We found a deep inlet for shelter. Rocks guarded the entrance, but once inside we were safe from wind and sea. We turned the ship so that her bows faced the open sea, and the cove was so narrow that our stern scraped stone as we slewed Fyrdraca about, and then we slept on board, men and their women sprawled under the rowers' benches. There were a dozen women aboard, all captured from Peredur's tribe, and one of them managed to escape that night, presumably sliding over the side and swimming to shore. It was not Iseult. She and I slept in the small black space beneath the steering platform, a hole screened by a cloak, and Leofric woke me there in the dawn, worried that the missing woman would raise the country against us.
I shrugged. 'We won't be here long.'
But we stayed in the cove all day. I wanted to ambush ships coming around the coast and we saw two, but they travelled together and I could not attack more than one ship at a time. Both ships were under sail, riding the south-west wind, and both were Danish, or perhaps Norse, and both were laden with warriors. They must have come from Ireland, or perhaps from the east coast of Northumbria, and doubtless they travelled to join Svein, lured by the prospect of capturing good West Saxon land.
'Burgweard should have the whole fleet up here,' I said. 'He could tear through these bastards.'
Two horsemen came to look at us in the afternoon. One had a glinting chain about his neck, suggesting he was of high rank, but neither man came down to the shingle beach. They watched from the head of the small valley that fell to the cove and after a while they went away. The sun was low now, but it was summer so the days were long.
'If they bring men,' Leofric said as the two horsemen rode away, but he did not finish the thought.
I looked up at the high bluffs on either side of the cove. Men could rain rocks down from those heights and the Fyrdraca would be crushed like an egg.
'We could put sentries up there,' I suggested, but just then Eadric, who led the men who occupied the forward starboard benches, shouted that there was a ship in sight.
I ran forward and there she was. The perfect prey.
She was a large ship, not so big as Fyrdraca, but large all the same, and she was riding low in the water for she was so heavily laden. Indeed, she carried so many people that her crew had not dared raise the sail for, though the wind was not heavy, it would have bent her leeward side dangerously close to the water. So she was being rowed and now she was close inshore, evidently looking for a place where she could spend the night and her crew had plainly been tempted by our cove and only now realised that we already filled it. I could see a man in her bows pointing further up the coast and meanwhile my men were arming themselves, and I shouted at Haesten to take the steering oar. He knew what to do and I was confident he would do it well, even though it might mean the death of fellow Danes. We cut the lines that had tethered us to the shore as Leofric brought me my mail coat, helmet and shield. I dressed for battle as the oars were shipped, then pulled on my helmet so that suddenly the edges of my vision were darkened by its faceplate.
'Go!' I shouted, and the oars bit and the Fyrdraca surged out. Some of the oar blades struck rock as we pulled, but none broke, and I was staring at the ship ahead, so close now, and her prow was a snarling wolf, and I could see men and women staring at us, not believing what they saw. They thought they saw a Danish ship, one of their own, yet we were armed and we were coming for them. A man shouted a warning and they scrambled for their weapons, and Leofric yelled at our men to put their hearts into the oars, and the long shafts bent under the strain as Fyrdraca leaped across the small waves and I yelled at the men to leave the oars, to come to the bows, and Cenwulf and the twelve men he commanded were already there as our big bows slammed through the enemy oars, snapping them.
Haesten had done well. I had told him to steer for the forward part of the ship, where her freeboard was low, and our bows rode up across her strakes, plunging her low in the water, and we staggered with the impact, but then I jumped down into the wolf headed ship's belly. Cenwulf and his men were behind me, and there we began the killing.
The enemy ship was so loaded with men that they probably outnumbered us, but they were bone weary from a long day's rowing, they had not expected an attack, and we were hungry for wealth. We had done this before and the crew was well trained, and they chopped their way down the boat, swords and axes swinging, and the sea was slopping over the side so that we waded through water as we clambered over the rowers' benches. The water about our feet grew red. Some of our victims jumped overboard and clung to shattered oars in an attempt to escape us.
One man, big-bearded and wild-eyed, came at us with a great sword and Eadric drove a spear into his chest and Leofric struck the man's head with his axe, struck again, and blood sprayed up to the sail
that was furled fore and aft on its long yard. The man sank to his knees and Eadric ground the spear deeper so that blood spilled down to the water.
I almost fell as a wave tilted the half-swamped ship. A man screamed and lunged a spear at me, I took it on my shield, knocked it aside and rammed Serpent-Breath at his face. He half fell, trying to escape the lunge, and I knocked him over the side with my shield's heavy boss.
I sensed movement to my right and swung Serpent-Breath like a reaping scythe and struck a woman in the head. She went down like a felled calf, a sword in her hand. I kicked the sword away and stamped on the woman's belly.
A child screamed and I shoved her aside, lunged at a man in a leather jerkin, raised my shield to block his axe blow and then spitted him on Serpent-Breath. The sword went deep into his belly, so deep that the blade stuck and I had to stand on him to tug it free.
Cenwulf went past me, his snarling face covered in blood, sword swinging. The water was up to my knees, and then I staggered and almost fell as the whole ship lurched and I realised we had drifted ashore and struck rocks.
Two horses were tethered in the ship's belly and the beasts screamed at the smell of blood. One broke its tether and jumped overboard, swimming white-eyed towards the open sea.
'Kill them! Kill them!' I heard myself shouting. It was the only way to take a ship, to empty her of fighting men, but she was now emptying herself as the survivors jumped onto the rocks and clambered away through the sucking backwash of blood-touched water. A half-dozen men had been left aboard Fyrdraca and they were fending her off the rocks with oars.
A blade stabbed the back of my right ankle and I turned to see a wounded man trying to hamstring me with a short knife and I stabbed down again and again, butchering him in the weltering water, and I think he was the last man to die on board, though a few Danes were still clinging to the ship's side and those we cut away.
The Fyrdraca was seaward of the doomed ship now, and I shouted at the men aboard to bring her close. She heaved up and down, much higher than the half-sunk ship, and we threw our plunder up and over the side. There were sacks, boxes and barrels. Many were heavy, and some clinked with coin.
We stripped the enemy dead of their valuables, taking six coats of mail and a dozen helmets and we found another three coats of mail in the flooded bilge. I took eight arm rings off dead men. We tossed weapons aboard Fyrdraca, then cut away the captured ship's rigging. I loosed the remaining horse that stood shivering as the water rose. We took the ship's yard and sail, and all the time her survivors watched from the shore where some had found a precarious refuge above the sea-washed rocks. I went to the space beneath her sleeping platform and found a great war-helm there, a beautiful thing with a decorated face-plate and a wolf's head moulded in silver on the crown, and I tossed my old helmet onto Fyrdraca and donned the new one, and then passed out sacks of coin. Beneath the sacks was what I thought must be a small shield wrapped in black cloth and I half thought of leaving it where it was, then threw it into Fyrdraca anyway. We were rich.
'Who are you?' a man shouted from onshore.
'Uhtred,' I called back.
He spat at me and I laughed. Our men were climbing back on board Fyrdraca no
w. Some were retrieving oars from the water, and Leofric was pushing Fyrdraca away, fearful that she would be caught on the rocks. 'Get on board!' he shouted at me, and I saw I was the last man, and so I took hold of Fyrdraca's stern, put a foot on an oar, and heaved myself over her side. 'Row!' Leofric shouted, and so we pulled away from the wreck.
Two young women had been thrown up with the plunder and I found them weeping by Fyrdraca's mast. One spoke no language that I recognised and later we discovered she was from Ireland, but the other was Danish and, as soon as I squatted beside her, she lashed out at me and spat in my face. I slapped her back, and that made her lash out again. She was a tall girl, strong, with a tangled mass of fair hair and bright blue eyes. She tried to claw her fingers through the eye-holes of my new helmet and I had to slap her again, which made my men laugh. Some were shouting at her to keep fighting me, but instead she suddenly burst into tears and leaned back against the mast root. I took off the helmet and asked her name, and her only answer was to wail that she wanted to die, but when I said she was free to throw herself off the ship she did not move. Her name was Freyja, she was fifteen years old, and her father had been the owner of the ship we had sunk. He had been the big man with the sword, and his name had been Ivar and he had held land at Dyflin, wherever that was, and Freyja began to weep again when she looked at my new helmet which had belonged to her father.
‘He died without cutting his nails,' she said accusingly, as if I were responsible for that ill luck, and it was bad fortune indeed because now the grim things of the underworld would use Ivar's nails to build the ship that would bring chaos at the world's end.
'Where were you going?' I asked her.
To Svein, of course. Ivar had been unhappy in Dyflin, which was in Ireland and had more Norsemen than Danes and also possessed savagely unfriendly native tribes, and he had been lured by the prospect of land in Wessex and so he had abandoned his Irish steading, put all his goods and wealth aboard his ships, and sailed eastwards.
'Ships?' I asked her.
'There were three when we left,' Freyja said, 'but we lost the others in the night.'
I guessed they were the two ships we had seen earlier, but the gods had been good to me for Freyja confirmed that her father had put his most valuable possessions into his own ship, and that was the one we had captured, and we had struck lucky for there were barrels of coin and boxes of silver. There was amber, jet and ivory. There were weapons and armour. We made a rough count as the Fyrdraca wallowed offshore and we could scarce believe our fortune. One box contained small lumps of gold, roughly shaped as bricks, but best of all was the wrapped bundle which I had thought was a small shield, but which, when we unwrapped the cloth, proved to be a great silver plate on which was modelled a crucifixion. All about the loath scene, ringing the plate's heavy rim, were saints. Twelve of them. I assumed they were the apostles and that the plate had been the treasure of some Irish church or monastery before Ivar had captured it. I showed the plate to my men.
'This,' I said reverently, 'is not part of the plunder. This must go back to the church.'
Leofric caught my eye, but did not laugh.
'It goes back to the church,' I said again, and some of my men, the more pious ones, muttered that I was doing the right thing. I wrapped the plate and put it under the steering platform.
'How much is your debt to the church?' Leofric asked me.
'You have a mind like a goat's arsehole,' I told him.
He laughed, then looked past me. 'Now what do we do?' he asked.
I thought he was asking what we should do with the rest of our charmed lives, but instead he was gazing at the shore where, in the evening light, I could see armed men lining the cliff top. The Britons of Dyfed had come for us, but too late. Yet their presence meant we could not go back into our cove, and so I ordered the oars to be manned and for the ship to row eastwards. The Britons followed us along the shore. The woman who had escaped in the night must have told them we were Saxons and they must have been praying we would seek refuge on land so they could kill us. Few ships stayed at sea overnight, not unless they were forced to, but I dared not seek shelter and so I turned south and rowed away from the shore, while in the west the sun leaked red fire through rifts in the cloud so that the whole sky glowed as if a god had bled across the heavens.
'What will you do with the girl?' Leofric asked me.
'Freyja?'
'Is that her name? You want her?'
'No,' I said.
'I do.'
'She'll eat you alive,' I warned him. She was probably a head taller than Leofric.
'I like them like that,' he said.
'All yours,' I said, and such is life. One day Freyja was the pampered daughter of an earl and the next she was a slave.
I gave the coats of mail to those who deserved them. We had lost two men, and another three were badly injured, but that was a light cost. We had, after all, killed twenty or thirty Danes and the survivors were ashore where the Britons might or might not treat them well. Best of all we had become rich and that knowledge was a consolation as night fell.
Hoder is the god of the night and I prayed to him. I threw my old helmet overboard as a gift to him, because all of us were scared of the dark that swallowed us, and it was a complete dark because clouds had come from the west to smother the sky. No moon, no stars. For a time there was the gleam of firelight on the northern shore, but that vanished and we were blind. The wind rose, the seas heaved us, and we brought the oars inboard and let the air and water carry us for we could neither see nor steer. I stayed on deck, peering into the dark, and Iseult stayed with me, under my cloak, and I remembered the look of delight on her face when we had gone into battle.
Dawn was grey and the sea was white-streaked grey and the wind was cold, and there was no land in sight, but two white birds flew over us and I took them for a sign and rowed in the direction they had gone, and late that day, in a bitter sea and cold rain, we saw land and it was the isle of Puffins again where we found shelter in the cove and made fires ashore.
'When the Danes know what we've done …' Leofric said.
'… they'll look for us,' I finished the sentence for him.
'Lots of them will look for us.'
'Then it's time to go home,' I said.
The gods had been good to us and, next dawn, in a calming sea, we rowed south to the land and followed the coast towards the west. We would go around the wild headlands where the porpoises swam, turn east and so find home.
~ ~ ~
Much later I discovered what Svein had done after we parted company and, because what he did affected my life and made the enmity between me and Alfred worse, I shall tell it here.
I suspect that the thought of a gold altar at Cynuit had gnawed into his heart, for he carried the dream back to Glwysing where his men gathered. Glwysing was another kingdom of the Britons in the south of Wales, a place where there were good harbours and where the king welcomed the Danes for their presence prevented Guthrum's men from raiding across the Mercian border.
Svein ordered a second ship and its crew to accompany him and together they attacked Cynuit.
They came in the dawn, hidden by a mist, and I can imagine their beast-headed ships appearing in the early greyness like monsters from a nightmare. They went up river, oars splashing, then grounded the boats and the crews streamed ashore, men in mail and helmets, Spear-Danes, Sword-Danes, and they found the half-built church and monastery.
Odda the Younger was making the place, but he knew it was too close to the sea and so he had decided to make it a fortified building. The church's tower was to be of stone, and high enough for men to keep a watch from its summit, and the priests and monks were to be surrounded by a palisade and a flooded ditch, but when Svein came ashore none of the work was finished and so it was indefensible, and besides, there were scarce forty troops there and those all died or fled within minutes of the Danes landing. The Danes then burned what work had been done and cut down the
high wooden cross which customarily marked a monastery and which had been the first thing the builders had made.
The builders were monks, many of them novices, and Svein herded them together arid demanded they show him where the valuables were hidden and promised them mercy if they told the truth. Which they did. There was not much of value, certainly no altar of gold, but supplies and timber needed to be purchased and so the monks had a chest of silver pennies which was reward enough for the Danes, who then pulled down the half-constructed church tower, wrecked the unfinished palisade and slaughtered some cattle. Then Svein asked the monks where Ubba was buried and was met by sullen silence, and the swords were drawn again and the question asked a second time, and the monks were forced to confess that. the church was being built directly over the dead chieftain's grave. That grave had been an earth mound, but the monks had dug it tip and thrown the body into the river, and when the Danes heard that story the mercy fled from their souls.
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