by James Wilde
He turned back to his men, his features darkening. ‘These curs used her.’ His words were almost lost beneath the pounding of the sea, but their power burned. Alric knew his friend was remembering his mother, beaten to death by his father’s fists, and his wife, whose head was taken by the man he had called brother. ‘They stole her days to come.’ He looked along the ship to the prow where Ragener sprawled, the tip of Sighard’s spear pressed against his neck. ‘Bring the woman,’ he snapped, ‘and bring the fire-pot.’
Alric felt chilled by what he saw in his friend’s face. Hereward’s killing rage was a terrible thing to behold, but somehow this was much worse.
Guthrinc touched his leader’s arm. ‘Hereward. Those storm-clouds are drawing nearer again. We should not stay here. We will be caught in the storm and pay a terrible price.’
Hereward seemed not to hear.
As two men heaved down the fire-pot on its chain, the Mercian strode over the benches with such force, Alric thought he would gut the sea wolf where he lay. Yet Brainbiter never left its sheath. Hereward loomed over his captive in silence for a long moment. Trying to contain his emotion, the monk thought.
Guthrinc and Kraki brought the woman up, swathed in the cloak. She raised her head as she stepped over the benches, ignoring the stares of all the men there. But when she saw Ragener, her features contorted and she bared her teeth. Her eyes held such murderous hatred that the sea wolf flinched from her gaze. With a hiss, she tried to wrench herself free from Kraki and Guthrinc’s grip upon her arms. Her fingers clawed and she lunged to rake out Ragener’s eyes.
Hereward held out an arm to block her. ‘You offered me gold,’ he said to the pirate. ‘There is no gold in the world to pay for what you took from this woman.’
Ragener knitted his brow, unable to understand the Mercian’s anger.
‘But you will pay with your life,’ Hereward added.
‘You do not know what you have there,’ Ragener snapped, refusing to meet the woman’s accusing stare. ‘If you take her with you, it will be the end of your days. A curse will hang over your head. You will be hunted wherever you go. Enemies will wait at every turn ready to take your head. There will be no safe place, no peace.’
‘Because of this woman,’ Hereward said with contempt.
‘You have been warned.’
Alric watched shadows cross the faces of the men. They were a superstitious breed at the best of times. Talk of curses and portents troubled them. But here they could see the commitment in Ragener’s face; he truly believed every word he was saying.
‘Who is she?’ the monk ventured. ‘Why would she bring such wrath down upon our heads?’
Ragener stared ahead, saying nothing.
‘He lies,’ Hereward said. ‘He tries to make his crimes against the woman seem just.’ He sneered. ‘What he did was punishment, not lust.’
The sea wolf raised his head. ‘Slay me, then. I will die knowing you have doomed yourselves.’
Hereward was unmoved. ‘Some would say justice would be to give this woman a knife and let her do what she will. That would be too easy.’
Alric grew cold. In his friend’s words he could hear a hint of what lay within. That devil was capable of anything.
‘Hold his left arm,’ the Mercian commanded.
Ragener struggled, but Sighard kept the spear-tip hard against his throat as two men gripped his arm and pinned it against the side of the ship.
‘Your body is ruined. Yet still it does not equal the ruin of your soul.’ Hereward took Kraki’s axe and swung it up high.
Ragener cried out, too late. The blade hammered through his wrist. His left hand flipped away, swallowed by the black waves. As the pirate howled in agony, Alric looked away. But it was the coldness in his friend’s face that he could not bear to see.
The Mercian motioned for the fire-pot. Now that Ragener had fallen limp, Hereward wrenched the man’s arm up and plunged the bloody stump into the coals. As the wound seared shut, the pirate roared in pain once more and then slipped into unconsciousness.
Hereward turned to the woman. She raised her head and peered into his eyes. Though she said nothing, Alric thought she seemed pleased.
‘You will show him mercy?’ the monk asked.
‘Aye,’ Hereward replied, but Alric felt troubled by the tight smile that followed.
With each moment, the swell swung to greater heights. The ropes holding the two ships together creaked as they strained. The monk turned and looked to the horizon. The sky was turning black and lightning danced across the water. Wind tore at his soaking tunic. Thunder cracked. They had run out of time.
At first Alric thought the Mercian had not heard, but then he nodded. ‘Return to our ship and make ready,’ he said.
‘The woman?’
‘Carry her. She will not struggle. She knows it is her only chance at life.’
As the men leapt across the gulf into their own ship, Hereward squatted on the front bench, his eyes never leaving the still form of the sea wolf. Unsettled, Alric hesitated, then decided to wait too, as did Kraki and Sighard.
The ship heaved, then fell. The thunder cracked closer. No one spoke. Finally Ragener’s eyes flickered open.
‘Have I not suffered enough?’ he croaked.
‘For what you did to that woman? Never.’ Hereward stood, bracing himself against the rolling of the deck. ‘I should carve you away, piece by piece. Finish the work the Normans began. And this world would be a better place without you in it. But my friend here, the monk, has pleaded for mercy and I cannot deny him.’
A mean smile of relief crept across the sea wolf’s ragged lips.
‘He speaks wisely, the churchman,’ Hereward continued. ‘He tells me of God above, and his will, and his plans for all men. I am but a poor warrior, with only a little learning to divide me from the beasts of the field. If there is a plan for me, I cannot see it, but my friend says there is, as there is for all men. Even you.’ Hereward held out his hands. Ragener looked as puzzled as Alric felt. The Mercian prowled around the ruined man. ‘What is God’s plan for you, sea wolf?’
Ragener blinked, not knowing what to say.
‘How can I kill you if God might have a plan for you?’ Hereward crouched so he could look directly in the man’s one good eye. ‘Aye, I must listen to the monk. I cannot judge you. God will do that.’
Lunging, the Mercian snarled his hand in Ragener’s belt and hauled him up as effortlessly as if he were lifting a child. The sea wolf gaped in shock. His opponent’s calm words of reason had lulled him into believing he would escape his fate. But Alric had known the truth, as he always knew. The devil demanded his payment. The monk bowed his head in silent, despairing prayer as Hereward dragged Ragener to the side. The sea wolf’s muttering turned to pleas of mercy, as the monk had demanded, as Hereward had promised.
‘Aye, mercy, I said, and mercy you shall get.’ When Alric looked up, Ragener was dangling over the turbulent sea, with only Hereward’s grip on his belt keeping him up. ‘By rights, a foul thing like you should be dead, but I will let you live,’ the Mercian continued. ‘The shore is not far away.’
Ragener cried out as he realized what was about to happen.
‘You do not need your eye, or your nose, or your ears. You have one good hand, and two good feet. Swim, sea wolf. Swim hard, for a storm is coming and these waters are treacherous. God will decide your fate now.’
The Mercian unfurled his fingers. Ragener screamed out as he fell. Within a moment, he was gone.
Alric’s heart sank with the sea wolf. He bowed his head once more, his prayers growing more urgent, but there were times when he thought his friend was beyond saving.
CHAPTER FOUR
A CLIFF OF black water towered overhead. Darkness as deep as a moonless night engulfed the ship. The ocean roared and the sky cracked and no man could hear his own prayers, let alone the voice of another. Down into a gorge the vessel plunged, and down, and down, until every man there thought the
y were already on their way to hell. Faces the colour of bone loomed out of the gloom, eyes wide with terror, as the warriors gripped on to the ropes that lashed them to their benches.
Finally the descent into the underworld stopped. The world held its breath.
Standing at the mast so all his men could see him, Hereward looked up that obsidian wall. He could not see the top. Perhaps this was God’s judgement on him for the fate he had inflicted upon Ragener. If he had not tarried so long to punish the sea wolf, they might have escaped the storm. Now they would all pay the price for his uncontrollable anger.
The cliff began to crumble.
With a roar louder than anything Hereward had heard in his life, the black wave rushed down towards them. Curses and oaths rang out all around. The torrent hit with the force of a thousand hammers. Water rammed into Hereward’s nose and mouth, blinded him, dragged him. If he had not been tied to the mast he would have been ripped into the deep. The prow swung up near-vertical. An instant later the vessel slammed down, aft-up. Men spilled across each other. Faces smashed on benches. So strong was the torrent that none could tell which was ship and which was ocean.
Bracing himself, Hereward pressed his back against the mast. He had expected the ship to be smashed into pieces by now, but the deck still felt solid beneath his feet. He spat out a mouthful of brine. If the end was near, he would face it like a warrior, looking it clear in the eye. He thought again of his mother, and of his wife Turfrida, and felt a pang of regret that he had failed them both. He thought of his father, mean-faced old Asketil, his hatred and rage growing with the years that weighted him, and was glad his sire no longer cast a shadow over what remained of his life. A thin mercy.
Another sheet of lightning. In this one, Guthrinc was frozen in the prow. Desperation creased his face as he looked directly at Hereward, stabbing a finger towards the black waters behind him. He was shouting something. A futile gesture. All words were crushed beneath the booming of sea and sky.
Darkness flooded back. The ship whirled, heaved, crashed. Gasping for air in the deluge, Hereward clung on until his fingers burned.
The ship slammed to a hard halt. A terrible grinding reverberated through the hull. Hereward wrenched forward, his rope snapping taut. As the vessel lurched like a drunken man and the din of rending timber drowned out the storm, the Mercian realized what Guthrinc had seen beyond the bow. Rocks, protruding from the waves to catch them like a fishhook.
Hereward loosened the rope from his wrist and bounded to the side. How far had the storm washed them that they were so close to land, he wondered? In a flare of lightning, he glimpsed ragged planks above the water-line. Rows of jagged brown teeth broke the surface of the surging torrent. All around the waves surged up higher than the mast. Soon they would be dashed to pieces, he could see that now. But if they abandoned ship, what chance did they have of surviving in the angry sea?
The Mercian spun round to command his men to prepare for the inevitable. Fierce eyes stared at him – the woman, the dried blood now washed from her, the wounds clear on her arms and face. She seemed to be accusing him, perhaps for the suffering that was to come, perhaps, because he was English, for the pain that had been inflicted upon her by Ragener.
His order died in his throat. A shadow darker than night loomed over him. For one moment, regrets flooded his mind, and then the wave smashed down.
His senses spun away.
Flashes reached him, like a light at the end of a dark cavern. Water engulfed him, waves hurled him, each one as hard as stone. Swirling, tumbling, turning, his breath burning. The thunder in his ears, deafening, then muffled. Madness, madness.
He had killed them all.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WIND HAD dropped along the shoreline. Black storm-clouds scudded out to sea, lightning dancing in their midst. But there, on the beach, barbs of sunlight glinted off the rolling waves as the wheeling gulls shrieked their warning. A battered figure was clawing its way out of the surf. Spitting out gouts of brine, Ragener rolled on to his back and sucked in a juddering gasp of air. He shuddered, feeling his candle close to winking out. Had he overcome so much only to die on the brink of success?
Running feet slapped across the wet sand, drawing nearer. A face hove into view, framed against the azure sky. A young woman, dark-eyed and pretty, a yellow headscarf tied across her black hair. He watched her flinch when she saw his ruined features, could read those familiar thoughts of trepidation in her face. But to her credit, she did not flee.
‘Wait here,’ she said in the Almoravid dialect he had come to know. When she returned she had woollen blankets, which she wrapped him in, and then she lit a fire there on the beach, rolling him close so he could absorb the warmth. She bound the bloody stump of his wrist in clean white linen, all the while murmuring prayers to her god.
Ragener felt himself slipping in and out of a strange, dreamlike existence. But after a while the fire worked its magic, and he felt the strength begin to return to his limbs.
‘You must rest,’ she whispered. ‘The sea can end your days long after you have left it.’
Aye, death was close, as it had been from the moment that Mercian bastard tossed him into the waves like shit on to the midden. As it had been for much of his life. ‘Though they have whittled down my body, they have not yet been able to end the fire in me,’ he croaked.
She smiled at him, knowing that his defiance was a sign that he had the will to live.
For a while, she told him about her life to give warmth to his thoughts, how she lived with her father, and had cared for him since her mother died of the sickness the previous winter. The old man’s heart had been broken – she thought he would never recover. And she told, in a quiet, hopeful voice, of how she had never travelled beyond her village but dreamed of the places the sailors described when they came searching for provisions. Ragener nodded along. He thought he understood her life.
When he was well enough to sit up, she brought him hot broth from her home nearby and the hard, seed-filled bread they ate in those parts. The stew was thin, little more than water, but he gulped it down and enjoyed the heat it brought to his arms and legs.
‘Your ship … when you fell prey to the storm … you were bound for the Normans?’ she asked, her face darkening.
He paused with the bowl at his lips and frowned.
‘To see the knight … Vavasour … and his men?’
‘Drogo Vavasour?’
‘He has made camp to the west of here. Men in long mail-shirts, their hair cut short and shaved at the back.’
Ragener looked across the stark, brown landscape beyond the beach. ‘What would a Norman knight and a war-band want in these parts?’
‘They say his king is hungry for power and wants more lands to call his own.’
The ruined man shrugged. That was the Norman way. But Drogo Vavasour … he knew that name, knew the tales they told of him in the villages of England. ‘There is no peace in this world anywhere,’ he murmured. ‘The drums of war beat in England, in Sicily, in Constantinople. And soon it will come here. That is the way of things. We cannot rest, ever. You fight or you are conquered. You fight or you die.’ Thoughtful, he watched the gulls swirling overhead.
As she took the bowl, the woman bowed her head. ‘God has not been kind to you,’ she said in a soft voice, still unable to look him full in the face.
He felt a laugh rumble up from deep inside him. It rolled out, too high-pitched, and went on too long. The girl recoiled, thinking him mad. Perhaps he was. ‘When I was thrown from my ship, I was told God would decide my fate,’ he said when he was finally able to control his hooting. ‘God has passed judgement on me. I live.’
‘Then you have been chosen to do God’s work.’
He nodded. ‘God smiles upon me.’ His fingers closed on a rock, as sharp as flint. A red line sliced across the ball of his thumb. He sucked the blood off, then weighed the rock in his remaining hand, remembering. ‘When William the Bastard seized the
crown, life became hard in England,’ he said. ‘In my village, many were close to starving. I stole a loaf of bread to fill an empty stomach. The Normans caught me and cut off my nose.’ His face fell. ‘The bread was not for me. It was for my mother,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘She told the soldiers where I hid when they came looking for me.’ He felt the stinging sense of betrayal rise up in him just as strongly as it had then, and the desperate loneliness that followed. ‘The Normans took my ears because I spoke harshly to a knight, and they slit my lip …’ he shrugged, ‘because I was less to them than a rat.’
‘How you must hate the Normans,’ she said, her voice tremulous with compassion.
He examined the stains on the linen binding his stump. ‘I have suffered greatly. Mine has been a life with no joy, and little love. I did not deserve this. No man does.’
‘But now God smiles on you,’ she reminded him, trying to raise his spirits with the sweetest smile he had seen upon a woman in many a year.
‘But still you flinched when you looked upon me.’ He peered into her eyes until she squirmed and looked away. Her smile faded.
After he had taken her face with the sharp rock, he wandered along the dusty coast path to the Norman camp. The white tents billowed in the hot breeze, the lines cracking. Over one, the pennant of Drogo Vavasour fluttered, a golden dragon against a red field. Ragener breathed in the sweet scent of woodsmoke from the fire. He thought he could smell meat cooking too and his stomach growled in response.
Two red-faced guards waited aside the track winding into the camp, their tunics stained with sweat. Their hauberks and shields were heaped to one side. When they saw him, they cried out a warning and snatched out their double-edged swords. They seemed surprised to see anyone approaching the camp, never mind one with such a ruined face.
