Raider's Wake: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 6)

by James L. Nelson

  They continued on toward the water and they could see the blacksmith’s shop was not the only one that had fires burning with enthusiasm that morning. The baker’s ovens were being heated as the baker prepared the coarse rye bread that would be loaded into linen bags to be brought aboard the ships. The butcher had fires stoked under his massive iron pots in which he would scald the pigs he was about to butcher and salt for the voyage.

  They crested the rise of ground near the end of the plank road and then, before them, lay the shipyard, busy as an ant hill, the river on which Vík-ló was situated, and beyond that the blue ocean. Thorgrim breathed deep.

  “They’ve finally got the yard crossed on Fox,” Harald said, nodding to the ship tied to the east side of the pier he and his men had built. Thorgrim looked in that direction. The crew of Fox, smallest of the four ships, had been having some difficulty with their rigging, but now it seemed they had straightened it out.

  “Good,” Thorgrim said. He breathed deep again. “A fine, fine morning Odin has blessed us with,” he said.

  “But a busy one,” Harald said. “There’s a great deal of work yet to be done.”

  Thorgrim looked over at his son, a few inches shorter than himself but broader. He took after his grandfather, Ornolf the Restless, in that way. Harald’s eyes were moving from one gang of laboring men to the next, and Thorgrim could all but hear the thoughts in his head, thoughts of stowing supplies and seeing to spare oars and cordage and making sure that every man had the weapons he needed and his sea chest brought aboard and lashed in place.

  Relax…Thorgrim thought. He wondered when his son had become so serious. Or when he himself had become less so. He wondered if all the food and ale and carnal satisfaction were making him soft.

  If they are, then they will not continue to do so for long, he thought. Raiding, voyaging, those were rarely pleasant or comfortable. Salt pork and old bread to eat, spoiled ale to drink, the deck of a longship or a gravel beach for a bed, those would quickly harden any places that had grown soft. And Thorgrim was strangely eager for all that and more.

  “Ah, Thorgrim!” Thorgrim and Harald looked to their left and saw Aghen the shipwright approaching, smile on his face. “I’m happy you layabeds could join us!”

  Thorgrim smiled and embraced Aghen. The two men had become close the previous winter, working side by side to build two of the four longships now floating just off the sandy shore. Thorgrim had seen in Aghen a skilled craftsman who loved ships and shipbuilding as much as he did, and a man whose ideas on that subject matched Thorgrim’s as much as two men could ever agree on such things. The ships they built, Blood Hawk and Sea Hammer, were two of the finest ships that Thorgrim had even seen.

  Those two vessels, as well as the smaller Dragon and Fox, had sailed in the spring for the raid on Glendalough. After Ottar had betrayed Thorgrim and his men, and left them to be butchered, he had taken all the ships with him, save for Sea Hammer, which had been holed. They had sailed for Vík-ló, and there Thorgrim had found them after he had put his sword through Ottar.

  Thorgrim had given Ottar’s men the choice of remaining and swearing loyalty to him, or taking their ships and departing. Many had opted to stay, including Oddi, who was Aghen’s assistant, and the other men who had been sent to hunt down the wolf that Ottar so feared. In all, more than one hundred of Ottar’s former men remained in Vík-ló. Ottar, it seemed, was not very popular, even among his own people.

  The rest were given leave to sail. There was some discussion of using one of the ships as a funeral pyre for Ottar, sending him off to Valhalla in proper fashion. But in truth, after Ottar’s behavior in the final dual with Thorgrim, no one was sure if Valhalla was where he was bound, and no one cared enough about him to sacrifice a perfectly good ship. So instead they had burned him on shore and sailed off with all the ships that had formerly belonged to the man.

  Sea Hammer alone of all the ships had not returned to Vík-ló. They had patched her and used her to escape down-river from Glendalough, but then their path had led in a different direction and they had hidden the ship as best they could and hoped she would be unmolested.

  As soon as Thorgrim was able, he sent a band of twenty armed men, augmented by others from the gang of Irish bandits they had befriended, to retrieve her. They found her right where she had been secreted. And they found that some local Irish people had come upon her first. The Irish, however, did not know what to do with her, and the best they could think of was to break off some of her upper strakes to use as firewood. She had suffered no more harm than that, and soon Sea Hammer was reunited with the rest of the fleet and the damage done her put to rights.

  “How goes it, Aghen?” Thorgrim asked.

  “Let me show you,” Aghen said and he led Thorgrim and Harald across the chip-strewn grass and the piles of drying lumber and the stacks of provisions waiting to take their place on board. They walked out along Harald’s pier, as solid underfoot as the ground itself.

  “Fox was not able to get their yard across because they were having all sorts of problems setting the shrouds up,” Aghen explained as they walked. “I was hoping we might save the old shrouds, get some more use out of them, but there was no chance. They were near rotten. So we made up new and now all is well.”

  Thorgrim nodded. A half dozen men were aboard Fox, receiving weapons and spare lumber and cordage from the men on the pier and storing it away. Good, Thorgrim thought. Things were moving ahead.

  Aghen turned in the other direction, toward Blood Hawk tied up on the west side of the pier. She, too, was taking on supplies, weapons, sea chests, all those things that a well-outfitted longship might carry off to sea. “We had some leaking down by the garboards, as you know,” Aghen said. “But we had her up on the beach and really got at the seams and she seems to be tight now.”

  Thorgrim nodded again, but his chief concern was Sea Hammer, his own ship. And Sea Hammer, he knew, was in fine shape. Once she had returned to the longphort he and Aghen and a gang of skilled men had gone over her and repaired the damage done and set everything to rights. Now she waited only her turn to come alongside the pier and receive those things she would need.

  Footsteps behind and the three men stepped aside as a half dozen men, stripped to the waist, came staggering down the dock bearing loads of provisions.

  “So, Aghen,” Thorgrim said, turning to the old shipwright. “Here’s the question I’ve failed to ask. Will you sail with us?”

  Aghen gave a smile, a sad sort of smile, and shook his head. “I’m not a young man anymore,” he said.

  “Neither am I,” Thorgrim said, “but by Thor I tell you, this getting ready to sail, to see what lies beyond the bright line at the edge of the sea, it’s making me feel like one again.”

  “I can see that,” Aghen said, “and I am happy for you, my friend. But for me, my fate is to die in Vík-ló. I’ve known that for some time. And to hope that if a shipwright dies with an adz in his hand, Odin will welcome him into the corpse hall as if he had been a warrior wielding a sword.”

  Thorgrim smiled. “I have no doubt of it,” he said. “Very well, I see your mind is made up. I won’t try to change it. You stay here and keep watch on Vík-ló and get ready to repair the damage I always manage to do to my ships.”

  “I’ll do that,” Aghen said. “But I see you’re bringing provisions and spare wood and cordage and such on board. That makes me think you’re making ready for a long voyage.”

  “I don’t know,” Thorgrim said. “By the gods, I swear I do not. So I’m getting ready for whatever might happen.”

  Aghen nodded. “I also couldn’t help but notice that you had your men load the plunder on board. All the hoard you had buried under the stack of drying lumber. All the silver and gold and jewels and such you and your men have managed to gather in your raiding.”

  “Ha!” Thorgrim said. “I’ve made and lost several fortunes since coming to Ireland. I hope to not lose it again.”

  “Of course,�
� Aghen said. “But we both know your treasure is safer here than it is on board a ship. So the fact that you are taking it tells me something else, Thorgrim Night Wolf. It tells me you never intend to return to Vík-ló.”

  Chapter Five

  What cause also moved them

  From the countries of war?

  To traverse the waves over the floods,

  In what number of ships did they embark?

  Historia Britonum of Nennius

  Louis de Roumois had a choice to make, and so he stood by the side of the road in the growing twilight, stared off into the distance, and tried to make it.

  Beside him, his horse nibbled at the grass, untroubled by the weight of the decision with which Louis wrestled. Ahead of him, two miles or so away, he could see the long earthen and palisade walls, the many plumes of smoke, the wide river like a band of black against the dark land that marked Ireland’s great Norse longphort. Dubh-linn. He had made it at last. And now he was not sure what to do.

  He turned to the horse, a good and faithful companion for these past weeks. “What say you?” he asked, but still the horse offered no opinion, just continued with its supper. Louis frowned and looked up at Dubh-linn again.

  For several weeks of travel he had worn his monk’s robe, and like the horse, it had served him well. In truth, the two things, a monk’s simple clothing and a fine warrior’s mount, made an odd combination. But there were any number of reasons why a monk might ride such a beast, and no one had shown much curiosity about it. But that might not be the case in Dubh-linn.

  And that wasn’t the biggest problem. Louis had managed to keep his sword secreted under the robe, strapped to his back, ready to go if he needed it. And he had needed it, a few times. Cutting down the three Irish bandits was just the last of those incidents. He had met another bandit the week earlier, but that one had had the sense to run at the first sight of the blade. And Louis, not yet entirely sick of his troubles, was willing to let the villain go.

  There had been another incident when he had begged shelter from a farmer, a man he could see now had been too eager by far to offer help. The farmer had come in the night, knife in hand, when he thought the trusting monk with the fine horse was asleep. That had not ended well for the farmer. Not at all.

  Keeping the sword hidden on the road was one thing, but he did not think he could continue to do so while walking around Dubh-linn. It was too obvious. But neither could he wear the monk’s robe with a sword hanging at his side.

  “So here’s the question, horse,” Louis spoke out loud again. “Is it safer for me to go about with a sword on my hip, or in the disguise of a monk?” And as soon as he put it in those terms, the answer was obvious, even without any prompting from the horse. Among the good Christian people of Ireland, a monk’s robe generally offered a degree on protection. Among the heathens of Dubh-linn, it would offer none at all. Indeed, it might well invite attack.

  “The sword it is,” Louis said. Louis, a prince of Roumois, a trained warrior, could wear a sword well. And just as important, he had the air of one who knew how to use it, which he most certainly did, and that, more than a holy man’s garb, would be most likely to keep him safe.

  He tugged the robe off over his head and unstrapped the sword. He dug through the saddlebag and pulled out his crumpled, damp tunic. He considered wearing his mail shirt as well, but rejected the idea. That was too likely to draw attention, and attention was a thing he did not want. Get into Dubh-linn, find a ship bound for Frankia or some place near enough, secure passage and sail. That was what he wanted, and the quicker he could make it happen, the better.

  Louis pulled the tunic on, strapped the sword around his waist, took up the horse’s reins, and swung himself back up into the saddle. He nudged the reluctant beast’s flanks and they headed off to cover the last few miles to the sprawling longphort.

  The sun, blazing orange in the surprisingly clear sky, was hanging just above the mountains to the west when Louis crossed the bridge over the wide river and followed the well-worn road to the gates of the Norse settlement, planted there on the Irish shore. With the sun still up, the gates were still open. A few well-armed and apparently drunk Northmen were lolling around; guards, Louis assumed, but they did no more than glance up at him as he rode through the opening in the earthen walls and into the longphort itself.

  From the vantage point of his horse’s back, Louis looked out at the town in front of him. Born and raised in Frankia, and well-traveled, being a member of the nobility, Louis had seen a few cities, including Paris with its fine palaces and cathedrals. Dubh-linn, by comparison, was like some overgrown peasant village, like a weed of a town that had taken root and spread. There were squat homes and workshops belching smoke from the gable ends of their thatched roofs, muddy roads crisscrossing the space. There was one wide, planked road that ran downhill to the riverfront where a dozen or more ship lay beached or tied to piers built out from the land.

  “Look at this, horse, will you?” Louis said. There were people and animals everywhere: horses and riders moving through the crowds, swine and cattle being driven here and there. The people crowding the streets were men, mostly. Northmen, well-armed as Northmen always were, dressed in tunics and leggings and cloaks, their hair and beards long, silver arm rings on thick upper arms. But there were women as well, and from their dress and the color of their skin and hair Louis guessed they were Irish women mostly. And that made sense. Easier to get women from the countryside thereabouts than to bring them all the way from the North countries.

  Duh-linn…Louis thought.

  Ugly, mud and smoke filled, crowded and reeking, still it was impressive by Irish standards. In the year or more that Louis had been in that country he had never been in so big and busy a place. While there was no place in Ireland that Louis knew of that might be called a city, Dubh-linn was the closest thing he’d heard of or seen.

  For a few minutes Louis remained atop his horse and took in the scene before him. Already much of the longphort was lost to him in the deepening shadows. Then with a sigh he slid off the horse and began to lead the beast along the wide plank road, searching the various buildings and yards as he did.

  Down a muddy side road he saw what he was looking for, or hoped it was, anyway. A stable with a half dozen horses in crude stalls, an open thatched structure beside it, sheltering a great pile of hay. Louis turned off the plank road and made his way toward the stable, his soft leather shoes sinking deep in the mud and threatening to come right off his feet as he pulled them free.

  He stopped beside the stable, looking around for whoever owned the place. He heard muttering from behind the pile of hay and a man with a massive red beard and nearly as massive arms and gut came ambling around. He looked at Louis and ran his eyes over Louis’s horse, and Louis did not miss the look of appreciation that he gave the animal.

  The man looked back at Louis and spoke in a rapid and guttural Norse that Louis did not understand in the least. It had occurred to him earlier that language might be a problem, but he had figured he would find some way around it when the time came. But now the time had come, and he was not sure what to do.

  Louis opened his mouth to speak, but the bearded man seemed to have taken note of the uncertain look on Louis’s face. He half turned and yelled something in his ugly language and a moment later a woman appeared. She was nearly as stout as the man, but she wore the brat and leine of an Irish woman.

  “Is there something we can do for you, sir?” the woman asked in the speech of a native of that country.

  “Yes,” Louis said. He had arrived in Ireland knowing not one word of that language, but since no one else spoke Frankish he had been forced to learn it quickly. “I have a horse and saddle to sell, and I wondered if you might be interested in buying it.”

  The woman translated the words, and Louis watched the red- bearded man go through a wonderful series of facial contortions: excitement, and then forced restraint and then an utterly false look of skeptici
sm as he looked over the horse’s legs, flanks, teeth and saddle. He spoke at last, shaking his head.

  “My husband says the horse has been ridden too hard and is near starved,” the woman said, “and is quite old, too. He says he can give you five silver pieces, no more, for the horse and the saddle.”

  Louis almost laughed. But he did not care about fair payment for the beast, which, strictly speaking, he had stolen, so he nodded his head and thought, I will make you one very happy thief, you whore’s son.

  The man did indeed seem happy, and not a little surprised, when Louis agreed to his price with no argument. He went into his house by the stable to fetch the money and Louis took off the saddlebags and slung them over his shoulder. The red-bearded man returned and Louis could see he was about to protest Louis’s taking the bags, but he clearly thought better of it and instead handed the silver over.

  Louis took the payment and tucked it into the purse hanging from his belt. The stable keeper was having trouble containing himself and clearly wanted Louis to move along before he realized his mistake in selling the horse so cheap, so Louis thanked him, thanked his wife, and trudged on down the muddy track to the plank road.

  It was nearly full-on dark, but there were fires burning here and there along the road and many of the open doors in the buildings that lined the plank road were lit with fires in the hearths, providing just enough light to see, which was all the light Louis wanted. Find a ship, sail back to Frankia, and do so with no trouble of any sort; that was what he wanted, and the anonymity of the dark could only help.

  Very well, a ship… he thought. There were ships to be found in Dubh-linn, he had seen them already, but he had no idea where they were going and to what end. He understood that the Northmen came to Ireland to raid, that many of those ships would be sailing off to plunder some hapless monastery. But he knew as well that merchant ships were now calling at the rapidly growing Dubh-linn, shipmasters realizing there was money to be made bringing goods from the east to Ireland and bringing Irish goods to the world beyond. And one of those mariners would no doubt be happy to exchange silver for passage.