Raider's Wake: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 6)

by James L. Nelson

  Conandil leaned her head back and closed her eyes and felt herself being swept deeper and deeper into the nightmare. She would not live as a slave. She certainly would not live without Broccáin. She missed her chance to die in honorable and just battle. Could she kill herself? No, that was a mortal sin, unforgivable. Years of hell on earth were still better than an eternity in hell itself. What if she let herself starve? Was that the same as hanging herself or cutting her wrists?

  Then she remembered something else that made her eyes open, made her sit up. There had been more than one ship. Two at least that she had seen and maybe more. She craned her neck to see over the edge of the ship she was on, and was rewarded with a glimpse of the top of a red and white sail not too far away. The second ship. If there were more she could not see them, but that did not mean they weren’t there.

  She leaned her head back once more and again closed her eyes. There was nothing she could do. She was floating, literally, figuratively. But at some point the ships would come ashore and then she would know if Broccáin was aboard one of them, and then she would figure out what next, and what next after that.

  The wait was not as long as she feared it would be. She thought they might have been bound directly for the slave markets across the seas to the east, and she had no idea how long that voyage might last. But the sun was still up when the Northmen lowered the sail and tied it in place and pulled out their long oars and began to row. Soon Conandil could see land passing by over the side of the ship, green hills. Irish hills, she was certain.

  She could smell wood smoke and food cooking and mud flats and animals. She could hear the sound of many, many voices, a cacophony of activity. And then the ship came to a stop and the Northmen came along the deck, dragging the aching, stiff, wounded prisoners to their feet. A man with a massive red beard grabbed Conandil and lifted her as if she weighed nothing at all and set her upright, and for the first time since coming to she was able to see beyond the side of the ship.

  Dubh-linn… she thought. She was no stranger to the longphort. Her father was a merchant and she had accompanied him on his travels around that part of Ireland, and that had certainly included Dubh-linn because any Irish merchant who wished to gain wealth came to Dubh-linn. Dubh-linn was where the wealth was to be found.

  She could recall seeing on those visits the Irish captives who were bound off to the slave markets. She had looked at them through the gaps in the thick boards of the enclosures in which they were held, remembered feeling sick about it. She remembered swearing she would make her father stop trading with the heathen swine. But she had not, and now she was receiving a just punishment for that cowardice.

  Heathens? she thought bitterly. That bastard Eochu, a good Irishman, a rí túaithe, a Christian, supposedly, had played as big a part in this treachery as the heathens had.

  She turned in a half circle. There were two other ships next to them which were also run up on the mud bank, the men aboard stowing their long oars and carrying ropes ashore. Those ships were crowded like the one she was aboard, packed with the captives from that short, brutal fight on the beach.

  She ran her eyes desperately over the sullen, shuffling men, their torn and bloody clothing, blood-streaked faces and matted hair and beards. And there, at last, on the second ship, she saw him. Broccáin. His red tunic was torn in a great gap down the front, dried blood like brown dirt covered his scowling face. Like all of them, his hands were pinned behind his back, his wrists lashed tight. He seemed to limp a bit with the few steps she saw him take. But he was alive. And that meant there was hope.

  A heavy board was run from the ship to the edge of the muddy bank. The captives were forced to clamber over it, no easy task with bound hands, and when any of them tumbled into the mud the heathens laughed and left them lying there until they were in danger of drowning, and only then, and reluctantly, they hauled them out and set them on the solid ground.

  The captives were herded up a road made of wooden planks, with the heathens like drovers on all sides. One by one the lashings on their wrists were cut free and they were shoved into the very enclosure in which Conandil had seen those other captives, years before. Dozens and dozens of men and women, the people of the túaithe once ruled by Bressal mac Muirchertach, the survivors of a bloody and nameless fight on a shingle beach.

  And finally the last of the Irish prisoners was inside and the heavy door was closed and barred. Through the gaps in the planks they could see the guards who walked the perimeter. Getting over the wooden walls would have been little problem, even high as they were, but anyone who tried would be dead before they touched the ground on the other side.

  As soon as she was pushed into the pen, Conandil made her way to Broccáin and threw herself into his arms. She hugged him and to her immense relief he hugged her back. She had feared that her husband, having fallen so far in a single day, would be too despondent to care about her, or anything. But he pressed her tight, and buried his face in her hair, and again she felt just the smallest sliver of hope.

  “Come, sit, let me look at your wounds,” she said, pushing him over to the plank wall and making him sit with his back to the boards.

  “It’s nothing, no great injury,” Broccáin said. “Most of us, we’re not so badly wounded. Those who were, they killed on the beach. But the bastards saw to it we were not badly hurt.” He paused. “The same way you take care not to harm any animal you intend to sell,” he added, and that time he could not hide the bitterness and despair.

  There were other women besides Conandil who had been swept up in the raid, but only half a dozen were in the enclosure, and Conandil did not like to think what had become of the others. Those who were there took it upon themselves to tend to the men’s wounds, but the wounds were not so bad, mostly shallow sword cuts or blows to the head. Broccáin was right. The heathens and Eochu’s men seemed to have taken pains to inflict little harm on the captives.

  They spent the night in the enclosure, and the next day the rain stopped and the sun broke through and it brought the smallest amount of relief to the miserable captives. They remained there that day and the next and the next and still it did not rain, but their hunger and thirst grew harder to bear with the meager food and water that was provided. The Irishmen speculated about where they might be bound, what fate might befall them over the seas. But mostly they were quiet, each lost in his or her own private misery.

  And then, after three days in the enclosure, they came for them. In the early morning, while Conandil lay between Broccáin and the man on her other side, wishing she could stay where she was and let death take her, the slavers came in death’s stead. She heard the bar of the door open and then the door swung open and two men stood there.

  One was short and broad, with a thick beard and wearing the clothing of a stranger from across the water. The other was broad as well, but tall, a massive man with huge hands, hands that Conandil noticed right away. Monstrous, obscene hands. That one, the big one, was dressed like an Irishman.

  Conandil heard the short man speak to the big one, though he didn’t so much speak as snap orders at him. Just a few words.

  “Here, get these swine going,” he said, but he was not speaking the Irish tongue.

  Frisian, Conandil thought.

  In the years she had accompanied her father she had heard many languages, and as it happened she had a certain gift for learning them, along with an insatiable curiosity. She was not fluent in any, save for Irish, but she had picked up enough of the Frisian tongue, and the Norse and the Frankish and the Angles, who spoke much like the Frisians, that she could converse tolerably well. It was a skill she kept to herself. She had learned, as a merchant’s daughter and later as a thrall, that there was considerable advantage in understanding what others were saying when those others thought you did not.

  Now the big Irishman was speaking, bellowing at the captives, his countrymen, who did not speak Frisian. “Up, up on your feet, you pigs. Up and don’t think you’ll try a
ny tricks!”

  Conandil looked past the two men filling the enclosure’s entrance. There were at least a dozen more behind them, men with spears held ready. There would be no rushing the door. These men were not strangers to this business.

  The captives stood slowly, sullenly. The big Irishman grabbed the man closest to him, jerked him toward the door and thrust him through. The shorter man with the beard had stepped out of the way, out of the pen, and now Conandil could see men waited with chains and manacles on the other side. An iron collar went around the neck of the first man, a chain threaded through the hasp to keep it shut. And then the next was pushed out of the door and a collar placed on him as well, the length of chain running between them.

  One by one, quick and efficient, the men were pushed out of the enclosure and chained by the neck. A dozen were bound together then marched away, and then the slavers started in on the next dozen.

  The next to go was a man standing five feet from where Conandil stood. He was one of the farmers, the fuidir who had come to the defense of the rath, and as he stepped up he growled to the big Irishman, “I know you, Áed, you traitorous bastard, and I’ll have your heart.”

  Áed did not respond, at least not verbally. He took two steps toward the man and smashed his massive fist into his face, a move far quicker than Conandil would have guessed was possible for the great lumbering beast. The farmer’s head snapped back, but before he could fall Áed had a fistful of his tunic. He jerked him back to his feet and drove a fist into his stomach, and as he doubled over, another to his face. This time the man went down, moaning and twisting on the ground. Áed turned to the two Frisians standing near the writhing man.

  “Get that pile of shit up and get him out there,” he said, the words like a snarl, and with not the least hesitation the two men lifted the prone man to his feet. His face was nearly covered in blood and his nose was hanging off at a strange angle. He gasped in pain as they half carried him through the door and supported him as the collar was secured around his neck.

  Broccáin was next. Mouth set in a scowl, he stepped through the gate and paused as the collar was affixed. Conandil watched with revulsion and fear. She was terrified that Broccáin would do something rash, decide he would rather die than suffer the humiliation of being bound like an animal. And that would only lead to worse humiliation and pain, because they were not likely to kill him, just beat him until he could resist no more. Young, strong, Broccáin was too valuable to be thoughtlessly slaughtered.

  It tore Conandil apart to see the collar go around her husband’s neck, to see the agony in his face, but she was nonetheless relieved that he did not fight. As long as he lived, he could still escape.

  She and the other women were the last to be brought out of the enclosure. They were not chained as the men had been, just forced at spear point to walk behind the shuffling lines. They made their way down the plank road they had come up a few days before. The sun was warm, the sky bright, the gentle wind sweeping the noxious smells of the longphort away. Some of the people crowding the narrow streets and trampled yards of the workshops along the way glanced up as the parade of frightened men and women marched past, but most did not. This was not, apparently, a particularly unique sight.

  They came at last to the river’s edge and the ships tied up there. Conandil knew nothing of ships. She had spent a total of six days on ships over the course of her life, and that had been as a captive of Northmen, this time and the last. She had been too miserable to take note of anything during those times.

  Now she stood on the riverbank and looked at the various vessels tied up there, as well as those tied to a solid-built wooden wharf that jutted out into the stream. Some of the ships were big and some not so big. Some had high, sweeping prows on which could be mounted the frightening dragons’ heads and other beasts with which the Northmen adorned their ships, though most did not have those carvings in place now. These, Conandil guessed, were the warships, the raiders who put out to sea and fell on hapless monasteries, plundering the wealth and enslaving the people.

  The other ships had none of the swift, threatening quality of the longships. They were smaller, generally, and wider and deeper. The middle part of these ships was more open and Conandil guessed that was so cargo could be put down there. These would be the merchant ships, the traders, the ones who brought the goods of Ireland to the world, and brought the fine things of the world back. The Irish, not a seafaring people, were coming to appreciate the opportunities for long-distance trade that the far-ranging Northmen brought with them.

  The lines of chained men were brought up short at the base of the wharf. There were four lines of a dozen men, and two more with six men each, more than sixty captives, including the women. Conandil did not think any of the ships she was looking at would be big enough to fit all those men aboard, certainly not for a voyage over the ocean. But she had no idea. The whole thing seemed so unreal, unfathomable and dreamlike.

  The big Irishman, Áed, was speaking again. “Listen to me, you worthless creatures,” he said. The chained men looked up and Áed stepped quick to the nearest one and hit him hard across the face with the back of his hand. “Don’t look me in the eye, don’t any of you miserable turds look me in the eye!” he shouted, and his voice had a hysterical tone to it. “You don’t look any of us in the eye! You look down. That’s what a slave does, he looks down, and so that’s what you’ll do.”

  He paused, ran his eyes over the men, looking for any defiance. Seeing none, he went on. “There are three ships here, and they belong to your new master, Brunhard. They are the finest ships in the western ocean. You will each get a bench on one, and when the wind blows we will sail and when the wind does not blow you will row. And if the wind never blows, you will row all the way to Frisia. And when you get to Frisia, then you will dream of the fine time you had aboard the ships, because then you will know what hell really is.”

  Áed paused again, waited for some reply, some sign of defiance. Again, there was none. A knot of men were standing off to one side, arms folded, watching with a detached sort of amusement. These Conandil took to be the ships’ sailors. Áed looked over at them and nodded.

  That gesture prompted the men to action. They ambled over to the various lines of slaves, led them out along the wharf and down the precarious planks to the decks of the three ships tied there, the chains of twelve men each taken aboard the larger ships, those of six men to a smaller one. Conandil followed behind, careful to keep with the line that included Broccáin.

  This is it, she thought. This is it, this is it, this is it… In a moment she would no longer be on Irish soil. She would be on the deck of a Frisian ship, a Frisian slaver, and there would be nothing but water between her and Broccáin and the slave markets in that foreign land. She felt her stomach turn, she felt like she wanted to run, to scream, to do something as this last chance slipped away from her.

  But there was nothing she could do, so she stepped silently down the rough plank and onto the deck of the ship rocking in the small swell from the sea.

  Chapter Nine

  [N]ever in speech with a foolish knave

  shouldst thou waste a single word.

  From the lips of such thou needst not look

  for reward of thine own good will…

  The Counseling of the Stray-Singer

  The weather was fine and Louis was wearing a sword and he was standing on the deck of a ship bound off for Frisia, from where he could easily make the journey south to his home in Frankia. Escaping the dull life of a novitiate at the monastery at Glendalough, returning to his native land, taking vengeance on the brother who had betrayed him, these were all things that Louis de Roumois had been dreaming of for a year and more. And yet he was not entirely pleased with the situation.

  Brunhard stood next to him on the afterdeck of his ship, the largest of his three ships. The vessel was called Wind Dancer, which suggested a sort of nimbleness that Louis doubted she would display. They were watching the
captives come aboard, the sailors shoving them to the rowing benches, encouraging them with punches and lashes from the short lengths of rope they each carried. There was one woman aboard, Louis could see, but she was not chained to the others. The sailors seemed to ignore her and she in turn tucked herself up against the side of the ship, tying to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

  “You see, here, this is how I do things, and it is a brilliant way!” Brunhard was saying. He had been keeping up a nearly unbroken monologue since he had returned to Wind Dancer at the head of the columns of chained men. “Why should I hire sailors, who will cost me far more than they are worth, to sail my ships, and go only when the wind blows, when I have ships loaded with the strong men I bring to the slave markets? Why should these pathetic creatures enjoy a carefree voyage across the ocean?”

  “You’ll have them row clear across the sea?” Louis asked.

  “If the wind will not do, yes, I will,” Brunhard said. “I buy strong slaves, and I teach them to row, and if the wind fails, out come the oars. While all the other traders are drifting around at sea like toy boats, we are on our way to Frisia. A shorter trip means I need buy less food to feed these sorry creatures, and by the time we arrive they are even stronger still. So I sell them for more silver than any other trader there.”

  “Hmm,” Louis said. That explained a number of things about which Louis had been vaguely wondering. In his experience, limited though it was, merchant ships tended to be decked over only in the bow and stern, with the midsection open for stowing cargo. There tended to be only a few oarports, and the oars, worked by the small crew, were used mostly to maneuver in harbor.