Night Wolf: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 5)

by James L. Nelson

  He never had the chance to find out. No sooner had they formed their defense than the heathens hoisted themselves up onto the far garden wall and dropped to the ground on the other side. They were nearly twice the number of Lochlánn’s men, but they seemed to have no fight left in them.

  I guess it wasn’t a trap, Lochlánn thought, and he felt the relief hit him like a blast of hot air from an oven.

  It was quiet, very quiet, like a garden was supposed to be when it wasn’t filled with dozens of men trying to kill one another. Lochlánn could hear the blood pounding in his ears and his own breathing, which was very loud.

  “After them?” It was Senach who spoke, and he spoke in a whisper, which seemed appropriate for some reason.

  “No, wait…” Lochlánn said. His relief notwithstanding, he still thought this might be a trap of some sort, and he was not going to have his men fling themselves over the wall and onto the upraised swords of the enemy.

  “Follow me,” he said. He moved across the garden, his pace just short of a jog. He stopped five feet from the wall where the heathens had gone over and listened. Nothing. He stepped up to the wall, put his hands on the top and pulled himself up. There was nothing to see on the other side, nothing but the dim outline of a few houses and the hills off to the east. The heathens were gone.

  Lochlánn dropped back down into the garden where his men stood with lowered shields and the points of their swords resting on the ground. That great surge of energy that came with battle was draining off. Lochlánn could feel it in himself, could see it on the faces and postures of his men. But it was his duty as captain to keep them going, despite their waning sense of purpose.

  “We can still run them down,” he said. “They’re on foot, I would think. We have horses.” He gestured to a portion of the men standing to his left. “You lot, see to the wounded. Take any back to Colman’s house. Then gather up the weapons, shields, all those things we set aside. We go tonight. Right now. The rest of us will get the horses and meet you at the house, and then we ride.”

  He stopped. No one moved.

  “Go, now,” Lochlánn said, suddenly afraid they would not obey, not sure what he would do if that happened. But it didn’t happen. They all moved at once, and they moved with resolve. Their sense of urgency might have gone, but they still obeyed when Lochlánn spoke.

  Lochlánn brought ten men with him, which he figured was all he would need. This was the moment for which they had spent the last week or more preparing, the moment when they would ride out in search of the heathens. They had thought they would leave at their own time, not one that the heathens forced upon them, but such would not be the case.

  They skirted the church, came around the far end. There were figures moving toward them, just discernable in the moonlight, a dozen or so and walking fast. Seeing them, realizing who they were, Lochlánn understood that he and his men might not be leaving at all.

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?” Lochlánn heard the rough, irascible voice of Brother Gilla Patraic, the oldest of the monks, whose charge included keeping the brothers in line so that the abbot would not be bothered by their petty squabbles.

  The two groups closed on one another, the men-at-arms and the monks. As far as Brother Gilla Patraic knew, these armed men could be the heathens, come to kill them all. But he seemed not to care. Brother Gilla Patraic was the sort who would try to defeat the Northmen with a tongue lashing, and might well do so.

  “Brother,” Lochlánn said as they drew close enough to see one another. Some of the monks were carrying staffs and others pitch forks. One had a scythe. Lochlánn tried not to laugh.

  “Brother Gilla Patraic,” Lochlánn began again, “the heathens have been here, we—”

  “We heard some goings-on,” Gilla Patraic interrupted, then looked Lochlánn up and down, as if just seeing him. “Brother Lochlánn, what is this? Why are you wearing these…things? I did not give my blessing for this. I—”

  It was Lochlánn’s turn to interrupt. “The heathens have sacked the church and now they’re getting away with their plunder. I said we should not let the men-at-arms break up the dúnad until we knew the heathens were gone. Now”—he gestured to the armed men behind him—“these men and I will ride after them and…”

  “You’ll ride after them?” Brother Gilla Patraic stammered, as if Lochlánn had suggested they would take wing and fly in pursuit. “You’ll do no such thing! You are only a novitiate, and under discipline. How can you think to dress like a man-at-arms without my leave? Is this the work of that renegade, Brother Louis?”

  Brother Louis… Lochlánn had all but forgot about him in the madness. He had not seen him in the garden, and yet Trian had said it was Louis who had sent the boy with the warning. He wondered if he should tell Brother Gilla Patraic any of this. But he did not get the chance.

  “Brother! Brother!” It was Brother Echach, running from the direction of the church. “They’ve taken everything, Brother Gilla Patraic,” he huffed, slurring the name into a single word as he came to a stop. His face looked paler than usual in the moonlight. He was sweating.

  “The heathens!” Brother Echach gasped. “They’ve taken everything! The altar service, the candlesticks. They ripped the door off the tabernacle!”

  Brother Gilla Patraic’s face was a mask of fury. He made the sign of the cross. “The host?” he asked. “Did they desecrate the host?”

  Brother Echach frowned. “No, actually,” he said, confusion evident. “It seems not. The host was on the altar and seemed untouched. Same with the relic of St. Kevin. The reliquary was gone, but the relics themselves were on the altar.”

  Louis… Lochlánn thought. That was the only explanation. Louis had stopped the heathens from the worst of the desecration.

  “See here, Brother Gilla Patraic,” Lochlánn said, forcing himself to sound calm and reasonable when all he wanted to do was push past this old man and be on his way. “As Brother Echach said, the heathens have got away with everything. Everything of value in the church. What you heard was us trying to stop them, but they got away. Now I mean to ride after them. Take back the riches of God’s house.”

  Brother Gilla Patraic frowned. Lochlánn could see that he was wrestling between his desire to get back the property of the church and his unwillingness to give this upstart novitiate free rein. And Lochlánn had a pretty good idea which way the old monk would go.

  “Very well, off with you,” Brother Gilla Patraic said. “But you be back by nightfall tomorrow, do you understand? If you haven’t done slaughter among the heathens by then, then you’ll never run them to ground.”

  “Yes, Brother. Nightfall tomorrow, I’ll be back by then,” Lochlánn said. At some later time he would have to make a confession of that egregious lie.

  He pushed past Brother Gilla Patraic and the other monks with their makeshift weapons and led his men to the stables. They found a lantern, and by its feeble light led the horses out of the stalls and saddled and bridled them. They walked the horses out into the night, which was no longer still. The revelation of the heathen raid had brought chaos to the monastery, bordering on panic. Lochlánn could hear men shouting, doors opening, feet running.

  Lochlánn smiled. The danger to Glendalough was passed, the heathens long gone. The attack had been more burglary than raid. He could not recall having ever heard of Northmen doing such a thing. But now he could ride out with the blessings of Brother Gilla Patraic, and not slink away as he had planned, as if he, too, were a thief.

  He and his men mounted and rode off, leading the other horses behind them. They passed through the gate in the vallum, the low wall that marked the boundary of the monastery’s sanctuary, through the gate in the higher, outer wall, and on to the home of the late Colman mac Breandan. The rest of the men were outside already, with shields, spears, bundles of food and bedding, all the matériel they had amassed for their expedition, piled against the wattle fence that surrounded the house.

  Brother Gilla Patraic
might wonder why we need all this for a single day’s hunt, Lochlánn mused. They had prepared for a much longer expedition than that. But, in truth, if they met with good fortune, they might well be back by the following evening. Lochlánn felt a tremor of disappointment at that thought, though he did not consider it likely.

  The riders dismounted and the men set about loading the food, weapons and gear on the horses while Lochlánn conferred with Senach.

  “None in the garden were badly wounded,” Senach said. “Those men that were down, they took blows to the head, mostly. They’re all right. A few gashes. We bound them up. But all will ride with us tonight.”

  “Good,” Lochlánn said, his feigned nonchalance masking the great relief he felt. As a leader of warriors he knew he must both see to his men’s welfare and yet not be shy about sending them to be hurt or killed, if need be. That latter part was a problem. He hoped such indifference would come with age, because he did not see it coming any other way.

  They watched for a moment as the others finished their preparations, then Senach turned to Lochlánn again. “How do you mean to find them?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “Not much of a moon tonight…”

  “I’ve thought this through,” Lochlánn said, which he had, though he had first decided to hunt the heathens down, and then considered whether or not he could actually do it. “They’re strangers to this countryside. They’ll have to stay to the road. They won’t be able to travel under cover in the dark, not loaded down and armed as they are. Even if Louis is helping them, he does not know this country well. We’ll find them on the road.”

  Senach nodded. He seemed impressed with Lochlánn’s certainty. Lochlánn wished he could be as impressed himself.

  They mounted and made their way out of town. The road made a dark band across the ground, rising and falling with the rolling land, easy enough to follow in the weak moonlight. They headed east, the last pinpricks of light from Glendalough soon lost from sight. They rode in silence, with just the jingling of the horses’ tack and the rhythmic thump of swords and shield and the sound of hooves on soft earth to break the silence.

  They found no one.

  By the time the first gray suggestions of dawn were creeping into the eastern sky, they had covered six miles or so of road beyond Glendalough and had come across no heathens, not even a sign of heathens. The way was deserted, and Lochlánn had to conclude that he had been wrong.

  What mistake he had made he still could not guess. He was sure he was right that strangers like the fin gall would not have been able to move through the trails and sundry paths that ran through the woods. Only hunters and bandits who knew that country could hope to do that. He was sure they had gone east. The heathens who raided the church were the heathens with whom Louis had joined, he knew that for certain, and they would be planning to escape aboard their longship.

  What am I missing? Lochlánn wondered. Where did I guess wrong?

  It did not help his status as captain to make such a mistake, but neither did it help to keep his men in the saddle when they were exhausted and it was clear the heathens would not be found. He called for a halt, let the men sleep in the grass by the side of the road while he himself kept watch. He saw no threat greater than a fox that darted past the sleeping men.

  The sun was a few hours up when Lochlánn roused the others and told them to have their breakfast. That done, he picked four men who knew that country best and ordered them to follow the paths that ran along the river and see if they could find any sign of the heathens. He and the rest mounted their horses once more and continued along the road as it ran east and then southeast. On their left hand they caught glimpses of the Avonmore River when the trees along the banks thinned enough to offer a view.

  They had stopped and were eating their midday meal when one of the men Lochlánn had sent to scout, a fleet young man named Corcc, came jogging up from the river a quarter mile away.

  “We didn’t find the heathens,” he reported after Lochlánn had allowed him to catch his breath. “But we found where they were.”

  Corcc led the rest of them back the way he had come, down across the field and into the woods, then over a ford in the river where the water came up nearly to their stirrups. On the far side they plunged into the woods once more, and a mile later came out on a sandbar at a bend in the river, a half acre or more of sand, all but hidden from view in any direction.

  Lochlánn climbed down off his horse and walked slowly across the dry ground, which made a soft crunching sound underfoot. It was clear that people had been here, quite a few, that they had been here for a while and had left very recently. A wide, blackened pit showed where a substantial fire had been burning. The center was filled with bits of charred wood, the remains of at least a week’s worth of fires, and a thin wisp of smoke still rose from the blackened debris. Beef bones lay scattered around. In various places the sand was disturbed in such a way that suggested tents had been pitched and men bedded down there.

  Near the edge of the river Lochlánn found a few lengths of wood, not firewood, but wood that had been worked, smooth boards a few feet in length. He picked one up and examined it. It was fresh cut at both ends, and in the middle a section had been none too delicately hacked out. Lochlánn knew almost nothing about ships and shipbuilding, but he guessed this was one of the boards from the Northmen’s ship, one that had been cut through to sink it and now had been replaced.

  He tossed the board aside and looked downstream. The heathens had made it back to the river with their plunder and headed off, with the current to carry them to safety.

  What was the bastard’s name? he thought. Trian had told him, and now he tried to recall. One of those odd heathen names.

  Thorgrim. Thorgrim Night Wolf. That was it.

  And now he and the rest had disappeared down river. How long ago? Not long. That morning, perhaps. Lochlánn doubted they could navigate the river in the dark, so they would have had to wait for the sun to rise.

  Can we still catch them? Lochlánn wondered. How fast can their damned ship go in the river? He did not know the answer and he doubted that any of the others did, either. Not that he intended to ask. Asking would make him appear unsure.

  He tossed the plank aside and walked back to where the rest of the men were waiting. “The heathens have taken to their ship, as you can see,” he said. “They can’t have left more than a few hours ago, since they can’t find their way down river in the dark.” He waited for someone to challenge that assumption, but no one did, so he continued. “They have but a few hours head start, by my guess.”

  He saw heads nodding. “So, we go after them?” Senach asked, a hopeful note in his voice.

  “Yes, we go after them,” Lochlánn said.

  And what do we do when we find them? he wondered. But he knew already.

  “We go after them,” Lochlánn continued. “We’ll find them and then we’ll set a trap and we’ll kill them all. Stamp them out. Like it should have been done the first time around.”

  It was the thing to do. It was what Louis de Roumois would have done. That, in Lochlánn’s mind, was what made it a good idea, but he knew better than to make that point out loud.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Let them take pains,

  These men of note,

  To protect themselves

  From Snorri’s plots

  The Saga of the People of Laxardal

  Aghen the shipwright stood to one side and watched Oddi’s ax take small bites out of the oak strake he was fashioning. The chips flew like spume from a wave breaking on the rocks.

  “Careful, careful there,” Aghen warned. “You go too fast and you’ll make a bad cut and then you’ve ruined the whole thing. All that work, and it’s just kindling.”

  “If I go too slow you’ll call me a lazy whore’s son,” Oddi said, never pausing in his ax strokes. There was no malice in his words. The opposite, really. He and Aghen had come to like one another, and their banter was more in the natur
e of friendly ribbing.

  “You are a lazy whore’s son,” Aghen said.

  He was quite certain that Oddi was reporting back to Ottar, not because Oddi had any love for Ottar but because he had been ordered to do so. Oddi must be telling the new lord of Vík-ló that the shipwright was being cooperative. In good spirits, even. Aghen had had no word from Ottar, no threats from him or any of the lick-ass men around him. That had to mean Ottar was pleased with the work being done to Raven Eye, and the only way he could know that would be if Oddi was telling him.

  All of that was good news to Aghen Ormsson. Because it opened up a line of attack that Ottar could not see.

  “How is our Lord Ottar these days?” Aghen asked as he applied a whetstone to one of his chisels. “He seems to leave us in peace to do our work.”

  Oddi shrugged as he wielded his ax. “Ottar is Ottar. Drunk. Mean. He doesn’t leave his hall much.”

  Aghen made a grunting sound. “You said he’s afraid still of Thorgrim Night Wolf?”

  “I don’t know,” Oddi said. “That’s my guess. I’ve heard him say the name. Saw him fly into a rage once when one of his hirdmen mentioned him. He claims Thorgrim’s dead; he says he made sure of that. He says it like he believes it. But not like he believes it absolutely.”

  Aghen made another grunting sound and worked in silence for a few minutes. “I saw a wolf the other night,” he said at last, speaking the words like an afterthought.

  Oddi stopped working and turned toward him. “A wolf?”

  Aghen nodded. “Just down by the river. I swear by the gods I thought it would have my throat, but it only snarled at me and then ran off.”

  Oddi’s eyes were wide, his mouth hanging partway open, but Aghen turned back to his chisel and whetstone.

  “Just a lone wolf?” Oddi asked. “Do you see such things around here, much?”

  “Never have before,” Aghen admitted. “I was as surprised as I could be, let me tell you. And I’m not ashamed to say I nearly pissed my trousers at the sight of it.”