Kings and Pawns

by James L. Nelson

  He was not certain why he had said that, any more than he was certain about much that had to do with him and Failend, a complication he had not foreseen. His feelings for Failend were not the feelings she had for him, that was true, but still he did care. Nor was he so obtuse that he could not understand the tangle of emotions with which the girl was wrestling. He would spare her that, if he could, even if it meant forgoing the comfort she brought him.

  He left Louis standing there, and he and Harald walked off toward the place where Sea Hammer floated in the stream. Thorgrim looked around the longphort which had been their home for so brief a time. The makeshift wall, a number of broken barrels, a few heaps of half-buried offal from slaughtered animals, blackened fire pits and the trampled earth were all that was left to mark their stay.

  They reached the water’s edge and waded out as far as they could toward the low midships where they might more easily climb aboard. Thorgrim set his hands on the sheer strake, ready to heave himself up over the side. He knew it would not be so easy as it had been in his younger days, or even a few years ago, after the battering he had endured since leaving his home. He thought of a wolf pack, how the leader of the pack would face a challenge to his position as soon as he showed any sign of weakness.

  With a soft grunt he pushed himself up and swung one leg over the sheer strake, then the other, then hopped easily down to the deck, as smoothly as one might wish, and the effort that it took had not shown on his face.

  I guess I am lead wolf still, he thought as he walked aft to the tiller, stepping with care down the crowded deck.

  Most of his men were at the oars, each one double-manned, or at work on various tasks. But forty or so of the English prisoners were packed into the open area down the ship’s centerline, sitting on the deck. Some looked with blank curiosity at him as he passed, some averted their eyes, some glared with undisguised anger. The priests wore their simple brown robes; the rest wore only tunics and leggings. They looked more like farmers than men-at-arms and Thorgrim was sure that only made them angrier still.

  He stepped up onto the small raised deck aft. He looked aloft. Sea Hammer’s yard had been lowered and swung fore-and-aft, resting on the gallows, as had the yards of the other ships. There would be no need for sails in the tricky harbor, not until they were well free of the land.

  Starri Deathless was already on his perch at the top of the mast. He looked down at the river. The water was running visibly down the ship’s side. The tide was still flooding and would be for a while more, and that was good. In those confined waters, with shallows and sandbars and mudflats just below the surface, it was better to be pushing against the current than to be swept along by it. Better to go aground on a rising tide than a falling one.

  “Ship oars!” Thorgrim called and the long oars came down to larboard and starboard, the blades were thrust through the oarports and the long shafts of the looms run out.

  “Take the anchor up!” Thorgrim called next and a dozen hands in the bow heaved on the seal hide rope and pulled the heavy anchor from the bottom. Sea Hammer’s bow began to swing as the ship came untethered and Thorgrim ordered to rowers to pull. The blades of the oars dug in, the ship began to make headway, and Thorgrim felt the rush of excitement and relief he always felt when his last connection to the land was broken and he was once more fully afloat. The sea might bring its own troubles and dangers, but Thorgrim would take those over the intrigues of men ashore any day.

  They pulled past Blood Hawk and, as soon as they were clear, Godi ordered his anchor heaved aboard, and then Long Serpent, Dragon, Oak Heart and the rest, one after another, freeing themselves from the bottom and falling into line astern of Sea Hammer, a waterborne parade, silent and dangerous as a wolf pack on the hunt.

  “Water looks deep enough here, Night Wolf!” Starri cried down from aloft.

  “Thank you, Starri!” Thorgrim called back, but he knew that already. Thorgrim Night Wolf did not care for surprises, or to leave anything unknown that could be known. Over the past few weeks he had taken several opportunities to row down the river and across the wide bay, sounding the bottom as he did, getting a sense for where the safe water ran. But things changed, sandbars shifted, and he had not been able to explore it all, so he was happy to have Starri’s sharp eyes aloft.

  The river narrowed as they pulled against the current, the scrubby banks only fifty feet away on either side. Thorgrim ran his eyes carefully along the shore, and he saw the others doing so as well. On the water they were safe from any substantial attack unless the English suddenly appeared in ships of their own, which Thorgrim was all but certain would not happen. Archers on shore, however, could do plenty of hurt over so short a distance. But other than a few herdsmen and their flocks there was nothing but vegetation to see.

  Soon the river began to widen again as Sea Hammer moved out into the delta, or what might well be called a bay. Thorgrim moved his eyes from the near shore and ran them along the more distant banks north and south. A flat, marshy, scruffy land, not much good for anything. Even if he had planned on staying in Engla-land, he would not have chosen that place for a home.

  “Sandbar to starboard!” Starri sang out. “You’ll miss it on this heading!”

  Thorgrim thanked him, though he had already seen the sandbar, and knew it was there even before they had seen it. He smiled to himself. Starri knew little about seafaring and cared even less, but he delighted in sitting at the masthead and shouting down directions.

  Harald, who had just finished overseeing the retrieval of the anchor, stepped up beside him. Harald had assumed a leadership role aboard Sea Hammer, and now it was time that he had his own ship, Thorgrim knew. He was certainly a competent enough seaman and comfortable and experienced enough with command for that.

  If one of those other captains dies or such, or if we get another ship, then it will be Harald’s, Thorgrim thought.

  It was not the first time he had thought that. There had been several opportunities to give Harald his own command, but Thorgrim had let them slip by, making this or that excuse. But he knew the truth of it: he did not want to lose Harald’s company, and he did not want to let his son wander too far from his sight.

  It was not how a father should treat his son, not a son who had reached manhood and proven himself the way Harald had, but Thorgrim could not help it. The loss of Hallbera had changed something inside him.

  “We still have to rid ourselves of these English prisoners,” Harald said. “Do you know where you’ll put them?”

  “I do,” Thorgrim said. “Last time I rowed down this way I saw a beach, just to the south there, and it looks to have water enough with the high tide for us to drop these sorry bastards off.”

  Thorgrim nodded toward the starboard bow. The long stretch of light brown sand that marked the beach was just coming into view around a low spit of land. In his explorations Thorgrim had poked around in the water off the beach and found nothing to impede their landing.

  Sea Hammer crawled past the spit of land and Thorgrim pushed the tiller gently away and the bow swung south, angling toward the beach. He looked over his shoulder. Blood Hawk was following in their wake, and behind, the rest were maintaining their neat line until it was their time to turn. The oarsmen were in a steady rhythm now, pulling easy, and the ship was moving nimbly in the calm water, the current not as strong in the wider harbor as it had been in the river.

  They closed quickly with the beach, and through a few low places in the dunes Thorgrim could get tantalizing glimpses of the ocean beyond, flashing in the sun. But they could not reach the open water that way. They would have to run the narrow, tricky channel through the dunes to the east before they could enjoy such freedom as that.

  “Take a pull, then rest on your oars!” Thorgrim called, and the rowers pulled once more, then straightened and pushed down on the handles of the oars. The blades came up dripping from the water, but Sea Hammer had enough way on that she kept moving, silent and steady, toward the beac
h. Ten feet from where water met shore, the bow ran itself into the soft sand and with a barely perceptible lurch the ship came to a stop.

  For the rowers it was a moment to rest, but for the prisoners it was a moment of confusion and growing fear. Thorgrim could see them looking around again, heads up, more alert now that there had been some change in their condition. He turned to Harald.

  “Should be shallow enough here for them to go over the side, at least forward of the beam,” he said. “Tell them to get off.”

  Harald nodded and headed forward. In their tunics, sitting in a cluster on the deck, it was impossible to tell who among the prisoners might have authority over the others, so Harald pushed past them and chose the man closest to the bow. Thorgrim saw his son gesturing over the side and to the shoreline beyond. He could hear the sound of his words but could not make them out and would not have understood them even if he could. He saw the prisoner look at Harald, look at the shore beyond, look back at Harald. He did not move.

  Harald’s gestures became more animated, his words a bit more emphatic. The Englishman looked over his shoulder at the man behind, as if to get his opinion on the matter or to ask what trick was being played.

  Before Thorgrim could speak, Harald did the very thing Thorgrim was about to tell him to do. He leaned down and grabbed the Englishman by the collar of his tunic. The prisoner was not a small man, but Harald, despite his age, was enormously strong, and he jerked the Englishman to his feet without the slightest difficulty. The Englishman started to make some sort of defensive gesture with his arms, but before he could do more than that Harald spun him around and threw him clean over the sheer strake and into the water below, dropping him neatly between two extended oars.

  There was a loud splash, a moment of thrashing around, then the man found his feet and stood and pushed his way through the water to the shore. Harald leaned down to grab the next man, but there was no need. Like a flock of birds lifting from a field, the prisoners leapt to their feet and raced for the side of the ship, starboard and larboard. They stumbled over the rowers’ legs and shoved one another out of the way as they vaulted over the sheer strakes, some bouncing off the looms of the oars on their way to the water.

  Thorgrim looked off to either side. Blood Hawk and Long Serpent were also aground, and the prisoners there seemed to have taken their cue for those aboard Sea Hammer. They were leaping into the water all along the side of the ship, some jumping into water that was too deep to comfortably stand, but they all managed to thrash their way ashore.

  The rest of the fleet came up behind, each ship running its bow aground, disgorging its panicked cargo. Soon there were more than two hundred drenched yet relieved men-at-arms and priests standing in a disordered line on the shore. They seemed to still be unsure of what had just happened, or what they should do next.

  “It’ll be some time before those ones are a threat,” Gudrid said. He had been standing near the afterdeck, spear in hand, in case the prisoners had decided on some heroic course of action.

  Thorgrim grunted. “Should take them the rest of the day just to get to the other side of the river,” he said.

  “We could sell them back their weapons,” suggested Armod, “if they had anything to pay with.”

  The prisoners disembarked, Thorgrim ordered the rowers to pull astern. Sea Hammer’s bow eased off the sand and the ship began to draw stern-first away from the beach. Once clear, he ordered starboard oars to pull ahead, larboard astern, and the longship spun like a dancer. Then they pulled together and Sea Hammer gathered headway, threading her way carefully between the tricky mud banks, Starri happily calling out directions from on high.

  They were going north now. Thorgrim looked out past the bow. Ahead was a strip of light-colored sand just a bit higher than the water surrounding it, a place where the bottom rose up above the surface and created a long, thin island of sand. He knew from his explorations that he wanted to head more or less straight for it, then turn to the east when he had closed to within a few hundred feet.

  “Night Wolf!” Starri called. “There’s a sandbar right ahead, and you’re heading right for it like a blind fool!”

  “Thank you, Starri,” Thorgrim called. “I’d be lost without you.”

  “You’d be aground, anyway,” Starri called back. Thorgrim pushed the tiller away and Sea Hammer made her turn to the east and once again the ships astern followed in her wake. Thorgrim could see, or at least he thought he could see, the spit of land forming the west entrance of the channel that connected the harbor to the sea.

  He had been through it only once, when the fisherman Sweartling had guided them, but then they were coming in from the sea, east to west. At the time Thorgrim had made as close a study as he could of the entrance, knowing that barring a complete disaster he would have to go back out again. But that was it. In his recent poking around he had not made it that far east. This water was largely unknown to him.

  “I see mud to the north!” Starri called out. “Best go a little south here!”

  Thorgrim pushed the tiller over. Starri’s words were in line with his memory, that there was a mudflat at the mouth of the channel and he would have to skirt around it to be safe. They rowed on, and now Thorgrim could see for certain the mouth of the channel, the gap in the long, sand beach through which they would row to gain the sea. Like open, welcoming arms. He turned Sea Hammer toward them.

  The channel itself was long as Thorgrim recalled, a mile at least, but he could not yet see beyond the mouth of it. He knew once he came around the bulge of land on the eastern shore that he would be able to see it open up before him, a long, straight, watery road to the sea. But it, like the harbor, was deceptive, with more sand and mud waiting to snag the ships’ bottoms.

  He looked at the shoreline as it grew closer. The tideline was all but gone, which meant that the tide was nearly at its highest point, and that in turn meant it would soon turn and start sweeping them out the channel. And that was not good. It meant less control in that tricky waterway.

  “Stroke oar, step it up!” Thorgrim called. Hall, who had been setting the stroke, increased his speed, and the others followed suit, and Sea Hammer began to move more quickly toward the channel’s mouth.

  Here we go, Thorgrim thought as the land came up on either side of his ship and they moved from the harbor into the narrower confines of the channel. Astern of Sea Hammer the other ships had also increased their pace, keeping their spacing even, one to the other.

  The change was abrupt, from the wide open harbor to the narrow strip of water that cut through the shore, the banks no more than sixty or seventy feet away on either side, close enough to cause some real problems.

  Thorgrim’s eyes were glancing from shore to shore, but focusing mostly on the water just ahead, his chief concern. He was tense, ready to react if some eddy or other quirk of the current began to twist Sea Hammer off her course. His arms and hands were sensitive to the feel of the tiller as he judged how much steerage he had, if the ship was still being driven by the oars or if the tide had turned and was sweeping them along. But the rudder still seemed to have a solid bite in the water, allowing him to maintain control.

  Then he heard Starri Deathless shout from the masthead, not his usual imperious command but a yell of genuine surprise, with a note of pleasure in it. At the same time he heard others calling out with at least the same degree of surprise.

  He looked up quickly, eyes moving from south to north. On either bank he saw the one thing he had not expected to see at all: makeshift fortifications, much like those at the longphort he and his men had built. And standing on them and in front of them were men-at-arms. Hundreds of men-at-arms. Waiting, apparently, for the Northmen to come.

  Twenty-Two

  False are thou, Freya!

  Who temptest me:

  by thy eyes thou showest it,

  so fixed upon us;

  while thou thy man

  hast on the dead-road

  the young Ottar�
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  The Poetic Edda

  Ealdorman Nothwulf stood on top of the uninspiring but functional wall that his men had so recently built, watching the longships coming on, and he felt a deep, warm sense of satisfaction. Pleasure, even. It was ironic, and he knew it. One did not generally feel pleasure at the sight of half a dozen ships, each crammed with bloodthirsty heathens, approaching fast. But this was different.

  He pulled his eyes from the lead ship and looked across the few hundred feet of water to the other side of the channel. There was another wall, another slapped-together fortification, much like the one on which he stood. Leofric stood on that one, looking at the ships just as he was. He saw Leofric raise his arm and wave and Nothwulf waved back.

  And you doubted me, didn’t you, old man? Nothwulf thought. He, Nothwulf, had seen the brilliance of this idea from the beginning. Leofric had not been so sure.

  The first suggestion of an idea had come to him in his tent, while camped with his army beyond the walls of the Northmen’s fortification. A nebulous, half-formed thing, this plan, but it had solidified with Aelfwyn’s appearance and the information she brought about Cynewise’s desire to be rid of the Northmen so that she could concentrate on killing him.

  Cynewise would pay the Northmen to leave. And to leave they would have to row through the narrow confines of the channel. There they would be vulnerable to archers and spearmen and other hazards. He could stop them, kill them, make himself the hero of Dorsetshire. There was nothing King Æthelwulf admired more than men who killed heathens. He might be growing more addled, but he would not ignore that.

  The worst possibility was that the Northmen would escape Nothwulf’s trap, but in doing so they would certainly lose many men, and that made the worst possibility not so bad. Best case, Nothwulf and Leofric managed to get one or more of the ships to run ashore and they captured them, slaughtering the crew. Then Nothwulf would have the glory, and he would have the danegeld Cynewise had paid, and he would have the plunder that the Northmen had taken. That last might be a bit tricky, given that the priory they had robbed was on Leofric’s land, but Nothwulf figured he could find some way around that.