The Warrior Chronicles

by Bernard Cornwell

  Finan found some fellow Irishmen in the compound and I discovered a Saxon who had been captured by a Dane from the coast of East Anglia. King Guthrum, the Saxon said, had returned to East Anglia where he called himself Æthelstan and was building churches. Alfred, so far as he knew, was still alive. The East Anglian Danes had not tried to attack Wessex, but even so he had heard that Alfred was making forts about his frontier. He knew nothing about Alfred’s Danish hostages, so could not tell me whether Ragnar had been released, nor had the man heard any news of Guthred or Northumbria, so I stood in the compound’s centre and shouted a question. ‘Is anyone here from Northumbria?’ Men stared at me dully. ‘Northumbria?’ I shouted again, and this time a woman called from the far side of the palisade which divided the mens’ compound from the womens’. Men were crowded at the palisade, peering through its chinks at the women, but I pushed two aside. ‘You’re from Northumbria?’ I asked the woman who had called to me.

  ‘From Onhripum,’ she told me. She was a Saxon, fifteen years old and a tanner’s daughter from Onhripum. Her father had owed money to Earl Ivarr and, to settle the debt, Ivarr had taken the girl and sold her to Kjartan.

  At first I thought I must have misheard. ‘To Kjartan?’ I asked her.

  ‘To Kjartan,’ she said dully, ‘who raped me, then sold me to these bastards.’

  ‘Kjartan’s alive?’ I asked, astonished.

  ‘He lives,’ she said.

  ‘But he was being besieged,’ I protested.

  ‘Not while I was there,’ she said.

  ‘And Sven? His son?’

  ‘He raped me too,’ she said.

  Later, much later, I pieced the whole tale together. Guthred and Ivarr, joined by my uncle Ælfric, had tried to starve Kjartan into submission, but the winter was hard, their armies had been struck by disease, and Kjartan had offered to pay tribute to all three and they had accepted his silver. Guthred had also extracted a promise that Kjartan would stop attacking churchmen, and for a time that promise was kept, but the church was too wealthy and Kjartan too greedy, and within a year the promise had been broken and some monks were killed or enslaved. The annual tribute of silver that Kjartan was supposed to give to Guthred, Ælfric and Ivarr had been paid once, and never paid again. So nothing had changed. Kjartan had been humbled for a few months, then he had judged the strength of his enemies and found it feeble. The tanner’s daughter from Onhripum knew nothing of Gisela, had never even heard of her, and I thought perhaps she had died and that night I knew despair. I wept. I remembered Hild and I wondered what had happened to her, and I feared for her, and I remembered that one night with Gisela when I had kissed her beneath the beech trees and I thought of all my dreams that were now hopeless and so I wept.

  I had married a wife in Wessex and I knew nothing of her and, if the truth were known, I cared nothing. I had lost my baby son to death. I had lost Iseult to death. I had lost Hild, I had lost all chance of Gisela, and that night I felt a swamping pity for myself and I sat in the hut and tears rolled down my cheeks and Finan saw me and he began weeping too and I knew he had been reminded of home. I tried to rekindle my anger because it is only anger that will keep you alive, but the anger would not come. I just wept instead. I could not stop. It was the darkness of despair, of the knowledge that my fate was to pull an oar until I was broken and then I would go overboard. I wept.

  ‘You and me,’ Finan said, and paused. It was dark. It was a cold night, though it was summer.

  ‘You and me?’ I asked, my eyes closed in an attempt to stop the tears.

  ‘Swords in hand, my friend,’ he said, ‘you and me. It will happen.’ He meant we would be free and we would have our revenge.

  ‘Dreams,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ Finan said angrily. He crawled to my side and took my hand in both his. ‘Don’t give up,’ he snarled at me. ‘We’re warriors, you and I, we’re warriors!’ I had been a warrior, I thought. There had been a time when I shone in mail and helmet, but now I was lice-ridden, filthy, weak and tearful. ‘Here,’ Finan said, and he pushed something into my hand. It was one of the antler-combs we had carried as cargo and somehow he had managed to steal it and secrete it in his rags. ‘Never give up,’ he told me, and I used the comb to disentangle my hair that now grew almost to my waist. I combed it out, tearing knots free, pulling lice from the teeth, and next morning Finan plaited my straight hair and I did the same for him. ‘It’s how warriors dress their hair in my tribe,’ he explained, ‘and you and I are warriors. We’re not slaves, we’re warriors!’ We were thin, dirty, and ragged, but the despair had passed like a squall at sea and I let the anger give me resolve.

  Next day we loaded Trader with ingots of copper, bronze and iron. We rolled barrels of ale into her stern and filled the remaining cargo space with salt meat, rings of hard bread and tubs of salted cod. Sverri laughed at our plaited hair. ‘You two think you’ll find women, do you?’ he mocked us. ‘Or are you pretending to be women?’ Neither of us answered and Sverri just grinned. He was in a good mood, one of unusual excitement. He liked seafaring and from the amount of provisions we stowed I guessed he planned a long voyage and so it proved. He cast his runesticks time after time and they must have told him he would prosper for he bought three new slaves, all of them Frisians. He wanted to be well-manned for the voyage ahead, a voyage that began badly, for, as we left Haithabu, we were pursued by another ship. A pirate, Hakka announced sourly, and we ran north under sail and oars and the other ship slowly overhauled us for she was longer, leaner and faster, and it was only the coming of night that let us escape, but it was a nervous night. We stowed the oars and lowered the sail so that Trader would make no noise, and in the dark I heard the oar-splashes of our pursuer and Sverri and his men were crouching near us, swords in hand, ready to kill us if we made a noise. I was tempted, and Finan wanted to thump on the ship’s side to bring the pursuers to us, but Sverri would have slaughtered us instantly and so we kept silent and the strange ship passed us in the darkness and when dawn came she had vanished.

  Such threats were rare. Wolf does not eat wolf, and the falcon does not stoop on another falcon, and so the Northmen rarely preyed on each other, though some men, desperate, would risk attacking a fellow Dane or Norseman. Such pirates were reviled as outcasts, as nothings, but they were feared. Usually they were hunted down and the crews were killed or enslaved, but still some men risked being outcasts, knowing that if they could just capture one rich ship like Trader they could make a fortune that would give them status, power and acceptance. But we escaped that night, and next day we sailed further north and still further north, and we did not put into land that night, nor for many nights. Then one morning I saw a black coast of terrible cliffs and the sea was shattering white against those grim rocks, and I thought we had come to our journey’s end, but we did not seek land. Instead we sailed on, going west now, and then briefly south to put into the bay of an island where we anchored.

  At first Finan thought it was Ireland, but the folk who came to Trader in a small skin boat did not speak his language. There are islands all about the northern coast of Britain and this, I think was one of them. Savages live on those islands and Sverri did not go ashore, but traded a few paltry coins with the savages and received in return some gulls’ eggs, dried fish and goat-meat. And next morning we rowed into a brisk wind and we rowed all day and I knew we were heading into the western wastes of the wilderness sea. Ragnar the Elder had warned me of those seas, saying that there were lands beyond them, but that most men who sought the far lands never came back. Those western lands, he told me, were inhabited by the souls of dead sailors. They were grey places, fog-shrouded and storm-battered, but that was where we were going and Sverri stood at the steering oar with a look of happiness on his flat face and I remembered that same happiness. I remembered the joy of a good ship and the pulse of its life in the loom of the steering oar.

  For two weeks we voyaged. This was the whale path, and the monsters of the sea rolled to look a
t us or spouted water, and the air became colder and the sky was forever clouded, and I knew Sverri’s crewmen were nervous. They thought we were lost, and I thought the same, and I believed my life would end at the sea’s edge where great whirlpools drag ships down to their deaths. Seabirds circled us, their cries forlorn in the white cold, and the great whales plunged beneath us, and we rowed until our backs were sore. The seas were grey and mountainous, unending and cold, scummed with white foam, and we had only one day of friendly wind when we could travel under sail with the big grey seas hissing along our hull.

  And so we came to Horn in the land of fire that some men call Thule. Mountains smoked and we heard tales of magical pools of hot water, though I saw none. And it was not just a land of fire, but a haunt of ice. There were mountains of ice, rivers of ice and shelves of ice in the sky. There were codfish longer than a man is tall and we ate well there and Sverri was happy. Men feared to make the voyage we had just made, and he had achieved it, and in Thule his cargo was worth three times what he would have received in Denmark or Frankia, though of course he had to yield some of the precious cargo as tribute to the local lord. But he sold the rest of the ingots and took on board whale bones and walrus tusks and walrus hides and sealskin, and he knew he would make much money if he could take those things home. He was in such a good mood that he even allowed us ashore and we drank sour birch wine in a long-house that stank of whale flesh. We were all shackled, not just with our ordinary manacles, but with neck chains too, and Sverri had hired local men to guard us. Three of those sentinels were armed with the long heavy spears that the men of Thule use to kill whales while the other four had flensing knives. Sverri was safe with them watching us, and he knew it, and for the only time in all the months I was with him he deigned to speak with us. He boasted of the voyage we had made and even praised our skill at the oars. ‘But you two hate me,’ he said, looking at Finan and then at me.

  I said nothing.

  ‘The birch wine is good,’ Finan said, ‘thank you for it.’

  ‘The birch wine is walrus piss,’ Sverri said, then belched. He was drunk. ‘You hate me,’ he said, amused by our hatred. ‘I watch you two and you hate me. The others now, they’re whipped, but you two would kill me before I could sneeze. I should kill you both, shouldn’t I? I should sacrifice you to the sea.’ Neither of us spoke. A birch log cracked in the fire and spewed sparks. ‘But you row well,’ Sverri said. ‘I did free a slave once,’ he went on, ‘I released him because I liked him. I trusted him. I even let him steer Trader, but he tried to kill me. You know what I did with him? I nailed his filthy corpse to the prow and let him rot there. And I learned my lesson. You’re there to row. Nothing else. You row and you work and you die.’ He fell asleep shortly after, and so did we, and next morning we were back on board Trader and, under a spitting rain, left that strange land of ice and flame.

  It took much less time to go back east because we ran before a friendly wind and so wintered in Jutland again. We shivered in the slave hut and listened to Sverri grunting in his woman’s bed at night. The snow came, ice locked the creek, and it became the year 880 and I had lived twenty-three years and I knew my future was to die in shackles because Sverri was watchful, clever and ruthless.

  And then the red ship came.

  She was not truly red. Most ships are built of oak that darkens as the ship lives, but this ship had been made from pine and when the morning or evening light lanced low across the sea’s edge she seemed to be the colour of darkening blood.

  She looked a livid red when we first saw her. That was on the evening of the day we had launched and the red ship was long and low and lean. She coursed from the eastern horizon, coming towards us at an angle, and her sail was a dirty grey, criss-crossed by the ropes that strengthen the cloth, and Sverri saw the beast-head at her prow and decided she was a pirate and so we struck inshore to waters he knew well. They were shallow waters and the red ship hesitated to follow. We rowed through narrow creeks, scattering wildfowl, and the red ship stayed within sight, but out beyond the dunes, and then the night fell and we reversed our course and let the ebb-tide take us out to sea and Sverri’s men whipped us to make us row hard to escape the coast. The dawn came cold and misty, but as the mist lifted we saw that the red ship was gone.

  We were going to Haithabu to find the first cargo of the season, but as we approached the port Sverri saw the red ship again and she turned towards us and Sverri cursed her. We were upwind of her, which made escaping easy, but even so she tried to catch us. She used her oars and, because she had at least twenty benches, she was much faster than Trader, but she could not close the wind’s gap and by the following morning we were again alone on an empty sea. Sverri cursed her all the same. He cast his runesticks and they persuaded him to abandon the idea of Haithabu and so we crossed to the land of the Svear where we loaded beaver hides and dung-encrusted fleeces.

  We exchanged that cargo for fine candles of rolled wax. We shipped iron-ore again and so the spring passed and the summer came and we did not see the red ship. We had forgotten her. Sverri reckoned it was safe to visit Haithabu so we took a cargo of reindeer skins to the port, and there he learned that the red ship had not forgotten him. He came back aboard in a hurry, not bothering to load a cargo, and I heard him talking to his crewmen. The red ship, he said, was prowling the coasts in search of Trader. She was a Dane, he thought, and she was crewed by warriors.

  ‘Who?’ Hakka asked.

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How would I know?’ Sverri growled, but he was worried enough to throw his runesticks on the deck and they instructed him to leave Haithabu at once. Sverri had made an enemy and he did not know who, and so he took Trader to a place near his winter home and there he carried gifts ashore. Sverri had a lord. Almost all men have a lord who offers protection, and this lord was called Hyring and he owned much land, and Sverri would pay him silver each winter and in return Hyring would offer protection to Sverri and his family. But there was little Hyring could do to protect Sverri on the sea, though he must have promised to discover who sailed the red ship and to learn why that man wanted Sverri. In the meantime Sverri decided to go far away and so we went into the North Sea and down the coast and made some money with salted herrings. We crossed to Britain for the first time since I had been a slave. We landed in an East Anglian river, and I never did learn what river it was, and we loaded thick fleeces that we took back to Frankia and there bought a cargo of iron ingots. That was a rich cargo because Frankish iron is the best in the world, and we also purchased a hundred of their prized sword-blades. Sverri, as ever, cursed the Franks for their hard-headedness, but in truth Sverri’s head was as hard as any Frank’s and, though he paid well for the iron and sword-blades, he knew that they would bring him a great profit in the northern lands.

  So we headed north and the summer was ending and the geese were flying south above us in great skeins and, two days after we had loaded the cargo, we saw the red ship waiting for us off the Frisian coast. It had been weeks since we had seen her and Sverri must have hoped that Hyring had ended her threat, but she was lying just offshore and this time the red ship had the wind’s advantage and so we turned inshore and Sverri’s men whipped us desperately. I grunted with every stroke, making it look as though I hauled the oar-loom with all my strength, but in truth I was trying to lessen the force of the blade in the water so that the red ship could catch us. I could see her clearly. I could see her oar-wings rising and falling and see the white bone of water snapping at her bows. She was much longer than Trader, and much faster, but she also drew more water which is why Sverri had taken us inshore to the coast of Frisia which all shipmasters fear.

  It is not rockbound like so many northern coasts. There are no cliffs against which a good ship can be broken in pieces. Instead it is a tangle of reeds, islands, creeks and mudflats. For mile after mile there is nothing but dangerous shallows. Passages are marked through those shallows with withies ramm
ed into the mud, and those frail signals offer a safe way through the tangle, but the Frisians are pirates too. They like to mark false channels that lead only to a mudbank where a falling tide can strand a ship, and then the folk, who live in mud huts on their mud islands, will swarm like water-rats to kill and pillage.

  But Sverri had traded here and, like all good shipmasters, he carried memories of good and bad water. The red ship was catching us, but Sverri did not panic. I would watch him as I rowed, and I could see his eyes darting left and right to decide which passage to take, then he would make a swift push on the steering oar and we would turn into his chosen channel. He sought the shallowest places, the most twisted creeks, and the gods were with him for, though our oars sometimes struck a mudbank, Trader never grounded. The red ship, being larger, and presumably because her master did not know the coast as Sverri did, was travelling much more cautiously and we were leaving her behind.

  She began to overhaul us again when we had to cross a wide stretch of open water, but Sverri found another channel at the far side, and here, for the first time, he slowed our oar-beats. He put Hakka in the bows and Hakka kept throwing a lead-weighted line into the water and calling the depth. We were crawling into a maze of mud and water, working our slow way north and east, and I looked across to the east and saw that Sverri had at last made a mistake. A line of withies marked the channel we threaded, but beyond them and beyond a low muddy island thick with birds, larger withies marked a deep water channel that cut inshore of our course and would allow the red ship to head us off, and the red ship saw the opportunity and took that larger channel. Her oar-blades beat at the water, she ran at full speed, she was overtaking us fast, and then she ran aground in a tangle of clashing oars.