The Lords of the North (19 page)

'If the little bastard children would just come close,' Finan said next day,

'I'd strangle the filthy wee creatures, so I would.'

I was astonished for it was the longest statement I had ever heard him make.

'Better to take them hostage,' I suggested.

'But they know better than to come close,' he said, ignoring my suggestion. He spoke
Danish in a strange accent. 'You were a warrior,' he said.

'I am a warrior,' I said. The two of us were sitting outside the hut on a patch of grass
where the snow had melted and we were gutting herrings with blunt knives. The gulls screamed
about us.

One of Sverri's men watched us from outside the long-house. He had a bow across his knees
and a sword at his side. I wondered how Finan had guessed I was a warrior, for I had never
talked of my life. Nor had I revealed my true name, preferring them to think that I was
called Osbert. Osbert had once been my real name, the name I was given at birth, but I had
been renamed Uhtred when my elder brother died because my father insisted his eldest
son must be called Uhtred. But I did not use the name Uhtred on board Trader. Uhtred was a
proud name, a warrior's name, and I would keep it a secret until I had escaped slavery.
'How did you know I'm a warrior?' I asked Finan.

'Because you never stop watching the bastards,' he said. 'You never stop thinking
about how to kill them.'

'You're the same,' I said.

'Finan the Agile, they called me,' he said, 'because I would dance around enemies. I
would dance and kill. Dance and kill.' He slit another fish's belly and flicked the offal
into the snow where two gulls fought for it. There was a time,' he went on angrily, 'when I
owned five spears, six horses, two swords, a coat of bright mail, a shield and a helmet that
shone like fire. I had a woman with hair that fell to her waist and with a smile that could
dim the noonday sun. Now I gut herrings.' He slashed with the knife. 'And one day I shall
come back here and I shall kill Sverri, hump his woman, strangle his bastard children and
steal his money.' He gave a harsh chuckle. 'He keeps it all here. All that money. Buried it
is.'

'You know that for sure?'

'What else does he do with it? He can't eat it because he doesn't shit silver, does he?
No, it's here.'

'Wherever here is,' I said.

'Jutland,' he said. 'The woman's a Dane. We come here every winter.'

'How many winters?'

This is my third,' Finan said.

'How did he capture you?'

He flipped another cleaned fish into the rush basket. 'There was a fight. Us against the
Norsemen and the bastards beat us. I was taken prisoner and the bastards sold me to
Sverri. And you?'

'Betrayed by my lord.'

'So that's another bastard to kill, eh? My lord betrayed me too.'

'How?'

'He wouldn't ransom me. He wanted my woman, see? So he let me go, in return for which
favour I pray he may die and that his wives get lockjaw and that his cattle get the staggers
and that his children rot in their own shit and that his crops wither and his hounds choke.'
He shuddered as if his anger was too much to contain.

Sleet came instead of snow and the ice slowly melted in the creek. We made new oars from
seasoned spruce cut the previous winter, and by the time the oars had been shaped the ice
was gone. Grey fogs cloaked the land and the first flowers showed at the edges of the reeds.
Herons stalked the shallows as the sun melted the morning frosts. Spring was coming and so
we caulked Trader with cattle hair, tar and moss. We cleaned her and launched her, returned
the ballast to her bilge, rigged the mast and bent the cleaned and mended sail onto her
yard. Sverri embraced his woman, kissed his children and waded out to us. Two of his crew
hauled him aboard and we gripped the oars.

'Row, you bastards!' he shouted, 'row!'

We rowed.

Anger can keep you alive, but only just. There were times when I was sick, when I felt too
weak to pull the oar, but pull it I did for if I faltered then I would be tossed overboard. I
pulled as I vomited, pulled as I sweated, pulled as I shivered, and pulled as I hurt in
every muscle. I pulled through rain and sun and wind and sleet. I remember having a fever
and thinking I was going to die. I even wanted to die, but Finan cursed me under his
breath.

'You're a feeble Saxon,' he goaded me, 'you're weak. You're pathetic, you Saxon scum.'
I grunted some response, and he

snarled at me again, louder this time so that Hakka heard from the bows. 'They want you to
die, you bastard,' Finan said, 'so prove them wrong. Pull, you feeble Saxon bastard,
pull.' Hakka hit him for speaking. Another time I did the same for Finan. I remember
cradling him in my arms and putting gruel into his mouth with my fingers. 'Live, you
bastard,' I told him, 'don't let these earslings beat us. Live!' He lived.

We went north that next summer, pulling into a river that twisted through a landscape
of moss and birch, a place so far north that rills of snow still showed in shadowed places. We
bought reindeer hides from a village among the birches and carried them back to the sea,
and exchanged them for walrus tusks and whalebone, which in turn we traded for amber and
eider feathers. We carried malt and sealskin, furs and salt meat, iron-ore and fleeces. In
one rock-circled cove we spent two days loading slates that would be turned into
whetstones, and Sverri traded the slates for combs made from deer antlers and for big coils
of sealskin rope and a dozen heavy ingots of bronze, and we took all those back to Jutland,
going into Haithabu which was a big trading port, so big that there was a slave compound
and we were taken there and released inside where we were guarded by spearmen and high
walls. Finan found some fellow Irishmen in the compound and I discovered a Saxon who had
been captured by a Dane from the coast of East Anglia. King Guthrum, the Saxon said, had
returned to East Anglia where he called himself Æthelstan and was building churches.
Alfred, so far as he knew, was still alive. The East Anglian Danes had not tried to attack
Wessex, but even so he had heard that Alfred was making forts about his frontier. He knew
nothing about Alfred's Danish hostages, so could not tell me whether Ragnar had been
released, nor had the man heard any news of Guthred or Northumbria, so I stood in the
compound's centre and shouted a question. 'Is anyone here from Northumbria?'

Men stared at me dully. 'Northumbria?' I shouted again, and this time a woman called
from the far side of the palisade which divided the mens' compound from the womens'. Men
were crowded at the palisade, peering through its chinks at the women, but I pushed two
aside. 'You're from Northumbria?' I asked the woman who had called to me.

'From Onhripum,' she told me. She was a Saxon, fifteen years old and a tanner's daughter
from Onhripum. Her father had owed money to Earl Ivarr and, to settle the debt, Ivarr had
taken the girl and sold her to Kjartan. At first I thought I must have misheard. 'To
Kjartan?' I asked her.

'To Kjartan,' she said dully, 'who raped me, then sold me to these bastards.'

'Kjartan's alive?' I asked, astonished.

'He lives,' she said.

'But he was being besieged,' I protested.

'Not while I was there,' she said.

'And Sven? His son?'

'He raped me too,' she said.

Later, much later, I pieced the whole tale together. Guthred and Ivarr, joined by my
uncle Ælfric, had tried to starve Kjartan into submission, but the winter was hard,
their armies had been struck by disease, and Kjartan had offered to pay tribute to all
three and they had accepted his silver. Guthred had also extracted a promise that
Kjartan would stop attacking churchmen, and for a time that promise was kept, but the
church was too wealthy and Kjartan too greedy, and within a year the promise had been broken
and some monks were killed or enslaved. The annual tribute of silver that Kjartan was
supposed to give to Guthred, Ælfric and Ivarr had been paid once, and never paid again. So
nothing had changed. Kjartan had been humbled for a few months, then he had judged the
strength of his enemies and found it feeble. The tanner's daughter from Onhripum knew
nothing of Gisela, had never even heard of her, and I thought perhaps she had died and that
night I knew despair. I wept. I remembered Hild and I wondered what had happened to her,
and I feared for her, and I remembered that one night with Gisela when I had kissed her
beneath the beech trees and I thought of all my dreams that were now hopeless and so I
wept.

I had married a wife in Wessex and I knew nothing of her and, if the truth were known, I
cared nothing. I had lost my baby son to death. I had lost Iseult to death. I had lost Hild,
I had lost all chance of Gisela, and that night I felt a swamping pity for myself and I sat
in the hut and tears rolled down my cheeks and Finan saw me and he began weeping too and I
knew he had been reminded of home. I tried to rekindle my anger because it is only anger
that will keep you alive, but the anger would not come. I just wept instead. I could not stop.
It was the darkness of despair, of the knowledge that my fate was to pull an oar until I
was broken and then I would go overboard. I wept.

'You and me.' Finan said, and paused. It was dark. It was a cold night, though it was
summer.

'You and me?' I asked, my eyes closed in an attempt to stop the tears.

'Swords in hand, my friend,' he said, 'you and me. It will happen.' He meant we would be
free and we would have our revenge.

'Dreams,' I said.

'No!' Finan said angrily. He crawled to my side and took my hand in both his.

'Don't give up,' he snarled at me. 'We're warriors, you and I, we're warriors!' I had been
a warrior, I thought. There had been a time when I shone in mail and helmet, but now I was
lice-ridden, filthy, weak and tearful.

'Here,' Finan said, and he pushed something into my hand. It was one of the antler-combs
we had carried as cargo and somehow he had managed to steal it and secrete it in his rags.
'Never give up,' he told me, and I used the comb to disentangle my hair that now grew
almost to my waist. I combed it out, tearing knots free, pulling lice from the teeth, and
next morning Finan plaited my straight hair and I did the same for him. 'It's how warriors
dress their hair in my tribe,' he explained, 'and you and I are warriors. We're not slaves,
we're warriors!' We were thin, dirty, and ragged, but the despair had passed like a squall at
sea and I let the anger give me resolve. Next day we loaded Trader with ingots of copper,
bronze and iron. We rolled barrels of ale into her stern and filled the remaining cargo
space with salt meat, rings of hard bread and tubs of salted cod. Sverri laughed at our
plaited hair. 'You two think you'll find women, do you?' he mocked us. 'Or are you
pretending to be women?' Neither of us answered and Sverri just grinned. He was in a good
mood, one of unusual excitement. He liked seafaring and from the amount of provisions
we stowed I guessed he planned a long voyage and so it proved. He cast his runesticks time
after time and they must have told him he would prosper for he bought three new slaves, all
of them Frisians. He wanted to be well-manned for the voyage ahead, a voyage that began
badly, for, as we left Haithabu, we were pursued by another ship. A pirate, Hakka
announced sourly, and we ran north under sail and oars and the other ship slowly
overhauled us for she was longer, leaner and faster, and it was only the coming of night
that let us escape, but it was a nervous night. We stowed the oars and lowered the sail so
that Trader would make no noise, and in the dark I heard the oar-splashes of our pursuer
and Sverri and his men were crouching near us, swords in hand, ready to kill us if we made a
noise. I was tempted, and Finan wanted to thump on the ship's side to bring the pursuers to
us, but Sverri would have slaughtered us instantly and so we kept silent and the strange
ship passed us in the darkness and when dawn came she had vanished.

Such threats were rare. Wolf does not eat wolf, and the falcon does not stoop on another
falcon, and so the Northmen rarely preyed on each other, though some men, desperate, would
risk attacking a fellow Dane or Norseman. Such pirates were reviled as outcasts, as
nothings, but they were feared. Usually they were hunted down and the crews were killed or
enslaved, but still some men risked being outcasts, knowing that if they could just
capture one rich ship like Trader they could make a fortune that would give them status,
power and acceptance. But we escaped that night, and next day we sailed further north and
still further north, and we did not put into land that night, nor for many nights. Then one
morning I saw a black coast of terrible cliffs and the sea was shattering white against
those grim rocks, and I thought we had come to our journey's end, but we did not seek land.
Instead we sailed on, going west now, and then briefly south to put into the bay of an
island where we anchored.

At first Finan thought it was Ireland, but the folk who came to Trader in a small skin
boat did not speak his language. There are islands all about the northern coast of Britain
and this, I think was one of them. Savages live on those islands and Sverri did not go
ashore, but traded a few paltry coins with the savages and received in return some gulls'
eggs, dried fish and goat-meat. And next morning we rowed into a brisk wind and we rowed all
day and I knew we were heading into the western wastes of the wilderness sea. Ragnar the
Elder had warned me of those seas, saying that there were lands beyond them, but that most
men who sought the far lands never came back. Those western lands, he told me, were
inhabited by the souls of dead sailors. They were grey places, fog-shrouded and
storm-battered, but that was where we were going and Sverri stood at the steering oar with
a look of happiness on his flat face and I remembered that same happiness. I remembered
the joy of a good ship and the pulse of its life in the loom of the steering oar.