“Niall it is, and I wasted tears mourning you! Hurt, lad?”
He held him at arm’s length, his keen eyes raking him with a concern that astonished Niall, who had never expected the Ealdorman of Devon to hold a half-bred Dane in any high esteem. Niall laughed in sheer relief. Then Judith threw herself upon him, laughing with tears standing in her eyes, and he broke from Odda’s hold to seize her, paying no heed to the hail of questions and exclamations and scandalized oaths that pelted at him.
He lifted his head at last from Judith’s, and instinctively glanced at the sea. He jerked erect. “Odda!” he cried. “Gall off your hounds from my ship!”
Odda was prompt in obedience. He signalled over his shoulder, and a man behind set a horn to his lips and blew a long, imperative summons. The men clustering round the Firedrake checked at the blast, with one actually clambering on her hull torch in hand to fire her, and turned back. Niall drew a deep breath of thankfulness; that had been a very near escape.
Odda had him by the arm again, studying his bloody face, his single odd garment, his wealed wrists and many bruises. He turned a grim stare on Baldred, standing slack-jawed and dumb nearby.
“He used you so?”
“My own kinsmen, most of it,” Niall disclaimed, despising Baldred too thoroughly to be vindictive.
Odda looked from Niall to the Firedrake, and a sudden rumble of laughter shook him. “Their longship?”
“Mine now.”
“Took your price, eh? Odd ideas of kinship Danes have. But you, Niall were certainly born to die in your bed at four score years.” He again regarded Baldred without favour. “As for you—”
“What else should we do with a Dane but hang him?” Baldred muttered sullenly.
“Did Niall claim peace in my name?”
“How were we to believe—”
“Before God, you shall learn to respect that name!” Odda swore ferociously. “And if you had fought Ubba with us, as a true man—”
“I guarded my own!” Baldred protested sourly.
“Cowered among your women and left it to better men like Niall to defend them!” Odda snorted contemptuously. Nor had he more than barely begun expressing his opinion, but the man in the red cloak moved to his side and touched his arm. He dismissed Baldred with a grunt, motioned Niall forward and spoke formally.
“My lord, this is Niall Egil’s son out of Waterford in Erin, of whom I told you.”
“We are well met, Niall,” said the man, and held out his hand with a smile.
He was physically unremarkable, of good height and well made, but worn and gaunt from hardship, with grey-blue eyes and light-brown hair and beard in sore need of trimming. He was as shabby and winter-battered as any of Odda’s veterans, but his helmet and byrnie were of rare craftsmanship. Niall’s eyes fixed incredulously on his face; there was but one man in all Wessex whom Odda would name as lord. Then he nodded to himself; no man could doubt who read that face, weary from bearing intolerable burdens yet serenely confident. He measured him in one long look, as Alfred of Wessex measured him.
“On your knees, Dane!” growled a voice behind Odda. “This is the King!”
“He is not my King,” Niall pointed out, without disrespect.
The King chuckled and grasped his hand. His smile was the friendliest Niall had ever encountered. “That is a pity,” he said pleasantly, “for I think Wessex could use you.”
“His arms are long enough, and an ox’s weight behind them,” Odda cheerfully disparaged him. “Niall, you have broken with your own kin and fought for Wessex—”
“His troth is still his own to pledge where he will,” the King informed him as he paused expectantly.
The Kings Niall had known had been Ivar the Boneless and his brothers and sons, faithless, greedy and cruel as skuas, whose feuds had torn Dublin and York for years past. A King who could grant an outlander of enemy blood such a right while desperately battling for his Kingdom’s existence was as fabulous a beast as a Christian Dane. A king to fight and die for, Niall's whole heart acknowledged, but while he had a ship he was no other’s man. “I am a ship’s captain,” he answered a little awkwardly, for it was not easy to deny such men, and Odda at least frankly expected him to accept his broad hint.
“A ship’s captain owns no King?” Alfred asked, his gravity belied by the brown skin’s crinkling at his eye-corners.
“Not outside arrow-shot of shore,” Niall told him, grinning.
Alfred laughed outright. Odda growled something in his beard about fools who did not know luck when it hit them in the face. Then, reckoning the matter closed, he looked about him. He nodded to Judith, and fixed a direful stare on Eymund.
“My kinsman Eymund Eystein’s son,” Niall hastily presented him. “Lord King, will you grant me his life?”
“Gladly, if he is your breed of Dane.”
“He saved my life, and came near losing his own for it.”
“Yet I sailed with Ubba, and fought Odda by the Parrett River,” Eymund told them coolly.
Odda’s face kindled, and he champed visibly. The harshvoiced man behind him muttered that it was a pity he should escape hanging, but Alfred merely nodded. “Yes, boldness has merit—especially as we were bound to find out.”
One of the last Englishmen straggling up from the beach, blown by the climb at the end of the long run, suddenly shouted, and jerked all heads round as by one string. He was pointing at the western headland. “A boat! A boat!” From the ridge they could not see it, and everyone started down and along the slope in a disorderly rush.
The fishing-boat, her square brown sail straining as she battled up-channel against the tide, was putting about to enter the bay as Niall reached the pebble ridge. Under the lee of the headland the wind failed. The sail came down, oars flashed, and the squat sturdy craft crawled slowly shoreward, crammed with men and perilously low in the water. Judith uttered a little yelp and ran out over the shifting pebbles, waving wildly.
“Edric!” she cried, as Niall reached her. “Edric and Cynric come after us!” It was too far to recognize individuals, but of course she knew the boat.
“Edric?” Odda echoed her sharply, his ruddy face paling.
“Leofric is dead,” she told him, and Niall put his arm about her and drew her to his side. She was trembling.
“God rest his soul,” said the King quietly.
“This is grief indeed,” Odda declared bleakly. “How?”
They told it between them, and Odda’s troop and Baldred’s men crowded to hear, while the fishing-boat crept like a manylegged spider across the sparkling bay.
“It was a good end,” Odda said heavily, tears glinting in his eyes. “We shall not forget it.” He hitched his shield higher on his shoulder and watched the boat. The tide was at its furthest ebb, slackening before the turn, and she was coming in a little faster. One red head could be distinguished in the bows, another at the stern, and nearly a score of men crowded the little craft. She reached the breakers, and bringing her through without swamping promised to be a tricky task.
Niall drew Judith down past the successive tide-lines to the water’s very edge. A yell greeted them, and the red head in the bows, now recognizable as Cynric, waved with circumspection. Edric at the tiller was too fully occupied to spare hand or eye. Judith scrubbed her sleeve viciously across her eyes. Her lips were quivering, and the hand that gripped Niall’s closed tightly. Niall yearned to comfort her, but any show of tenderness at this moment would only break down all her resolution.
“Stand between me and Edric’s wrath, Judith,” he gravely requested instead.
“Wrath? What do you mean?”
“For bringing them so far to find us.”
“They will forgive it,” she promised, in a tone that boded ill for her brothers if they did not.
“That depends on how much rowing they have been obliged to do,” Odda said judicially.
The boat was safely in. As a breaker sucked back her keel grounded, and her crew l
eaped overside and ran her up the shingle, shouting what greetings they had wind for. Edric and Cynric waded thigh-deep through the dragging waves to fling themselves dripping on Judith and Niall and embrace them impartially. They noticed neither King Alfred nor Odda, they spoke no word of an imperilled sister nor of an overlong row, but hugged them into a fourfold knot with a thankfulness too near tears for speech.
Edric broke free first. He kissed Judith, held Niall off by both arms while he looked him up and down, and said fervently. “Praise be to God! Is there no spark of sense in you, madman?”
“Enough to keep my hide whole,” Niall retorted, gripping him by the elbows. The hard words had told him beyond all doubt that they were surely and certainly brothers.
“That was luck served you, not sense!” They looked soberly into each other’s faces, thinking of Leofric and sharing grief. “Niall, there are no words—-—” He steadied himself, again the hard-headed, practical Edric. “Judith, have you made sure of Niall?”
He loosed him and stepped back. A fresh shock assailed him. He gasped incredulously, fell on one knee before the King and caught his extended hand to his lips. “My lord—my lord King!”
“We are hunting Danes,” Odda explained, reaching out a broad brown hand as the King bade him rise. “We beat off three raids yesterday.”
“But so few!”
Odda grinned. “All whose horses could stay with us, and we have nearly worn the brutes’ legs off.”
“If you want Danes,” Niall suggested grimly, “Leofric’s slayers will be on their way here.”
They considered that with wolfish eyes, and the King turned to study the bald-crowned hill behind them. “Along the coast? Yes, no other choice for them. A good thought, Niall.”
“This coast,” Odda pronounced, “should offer chances for even a handful of churls to give fit welcome to your kinsmen—who do not know it.”
“How far to Brockhurst?” Niall asked Judith.
“Near three leagues.”
“If the leagues all stand on end and are cumbered with woods,” Eymund commented, “by the time Rorik and Skuli reach us, however ready their arms are their legs will be unwilling.”
“They will follow the shore,” Judith stated with calm certainty, “and where they can, march along the beach for easier going.”
“This is your coast, Baldred,” the King said, addressing him as though no hard words had flown among them. “Where is a likely place for an ambush?”
“Never gave a thought to it, lord King,” he muttered sullenly. “Daresay the cove beyond the hill would serve.”
The King regarded him with compressed lips. Men like Baldred deserved neither an Alfred nor an Odda. Niall recognized with more disgust than surprise the self-centred attitude that had surrendered most of England piecemeal into the Danish grip, and reckoned it as damnable as the eternal disunity of his own Erin, which should have served to warn all Christendom. Odda looked about to ignite with wrath.
“Shall we see, lord King?” Niall suggested briskly.
The King grinned. “I would go myself, but if I turn my back blood will be spilled here. Take your kinsman, and make haste.”
Niall shrewdly surmised that the King desired to address an appropriate homily to Baldred, but preferred not to expose Wessex’s shame in its nakedness before outlanders. His presence would only exacerbate ill-feeling, and he jerked his head at Eymund and started for the hill. He was not in the least surprised when, before they had gone a dozen paces, Judith’s bright head appeared at his shoulder.
They climbed the first ridge towards the stockade. The ground sloped steeply to a narrow creek, rocks and mud and weed with a small stream twisting along its middle. Gulls foraging along the water’s edge flapped indignantly away. They crossed the inlet by a flimsy wooden bridge, passed by the weathered stockade patched here and there with fresh timber, from whose gate women and children peered scared and bewildered, and reached the tilted woods beyond.
The path was no more than a way round the hill trodden just often enough to mark it, and where it was not stony it was boggy, but it brought them out to the point, where the wind flung Niall’s hair sideways like a banner and snatched at Judith’s shortened gown. It was backing west again, harsh and salty from the sea, biting at the budding trees that cowered from it. In all the days since it had driven Niall upon this shore that wind had never failed.
“Hey, what a lookout’s post!” Eymund exclaimed, turning slowly about, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare from the sparkling channel. The hills piled beyond it, grey, purple and dim blue into far Wales. In the wide bay the stranded Firedrake and the fishing-boats looked like a child’s strewn toys, and they could see beyond the lesser headland miles of empty water and not one of the skulking longships. On their left a shoulder of the hill cut off their view of the shore, and Judith was already threading through the thickets. They trotted to catch her.
Niall put his arm about her slim shoulders. She was not scrawny at all, he had discovered, but firm-fleshed and sweetly rounded inside her rough clothing, and lithe as green hazel. Eymund grinned at them like a great baboon, but he merely proved himself incapable of appreciating anything more than the obvious, and Niall pitied him.
“There they go!” Judith exclaimed. “Under that flat-topped hill—see the sun flash on helmets!”
Five or six miles away, the sun’s rays fingered through thin leaves and touched bright metal to betrayal. The tiny twinkles sparked and were gone, signalling as far as eye could follow.
“Rorik and Skuli,” Niall pronounced without doubt.
Further round the point the path forked, and they followed the right-hand branch that dipped steeply towards the shore. It became a perilous scramble which they treated with the respect it deserved, until they came to the last trees clinging grimly to the cliffside above the beach. Scratched and sweating, they stood on the verge.
A pretty little cove opened before their delighted gaze, curving to a lower headland half a mile away. Beyond the jumble of fallen scree stretched an arc of pale sand, striped with tide-lines of weed and refuse, and beyond the last a deeper brown expanse from which the waves had withdrawn that morning. The distant headland was dotted with the snowflakes of nesting gulls.
Niall concentrated his attention on that headland after one glance about him. The tide had left even the furthest of its scattered rocks, rising from the sand that was drying golden and powdery in the sun and wind. It made for easy marching, that flat hard surface, just as the soft sand above high-water mark made for floundering. But the lowest tide-line that divided the two, and the seaweed draping the rocks, told him that by high tide that point would be over two fathoms deep, and he had learned how appallingly high and fast the flood raced up the funnel of the Severn Sea. It was just turning now. Rorik and Skuli were making unexpectedly good time, marching along the beach wherever they could. He thought that they might beat the tide to the point; two hours should see them here.
Eymund moved uneasily, and Niall reached out in compunction. “Eymund, if you would withdraw from this battle, no man will blame you.”
“Rorik dissolved kinship when he agreed to my killing.”
“Blood is blood, and he is your mother’s brother.”
He gazed soberly over the sunny cove, and Niall sensed the misery he hid under his gaiety, remembered how hardly he had come to his own choice, and knew sympathy. “Yes,” Eymund said flatly. “I will not lift hand against Rorik, but I stand by you.”
“Within those limits?” Judith asked grimly. “You cannot serve two loyalties.” He flushed, opened his mouth to speak and shut it helplessly. She made an impatient little gesture. “Yes, you have used life lightly, but now you know it is no sport and you do not like the knowledge. Stand to it and choose.”
The blood left his face as quickly as it had risen; he had no defence against the sharp edge of her truth. “I will go with Niall,” he said, as simply as to another man.
“How far?” she pre
ssed him ruthlessly, and Niall held his tongue behind his teeth; this was between the two of them. “Niall fights for Wessex and Christian faith.”
Her point stabbed him to the vitals. He saw at last what his careless choice entailed. It was no heedless venture, but bitter endeavour and an end to using life lightly. He bent his head and ran a hand through his yellow hair. “I have already asked Niall for Christian baptism.”
“There is more to that than words and water,” she declared sternly. Then, considering his troubled face, she added more gently, “Who am I to judge you? If I have wronged you I am sorry.”
He shook his head. “Lady, you had to learn.”
“No. You had to learn.”
His eyes widened in startled comprehension. “No wrong, lady. Your brother is dead. Yet for Niall’s sake, will you try not to hate me?”
“Hate you? Since we both love Niall we should be friends.” She held out her hand frankly as a boy, and he took it as if she had been one. “Agreed, lady.” Then, because he was still Eymund, his gravity crumbled and broke, his impudent smile flashed bright as ever. “Also I must unlearn what I thought I knew of women. I was sure that would be one more reason to hate me.”
That stung her. She jerked her hand back. “Should I be so base as to try to part Niall from his one dear kinsman? What kind of love is that?”
“Blame the company he has frequented for his views,” Niall recommended dryly, judging that he might now add his mite, “but do not ask what it was.”
They smiled at each other in sudden good fellowship. All would yet be well with them; they shared honesty and humour. Recalling them to their purpose, he studied the cliff, its steep broken slope and the jagged boulders at its foot. The most active man must clamber ape-like on all fours, without a hand to spare for defence, and it would gladden his heart to look down it upon Rorik, sword in hand.
“This is the way they must come,” he said, glancing right at the waves breaking against the point, “and a dozen men can hold it. Another dozen yonder, and the tide coming in—Rorik will need wings or fins to pass.”
The Price of Blood Page 20
