“Leofric,” he said in an urgent undertone, “you must leave us and go for help!”
The Englishman stared desperately into his face. “How can I leave her ? She is my wife! Besides,” he added, grimly practical, “I doubt any help I could fetch would be here in time.”
Elfwyn lifted up on her elbow. “No, no, stay with me, Leofric!” she panted. “Oh, do not leave me!”
“I shall not leave you, my heart.” He sat down and raised her against his shoulder, supporting her in his left arm.
“Babies come to birth—with or without a midwife,” she told him with forced cheerfulness. Niall knelt at her other side, more scared than by any peril of sea or battle. There was nothing else for it. Leofric would not leave his wife, and he would win no aid by losing himself on the moors in a futile attempt to find their friends.
“Whatever befall, two can deal with it better than one,” he muttered, foolishly trying to reassure himself more than them.
“I know little of birth,” Leofric answered.
“And I less than that.” He had been his own mother’s last child. She had deemed it an abomination to employ serving-women of child-bearing age in her household, lest she set temptation before her own menfolk and lead them into sin. She had had no women friends to gossip comfortably over a good fire, distaffs in hand, in a boy’s hearing. His own loves had been brief and casual as any sailor’s, so that he had never known whether they bore fruit. It came to him, a curiously chilling thought, that there might well be sons and daughters of his own in the ports of the Middle Sea, for ever unknown and lost to him. This that Leofric shared with his Elfwyn made all his heedless pleasures appear mean and ugly bargains. He had rejected the idea of marriage, with his parents’ example behind him, but now, before he came to death in other men’s cause in a strange land, he was sorry that he would never see a child of his own to carry his blood into the future.
Leofric was whispering his wife’s name, whispering love-words over and over under his breath, so that only a word here and there reached Niall’s ears. Elfwyn had gone from them into her own world of pain and effort, heaving and writhing as the pangs came closer and sharper. Occasionally she gasped some response to her husband. The time crawled past. They heard no human sound beyond the hollow, only the noises of beasts and owls and wind. Once Niall rose abruptly and clambered up the hill, beyond the trees to the open moor, praying and hoping for a sight of their folk returning, but it stretched bleak and empty in the moonlight. He came down to the sight of Leofric’s white shirt and white face as he looked up anxiously, and Elfwyn struggling with moans and grunts to bring forth. He shook his head, and crouched again beside her.
“They must have missed us by now,” he offered.
“They will be on the way back,” Leofric agreed, more in hope than in certainty. “But the Danes will be after us at daybreak.”
That was truly a certainty, but they could only pray that Elfwyn would be delivered by then, so that they could carry her to safer hiding. They were helpless, waiting on the inexorable progress of new life, on the sweating straining girl who tried to smother her groans as the pains tore her. At the back of Niall’s mind was the memory of the women anxiously clucking over her state, and he was sure that it was in the forefront of Leofric's thought.
“And I have not had time enough to learn left-hand swordplay,” Leofric growled as an afterthought.
Niall started. He had guessed, from Leofric’s making no attempt to use the wounded arm, that the injury was more grievous than he had admitted, but not that it had crippled him. “Must you?” he asked quietly.
“The sinew is cut through above the elbow. Left hand it must be,” Leofric told him flatly. Then a fresh spasm seized the girl upon his knees, and he bent over her, murmuring in her ear. The contractions wrenched at her, and she cried out hoarsely, her head thrusting back against Leofric’s shoulder and her knees lifting. The two ignorant, helpless men crouched over her. Leofric, who as a farmer had helped his beasts to bring forth, instructed Niall as best he could, and the seaman, sweating with dread and pity, prayed for a safe outcome that his clumsiness might not mar.
The branches overhead were inked upon grey dawnlight when the child was born. It lay in Niall's hands, wet and raw and hideous, and tinier than he had ever believed a babe could be. It squirmed faintly in his hold, stirring its skinny crooked legs, and opened a wide black mouth in the dark, wrinkled little face. A thin mewing sound startled Niall by its feebleness; he had vaguely expected a lusty squalling. Hurriedly he tied and cut the cord as Leofric bade him, and wrapped the chilling, slippery little creature in a piece of stuff torn in readiness from the skirt of his tunic. It mewed again, misliking the damp cold world into which it had been untimely thrust, and at the weak cry all Niall’s distaste for the ugly little creature was washed away by pity.
“Give me—my son,” whispered Elfwyn, slack and spent in Leofric’s arm.
“It is a girl,” Niall blurted, not knowing how to ease her disappointment. He heard her low cry, and Leofric’s voice assuring her that a daughter contented him very well, that she was God’s gift to them, and that he would dearly love a little maid like his sweet wife. She was not to grieve, but to believe that a girl was as welcome to him as any boy.
“Next time—it will be a son,” Elfwyn said faintly, and Niall gaped amazed at the indomitable courage that contemplated passing again through this ordeal immediately it was done. “Niall—give me my baby.”
“I have not yet done,” he said hoarsely, not daring to tell her that the baby could not live. He was sure of it. She was so tiny, so feeble, and she had ceased to stir inside the wrapping. Only the thin little cry, weaker and fainter, proved that she still lived. Born too soon, on the cold hillside in the April dawn, without warm water to wash her or swaddling-bands to wind her in, she was another victim of the Danes.
He kicked and levered stones out of the rocky ground and buried the afterbirth beneath them. Rainwater had collected in hollows of the rocks, and he washed his bloody hands, filled his palms with water and came back. The baby’s mewing was scarcely audible now, and this he must do, whether Elfwyn realized the truth or not.
“What—what name do you give her?” he asked.
“Name?” Leofric repeated dazedly. “We had not thought—not for a girl—”
The child was silent; there was no time to waste if her new-sent soul were to return to God washed clean of sin. “In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritui Sancto,” he began, staring desperately about him, snatched at the first name that came to his mind and gabbled the rest as he thrice dripped water on the tiny black head. The child gasped feebly and moved its head a little, opening its mouth. Elfwyn cried out, reaching her arms to him for the tiny creature, and Niall hastily signed the cross on her brow with a wet finger and laid the little Judith on her breast, where she moved no more. Elfwyn heaved herself up against Leofric’s shoulder, hugged the child to her and rocked and kissed and wept over her, crying distractedly.
“My baby—my little baby—she must live! It was not true I did not want her! She is cold—she will be better when I have warmed her! She will suck and grow strong once she is warmed!”
“Hush, hush, my dearling! The Danes are below!” Leofric pleaded. “Yes, hold her close and warm her!” He wriggled somehow out of his sling and passed it to his wife to wrap the baby in.
Niall tried to close his ears as he knelt by the mother, wretched and afraid. It was not for him, a stranger and an alien, even to witness their grief, and shame and guilt and fury for his kinsmen’s deeds devoured him. But a pair of hands would not descend from Heaven to deal with their practical needs, and his were the only ones available. Daylight was rising up the sky; hardly a star was left behind the trees. He half-rose, glancing about him for something to hold water, and then checked, appalled and staring. The growing light showed him the blood, black and wet and spreading over the tunic beneath her—far too much blood. He flung himself down beside her, and at sight
of that dark flood his heart jolted. He looked quickly at her and Leofric. She lay with her head on his breast, the child clasped in her arms, and she was crying quietly. Leofric’s red head, dark in the grey dawn, stooped over hers. Niall wadded the sodden tunic against her, pressed it as tight as he could, but the warm wet tide flowed stickily over and between his hands. He knew how to deal with wounds, but this was beyond him. She had stopped crying and subsided against her husband, her face hidden in his shirt, and Leofric was trying to comfort her. As he glanced at her Niall saw her arms slacken about the baby, so that the tiny dark head fell back. And still the blood poured from her.
Leofric, suddenly rousing to awareness of Niall's frantic efforts, exclaimed and leaned forward. There was light enough to see how all the colour ebbed from his face, so that the freckles stood sharp and clear. And in the hush as the two men looked at each other, questioning and answering without words, far below voices and laughter sounded through the trees. But Elfwyn’s life was running out in that red flood, and nothing they could do served to check it.
The girl murmured something about the baby and collapsed, her eyes shut and her breath coming fast and short. The flow seemed to be slackening at last, but Niall was not cheered by that. His entrails had dissolved in to a cold and sickening void as he realized that she had already lost too much blood to rally, weak from childbirth as she was. He took the baby from her arms as they slipped loosely to her sides, and after peering closely into the tiny still face he laid his cheek against it. Judith was no longer breathing, already cooling. He laid her on a flat stone. Elfwyn was unconscious; no use trying to rouse her to make even a general confession. Leofric, crouched over her with his face against her hair, was rocking back and forth with her, whispering in her senseless ear and catching at an occasional sob. Niall knelt and began in hopeless, weary sorrow the familiar prayers for the dying.
The Danes were approaching quickly. Some of them, disdaining the path that angled one way and the other, were climbing directly up the steep, slippery slope, hooting with laughter at each other as they floundered, clutching at branches with a great crackling and creaking. They were not burdened as Niall had been last night, but nimble as goats. The sky was grey, the pale clouds already flushing pink, and daylight was soaking down from it, through the entwined leafless tree-tops to the rocks and thickets, in a cold pitiless flood. Niall ended his prayers, looked down at his blackened hands as though he had never seen blood upon them before, shuddered and reached for the axe. He commended himself briefly to God, before Whom he must shortly stand.
Behind him the gasping breaths, that had been growing more irregular and infrequent, suddenly stopped. Below him the Danes clambered up, panting, laughing, calling to each other. The breathing began again, laboured and rare, with an odd rattle in it that he knew. It stopped again, and part of him strained intently to hear the rattle while another part listened and peered to find death advancing up the hill. It came, and ended. He turned his head to see Leofric kiss his wife’s slack mouth in desperate passion. Then he laid her down on the bloody clothes, stared unseeingly at Niall, and tugged out his sword, awkwardly left-handed. All at once he leaped to his feet, staggered slightly on cramped legs, shouted, “Elfwyn!” and launched himself screeching down the hill.
Niall, taken completely by surprise, grabbed at him and missed. By the time he had started after him, Leofric was twenty paces beyond his reach, bounding and slithering down that dangerous pitch with such crazy disregard for his footing that he increased his lead with every stride. Niall followed recklessly enough, but no sane man could match that pace.
Shouts of warning and alarm filled the leafless woods, and the ring of drawn steel. Leofric crashed through a thicket and vanished. Niall saw shifting gleams of metal, patches of coloured cloth, glancing among the budding whitethorns and grey-green gorse. There was a clang and a scuffle and the clatter of a falling body, howls of surprise and wrath, Leofric’s demented voice yelling, “Out, out! Elfwyn! Out, dogs, out!” Niall burst through the thicket himself, axe up to shield his face from the clawing thorns, and tore free as his friend bowled a burly Dane in a ring-byrnie heels over helmet down the slope in a kicking confusion of leather-bound legs and painted shield. Other raiders closed on him, he struck one awkward blow that sheared off half a man’s face, and then an axe split his skull from behind.
Niall hurtled among the killers, determined to send a Dane or two after Leofric before he died also, and they flung themselves aside. He checked beside his friend’s body, roaring in Irish and Norse, and swung up the axe. They dodged and circled for an opening, wary of his tremendous reach, and tried to get uphill of him. The slippery slope made the worst of fighting-ground. A sword swept at his head, a spear at his belly, and he sprang away to get a tree at his back, caught the spear in his left hand as it grazed his ribs and jerked viciously. The spearman’s feet went from under him, and his head leaped from his shoulders and bounced down the hill. The stocky man Leofric had overthrown scrambled back blaring like a bull. Niall swung back his axe to split him to the teeth, and then recognized his kinsman Rorik.
He could not strike. He jumped aside, and as Rorik slithered, tripped him. Eymund’s voice was shouting his name. Rorik heaved up on hands and knees, his face a mask of blinding mud, and clawed about for his fallen sword. Then half a dozen came at him together, shields up and touching, and as he turned to meet them a heavy body caught him behind the knees, arms grappled his thighs, and he went backwards over a bony shoulder. Shields and men promptly buried him, and he sprawled crushed and flattened and breathless under their weight. He was rolled over, expecting the blow that should end him, and then his arms were dragged back, thongs tightened round him and his wrists were lashed together behind him.
10
Niall rolled over onto one elbow and pushed himself up to a sitting position, gasping for breath and glaring murderously at his kinsman Rorik, who stood over him wiping mud from his face and spitting earth and fury. Someone thoughtfully stooped and unclasped his silver belt with his weapons. Eymund, white-faced and stricken, opened and clenched his hands and stared helplessly from one to the other, and a ring of Vikings waited until the gift of coherent speech should be vouchsafed their captain. Niall, in no humour to wait on any man, heaved himself to his knees and stood up.
“Finish your good work, butcher!” he invited grimly.
“By Thor’s Hammer,” Rorik frothed, “you have turned killer of your own kin!”
“That is not so, Rorik!” Eymund protested. “He could have killed you, and forbore!”
“For which I am now heartily sorry!”
“Forbore? That is Rolfs axe, and we all saw Halldor’s head jump off it! You led those who broke out at the back last night?”
“I did.”
“And you knew we were your blood-kin?”
“I stayed by my friends.”
“You counted an English thrall more than your own blood?” Rorik lifted his hand as though to beat his face in.
“I pledged myself to men of my own faith.”
“Your faith!” He spat at Niall’s feet. “A fair faith you got from that whey-blooded misery that made a gelding of my kinsman Egil, and bore a cur false to his own blood! He should have strangled her and drowned her whelps before ever he gave up his father’s gods for her puling White Christ!” Flecks of froth gathered at the corners of his mouth as he raged at Niall, who gazed down in bleak contempt.
“Niall was bred to follow the White Christ!” Eymund tried to defend him.
“What sickly God is that for a man to follow? A faith that bids him betray his kin!”
“But his friend and his faith—”
“If kinsmen fail to stand together, what shall uphold the world?”
Niall’s own temper had been held on a frail enough tether, and now the raw memories of the night’s horrors and the dawn’s bitter grief combined with Rorik’s blether of heathen ethics to snap that thread. “Kinsmen?” he cried violently. “Befor
e my God, it shames me to share the same blood as murdering thieves!”
“Thieves?” Rorik repeated blankly.
“You prate to me of duty, and you rob and burn and slaughter, you creep on peaceful folk by night, you make war on women and children and little babes—” He checked suddenly, and clenched his fists. Elfwyn’s blood was dry and cracking on his hands, the hands that had delivered and christened and laid down that little Judith who had come and gone between dawn and twilight. “Oh God, why did I not kill you when I could?” he cried.
“You are crazed!” exclaimed Eymund. “What are they but sheep to shear and slaughter? They are no kin of ours—”
“And raiding a peaceful land is right and honourable in a valiant warrior!”
“What is this folly of honour and right?” Rorik growled. “Gold and gear belong to him who can take and hold them. But you would have aided this madman to slay your own—”
“Go up the hill and look on your work there, murderer! And then finish it! My hands are tied, so what is there to hinder you?”
The Danes looked at him and at each other in curious surmise. Rorik, holding his wrath in check, jerked his head impatiently at Eymund, who started up the hill with half a dozen followers. The others muttered among themselves, looking on Niall as on a monster or a madman. One man turned over Leofric’s body and removed his belt and weapons, and the gold ring of Niall’s gift, handing them to the one who bore Niall's gear and would hold the plunder until its division. Then Eymund came down the slope as though devils bayed at his heels, his lips white and his eyes sick with shame and horror.
“A girl dead in child-bearing, and the babe dead also,” he said tonelessty, and looked down at Leofric. His eyes asked Niall the question, and at his grim nod he bowed his head and would not meet his bitter gaze. Even Rorik’s rage was momentarily quenched.
It was the sullen giant Aslak who snorted and demanded, “What is one wench more or less for Dublin market? Gut the blood-eagle on this traitor and have done!”
The Price of Blood Page 14
