The Reluctant Berserker (5 page)

The warriors were stripping off hauberks and piling them on the tables above their heads, lying beneath, shoulder to shoulder under their overlapped cloaks, crammed in and companionable like badgers in their sett. A few wealthy merchants and seafarers had inserted themselves around the walls, where it was coldest. Leofgar thought they could make one more gap if they pleased. “They are already so squeezed, asking them to shuffle up a little more could be no harm. I don’t ask for myself—I can sleep outside—but my master is an old man, and has sung himself raw tonight. You will not, surely, throw his old bones out into the cold?”

The warden dipped his head, his shaven crown gleaming in the lamplight. “Alfric has asked me to thank your master and to offer him this ring in gratitude.” He held out a finger ring of gold, set with a little garnet in the centre. Behind the garnet, a sheet of patterned metal caught the light and threw it back, making the stone glow and glitter. It was a princely gift, but Leofgar would have traded it with a light heart for a spot by the fire for Anna.

He was about to haggle, but his master limped to his side and took the ring with a courteous nod of the head and a smile. You would never have known, Leofgar thought, looking at Anna, how much more welcome would be an invitation to stay.

Sighing, Leofgar relieved Anna of the harp bag. Swaddled tight in her lappings of lamb’s wool, Lark was silent and smug against his back. She knew she had played well. She at least was content.

She too would have been better off in the dry warmth of the hall, rather than taken out into the night to face the blood-month’s chill and the cold dews of dawn. He could see from Anna’s sharp glance that any more arguing would earn him a switch across the back, and though the weakness of the old man’s arm had taken the sting out of his blows a long time ago, it was his disappointment Leofgar chiefly feared. He hoisted his own bags, took a last swallow of beer from a nearby cup before the slaves could tidy it away and, having thus relieved his dry throat, forced out a word or two of thanks and farewell. They would be back for the fair next year—no sense in leaving ill will behind to welcome them.

Outside, the night was dark and silent. Clouds had ridden up out of the sea and veiled the moon. The houses and workshops of the town showed only the occasional line or star of amber, where firelight bled through the holes in the walls. Otherwise the buildings were scarcely darker than the spaces between them.

The mud squelched underfoot, churned up by feet and carts and sleds and horses. Every footstep was a struggle against a grip that held on and pulled back. Leofgar’s shoulders were tight from an evening of playing, and the straps of their bags cut thinly into the aching muscles. The pit of his stomach trembled from having sung and piped so long. Wind froze his cheeks and made his ears sting, and he was afraid to ask how Anna fared, whose joints ached unceasingly in anything but the hottest of summers.

He felt basely ashamed. For surely they would have found a place in the hall if it had not been for his revenge on that boor. His master could be curling up now on a thick mattress of straw, under their shared cloaks, warmed on all sides by bodies and the embers of a noble fire, but for him.

They reached the end of the street, and here at least the mud became shallower. A little light came up from the harbour, where the wide sea shone grey. Fishermen’s huts, scarcely twelve feet long, lined the wharves, their shingled roofs sloping down almost to the ground. Beneath the eaves, Leofgar could have lain, rolled in his cloak and sheltered just enough from rain and wind to fall asleep. Dark lumps swathed in cloth clustered around each building, where other travellers had had the same idea. But that was a game for the young, and a death sentence for the old.

“I could knock,” he whispered, feeling Anna take the opportunity to draw close and lean on his arm. “At one of these doors. Someone will be glad to take silver for a night’s lodging. I would have you lie in warmth.”

In the dark, the old man’s weight bore heavily down on him. He could feel a shiver through the thin hands that grasped his biceps, and when a wind came moaning through the streets and stirring the straw with a rattle by his feet, cold flowed down his own spine like heavy rain.

“Every year”—Anna chuckled, though his voice was thick and rough in his throat—“we say the same things. We will stay where we always stay. It does well enough.”

He had taken the lead now, walking cautiously through the blind dark. Leofgar followed, through the cluster of huts, out onto the narrow track that took them over dunes and down into the next bay.

Proud as the devil, Anna had drawn ahead, his back straight and his step long, the wheeze of his breath muffled behind one hand. But he stumbled on the way down and let Leofgar catch him without a curse, and that was new this year. New this year too was the way that—when they went on—he let Leofgar take his elbow again and gradually bear more and more of his weight, until they hobbled as one creature, slowly and painfully into the fumes of the bay.

This was a narrow inlet too shallow for ships. Instead, the folk of Uisebec had built salt pans here. Hurrying clouds parted for a moment, and the moon lit the white walls that dammed the outflow of the tide, made them glitter as though they were drifted over by snow. Pillars of steam rose silvery up to the stars, and the damp warmth enfolded them both as they limped closer.

The air was bitter on the lips, and salt crunched underfoot as they found the first of the boarded walks along which sleds were pulled from the pans to the warehouses. A sullen red glow at the most distant pan showed where a peat fire smouldered. Slaves tended it. They looked up with faces from which life had leached all expression, even fear, as the harpers loomed out of the night. They were glad enough to exchange a place at the fire for music and news, and the promise that Leofgar would take a shift at their work, let them sleep an extra hour.

Some of the faces were new. Some they had come to know over ten years of markets. One of these, a man called Asc, watched as Anna propped himself up against the low wall of the pan, wringing his hands over and over, trying to rub out the aches.

“He’s too old to be out here with us.”

“You see?” Leofgar turned to his master with a triumphant smile. It faltered and fell away as the russet light painted all the lines on Anna’s face with a light like blood. Some magic was at play—or some had been withdrawn—for it was as if he were seeing ten years of hardship fall on the old man at once.

Time set its stamp so slowly on change, he thought, that you go for years not noticing that anything new has been wrought. Then one day the scales fall from your eyes and the world has been unmade around you. He’d jokily called Anna “the old man” for the past decade. He’d called him “ancient one” indeed, since Anna first stopped at the cot of Leofgar’s family and offered him a glimpse of a life that was not all sheep. But Leofgar had been a child in those days, and “ancient” had meant “has some grey in his beard”. He hadn’t really appreciated that ten years of sleeping in ditches had changed them both since then.

Now he saw for the first time how haggard Anna’s face was—the way his skin hung off, creased as a linen tunic put away damp. Age spots, bruises and broken veins mottled the backs of his hands and his bald scalp. His eyelids had folded over on themselves and weighed his eyes half-closed at all times. They were fully closed now, pressed tight, and his forehead was scored deep with furrows of pain. It hit Leofgar, like an arrow through a lung, that his master looked not only old but frail, like a heathen sacrifice dredged out of a bog. A skeleton clothed in second-hand skin. Death had started to show, like a fraying edge in a garment too weak to be resewn.

Triumph turned rapidly into ashes, but he finished his thought nevertheless. It was only truer now. “I was right. We should have paid for lodging. We can afford it, and you should have a bed softer than this sharp ground.”

“That silver is to tide us over when I can walk no more,” Anna mumbled. “Which is soon, but not yet. We will need it more then, for you will leave me and find a lord to serve, and I will pay for some good wife to nurse me to my grave.”

In the heart of the fire, three round, granite rocks nestled like dragon eggs. Asc took one between iron tongs and, lifting it out, dropped it into the nearest salt pan, where it sank with a hiss and a bubbling. After some fishing in the milk-white water, he picked out a second, now cold, and set it gently down at the edge of the flames to ease into warmth before it went back into the hottest embers. When he had done, he traded the tongs for a paddle on the end of a long stick, and scraped the salt on the bottom of the pan—soft as new butter—to the sides.

While he laboured, Leofgar took the tongs in his turn and brought a second stone out of the fire. He pulled his spare tunic out of his bag, wrapped the glowing thing in it and placed it in Anna’s lap, folding his master’s hands around it. Anna opened one eye. Despite his weariness, there was a wry twinkle in it.

Leofgar smiled in return, painfully fond. “You know I’ll do nothing of the kind. We will find a lord together, who will take us both. Then I will take care of you. Are you not my father, that I should leave you behind? Don’t ask it of me.”

“Yet you left your own sire without a backward glance.” Anna smiled to take the sting out of the words. “You are a wanderer at heart. And perhaps
I
should find a lord to praise with my remaining hours and leave you to walk the earth alone, being thrown out of mead halls for picking fights with men twice your size.”

Distracted, Leofgar grinned. The taste of that victory remained sweet, despite his guilt. “We scops are beholden to no one,” he said, taking out the parcel of bread and meat and pastries he had purloined from the hall, sharing it with Asc, Anna and the other two silent ones. “We are masters of our own craft, who have attained skills and knowledge those butter-fed bruisers could never imagine. Why should we scrape to them as though they were saints, or humble ourselves as if to the holy ones of God?”

“Ah.” Anna brought his knees up so that he was more firmly curled around the hot stone. “I thought it must be your fault that you and he were at odds.”

“He walked into me and demanded I apologise.”

“You could not have feigned regret, though it might have spared you a bruising?”

Leofgar edged as close to the fire as he could get, so that when slow, grassy sparks drifted out they landed on his cloak and singed it brown. He propped up his feet against the hearthstone and watched steam rise from his shoes, as his warming feet tingled and his ears throbbed with returning blood. It was better to think on his adventures this evening than it was to look too closely at his diminishing future.

“He…” It was better still to conjure up the warrior’s face in his mind. He’d been a big man, yes, half as wide again as Leofgar and all of it muscle. But he had a generous, feminine mouth, plump in the lips like two silken cushions. More than that, he had worried eyes.

The mouth might have been a fluke—a moment of whimsy on God’s part—for why shouldn’t the creator have a little fun now and again, gifting the burliest of men with incongruous beauties? The eyes, though… He hadn’t seen the colour, but he had seen the doubts, the thought, complicated and cautious, as out of place in the brutal young man as his woman’s mouth.

“He seemed the sort who would take a joke,” Leofgar finished, abruptly changing his mind. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about this after all. “I swear, if I had thought him a complete arsehole, I would have kept my head down and been as meek as you please. I am not altogether in favour of my own martyrdom.”

“Just bear in mind that we will never gain a place in any lord’s household if you cannot learn discretion. It is no shame to give every man what he wants. It is part of a scop’s skill—to please, to praise, to flatter and to fawn. And I would rather have a home in my old age than any amount of cold gold in my pocket.”

“I would rather have my freedom,” Leofgar mused, pushing the now-dry stone into the centre of the fire. The salt on it burnt off in long blue flames, wondrous to behold. “I know all the songs tell us how terrible it is to be alone, without place or protector, a wanderer in the wilderness. I can recite the lament of the lordless with every syllable dripping with woe. It isn’t to be alone that I fear, it is to be caged. Bound to some man who thinks that because he feeds you he thus owns you. That his are the words that come out of your mouth, and his are your thoughts—that you exist only to praise and serve him. How can a man of pride bear that? How can any real man be content as another’s servant?”

“I’ve an answer to that.” It was the slave, Asc, who spoke. “For I was starving, and my family were starving, before I sold myself to Alfric to pay my debts. I tell you, you can’t have ever been hungry enough, if you think you wouldn’t embrace a few years as someone else’s chattel rather than see your young daughter die, with the bones all but sticking through her skin, and her bright eyes like wounds.”

He replaced the hot stone in Anna’s bundle, raked out and changed the one in the pan, and sat again, all unselfconsciously, as though no shame weighted down his shoulders. Leofgar thought that Asc had a dignity Anna shared, that he himself—spiky as a hedgehog with pride—did not. If the price of that dignity was to learn to submit to something greater than himself, whether that be famine or old age, he had no desire to pay it.

“We all serve in the end.” Anna nodded at the slave’s words. “Asc serves Alfric, Alfric serves Hereswith, Hereswith serves the king. The king serves God. In the end we are all alike in needing to surrender to God’s will, for the Lord of All works our wyrd as He sees fit, and our weal is only to do—for the fleeting days of our mortal life—as we are given to do.”