The Pale Horseman (6 page)

'Who are they?'

'Shipwrights.’

'So they do the work?'

'Can't expect me to do it!' Leofric protested. 'I'm in command of the Eftwyrd!'

'So,' I said, 'you're planning to drink my ale and eat my food for a month while those dozen
men do the work?'

'You have any better ideas?'

I gazed at the Eftwyrd. She was a well-made ship, longer than most Danish boats and with
high sides that made her a good fighting platform. 'What did Burgweard tell you to do?' I
asked.

'Pray,' Leofric said sourly, 'and help repair Heahengel.'

'I hear there's a new Danish leader in the Saefern Sea,' I said, 'and I'd like to know if
it's true. A man called Svein. And I hear more ships are joining him from Ireland.'

'He's in Wales, this Svein?'

'That's what I hear.'

'He'll be coming to Wessex then,' Leofric said.

'If it's true.'

'So you're thinking ...' Leofric said, then stopped when he realised just what I was
thinking.

'I'm thinking that it doesn't do a ship or crew any good to sit around for a month,' I said,
'and I'm thinking that there might be plunder to be had in the Saefern Sea.'

'And if Alfred hears we've been fighting up there,' Leofric said, 'he'll gut us.'

I nodded up river towards Exanceaster. 'They burned a hundred Danish ships up there,' I
said, 'and their wreckage is still on the riverbank. We should be able to find at least one
dragon's head to put on her prow.'

Leofric stared at the Eftwyrd. 'Disguise her?'

'Disguise her,' I said, because if I put a dragon head on Eftwyrd no one would know she was
a Saxon ship. She would be taken for a Danish boat, a sea raider, part of England's
nightmare.

Leofric smiled. 'I don't need orders to go on a patrol, do I?'

'Of course not.'

'And we haven't fought since Cynuit,' he said wistfully, 'and no fighting means no
plunder.'

'What about the crew?' I asked.

He turned and looked at them. 'Most of them are evil bastards,' he said, 'they won't mind.
And they all need plunder.'

'And between us and the Saefern Sea,' I said, 'there are the Britons.'

‘And they're all thieving bastards, the lot of them,' Leofric said. He looked at me and
grinned. 'So if Alfred won't go to war, we will?'

'You have any better ideas?' I asked.

Leofric did not answer for along time. Instead, idly, as if he was just thinking, he
tossed pebbles towards a puddle. I said nothing, just watched the small splashes, watched
the pattern the fallen pebbles made, and knew he was seeking guidance from fate. The Danes
cast rune sticks, we all watched for the flight of birds, we tried to hear the whispers of the
gods, and Leofric was watching the pebbles fall to find his fate. The last one clicked on
another and skidded off into the mud and the trail it left pointed south towards the sea.
'No,' he said, 'I don't have any better ideas.'

And I was bored no longer, because we were going to be Vikings.

We found a score of carved beasts' heads beside the river beneath Eanceaster's walls, all
of them part of the sodden, tangled wreckage that showed where Guthrum's fleet had been burned
and we chose two of the least scorched carvings and carried them aboard Eftwyrd. Her prow and
stem culminated in simple posts and we had to cut the posts down until the sockets of the
two carved heads fitted. The creature at the stern, the smaller of the two, was a gape mouthed
serpent, probably intended to represent Corpse-Ripper, the monster that tore at the dead
in the Danish underworld, while the beast we placed at the bow was a dragon's head, though it
was so blackened and disfigured by fire that it looked more like a horse's head. We dug into
the scorched eyes until we found unburned wood, and did the same with the open mouth and when
we were finished the thing looked dramatic and fierce.

'Looks like a fyrdraca now,' Leofric said happily. A fire-dragon.

The Danes could always remove the dragon or beast-heads from the bows and sterns of their
ships because they did not want the horrid-looking creatures to frighten the spirits of
friendly land and so they only displayed the carved monsters when they were in enemy
waters. We did the same, hiding our fyrdraca and serpent head in Eftwyrd's bilges as we went
back down river to where the shipwrights were beginning their work on Heahengel. We hid the
beast-heads because Leofric did not want the shipwrights to know he planned mischief.

'That one,' he jerked his head towards a tall, lean, grey-haired man who was in charge of
the work,

'is more Christian than the Pope. He'd bleat to the local priests if he thought we were
going off to fight someone, and the priests will tell Alfred and then Burgweard will take
Eftwyrd away from me.'

'You don't like Burgweard?'

Leofric spat for answer. 'It's a good thing there are no Danes on the coast.'

'He's a coward?'

'No coward. He just thinks God will fight the battles. We spend more time on our knees than
at the oars. When you commanded the fleet we made money. Now even the rats on board are
begging for crumbs.'

We had made money by capturing Danish ships and taking their plunder, and though none of
us had become rich we had all possessed silver to spare. I was still wealthy enough because I
had a hoard hidden at Oxton, a hoard that was the legacy of Ragnar the Elder, and a hoard
that the church and Oswald's relatives would make their own if they could, but a man can never
have enough silver. Silver buys land, it buys the loyalty of warriors, it is the power of a
lord, and without silver a man must bend the knee or else become a slave. The Danes led men by
the lure of silver, and we were no different. If 1 was to be a lord, if I was to storm the
walls of Bebbanburg, then I would need men and I would need a great hoard to buy the swords and
shields and spears and hearts of warriors, and so we would go to sea and look for silver,
though we told the shipwrights that we merely planned to patrol the coast. We shipped barrels
of ale, boxes of hard-baked bread, cheeses, kegs of smoked mackerel and flitches of bacon.
I told Mildrith the same story, that we would be sailing back and forth along the shores of
Defnascir and Thomsaeta.

'Which is what we should be doing anyway,' Leofric said, 'just in case a Dane
arrives.'

'The Danes are lying low,' I said.

Leofric nodded. 'And when a Dane lies low you know there's trouble coming.'

I believed he was right. Guthrum was not far from Wessex, and Svein, if he existed, was
just a day's voyage from her north coast. Alfred might believe his truce would hold and that
the hostages would secure it, but I knew from my childhood how land-hungry the Danes were,
and how they lusted after the lush fields and rich pastures of Wessex. They would come, and
if Guthrum did not lead them then another Danish chieftain would gather ships and men and
bring his swords and axes to Alfred's kingdom. The Danes, after all, ruled the other three
English kingdoms. They held my own Northumbria, they were bringing settlers to East Anglia
and their language was spreading southwards through Mercia, and they would not want the last
English kingdom flourishing to their south. They were like wolves, shadow-skulking for the
moment, but watching a flock of sheep fatten.

I recruited eleven young men from my land and took them on board Eftwyrd, and brought
Haesten too, and he was useful for he had spent much of his young life at the oars. Then, one
misty morning, as the strong tide ebbed westwards, we slid Eftwyrd away from the river's bank,
rowed her past the low sandspit that guards the Use and so out to the long swells of the sea.
The oars creaked in their leatherlined holes, the bow's breast split the waves to shatter
water white along the hull, and the steering oar fought against my touch and I felt my spirits
rise to the small wind and I looked up into the pearly sky and said a prayer of thanks to Thor,
Odin, Njord and Hoder.

A few small fishing boats dotted the inshore waters, but as we went south and west, away
from the land, the sea emptied. I looked back at the low dun hills. slashed brighter green where
rivers pierced the coast, and then the green faded to grey, the land became a shadow and we
were alone with the white birds crying and it was then we heaved the serpent's head and the
fyrdraca from the bilge and slotted them over the posts at stem and stern, pegged them into
place and turned our bows westwards.

The Eftwyrd was no more. Now the Fyrdraca sailed, and she was hunting trouble.

The crew of the Eftwyrd turned Fyrdraca had been at Cynuit with me. They were fighting
men and they were offended that Odda the Younger had taken credit for a battle they had
won. They had also been bored since the battle. Once in a while, Leofric told me, Burgweard
exercised his fleet by taking it to sea, but most of the time they waited in Hamtun.

'We did go fishing once, though,' Leofric admitted.

'Fishing?'

'Father Willibald preached a sermon about feeding five thousand folk with two scraps of
bread and a basket of herring,' he said, 'so Burgweard said we should take nets out and fish.
He wanted to feed the town, see? Lots of hungry folk.'

'Did you catch anything?'

'Mackerel. Lots of mackerel.’

'But no Danes?'

'No Danes,' Leofric said, 'and no herring, only mackerel. The bastard Danes have
vanished.'

We learned later that Guthrum had given orders that no Danish ships were to raid the
Wessex coast and so break the truce. Alfred was to be lulled into a conviction that peace
had come, and that meant there were no pirates roaming the seas between Kent and Cornwalum
and their absence encouraged traders to come from the lands to the south to sell wine or to
buy fleeces. The Fyrdraca took two such ships in the first four days. They were both Frankish
ships, tubby in their hulls, and neither with more than six oars a side, and both believed the
Fyrdraca was a Viking ship for they saw her beast-heads, and they heard Haesten and I talk
Danish and they saw my arm rings. We did not kill the crews, but just stole their coins, weapons
and as much of their cargo as we could carry. One ship was heaped with bales of wool, for the
folk across the water prized Saxon fleeces; but we could take only three of the bales for fear
of cluttering the Fyrdraca's benches.

At night we found a cove or river's mouth, and by day we rowed to sea and looked for prey,
and each day we went further westwards until I was sure we were off the coast of Cornwalum,
and that was enemy country. It was the old enemy that had confronted our ancestors when
they first came across the North Sea to make England. That enemy spoke a strange language, and
some Britons lived north of Northumbria and others lived in Wales or in Cornwalum, all places
on the wild edges of the isle of Britain where they had been pushed by our coming.

They were Christians, indeed Father Beocca had told me they had been Christians before
we were and he claimed that no one who was a Christian could be a real enemy of another
Christian, but nevertheless the Britons hated us. Sometimes they allied themselves with
the Northmen to attack us, and sometimes the Northmen raided them, and sometimes they made
war against us on their own, and in the past the men of Cornwalum had made much trouble for
Wessex, though Leofric claimed they had been punished so badly that they now pissed
themselves whenever they saw a Saxon. Not that we saw any Britons at first. The places we
sheltered were deserted; all except one river mouth where a skin boat pushed off shore and a
half naked man paddled out to us and held up some crabs which he wanted to sell to us. We took
a basketful of the beasts and paid him two pennies. Next night we grounded Fyrdraca on a
rising tide and collected fresh water from a stream, and Leofric and I climbed a hill and
stared inland. Smoke rose from distant valleys, but there was no one in sight, not even a
shepherd.

'What are you expecting,' Leofric asked, 'enemies?'

'A monastery,' I said.

'A monastery!' He was amused. 'You want to pray?'

'Monasteries have silver,' I said.

'Not down here, they don't. They're poor as stoats. Besides …'

'Besides what?'

He jerked his head towards the crew. 'You've got a dozen good Christians aboard. Lot of bad
ones too, of course, but at least a dozen good ones. They won't raid a monastery with you.'

He was right. A few of the men had showed some scruples about piracy, but I assured them
that the Danes used trading ships to spy on their enemies. That was true enough, though I doubt
either of our victims had been serving the Danes, but both ships had been crewed by
foreigners and, like all Saxons, the crew of the Fyrdraca had a healthy dislike of
foreigners, though they made an exception for Haesten and the dozen crewmen who were
Frisians. The Frisians were natural pirates, bad as the Danes, and these twelve had come to
Wessex to get rich from war and so were glad that the Fyrdraca was seeking plunder.

As we went west we began to see coastal settlements, and some were surprisingly large.
Cenwulf, who had fought with us at Cynuit and was a good man, told us that the Britons of
Cornwalum dug tin out of the ground and sold it to strangers. He knew that because his father
had been a trader and had frequently sailed this coast.

'If they sell tin,' I said, 'then they must have money.'

'And men to guard it,' Cenwulf said dryly.

'Do they have a king?'

No one knew. It seemed probable, though where the king lived or who he was we could not know,
and perhaps, as Haesten suggested, there was more than one king. They did have weapons
because, one night, as the Fyrdraca crept into a bay, an arrow flew from a cliff top to be
swallowed in the sea beside our oars. We might never have known that arrow had been shot
except I happened to be looking up and saw it, fledged with dirty grey feathers, flickering
down from the sky to vanish with a plop. One arrow, and no others followed, so perhaps it
was a warning, and that night we let the ship lie at its anchor and in the dawn we saw two cows
grazing close to a stream and Leofric fetched his axe.