WARRIORS OF THE NORTH

by H A CULLEY

  Eochaid’s opinion of the missing Aderyn took a nose dive. Only a coward would abandon his family like that. He looked around the small hut and at first he didn’t see anyone else, then he realised that there was a ladder up to a sleeping platform. He turned back to the woman.

  ‘We seek Brother Aidan and his companion. We know that they landed here in October last year but they seem to have disappeared. Can you help us?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, he left here to travel up Nithsdale as far as Kendoon Loch. He said that he hoped to travel on from there through the Glen Ken Hills to the coast opposite the Isle of Arran, but it would depend on the weather. I believe that Glen Ken can be dangerous in winter if they get a lot of snow, but I’ve never been there myself. He may have had to stay for the winter somewhere in Nithsdale; or, of course, he may have been betrayed and killed. However, if that was the case I think word would have reached us. Brother Aidan is well known. Our evil king would boast about it if he’d managed to lay his hands on him.’

  ‘Thank you, you’ve been most helpful.’ Eochaid handed her a leather pouch containing several scraps of silver. ‘This will pay for medicine if you know a healer or a wise woman.’

  ‘Thank you, lord. We have a good healer but he is expensive and we couldn’t afford him before now. You are our saviour.’

  She babbled on about how grateful she was and Eochaid backed towards the door, eager to leave the hut with its sick inhabitants now he had what he wanted. One of the men with him quickly opened the door and the three left hurriedly. Eochaid was embarrassed by the woman’s effusive thanks as well as being worried about catching whatever it was that her husband and child had. All three were glad to breathe in the fresher air outside the hut, despite its overtones of sewage and rotting garbage.

  They were nearly back at the quayside when they were stopped by four men, all carrying spears and small shields called targes. Two of them had poor quality helmets on their heads, the others were bareheaded.

  ‘Why were you seeking the hut of the Christian scum Aderyn?’ one of the men wearing a helmet asked them belligerently.

  Eochaid realised that the first man they’d questioned had obviously alerted the soldiers up at the fortress. He studied the four Britons. The two without helmets were little more than boys – perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old – and they were edgy. He could tell by the way that their hands kept grasping their spears tightly and then relaxing their grip. They wouldn’t meet his eye, nor would the third man. Only the leader seemed confident of himself.

  ‘Someone owed him money and asked me to take it to him. However, he wasn’t there so I gave it to his daughter.’

  It was nearly the truth and Eochaid said it with conviction.

  ‘Why does an Irishman owe a Strathclyde Christian money?’

  ‘I’m from Ulster but the man who owed the debt isn’t. I happened to be doing business with him in Ayr.’

  Ayr was another port in Strathclyde. This time it was a lie and the questioner must have sensed it.

  ‘I don’t believe you. You’re to come with us. The custos wants to question you.’

  Eochaid nodded to his two men and turned as if to accompany the four soldiers. The leader and the other man with the helmet led the way and the two youths brought up the rear. If the man in charge had a modicum of common sense he’d have asked them to hand over their seaxes. It took less than a second to unsheathe them and, whilst his two men slit the throats of the two soldiers in front, Eochaid whipped around and confronted the two frightened youths.

  ‘Now you can drop those spears and walk away or you can die here; your choice.’

  The two looked at each other, dropped their spears and shields and ran.

  A few minutes later Eochaid was sailing back down the river to re-join the rest of his men. The custos would know that he had left by ship and would send boats after him. However, everyone at Dùn Phris had seen him depart on one ship manned by a few sailors, they wouldn’t be expecting two birlinns filled with experienced warriors.

  Luckily nothing had appeared by the time that the two birlinns were loaded and ready to leave. Eochaid’s men rowed out of the estuary and turned east to wait opposite the sandbank on the other side of estuary. Half an hour later three boats called pontos - based on a Roman design with eight oars a side and a square mainsail - sailed into sight crammed with armed Britons. Eochaid’s ships were the only ones with oars in the water; the Strathclyde ships having raised their sails and shipped their oars to take advantage of the westerly wind.

  The two birlinns sprang forward and the archers in the bows concentrated their efforts on the leading ponto. One of the first to be killed was the steersman and the ponto slewed around out of control until it gybed and the mast snapped. Few of the men on board her were wearing chainmail or even a leather jerkin and many were killed or wounded by arrows before Eochaid’s ships swept past her. The first enemy ponto wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

  The other two ships tried to get their sails down and put their oars in the water. They succeeded – just – but they hadn’t picked up any speed by the time that Eochaid’s birlinns reached them. Each of the two pontos had twenty men on them, less than half the number of the opposing vessels. Eochaid’s birlinn came alongside one of them just after his archers had rained a volley of arrows down on the crew. Half a dozen of the twenty were killed or injured and the morale of the rest had sunk to rock bottom. Eochaid jumped over the gunwale down into the belly of the smaller ponto spearing a man with his sword as he did so. He sprung up from the crouching position in which he had landed just in time to parry the sword of a large man dressed in a chain mail byrnie with an expensive helmet with a faceplate. As the man swung his sword at him again Eochaid knocked it away with his shield. His adversary didn’t have a shield but wielded a seax in his left hand. He now used this to stab at Eochaid’s throat. The Irish prince knocked it away with his own sword, which left his opponent’s belly exposed. He brought the sword back quickly and thrust it at the large paunch.

  The links of the chain mail were well made, but not were strong enough to resist the sharp point of a good sword. Several of them parted and the point burst through, cut through the thick leather jerkin underneath and lodged in the man’s intestines.

  He howled in pain and furiously tried to slash at Eochaid’s neck. The Irishman jerked his head back out of harm’s way and rammed the bronze rim of his shield up into the man’s throat, bruising his windpipe badly. He man gasped for breath then fell to his knees in agony as the fatal wound to his innards incapacitated him.

  Once his men saw that he was dying the heart went out of them and the few survivors surrendered. The other vessel had already surrendered, but the leading vessel had now sorted itself out and was making for the entrance to the River Nith as fast as it could go. However the wind was against it and so it relied on rowers, of which there weren’t enough left to man every oar. Eochaid left ten men behind to secure the ship he had just captured and the remaining thirty grabbed an oar and put their backs into it. It soon became apparent that they were overtaking the smaller ponto quite quickly. They had no chance of reaching the entrance to the river, let alone the safety of Dùn Phris and so they stopped rowing and surrendered.

  ~~~

  Eochaid and fifty of his men moved quietly through the mucky alleys of the settlement below the fortress of Dùn Phris. He had learned from the captives that the man with the paunch who he’d killed had been the custos and a virulent anti-Christian. Quite a few of those who had surrendered had claimed to be Christians who had denied their faith when the pagan Owain had come to the throne. They were only too happy to tell Eochaid what they knew in the hope of avoiding slavery or death.

  He had left thirty men, the boys and the wounded with the five ships and the prisoners at a sheltered spot on a bend in the river, whilst he took one of the captives as a guide and set out to capture the fortress. He had reluctantly decided that he couldn’t leave it behind in enemy hands whilst he v
entured into the interior.

  ‘Godwine,’ he said, calling forward one of the most experienced scouts in his crew. ‘I need to know all you can find out about the sentries.’

  The man nodded and, beckoning one of the other scouts to join him, the pair set off at a lope towards the settlement. Eochaid’s crew were a mixture of Irishmen from his own clan of the Ulaidh in Ulster, where his nephew, Congal Cláen, was king, and Angles who had joined him when they all lived on the Isle of Arran when Oswald was its thegn. Godwine was one of the latter.

  Whilst he was waiting for Godwine to return Eochaid found himself thinking about the future. He had left Ulster when Congal had betrayed his own grandfather, who was also Eochaid’s father, on the battlefield and seized the throne of the Ulaidh for himself. Eochaid had vowed never to return but recently he’d been asked by Domnall Brecc, King of Dalriada and Congal’s supposed overlord, to help him in the growing conflict between the Ulaidh and the High King of Ireland. A similar plea had gone to Oswald but he’d wisely ignored it. He had enough problems trying to re-unite Northumbria without getting embroiled in the complex politics of Ireland.

  Eochaid didn’t find it so easy to disassociate himself from the land of his birth. Although he’d been Oswald’s friend and comrade in arms since they’d first met on Iona when he was fourteen, he was beginning to think it was time for him to become his own man. The days when they’d been close and did most things together had passed. Increasingly he felt that they were growing apart now that Oswald was a king. By the time that Godwine had returned he’d made his mind up to respond to Domnall’s call for assistance just as soon as he’d completed his current mission.

  ‘They are obviously alert, Godwine told him. ‘We saw sentries patrolling in pairs around the circular palisade. I can’t be certain but I think that there are three pairs. There are four more on the walkway by the gates. The palisade is more than twice the height of a man with a ditch perhaps five feet deep in front of it except, of course, at the gates.’

  ‘Thank you, Godwine. Very concise and helpful. Did you manage to see what is inside the palisade?’

  ‘It’s on the top of a rise with no high point from which to see over the palisade. We could see the roof of the hall and several huts though.’

  ‘What is the roofing material: straw, turf, timber?’

  ‘It was thatched with straw.’

  Eochaid smiled. ‘Good. As we haven’t had any rain in the past few days, it should burn nicely.’

  He had several archers amongst his men. When they lit a fire outside the palisade the sentries became agitated but the gates remained firmly shut. When the first fire arrows arced into the night sky and lodged in the thatch of the hall and two of the huts there was a lot of shouting, and then panic as the water chucked from leather buckets failed to reach far enough up the roof to make any difference to the flames. These had to be filled from the well and it took time for them to haul the water up to the surface. It was a fruitless exercise and before half an hour had passed the inside of the fortress was blazing furiously. It became too hot for the soldiers to remain in the confined space and the gates suddenly swung open.

  ‘Here they come. Spare the women and children but kill the men,’ Eochaid yelled, more to salve his conscience than in expectation that he would be obeyed.

  The women and children emerged first. One or two were killed by the inexperienced warriors high on adrenalin before their first fight, but most were allowed through the circle of attackers and disappeared into the settlement. The garrison tried to charge the waiting warriors in a wedge but most were suffering from smoke inhalation and a few had serious burns. They stumbled and weaved about trying to suck in the relatively clean air away from the burning buildings and that destroyed the cohesiveness of their charge.

  Eochaid had positioned himself in the middle of the two ranks of the shield wall. He saw a large Briton wielding an axe come straight for him and he crouched down waiting for the man’s attack. Unlike most of his fellows, this man was protected by a byrnie and a simple round helmet. He swung his long axe in a circle as he neared Eochaid, threatening to cut in half the men on either side of him as well. Eochaid ducked and held his shield up, hoping that the axe head would glance off it. It never reached him, getting stuck in the torso of the man to his left.

  He stepped forward and thrust the point of his sword into the throat of the large Briton as he struggled to free his axe. The man gurgled and fell to his knees, struggling for breath. Eochaid’s sword had severed his windpipe but hadn’t cut any vital blood vessels. He rectified that by pulling out his sword and slashing it into his neck, half severing his head from his body. It flopped sideways in a spray of blood and the man toppled sideways.

  When they saw him go down, the fight went out of the rest of the Britons. They fought on but, as more and more of them were killed, the remainder surrendered.

  ‘He was their lord,’ Godwine told him later.

  ‘How many did we lose?’

  ’Only three, plus a few more wounded. When we counted their dead there were over forty of them.’

  ‘Wounded?’

  ‘None. I fear the men killed them rather than be bothered with looking after them.’

  Eochaid nodded. ‘Not very Christian but they would have been a problem for us.’

  He suspected that Godwine had given the order to slaughter the wounded. He wasn’t happy about it, and certainly wouldn’t have ordered it, but it did solve a problem. They couldn’t have sold them as slaves in that condition and they couldn’t have gone in search of Aidan with a dozen or more wounded enemy warriors in tow.

  ‘How many captives?’

  ‘Seventeen; a mixture of old men, young warriors and boys.’

  ‘Boys?’

  ‘Yes, slaves who worked in the kitchens, stable boys and the like. There are five of them.’

  ‘Bring them here.’

  When they were brought before Eochaid he could see that they ranged in age from ten to perhaps fifteen. None looked like the small, swarthy dark haired Britons who inhabited Strathclyde.

  ‘Are any of you Angles or Saxons?’ he asked in English.

  The youngest and the eldest stepped forward, declaring that they were both Angles. Another was from Dalriada and the two with red hair turned out to be twins from Ulster. Unfortunately for them they claimed to be from the Uí Néill clan, the enemies of Eochaid’s people – the Ulaidh.

  The two Angles and the Dalriadan were given the option of slavery or becoming ship’s boys and serving Eochaid. It wasn’t a difficult decision for them to make. The two Irish boys were returned to the rest of the captives. Eochaid would take them up the Solway Firth to Caer Luel in Rheged the next day with the men they’d captured earlier to sell them as slaves. Then they could make a start on the journey up the Nith to find Aidan and Ròidh.

  ~~~

  Ròidh peered out from under the bush where he was hiding and, now certain that there was nobody anywhere near him, he darted out from concealment to check on the trap he’d set the previous day. He was in luck. A large hare had been snared and it was the work of moments to kill it and take it back to the cave where he and Aidan had taken refuge.

  They had been extremely lucky. When they had been warned about King Owain’s campaign against Christians, Aidan had decided to head for Ayr on the west coast of Strathclyde and try to either hire or steal a fishing boat to travel across to Brodick on the Isle of Arran, which was in Dalriada. Oswald had been Thegn of Arran and Bute and it should then be a simple matter to find someone to take them back to Iona. The problem was firstly to survive the coming winter and then travel all the way up Nithsdale and Glen Ken without being discovered.

  God had been smiling on them because halfway up Nithsdale they had found an isolated hut. The previous occupants had obviously succumbed to some sort of illness because there were five bodies in the hut: a man and woman and three children. Aidan and Ròidh buried them and then proceeded to burn the beds in which they
had lain, replacing them with furs they had found stored in the loft. The man had evidently been a hunter and fur trader because they also found a hunting bow and quiver full of barbed arrows together with a long skinning knife.

  When he was a boy living in the crannoch on Loch Ness Ròidh had been taught how to fish, to hunt and to trap; skills which now proved invaluable. Thankfully the winter proved to be wet but not too cold, apart from a couple of periods of ice and snow. There had been some salted meat, cheeses and flour in the hut and Ròidh supplemented this with small animals he managed to trap, the odd deer and trout from the river.

  Luckily no man troubled them but the wolves were a different matter. They were forced to stay in the hut for two days during the first blizzard of the winter in mid-December. Fortunately they had enough supplies stored so that Ròidh didn’t have to go hunting. In particular there was a young doe in the shed attached to the hut, hanging until the venison became tender. After a week a pack of wolves had ventured into the clearing where the hut stood and scrabbled at the door to the shed. Perhaps unwisely, Ròidh went outside with his bow to scare them off.

  His first arrow took a large wolf in the shoulder and it immediately yelped and turned to face its attacker. The rest of the pack joined it in growling menacingly at the young monk. He sent another arrow towards the big wolf and hit it in the side of its chest. Again, it wasn’t fatal as the head of the arrow bounced off the animal’s ribs. It gathered itself and launched itself at him. Ròidh stood there petrified and would have undoubtedly been killed had Aidan not stepped in front of him and buried the skinning knife deep in the wolf’s chest. The wolf struggled briefly then dropped to the ground. It twitched once and then lay still.

  The rest of the pack howled their dismay at the killing of the alpha male – all except one who had been waiting for an opportunity to challenge the dead wolf. He now growled and tried to induce the rest of the pack to attack the two men, but the alpha female knocked him to one side. The alpha male and female jointly led the pack and she was letting him know that she would choose her next mate.