“No!” Eymund cried. “Rorik, no! He is your kinsman!”
“I disown kinship with any of Ubba’s vile wolves!” snarled Niall.
Rorik flared at that. “He was a bold and lucky leader, and you keep your tongue from his name, you gutless worm of a Christian!”
“He murdered the holy martyr King Edmund, and will burn in Hell for ever!”
“Holy martyr? Ha, that fool? He ran on a death he had no need to die—as you are doing.”
Niall stepped back as from the fuming lips of Hell’s Pit, suddenly pallid with a shock of loathing that no man mistook for fear. “You were there!”
“I was there. What are bones eight years wolf-scattered to do with us now?”
“You stood by and watched a valiant King’s torment—” Niall began in a passion of horror and fury.
“I loosed an arrow or two myself.”
Niall stepped back a pace and then another, almost expecting the thunderbolt that was eight years overdue to flash down and consume the man who made that confession. “Kinsman?” he whispered. “Make haste and spill that blood I share with you! It shames me to live with it!”
“By all the gods, only that blood has kept you alive so long! You deny it for an outlander dead eight years—dead as Christian England and your whimpering sheep’s faith?” Rorik asked in deadly quiet.
Niall laughed mirthlessly. “Dead? Alive enough to end Ubba and set you fleeing like hares out of Christian England!”
The whole ring gasped, snarled and swayed inwards with a soft slapping of hands to hafts and scuffle of feet over slippery ground. Rorik gestured to hold them back. His smeared face was purple, even the whites of his eyes injected with blood, but he held himself. He had not reached his advanced age without learning self-command, and indeed for a Viking captain he was too much given to wordiness. Eymund opened and shut his mouth helplessly; no intervention by him now would do aught but harm, and he was too appalled to attempt one. A crow squawked up the hill, and everyone started.
Rorik achieved speech at last, in a low voice that grated as if his tongue had been filed. “You shall have justice. You are Egil’s son. I do not forget that if you do. You will deny your White Christ, and lead us to plunder the Middle Sea.”
“Rorik, he is a Christian! You know he cannot agree! Rorik—”
“Be still, fool!” he cut short his nephew’s frenzied protest, and as Eymund plunged between them, at a nod from Rorik the giant Aslak reached out and plucked him bodily backwards. He pinned his arms in a vast embrace, grinning at his futile struggles, and gagged his anguished objections with a huge hand over his mouth. “No kinsman of mine shall shame his blood by worshipping the White Christ!” Rorik declared.
“Then cut the blood-eagle on me and end your shame,” Niall proposed coolly.
Rorik measured his tall body with a kind of gloomy respect. “I meant to, but since you prate so of King Edmund you may die his death,” he pronounced.
“You honour me.”
He looked once on Leofric’s dead face in bitter grief, and wished fiercely that he had never let kinship check him, but had split Rorik to the teeth and died killing. But as he went down among his foes he realized that death had been kinder to Leofric than life. He and Elfwyn and their Judith were together in God’s hands, none left to maimed existence.
Once Eymund, moving dispiritedly at Rorik’s heels, looked back. Niall ignored the details of King Edmund’s death-agony lovingly related by an eye-witness at his ear. They came through the broken gateway into a desolate settlement, where apart from two bored warriors lounging by the gap no one moved. A child was crying steadily and wearily. Under the thin light of sunrise the hall was a stretch of ashes and charred timber, with smoke drifting lazily over it. More guards stood by the church door beyond it, and Niall guessed that the night’s captives were held there.
“That tree will serve,” Rorik said, nodding heavily at the moot-ash.
“Kill him cleanly!” Eymund entreated passionately.
“But this way,” Rorik pointed out reasonably, “he may repent and be spared as long as life stays in him.”
Niall laughed aloud, and it was genuine laughter; Rorik’s perverted doctrine of penitence tickled him. He smiled at Eymund’s anguished face. “ ‘If kinsmen fail to stand together, what shall uphold the world?’ ” he quoted dryly. “Let be, Eymund. I have chosen.” He gazed expectantly at Rorik who looked slightly disconcerted and then shut his teeth with an audible snap.
“Strip him, and find a whip!”
Half a dozen men flung Niall flat and ripped off his clothing. He disdained to resist, and was heaved naked to his feet. Rorik gestured impatiently at the tree. They started to drag him backwards towards it, so that he almost fell, and righted himself with a surge of his great strength. “I am not a sheep,” he told them icily. “I will go on my own feet.” He felt no fear, only scorn, wrath and a curious exaltation. The Vikings gaped, and then permitted him to walk among them until he stood under the massive bare branches.
“Is Skuli to miss the sport?” Aslak demanded suddenly, as someone ran for rope.
“Skuli?” Rorik repeated sharply.
“It is his right,” the giant asserted.
Another added his voice. “We cheat him if we kill the traitor now. It would anger the gods to let such evil live, but this will go better after our supper-ale.”
Rorik nodded judicially. “We will hold him until Skuli comes. Tie him to the tree.”
They thrust Niall against it. His arms were wrenched behind him to embrace the trunk, and his wrists joined by a short length of rope. They let that suffice, and indeed no more was needed. He did not even try the knots. It was a pity he was not to die at once, for an extremely unpleasant day would precede his murder, but he would ask no mercy of his kinsmen. Since he was sure of death, he stared calmly at them all, a hard little smile on his mouth, and kept silence.
Rorik scowled and tramped away, and Eymund followed still protesting. Eymund after this day would never abide with his uncle again. Gorm and Helgi and the others were better off, drowned in the impersonal sea with their honour unflawed. Whichever way Eymund turned now he must break faith.
A score or so lingered, Aslak at their head. Niall had loathed him on sight, and found no reason to reconsider that now. He found pleasure in tormenting helplessness. He led the rest in baiting him, mocking and mauling. Niall’s only recourse was to keep fast hold of his temper and make no response whatsoever, and when they learned that no goading would induce him to struggle or whine the pastime palled, and they drifted away to find another.
Men strolled about the open garth. A small group sat playing knuckle-bones by the hall’s ashes. A dozen youngsters held a series of wrestling-matches and a long-jump contest, with much noisy betting. The loot had been piled in a forlorn heap under the forge roof, awaiting formal division. The raid had been meagrely rewarded; a few poor goods from the cottages, weapons and trinkets from the dead, oddments snatched from the blazing hall. On top of the pile his own splendid arms mocked him more sharply than his brutal enemies, with the knowledge that one would wield them for heathendom.
Eymund loped across the miry ground to him, his face strained and wretched. He threw out his hands despairingly. “I—I cannot budge him! Niall you must yield!”
“No.”
“Niall, you know how King Eymund died! And he will spare you if—”
“If I deny God. It is the truth I die in.”
“Niall, agree to what he asks! I swear to get you safely away at the first chance! Does your God require your life of you? Give way—pretend—”
“You know me better,” Niall said quietly, and Eymund bit his lips and stared at the tangle of footprints pressed into the muddy earth. Dumbly he held out his hands again, turned and walked away.
Under the curious, unfriendly eyes that watched him Niall could not betray fear. He was not afraid of death, and when they made an end of him would indeed welcome it. The pains of mar
tyrdom would absolve all his sins and pass him triumphant through the gates of Heaven. Yet his vigorous young body revolted from that horror of pain and humiliation. Tonight, when his enemies were full-fed and inflamed with mead, he would be flogged to bloody pulp and slowly shot to death with arrows.
The rope ate into his wrists, and his arms and shoulders, strained by his unnatural position, first ached and then throbbed. However he tried to lean his weight against the rough bark, his head and shoulders were forced forward by the way his arms were bound, and all his muscles knotted in cramp. As the hours wore by and he grew more weary, sagging against the ash-tree and his wrenched arms, the punishment increased to torture. Clouds swept across the sun, rain hissed through the bare branches and drenched him, and though the wind speedily dried him, the process froze his shuddering flesh on his bones.
The captives were carelessly confined to the little church and its vicinity. The women kept the children inside the church, where infants seemed always to be wailing, and themselves moved from it only when they must, to the well and byres and food-stores. Their treatment hardened Niall’s anger to determined hatred. They were not human beings but merchandise, and since pregnant women fetched the highest prices in Dublin slave-market, there was no reason for any to stint their lusts. And when the women ventured out he was aware of their eyes on him, of their indignant sympathy and the anger each for the other that made a bond between them.
A frightful din at his back distracted him, a tumult of squeals and grunts and yelps of laughter. A lank, flat-sided young boar, the bristles ridged along his back and tusks agleam, shot past him, hotly pursued by shouting Danes. He charged for the wrestlers, and they fell apart in haste and ran at him, hooting with mirth as they dodged his savage rushes. Headed off, he turned on the gamblers, who had suspended their game to share the jest. Knuckle-bones leaped high and asunder, and overset gamesters went rolling and kicking. The boar, gnashing and squealing, availed himself in passing of the proffered seat of a pair of once blue braies, and shouldered another scrambling ruffian into the ashes, which were still warm enough to lift him out with speed, grey and half-stifled. Then he plunged with lowered head for the gap between the church and a barn, was turned aside, and finally bayed and bloodily despatched by cheering hunters against the church wall.
The wearer of the braies staggered to his feet pawing at his slashed rump and expressing his opinion of swine and fools who called themselves butchers. His sympathetic comrades collapsed in bellowing glee. The jest won a sour smile from Niall, who mentally commended the English boar and trusted his tough flesh would not lie quiet even in indurated Danish bellies. Then he saw that old Hild had taken advantage of the commotion to stalk staff in hand towards him.
She was halted within twenty paces by a pair of spears. “Hey, old bones, he is not tied there to pleasure you!” a knave mocked her. “Shameless, going to a naked man before this company!”
“If he were not tied he would run like a hare to see such an old troll coming for him,” grinned his companion. “Go back!”
Hild stood fast, her grim old face inscrutable, her gnarled knuckles white as they gripped the staff. “Mannerless pups need their tails birching,” she commented without heat. “I will speak with my black lad.”
“Get back to your kennel!”
She snorted. “I am not worth carrying to Dublin market, so what matter if you kill me now or later? I will speak with my lad.” She struck aside the menacing spear with surprising force and strode nearer, halting where she could talk without lifting her voice. The Danes started after, and she fixed them with her pale cold stare, that daunted them. She kept it on them until their eyes refused to meet hers, and then turned to Niall.
“My nurseling’s young ones, black whelp?” she asked harshly.
“Leofric is slain, grandmother.”
She drew a hard breath, and nodded. “My Lady Elfwyn?”
“Dead also. We were parted in the dark, and the child was born in the high woods with none to help but Leofric and me. I baptised her Judith, and she died. Then Elfwyn died, and the Danes being upon us, Leofric ran against them and was killed.”
“Fitting enough,” she pronounced unflinchingly. “And King Edmund’s death for you, my outlander?”
“I never hoped to be a holy martyr,” he answered, grinning crookedly.
“We will pray for you, black lad,” she promised him. “And for these dogs’ damnation.”
“Off with you,” growled a Dane, “before I make another holy martyr!”
She gave the threatening spear the same baleful stare. “Your mothers failed in their duty,” she grated icily. “They should have birched some courtesy into your hinder ends while they were tender.” Leaving them scowling indeed like chidden brats, she strode without haste back to the church. An outburst of lamenting followed hard on her entry.
The pirates had kindled a fire near the hall’s ruins, and were lugging up the seasoned timbers from the village wood-store and wastefully stacking it to a roaring bonfire. The butchered boar, and several of his sty-mates, had been gutted, roughly singed to rid them of bristles, and jointed. Spits were rigged. They had to let the blaze die down before they could start cooking, but presently the joints were smoking before a hot fire that pulsed and flickered in the swooping wind.
The man they set to tend the spits seemed to be a prisoner; he was unarmed, without even a knife at his belt. A plumpish fellow of perhaps forty, with thin brown hair fringing a bald pate, he fawned and cringed in a fashion that Niall eyed with cold disgust. The Danes kicked him out of their way more scornfully than they would have kicked a dog. Niall had no need to wonder any longer how the pirates had found Brockhurst, and he sickened to see the traitor who had bought his vile life at such a price. He watched him trotting anxiously about the fire, his pot-belly and flabby jowls quivering as he stoked and turned and prodded, and saw the fascinated terror in his face every time he glanced sidelong at the doomed victim.
The Vikings gathered to the meal at last with jests and rough fooling, and reduced the pigs in an unbelievably short time to bare bones, which they pitched indifferently at the fire or the cook. Rorik looked gloomy and irritable, Eymund sunk in dejection. He turned his face once towards Niall and made a desperate gesture with his long brown hands, telling him as plainly as by words that he was still vainly trying to move Rorik from his resolve. After that he resolutely ignored him, chewed doggedly through a lump of shoulder-meat, and departed while the rest were still lounging round the fire picking their teeth and pelting the English prisoner with the last fragments.
After the women’s lament for their Thane and his wife and child, they had remained ominously silent. Niall was uneasily aware that they were devoting themselves with one mind to the problem of his rescue, and he prayed God to lend them sense enough to recognize the impossible. He prayed as earnestly for courage to endure to his end without dishonouring his faith by whimpering.
By the time the sun had swung down to the bare trees topping the western hills, Niall had only one desire left in him, for release from the intolerable bond holding him to the tree. Blood had oozed over the backs of his hands from his chafed wrists, his arms and shoulders were afire, and every muscle in his body ached with cramp and cold. It cost a grim effort to lift his head and win a last sight of the sun firing the clouds to gold and flame. Then the light was gone, and the hill’s shadow lay over the whole village, filling it with dusk and dark corners. The crackling cookfires gathered brilliance and cast it redly outwards. Still there was no sign of Skuli’s awaited company, so that Niall grimly hoped that they had encountered men of Wessex on their way. Men were gathering to supper, drawn by savoury odours, and rolling out barrels of mead and ale that would have served Leofric’s household for a month, to be squandered in one night’s carousal.
In the church the women were chanting an English hymn.
That was for him, he knew, and braced his sagging body in a vain attempt to stand upright. His skin prickled
uneasily as he realized that some attempt, probably a dash across the open to cut him free, would be made while the Danes were eating. If woman or youngster came to harm for his sake it would be a last grief and a last blame for him. Hild emerged from the church, holding high the carved wooden crucifix from the altar for him to see. A couple of guards thrust her back inside and slammed the door.
A lanky youth pelted round the forge and shouted across the talk and laughter to Rorik. “Skuli is here! The Firedrake is coming round the point!”
“Nearly too late for supper,” growled Rorik. “You left Tosti to signal him in?”
“Aye, but he has had ill luck! Half his crew gone by the look of it! They will need help to beach her!”
Rorik drained his horn and threw it down. “Cannot beach on that shore—here, come with me, some of you!” He started for the gate, with two-thirds of the company at his back.
A score or so remained as guards, or to harry the wretched Englishman at the spits. Four or five slouched closer to the church to discourage the women, who had crowded to the door. Niall heard them shouting threats, and several of their comrades ran to join them in thrusting the captives back. Another hymn started, and wavered into silence punctuated by babies’ howls as the ruffians shouted it down.
Swift light feet were running up behind the ash-tree at Niall’s back. He stiffened as they halted, and heard jerky breathing. The rope tugged at his raw wrists, and then the agonizing strain was gone. His arms fell uselessly to his sides, anguish skewered through his shoulder-joints, and he stumbled forward from the supporting trunk and almost fell on his face. A strong arm seized him from behind and held him against a hard warm body, steadying him until his boneless legs could take his weight, dragging him bodily away. He staggered, and clutched numbly at something cold and angular that rammed against his breast. He glanced down, gasped and hugged to him his own belt with sword and dagger.
The Price of Blood Page 15
