7
Afternoon found Niall on the seaward edge of the moors, looking for familiar landmarks with more hope than expectation. The hills to his inexperienced eyes seemed alike as waves beyond sight of land, and though he could not be far from Brockhurst he might seek until nightfall and not find it. The only certain way would be to descend and follow the shore, but the prospect of scrambling several miles along the cliffs daunted him. He was hungry and weary, bruised all over and aching with stiffness.
He went doggedly on until a faint sound made him cock his head like a dog. It came again on the wind, a ewe’s plaintive bleat for her lamb. Sheep meant a settlement. He slanted seaward, swinging down the long slopes as though he had never been tired. Heather yielded to gorse and bracken, treetops below fretted the channel’s glitter and then closed before him to hide it. All at once he came face to face with a startled wether, which bleated indignantly, leaped about and scuttered away uphill on neat little hooves. He laughed aloud and threatened it with his improvised spear.
The sheep-paths converged, twisted downhill, dived under the trees and became the track he knew. He squelched down it, meeting nothing but a rooting hog, and halted as he set eyes on the stockade, tight and trim, with thatched roofs shining unburned in the sunshine. A great sigh of relief left him. He had not known the depth of his fear until it was past.
He had advanced half-way to the stockade before he was observed, for any watchers must have their attention centred on the seaward approaches. The first high squeak of warning spurted scurrying figures from the gateway at its further side and round it's flank, but not in flight. Red hair flamed, a clear voice shouted orders, and they came at him. He halted, ringed about with points of javelins and nocked arrows. Grimly resolute young faces menaced him, and though they were but women and lads too young to go into battle, he was very far from laughter. Judith swung back her arm for the cast.
“You!”
He was holding the ash-pole in both hands, across his body. He tossed it to her feet without lifting it, and held out empty hands.
“I come in peace, Lady Judith.”
“And we are to believe that, Dane?”
“I should not otherwise venture my entrails with javelin-cast,” he answered promptly. “Also I am in no state to make war.” He grinned; this was a fair welcome for the bearer of good news, the defender of women and brats offering his strong arms to their service.
She came closer, pale and appallingly grim, her narrowed grey eyes surveying him from tangled hair to shoeless feet, her lips parting on doom. Sharp pity stabbed him.
“Odda has won a great victory,” he said gently. “And when last I saw them, your brothers were all alive.”
Wild, incredulous delight flooded her face with colour, and her shadowed eyes shone. Then her brows knotted in fury, and the point pricked his breast. “The truth, Dane! Ubba—how could we—you are lying!”
“Ubba is dead, his banner taken, his host scattered. I fought beside Odda, Lady Judith.”
She stared at him, her left hand lifting to her throat, her eyes wide. He had never guessed how beautiful grey eyes could be.
“I—I believe you,” she whispered. “It—it is too mad to be a lie.” And she dropped her javelin, covered her face with her hands and began to cry.
He gaped in dismay for a moment, and then put a hand tentatively on her shoulder. She went on sobbing, the tears running between her fingers and her body shuddering. The lads and young women drew together, staring blankly with tears in their own eyes, too awed to be of use. It was for him to comfort her. Niall awkwardly set his arm round her and held her against his shoulder. Girls in plenty had wept on his breast before, seaport girls shedding their professional tears of farewell that were so easily dried by a few kisses and an extra gift at parting, but he patted Judith’s unresponsive shoulder and held her as though he had never in his life had his arm about a lass. He lifted his hand and softly stroked her rough red head. At once she dropped her hands from her contorted face, struck fiercely against his ribs and jerked free as if his touch scalded her.
They swung about and apart, to find all the women and children of the settlement thronging and gaping, and old Hild thrusting through the crowd with white, wide-eyed Elfwyn clinging to her lean arm. Niall smiled reassurance at her as her eyes implored him for word.
“It is victory!” he said clearly, for all the hushed throng to hear. “Odda and the men of Devon have destroyed Ubba and his host, and all that live are fled!”
“Leofric? My husband—and his brothers?”
“Alive and whole, my lady, when last I saw them.”
“Then how have you come here without them, Dane?” Hild demanded harshly, striking her staff against the earth. Niall had never yet seen her use it to uphold her aged limbs, but it had its uses, as kitchen-boys and serving-wenches would testify.
Niall briefly recounted his tale as they walked round to the gate. Their strained and weary faces relaxed over his final misadventure, more comical in the telling than in the event. There was even a giggle or two from the girls as they eyed his ridiculously curtailed shirt and the inches of bare hide between its ragged edge and his waistband. He grinned shamelessly at them, entirely unabashed. He had no dignity left to be affronted. The whispers and nudges and squeaks would have risen to hysteria had not old Hild quelled it by cracking her staff across the noisiest wench’s plump behind.
“Is this a fitting way to rejoice? Let us give thanks for deliverance to Him Who sent it!”
Sobered, they moved in a body to the little wooden church, Niall towering among them. Then the women and children dispersed, and Judith, Elfwyn and Hild brought him to a hall bare as a picked bone. Even the great cauldron was gone from the fire, an unwieldy burden indeed for women and boys to have carried away, but the most valuable of all the furnishings. Yet the great fire burned red, a boy was turning a spit on which a saddle of mutton gently sizzled and dripped, and a basket of new-baked bread stood nearby. Niall sniffed appreciatively, and Hild met his eye and snorted. She tenderly escorted Elfwyn towards the bower doorway.
"Rest you, my dearling! Your man will be with you when your babe is born.”
Judith frowned at the curtain fallen behind them, her face troubled. The two girls were different as honey and spice, but he knew that they loved each other dearly.
"You fear for her?” Niall asked bluntly, catching the infection of anxiety, though this was a woman’s matter in which he should not meddle.
"Yes. Hild is not easy.”
“God grant her a happy delivery.”
"So we all pray.” She scowled at him. ‘‘I should ask your pardon,” she said abruptly.
"Only if it eases your conscience, Lady Judith.” He grinned, and her scowl relaxed. Suddenly her tense face warmed, and she grinned back like a boy.
"Sit down,” she bade him, gesturing to the bench by the fire.
“Am I to strain my neck to speak with a walking tree?”
She snatched a flat cake of bread from the basket and flipped it to him. "Stay yourself with that until supper.” She prodded the spit-boy with her toe; his undisguised preoccupation with the giant Dane was endangering the mutton.
Niall filled his mouth with the rough, crusty barley-bread, still warm from the baking, and regarded Judith with amusement.
She was not the kind of girl he would choose to cuddle, all sinew and bony angles, and a masterful little shrew at that, but he liked her. They were friends, and no more need be said of misjudgement or apology.
A little frown gathered her brows as she watched him eat. She caught his inquiring glance and said in her direct way. “You can never go home to Erin now.”
“My ship was my home,” he answered with unabated cheerfulness, ‘‘and there are too many swords waiting for me in Waterford for a prudent trader to venture back.”
“Have you no kin in Erin? No brother or sister?”
“My sister died before I was born. I had a brother, but he is dead t
oo.”
“But your other kindred—”
“Most likely edging their blades for our next meeting,” he grinned. No man could regret Rorik Cropear, once met and loathed for ever, but he was sorry that Eymund must be lost to him too.
“How does a Dane come to be a Christian?” she demanded, as Odda had done.
“My mother was Irish. My father loved her, and to win her submitted to baptism. They were joined in Christian wedlock.”
“That was a great thing for a heathen ravager to do!” she commented unexpectedly.
“For him, yes. For her, a great sin.”
“What sin?”
“That she loved a heathen and fled with him, in despite of her faith and kinsmen. He was baptised afterwards, of course—when the wrong was done.”
“Oh!” She considered the implications of that for a moment, and then said impatiently, “Wedlock mended the wrong!”
“Her brother the priest did not see it so. When my sister died he showed her it was God’s retribution on her lust for a heathen. So when I was born she vowed me to the Church in atonement.”
“At the bidding of her brother the priest?”
“He was always about her, and she listened to him.”
“And he approved her marriage?”
“Never. But however he hated my father, could a holy priest knowingly do such wrong to his sister?”
“His hatred could persuade him it was righteousness, I doubt not. And your father consented?”
“It was her soul’s salvation, and he could deny her nothing. Her life was penance and prayer and holy works, and after I was conceived she would not lie again with him. Colum the priest reckoned all commerce of the flesh a sin.” He thought of his austere and beautiful mother, a silent shadow in her crow-black gown, and of the great simple man who had loved her. “It was bitter grief to my father, but what more could he have done ?”
“Kicked brother Colum the priest through the door and given his wife a brat each year to occupy her conscience,” Judith said robustly. “Did his baptism and Christian wedlock count for nothing?” She looked curiously at Niall. “A happy household, in truth!”
"There was my father—and Thorvard my brother. He was four years the elder, and my dearest on earth. We could laugh together, and he taught me to ride and swim and shoot and fish— yes, and in secret he taught me weapon-craft. He hated Colum the priest as I have never known a man hated.”
“And how long did a Dane, however much a Christian, bear with Colum the priest and the selfish hypocrite he married?”
"Selfish?” That was not the epithet commonly applied to his very holy mother.
‘‘She cared nothing for the misery she brought her family so that she had her way.”
Hers was so novel an opinion that for a moment Niall could not assimilate it, and when he did, his only surprise was that it did not surprise him. He looked up from the fire into Judith’s steady eyes, and a guilt that had nagged him many years eased within him. He nodded slowly. “I never looked at it so.”
‘‘Neither did she, and hers was the way you heard it.” She was only a young maid, but she saw clearly and spoke the blunt truth.
‘‘My father never failed in his love for her, but in the end he knew that Colum the priest had poisoned his marriage,” Niall continued quietly. He had never told this before, but he wished Judith to know the whole. “Then it was too late. The last year was one long dispute, with Colum carping always that Thorvard was on the edge of apostasy, with my father’s encouragement; that I was of age to be cloistered and deliberately withheld; that marriage to a heathen was no marriage and void—”
‘‘And your father never so much as tore his tongue out?”
Niall was surprised into laughing. “He withstood the temptation."
"Then he was nearer sainthood than any Dane yet born.”
Niall shrugged. “He raged and stormed, he besought her and cursed Colum, and she—she withdrew aside the hem of her garments. Whereat in despair and defiance he took to mead in the company of his heathen friends.”
“And they carped the more.”
"Yes. One evening in late summer, after a fierce quarrel, he called in a dozen pot-comrades from the harbour to sup and drink. My mother went to pray for his redemption. Colum bade Thorvard go with her, but our father said he was of age to join the men—he was thirteen—and he defied them. And since where Thorvard was I would be also, I escaped her and hid in a corner of the hall behind the hangings, where I fell asleep.
“They were all far gone in mead, and most of them under the table, when there was some drunken foolery with a torch. I woke to a roar of fire. All by the door was one red flame, and men stumbling and crawling, and black smoke coiling. I screamed to Thorvard, and he came to me. He piled stools and chests until he could lift and thrust me through the furthest window, just as the thatch flared over it. He clawed through the fire and fell beside me, and died.”
For a long moment she stared at him without words, and then drew hard breath. “They all died?”
“All.”
“And—-after?”
“My mother returned to her other brother Murdoc. He had a welcome of sorts for her, but no place for a half-bred brat. So they thrust me into the monastery, and she became a nun to atone for the wrong.” He stared into the little red and blue flames playing over the glowing coals. “But the heathen blood was too strong in me, or the Devil had claimed me for his own, as they all swore. All their prayers and fasts and beatings could not make a monk of me. I knew I was my mother’s sin-offering, but the day I learned she was dead I broke out and ran.”
“Since she could profit no longer, why not?”
He glanced quickly up at her, but his sight was blurred by staring into the fire. He went on. “I found a sea-captain in Waterford, a friend of my father’s, Bjorn the Wanderer. He took me aboard.”
“You turned pirate with a heathen Viking?” she asked without heat.
“Bjorn was a half-Christian of sorts, prime-signed but not baptised. You do not know prime-signing ? A priest signs a trader with the cross, in token that he will abide by Christian custom while in a land where it holds. He was a fat man and merry, plagued with pains in the joints. He knew the Middle Sea from Njorva Sound to Miklagard✹. He loved best to sail seas no keel had furrowed since time began.”
“No raiding?”
“We fought at other folks’ choosing, not ours. Bjorn was a prudent man. A Christian could sail with him.”
“You were never tempted to deny Christ?”
“Deny Him Who is the world’s salvation? What other truth is there?”
"None, Niall. And you sailed south where no ship had been?”
“It was Bjorn sailed south,” he disclaimed. “I did but bring the Raven home from the land of black swamps beyond the sun, when he died. He gave her to me as he lay dying, and the crew chose to follow me as captain. Later I made friends in Spain, hard-pressed by the Moors, and aided them in their warfare. Last summer we won a city and gained much plunder. I came north to buy a new ship, and left my treasure with my mother’s brother Murdoc while I looked through the Irish ports.” He caught her slight grimace, and nodded, smiling grimly. “A kinsman with thirty seamen at his back is entitled to ask greater favours than would be granted a half-bred brat alone. No man takes treasure into Dublin among Ivar’s murderous kin if he sets any value on his throat. But while I was gone four chiefs of Waterford fell on Murdoc’s house, and slew him and his sons for the treasure.”
“Colum the priest?” she asked hopefully.
“Poisoned by his own eloquence years before. I had no great love for Murdoc or his sons, but they were my kin. We hunted his slayers through Waterford and killed all four chiefs. Their friends and kinsmen roused the town against us, and we sailed into the storm. The rest you know, Lady Judith.”
"Yes. The rest I know.” She looked over his huge body, muddy and half-stripped. “You have lost all you had, Niall.”
“I have my life.”
“But what will you do now?”
“See this war of yours to its end with Odda, of course.”
“But afterwards?”
We have Guthrum before us. Dare we look further, for an afterwards?”
“Can you go back to trading, Niall?”
“If I had a ship, no Dane would ever sail with me.”
She bit her lip, staring at him in real distress. He was mildly puzzled that the plight of a stranger should trouble her, but he was grateful that she wished him well. He grinned at her, but before he could say anything Hild lifted the curtain over the bower doorway and stalked down the hall. Her white brows drew into a frown at sight of the two facing each other so earnestly, but her only expression of disapproval was directed against the neglectful turnspit, an emphatic thwack across his shoulders.
“My lady is abed,” she announced curtly. The two women exchanged anxious glances, and Niall closed his lips on his own uneasiness. Hild turned her ferocious scowl on him. He gave her staff a wary glance and prepared to dodge. By the sound there was yet weight in her arm.
“And how long it this shameless heathen to affront your father’s hall with his naked belly?” she demanded, prodding forcefully at the offending gap. “Will you sit here chattering until nightfall, when it would be more seemly to find him decent covering?”
“So it would,” agreed Judith, grinning at her scowl and Niall’s laugh, “if aught in this house would cover him.”
They rummaged with better success than he had anticipated, for by supper-time he could face that household of women without being the occasion of their giggles. True, he had to breathe with discretion, and the tunic’s woefully short sleeves gave him a striking resemblance to an urchin who had outgrown his clothing, but his constriction would not last longer than tomorrow; three women were industriously stitching on his behalf.
He had expected Leofric and his company before the next day’s sundown, but Elfwyn’s state made him close his lips discreetly on prophesy, for which he was glad when darkness came without them. Even his imperturbable cheerfulness was wearing thin when another noon passed without a sight of them, but less than an hour later a shepherd-boy and his dog came tumbling and yelping down the hill to bring them welcome word.
The Price of Blood Page 10
