat me, he also taught me his skills; and something more, for it was working with him at such times that I learned a thing about myself which it was good that I should know, though I did not understand it for years afterwards.

And then my time with Gyrth and the cattle was over.

One evening a storm blew up. It was no greater than others of the late summer gales along that black-fanged coast, that
send ships running for shelter where little enough shelter is to be found. But it struck without warning, out of a clear sky. There had been a soft offshore breeze all day, warm with the scents of bracken and bog myrtle; then almost between gust and gust, it shifted, and changed and began to blow low along the ground, brushing up the leaves of the thorn trees to a rough silver; and in a little, the sky was covered by a thin membrane of cloud, like the skin of warm milk, and there began to be a hollow sounding of the sea. But even Gyrth, who was as weatherwise as most of his kind, did not guess how soon the storm would be upon us. He sniffed the wind like a hound and squinted at the sky. ‘Going to be a bit of a blow before morning. Rain too, I’d not wonder. Best take Brindle and get the yearlings down off Black Head.’

I whistled the old bitch after me, and set off; but before I was half-way up to Black Head, the wind was roaring through the oak woods, the sky racing with darkly huddled cloud like flocks of driven sheep; and by the time I came out on to the open Head above its deep sea inlet, fine grey swathes of rain were driving in from the west, cutting sight to a couple of spear throws. Most of the yearlings were bunched in the lea of the outcrop of dark rocks that gave the place its name; but three or four were lacking. Most like, I thought, they had drifted on down the lea slope before the wind. I left Brindle to keep the rest together, and pushed on after the strays.

They were widely scattered, and the sodden daylight was fading into the dusk before I had them all gathered up; and it was the edge of dark when I got them back to the rest. They were still huddled in the shelter of the outcrop, with Brindle watchfully in charge. She wagged her tail in greeting when I came out of the murk, and I spared a moment to fondle her great rough head and praise her. ‘So, so, that was well done, my girl. Home now.’

She gathered the cattle as she had been taught, and together
we began the homeward drove, down the windward slope and over towards the combe head and the herd and gleam of firelight from the doorway of Gyrth’s bothy.

But we never got there.

Only as far as the place where a rough path, half lost among rocks and long sea grasses, left the track we were following and plunged over the cliff edge down to the inlet below. The rain seemed to blow aside like a curtain just as we got there, and for a moment I had a clear view of the cove, and a flickering blur of light among the rocks that made me check and peer down. Someone had lit a fire down there on the shingle, where the long jagged comb of rock running seaward gave shelter from the pounding waves. There was always driftwood to be found among the boulders and sea-fretted crannies of the cliff foot that would be dry from the rain. There was something else down there too, that had not been there earlier: a long slim shape of darkness on the paler shingle. I peered down through the wind and rain, and realized that it was a ship. Some ship that had come running for shelter before the storm, and either by luck or superb seamanship, was now beached safe in the lea of the rocks above the boiling tideline.

Merchantman or raider? It could be the same thing at times, for many a trading vessel of the Northmen turned riever on the way home from an unsuccessful voyage, or when they themselves had met with raiders and lost their cargo.

My heart began to race, and something within me shouted ‘Danger!’ as I pulled back from the cliff edge and turned in frantic haste to get the cattle away. But it was too late. We hadn’t pushed on another spear throw, Brindle weaving to and fro at the heels of the jostling yearlings, when all at once the darkness among the wind-lashed furze bushes was alive with men.

Maybe there were no more than six or eight, but in the
stormy darkness they might have been an army. The world burst into a reeling chaos of shouting men and bellowing cattle. The yearling were all ways at once. It did not last long. I pulled my knife from my belt and went for a big man who loomed suddenly before me. My foot slipped on the sodden turf, and naked steel went whitt-t-t past my ear as I pitched down. In all likelihood that fall saved my life. I had a moment’s confused awareness of men and cattle above and all around me, and of Brindle springing with a snarl at the throat of one of the raiders; and then a flying hoof caught me on the side of the head, there was a burst of bright sparks inside my skull, and I went out into jagged darkness.

When I came back to myself, the rain had stopped, and I was sprawled on my back staring up at a blurred moon riding high in a sky of racing cloud-wrack. I lay for a while vaguely wondering where I was, and why my head hurt so much, until suddenly the memory of what had happened kicked me in the belly. I rolled on to my face and vomited, then got slowly on to one elbow and clawed myself up to my knees.

Under the booming of the wind and the surf, there was silence all about me. Nothing moved but the lashing furze branches: no men, no cattle. I managed to get up, the world dipping and swimming round me; and with my first step fell over something that brought me to my knees again. It was the body of old Brindle. I put out my hand and felt a sodden mass of hair with no life under it; and my hand came away sticky from the gaping hole in her throat. I wiped it on the grass. And as I did so, a kind of red wave rose from somewhere deep within me, engulfing all things save the thirst to kill.

In the years since then, I have come to know how large a part the blow on my head must have played in what followed after. Such a blow may make a man seem quite foolish, or see two of everything and wish only to sleep; or be for hours, maybe days, as though he were fighting drunk.

I felt about and found my knife, then got once more to my feet, and stumbled back to the place where I had first seen the fire in the cove. It was still there, and the long ship-shadow beyond it, and a movement of figures, half seen in the flame-light. They would not care who saw their blaze, I thought, for when the Viking Kind come ashore, sensible folk stay away. It seemed to me that I was thinking quite clearly, and yet I did not think it at all foolish that I should be scrambling down the cliff path towards them, with a knife in my hand. They had killed my dog, the only thing I had to love, and I was going to kill as many of them as I could, in return.

I slipped and half fell the last part of the way, picked myself up, knife still in hand, and charged on towards the dark figures round the fire. I was seeing everything through a red haze, but sharp-edged and for one instant frozen into stillness like a picture on a wall: the battered ship, the wind-torn fire, the carcasses of three yearlings lying on the blood-stained shingle while great joints hacked from them were already half-cooking, half-scorching on spear points over the heart of the blaze, the men in rough dark seamen’s clothes, their faces all turned towards me as I ran.

Why they did not kill me then, I shall never know. A flung spear would have brought me down easily enough. Maybe, seeing that I was alone, it seemed scarce worth the trouble at least until they had had a bit of fun with me first.

Then I was among them, and the scene splintered out of its stillness. Someone stepped into my path, grinning. I saw the white animal flash of teeth in a wind-burned face, and the firelight on the blade of a dirk, and hurled myself forward, choking with the rage and grief that was in me. ‘You killed my dog! Devils! You killed my dog!’ There was a blare of laughter, and an arm came round me from behind, crushing me back against somebody’s body. My dagger hand was caught and wrenched upward. I fought like a trapped animal,
and when the knife was twisted from my grasp, ducked my head and bit into the arm that held me. I tasted blood between my teeth, and the laughter turned to a bellow of surprise and pain, but the grip never slackened.

‘Ach! It bites like a wolf-cub!’ somebody said. The Norse is kin to the Saxon tongue, and even through the red haze, I could understand after a fashion.