The Pale Horseman (7 page)

'The cows are there to kill us,' Haesten warned us in his new and not very good English.

'The cows will kill us?' I asked in amusement.

'I have seen it before, lord. They put cows to bring us on land, then they attack.'

We granted the cows mercy, hauled the anchor and pulled towards the bay's mouth and a howl
sounded behind us and I saw a crowd of men appear from behind bushes and trees, and I took
one of the silver rings from my left arm and gave it to Haesten. It was his first arm ring and,
being a Dane, he was inordinately proud of it. He polished it all morning.

The coast became wilder and refuge more difficult to find, but the weather was placid. We
captured a small eight-oared ship that was returning to Ireland and relieved it of sixteen
pieces of silver, three knives, a heap of tin ingots, a sack of goose feathers and six
goatskins. We were hardly becoming rich, though Fyrdraca's belly was becoming cluttered
with pelts, fleeces and ingots of tin.

'We need to sell it all,' Leofric said.

But to whom? We knew no one who traded here. What I needed to do, I thought, was land close
to one of the larger settlements and steal everything. Burn the houses, kill the men,
plunder the headman's hall and go hack to sea, but the Britons kept lookouts on the headlands
and they always saw us coming, and whenever we were close to one of their towns we would see
armed men waiting. They had learned how to deal with Vikings, which was why, Haesten told me,
the Northmen now sailed in fleets of five or six ships.

'Things will be better,' I said, 'when we turn the coast.'

I knew Cornwalum ended somewhere to the west and we could then sail up into the Saefern
Sea where we might find a Danish ship on its voyage from Ireland, but Cornwalum seemed to be
without end.

Whenever we saw a headland that I thought must mark the end of the land it turned out to be
a false hope, for another cliff would lie beyond, and then another, and sometimes the tide
flowed so strongly that even when we sailed due west we were driven back east.

Being a Viking was more difficult than I thought, and then one day the wind freshened from
the west and the waves heaved higher and their tops were torn ragged and rain squalls hissed
dark from a low sky and we ran northwards to seek shelter in the lee of a headland. We dropped
our anchor there and felt Fyrdraca jerk and tug like a fretful horse at her long rope of
twisted hide. All night and all next day the weather raged past the headland. Water
shattered white on high cliffs. We were safe enough, but our food was getting low, and I had
half decided we must abandon our plans to make ourselves rich and sail back to the Uisc where
we could pretend we had only been patrolling the coast, but on our second dawn under the lee
of that high cliff, as the wind subsided and the rain dropped to a chill drizzle, a ship
appeared about the eastern spit of land.

'Shields!' Leofric shouted, and the men, cold and unhappy, found their weapons and lined
the ship's side.

The ship was smaller than ours, much smaller. She was squat, high-bowed, with a stumpy mast
holding a wide yard on which a dirty sail was furled. A half-dozen oarsmen manned her, and the
steersman was bringing her directly towards Fyrdraca, and then, as she came closer and as
her small bows broke the water white, I saw a green bough had been tied to her short mast.

'They want to talk,' I said.

'Let's hope they want to buy,' Leofric grumbled.

There was a priest in the small ship. I did not know he was a priest at first, for he looked
as ragged as any of the crewmen, but he shouted that he wished to speak with us, and he spoke
Danish, though not well, and I let the boat come up on the flank protected from the wind where
her crewmen gazed up at a row of armed men holding shields. Cenwulf and I pulled the priest
over our side. Two other men wanted to follow, but Leofric threatened them with a spear and
they dropped back and the smaller ship drew away to wait while the priest spoke with us.

He was called Father Mardoc and, once he was aboard and sitting wetly on one of
Fyrdraca's rowing benches, I saw the crucifix about his neck.

'I hate Christians,' I said, 'so why should we not feed you to Njord?'

He ignored that, or perhaps he did not know that Njord was one of the sea gods. 'I bring you
a gift,'

he said, 'from my master,' and he produced, from beneath his cloak, two battered arm
rings.

I took them. They were poor things, mere ringlets of copper, old, filthy with verdigris and
of almost no value, and for a moment I was tempted to toss them scornfully into the sea,
but reckoned our voyage had made such small profit that even those scabby treasures must be
kept.

'Who is your master?' I asked.

‘King Peredur.'

I almost laughed. King Peredur? A man can expect a king to be famous, but I had never
heard of Peredur which suggested he was little more than a local chieftain with a
high-sounding title.

'And why does this Peredur,' I asked, 'send me miserable gifts?'

Father Mardoc still did not know my name and was too frightened to ask it. He was
surrounded by men in leather, men in mail, and by shields and swords, axes and spears, and he
believed all of its were Danes for I had ordered any of Fyrdraca's crew who wore crosses or
crucifixes to hide them beneath their clothes. Only Haesten and I spoke, and if Father
Mardoc thought that strange he did not say anything of it, instead he told me how his lord,
King Peredur, had been treacherously attacked by a neighbour called Callyn, and Callyn's
forces had taken a high fort close to the sea and Peredur would pay us well if we were to help
him recapture the fort that was called Dreyndynas.

I sent Father Mardoc to sit in the Fyrdraca's bow while we talked about his request. Some
things were obvious. Being paid well did not mean we would become rich, but that Peredur
would try to fob us off with as little as possible and, most likely, having given it to us
he would then try to take it back by killing us all.

'What we should do,' Leofric advised, 'is find this man Callyn and see what he'll pay
us.'

Which was good enough advice except none of us knew how to find Callyn, whom we later
learned was King Callyn, which did not mean much for any man with a following of more than
fifty armed men called himself a king in Cornwalum, and so I went to the Fyrdraca's bows and
talked with Father Mardoc again, and he told me that Dreyndynas was a high fort, built by the
old people, and that it guarded the road eastwards, and so long as Callyn held the fort, so
long were Peredur's people trapped in their lands.

‘You have ships,' I pointed out.

‘And Callyn has ships,' he said, 'and we cannot take cattle in ships.'

'Cattle?'

'We need to sell cattle to live,' he said.

So Callyn had surrounded Peredur and we represented a chance to tip the balance in
this little war.

'So how much will your king pay us?' I asked.

'A hundred pieces of silver,' he said.

I drew Serpent-Breath. 'I worship the real gods,' I told him, 'and I am a particular
servant of Hoder, and Hoder likes blood and I have given him none in many days.'

Father Mardoc looked terrified, which was sensible of him. He was a young man, though it
was hard to tell for his hair and beard were so thick that most of the time he was just a broken
nose and pair of eyes surrounded by a greasy black tangle. He told me he had learned to speak
Danish when he had been enslaved by a chieftain called Godfred, but that he had managed to
escape when Godfred raided the Sillans, islands that lay well out in the western
sea-wastes.

'Is there any wealth in the Sillans?' I asked him.

I had heard of the islands, though some men claimed they were mythical and others said the
islands came and went with the moons, but Father Mardoc said they existed and were called
the Isles of

the Dead.

'So no one lives there?' I asked.

'Some folk do,' he said, 'but the dead have their houses there.'

'Do they have wealth as well?'

'Your ships have taken it all,' he said. This was after he had promised me that Peredur
would be more generous, though he did not know how generous, but he said the king was
willing to pay far more than a hundred silver coins for our help, and so we had him shout to
his ship that they were to lead us around the coast to Peredur's settlement. I did not let
Father Mardoc go back to his ship for he would serve as a hostage if the tale he had told us
was false and Peredur was merely luring us to an ambush.

He was not. Peredur's home was a huddle of buildings built on a steep hill beside a bay
and protected by a wall of thorn bushes. His people lived within the wall and some were
fishermen and some were cattle herders and none was wealthy, though the king himself had a
high hall where he welcomed us, though not before we had taken more hostages. Three young men,
all of whom we were assured were Peredur's sons, were delivered to Fyrdraca and I gave the
crew orders that the three were to be killed if I did not return, and then I went ashore with
Haesten and Cenwulf. I went dressed for war, with mail coat and helmet polished, and
Peredur's folk watched the three of us pass with frightened eyes. The place stank of fish and
shit. The people were ragged and their houses mere hovels that were built up the side of the
steep hill that was crowned with Peredur's hall. There was a church beside the hall, its thatch
thick with moss and its gable decorated with a cross made from seawhitened driftwood.

Peredur was twice my age, a squat man with a sly face and a forked black heard. He greeted
us from a throne, which was just a chair with a high back, and he waited for us to bow to him,
but none of us did and that made him scowl. A dozen men were with him, evidently his courtiers,
though none looked wealthy and all were elderly except for one much younger man who was in the
robes of a Christian monk, and he stood out in that smoke darkened hall like a raven in a
clutch of gulls for his black robes were clean, his face close-shaved and his hair and tonsure
neatly trimmed. He was scarcely older than I, was thin and stern-faced, and that face looked
clever, and it also carried an expression of marked distaste for us. We were pagans, or at
least Haesten and I were pagans and I had told Cenwulf to keep his mouth shut and his
crucifix hidden, and so the monk assumed all three of us were heathen Danes.

The monk spoke Danish, far better Danish than Father Mardoc. 'The king greets you,' he
said. He had a voice as thin as his lips and as unfriendly as his pale green eyes. 'He greets
you and would know who you are.'

'My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,' I said.

'Why are you here, Uhtred Ragnarson?' the priest asked.

I contemplated him. I did not just look at him, but I studied him as a man might study an
ox before killing it. I gave him a look which suggested I was wondering where to make the
cuts, and he got my meaning and did not wait for an answer to his question, an answer which
was obvious if we were Danes. We were here to thieve and kill, of course, what else did he
think a Viking ship would he doing?

Peredur spoke to the monk and they muttered for some time and I looked around the hall,
searching for any evidence of wealth. I saw almost nothing except for three whalebones
stacked in a corner, but Peredur plainly had some treasure for he wore a great heavy torque
of bronze about his neck and there were silver rings on his grubby fingers, an amber brooch
at the neck of his cloak and a golden crucifix hidden in the cloak's lice-ridden folds. He
would keep his hoard buried, I thought, and I doubted any of us would become rich from this
alliance, but in truth we were not becoming rich from our voyage either, and at least
Peredur would have to feed us while we haggled.

'The king,' the monk interrupted my thoughts, 'wishes to know how many men you can lead
against the enemy.'

'Enough,' I said flatly.

'Does that not depend,' the monk observed slyly, 'on how many enemies there are?'

'No,' I said. 'It depends on this,' and I slapped Serpent-Breath's hilt. It was a good,
arrogant reply, and probably what the monk expected. And, in truth, it was convincing for
I was broad in the chest and a giant in this hall where I was a full head taller than any other
man.

'And who are you, monk?' I demanded.

'My name is Asser,' he said. It was a British name, of course, and in the English tongue it
meant a he-ass, and ever after I thought of him as the Ass. And there was to be a lot of the
ever after for, though I did not know it, I had just met a man who would haunt my life like a
louse. I had met another enemy, though on that day in Peredur's hall he was just a strange
British monk who stood out from his companions because he washed. He invited me to follow
him to a small door at the side of the hall and, motioning Haesten and Cenwulf to stay where
they were, I ducked through the door to find myself standing beside a dung-heap, but the
point of taking me outside had been to show me the view eastwards.

I stared across a valley. On the nearer slope were the smoke blackened roofs of Peredur's
settlement, then came the thorn fence that had been made along the stream which flowed to the
sea. On the stream's far side the hills rose gently to a far off crest and there, breaking the
skyline like a boil, was Dreyndynas.

'The enemy,' Asset said.

A small fort, I noted. 'How many men are there?'

'Does it matter to you?' Asser asked sourly, paying me back for my refusal to tell him how
many men I led, though I assumed Father Mardoc had made a count of the crew while he was on
board Fyrdraca, so my defiance had been pointless.

'You Christians,' I said, 'believe that at death you go to heaven. Isn't that right?'

'What of it?'

'You must surely welcome such a fate?' I asked. 'To be near your god?'

'Are you threatening me?'