War of the Wolf

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Then why won’t you protect us all the way?”

  “Because twenty-two warriors are enough to keep you safe,” I said confidently, “and because I have urgent business somewhere else and it will be quicker for me to cut across country.” I was tempted to escort the nuns all the way to Mameceaster, but the temptation was solely because of Mus. I wondered about her. When she had been married to Bishop Leofstan she had whored enthusiastically, but Æthelstan had been certain she was a reformed sinner. Maybe she was, but I did not like to ask her. “What will you do in Mameceaster?” I asked instead.

  “Maybe I’ll take my vows.”

  “Why haven’t you taken them yet?”

  “I don’t feel worthy, lord.”

  I gave her a skeptical look. “Prince Æthelstan believes you’re the holiest woman he knows.”

  “And the prince is a good man, lord, a very good man,” she said, smiling, “but he doesn’t know women very well.”

  Something in her tone made me look at her again, but her face was all innocence, so I ignored her remark. “So what will you do in Mameceaster?” I asked instead.

  “Pray,” she said, and I made a scornful sound. “And heal the sick, lord.” She gave me her dazzling smile. “And what’s your business, lord, that makes you abandon me?”

  “I have to kill a monk,” I told her, and, to my surprise, she laughed.

  We left them next morning, striking west into wooded hills. I had not been truthful with Mus, our quickest route was to follow the convenient Roman roads, but I needed to approach Arnborg’s settlement without being discovered, and that meant cutting across the country, finding our way by instinct and by the sun. I doubled my scouts. We were entering land where the Danish had been reinforced by Norse settlers, where few Saxons survived, land that had been claimed by Mercia, but never occupied by Mercian troops. Mameceaster, the nearest burh, had been made deep in this land, a defiant gesture by Edward that claimed that he was king of all the country south of the burh, but many of the people here had not even heard of Edward.

  The land was rich, but sparsely settled. There were no villages. In southern Mercia and in Wessex, which was now supposedly all one kingdom, there were settlements of cottages, usually built around a church and with no defensive palisade, but here what dwellings existed were almost all behind strong timber walls. We avoided them. We ate hard cheese, stale bread, and smoked herrings that Æthelstan’s steward had given us from his storehouses. We carried forage bags for the horses because the spring grass was still weeks away. We slept in the woods, warmed by fires. Folk would see those fires and wonder who had set them, but we were still far south of the Ribbel, and I doubted that Arnborg would hear of us. Men must have seen us, even if we did not see them, but all they saw were some ninety armed riders with their servants and spare horses. We flew no banner, and the wolf heads on our shields were faded. If any folk did see us they would avoid us because in a dangerous land we were the danger.

  Next day, late in a cold afternoon, we saw the Ribbel. It was a sullen day with a gray sky and a gray sea, and ahead of us stretched the wide estuary where gray mudbanks were edged with endless marshes. Smoke rose into the windless air from a dozen settlements on the estuary’s shores. No ships disturbed the river’s channels that threaded the mud, though I could see a score of fishing boats hauled above the high-tide mark. It was close to low tide now and some of the withies marking the channels were out of the water, which swirled fast and flat. The tide was big there, and the river was draining to the sea. “Good living,” Finan murmured, and he was right. I could see the fish traps in the tangled channels, and both the mudbanks and the water were bright with birds; seabirds and shorebirds, swans and waders, godwits and plovers, geese and sanderlings. “Dear God,” Finan said, “but look at those fowl! You’d never go hungry here!”

  “There’s good salmon too,” I said. Dudda, a shipmaster who had once guided us across the Irish Sea, had told me the Ribbel was a marvelous river for salmon. Dudda was a drunkard, but a drunkard who knew this coast, and he had often told me his dream of settling beside the Ribbel’s estuary, and I could see why.

  The settlers were Norsemen now. I doubted they had seen us. We had approached the river slowly, leading our horses, only moving when our scouts gave a signal. Most of my men and all our horses were now in a swale of icy puddles and brittle reeds, hidden from the river lands by a low rise crowned with trees and brush where I had posted a dozen men. I joined them, climbing the shallow slope quietly and slowly, not wanting to explode birds from their nests, and once on the crest I could see far across the estuary, and see rich steadings, too many steadings. As soon as we rode out of the icy swale we would be seen, and the news of armed strangers would spread across the river lands, and Arnborg, wherever he was, would be warned of our coming.

  I was gazing at the closest steading, a substantial hall and barn surrounded by a freshly repaired palisade. The thatch on one of the lower buildings was new, while smoke rose from a hole in the highest roof. A boy and a dog were driving sheep toward the steading’s open gates where one man slouched. The man was far away, but Finan, who had the keenest eyesight of any man I knew, reckoned he wore no mail and carried no weapon.

  “We go there tonight,” I told Finan. “You, me, Berg, and Kettil.”

  I had no need to explain what I planned. Finan nodded. “And the second group?”

  “Eadric can pick a dozen men.”

  Finan looked up at the clouded sky. “There’ll be no moon,” he warned, meaning that we would be shrouded in utter darkness, liable to lose our way and blunder helplessly in the night.

  “Then we go slowly and carefully,” I said. I watched the last sheep disappear into the steading and saw the gates closed. The raw wood where the palisade had been patched suggested that whoever owned the steading had gone to expense and trouble to keep his home safe, yet the man guarding the gate had looked anything but alert. My father had always said that ramparts don’t make you safe, it’s the men guarding the ramparts who keep your women from rape, your children from slavery, and your livestock from slaughter. I guessed that whoever was in the steading wished nothing more than to stay warm. It was a freezing winter afternoon, the sheep were safely home, and sensible folk would want to stay close to their hearth, confident that the wolves were locked out.

  We waited deep into that dark night. It was cold, and we dared not set any fires. We shivered. The only lights were glimmers of firelight showing in a handful of the homesteads. The closest one showed no light except, at first, a faint fire-glow in the hole of the hall’s roof, and even that faded. And still we waited, too cold to sleep. “We’ll be warm soon,” I murmured to the men close to me.

  I had memorized the look of the land. I knew we must walk across rough pasture to find a ditch and then follow the ditch north and west until we came to a straggling hedge that would take us east to the track where we had seen the sheep being herded, and that track would lead us to the closest steading. And we must become sceadugengan, the shadow-walkers, creatures of the night.

  It is no wonder that the gates are closed and the hall doors barred at night, because the darkness is when the sceadugengan walk. They are shape-shifters; goblins, elves, sprites, and dwarves. They might choose to appear as beasts, as wolves or bulls, they come from Midgard to haunt the land, and they are neither alive nor dead, they are horrors from the shadows. And as at last we crossed the pasture, treading carefully in the absolute darkness, I thought of the old poem, the lay of Beowulf, which had been chanted in my father’s hall and was still chanted in the same hall, now mine. “Com on wanre niht. Scriðan sceadugenga; sceotend scoldon,” the harpist declaimed, and we would shudder at the thought of ghouls slithering from the darkness. “Then out of the night slides the shadow-walker; stealthy warrior.” And we were the stealthy warriors.

  I chanted the phrase over and over in my head as we left the woodland and walked toward the ditch. “Scriðan sceadugenga; sceotend scoldon, scriðan
sceadugenga; sceotend scoldon.” Over and over I said it silently, a mindless chant to keep the demons away. The approach to the steading seemed to take much longer than I had anticipated, so that I began to fear we had lost our way, but at last I smelled woodsmoke, and Finan must have seen some faint glow off to our left because he plucked my cloak. “This way,” he whispered.

  We followed the track. No grass beneath our feet now, only frost-hardened mud, sheep droppings, and horse dung, but there was the smallest glimmer of flame-light showing through a shutter of the hall that revealed a chink between the palisade’s logs. No dog barked, no one shouted a challenge as at last we reached the steading. The gate was edged by two high trunks into which iron hinges were secured. We heard nothing except our footfalls, the sigh of a small night wind, the distant howl of a vixen, and an owl calling. “Ready?” I murmured to Berg and Kettil.

  “Ready,” Berg answered.

  I stood with my back to the gate, linked my hands to make a step, and Berg, who was young and strong, put his hands on my shoulder, one foot on my hands, and heaved himself upward. I pushed him as he went. He made a scrabbling noise as he straddled the gate’s top, and I waited for the howl of dogs as Kettil took his place. “I’m over!” Berg called softly. He had jumped down on the gate’s far side, and I heaved Kettil up. He followed Berg over the gate, and I thought the noise they made must wake the dead, especially when the two lifted the great locking bar that scraped in its brackets. Still no barking. The hinges squealed as Berg and Kettil pushed the gate open.

  “Call Eadric,” I said, and Finan gave a short, sharp whistle. Eadric’s men had followed us, and now they spread around the whole steading, their task to make certain no one left by a gate we had not seen or by climbing as Berg and Kettil had done. Eadric himself, with two men, joined us as Berg and Kettil pushed the great gate fully open. “Easy work, lord,” Kettil said.

  “So far.”

  The dogs woke at that moment. There were two of them that began barking somewhere to my left, but they had to be tethered because neither came close. The sheep began bleating, which only made the dogs even noisier. Finan and I had gone to the hall door and I heard movement on the far side, then a woman’s voice shouted at the dogs to stop their noise. I drew Serpent-Breath as Finan slid Soul-Stealer from her long scabbard. I had expected to break the hall door down, but it seemed the folk inside would open it for us because I heard the bar being lifted and a wooden bolt shot.

  The door was pushed open, immediately throwing light into the yard. Inside the hall a servant was feeding the hearth, and flames leaped up, and in that brighter light I saw two men, both bare-headed and neither wearing mail, standing with long spears a couple of paces beyond the door. A woman, swathed in a blanket, stood between them.

  And what did they see?

  They saw a nightmare. They saw warriors with drawn swords, warriors in mail, warriors with decorated helmets and closed cheek-pieces, cloaked warriors, night warriors, shadow-walkers with naked blades. One of the two men raised his spear and I smacked it aside with Serpent-Breath. The man’s move had been tentative, he was too scared to attack with any force, maybe he had hardly meant to threaten me, but had just raised his blade without thinking. He gasped as my heavier blade drove the spear out of his hand. It clattered to the floor as Finan and I stalked into the hall. Eadric and his men followed us closely. “Drop that spear!” I snarled at the second man, and, when he did not obey, Finan just took the weapon from him.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked. She showed more defiance than the two men, who backed away from us. Her gray hair was tied in a knot at the nape of her neck beneath a white woolen cap. She was tall, stoutly built, with a commanding face and indignant eyes. She clutched the heavy blanket around her shoulders and stared at me belligerently. “Who are you?” she demanded again.

  “Your guests,” I said, and walked past her to the hearth where the servant who had been reviving the fire now cowered. “Eadric!”

  “Lord?” Eadric ran to me, grateful for what small warmth the hearth gave.

  “Saxons!” the woman spat at me.

  I ignored her. “Search the steading,” I told Eadric, “then light a fire in the yard and try not to burn down the palisade.”

  The fire’s glow would be a signal to our men still waiting in the swale where the puddles were thick ice. Eadric, an older man and utterly reliable, was probably the best of my scouts. He twisted some dry floor rushes around a piece of wood, stooped to light it, and then carried the makeshift torch into the darkness, followed by two of his men. “Kettil, Berg! Search the hall,” I ordered. There was a high platform in the hall, and beneath it a separate chamber. “Look in there,” I told Berg, pointing to the chamber’s door, then sheathed Serpent-Breath and walked back to the woman. “Your name,” I asked in Danish, a language most of the Norse understood.

  “My name is not for Saxon scum,” she said.

  I looked at the two disarmed men. “Your servants?” She did not answer, but did not need to. She was plainly in command of this household, and the two men looked as frightened of her as they were of me. “I’ll blind both,” I said, “one eyeball at a time, till you tell me your name.”

  She wanted to defy me, but relented when I drew a knife from my belt and one of the servants whimpered. “Fritha,” she said reluctantly.

  “Widow? Wife? What?”

  “I am married to Hallbjorn,” she said proudly, “and he will come soon, come with all his men.”

  “I’m terrified,” I answered. Eadric’s men were carrying firewood from the hall into the yard. There was some small danger of alerting the nearer steadings if we lit a great fire in the open air, but it was a risk I was willing to take. Even if someone saw the flames I doubted they would investigate on this dark, freezing night, and I needed to bring my men and horses out of the cold and into warmth and shelter.

  Berg, grinning happily, pushed two maidservants into the hall. “No one else here, lord,” he said, “and there’s just one door at the back.”

  “Barred?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Keep it barred,” I said, then pointed at the maids. “You two. Find food and ale, bring it. All of it!” One of the girls glanced at Fritha as if seeking her permission and I just growled, took one pace toward her, and she ran.

  Fritha had noticed the hammer amulet that hung over my mail. She saw the same symbol around Berg’s neck, then glanced at Finan, who wore a cross. She was confused, and I saw that she was about to speak when there was a sudden shout from outside the hall, a yelp, then a moment of silence before men laughed. Fritha clutched her hands together.

  Eadric came in from the yard where the fire was now burning. “More women and children in the small hall, lord,” he said, “two slaves in the barn, pair of dogs, a flock of mangy sheep, and just one horse.”

  “Bring all the people in here,” I ordered him. “And what was that noise we just heard?”

  Eadric shrugged. “It was outside, lord.”

  The answer to my question proved to be a boy, no more than eleven or twelve, who was dragged in by a grinning Folcbald, the big Frisian. “The little bugger jumped the palisade, lord,” Folcbald explained, “and was running away.”

  “Don’t hurt him!” Fritha called. “Lord, please!”

  I walked to her, stared her in the eye. “So I’m no longer scum?”

  “Please, lord,” she said.

  “Your son?” I guessed, and she nodded. “Your only son?” She nodded again. “His name,” I demanded.

  “Jogrimmr,” she said the name in a whisper. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Where were you going, Jogrimmr?” I asked the boy, though I still looked into his mother’s eyes.

  “To get help,” the boy answered, and I could hear the defiance in his unbroken voice. I turned to see him glaring at me. Folcbald loomed above him, grinning.

  I looked back to his mother, but still talked to the boy. “And tell me, Jogrimmr, where your f
ather is.”

  “Coming to kill you.”

  “Many have tried, boy. I’ve filled the benches of Valhalla with men who thought I could be killed. Now tell me what I want to know.”

  The boy was stubbornly silent, and it was his mother who answered. “He has gone to join his lord.”

  “Arnborg?” I guessed.

  “Arnborg,” she said.

  “Arnborg is a great lord!” the boy called behind me.

  “Arnborg,” I said, “is a piece of toad shit. And where is he?”

  I still gazed into Fritha’s eyes and saw a flicker of fear there. “I won’t tell you!” Jogrimmr called boldly.

  “Folcbald,” I said, still looking at Fritha, “how do we kill small boys these days?”

  Folcbald must have looked bemused because he said nothing, but Kettil, who was searching the hall’s high platform, was quick-witted. “We killed the last one by nailing his head to a wall, lord.”

  “I remember,” I said, and smiled at Fritha. “Where is Arnborg?”

  “They went east, lord!” she said.

  “The nail went in quickly, am I right, Kettil?”

  “Much too fast, lord,” he called down to me, “he died before he could tell us anything! You said the next time we must drive the nail slowly.”

  “And how did we kill the boy before that?”

  “Oh, that one screamed, lord!” Kettil said happily. “Wasn’t he the one we burned to death?”

  “No,” Folcbald had at last understood what we were saying, “we skinned that little bastard alive. It was the youngster before him we burned. Remember? He was a fat little boy and he sizzled. Smelled like bacon on a hot rock.”

  “Arnborg went east!” Fritha said desperately, “I don’t know where!”

  I believed her. “When?” I asked.

  “A fortnight ago.”

  I heard hoofbeats sounding in the firelit yard and knew the rest of my men had brought the horses safely to the steading that was now ours. The hall began to get crowded as my warriors came into the warmth, and as the men, women, and children we had captured were driven inside. “How many men rode with your husband?” I asked Fritha.