The Pale Horseman s-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  'The enemy,' Asset said.

  A small fort, I noted. 'How many men are there?'

  'Does it matter to you?' Asser asked sourly, paying me back for my refusal to tell him how many men I led, though I assumed Father Mardoc had made a count of the crew while he was on board Fyrdraca, so my defiance had been pointless.

  'You Christians,' I said, 'believe that at death you go to heaven. Isn't that right?'

  'What of it?'

  'You must surely welcome such a fate?' I asked. 'To be near your god?'

  'Are you threatening me?'

  'I don't threaten vermin,' I said, enjoying myself. 'How many men are in that fort?'

  'Forty? Fifty?' He plainly did not know. 'We can assemble forty.'

  'So tomorrow,' I said, 'your king can have his fort back.'

  'He is not my king,' Asser said, irritated by the assumption.

  'Your king or not,' I said, 'he can have his fort back so long as he pays us properly.'

  That negotiation lasted until dark. Peredur, as Father Mardoc had said, was willing to pay more than a hundred shillings, but he feared we would take the money and leave without fighting and so he wanted some kind of surety from me. He wanted hostages, which I refused to give, and after an hour or more of argument we had still not reached an agreement, and it was then that Peredur summoned his queen. That meant nothing to me, but I saw the Ass stiffen as though he were offended, then sensed that every other man in the hall was strangely apprehensive. Asser made a protest, but the king cut him off with an abrupt slice of his hand and then a door at the back of the hall was opened and Iseult came to my life.

  Iseult. Finding her there was like discovering a jewel of gold in a midden. I saw her and I forgot Mildrith. Dark Iseult, black-haired Iseult, huge-eyed Iseult. She was small, thin as an elf, with a luminous face and hair as black as a raven's feathers. She wore a black cloak and had silver bands about her neck and silver bracelets at her wrists and silver rings at her ankles and the jewellery clinked

  gently as she walked towards us. She was maybe two or three years younger than me, but somehow, despite her youth, she managed to scare Peredur's courtiers who backed away from her.

  The king looked nervous, while Asser, standing beside me, made the sign of the cross, then spat to ward off evil.

  I just stared at her, entranced. There was pain on her face, as if she found life unbearable, and there was fear on her husband's face when he spoke to her in a quiet, respectful voice. She shuddered when he talked and I thought that perhaps she was mad, for the grimace on her face was awful, disfiguring her beauty, but then she calmed and looked at me and the king spoke to Asser.

  'You will tell the queen who you are and what you will do for King Peredur,' Asser told me in a distant, disapproving voice.

  'She speaks Danish?' I asked.

  'Of course not,' he snapped. 'Just tell her and get this farce over.'

  I looked into her eyes, those big, dark eyes, and had the uncanny suspicion that she could see right through my gaze and decipher my innermost thoughts. But at least she did not grimace when she saw me as she had when her husband spoke.

  'My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,' I said, 'and I am here to fight for your husband if he pays what I am worth. And if he doesn't pay, we go.'

  I thought Asser would translate, but the monk stayed silent.

  Iseult still stared at me and I stared back. She had a flawless skin, untouched by illness, and a strong face, but sad. Sad and beautiful. Fierce and beautiful. She reminded me of Brida, the East Anglian who had been my lover and who was now with Ragnar, my friend. Brida was as full of fury as a scabbard is filled with blade, and I sensed the same in this queen who was so young and strange and dark and lovely.

  'I am Uhtred Ragnarson1' I heard myself speaking again, though I had scarcely been aware of any urge to talk, 'and I work miracles.'

  Why I said that I do not know. I later learned that she had no idea what I had said, for at that time the only tongue she spoke was that of the Britons, but nevertheless she seemed to understand me and she smiled.

  Asser caught his breath. 'Be careful, Dane,' he hissed, 'she is a queen.'

  'A queen?' I asked, still staring at her, 'or the queen?'

  'The king is blessed with three wives,' the monk said disapprovingly.

  Iseult turned away and spoke to the king. He nodded, then gestured respectfully towards the door through which Iseult had come. She was evidently dismissed and she obediently went to the door, but paused there and gave me a last, speculative look.

  Then she was gone.

  And suddenly it was easy. Peredur agreed to pay us a hoard of silver. He showed us the hoard that had been hidden in a back room. There were coins, broken jewellery, battered cups and three candleholders which had been taken from the church, and when I weighed the silver, using a balance fetched from the market place, I discovered there was three hundred and sixteen shillings' worth, which was not negligible. Asser divided it into two piles, one only half the size of the other.

  'We shall give you the smaller portion tonight,' the monk said, 'and the rest you will get when Dreyndynas is recovered.'

  'You think I am a fool?' I asked, knowing that after the fight it would be hard to get the rest of the silver.

  'You take me for one?' he retorted, knowing that if he gave us all the silver then Fyrdraca would vanish in the dawn.

  We agreed in the end that we would take the one third now and that the other two thirds would be carried to the battlefield so that it was easily accessible. Peredur had hoped I would leave that larger portion in his hall, and then I would have faced an uphill fight through his dung-spattered streets, and that was a fight I would have lost, and it was probably the prospect of such a battle that had stopped Callyn's men attacking Peredur's hall. They hoped to starve him, or at least Asser believed that.

  'Tell me about Iseult,' I demanded of the monk when the bargaining was done.

  He sneered at that. 'I can read you like a missal,' he said.

  'Whatever a missal is,' I said, pretending ignorance.

  'A book of prayers,' he said, 'and you will need prayers if you touch her.' He made the sign of the cross. 'She is evil,' he said.

  'She's a queen, a young queen,' I said, 'so how can she be evil?'

  'What do you know of the Britons?'

  'That they stink like stoats,' I said, 'and thieve like jackdaws.'

  He gave me a sour look and, for a moment, I thought he would refuse to say more, but he swallowed his British pride.

  'We are Christians,' he said, 'and God be thanked for that great mercy, but among our people there are still some old superstitions. Pagan ways. Iseult is part of that.'

  'What part?'

  He did not like talking about it, but he had raised the subject of Iseult's evil and so he reluctantly explained.

  'She was born in the springtime,' he said, 'eighteen years ago, and at her birth there was an eclipse of the sun, and the folk here are credulous fools and they believe a dark child born at the sun's death has power. They have made her into a,' he paused, not knowing the Danish word, 'a gwrach,' he said, a word that meant nothing to me.

  'Dewines,' he said irritably and, when I still showed incomprehension, he at last found a word. 'A sorceress.'

  'A witch?'

  'And Peredur married her. Made her his shadow queen. That is what kings did with such girls. They take them into their households so they may use their power.'

  'What power?'

  'The skills the devil gives to shadow queens, of course,' he said irritably. 'Peredur believes she can see the future. But it is a skill she will retain only so long as she is a virgin.'

  I laughed at that. 'If you disapprove of her, monk, then I would be doing you a favour if I raped her.'

  He ignored that, or at least he made no reply other than to give me a harsh scowl.

  'Can she see the future?' I asked.

  'She saw you victorious,' he said, 'and told the king he could trus
t you, so you tell me?'

  'Then assuredly she can see the future,' I said.

  Brother Asser sneered at that answer. 'They should have strangled her with her own birth-cord,' he snarled. 'She is a pagan bitch, a devil's thing, evil.'

  There was a feast that night, a feast to celebrate our pact and I hoped Iseult would be there, but she was not. Peredur's older wife was present, but she was a sullen, grubby creature with two weeping boils on her neck and she hardly spoke. Yet it was a surprisingly good feast. There was fish, beef, mutton, bread, ale, mead and cheese, and while we ate Asser told me he had come from the kingdom of Dyfed, which lay north of the Saefern Sea, and that his king, who had an impossible British name which sounded like a man coughing and spluttering, had sent him to Cornwalum to dissuade the British kings from supporting the Danes.

  I was surprised by that, so surprised that I looked away from the girls serving the food. A harpist played at the hall's end and two of the girls swayed in time to the music as they walked. 'You don't like Danes,' I said.

  'You are pagans,' Asser said scornfully.

  'So how come you speak the pagan tongue?' I asked.

  'Because my abbot would have us send missionaries to the Danes.'

  'You should go,' I said. 'It would be a quick route to heaven for you.'

  He ignored that. 'I learned Danish among many other tongues,' he said loftily, 'and I speak the language of the Saxons too. And you, I think, were not born in Denmark?'

  'How do you know?'

  'Your voice,' he said. 'You are from Northumbria?'

  'I am from the sea,' I said.

  He shrugged. 'In Northumbria,' he said severely, 'the Danes have corrupted the Saxons so that they think of themselves as Danes.' He was wrong, but I was scarcely in a position to correct him. ‘Worse,'

  he went on, 'they have extinguished the light of Christ.'

  'Is the light of Thor too bright for you?'

  'The West Saxons are Christians,' he said, 'and it is our duty to support them, not because of a love for them, but because of our fellow love for Christ.'

  'You have met Alfred of Wessex?' I asked sourly.

  'I look forward to meeting him,' he said fervently, 'for I hear he is a good Christian.'

  'I hear the same.'

  'And Christ rewards him,' Asser went on.

  'Rewards him?'

  'Christ sent the storm that destroyed the Danish fleet,' Asser said, and Christ's angels destroyed Ubba. That is proof of God's power. If we fight against Alfred then we range ourselves against Christ, so we must not do it. That is my message to the kings of Cornwalum.'

  I was impressed that a British monk at the end of the land of Britain knew so much of what happened in Wessex, and I reckoned Alfred would have been pleased to hear Asset's nonsense, though of course Alfred had sent many messengers to the British. His messengers had all been priests or monks and they had preached the gospel of their god slaughtering the Danes, and Asser had evidently taken up their message enthusiastically.

  'So why are you fighting Callyn?' I asked.

  'He would join the Danes,' Asset said.

  'And we're going to win,' I said, 'so Callyn is sensible.'

  Asset shook his head. 'God will prevail.'

  'You hope,' I said, touching the small amulet of Thor's hammer I wore on a thong around my neck.

  'But if you are wrong, monk, then we'll take Wessex and Callyn will share the spoils.'

  'Callyn will share nothing,' Asser said spitefully, 'because you will kill him tomorrow.'

  The Britons have never learned to love the Saxons. Indeed they hate us, and in those years when the last English kingdom was on the edge of destruction, they could have tipped the balance by joining Guthrum. Instead they held back their sword arms, and for that the Saxons can thank the church.

  Men like Asser had decided that the Danish heretics were a worse enemy than English Christians, and if I were a Briton I would resent that, because the Britons might have taken back much of their lost lands if they had allied themselves with the pagan Northmen. Religion makes strange bedfellows.

  So does war, and Peredur offered Haesten and myself two of the serving girls to seal our bargain. I had sent Cenwulf back to Fyrdraca with a message for Leofric, warning him to be ready to fight in the morning, and I thought perhaps Haesten and I should retreat to the ship, but the serving girls were pretty and so we stayed, and I need not have worried for no one tried to kill us in the night, and no one even tried when Haesten and I carried the first third of the silver down to, the water's edge where a small boat carried us to our ship.

  'There's twice as much as that waiting for us,' I told Leofric.

  He stirred the sack of silver with his foot. 'And where were you last night?'

  'In bed with a Briton.'

  'Earsling,' he said. 'So who are we fighting?'

  'A pack of savages.'

  We left ten men as ship guards. If Peredur's men made a real effort to capture Fyrdraca then those ten would have had a hard fight, and probably a losing fight, but they had the three hostages who may or may not have been Peredur's sons, so that was a risk we had to take, and it seemed safe enough because Peredur had assembled his army on the eastern side of the town. I say army, though it was only forty men, and I brought thirty more, and my thirty were well armed and looked ferocious in their leather. Leofric, like me, wore mail, as did half a dozen of my crewmen, and I had my fine helmet with its face-plate so I, at least, looked like a lord of battles.

  Peredur was in leather, and he had woven black horsetails into his hair and onto the twin forks of his beard so that the horsetails hung down wild and long and scary. His men were mostly armed with spears, though Peredur himself possessed a fine sword. Some of his men had shields and a few had helmets, and though I did not doubt their bravery I did not reckon them formidable.

  My crewmen were formidable. They had fought Danish ships off the Wessex coast and they had fought in the shield wall at Cynuit and I had no doubt that we could destroy whatever troops Callyn had placed in Dreyndynas.

  It was afternoon before we climbed the hill. We should have gone in the morning, but some of Peredur's men were recovering from their night's drinking, and the women of his settlement kept pulling others away, not wanting them to die, and then Peredur and his advisers huddled and talked about how they should fight the battle, though what there was to talk about I did not know.

  Callyn's men were in the fort, we were outside it, so we had to assault the bastards. Nothing clever, just an attack, but they talked for a long time, and Father Mardoc said a prayer, or rather he shouted it, and then I refused to advance because the rest of the silver had not been fetched.

  It came, carried in a chest by two men, and so at last, under the afternoon sun, we climbed the eastern hill. Some women followed us, shrieking their battle-screams, which was a waste of breath because the enemy was still too far away to hear them.

  'So what do we do?' Leofric asked me.

  'Form a wedge,' I guessed. 'Our best men in the front rank and you and me in front of them, then kill the bastards.'

  He grimaced. 'Have you ever assaulted one of the old people's forts?'

  'Never.'

  'It can be hard,' he warned me.

  'If it's too hard,' I said, 'we'll just kill Peredur and his men and take their silver anyway.'

  Brother Asser, his neat black robes muddied about their skirts, hurried over to me. 'Your men are Saxons!' he said accusingly.

  'I hate monks,' I snarled at him. 'I hate them more than I hate priests. I like killing them. I like slitting their bellies. I like watching the bastards die. Now run off and die before I cut your throat.'

  He ran off to Peredur with his news that we were Saxons. The king stared at us morosely. He had thought he had recruited a crew of Danish Vikings, and now he discovered we were West Saxons and he was not happy, so I drew Serpent-Breath and banged her blade against my limewood shield.

  'You want to fight this battle o
r not?' I asked him through Asser.

  Peredur decided he wanted to fight, or rather he wanted us to fight the battle for him, and so we slogged on up the hill which had a couple of false crests so it was well into the afternoon before we emerged onto the long, shallow summit and could see Dreyndynas's green turf walls on the skyline. A banner flew there. It was a triangle of cloth, supported on its pole by a small cross-staff, and the banner showed a white horse prancing on a green field.

  I stopped then. Peredur's banner was a wolf's tail hung from a pole, I carried none, though, like most Saxons, mine would have been a rectangular flag. I only knew one people who flew triangular banners and I turned on Brother Asser as he sweated up the hill.