The Pale Horseman

by Bernard Cornwell

  Brida was indeed cunning. She had been my first lover, an East Anglian girl who had been raised by Ragnar’s father and who now slept with Ragnar. “Talk to her,” I said, “and give her my greetings, and say that if it comes to war…” I paused, not sure what to say. There was no point in promising to do my best to rescue Ragnar, for if war came then the hostages would be slaughtered long before I could reach them.

  “If it comes to war?” Wulfhere prompted me.

  “If it comes to war,” I said, repeating the words he had spoken to me before my penance, “we’ll all be looking for a way to stay alive.”

  Wulfhere stared at me for a long time and his silence told me that though I had failed to find a message for Ragnar, I had given a message to Wulfhere. He drank ale. “So the bitch speaks English, does she?”

  “She’s a Saxon.”

  As was I, but I hated Alfred and I would join Ragnar when I could, if I could, whatever Mildrith wanted, or so I thought. But deep under the earth, where the corpse serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, there are three spinners, three women who make our fate. We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners’ fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it. Wyrd bið ful āræd, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable, and the spinners had decided my fate because, a week after the witan had met, when Exanceaster was quiet again, they sent me a ship.

  The first I knew of it was when a slave came running from Oxton’s fields saying that there was a Danish ship in the estuary of the Uisc and I pulled on boots and mail, snatched my swords from their peg, shouted for a horse to be saddled, and rode to the foreshore where Heahengel rotted.

  And where, standing in from the long sand spit that protects the Uisc from the greater sea, another ship approached. Her sail was furled on the long yard and her dripping oars rose and fell like wings and her long hull left a spreading wake that glittered silver under the rising sun. Her prow was high, and standing there was a man in full mail, a man with a helmet and spear, and behind me, where a few fisherfolk lived in hovels beside the mud, people were hurrying toward the hills and taking with them whatever few possessions they could snatch. I called to one of them. “It’s not a Dane!”

  “Lord?”

  “It’s a West Saxon ship,” I called, though they did not believe me and hurried away with their livestock. For years they had done this. They would see a ship and they would run, for ships brought Danes and Danes brought death, but this ship had no dragon or wolf or eagle’s head on its prow. I knew the ship. It was the Eftwyrd, the best named of all Alfred’s ships that otherwise bore pious names like Heahengel or Apostol or Cristenlic. Eftwyrd meant judgment day, which, though Christian in inspiration, accurately described what she had brought to many Danes.

  The man in the prow waved and, for the first time since I had crawled on my knees to Alfred’s altar, my spirits lifted. It was Leofric, and then the Eftwyrd’s bow slid onto the mud and the long hull juddered to a halt. Leofric cupped his hands. “How deep is this mud?”

  “It’s nothing!” I shouted back. “A hand’s depth, no more!”

  “Can I walk on it?”

  “Of course you can!” I shouted back.

  He jumped and, as I had known he would, he sank up to his thighs in the thick black slime, and I bent over my saddle’s pommel in laughter, and the Eftwyrd’s crew laughed with me as Leofric cursed, and it took ten minutes to extricate him from the muck, by which time a score of us were plastered in the stinking stuff, but then the crew, who were mostly my old oarsmen and warriors, brought ale ashore, and bread and salted pork, and we made a midday meal beside the rising tide.

  “You’re an earsling,” Leofric grumbled, looking at the mud clogging up the links of his mail coat.

  “I’m a bored earsling,” I said.

  “You’re bored?” Leofric said. “So are we.” It seemed the fleet was not sailing. It had been given into the charge of a man named Burgweard who was a dull, worthy soldier whose brother was Bishop of Scireburnan, and Burgweard had orders not to disturb the peace. “If the Danes aren’t off the coast,” Leofric said, “then we aren’t.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “He sent us to rescue that piece of shit,” he nodded at Heahengel. “He wants twelve ships again, see?”

  “I thought they were building more?”

  “They were building more, only it all stopped because some thieving bastards stole the timber while we were fighting at Cynuit, and then someone remembered Heahengel and here we are. Burgweard can’t manage with just eleven.”

  “If he isn’t sailing,” I asked, “why does he want another ship?”

  “In case he has to sail,” Leofric explained, “and if he does, then he wants twelve. Not eleven, twelve.”

  “Twelve? Why?”

  “Because,” Leofric paused to bite off a piece of bread, “because it says in the gospel book that Christ sent out his disciples two by two, and that’s how we have to go, two ships together, all holy, and if we’ve only got eleven, then that means we’ve only got ten, if you follow me.”

  I stared at him, not sure whether he was jesting. “Burgweard insists you sail two by two?”

  Leofric nodded. “Because it says so in Father Willibald’s book.”

  “In the gospel book?”

  “That’s what Father Willibald tells us,” Leofric said with a straight face, then saw my expression and shrugged. “Honest! And Alfred approves.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “And if you do what the gospel book tells you,” Leofric said, still with a straight face, “then nothing can go wrong, can it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “So you’re here to rebuild Heahengel?”

  “New mast,” Leofric said, “new sail, new rigging, patch up those timbers, caulk her, then tow her back to Hamtun. It could take a month!”

  “At least.”

  “And I never was much good at making things. Good at fighting, I am, and I can drink ale as well as any man, but I was never much good with a mallet and wedge or with adzes. They are.” He nodded at a group of a dozen men who were strangers to me.

  “Who are they?”

  “Shipwrights.”

  “So they do the work?”

  “Can’t expect me to do it!” Leofric protested. “I’m in command of the Eftwyrd!”

  “So,” I said, “you’re planning to drink my ale and eat my food for a month while those dozen men do the work?”

  “You have any better ideas?”

  I gazed at the Eftwyrd. She was a well-made ship, longer than most Danish boats and with high sides that made her a good fighting platform. “What did Burgweard tell you to do?” I asked.

  “Pray,” Leofric said sourly, “and help repair Heahengel.”

  “I hear there’s a new Danish leader in the Sæfern Sea,” I said, “and I’d like to know if it’s true. A man called Svein. And I hear more ships are joining him from Ireland.”

  “He’s in Wales, this Svein?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “He’ll be coming to Wessex then,” Leofric said.

  “If it’s true.”

  “So you’re thinking…” Leofric said, then stopped when he realized just what I was thinking.

  “I’m thinking that it doesn’t do a ship or crew any good to sit around for a month,” I said, “and I’m thinking that there might be plunder to be had in the Sæfern Sea.”

  “And if Alfred hears we’ve been fighting up there,” Leofric said, “he’ll gut us.”

  I nodded upriver toward Exanceaster. “They burned a hundred Danish ships up there,” I said, “and their wreckage is still on the riverbank. We should be able to find at least one dragon’s head to put on her prow.”

  Leofric stared at the Eftwyrd. “Disguise her?”

  “Disguise her,” I said, because if I put a dragon head on Eftwyrd no one would know she was a Saxon ship. S
he would be taken for a Danish boat, a sea raider, part of England’s nightmare.

  Leofric smiled. “I don’t need orders to go on a patrol, do I?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And we haven’t fought since Cynuit,” he said wistfully, “and no fighting means no plunder.”

  “What about the crew?” I asked.

  He turned and looked at them. “Most of them are evil bastards,” he said. “They won’t mind. And they all need plunder.”

  “And between us and the Sæfern Sea,” I said, “there are the Britons.”

  “And they’re all thieving bastards, the lot of them,” Leofric said. He looked at me and grinned. “So if Alfred won’t go to war, we will?”

  “You have any better ideas?” I asked.

  Leofric did not answer for a long time. Instead, idly, as if he was just thinking, he tossed pebbles toward a puddle. I said nothing, just watched the small splashes, watched the pattern the fallen pebbles made, and knew he was seeking guidance from fate. The Danes cast runesticks, we all watched for the flight of birds, we tried to hear the whispers of the gods, and Leofric was watching the pebbles fall to find his fate. The last one clicked on another and skidded off into the mud and the trail it left pointed south toward the sea. “No,” he said, “I don’t have any better ideas.”

  And I was bored no longer, because we were going to be Vikings.

  We found a score of carved beasts’ heads beside the river beneath Exanceaster’s walls, all of them part of the sodden, tangled wreckage that showed where Guthrum’s fleet had been burned and we chose two of the least scorched carvings and carried them on board Eftwyrd. Her prow and stern culminated in simple posts and we had to cut the posts down until the sockets of the two carved heads fitted. The creature at the stern, the smaller of the two, was a gape-mouthed serpent, probably intended to represent Corpse-Ripper, the monster that tore at the dead in the Danish underworld, while the beast we placed at the bow was a dragon’s head, though it was so blackened and disfigured by fire that it looked more like a horse’s head. We dug into the scorched eyes until we found unburned wood, and did the same with the open mouth, and when we were finished the thing looked dramatic and fierce. “Looks like a fyrdraca now,” Leofric said happily. A fire-dragon.

  The Danes could always remove the dragon or beast heads from the bows and sterns of their ships because they did not want the horrid-looking creatures to frighten the spirits of friendly lands and so they only displayed the carved monsters when they were in enemy waters. We did the same, hiding our fyrdraca and serpent head in Eftwyrd’s bilges as we went back downriver to where the shipwrights were beginning their work on Heahengel. We hid the beast heads because Leofric did not want the shipwrights to know he planned mischief. “That one,” he said as he jerked his head toward a tall, lean, gray-haired man who was in charge of the work, “is more Christian than the pope. He’d bleat to the local priests if he thought we were going off to fight someone, and the priests will tell Alfred and then Burgweard will take Eftwyrd away from me.”

  “You don’t like Burgweard?”

  Leofric spat for answer. “It’s a good thing there are no Danes on the coast.”

  “He’s a coward?”

  “No coward. He just thinks God will fight the battles. We spend more time on our knees than at the oars. When you commanded the fleet we made money. Now even the rats on board are begging for crumbs.”

  We had made money by capturing Danish ships and taking their plunder, and though none of us had become rich we had all possessed silver to spare. I was still wealthy enough because I had a hoard hidden at Oxton, a hoard that was the legacy of Ragnar the Older, and a hoard that the church and Oswald’s relatives would make their own if they could, but a man can never have enough silver. Silver buys land, it buys the loyalty of warriors, it is the power of a lord, and without silver a man must bend the knee or else become a slave. The Danes led men by the lure of silver, and we were no different. If I was to be a lord, if I was to storm the walls of Bebbanburg, then I would need men and I would need a great hoard to buy the swords and shields and spears and hearts of warriors, and so we would go to sea and look for silver, though we told the shipwrights that we merely planned to patrol the coast. We shipped barrels of ale, boxes of hard-baked bread, cheeses, kegs of smoked mackerel, and flitches of bacon. I told Mildrith the same story, that we would be sailing back and forth along the shores of Defnascir and Thornsæta. “Which is what we should be doing anyway,” Leofric said, “just in case a Dane arrives.”

  “The Danes are lying low,” I said.

  Leofric nodded. “And when a Dane lies low you know there’s trouble coming.”

  I believed he was right. Guthrum was not far from Wessex, and Svein, if he existed, was just a day’s voyage from her north coast. Alfred might believe his truce would hold and that the hostages would secure it, but I knew from my childhood how land-hungry the Danes were, and how they lusted after the lush fields and rich pastures of Wessex. They would come, and if Guthrum did not lead them then another Danish chieftain would gather ships and men and bring his swords and axes to Alfred’s kingdom. The Danes, after all, ruled the other three English kingdoms. They held my own Northumbria, they were bringing settlers to East Anglia, their language was spreading southward through Mercia, and they would not want the last English kingdom flourishing to their south. They were like wolves, shadow-skulking for the moment, but watching a flock of sheep fatten.

  I recruited eleven young men from my land and took them on board Eftwyrd, and brought Haesten, too, and he was useful for he had spent much of his young life at the oars. Then, one misty morning, as the strong tide ebbed westward, we slid Eftwyrd away from the river’s bank, rowed her past the low sand spit that guards the Uisc and so out to the long swells of the sea. The oars creaked in their leather-lined holes, the bow’s breast split the waves to shatter water white along the hull, and the steering oar fought against my touch. I felt my spirits rise to the small wind and I looked up into the pearly sky and said a prayer of thanks to Thor, Odin, Njord, and Hoder.

  A few small fishing boats dotted the inshore waters, but as we went south and west, away from the land, the sea emptied. I looked back at the low dun hills slashed brighter green where rivers pierced the coast, and then the green faded to gray, the land became a shadow, and we were alone with the white birds crying. It was then that we heaved the serpent’s head and the fyrdraca from the bilge and slotted them over the posts at stem and stern, pegged them into place, and turned our bow westward.

  The Eftwyrd was no more. Now the Fyrdraca sailed, and she was hunting trouble.

  THREE

  The crew of the Eftwyrd turned Fyrdraca had been at Cynuit with me. They were fighting men and they were offended that Odda the Younger had taken credit for a battle they had won. They had also been bored since the battle. Once in a while, Leofric told me, Burgweard exercised his fleet by taking it to sea, but most of the time they waited in Hamtun. “We did go fishing once, though,” Leofric admitted.

  “Fishing?”

  “Father Willibald preached a sermon about feeding five thousand folk with two scraps of bread and a basket of herring,” he said, “so Burgweard said we should take nets out and fish. He wanted to feed the town, see? Lots of hungry folk.”

  “Did you catch anything?”

  “Mackerel. Lots of mackerel.”

  “But no Danes?”

  “No Danes,” Leofric said, “and no herring, only mackerel. The bastard Danes have vanished.”

  We learned later that Guthrum had given orders that no Danish ships were to raid the Wessex coast and so break the truce. Alfred was to be lulled into a conviction that peace had come, and that meant there were no pirates roaming the seas between Kent and Cornwalum and their absence encouraged traders to come from the lands to the south to sell wine or to buy fleeces. The Fyrdraca took two such ships in the first four days. They were both Frankish ships, tubby in their hulls, and neither with more th
an six oars a side, and both believed the Fyrdraca was a Viking ship for they saw her beast heads, and they heard Haesten and me speaking Danish and they saw my arm rings. We did not kill the crews, but just stole their coins, weapons, and as much of their cargo as we could carry. One ship was heaped with bales of wool, for the folk across the water prized Saxon fleeces, but we could only take three of the bales for fear of cluttering the Fyrdraca’s benches.

  At night we found a cove or river’s mouth, and by day we rowed to sea and looked for prey, and each day we went farther westward until I was sure we were off the coast of Cornwalum, and that was enemy country. It was the old enemy that had confronted our ancestors when they first came across the North Sea to make England. That enemy spoke a strange language, and some Britons lived north of Northumbria and others lived in Wales or in Cornwalum, all places on the wild edges of the isle of Britain where they had been pushed by our coming. They were Christians. Indeed, Father Beocca had told me they had been Christians before we were and he claimed that no one who was a Christian could be a real enemy of another Christian. But nevertheless the Britons hated us. Sometimes they allied themselves with the Northmen to attack us. Sometimes the Northmen raided them. Sometimes they made war against us on their own. In the past the men of Cornwalum had made much trouble for Wessex, although Leofric claimed they had been punished so badly that they now pissed themselves whenever they saw a Saxon.

  Not that we saw any Britons at first. The places we sheltered were deserted, all except one river mouth where a skin boat pushed offshore and a half-naked man paddled out to us and held up some crabs, which he wanted to sell to us. We took a basketful of the beasts and paid him two pennies. Next night we grounded Fyrdraca on a rising tide and collected fresh water from a stream, and Leofric and I climbed a hill and stared inland. Smoke rose from distant valleys, but there was no one in sight, not even a shepherd. “What are you expecting,” Leofric asked, “enemies?”

  “A monastery,” I said.

  “A monastery!” He was amused. “You want to pray?”