Sword of Kings

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Gunnald?’ Finan suggested.

  ‘I suspect so.’ I said, no longer trying to be quiet. I took the last step and ripped the curtain down. There was a gasp, a scream, and I saw another cage, which held three women who watched me with eyes wide with terror. I put a finger to my lips and they crouched silent, their eyes going to another wooden stairway that led to the top floor. ‘Gunnald!’ I shouted.

  There was no answer.

  ‘Gunnald! I came here to keep a promise!’ I climbed the stairs, deliberately heavy-footed. ‘You hear me, Gunnald?’

  There was still no answer, just a scuffling sound deep in the attic. This last floor was built under the roof. Beams crossed it. There was little light, but as I reached the top I saw the fat man standing at the far end. He had a sword in his hand. He was shaking. I had rarely seen a man so frightened.

  Finan went past me and pushed open the small shutter I had seen from the courtyard, and in the new light I saw heavy timber chests and a sturdy wooden bed heaped with furs. There was a girl half-hidden in the bed, watching us fearfully. ‘Gunnald?’ I asked the man. ‘Gunnald Gunnaldson?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said scarce above a whisper.

  ‘I’d drop the sword,’ I said, ‘unless you want to fight me?’

  He shook his head, but still gripped the weapon.

  ‘My name,’ I said, ‘is Uhtred, son of Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg.’

  The sword fell from a nerveless hand, clattering on the wooden floor. Gunnald followed it, dropping to his knees and holding clasped hands towards me. ‘Lord!’

  There was a second shuttered window in the gable facing the river. I walked past the kneeling man and pushed the shutter open to let more light into the room. ‘I don’t like slave-traders,’ I said mildly as I went back to Gunnald.

  ‘Many don’t, lord,’ he whispered.

  ‘Is she a slave?’ I asked, pointing Serpent-Breath at the girl in the bed.

  ‘Yes, lord,’ Gunnald’s whisper was scarcely audible.

  ‘Not any longer,’ I said. Gunnald said nothing. He was still shaking. I saw a robe or gown on the floor, a threadbare thing of linen. I picked it up with Serpent-Breath’s bloodied tip and tossed it to the girl. ‘Do you remember a slave-trader called Halfdan?’ I asked Gunnald. He hesitated, perhaps surprised at the question. His face was round, his eyes small, and his beard too scanty to cover his thick jowls. His hair was thinning. He wore a mail coat, but too small, so he had ripped the sides upward so the mail would cover his belly. A big belly. ‘We don’t see many fat people,’ I said, ‘isn’t that right, Finan?’

  ‘A few monks,’ Finan said, ‘and a bishop or two.’

  ‘You must eat plenty,’ I told Gunnald, ‘to get a belly like that. Your slaves are all thin.’

  ‘I feed them well, lord,’ he muttered.

  ‘You do?’ I asked with pretended surprise.

  ‘Meat, lord. They eat meat.’

  ‘Are you telling me you treat your slaves with kindness?’ I asked. I crouched in front of him and let Serpent-Breath’s tip rest on the floor by his knees. He stared at the blade. ‘Well?’ I prompted him.

  ‘A contented slave is a healthy slave, lord,’ Gunnald managed to say, his eyes on the blade’s drying blood.

  ‘So you do treat them well?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘So that girl wasn’t forced to your bed?’

  ‘No, lord,’ and again his whisper was almost inaudible.

  I stood. ‘You’ll think I’m a strange man, Gunnald,’ I said, ‘because I don’t like seeing women beaten or raped. You think that’s strange?’ He just looked at me, then lowered his eyes again. ‘Halfdan treated women badly,’ I said. ‘Do you remember Halfdan?’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ he whispered.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘Tell you, lord?’

  ‘Tell me about him!’ I encouraged him.

  He managed to raise his eyes to me again. ‘He had a yard on the other side of the bridge, lord,’ he said. ‘He did business with my father.’

  ‘He died, yes?’

  ‘Halfdan, lord?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He died, lord. He was killed.’

  ‘Killed!’ I sounded surprised. ‘Who killed him?’

  ‘No one knows, lord.’

  I crouched again. ‘It was me, Gunnald,’ I whispered, ‘I killed him.’

  The only answer was a whimper. Footsteps sounded on the stairs and I turned to see Father Oda, Vidarr Leifson and Benedetta come into the attic. Benedetta’s hood shadowed her face. Another whimper made me look back to Gunnald who was shivering, and not from the cold. ‘You, lord?’

  ‘I killed Halfdan,’ I said. ‘He was fat too.’

  That killing had been years before and in a riverside yard not unlike Gunnald’s. Halfdan had thought I had come to buy slaves and had greeted me with an effusive politeness. I still remember his bald head, his waist-long beard, his false smile, and his swollen belly. Finan had been with me that day, and both of us had been thinking of the months we had been enslaved together, chained to a bench of a slaver’s ship, whipped through the ice-cold seas, and kept alive only by the thoughts of revenge. We had seen our fellow oarsmen whipped to death, heard the women sobbing, and seen children dragged screaming to our owner’s house. Halfdan had not been responsible for any of that misery, but he had paid for it all the same. Finan had hamstrung Halfdan and I had slit his throat, and that was the day we freed Mehrasa, a dark-skinned girl who came from the lands beyond the Mediterranean. She had married Father Cuthbert and now lived in Bebbanburg. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

  ‘Halfdan,’ I still crouched close to the shivering Gunnald, ‘liked to rape his slaves. Do you rape your slaves?’

  Gunnald, terrified, retained enough cunning to understand that I had this strange dislike of slavers raping their own property. ‘No, lord,’ he lied.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ I said, standing again, this time taking his abandoned sword with me.

  ‘No, lord!’

  ‘So you treat your slaves well?’

  ‘Yes, lord. I do, lord!’ He sounded frantic now.

  ‘I am glad to hear it,’ I said. I tossed Gunnald’s sword to Finan, then drew Wasp-Sting and held the seax hilt first towards Benedetta. ‘You’ll find this easier,’ I told her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Father Oda began to say something, then looked at my face and thought better of it. ‘One last thing,’ I said, and turned back to the kneeling Gunnald. I stood behind him and dragged the ragged mail coat over his head so that all he wore was a thin woollen robe. When the coat was free of his face and he could see again, he gasped because Benedetta had pushed back her hood. He stammered something, then, as he saw the hatred on her face and the blade in her hand, the stammering turned into a moan. ‘You two know each other, I think,’ I said.

  Gunnald’s mouth still moved, or at least quivered, but no sound came now. Benedetta turned the sword so that the attic’s small light glinted on the steel. ‘No, lord!’ Gunnald managed to say in a panicked voice as he shuffled backwards. I kicked him hard, he went still, then moaned again as his bladder gave way.

  ‘Porco!’ Benedetta spat at him.

  ‘Father Oda,’ I said, ‘come downstairs with us. Vidarr, you stay here.’

  ‘Of course, lord.’

  ‘Don’t interfere. Just make sure it’s a fair fight.’

  ‘A fair fight, lord?’ Vidarr asked, puzzled.

  ‘He’s got a cock, she’s got a sword. Seems fair to me.’ I smiled at Benedetta. ‘There’s no hurry. We won’t leave for a while. Come, Finan! You, girl!’ I looked at the bed. ‘Are you dressed?’ She nodded. ‘Then come!’

  There was a coiled whip made of braided leather hanging on a nail driven into the newel post of the stairs. I took it and saw dried blood crusted in the whip’s tip. I tossed the whip to Vidarr, then went downstairs.

  Leaving Benedetta, Vidarr, and Gunnald in the attic.

  And G
unnald was screaming before I reached the middle floor.

  ‘The church,’ Father Oda said to me when we reached the bottom of the two stairways, ‘does not condone slavery, lord.’

  ‘Yet I’ve known churchmen own slaves.’

  ‘It is not seemly,’ he said, ‘yet the scriptures do not forbid it.’

  ‘What are you telling me, father?’

  He flinched as another scream sounded, this one more terrible than any that had assaulted our ears as we came downstairs. ‘Well done, girl,’ Finan muttered.

  ‘Vengeance must belong to God,’ Father Oda said, ‘and only to God.’

  ‘Your god,’ I said harshly.

  He flinched again. ‘In his epistle to the Romans,’ the priest said, ‘Paul tells us to leave revenge to the Lord.’

  ‘The lord took his time revenging Benedetta,’ I said.

  ‘And the fat bastard deserves it, father,’ Finan put in.

  ‘I don’t doubt it, but by encouraging her,’ he was looking at me now, ‘you have encouraged her to commit a mortal sin.’

  ‘Then you can shrive her,’ I said curtly.

  ‘She is a fragile woman,’ Oda said, ‘and I would not burden her fragility with a sin that separates her from Christ’s grace.’

  ‘She’s stronger than you think,’ I said.

  ‘She is a woman!’ he said sternly. ‘And women are the weaker vessels. I was at fault,’ he paused, plainly disturbed, ‘and I should have stopped her. If the man deserved death then it should have been at your hands, not hers.’

  He was right, of course. I did not doubt that Gunnald deserved death for a multitude of crimes, but what I had just unleashed in the slaver’s attic was cruel. I had condemned him to a long, terrible, and painful death. I could have satisfied justice with a swift killing, as swift as the one I had given Halfdan so many years before, but I had chosen cruelty instead. Why? Because I knew that choice would please Benedetta. Another scream sounded, faded, grew again. ‘It is not seemly,’ Father Oda repeated, ‘that you have put that woman’s mortal soul at risk!’ He spoke fervently and I wondered if the Danish priest was attracted to Benedetta and that thought gave me a pulse of jealousy. She was beautiful, undeniably beautiful, but there was a darkness in that beauty and an anger in her soul. I told myself she was ridding herself of that shadow with Wasp-Sting.

  ‘You pray for her, father,’ I said dismissively, ‘and I’m going to look at the ship that will take us home.’ I led Finan into the early sunlight. Gunnald’s screams had faded and the loudest noise came from the gulls fighting over a carcass stranded on the mud at the far side of the Temes. A small breeze, too small to be of any use to a sailor, rippled the river. Gunnald, while he still lived, owned two wharves, both protected by walls of wooden staves. His ship was on the left-hand wharf, a long, big-bellied ship, made for distant voyages. She looked heavy. Her timbers were dark, almost pitch-black, and weed was thick at her waterline. A sail was furled on the yard, but its ragged cloth was crusted with bird droppings. I walked down the wharf, then stopped. Finan stopped with me, swore, then began to laugh. ‘Taking her to Bebbanburg, are we?’ he asked.

  There was water in the ship’s wide belly. The dark of her timbers was not pitch, but rot. There were a half-dozen oars, good only for firewood, their looms warped and their blades cracked. A gull screamed at me. I stepped down onto a bench that creaked alarmingly and prodded the hull with Serpent-Breath, and her blade’s tip went into the wood as though it were fungus. This ship could not cross the river, let alone take us home to Bebbanburg.

  I had captured a wreck.

  Finan was grinning. ‘It would be quicker to swim to Bebbanburg!’

  ‘We might have to,’ I answered sourly. ‘It’s my fault. I should have sent Oswi to take a look. Not the boy.’

  ‘I think it’s aground,’ Finan said.

  I climbed back to the wharf and gazed across the useless ship at the further berth, which was empty. ‘Benedetta said he had two ships.’

  Finan followed my gaze and shrugged. ‘A second ship isn’t much use if it’s not here,’ he said. I made no answer. ‘Maybe he’s sent some slaves to Frankia?’ Finan suggested. ‘They say prices are higher there.’

  That would explain the empty berth. ‘How many slaves have we got?’

  ‘A dozen women, four children, and three half-starved young men.’

  ‘I expected more.’

  ‘So maybe his second ship will be back in a day or two!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I grunted. I looked beyond the empty wharf and saw there were four guards watching us from the high parapet of the bridge that was a long bowshot away. I waved to them, and after a moment’s hesitation, one waved back. I doubted they had heard the commotion as we captured the yard, and though they could probably hear Gunnald’s desperate shrieks of pain they would surely not think such sounds unusual coming from a slaver’s warehouse.

  ‘So what do we do?’ Finan asked.

  ‘We think,’ I said sharply, but in truth I had no idea what we should do. My father, I thought, had been right. I was impetuous. I had been goaded by the attacks on my ships and, with the excuse of my oath to Æthelstan, I had come south thinking to find Æthelhelm and kill him. Now Spearhafoc was gone and I was trapped in an enemy-held city. ‘We wait for the second ship, I suppose. A pity we can’t ask Gunnald where it is.’

  ‘We can ask his men, they’ll know.’

  Benedetta was coming down the wharf, her hood still pushed back so that the sun glinted on her long dark hair that had come loose. To my eyes she looked like a Valkyrie, one of the messengers of the gods who take slain warriors to the feast hall in Valhalla. She was unsmiling, blood had splashed onto her grey robe, while Wasp-Sting was coated to the hilt with gore. I looked quickly up to the bridge parapet, wondering what the guards would make of a blood-covered blade, but they had all turned their backs. ‘I will wash it for you, lord,’ Benedetta said, showing me the sword.

  ‘Give it to one of the boys to wash,’ I said. ‘Tell Aldwyn to scrub it.’

  ‘And thank you, lord.’

  I looked into her grey-green eyes. ‘Father Oda says I encouraged you to commit a sin.’

  ‘That is what I am thanking you for, lord.’

  ‘Did you make the bastard suffer?’ Finan asked.

  ‘They will have heard his screams in hell,’ she said.

  ‘Then you did well, so you did!’ the Irishman said happily.

  ‘I did what I have dreamed of doing for over twenty years. I am happy.’ She turned to look into the wreckage. ‘Is this the boat?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘That is good,’ she said gravely, making both Finan and me laugh.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ Finan said.

  ‘It’s not,’ I agreed, still laughing.

  Then someone began hammering on the outer gate, and a moment later Aldwyn came running. ‘Lord, lord! There are soldiers outside! Soldiers!’

  ‘God help us,’ Finan said.

  Someone had to.

  The hammering started again. I had run through the warehouse and into the yard where I opened the small hatch in the gate. Two soldiers only, both wearing mail and both looking bored, and with them were two men, evidently servants who were standing by a handcart that was loaded with two barrels. ‘I’m opening the gate!’ I called.

  ‘Take your time!’ one of the mailed men answered sourly.

  Finan and Vidarr were with me. There were also two dead men and two slaughtered dogs sprawled on the stones. I pointed at them, then at the stable, and Finan took one corpse, Vidarr the other, and began dragging them out of sight.

  ‘Hurry!’ a voice called from beyond the gate.

  ‘I’m hurrying!’ I called, and lifted the first locking bar. I dropped it noisily and saw Vidarr was dragging the dogs into the stable. I lifted the other bar, taking my time, waiting till Finan had closed the stable, then I pulled open the gates.

  One of the two men I had supposed were servants took a backwar
d step, evidently surprised by my appearance. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Who are you?’ I responded harshly.

  ‘I am the under-steward from the palace,’ he answered nervously, ‘delivering the supplies, of course. But where’s Ælfrin?’

  ‘Sick,’ I said, suddenly realising that I was wearing my hammer amulet openly. The man who was questioning me saw it too and looked back to my eyes warily.

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘Fever.’

  ‘Most of the lads are sweating like pigs,’ Finan added to my story, ‘and the slaves too. A couple of them are already dead.’

  The man took another backwards step, as did the two soldiers. Both of the mailed men looked strong and confident, but even the most confident warrior who had experienced the hell of shield walls feared the plague. Finan feared it too and, doubtless remembering the rumours of sickness in the north, made the sign of the cross.

  ‘Did Lord Varin send you?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ the under-steward said. ‘We couldn’t send any in the last two weeks because the pretty boy’s men were in charge, but things are normal again now.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, hurry,’ one of the soldiers growled.

  ‘So Gunnald hired you?’ the under-steward asked me.

  I gestured towards the warehouse. ‘Go and ask him.’

  ‘He’s sweating too,’ Finan said, ‘God preserve him.’

  ‘Four shillings,’ the man said, evidently tired of the conversation. He beckoned at the handcart. ‘Just pay and take the barrels.’

  ‘I thought it was just two?’ Finan had the wit to bargain. ‘Gunnald said two shillings.’

  One of the soldiers stepped towards us. ‘Four shillings,’ he snarled. ‘They hired the two of us to keep your damned food safe, so the price has gone up. Four shillings.’

  I felt into my rapidly diminishing pouch, gave the under-steward four shillings, and helped Finan and Vidarr carry the two barrels into the yard. They stank.