Chapter the Twenty-Second: The Warrior’s Bargain
THEY ranged about on the empty beach, exposed and vulnerable. Other than the bodies nothing remained. Yrling always made certain that any gear they had camped with was packed away before the raiding party went out, so that on their return they could the more swiftly load the booty they had taken onto the ships, and be off. There was nothing to salvage. The fire-pit with its cold ashes looked an empty eye.
They stood bereft, taking it in. The ships had been home to them. Every scrap of comfort they had known was now lost. Blankets, mantles, spare clothing, extra weapons, and the little food they had carried over from the last raid, the supply of henbane seeds they used to quell the pain of wounds; all was out of their reach. Their very means of travel was gone.
Each man cast his thoughts to what he had lost in this outrage. Some, like Asberg from Yellow-sail, had lost their ship twice, and now for good. A few stood looking down at their persons, as if gauging what was left to them. Sidroc, staring out at the blankness of the sea, found himself recalling loss of the beautiful blazed-faced chestnut mare. Yrling’s final sacrifice to pay the last sum of silver due on his ship was giving her up.
“My harp,” Toki muttered.
“And your comb,” Une added, for it would have been in Toki’s pack, gone with all their goods.
“Bue served you well,” Une ended. There was no triumph in his voice, only the grim recounting of a simple fact.
Toki gave a short laugh at this. “No worse than I would have served him,” he admitted.
They must move on, find food. Yrling did not want to stay to gather brushwood to fire the bodies of the dead, yet they did so, hauling the four bodies side by side, striking sparks from iron and flint. These had died in his service and in that of Odin, to whom he had given himself. He must send their bodies to All-Father’s hall in Asgard to keep faith with that bond.
They set off, the Sun now high overhead, the smell of burning spreading like reaching fingers after them. They would skirt the sea. The forest was deep, and their one foray down a track through it led only to desolation.
Food was their pressing need. Three of their good bowmen had bows and arrows with them, but finding deer in mid-Summer would not be easy; the stags would be upland, the does still hiding their young. They knew boar ran here, but had no hounds to search them out with. All had seen wild ducks and geese, but it would take a score to feed the fifty of them. They had spotted no berries, and the apples they found were still tiny and sour. At least fresh water was never far away; the land was scored with flowing streams. But water alone could not keep them moving. A river could offer fish, captured in a weir of woven roots. It all took time, which they did not have. Yrling knew their best bet was to stay on the move until they came across a likely strike.
They spent the day following the coast, and slept that night as they could upon the sand, their bellies grumbling. They set out again just after first light, finding the forest to their left running down to shrubs and then to marsh. The water was brackish but they drank it. They moved slightly inland to firmer footing, and picked up the smallest of tracks where it led from the forest. The track grew to a path, and widened until the scars of wheel ruts marked it. They were cautious now, lest any be taking the same route, and kept themselves within the line of shrubby growth. The Sun was at its highest point when they heard the sound of a man, singing.
They froze behind the leaves which hid them. The path twisted and turned, losing itself to sight between the tall growth of waving reeds on one side, and osiers on the other. Then they saw him, a single figure seated astride a dark brown ass. He was gowned, almost as a woman would be dressed, and singing a song both unmelodious and unintelligible to their ears. The man was the poorest of riders; his elbows up almost about his shoulders, his knees splayed out so that he did no more than perch upon the top of his wood and leathern saddle. The ass, for its part, kept turning its long and furry ears as if in protest to the man’s song, but other than that went on smartly enough.
All knew to make no move until Yrling signalled, and he did not. They let beast and rider pass unmolested, themselves unseen.
When he was out of sight they stepped out upon the packed ground he had passed them on.
“He came from someplace,” Yrling noted. “We will see from where.”
They moved forward, on the path itself and almost at a trot. Their spears were in their hands, but their shields still slung upon their backs. The marshes on one side of them continued to firm, the water becoming a true channel. The setting gave Yrling hope. Rounding another bend in the path they saw from whence the rider had issued.
A settlement lay ahead. The palisade surrounding it was no more than a stockade fence, meant to keep wandering livestock out, and the gates to that fence were wide open, almost as if in welcome. Outside the stockade were pastures on which sheep grazed, and milk cows lay in the slanting sunlight. To one side were fields, furrowed in rows of grain and vegetables, where men, some dressed in long gowns, and some in the way of ordinary folk, worked, bending over their hoes and mattocks.
Even better, the top of one building within was crowned with an iron frame work, one rod of iron upright, the second crossing it through. The sign of the Christians. Here was all they could ask for, Yrling knew.
“The Gods have led us,” he said. “This is one of their temples, with holy men. This place is called Beardan. There will be treasure within.”
This would be easier than they had dreamt possible. They could sweep in the open gates unopposed. Their hunger coupled with their excitement made them feel giddy, their empty bellies tightening even further. Almost to a man their shields were swung around and taken up in their left hands. Gizur and the other archers were ready, their quivers within easy reach of their fingertips, their bowstrings taut.
They quickened their pace but kept their silence, knowing soon some of the field workers would see them and call out alarm. In fact so intent were the men on their hoeing that they were less than fifty paces away before one straightened up and gave cry. The raiders ignored them. Spears ready, they had formed up in lines of four and five, few enough across to be admitted through the gates in a single rank. The file behind those first four ran ten or twelve deep, a river of rushing men. Yrling stepped through first, flanked by Une, Jari and Sidroc; with Asberg, Bjarne, Toki, Gizur, and all the rest just behind.
The work yard had more of the gowned men within, men wearing the long plain brown garb the ass-rider wore. These were the holy men, monks they were called. There were also men in ordinary leggings and tunics which all Saxons wore, serving men perhaps. These were at work with the monks, sawing boards by the side of the stockade, wheeling hand wains piled with fire wood, and stepping with astonished faces from the smaller outbuildings.
The raiders streamed in, their mouths now opening in fully-voiced war cries, their fists brandishing their uplifted spears as they came. The look of confused terror on all who they met gave a reckless glee to those who stormed in. There were no guards to oppose them, and those living here bore no weapons. Even the serving men who wore knives were slow to draw them, and the gowned monks were completely unarmed, nothing hanging at their waists save for long cords of hempen rope ending in a small cross of two wooden sticks.
Some of the men within ran out of sight, behind sheds or storehouses. These made their way along the stockade and out the gates when the raiders were all in, joining those who had been working in the fields before they fled.
In the centre of the enclosure, at the very heart of it, stood a squat gable-peaked building the like of which none of the Danes had ever seen. It was made of cut stone blocks, closely fitted together. Its roof was neither mossy wooden boards nor bristling thatch, but sheathed over with dully gleaming lead sheets, the costliest roof any building could bear. It was all proof against fire, in its stone walls and lead roof, and proof too of the value of what must lie within. The other buildings w
ere timber and wattle and daub, as would be found in any keep or farmstead, but this stone building, marked with the iron framework of two crossed rods on its roof, surely marked the treasure-place.
The door of this building now opened from within, and they watched gowned men run to it, and into the dim interior. Those in the first rank of the raiders saw the monks as they scurried to take final position before a high table built of stone slabs, a table upon which lay a wealth of gleaming silver. This silver sat on a linen cloth of purest white, trailing over the slab ends of the stone, its own smooth brightness heightening the pale glow of the treasure upon it.
A man, older than the others, gowned and with the top of his head shaved clean, stood before the high table, arms outspread as if he could by force of will deter those running at it. An arrow from the bow of Gizur dropped him before any outstretched spear could touch him. A younger monk, shrieking, swept past the fallen elder, and crying out words that none who knew the tongue of Angle-land could follow, grasped at the tallest piece of silver on the table, holding it before him.
It was that Cross of the Christians, their sacred sign. He held the heavy thing before his chest, thrusting it forward at Yrling as if it were a protective shield. He did not remain long on his feet. The men who had crowded in were now everywhere.
Sidroc, off to one end of the stone table, stopped another monk who had snatched something from its surface, and now clasped it to his breast. Sidroc held his spear before him, his round of alder wood shielding his body. The man he stopped had nothing save what he cradled to his heart. The monk was young, a few years at most older than he, slight and bony. He was not, like many of the others, crying out gibbering pleas, but it was clear he thought he was looking his last on a human face. The face the monk saw was that of a lean young Dane of great height, one with a cheek badly scarred, who wore his dark brown hair in two long plaits.
“Give it,” Sidroc found himself telling him, in the tongue of the Saxons. He could not kill this one, unarmed and unresisting as he was.
The man blinked at him. Spear still pointing at the monk, Sidroc let go his shield, dropping it to his knees. He reached out his hand, summoning the man to surrender what he cradled.
The man was quaking, his body trembling like a leaf in a bitter wind. Around them the cries and shrieks were abating; monks lay on the floor where they had fallen, pierced by spear points or arrowheads.
He did not let go, did not obey Sidroc’s order. It took a mere snatch of Sidroc’s free hand to wrench the thing away, pushing the monk back the few steps to the stone wall as he did so.
“What?” asked Toki, suddenly at Sidroc’s side. His yellow hair had fallen all about his shoulders, and his teeth were flashing as he grinned at his cousin.
Sidroc showed what he had won, the most curious piece of silver he had ever beheld. It was formed in the shape of a human hand, fingers and all, and was of the same size of a human hand. It ended at the wrist joint, which was set round with a rim of white pearls and gemstones of blue, as if a cuff on a richly decorated sleeve.
“A vessel of some kind,” Sidroc said. It was weighty due to the silver, but he could feel as well it was hollow within.
The monk he had taken it from was still flattened against the wall, eyes large, staring at them.
Toki jerked his shield towards him in question.
“I cannot kill a man who will not fight,” Sidroc told him.
Toki made answer with both spear and voice.
“I can,” he said, plunging his spear into the monk’s chest.
The oath Sidroc uttered was spoken with stark vehemence. The monk was his capture. It was almost as if Toki had tried to claim the silver hand. He found himself baring his teeth at his cousin, turning away from both him and the dying monk, now crumpled at the base of the wall.
He shoved the silver hand under his belt, retrieved his shield. He faced back into the body of the temple. His eyes rose from the stone floor and the monks lying there to the dark crooks of the timber roof joists. He glimpsed, from the tail of his eye, Toki move away as well.
Sidroc had seen much of needless slaughter in these last weeks. To practise that here, amongst men protecting objects of magical intent to their Gods, men who could not be provoked to fight back, seemed foolish and possibly worse. Tyr, the God of Justice, was his God, his fulltrúi, and he could not believe that Tyr would approve of such butchery.
He shook his head; it was all he could do. His uncle was kneeling at the side of the oldest monk, sprawled at the foot of the stone table. This one bore a cross not of wood, but of silver, and Yrling was cutting it from the cord that had tied it to the man’s waist.
Jari and Une were at the table, gathering up what had sat there. Besides the tall silver cross, retrieved from the floor, there were two candle holders, also of silver, and each holding tapers of beeswax. There was a small chest of some kind, also chased in silver, and a choice goblet, silver with a flaring foot of gold.
His uncle was standing now, looking on this. Sidroc went to him and added the silver hand to the pile. His uncle greeted it with a grunt and a nod. He lifted it, gave it a shake, and heard the faint rattle from within. He saw the seam line about the pearl and gemstone cuff, pulled at it. Out dropped tiny splinters of dried and brown bone. They stared at them, poor fragments of a once real hand, encased in splendour, and now lying on the veined stone floor. If it was some kind of magic, they would let the fragments lie. But Yrling once again gave Sidroc a nod before he refitted the end; of all that was taken this hand was of special note.
The linen cloth draped upon the stone table was splashed on one end with blood, looking like berries in the snow. It still served well to wrap all these up. It was a heavy armful Yrling walked out with.
The action within the stone treasure house was over almost before it began. Only the men in the foremost ranks were needed, freeing the others to range about the little settlement. The first flush of conquest had ended, and richly, and now the gnawing hunger felt by all reasserted itself.
The kitchen yard was off to the right, set off by goose pens and fowl houses. Not a few of the men were there now, clustering by the cook fire and by the work tables near to the domed ovens.
The first thing they fell upon was fish, rows and rows of it, freshly roasted and impaled on green skewers. The kitchen yard was lately abandoned by the cooks; meal time must have been near for these monks. Some of the long skewers hung still above the fire, while many others had been set to cool on an iron rack propped up by stones. They were the young of some fatty fish, bream perhaps, the curling scales shining with heat, the flesh firm, moist, and of delicious savour. There was bread too, and in abundance, enough for each man to have his own loaf; bread must form a large part of what these holy men supped on. This was eaten with a relish even greater than the fish, the crusted loves broken open, dipped into crocks of soft sweet butter lifted from the cooling depths of the sunken store house. Cheeses were there as well, tangy and flavoured with green herbs. They stood there about the cooking rings and the work tables, tired, filthy, lifting this all to their mouths, the filling of their shrunken bellies making them almost forget the mound of silver treasure they had just won.
The well held sweet water; if there was a brew-house they did not find it. Nor was there any meat they could uncover, no smokehouse with deer haunch or hanging hams. Late peas and early beans might be found in the vegetable gardens; time for such foraging they had none. But they filled baskets with eggs, both hens and geese; and wrung the necks of as many fowl as they could. They took as much cooking kit as they could carry, not the largest iron cauldron, but several smaller ones, and toasting forks and spoons.
Then mindful of the need for haste, they scoured the rest of the buildings. They must take everything upon their own backs, but packs of leathern and oiled linen were found piled in the storerooms. One house of timber which seemed an ordinary hall showed itself a honey comb of tiny rooms, each holding a
single cot and stool.
“Sif!” called Une to Toki, who had entered one such room together. Toki was about to swear back at him, when a grinning Une tossed him a well-made comb of wood, found on a low stool. Every monk had a comb, and each had also small shears, ear scoops, bone-handled razors and oil, and a linen towel. They had need for all of it. They plucked shoes from under cots or from the feet of the dead. They stuffed away rolled blankets, filled as many packs as they could with oats, barley, and rye; found a sack of hazelnuts and another of dark dried cherries.
In one building, set round with tables, lay a locked chest. A strike with Une’s war-axe revealed what it held. Four nearly square objects lay within, boxes they looked, decorated with silver lids holding clear crystals, carnelians of ruby hue, and blue stones of a richness like lapis. They were wondrous to behold, as was the thought of what might be hidden within. Pulling them out Yrling saw they were not boxes. The silver lids were hinged, but within were leaf after leaf of animal skin, thinned and smoothed to a creamy shade, and covered all over with scrawling designs in black, red, and blue. They had their own interest, but the whole was heavy, and they set to work ripping the silver and gemmed boards from top and bottom.
Another chest revealed more finely woven linens, these stitched with coloured thread work, and also narrow strips of the same, as highly decorated as the trim on any great lady’s sleeves and hem. All these were rolled and stuffed into leathern packs. To his great delight Toki found a harp, one slightly smaller than his own but far more richly decorated, the light wood stained yellow, the body of it bearing drawings in black of coiling beasts. Even the pins holding the strings were worthy, carved from pale walrus ivory made to look like the heads of cats. Something of this value he must offer to his uncle, and did so, holding it out to Yrling. His uncle, busy packing away booty, only laughed, telling him he expected a Saga-tale made of his exploits in return.
Sidroc the Dane Page 33