The Pagan Lord (11 page)

We had dragged the swamped boat with us, though most of the broken hull, weighted down by ballast stones, had gone to the sea’s bed where the monsters lurk. The sail was gone; there was only shattered wood, an empty wicker fish basket, and one man splashing desperately, flailing in the heaving seas to reach
Middelniht
’s side.

‘He’s one of the men who was with Father Byrnjolf,’ Finan said.

‘You recognise him?’

‘That flattened nose?’

The man reached up to grasp an oar, then pulled himself towards our flank, and Finan stooped to pick up an axe. He looked at me, I nodded, and the axe blade caught the moonlight as it slashed down. There was the butcher’s sound and a spray of blood, black as the land, from the shattered skull, then the man drifted away.

‘Hoist the sail,’ I said, and, when the oars were stowed and the sail drawing, I turned
Middelniht
’s bows north again.

The
Middelniht
had killed our enemies in the middle of the night, and now we were going to Bebbanburg. Ælfric’s nightmare was coming true.

The weather calmed in the night and that was not what I wanted.

Nor did I want to remember the face of that fisherman with his flattened nose and the scars on his sun-darkened cheek, and how his eyes had looked up, desperate, pleading and vulnerable, and how we had killed him, and how his black blood had sprayed the black night and vanished in the swirl of black water beside
Middelniht
’s hull. We are cruel people.

Hild, whom I had loved and who had been an abbess in Wessex and a good Christian, had so often spoken wistfully of peace. She had called her god the ‘prince of peace’ and tried to persuade me that if only the worshippers of the real gods would acknowledge her nailed prince then there would be perpetual peace. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ she liked to tell me, and she would have been pleased these last few years because Britain had known its uneasy peace. The Danes had done little more than raid for cattle, sometimes for slaves, and the Welsh and Scots had done the same, but there had been no war. That was why my son had not stood in the shield wall, because there had been no shield walls. He had practised time and again, day after day, but practice is not the real thing, practice is not the bowel-loosening terror of facing a mead-crazed maniac who is within arm’s length and carrying a lead-weighted war axe.

And some men had preached that the peace of these last few years was the Christian god’s will, and that we should be glad because our children could grow without fear and what we sowed we could harvest, and that it was only during a time of peace that the Christian priests could preach their message to the Danes, and that when that work was done we would all live in a Christian world of love and friendship.

But it had not been peace.

Some of it was exhaustion. We had fought and fought, and the last battle, a welter of blood-letting in the winter marshland of East Anglia, where King Eohric had died and Æthelwold the Pretender had died and Sigurd Thorrson’s son had died, that battle had been a slaughter so great it had slaked the appetite for more battle. Yet it had changed little. The north and east were still Danish, and the south and west still Saxon. All those graves had yielded little land for either side. And Alfred, who wanted peace, but had known there could be no peace while two tribes fought for the same pastures, had died. Edward, his son, was king in Wessex, and Edward was content to let the Danes live in peace. He wanted what his father had wanted, all the Saxons living under one crown, but he was young, he was nervous of failure, and he was wary of those older men who had advised his father, and so he listened to the priests who told him to hold hard to what he possessed and to let the Danes stay where they were. In the end, the priests said, the Danes would become Christians and we should all love one another. Not all the Christian priests preached that message. Some, like the abbot I had killed, urged the Saxons to war, claiming that the body of Saint Oswald would be a sign of victory.

Those belligerent priests were right. Not about Saint Oswald, at least I doubted that, but they were surely right to preach that there never could be a lasting peace while the Danes occupied lands that had once been Saxon. And those Danes still wanted it all; they wanted the rest of Mercia and all of Wessex. It did not matter what banner they fought under, whether it was the hammer or the cross, the Danes were still hungry. And they were powerful again. The losses of the wars had been made good, they were restless, and so was Æthelred, Lord of Mercia. He had lived all his life under the thrall of Wessex, but now he had a new woman and he was getting old and he wanted reputation. He wanted the poets to sing of his triumphs, he wanted the chronicles to write his name in history, and so he would start a war, and that war would be Christian Mercia against Christian East Anglia, and it would draw in the rest of Britain and there would be shield walls again.

Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win. Even the nailed god cannot change that truth. And I was a warrior, and in a world at war the warrior must be cruel.

The fisherman had looked up and there had been pleading in his eyes, but the axe had fallen and he had gone to his sea grave. He would have betrayed me to Ælfric.

I told myself there would be an end to the cruelty. I had fought for Wessex all my life. I had given the nailed god his victories, and the nailed god had turned around and spat in my face, so now I would go to Bebbanburg and, once I had captured it, I would stay there and let the two tribes fight. That was my plan. I would go home and I would stay at home and I would persuade Æthelflaed to join me, and then not even the nailed god could prise me out of Bebbanburg because that fortress is invincible.

And in the morning I told Finan how we would capture it.

He laughed when he heard. ‘It could work,’ he said.

‘Pray to your god to send the right weather,’ I said. I sounded gloomy, and no wonder. I wanted hard weather, ship-threatening weather, and instead the sky was suddenly blue and the air warm. The wind had turned light and southerly so that our sail flapped at times, losing all power and causing
Middelniht
to slop lazily in a sun-glittering sea. Most of my men were sleeping, and I was content to let them rest rather than take to the oars. We had steered well offshore and were alone under that empty sky.

Finan looked up to see where the sun was. ‘This isn’t the way to Bebbanburg,’ he said.

‘We’re going to Frisia.’

‘Frisia!’

‘I can’t go to Bebbanburg yet,’ I explained, ‘and I can’t stay on the Northumbrian coast because Ælfric will discover we’re here, so we must hide for a few days. We’ll hide in Frisia.’

And so we crossed the sea to that strange place of islands and water and mudbanks and reeds and sand and driftwood, and of channels that shift in the night, and land that is there one day and not the next. It is a home for herons, for seals and for outcasts. It took us three days and two nights to make the crossing, and in the third day’s dusk, when the sun had turned all the west into a cauldron of glowing fire, we crept into the islands with a man in our bows testing the depth by probing with an oar.

I had spent time here. It was in these shoals that I had ambushed Skirnir and watched him die, and in his hall on the island of Zegge I had discovered his paltry treasure. I had left his hall intact and we searched for it now, but the island had gone, washed out by the relentless tides, though we did find the crescent-shaped sandbank where we had tricked Skirnir into dividing his forces, and so we beached
Middelniht
there and made a camp on the dunes.

I needed two things: a second ship and bad weather. I did not dare search for the ship because we were in waters where another man held sway, and if I took the ship too early that man would have time to seek me out and demand to know why I poached in his waters. He found us anyway, arriving on our second day in a long, low vessel rowed by forty men. His ship came fast and confident through the unmarked channel that twisted towards our refuge, then the prow grated on the sand as the steersman bellowed at the oarsmen to back water. A man leaped ashore; a big man with a face as broad and flat as a spade’s blade and with a beard reaching to his waist. ‘And who,’ he bellowed cheerfully, ‘are you?’

‘Wulf Ranulfson,’ I answered. I was sitting on a bleached driftwood log and I did not bother to stand.

He paced up the beach. It was a warm day, but he wore a thick cloak, high boots, and a chain-mail hood. His hair was matted and long, hanging to his shoulders. He had a long-sword strapped at his waist and a tarnished silver chain half hidden by his beard. ‘And who is Wulf Ranulfson?’ he demanded.

‘A traveller out of Haithabu,’ I answered mildly, ‘and on his way back there.’

‘So why are you on one of my islands?’

‘We’re resting,’ I said, ‘and making repairs.’

‘I charge for rest and repairs,’ he said.

‘And I don’t pay,’ I responded, still speaking softly.

‘I am Thancward,’ he boasted, as if he expected me to recognise the name. ‘I have sixteen crews, and ships for all of them. If I say you pay, you pay.’

‘And what payment do you want?’

‘Enough silver to make two more links for this chain,’ he suggested.

I stood slowly, lazily. Thancward was a big man, but I was taller and I saw the slight surprise on his face. ‘Thancward,’ I said, as if trying to remember the name. ‘I have not heard of Thancward, and if he had sixteen ships why would Thancward come to this miserable beach himself? Why would he not send his men to run his paltry errand? And his ship has benches for fifty rowers, yet only forty are at the oars. Maybe Thancward has mislaid his men? Or perhaps he believes we’re a trading ship? Perhaps he thinks he didn’t need to bring many warriors because we’re weak?’

He was no fool. He was just a pirate, and I suspected he had two or three ships, of which perhaps only the one he was using was seaworthy, but he was trying to make himself lord of these shoals so that any passing ship would pay him passage money. But to do that he needed men, and if he fought me then he would lose men. He smiled suddenly. ‘You’re not a trading ship?’

‘No.’

‘You should have said!’ He managed to make his surprise sound genuine. ‘Then welcome! You need supplies?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Ale?’ he suggested.

‘Turnips?’ I countered. ‘Cabbages? Beans?’

‘I shall send them,’ he said.

‘And I shall pay for them,’ I promised, and each of us was satisfied. He would receive a scrap of silver, and I would be left alone.

The weather stayed obstinately warm and calm. After that bleak, cold, wet summer there were three days of burning sun and small wind. Three days of practising sword-craft on the beach and three days of fretting because I needed bad weather. I needed a north wind and high seas. I needed the view from Bebbanburg’s ramparts to be of chaos and white water, and the longer that sun shone on a limpid sea the more I worried that Father Byrnjolf might have sent another warning to Bebbanburg. I was fairly sure the priest had died when
Middelniht
crushed the fishing boat, but that did not mean he had not sent a second message by some trader travelling north on the old roads. That was unlikely, but it was a possibility and it gnawed at me.

But then on the fourth morning the north-eastern sky slowly filled with dark cloud. It did not pile up with a ragged edge, but made a line straight as a spear-shaft across the sky; one side of the line was a deep summer blue and the rest of the sky was dark as a pit. It was an omen, but of what I could not tell. The darkness spread, a shield wall of the gods advancing across the heavens, and I took the omen to mean that my gods, the northern gods, were bringing a great storm south. I stood on top of a dune and the wind was strong enough to blow the sand off the dune’s crest and the sea was stirring into whitecaps and the breakers were seething white on the long shoals and I knew it was time to sail into the storm.

It was time to go home.

Weapons sharp and shields stout. Swords, spears and axes had been ground with whetstones, shields bound with leather or iron. We knew we were sailing to battle, but the first fight was against the sea.

She is a bitch, the sea. She belongs to Ran, the goddess, and Ran keeps a mighty net in which to snare men, and her nine daughters are the waves that drive ships into the snare. She is married to a giant, Ægir, but he is an indolent beast, preferring to lie drunk in the halls of the gods while his bitch-wife and her vicious daughters gather ships and men to their cold unloving breasts.

So I prayed to Ran. She must be flattered, she must be told she is lovely, that no creature in the sky or on the earth or beneath the earth can compare to her beauty, that Freyja and Eostre and Sigyn and all the other goddesses of the heavens are jealous of her beauty, and if you tell her that over and over again she will reach for her polished silver shield to gaze at her own reflection, and when Ran looks upon herself the sea calms. And so I told the bitch of her loveliness, how the gods themselves shuddered with desire when she walked by, how she dimmed the stars, how she was the most beautiful of all the gods.

Yet Ran was bitter that night. She sent a storm out of the north-east, a storm that raced from the lands of ice and whipped the sea to anger. We had sailed westwards all day in a hard, lashing wind, and if that wind had lasted we would have been cold, wet and safe, but as night fell the wind increased, it howled and screamed, and we had to drop the sail and use the oars to hold
Middelniht
’s head towards the vicious seas that crashed about her prow, that reared in the darkness as unseen, white-topped monsters that heaved the hull up and then let it fall into a trough so that the timbers creaked, the hull strained and the water swirled about wet oarsmen. We bailed, hurling water over the side before the
Middelniht
was swallowed into Ran’s net, and still the wind shrieked and the waters clawed at us. I had two men helping me on the steering oar, and there were times I thought it must break, and times I thought we were sinking, and I shouted my prayers to the bitch goddess and knew every man aboard was also praying.