by Katy Moran
He sat up, the blanket bunched around his legs, leaning against the ridged, knobbly trunk of the ash tree. Spreading the fingers of his right hand out in his lap, he gazed at Egric’s ring, bright metal shining against his skin, burning golden light; the fire of the sea. He wore the ring of the Wolf Folk. So why had he dreamt of flying like a bird instead of running with wolves?
Later that morning, after the rugs and sheepskins had been taken out to air in the yard, and everyone had scattered to the day’s tasks, Hild called Essa into the hall. Egric stood by the hearth; it was very quiet. Smoke from last night’s fire still hung in the air, not quite drawn up through the thatch. The doors had been thrown open, though, and a fresh breeze disturbed the ashes. Red’s sister, Starling, was nursing the smallest of her children, and sat on the wooden linen-kist crooning to it, but apart from that, everyone had gone to lay hedges and spread muck on the fields, or into the weaving-shed.
Egric looked up and smiled. “So,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re not looking too mazed after last night’s sport. Forgive me, but I don’t hold with these unchristian rites – drinking mysterious herbs and leaping about.”
Leaping about? Essa thought. He did not remember doing that.
“Look around, Egric,” Hild said. “Do you see one Christian but yourself in this village? We keep the old ways here, and the spirit journey has power. It turns boys into men.”
“They’re men now that they wear rings for us. And you seem to have forgotten that Essa is a Christian. You know my views on brewing these old beliefs, my lady.”
“And you know mine. Yes, Essa is a Christian born, but he has been here with us five years and come to no harm. You might be Christian, you and your good lady wife, but as soon as the harvest fails you’ll be leaving little presents for the Aesir, back to the old ways, just in case.” Hild turned and scraped leftover porridge from the pan into the pig bucket.
“Well, Essa,” said Egric. “I hope you found your journey useful, all the same.”
Essa suddenly felt cold: what if Egric found out where it had taken him? Every clan had its own sacred spirit-animal – the Mercians had the wild boar, the East Anglians had their wolves. That was why they were called the Wolf Folk. He was bound to them by gold, but instead of taking him running through the night like a wolf, Essa’s spirit-journey had taken him flying high above the earth, and he had no sense of what that meant.
“You must kneel before the atheling, my honey.” Hild’s voice broke into his thoughts, bringing him back to the everyday world. “Now you are his to command, and I no longer have any say.” She turned to leave, and then said to him, “Essa, come to me in the weaving-hall when my lord has finished with you. There’s something I wish to speak to you of.” He watched her go and then dropped to his knees, sinking down so low his forehead touched the floorboards. What could Hild want to talk to him about, he wondered, staring at the grain in the old wood. Egric had most likely complained to her of Essa’s rudeness the night he arrived. He knows my father, he thought, I wonder— But what Egric said next drove all thoughts of Cai from Essa’s mind.
“I want you to get into Penda’s camp,” said the atheling. “The one across the marsh, and see if he’s garrisoned it or not. He must know of Seobert’s retreat by now – it’s been months. I need to find out if he’s gathering his men to the border, ready to attack us. And if he has, I want to know when he plans to do it. You will be my eyes and ears, right in the guts of Penda’s camp, Essa, so do not fail me.”
Essa remained kneeling, excitement burning in his belly, waiting for permission to sit up. They stored provisions in the dark cool foundations of the hall, beneath the ancient floorboards. He could smell the old, oiled wood, the earthy reek of last harvest’s carrots packed in sand, and the sharp stink of garlic bulbs and onions hanging to dry from nails banged into the floorboards from the undercroft below. The point of one of the nails had worked its way up through the wood and was poking into his knee, but he knew he must not move till Egric gave him leave.
So Essa kneeled, trying to ignore the jabbing nail till, at last, he felt Egric lay a hand on the back of his head, saying, “Rise. You’ll leave tomorrow night, at dusk. I want you back here by dawn.”
Essa got to his feet, murmuring, “Thank you, my lord.”
Egric laughed. “You make a good show of it, Aesc, son of Cai, but you do not deceive me. I know your kind – you think you can do whatever you like. But you will do well to remember what happens to a man who does not follow the word of his lord.”
Essa nodded. He had heard all the stories. He would be cast out, banished to the wildwood, never to know the warmth of a hall again. “I understand, my lord,” he said. “But – there is one thing I want to ask – how do you know who I am? Who my father is? Do you know him? You can speak our language. Is he still alive?”
Egric held up his hand and Essa fell silent.
“That is not one thing,” Egric said. “And it is not your place to ask questions of me. Your place is to do exactly as I tell you, saying nothing. Now go, you must have work to do.”
Essa swallowed his anger, bowing his head. He could feel the gold ring, cold and unfamiliar around the middle finger of his right hand.
Cai had been right, all those years ago. It was as good as a shackle.
And when Essa went out into the chilly, spring light in the yard, Red and Cole came up to him, Cole saying, “Come on, we’ve been waiting. Ariulf’s just told us we’re to go out and help them spread muck on the bottom field.”
Red handed Essa a flask of cider. “Do you still join in the lowly tasks now you wear a ring for Egric, halfling?” Essa shoved him in the arm, laughing; they all went out of the village gate, and Essa forgot all about Hild wanting to speak to him.
Essa went quietly and at an even pace through the trees; he could smell the night drawing in before the light started to fade. It was a good night for being outside.
A hundred paces beyond the village walls, once he was well into the woods, he dropped to his knees and whistled a long, low note, hardly audible to a man’s ear. He grinned, wanting to laugh out loud. This was his first act of disobedience, but no one would ever know. As if he would go without her, anyway.
He waited, feeling his mind drift, his spirit leave his body. Suddenly, everything grew sharper, every smell and every sound. He was inside Fenrir. The wood-shore rang with the hum of heartbeats; he could hear small creatures crackling through dead bracken, the creak of an owl’s wing. His heart soared with the desire to chase, to run, to seek hot-blooded creatures in the night. Then he was back inside himself, and he knew she was coming. She came loping through the trees towards him, and he held out his hands for her to lick. Come on, girl, let’s go.
Get across the marsh. Over the wall. Watch. Listen. Wait.
He had to keep running through his task. It was the only way of shutting out the echo of Cai’s voice at the back of his mind.
Being bound by a ring is the same as being shackled by an iron chain. Better you follow the hawk’s path, free under the sky. They call it fire of the sea, but gold’s just a trap, and it’ll lure you into slavery.
“That’s well enough for him to say,” Essa said, digging his fingers into the thick fur at Fenrir’s neck as she paced along beside him. “He left me here with these folk, what else can I do but follow their ways?” But Fenrir had no answers.
The cold air chilled his skin. Crows shrieked mournfully as they soared up to their high nests, clustered in the trees at the edge of the wood. He heard the coughing bark of a roe deer in the distance and Fenrir tensed, torn by the longing to chase it. Not now, not yet. There’ll be time for that, girl. By the time he was through the woods to the marshes, darkness had settled over the land like a heavy blanket.
The night had turned overcast. The stars were obscured by skeins of cloud, stained silver by the narrow, sickle-shaped moon. The ground started feeling boggy beneath his feet and the trees were thinning out. There were more will
ows here, their great thirsty roots inching down through the marshy soil. Weak moonlight shone silver off the wetlands, filtered through long, stretching fingers of cloud. A long- dead oak stood skeletal against the horizon and Essa’s breath caught in his chest. The marshes had a strange beauty about them, even though a lot of people refused to even go there after dark. He’d last been here in autumn, reed-cutting with Cole, Red, Fenrir and some of the other hall dogs. They had poled their way across the flatlands in the flat-bottomed coracle, edging into the reedbeds, surprising a family of coots swimming briskly away in a neat line, their white foreheads bobbing haughtily.
Even at night the marshes pulsed with life, rich and bubbling beneath the surface. Essa kneeled down, took off his sheepskin boots and rolled up his trousers to his knees. He tied the boots together by their leather straps and hung them over his shoulders. Flat fish nestled in the mud, feeling tremors rippling through their dark, warm, muddy world as he waded through it, carefully testing with each footfall, knowing that with one misstep he could be sucked into the dark heart of the marsh, never to be seen again. Fenrir followed an arm’s length behind him, her paws kicking up soft mounds of water, leaving a wake behind her. She knew how to move quietly. He could feel the marsh-mud between his toes. There was always the chance he would step on something that moved.
The Mercian camp rose up out of the flat skyline like the crooked knee of a sleeping giant. As a child, Essa had always imagined the earth in this way: a dreaming giant under a blanket of green, speckled with mountains and marshes and forests. The earthworks loomed before him as he edged closer, through the great reedbed at the Mercian end of the marsh, trying to suppress the desire to shudder as his bare toes were tugged and tangled by invisible roots and drowned fronds of reed. Alders clawed up at the moon with branches like gnarled fingers, pointing him towards the Mercian mound that Hild said had been there since before the men from Rome came and went, leaving their strange buildings of stone for folk to marvel at in songs by the fire.
Essa walked around the outside of it, reluctant to leave the sheltering trees. Everything was more or less how he remembered from his visit with Cai long ago, but now the ring of piled earth surrounding the fort looked higher, the ditch below it deeper. There were probably guards stationed at the top of the mound, a circle of watchful eyes, looking east across the marshes towards the border and out west, where the great woods stretched all the way to Powys. It would be impossible to get past them. He’d have to move like smoke. He smiled to himself in the dark: this was madness. But the thought of going back to the hall with nothing to report to Egric was worse. He crept away from the reeds at the edge of the marsh and slid around the hump of the mound. From this angle it looked even more like a sleeping giant, the crook of an enormous elbow curving around under a blanket of grass and mud. Here, there was the dark scar of a gateway carved into the side of the mound, just like at the hall. Outside the gates a long, dark finger pointed up at the night sky, drawing a line through the moon. The flag mast. Essa squinted into the gloom. There it was. Penda’s standard flapped like a crow’s wing against the night; a white boar on scarlet.
The Mercian king was at the fortress, then. It made sense: now that Seobert was refusing to come out of Bedricsworth monastery, Penda must have all eyes on the border – just as Egric did. Essa wondered briefly if there was another boy who came to spy on their village under the orders of his Mercian lord. He would have seen Egric’s royal standard flapping on the flag mast by the village gate; the running wolf. He would have known the atheling had come to rouse the borderers for a fight.
Now Essa was closer, he could see the palisade fence running in a ring around the flattened top of the mound. That was where the fighting men would be, if there were any, cooped up behind the fence like dogs before the hunt. He remembered Cai riding Melyor across the yard, saying, Come up. He remembered the smooth wooden goose-pieces cupped in his palm as he laughed, not knowing Cai was about to leave him for ever. He stood still for a moment, and the smell of wood smoke hit the back of his throat. If those guards caught him, they would kill him. Essa breathed out slowly, kneeled by Fenrir, pushing his face close to hers, twining his fingers about her ears. Stay here, in the shadows. Wait for me to come. By the rising of the sun, I’ll be back. She whined, a soft growl that made her ribs quiver. He knew she would wait for him. It meant she could be free to hunt alone for a night, and he whispered a silent apology that she would have no pack, no swift brothers and sisters at her side, no two-legs waiting with words of praise when she returned with a kill.
But if he did not do it now, he never would. Drawing in a long breath, Essa sprang across the ditch, landing in a crouch an arm’s length above the water. He ran lightly and quickly up the mound, and stood by the fence for a while, listening. After a few moments of hearing nothing but voices muffled by distance, he loosened the rope knotted around his waist and took the iron grappling hook from his belt. His fingers fumbled over the knot and for a moment Essa thought he would have to give up and go back because his hands were shaking too much. Then the hook was fixed to the rope and in one swift movement he threw it over the fence and heard the iron prongs catch into the wooden fence on the other side. He smiled to himself in the dark. This was almost too easy.
He was nearly at the top of the fence when somebody on the other side dropped a cup and swore. Essa heard it clearly: a metal cup, bouncing on beaten earth with a hollow ring. There were sentries walking around the inside of the palisade. Well, he would have come across them sooner or later.
“There goes my ale. I’ll get another. Will you have one?”
There was a muttered reply from an unseen companion.
Essa’s arms were beginning to ache. He waited until the sound of their footfalls faded into the distance, and he could feel the muscles in his shoulders wanting to tear. He swung one leg over the top of the fence, still holding on to the rope. Soon the tension would give and the hook would come loose. He managed the other leg and lay, for a moment, face down, balanced on the top edge of the palisade. In the distance, somebody belched. The ordinariness of the sound seemed wildly out of place. He landed quietly in a crouch in a tangle of hawthorn, still holding the rope, and managed to catch the hook before it hit the ground. Coiling the rope, Essa kneeled and pushed it with the hook into the undergrowth, marking his place in relation to the flag mast. It would do no good to lose them if he had to leave in a hurry.
Now he could see the shadowed bulk of the hall, surrounded by more tents than he could count on two hands, pale shapes clustering under the night. He stared for a moment, remembering his place by the fire in there, leaning against Cai’s knees as he sang of the bear-king from the old days, who went across the lake with nine maidens, and would return at the hour of his people’s direst need. Well, Essa thought, where is he? He hasn’t shown his face yet, and his people have been overrun by Anglish. He could smell the tanned skins used to make the tents: leather and old sailcloth that still stank of rotting seaweed. (When was the last time he’d seen the sea? Seven summers ago?) So there were fighting men here with their king, whose standard flapped against the flag mast outside the gate.
Where are you, king of the Mercians?
And then Essa heard the sound of footfalls on the beaten earth: the guard, King Penda’s guard. Every fibre in his body urged him to move, get away as fast as he could. A man with a torch emerged from the shadowy jumble of tents, coming closer – a tall, rangy figure with slightly stooped shoulders, moving with the same sense of restrained speed as one of Hild’s hunting dogs.
There was nowhere to run.
Mercia. Inside King Penda’s fortress
THE GUARD stared at Essa for a moment, then let out a loud, sharp crack of laughter. He drew a knife from his belt and Essa stepped back, heart hammering. “Oh no,” said the guard. “I think it’s time I paid out my debt, don’t you?” He held the knife by the blade, proffering the bone handle.
Essa laughed, unable to believe his luck
, feeling the weight of fear lift. “No, you keep it,” he said. “It’s been too long.”
Of all the people in this camp who could have found him, here was the boy he had once beaten at Fox and Geese.
“Really. You should have it.” The boy held out the knife again. Essa took it, buckling the leather scabbard to his belt, nodding his thanks and sending a silent prayer of gratitude to Jesus Christ and the entire host of the Aesir.
The boy laughed in a friendly way. “I remember your father dragging you off, last time you were here. I was glad to keep my knife, but I always felt bad about it – you’d fairly won.”
“That was a long while ago,” said Essa, fighting the urge to scramble back over the fence and run for the village as if wild dogs were at his heels. He noticed a brooch in the shape of a boar glittering gold at the boy’s throat, holding the thick folds of his cloak together. Who is he? And why hasn’t he asked what I’m doing here? A prickling feeling slid down his back and, looking down at his arm, Essa saw that every tiny hair was standing on end.
“I don’t think I ever learned your name!” said the boy. “I’m Wulf.” He held out his hand, and Essa took it.
“I’m Essa.” He paid no heed to what he had said at first – his mind was racing through all the possible ways of getting out of the fortress with his skin intact. Back over the wall, once this Wulf had gone? Or out through the gate, even? He had to get back to the village somehow. There was already plenty to tell Egric – it was bad enough the Mercians had sent fighting men to the border again, with King Penda himself among their number. How much worse could it get? Egric needed to know, so he could ride to the king and winkle him out of that monastery to fight.
Then, with a sick jolt, Essa realized he had just given his name.
