Daughter of the Wolf (20 page)

His face had grown sober again. ‘I am sorry.' He reached out and took her hand confidently in his. She stared at him in disbelief as he pressed the handle of the mirror into her palm and folded her fingers about it. She shook her head violently, but he kept his hand firm-clasped round hers. ‘I'll come by your hall again, maybe, on a luckier day. Your father and mother might like to see what I carry. You have a church, you said?' She nodded, unable to speak, to correct him about her parents. ‘I'll bring the things priests like, one of these days. Oil. Incense. I can get the vessels, too, given enough warning. Books, even.' She nodded once more, still dumb, as he took his hand away. ‘Keep the mirror by you for a while. Think it over – though if you ask me, Alvrun, the man who made it had your face in his mind.' He looked at the distant, restless horizon and frowned slightly. After a moment he said, ‘This day week. I'll look for you here. Sunset.'

‘But—'

‘No buts. If you're not here I won't bear a grudge. We'll meet again.'

He was smiling again, a smile that started with his eyes, and despite herself she could feel her face answering in kind, and though he had taken his hands away their warmth still lingered. ‘I—'
could never afford it
, she was going to say, but he had already swung the pack up on to his shoulders and was loping away along the shoreline, waving a hand in farewell but never looking back. It felt as though he were taking something of hers with him, something beyond price.

The two motionless figures knelt side by side on the cold earthen floor of the dark church. Not so much as a single rushlight guttered on the altar.

‘I could have saved him,' Abarhild said again. Her knees were agony. ‘I am disappointed in you.'

‘
Domina
.' Fredegar's voice gave nothing away.

‘Our people are not your cattle to put down at will.'

Outside, a patch of freshly turned soil lay a few yards from the minster's south door. Ingeld had been startled at the request to admit the boy to the family lych-yard, and minded to refuse, but Fredegar had taken him to one side. Abarhild hadn't been able to hear his muttered words but she had approved the priest's dark frown, and his fierce, stabbing gestures from the boy's swaddled corpse where it lay on its hurdle to the minster and back again. Her last-born child needed firm handling. Men – and women – deferred to him far too much. How would he ever grow into the good man she knew he could be?

‘You think Cudda would have been grateful for your cobbling him back together?' Fredegar gazed up at the dim altar.

‘More grateful than he would be for you cutting his throat.' She peered up at the priest's hawklike profile, backlit from the little window high in the north wall.

‘You are wrong, there.' He spoke to the stone cross carved in the wall above the altar. ‘His father knew it, and so do you,
domina
, in your heart. I'd seen that boy around the place, running with your grandson. He lived in his body, as the beasts do. Lose his health and he would have nothing left. If he had been able to speak, he would have begged for the knife.'

‘You play at being God.'

‘He is mercy as well as justice. I did what I hope to be God's will. Father abbot knows it, too, for what that's worth. And so does your granddaughter.'

The old lady rose to her feet with an audible creak. The silent slave-woman who had been waiting in the porch stepped forward and offered Abarhild an arm just as she staggered.

The priest said, ‘If anyone is to blame here it is that whelp Athulf.' Grey-faced Athulf, who had watched the ceremonial from a sulky distance, never dismounting from his cobby little chestnut. As soon as the first spade-load of earth had slid over the shrouded body and the women had stopped their keening, he had tugged his reins around and forced his horse up the slope behind the church.

‘How is it Athulf's fault?' Abarhild turned to look at him, still at his devotions. ‘How? Cudda should have known better than to go near the forge fire in that state.'

Fredegar shook his head, but didn't answer.

Abarhild hobbled away from the altar, dipping her fingers in the holy-water stoup by the door and crossing herself as she came out into the lengthening daylight. She was convinced she was right, and she also knew that she was alone in that belief. Elfrun had confessed as much.

‘He would have died in agony, Grandmother. It would have taken days... and if he had lived, what sort of life...?'

Such specious arguments.

Agony.

And what was so wrong with that?

God sent men agony to make them into something worth welcoming into Heaven. That boy would have been purified by pain as the prophet Isaiah had been cleansed by the seraph who brought a burning coal to cleanse his mouth of blasphemy. How fitting that the fire of the forge had been God's tool. Cudda should have been left to live or die, and, if he had lived, to have learned to accept his lot. Used it to grow his soul in wisdom and acceptance of what God had willed for him.

She expected little of Ingeld, and in her secret heart she admitted as much. But Fredegar had been trained in a house that knew proper discipline: she hadn't thought him capable of such weakness. She tightened her grip on her woman's arm. Pain was good for men's souls.

It had to be, else why would there be so much of it in the world?

She thought of Elfrun's white, horrified face, watching the blood spurting from Cudda's neck, soaking into the packed earth of the smithy floor while the boy had gurgled and choked his life away. She had always thought the best thing for that girl would be to take her out of this world of sorrow and put her away somewhere safe. Such a shame she had never made Radmer see sense about sending the child to that house of nuns, north at Hovingham. Elfrun would have made a fine abbess in the fullness of time, spared the pain that was the allotted fate of women.

Burying your children.

At the grave-edge Wynn stood with her parents, with the baby nestled in the crook of its mother's arm and a couple of smaller children clinging to her skirts, though most of the rest of the mourners had long since peeled away, back to tending their hearths and their hedges. Cuthred and his wife looked as though they were exchanging angry words. Wynn was glancing from one to the other, quick bird-like movements, her arms wrapped around her skinny body. As Abarhild watched, the girl turned her back on her mother and took her father's arm. The gesture had something final and defiant about it. The woman watched her husband and daughter go with a look of disbelief before dropping her head and burying her face in the swaddling cloth of her infant. Her shoulders were shaking. Abarhild wondered whether she should go to her, offer such feeble comfort as she was capable of, but another woman was there before her, and the two walked slowly away.

Abarhild felt a sudden weary desire for her narrow pallet. Could not the world just have done, and let her go? God had made it, but men had marred it: a bitter, horrible place, and she wished that she and those she loved were safely out of it.

But in Radmer's absence she could scarcely send the child to a nunnery. And these Northumbrian houses. Lax and ill disciplined, with little tradition of learning. Not that the men's houses were much better. Abarhild thought wistfully of her own old home. Was there anyone still at Chelles who would remember her?
Hilde
, they had called her. The fresh-faced novice of some sixty years ago, that girl who had been taken away so suddenly. The white-washed building where the novices had slept, always clean and sweet and comfortable, and the sun always shining, always warm. She had always been warm in those days.

Abarhild shook her head and muttered below her breath, and her woman eyed her sideways.

Luda was waiting for her outside the door of her little pentice attached to the minster's common hall, wax tablets clutched in his hand. He started speaking while she was still several yards away.

‘I need a decision about the hall cattle, lady. We haven't the inkeep for half the ones I wanted to over-winter. The barley that should go to them we'll be needing for ourselves, and we can't leave the beasts to starve.'

Abarhild scowled at this vision of a hungry winter. ‘Why are you asking me? Speak to Elfrun. She wants to be lady of the hall? Let her decide.'

Luda gave his lopsided shrug. ‘She told me she didn't understand. I thought it better to come to you.'

‘Kill them, then, while they're still fat enough to be worth the salting. Why do you even need to ask?'

He was opening his mouth to reply, but a ringing ululation from the hillside above the church cut across his words. All three turned to see Athulf on horseback, skidding down the slope, past the minster and the fresh earth of Cudda's grave with never a pause, his reins in one hand and his other arm gesticulating violently to the north. He was shouting something but they could make neither head nor tail of his wild words.

‘What is it now?' Abarhild had had enough for one day, even of her beloved grandson.

He brought his mount to a wheeling halt only feet from them. ‘In the estuary! Get your men!' His voice emerged as a painful rasp after that ringing shout.

Abarhild felt a pulse of anxiety. ‘What is it, boy?'

But Athulf was ignoring her, addressing his gasping words to the steward. ‘Dozens of them! The good sort, the black ones. Heading past the river-mouth! Quick – get everyone! I'm down to the boats!'

He clapped his heels to his horse's flanks and was away.

‘Please, my lady?' Her woman, hissing. ‘Please – my arm. I'll be bruised tomorrow.'

Abarhild unclenched her fingers but didn't relinquish her grip. ‘What's happening?'

Further along the estuary, to Athulf's fury, the Illingham boats were already putting out. But the men of Donmouth were only moments behind.

Widia was at Athulf's side. ‘Neap tide,' he said tersely. ‘This is as high as it will get. And we're only just past slack water. We can do this. Off your horse, lad.'

‘We'll have to share, with them.' Athulf's tone was bitter. Widia turned a frowning face up to the boy. ‘Yes, I know there'll be more than enough,' Athulf went on. ‘But they never offered to help us... And I saw them first.'

Widia knew fine well where those ten sacks of grain had come from, but he also knew when to hold his peace. Sometimes one should just accept blessings, and not ask too closely. ‘Into the boat, lad.' He half turned and shouted to the men running the boat down to the water. ‘Got your billhooks? Gaffs?'

They had been meaning to put out far into the bay and harry the herd from behind. But there was no need. The whales were coming landward by themselves.

Athulf's belly was growling with desire at the sight of those short, sharp fins and blunt heads. They were the small black whales called Wade's cattle, and they made fine eating.

And, best of all, they were swimming round the headland. If they carried on that course they would be grounding on the sandbanks downstream from where the river fed into the estuary.

Athulf let out an exhilarated shriek, higher-pitched than he would have liked, and slithered down from Mara's back. Pausing only to loop the reins round his saddle-bow, he plunged forward, tugging his knife from its sheath. ‘To me!' With his left hand, he grabbed a gaff from the pile Hirel had just set down and waded forward into the ebbing tide. He had only seen a whale-drive once, and then he had been too young to be allowed to do more than help the women gut and strip and pack. But he knew he could do this. ‘To me! Over here!' He had to lead. He had to do this, and then he would be forgiven for Cudda's drunken stumble.

Not the dozens he had proclaimed in that first, over-excited moment on the hillside when he had spotted the sleek black backs arcing through the water. But at least twenty, propelling their way towards him with great up-and-down thrusts of their curved tails.

Athulf was thinking fast.

Widia had said this was as high as the water would get, and that it was on the turn. Athulf could already see the change in the current, out where river water met sea. His first impulse had been the right one. He waved his arms at the men in the boats, pulling hard on their oars to counter the gathering tide that wanted to take them out to sea. ‘Over here!' he screamed, and again, ‘To me!' Get at least some of the whales on the shoreward side of the sandbank, and their job was done.

There were half a dozen boats now, Donmouth and Illingham side by side. Four men at the oars, and one in the bow of each, lobbing stones, beating the water with spare oars and bellowing.

The water was boiling, dark green and streaked with foam. Impossible to tell just yet where the sandbank lay, and how far under the ebbing surf. Athulf became aware of others in the water, hungry men with drawn knives to his left and right. Fredegar was only feet away, soaked to the waist. Widia stood on his other flank, holding one of the great flanged spears they used for boar. Athulf waded in deeper. The water was heart-stoppingly cold.

More boats, a crescent of shrieking, bawling men, drawing the trap ever closer. The sea was an explosion of fins and flukes and the round black heads. Athulf swallowed in almost painful anticipation of the sweet blubber melting on his tongue.

And a whale loomed right in front of him.

Sweet Mother of Christ, it was so big. Like a black pig out of a nightmare, barrelling straight at him with great thrusts of its tail. Its mouth was open, showing two rows of neat, pointed teeth framing a pink mouth. He raised his knife. Coming so fast! How was a man supposed to deal with a beast like this? Widia had the right of it, you needed a great, flanged boar-spear, not a mere knife.

He was still staring at the monstrous thing, wondering at its size and force, the speed of its approach, when it hit him in the chest with a thump that shook creation, and he went under.