‘Thór!’ Bjorn roared as Frankish blades ripped into his brynja, carving the flesh beneath so that blood and broken iron rings mixed in a slick gore.
‘Bjorn!’ I screamed. As quick as a breath he grinned at me and then Bishop Borgon’s man swung his short axe, taking off Bjorn’s head, which landed in the long grass, the blond plaits somehow still perfect.
‘Hold! Hold!’ Sigurd yelled to the Wolfpack, for the shield-wall had broken and men were running to help Bjorn. ‘Get back and hold, damn you!’ Sigurd yelled, the cords in his neck straining, because without the shieldwall we were all as dead as Bjorn and the jarl knew it.
‘The silver! To me!’ Olaf yelled and a knot of warriors ran with him and stood over the hoard, shields locked and spears facing the Franks, who seemed unsure what to do next.
‘Enough! No more!’ Alcuin cried, repeating the order in the Frankish tongue. A knife, gripped by one of the men holding me, began to bite into my throat. ‘In the name of the emperor, sheathe your blades,’ Alcuin implored. He might have been old and frail but the blue cloaks listened to him. ‘My children,’ he said to them, ‘we did not come here to fight these men. Let us not spill blood on the feast day of Saint Crispin and his brother Saint Crispinian. Let us all be brothers today!’
‘That devil tried to kill a priest of God!’ Borgon protested, saliva flying from his old mouth as he gestured at the pockmarked worm whom I had not strangled quickly enough. The little turd was holding his neck and wheezing, spittle at the corners of his lips, as the other Christ slaves sought to comfort him. The main bulk of the Fellowship stood in a solid wall with their backs to the wharf and Serpent and Fjord-Elk, but Olaf and some fifteen men, including, I noticed, some of the Wessexmen, were horribly vulnerable where they stood before that glittering hoard. The Franks could close round them like a river round a monk’s skinny body. Yet I knew Olaf and the others would all die trying to protect that silver. I remembered then that Óðin means ‘frenzy’, and I suddenly knew he had been watching it all, maybe even had a hand in that chaos, moving us like tafl pieces and laughing as the blood flew.
Egfrith stood shivering in his dripping undergown behind Sigurd, who had found his sword and now came to me, pointing the blade at the knot of men who still held me down.
‘Let him go or I will kill you where you stand,’ the jarl growled and the men looked to Alcuin, their grip on me tightening, though the knife drew back from my throat. Borgon’s giant, his leg blood-slick, stepped towards Sigurd – without limping, I noticed – his spear and axe raised to strike, but then the bishop shouted something and the Frank stopped dead as all eyes looked to Alcuin. The old man nodded his grey head and the Franks stepped back, allowing me to get to my feet, my head still ringing and my sight fogged. Sigurd nodded at Alcuin, then went over to where Bjorn’s head lay in the grass. Carefully, he picked it up, the once blue eyes now grey and staring, and walked the five paces to the Norseman’s body, placing the head on the bloody stump of Bjorn’s neck, making his corpse whole. ‘The hoard is mine,’ Sigurd declared to the mass of Frankish soldiers. ‘It is the blood-price for this man, who was called Bjorn.’
‘All that silver for one man?’ Borgon asked, his old, ink-stained palms outstretched.
‘He was worth it and more,’ Sigurd said, holding Bjarni’s eye a moment. Bjorn’s brother was in the shieldwall between Svein and Aslak and his handsome face was drawn with the agony of seeing his brother killed. ‘Take your men and leave this place, Alcuin,’ Sigurd warned, ‘before it is too late. A man who puts his hand in a wolf’s mouth cannot be surprised when he is eating his next meal one-handed.’
Alcuin watched as some Frankish soldiers dragged away the two men Bjorn had killed before he himself had fallen, a great prize for Óðin’s death maidens. Then Alcuin’s watery eyes stared at Sigurd and he seemed to tremble slightly though not through fear. ‘We will leave, heathen,’ he said, ‘but do not mistake reason for weakness. You are lucky you are facing me today and not the emperor, for he would see this field blood-slick before noon. He would cut you down himself. I am old and tired of men killing each other. One day you too may tire of it, though I fear you will never grow old, Sigurd son of Harald.’ He pointed to the longships. ‘Take to your ships and leave. Take the silver, too.’ He grimaced. ‘It is the price of peace. Now go while you can.’ He gestured to a soldier with a crested helmet who roared orders at which the Franks flowed like water into two columns of eight abreast. Then at another command they turned their backs on us, stamping their boots so that I felt the ground tremble.
Bishop Borgon looked horrified, as though he could not believe they were just going to walk away from all that silver and, worse, the hurt done to his priest and through that the insult done to him. And yet it was clear that Alcuin, though no soldier, held the reins of this army in the emperor’s absence. Borgon’s giant stared balefully at me and I stared back with my blood-eye, promising him pain I could not inflict.
‘Father Egfrith, come with us,’ Borgon snapped, beckoning the monk with sharp gestures. ‘You have tried your best and cannot do more. Some men are beyond salvation. Even the gates of Heaven are closed to such as these.’
The Wessexman Wiglaf gave Egfrith a cloak, which he wrapped round himself and clutched at his neck. ‘Thank you, my lord bishop, but I will stay,’ he said, adding: ‘by your grace,’ with a slight bow. ‘My course is set and even the fiercest wind will not turn me from it. Deus vult.’ He sniffed loudly.
Borgon looked surprised. ‘God wills it?’ His thin lips curled. ‘Then may He grant you the patience of Job,’ he said, then turned and with his bodyguard and the other churchmen joined Alcuin as the blue-cloaked columns began to march.
‘How’s your head, lad?’ Penda asked as the shieldwall broke and men pissed their nerves away and drank long and deep from mead skins.
‘At least it’s still on his shoulders,’ Svein said, looking at Bjarni who was kneeling by his brother’s corpse. ‘Óðin gains a great warrior today.’
‘Bjorn saved my life,’ I said.
Svein swung the great bearded war axe on to his shoulder. ‘It was a good death,’ he said, walking off to help the others pile the silver back into their barrels.
‘Egfrith, what of Cynethryth?’ I asked. ‘If you had told me before, Bjorn would still be alive.’ In truth I knew Bjorn was dead because of me, because I had let the pockmarked Frankish priest feed a fire in my soul. But Egfrith did not deny the accusation. Instead his little eyes were full of pity, which I liked even less.
‘I would have told you after the baptism, Raven,’ he said, ‘on my word I would have told you everything, but Christ was calling Sigurd and I must not be deaf to the Lord.’ He glowered. ‘Thanks to you your jarl’s soul remains in darkness.’
‘Spit it out, monk,’ I snapped, touching the egg-sized lump on the left side of my head, and Egfrith sighed, closing his eyes a moment.
‘Very well,’ he said with a nod. ‘Cynethryth is confined to the convent at Aix-la-Chapelle. Abbess Berta has her beaten,’ he grimaced, ‘and worse, I suspect. For she believes the girl’s soul has been defiled.’
‘By me,’ I said, anger rising inside me again.
‘Because she has lived with heathens outside the Lord’s shadow,’ Egfrith said, touching my arm. ‘I pleaded for her, Raven. It broke my heart to see what they had done to her. But the abbess is a powerful woman and I am just a monk. She even accused me of being tainted by heathen sin.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I am sorry. I know you care for the girl in your own way.’
‘Do not be sorry for me, monk,’ I snarled. ‘Save your pity for that foul bitch abbess and any other who has laid a hand on Cynethryth.’
A gust plucked at my cloak and Egfrith shivered, shaking his head glumly before walking away. And I stood with Bjorn’s blood cold and sticky across my face, my soul seething in its dark place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THAT NIGHT WE BURNT BJORN’S CORPSE ON A GREAT PYRE AND THE slick
flames taunted the darkness beside the river where we camped. We dared not leave our ships or the hoard and go into the town, but neither were we going to skulk away from Alcuin’s threat like a whipped hound. The next day I went into the beechwoods with Bjarni and we found a boulder with one flat side and on to that rock Bjarni inscribed a rune pattern which spoke of his brother. It took the whole day and half of the next day too, but when he had finished the carving it was beautiful. A serpent coiled in the rock and inside the beast’s length was written, Bjarni son of Anundr carved this stone in memory of Bjorn, who sailed with Sigurd and cut down his enemies. We will meet again in Óðin’s hall, my brother. Into the carving we rubbed red clay dug from near the river and when we were done, the other Norsemen thought it was a very fine rune stone and drank themselves senseless in memory of the sword-brother they had lost.
‘Bjorn’s name will live for ever,’ Sigurd said, slapping Bjarni’s shoulder. ‘Old Anundr would be proud to see this stone so far from your home.’
‘He was a good brother,’ Bjarni said with a nod, emptying the drinking horn down his throat, and for me that stone was a powerful seidr thing, for it would whisper Bjorn’s tale until the end of the world. I still think of it sometimes, standing in that beechwood half swallowed by thickets, its red runes still as clear as the day Bjarni carved them with his chisel those many years ago.
We were rich. We were richer than any of us had ever believed possible and when we loaded the barrels of silver on to Serpent she creaked in complaint and sat a little lower against the wharf. We had honoured Bjorn and now it seemed many thought it was time to take the sea road north again before the winter came. We had certainly done enough to ensure that the name of the Wolfpack would be spoken around hearths by old men who had once sailed their own dragons to far-off lands, and by young men eager to test themselves and taste their own glory. Asgot was as happy as a fiend. That night, during a feast of roasted meats, he pointed at me from the far side of the fire, cackling and spilling glistening juices into his beard.
‘You are a blade with two edges, Raven,’ he said, his knowing yellow eyes like rivets in my soul. ‘The All-Father wields you like a sword and when he does, men die. Good men. But because of you our jarl did not give himself to the nailed god.’ There were murmurs of agreement. He raised a drinking horn to me and I looked over at Sigurd.
‘Asgot is right, Raven,’ Sigurd said simply. ‘The All-Father did not want me washing in the Christians’ river.’ He smiled at Egfrith. ‘Or perhaps, monk, your nailed god did not want a wolf in his sheep pen.’ Egfrith sat slumped and defeated and it was clear that he was bitterly disappointed to have come so close, yet failed to ensnare a great jarl in his White Christ net. ‘I thought it would not matter,’ Sigurd said, ‘but I was wrong.’
‘Bjorn died because of me,’ I said gloomily, drinking deep of my mead horn.
‘And now my brother drinks in Valhöll!’ Bjarni yelled, raising a chorus of ‘hey’s. ‘Do not pity him, Raven. Would that we all had such deaths.’
‘We have a hoard the like of which has never been seen in the north,’ Olaf said. ‘It will blaze for years and light the long winter months. It will keep our old bones warm.’ He raised his horn to the Fellowship. ‘And our jarl has seen the sense of telling the Christ god to go and fuck himself.’ He smiled such a smile as I had not seen from him since before his son Erik was killed at Ealdred’s hall. ‘It is a good day,’ he said, banging his drinking horn against Svein’s. But it was not a good day from where I sat. A good friend was dead because of me, gone to the afterlife too soon. And then there was Cynethryth. The Franks were beating her because they thought I was a devil who had entrapped her soul by some foul seidr.
‘Don’t drown yourself, lad,’ said a voice. I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth, turning my foggy head to see Penda leaning on a rolled skin, watching me in a way that told me he had been at it a while. He slid his long knife over a whetstone. ‘I want you with a clear head in the morning,’ he said, spitting on the stone. ‘We have scheming to do.’ I looked at him, my head spinning and too sick with misery to poke around for his meaning. ‘You hear me, lad?’ he said, pointing the knife at me, then testing its edge against his thumbnail. ‘No more mead. I want you sober.’
‘Why?’ I asked dolefully.
‘Because tomorrow night we’re going to get Cynethryth,’ he said. I felt my mead-slick lips pull back from my teeth.
The plan was simple. Too simple, it seemed to me. Father Egfrith had come up with it next morning, which had surprised me because I thought he was still too sour about Sigurd’s failed baptism to help us free Cynethryth. But when he heard Penda and me talking about breaking Cynethryth out of the convent, his weasel eyes came alive.
‘Cynethryth is a good girl,’ he said, rubbing the stubble on his cheeks and frowning. ‘I have grown fond of her. What she did to Ealdred . . . well, that was unfortunate.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She must seek the Lord’s forgiveness for that terrible sin. But she has suffered too. I believe Christ weeps for the poor child and how cruelly the Franks are ministering to her. There are other, kinder ways to tend to Cynethryth’s soul. As for Abbess Berta, she is a curdled old crone. Forgive me, Father,’ he muttered, signing the cross over his chest. ‘She is misguided. I do not agree with her methods and I do not believe our Heavenly Father does either. Therefore I cannot stand idle whilst the poor child suffers.’
And so Egfrith was to take some of the silver, go to the monastery of Aix-la-Chapelle and there buy from the cellarer two large, cowled habits and then meet Penda and myself at nightfall by the boundary ditch between the forest and the city.
‘I’ll pay the cellarer well enough to see he will not ask questions,’ Egfrith said confidently. Then he looked at Penda and me dubiously. ‘So long as you keep your mouths shut and your cowls up, we should be able to enter the convent and steal young Cynethryth away.’
‘We can do that, monk,’ I said, glancing at Penda, who smiled mischievously. ‘Just get us in and we will do the rest.’
‘You’ll be poking a wasps’ nest with a big stick,’ Olaf warned, cuffing a trickle of mead from his beard. The sun was rising fast, shining through the misty eastern woods so that the lichened ash trunks seemed on fire. Pigeons cooed softly, their patient song clashing with the noisy trilling of robins, wrens and chaffinches. ‘The Franks will spit teeth when they find out,’ Uncle added, ‘and that spindling bishop would have fought us last time if that old goat Alcuin had not been there to keep the Franks’ swords in their scabbards.’
‘Uncle is right, Raven,’ Sigurd said, ‘so you must be quick. We will be at our benches and have the ships ready to leave. But if they catch you in the city you will be on your own.’
‘I understand,’ I said. Penda nodded agreement.
‘Let me take some men and go with them,’ Svein the Red asked, his broad forehead wrinkled with worry. ‘We can wait for Raven in the trees, but at least we can be close in case there is a fight.’
‘We only have six decent horses, Svein, and none of them would move faster than an ox with you on its back.’ Svein harrumphed sulkily.
‘I will go,’ Black Floki offered, his mouth grim-set. ‘Halldor too.’ Halldor was Floki’s cousin. A man obsessed with his weapons, Halldor had given them all names and you could be sure that his blades were the sharpest of any in the Wolfpack. He nodded simply at his cousin’s suggestion and Floki held Sigurd’s eye. ‘We will wait for them as Svein said, out of sight amongst the trees. But our spears will be ready in case the Franks come after them.’
‘If we can we will spirit the girl away without the nuns knowing anything about it,’ Egfrith said hopefully. Sigurd nodded, but his eyes betrayed doubt.
‘Thank you, Floki,’ I said, ‘and you, Halldor. Light a torch so that we can find you when we have Cynethryth. But do not leave the trees. If we are caught it is our concern. I don’t want the Franks seeing Sigurd’s hand in it.’
Floki scowled. ‘Just
try not to bring a herd of the blue cloaks with you,’ he said.
The five of us set off on horseback. At dusk we came to the edge of the forest from where we could see Aix-la-Chapelle and there we waited below a rookery suspended high up in a stand of ash and watched Father Egfrith ride on, his horse flicking its tail at the clouds of flies that followed.
When the monk returned he was puffed up and his weasel face glowed with pride, though I could not blame him, for he had managed to get hold of two new habits of brown wool.
‘Well done, Father,’ Penda said with a grin as he disappeared into the scratchy garb, his spiky head soon emerging so that with his scarred face he did not look like any monk you have ever seen.
Black Floki spat disapprovingly, but Halldor laughed. ‘You two make good Christ slaves,’ he said, plucking the wool at our shoulders where the habits were far too tight. ‘The Christ brides will bolt their door on the inside and make you poke the cobwebs from their cunnies until Ragnarök.’
Raven: Sons of Thunder Page 23
