The Reluctant Berserker (15 page)

He sighed. “Did you intend to kill Cenred?”

Wulfstan suffered again the disorientated jolt he had felt when Cenred did not get up. “No, my lord. I knocked him down. I thought he would come back fighting. I didn’t know the axe was there. All I wanted was to shut his filthy mouth, not to kill him. I swear.”

“So you shut him up forever, the only way you reliably could.” Saewyn made a move as if to jump down off the dais and go for Wulfstan, and immediately Ecgfreda and her maidens surrounded and restrained her.

Ecgbert shook his head, apparently in despair. “I presume you can call no witnesses, Wulfstan, to confirm your words?”

“No, lord. It was whispered. I don’t know… I don’t think anyone was awake to hear.”

“Yet”—Ecgbert smoothed down his tunic and rubbed a thumb over the pommel of his sword—“we are well aware of what kind of man Cenred was. His delight in malice, his taunts. There are few who have not felt these things, many who wondered that you bore with him as long as you did.”

He turned his gaze on the lawspeaker. “I myself will be witness for Wulfstan that he—rightly—reacts with an inspired fury at such accusations. I have seen it myself before, and I say to you that if Cenred needled him on this point, he must have known the wrath he would face. It is no more than just that his own malice doomed him in the end.

“I therefore rule that Wulfstan will pay the full weregild of a fighting man to Saewyn, Cenred’s mother, as compensation for the loss of her son. Saewyn, you will accept it. You did your best with the child, but his father’s blood was too strong in him, as anyone who knew him could have seen.

“There the incident will be at an end. I have no doubt that my youths will ever be urging each other to taunt Wulfstan further on this subject, as a trial of strength or bravery, and to you I say ‘the first youth who does, I will give over to be hanged like a common criminal’. No more of this. I will have peace, if I have to send you all home to your families in disgrace.”

“I have the weregild here.” Wulfric came slowly up the steps to the dais. Opening a bulging pouch, he tipped a small hummock of silver coins onto the table. The priest and lawspeaker counted them together and nodded, satisfied.

“It is the proper amount.” The priest returned the coins to their sack and held it out to Saewyn, whose mouth was working, as though she would speak but could not force it out.

“Take it,” Ecgbert insisted, sharp as the tip of an arrow.

“I do not want coin,” she managed at last, her voice tight as if squeezed through a sieve. “I am the last of my family. It is my task to see that my son gets revenge.”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” the priest intoned, softly, but with an undertone of hellfire. “Blood feud is a wicked pagan practice. You are angry now, child, but you will not always be so. Take what is owed to you and repent of your ire. If you cannot find mercy in your heart, find at least obedience, lest you too be struck down by your own malice, as it seems was the fate of your son.”

Saewyn cast a fold of her mantle over her head and stumbled away, blinded by grief.

After that, it all went easier. Over the next few days, folk of all sorts sickened Wulfstan further by coming up to praise him. Time and again he heard of liberties taken, strength applied followed by shame. The coward’s son, it seemed, had been driven all his life by a wish to prove himself better than those around him, and had done so by humiliating them one by one.

Their thanks should have pleased him, but instead they only made him sadder. How hag-ridden must Cenred have been to need to do such a thing? And why—why had Wulfstan not been told of it before, when the knowledge would have been useful to him, when it would have saved Cenred’s life? Never would he have trusted the man with a secret so deadly, if he had but known.

Nor would any of these thanks have come his way if the folk knew Cenred had been speaking the truth. They would have thanked
him
then, for ridding them of one who walked in the semblance of a man but was no such thing.

Wulfstan was prevented by his father from attending his friend’s funeral. He had put on his best clothes, his richest belt and the jewelled scabbard to his sword. He was ducking out of the hall door to join the small procession of villagers walking up to the graveyard when Wulfric caught his arm and stopped him. “Saewyn will think you mock her by it,” Wulfric said. “She will not understand that you mourn too. Come on. Let’s get a drink.”

He led Wulfstan instead to the mead hall, sent a servant for beer, and they drank to Cenred’s journey to Heaven or Hell until the service was over and the folk began to wander back. Most of them looking satisfied, all of them nodding companionably to Wulfstan as they passed.

“Fortune smiles upon you, son,” Wulfric said at last. “For this amount of goodwill, the silver of the weregild is a small cost.”

“I will repay you.”

“Of course you will. You will pay me better by giving up the killing of friends. Once, to rid the household of a wyrm with poisoned teeth, that is no more than a young man’s fighting mettle. But Ecgbert says this is becoming a habit of yours. I will not pay again. I will not have you squander all my fortune over your feuds.”

“I have no intention of—”

“Good.”

Dark had fallen outside, now, and all the folk had come to huddle indoors. Wulfstan was about to ask after his mother and brothers when a young man he didn’t recognise jostled his shoulder. From the corner of his eye, he registered a madder hood pulled down low, a green tunic, a springy deer-like slenderness, such as that of a boy who has just had his first growth and sprung into height without putting on the muscle to match. A stranger, here? When had that happened?

The boy leaned forward so the rushlight in the centre of the table shone beneath his hood and showed his face. Even so it took Wulfstan a long, puzzled, blank moment to fit it to anything that made sense.

Something twisted in his head, just as the boy gave a smile at his slowness. The raw, unfinished face suddenly became delicate, as though—having being given the key—his mind could open the box and see what was there.

“Ecg—”

She stumbled as though drunk and elbowed him in the shoulder, and he had the sense to finish, “—stan. What…?”

“You must come with me,” she said in a little gruff voice. “There’s something you must see.”

“Father?” He didn’t think of saying no. She would not have gone to these extraordinary ends for any light reason.

“Go,” Wulfric sighed. “We will speak in the morning, before I return home. I see this is an urgent matter.”

“My thanks.”

Ecgfreda took him by the belt and tugged him out of the hall, as a single man with a rope could pull a barge if it was but unmoored enough. She led him out of the burh itself and on to where the woods marched almost to the lip of the moat. “Ecgfreda, what is this?”

“Shh!” she said. “I could not have had you leave the hall and be alone in my company if anyone had known it was me. Luckily, in my brothers’ cast-offs, no one would look twice. Now listen.

“After the funeral, Saewyn was alone, and that seemed to me a sad thing, so I filled a jug of wine and took it to her house, meaning to comfort her. First the husband and then the son. She has been ill-served by fate, and it seems unfair, since she is herself so good a woman.”

Ecgfreda turned off the path beside a stone that looked like the hindquarters of an otter. She began to thread her way through the tangle of small boughs, bending them quietly to let her pass, not releasing them until Wulfstan had done the same.

“At least”—she gave him a glance over her shoulder, her profile pale against the hood—“I
thought
she was good. Yet when I got outside she was shouting, like one who will have her say even though there is no one to hear. She swore by her craft and by the heathen gods and by all sorts of demons I will not name that she would have revenge.”

Further in the trees, staining them to waist height with blood, a red light flickered. Wulfstan stopped in his tracks as if nailed there. “She’s summoning demons? Against me?”

“I don’t know,” Ecgfreda whispered. “When Saewyn had finished speaking I watched for a while, and when she came out, I followed her here. She had a basket on her arm with plants and knives, and something that wriggled. I watched her set the fire and I knew she really meant it, and I came to get you.”

“
Why
?”

She looked at him as though he had lost his mind. “So that you could do something about it.”

He returned the look to her. “I’m a warrior,”
and I’m steeped in sin top to toe, full of lying and killing and fornication.
“I can’t go up against demons! That’s a priest’s job. It’s a task for someone who is armoured by God and protected by Him. A spiritual warrior not a worldly one.”

The wavering, eerie light showed him the disappointment on her face. “One woman and a basket, and you are afraid.”

That was goading enough to prick him right through the fear. He hunkered down, pressed through the weave of briars and branches and crept a little closer.

There
was
a fire, but it smouldered with a sullen red gleam unlike that of a simple wood fire. Its light could not fully illuminate the clearing of which it was the centre, and he had glimpses only of something moving around the edges of the trees.

Flash and drum of footsteps, twist and spiral of something man-shaped circling the clearing. The smoke drifted out to him and smelled acrid and potent. He began to hear words in amongst the footfalls—whispered words in some tongue that was neither Englisc nor Latin. Like nonsense it sounded, long rolling syllables of nonsense.

All the time the figure spoke, a humped black thing left in the basket by the fire snuffled like a child asleep.

At last the dancing figure stopped, pressed its hands to its head and adjusted its face. It walked forwards into the light, and horror tried to claw out Wulfstan’s throat as he saw the huge great owl eyes, the beak and the crown of grey feathers above the body of a woman. He made a move as if to run, and Ecgfreda caught his wrist and stayed him.

“It’s a mask,” she said, though he could see for himself it was not. “Whatever she’s going to do, you must stop her. For your soul’s sake.”

“I will not kill her.”

“She’s practicing witchcraft. I will witness as much before the court.”

His horror at the demons was not enough to whip him past his guilt. “Have I not done enough to her already? Perhaps I…”

Saewyn, or the owl-creature that she had become, now picked from the basket some little black thing with four limbs. With one hand, she slipped a noose around its neck and—supporting it carefully—tied the other end of the rope around the lowest branch of a magnificent ash.

She threw something on the fire and there was a flash like lightning. When the whole world felt scoured by light, she let go and, as the creature fell, the noose slipping strangling tight, she stabbed it three times over the heart and set it twisting, so the blood sprayed out in a perfect circle around her feet.

Perhaps I deserve it
, Wulfstan had been going to say, but his voice froze in his mouth. It seemed to him that, after the light, a darkness had risen from the fire and gone to lap at the spilled blood. It seemed to him that the witch was speaking to it in a gentle voice. There was only a breath of time left before it would raise its head and look at him, and his contrition did not stretch to waiting for it.

Quietly as he could, he wormed away. When he came to the paths, he ran. He ran and a demon pursued him, passing Ecgfreda by, unharmed, as it followed him into the hall.

There, he went down on bended knee before both his fathers—Wulfric and Ecgbert alike—and begged for the chance to make a pilgrimage. “To soothe my soul and pray that this warrior madness be lifted from me.”
And to get far, far away and into a saint’s protection before Saewyn’s fiend can eat me up from within.

Chapter Seven

For the first few days of his flight, Wulfstan spent every moment, every hoofbeat, expecting the end to come. He exhausted himself with terror, startling at shadows, spending the nights fully armoured, vigilant and awake.

But after a week of this, when he lay down in the shelter of a hedge and slept for a day and a half, unmolested except by midges, he began to understand that he had been condemned to a long, slow torment, rather than a rapid one. He was not simply to be destroyed—he was to be played with first.

Generally, Wulfstan’s fiend followed him in the shape of a black dog—he would catch glimpses, now and again, out of the corner of his eye. Today, however, as he slogged his way through carr woodland, knee deep in brackish water, it curled around his feet like an enormous eel. He could feel it down there, grasping at his ankles with slippery loops. He could sense the crest of it pushing the water aside, slipping beneath the fallen leaves, dark as death, strong as sorrow.

Looking up, he tried to gauge his direction from the sun, but the gnarled alders that surrounded him, the chestnuts that hogged every patch of drier ground, fluttered their leaves above him with a hissing like gossiping snakes. They blocked out everything but moving dazzle.

Outside the wood, the long days of summer were passing in the fields and farmers were doing whatever it was that they did in the time between sowing and harvest. It had seemed an idyllic life as Wulfstan passed it on horseback, with the sun bright on the back of his neck and his mail folded up small in its sack of pig-stomach, keeping itself bright in his saddlebags.