Lords of the North

by Bernard Cornwell

  “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 favor 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. Gray 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.

  Finan found some fellow Irishmen in the compound and I discovered a Saxon who had been captured by a Dane from the coast of East Anglia. King Guthrum, the Saxon said, had returned to East Anglia where he called himself Æthelstan and was building churches. Alfred, so far as he knew, was still alive. The East Anglian Danes had not tried to attack Wessex, but even so he had heard that Alfred was making forts about his frontier. He knew nothing about Alfred’s Danish hostages, so could not tell me whether Ragnar had been released, nor had the man heard any news of Guthred or Northumbria, so I stood in the compound’s center and shouted a question. “Is anyone here from Northumbria?” Men stared at me dully. “Northumbria?” I shouted again, and this time a woman called from the far side of the palisade which divided the men’s compound from the women’s. Men were crowded at the palisade, peering through its chinks at the women, but I pushed two aside. “You’re from Northumbria?” I asked the woman who had called to me.

  “From Onhripum,” she told me. She was a Saxon, fifteen years old and a tanner’s daughter. Her father had owed money to Earl Ivarr and, to settle the debt, Ivarr had taken the girl and sold her to Kjartan.

  At first I thought I must have misheard. “To Kjartan?” I asked her.

  “To Kjartan,” she said dully, “who raped me, then sold me to these bastards.”

  “Kjartan’s alive?” I asked, astonished.

  “He lives,” she said.

  “But he was being besieged,” I protested.

  “Not while I was there,” she said.

  “And Sven? His son?”

  “He raped me too,” she said.

  Later, much later, I pieced the whole tale together. Guthred and Ivarr, joined by my uncle Ælfric, had tried to starve Kjartan into submission, but the winter was hard, their armies had been struck by disease, and Kjartan had offered to pay tribute to all three and they had accepted his silver. Guthred had also extracted a promise that Kjartan would stop attacking churchmen, and for a time that promise was kept, but the church was too wealthy and Kjartan too greedy, and within a year the promise had been broken and some monks were killed or enslaved. The annual tribute of silver that Kjartan was supposed to give to Guthred, Ælfric, and Ivarr had been paid once, and never paid again. So nothing had changed. Kjartan had been humbled for a few months, then he had judged the strength of his enemies and found it feeble. The tanner’s daughter from Onhripum knew nothing of Gisela, had never even heard of her, and I thought perhaps she had died and that night I knew despair. I wept. I remembered Hild and I wondered what had happened to her, and I feared for her, and I remembered that one night with Gisela when I had kissed her beneath the beech trees and I thought of all my dreams that were now hopeless and so I wept.

  I had married a wife in Wessex and I knew nothing of her and, if the truth were known, I cared nothing. I had lost my baby son to death. I had lost Iseult to death. I had lost Hild, I had lost all chance of Gisela, and that night I felt a swamping pity for myself and I sat in the hut and tears rolled down my cheeks and Finan saw me and he began weeping too and I knew he had been reminded of home. I tried to rekindle my anger because it is only anger that will keep you alive, but the anger would not come. I just wept instead. I could not stop. It was the darkness of despair, of the knowledge that my fate was to pull an oar until I was broken and then I would go overboard. I wept.

  “You and me,” Finan said, and paused. It was dark. It was a cold night, though it was summer.

  “You and me?” I asked, my eyes closed in an attempt to stop the tears.

  “Swords in hand, my friend,” he said, “you and me. It wi
ll happen.” He meant we would be free and we would have our revenge.

  “Dreams,” I said.

  “No!” Finan said angrily. He crawled to my side and took my hand in both his. “Don’t give up,” he snarled at me. “We’re warriors, you and I, we’re warriors!” I had been a warrior, I thought. There had been a time when I shone in mail and helmet, but now I was lice-ridden, filthy, weak, and tearful. “Here,” Finan said, and he pushed something into my hand. It was one of the antler-combs we had carried as cargo and somehow he had managed to steal it and secrete it in his rags. “Never give up,” he told me, and I used the comb to disentangle my hair that now grew almost to my waist. I combed it out, tearing knots free, pulling lice from the teeth, and next morning Finan plaited my straight hair and I did the same for him. “It’s how warriors dress their hair in my tribe,” he explained, “and you and I are warriors. We’re not slaves, we’re warriors!” We were thin, dirty, and ragged, but the despair had passed like a squall at sea and I let the anger give me resolve.

  Next day we loaded Trader with ingots of copper, bronze, and iron. We rolled barrels of ale into her stern and filled the remaining cargo space with salt meat, rings of hard bread, and tubs of salted cod. Sverri laughed at our plaited hair. “You two think you’ll find women, do you?” he mocked us. “Or are you pretending to be women?” Neither of us answered and Sverri just grinned. He was in a good mood, one of unusual excitement. He liked seafaring and from the amount of provisions we stowed I guessed he planned a long voyage and so it proved. He cast his runesticks time after time and they must have told him he would prosper for he bought three new slaves, all of them Frisians. He wanted to be well-manned for the voyage ahead, a voyage that began badly, for, as we left Haithabu, we were pursued by another ship. A pirate, Hakka announced sourly, and we ran north under sail and oars and the other ship slowly overhauled us for she was longer, leaner, and faster, and it was only the coming of night that let us escape, but it was a nervous night. We stowed the oars and lowered the sail so that Trader would make no noise, and in the dark I heard the oar-splashes of our pursuer and Sverri and his men were crouching near us, swords in hand, ready to kill us if we made a noise. I was tempted, and Finan wanted to thump on the ship’s side to bring the pursuers to us, but Sverri would have slaughtered us instantly and so we kept silent and the strange ship passed us in the darkness and when dawn came she had vanished.

  Such threats were rare. Wolf does not eat wolf, and the falcon does not stoop on another falcon, and so the Northmen rarely preyed on each other, though some men, desperate, would risk attacking a fellow Dane or Norseman. Such pirates were reviled as outcasts, as nothings, but they were feared. Usually they were hunted down and the crews were killed or enslaved, but still some men risked being outcasts, knowing that if they could just capture one rich ship like Trader they could make a fortune that would give them status, power, and acceptance. But we escaped that night, and next day we sailed farther north and still farther north, and we did not put into land that night, nor for many nights. Then one morning I saw a black coast of terrible cliffs and the sea was shattering white against those grim rocks, and I thought we had come to our journey’s end, but we did not seek land. Instead we sailed on, going west now, and then briefly south to put into the bay of an island where we anchored.

  At first Finan thought it was Ireland, but the folk who came to Trader in a small skin boat did not speak his language. There are islands all about the northern coast of Britain and this, I think was one of them. Savages live on those islands and Sverri did not go ashore, but traded a few paltry coins with the savages and received in return some gulls’ eggs, dried fish and goat-meat. And next morning we rowed into a brisk wind and we rowed all day and I knew we were heading into the western wastes of the wilderness sea. Ragnar the Elder had warned me of those seas, saying that there were lands beyond them, but that most men who sought the far lands never came back. Those western lands, he told me, were inhabited by the souls of dead sailors. They were gray places, fog-shrouded and storm-battered, but that was where we were going and Sverri stood at the steering oar with a look of happiness on his flat face and I remembered that same happiness. I remembered the joy of a good ship and the pulse of its life in the loom of the steering oar.

  For two weeks we voyaged. This was the whale path, and the monsters of the sea rolled to look at us or spouted water, and the air became colder and the sky was forever clouded, and I knew Sverri’s crewmen were nervous. They thought we were lost, and I thought the same, and I believed my life would end at the sea’s edge where great whirlpools drag ships down to their deaths. Seabirds circled us, their cries forlorn in the white cold, and the great whales plunged beneath us, and we rowed until our backs were sore. The seas were gray and mountainous, unending and cold, scummed with white foam, and we had only one day of friendly wind when we could travel under sail with the big gray seas hissing along our hull.

  And so we came to Horn in the land of fire that some men call Thule. Mountains smoked and we heard tales of magical pools of hot water, though I saw none. And it was not just a land of fire, but a haunt of ice. There were mountains of ice, rivers of ice, and shelves of ice in the sky. There were codfish longer than a man is tall and we ate well there and Sverri was happy. Men feared to make the voyage we had just made, and he had achieved it, and in Thule his cargo was worth three times what he would have received in Denmark or Frankia, though of course he had to yield some of the precious cargo as tribute to the local lord. But he sold the rest of the ingots and took on board whalebones and walrus tusks and walrus hides and sealskin, and he knew he would make much money if he could take those things home. He was in such a good mood that he even allowed us ashore and we drank sour birch wine in a long-house that stank of whale flesh. We were all shackled, not just with our ordinary manacles, but with neck chains too, and Sverri had hired local men to guard us. Three of those sentinels were armed with the long heavy spears that the men of Thule use to kill whales while the other four had flensing knives. Sverri was safe with them watching us, and he knew it, and for the only time in all the months I was with him he deigned to speak with us. He boasted of the voyage we had made and even praised our skill at the oars. “But you two hate me,” he said, looking at Finan and then at me.

  I said nothing.

  “The birch wine is good,” Finan said, “thank you for it.”

  “The birch wine is walrus piss,” Sverri said, then belched. He was drunk. “You hate me,” he said, amused by our hatred. “I watch you two and you hate me. The others now, they’re whipped, but you two would kill me before I could sneeze. I should kill you both, shouldn’t I? I should sacrifice you to the sea.” Neither of us spoke. A birch log cracked in the fire and spewed sparks. “But you row well,” Sverri said. “I did free a slave once,” he went on, “I released him because I liked him. I trusted him. I even let him steer Trader, but he tried to kill me. You know what I did with him? I nailed his filthy corpse to the prow and let him rot there. And I learned my lesson. You’re there to row. Nothing else. You row and you work and you die.” He fell asleep shortly after, and so did we, and next morning we were back on board Trader and, under a spitting rain, left that strange land of ice and flame.

  It took much less time to go back east because we ran before a friendly wind and so wintered in Jutland again. We shivered in the slave hut and listened to Sverri grunting in his woman’s bed at night. The snow came, ice locked the creek, and it became the year 880 and I had lived twenty-three years and I knew my future was to die in shackles because Sverri was watchful, clever, and ruthless.

  And then the red ship came.

  She was not truly red. Most ships are built of oak that darkens as the ship lives, but this ship had been made from pine and when the morning or evening light lanced low across the sea’s edge she seemed to be the color of darkening blood.

  She looked a livid red when we first saw her. That was on the evening of the day we had launched and the red
ship was long and low and lean. She coursed from the eastern horizon, coming toward us at an angle, and her sail was a dirty gray, criss-crossed by the ropes that strengthen the cloth, and Sverri saw the beast-head at her prow and decided she was a pirate and so we struck inshore to waters he knew well. They were shallow waters and the red ship hesitated to follow. We rowed through narrow creeks, scattering wildfowl, and the red ship stayed within sight, but out beyond the dunes, and then the night fell and we reversed our course and let the ebb-tide take us out to sea and Sverri’s men whipped us to make us row hard to escape the coast. The dawn came cold and misty, but as the mist lifted we saw that the red ship was gone.

  We were going to Haithabu to find the first cargo of the season, but as we approached the port Sverri saw the red ship again and she turned toward us and Sverri cursed her. We were upwind of her, which made escaping easy, but even so she tried to catch us. She used her oars and, because she had at least twenty benches, she was much faster than Trader, but she could not close the wind’s gap and by the following morning we were again alone on an empty sea. Sverri cursed her all the same. He cast his runesticks and they persuaded him to abandon the idea of Haithabu and so we crossed to the land of the Svear where we loaded beaver hides and dung-encrusted fleeces.