The Warrior Chronicles

by Bernard Cornwell

  The slave mark almost had no time to heal, for we all came near death that first night. The wind suddenly blew hard, turning the river into a welter of small, hurrying whitecaps, and Trader jerked at her anchor line, and the wind rose and the rain was being driven horizontally. The ship was bucking and shuddering, the tide was ebbing so that wind and current were trying to drive us ashore, and the anchor, that was probably nothing more than a big stone ring that held the ship by weight alone, began to drag. ‘Oars!’ Sverri shouted and I thought he wanted us to row against the pressure of wind and tide, but instead he slashed through the quivering hide rope that tied us to the anchor and Trader leaped away. ‘Row, you bastards!’ Sverri shouted, ‘row!’

  ‘Row!’ Hakka echoed and slashed at us with his whip. ‘Row!’

  ‘You want to live?’ Sverri bellowed over the wind, ‘row!’

  He took us to sea. If we had stayed in the river we would have been driven ashore, but we would have been safe because the tide was dropping and the next high tide would have floated us off, but Sverri had a hold full of cargo and he feared that if he were stranded he would be pillaged by the sullen folk who lived in Gyruum’s hovels. He reckoned it was better to risk death at sea than to be murdered ashore, and so he took us into a grey chaos of wind, darkness and water. He wanted to turn north at the river mouth and take shelter by the coast and that was not such a bad idea, for we might have lain in the lee of the land and ridden out the storm, but he had not reckoned with the force of the tide and, row as we might, and despite the lashes put onto our shoulders, we could not haul the boat back. Instead we were swept to sea and within moments we had to stop rowing, plug the oar-holes and start bailing the boat. All night we scooped water from the bilge and chucked it overboard and I remember the weariness of it, the bone-aching tiredness, and the fear of those vast unseen seas as they lifted us and roared beneath us. Sometimes we turned broadside onto the waves and I thought we must capsize and I remember clinging to a bench as the oars clattered across the hull and water churned about my thighs, but somehow Trader staggered upwards and we hurled water over the side, and why she did not sink I will never know.

  Dawn found us half waterlogged in an angry, but no longer vicious sea. No land was in sight. My ankles were bloody for the manacles had bitten into the skin during the night, but I was still bailing. No one else moved. The other slaves, I had not even learned their names yet, were slumped on the benches and the crew was huddled under the steering platform where Sverri was clinging to the steering oar and I felt his dark eyes watching me as I scooped up buckets of water and poured them back to the ocean. I wanted to stop. I was bleeding, bruised and exhausted, but I would not show weakness. I hurled bucket after bucket, and my arms were aching and my belly was sour and my eyes stung from the salt and I was miserable, but I would not stop. There was vomit slopping in the bilge, but it was not mine.

  Sverri stopped me in the end. He came down the boat and struck me across the shoulders with a short whip and I collapsed onto a bench, and a moment later two of his men brought us stale bread soaked in seawater and a skin of sour ale. No one spoke. The wind slapped the leather halliards against the short mast and the waves hissed down the hull and the wind was bitter and rain pitted the sea. I clutched the hammer amulet. They had left me that, for it was a poor thing of carved oxbone and had no value. I prayed to all the gods. I prayed to Njord to let me live in his angry sea, and I prayed to the other gods for revenge. I thought Sverri and his men must sleep and when they slept I would kill them, but I fell asleep before they did and we all slept as the wind lost its fury, and some time later we slaves were kicked awake and we hauled the sail up the mast and ran before the rain towards the grey-edged east.

  Four of the rowers were Saxons, three were Norsemen, three were Danes and the last man was Irish. He was on the bench across from me and I did not know he was Irish at first for he rarely spoke. He was wiry, dark-skinned, black-haired and, though only a year or so older than me, he bore the battle scars of an old warrior. I noted how Sverri’s men watched him, fearing he was trouble and when, later that day, the wind went southerly and we were ordered to row, the Irishman pulled his oar with an angry expression. That was when I asked him his name and Hakka came storming down the boat and struck me across the face with a leather knout. Blood ran from my nostrils. Hakka laughed, then became angry because I showed no sign of pain and so hit me again. ‘You do not speak,’ he told me, ‘you are nothing. What are you?’ I did not answer, so he hit me again, harder. ‘What are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ I grunted.

  ‘You spoke!’ he snarled, and hit me again. ‘You mustn’t speak!’ he screamed into my face and slashed me around the scalp with his knout. He laughed, having tricked me into breaking the rules, and went back to the prow. So we rowed in silence, and we slept through the dark, though before we slept they chained our manacles together. They always did that and one man always had an arrow on a bow in case any of us tried to fight as the man threading the chain bent in front of us.

  Sverri knew how to run a slave ship. In those first days I looked for a chance to fight and had none. The manacles never came off. When we made port we were ordered into the space beneath the steering platform and it would be closed up by planks that were nailed into place. We could talk there and that is how I learned something of the other slaves. The four Saxons had all been sold into slavery by Kjartan. They had been farmers and they cursed the Christian god for their predicament. The Norsemen and Danes were thieves, condemned to slavery by their own people, and all of them were sullen brutes. I learned little of Finan, the Irishman, for he was tight-lipped, silent and watchful. He was the smallest of us, but strong, with a sharp face behind his black beard. Like the Saxons he was a Christian, or at least he had the splintered remnants of a wooden cross hanging on a leather thong, and sometimes he would kiss the wood and hold it to his lips as he silently prayed. He might not have spoken much, but he listened intently as the other slaves spoke of women, food and the lives they had left behind, and I daresay they lied about all three. I kept quiet, just as Finan kept quiet, though sometimes, if the others were sleeping, he would sing a sad song in his own language.

  We would be let out of the dark prison to load cargo that went into the deep hold in the centre of the ship just aft of the mast. The crew sometimes got drunk in port, but two of them were always sober and those two guarded us. Sometimes, if we anchored offshore, Sverri would let us stay on deck, but he chained our manacles together so none of us could attempt an escape.

  My first voyage on Trader was from the storm-racked coast of Northumbria to Frisia where we threaded a strange seascape of low islands, sandbanks, running tides and glistening mudflats. We called at some miserable harbour where four other ships were loading cargoes and all four ships were crewed by slaves. We filled Trader’s hold with eelskins, smoked fish and otter-pelts.

  From Frisia we ran south to a port in Frankia. I learned it was Frankia because Sverri went ashore and came back in a black mood. ‘If a Frank is your friend,’ he snarled to his crew, ‘you can be sure he’s not your neighbour.’ He saw me looking at him and lashed out with his hand, cutting my forehead with a silver and amber ring he wore. ‘Bastard Franks,’ he said, ‘bastard Franks! Tight-moneyed misbegotten bastard Franks.’ That evening he cast the runesticks on the steering platform. Like all sailors, Sverri was a superstitious man and he kept a sheaf of black runesticks in a leather bag and, locked away beneath the platform, I heard the thin sticks clatter on the deck above. He must have peered at the pattern the fallen sticks made and found some hope in their array, for he decided we would stay with the tight-moneyed misbegotten bastard Franks, and at the end of three days he had bargained successfully for we loaded a cargo of sword-blades, spear-heads, scythes, mail coats, yew logs and fleeces. We took that north, far north, into the lands of the Danes and the Svear where he sold the cargo. Frankish blades were much prized, while the yew logs would be cut into plough-blades,
and with the money he earned Sverri filled the boat with iron-ore that we carried back south again.

  Sverri was good at managing slaves and very good at making money. The coins fairly flowed into the ship, all of them stored in a vast wooden box kept in the cargo hold. ‘You’d like to get your hands on that, wouldn’t you?’ he sneered at us one day as we sailed up some nameless coast. ‘You sea-turds!’ The thought of us robbing him had made him voluble. ‘You think you can cheat me? I’ll kill you first. I’ll drown you. I’ll push seal shit down your throats till you choke.’ We said nothing as he raved.

  Winter was coming by then. I did not know where we were, except we were in the north and somewhere in the sea that lies about Denmark. After delivering our last cargo we rowed the unladen ship beside a desolate sandy shore until Sverri finally steered us up a tidal creek edged with reeds and there he ran Trader ashore on a muddy bank. It was high tide and the ship was stranded at the beginning of the ebb. There was no village at the creek, just a long low house thatched with moss-covered reeds. Smoke drifted from the roof hole. Gulls called. A woman emerged from the house and, as soon as Sverri jumped down from the ship, she ran to him with cries of joy and he took her in his arms and swept her about in a circle. Then three children came running and he gave each a handful of silver and tickled them and threw them in the air and hugged them.

  This was evidently where Sverri planned to winter Trader and he made us empty her of her stone ballast, strip her sail, mast and rigging, and then haul her on log rollers so she stood clear of the highest tides. She was a heavy boat and Sverri called on a neighbour from across the marsh to help haul her with a pair of oxen. His eldest child, a son aged about ten, delighted in pricking us with the ox goad. There was a slave hut behind the house. It was made of heavy logs, even the roof was of logs, and we slept there in our manacles. By day we worked, cleaning Trader’s hull, scraping away the filth and weeds and barnacles. We cleaned the muck from her bilge, spread the sail to be washed by rain, and watched hungrily as Sverri’s woman repaired the cloth with a bone needle and catgut. She was a stocky woman with short legs, heavy thighs and a round face pockmarked by some disease. Her hands and arms were red and raw. She was anything but beautiful, but we were starved of women and gazed at her. That amused Sverri. He hauled down her dress once to show us a plump white breast and then laughed at our wide-eyed stares. I dreamed of Gisela. I tried to summon her face to my dreams, but it would not come, and dreaming of her was no consolation.

  Sverri’s men fed us gruel and eel soup and rough bread and fish stew, and when the snow came they threw us mud-clotted fleeces and we huddled in the slave hut and listened to the wind and watched the snow through the chinks between the logs. It was cold, so cold, and one of the Saxons died. He had been feverish and after five days he just died and two of Sverri’s men carried his body to the creek and threw him beyond the ice so that his body floated away on the next tide. There were woods not far away and every few days we would be taken to the trees, given axes and told to make firewood. The manacles were deliberately made too short so that a man could not take a full stride, and when we had axes they guarded us with bows and with spears, and I knew I would die before I could reach one of the guards with the axe, but I was tempted to try. One of the Danes tried before I did, turning and screaming, running clumsily, and an arrow took him in the belly and he doubled over and Sverri’s men killed him slowly. He screamed for every long moment. His blood stained the snow for yards around and he died so very slowly as a lesson to the rest of us, and so I just chopped at trees, trimmed the trunks, split the trunks with a maul and wedges, chopped again and went back to the slave hut.

  ‘If the little bastard children would just come close,’ Finan said next day, ‘I’d strangle the filthy wee creatures, so I would.’

  I was astonished for it was the longest statement I had ever heard him make. ‘Better to take them hostage,’ I suggested.

  ‘But they know better than to come close,’ he said, ignoring my suggestion. He spoke Danish in a strange accent. ‘You were a warrior,’ he said.

  ‘I am a warrior,’ I said. The two of us were sitting outside the hut on a patch of grass where the snow had melted and we were gutting herrings with blunt knives. The gulls screamed about us. One of Sverri’s men watched us from outside the long-house. He had a bow across his knees and a sword at his side. I wondered how Finan had guessed I was a warrior, for I had never talked of my life. Nor had I revealed my true name, preferring them to think that I was called Osbert. Osbert had once been my real name, the name I was given at birth, but I had been renamed Uhtred when my elder brother died because my father insisted his eldest son must be called Uhtred. But I did not use the name Uhtred on board Trader. Uhtred was a proud name, a warrior’s name, and I would keep it a secret until I had escaped slavery. ‘How did you know I’m a warrior?’ I asked Finan.

  ‘Because you never stop watching the bastards,’ he said. ‘You never stop thinking about how to kill them.’

  ‘You’re the same,’ I said.

  ‘Finan the Agile, they called me,’ he said, ‘because I would dance around enemies. I would dance and kill. Dance and kill.’ He slit another fish’s belly and flicked the offal into the snow where two gulls fought for it. ‘There was a time,’ he went on angrily, ‘when I owned five spears, six horses, two swords, a coat of bright mail, a shield and a helmet that shone like fire. I had a woman with hair that fell to her waist and with a smile that could dim the noonday sun. Now I gut herrings.’ He slashed with the knife. ‘And one day I shall come back here and I shall kill Sverri, hump his woman, strangle his bastard children and steal his money.’ He gave a harsh chuckle. ‘He keeps it all here. All that money. Buried it is.’

  ‘You know that for sure?’

  ‘What else does he do with it? He can’t eat it because he doesn’t shit silver, does he? No, it’s here.’

  ‘Wherever here is,’ I said.

  ‘Jutland,’ he said. ‘The woman’s a Dane. We come here every winter.’

  ‘How many winters?’

  ‘This is my third,’ Finan said.

  ‘How did he capture you?’

  He flipped another cleaned fish into the rush basket. ‘There was a fight. Us against the Norsemen and the bastards beat us. I was taken prisoner and the bastards sold me to Sverri. And you?’

  ‘Betrayed by my lord.’

  ‘So that’s another bastard to kill, eh? My lord betrayed me too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He wouldn’t ransom me. He wanted my woman, see? So he let me go, in return for which favour I pray he may die and that his wives get lockjaw and that his cattle get the staggers and that his children rot in their own shit and that his crops wither and his hounds choke.’ He shuddered as if his anger was too much to contain.

  Sleet came instead of snow and the ice slowly melted in the creek. We made new oars from seasoned spruce cut the previous winter, and by the time the oars had been shaped the ice was gone. Grey fogs cloaked the land and the first flowers showed at the edges of the reeds. Herons stalked the shallows as the sun melted the morning frosts. Spring was coming and so we caulked Trader with cattle hair, tar and moss. We cleaned her and launched her, returned the ballast to her bilge, rigged the mast and bent the cleaned and mended sail onto her yard. Sverri embraced his woman, kissed his children and waded out to us. Two of his crew hauled him aboard and we gripped the oars.

  ‘Row, you bastards!’ he shouted, ‘row!’

  We rowed.

  Anger can keep you alive, but only just. There were times when I was sick, when I felt too weak to pull the oar, but pull it I did for if I faltered then I would be tossed overboard. I pulled as I vomited, pulled as I sweated, pulled as I shivered, and pulled as I hurt in every muscle. I pulled through rain and sun and wind and sleet. I remember having a fever and thinking I was going to die. I even wanted to die, but Finan cursed me under his breath. ‘You’re a feeble Saxon,’ he goaded me, ‘you’re weak. You’re
pathetic, you Saxon scum.’ I grunted some response, and he snarled at me again, louder this time so that Hakka heard from the bows. ‘They want you to die, you bastard,’ Finan said, ‘so prove them wrong. Pull, you feeble Saxon bastard, pull.’ Hakka hit him for speaking. Another time I did the same for Finan. I remember cradling him in my arms and putting gruel into his mouth with my fingers. ‘Live, you bastard,’ I told him, ‘don’t let these earslings beat us. Live!’ He lived.

  We went north that next summer, pulling into a river that twisted through a landscape of moss and birch, a place so far north that rills of snow still showed in shadowed places. We bought reindeer hides from a village among the birches and carried them back to the sea, and exchanged them for walrus tusks and whalebone, which in turn we traded for amber and eider feathers. We carried malt and sealskin, furs and salt meat, iron-ore and fleeces. In one rock-circled cove we spent two days loading slates that would be turned into whetstones, and Sverri traded the slates for combs made from deer antlers and for big coils of sealskin rope and a dozen heavy ingots of bronze, and we took all those back to Jutland, going into Haithabu which was a big trading port, so big that there was a slave compound and we were taken there and released inside where we were guarded by spearmen and high walls.