“Why not?” Leofric asked from behind him. He and Cynric had approached unnoticed during the brief dispute.
“I killed four noteworthy men of Waterford. Their kinsmen and friends were many, and wanted blood for blood.”
“Why did you kill them ?”
“They murdered my mother’s brother and his sons.”
That left them all without words to answer. They turned from him with shocked faces. Then one of the men untied his feet, and he was escorted to the ponies by half a dozen spears, a guard that brought the smile back to his lips. “You honour me above my deserts,” he observed ironically to Leofric as he swung into the saddle. “I am not a berserk, to tear out your throat barehanded with a dozen spears in me.”
“A model of prudence—or a peaceful trader!” said Edric, who seemed to have recovered a bitter-flavoured humour.
“Prudence,” Niall gravely assured him, “is the first need for survival in the Middle Sea.”
“It is ill-done to bait a prisoner, Edric,” Leofric quietly reproved him.
“Nay, will you deny me the last sport I am likely to enjoy?” Niall protested.
The lad Cynric gaped as if he could not believe him real. “Are you not afraid at all?” he blurted, and then flushed scarlet. “You—you take it as a jest—”
Niall considered the question quite seriously for a moment. “My head has sat loose on my shoulders many years.”
"But you go so cheerfully to face Odda—” the boy began, his face creased in bewilderment, and failed to finish the doom-burdened sentence.
Niall grinned. “What choice have I? To be dragged at your brother’s saddle, and goaded by Eglaf’s spear in my backside?”
“He is being meek and obedient,” Edric grimly enlightened the youngster, “hoping that we will grow careless and afford him a chance to run—and God help the man who stands in his way then!"
“He would come to no more harm than would be needful to shift him from it,” Niall assured him. “I bear none of you any ill-will.”
“Edric uttered a bark of unwilling laughter, but Leofric twisted to look sternly down at him. “And you would join yourself to Ubba to ravage our land?”
"No,” Niall said flatly.
"No? What other way would you take?”
“I do not know.” It was the question that had hammered at him day, and he had found no answer; a harsher, more urgent version of the problem that had shaped his whole life. He was at once a Christian and a Norseman, an anomaly rejected by both. He would not fight his faith, he could not fight his kin. His nearest kinsman was one of Ubba’s captains, and Ubba was Christ's avowed foe; Ubba who with his evil brother Ivar the Boneless had ravaged the North, seized Dublin’s Kingship, taken fire and slaughter through the great abbeys of East Anglia, and tortured to death the holy martyr King Edmund. He met Leofric's accusing gaze. “I am a Christian!” he declared half-angrily. “And this is no quarrel of mine and I want no part in it!”
“Your part will be a rope!” croaked the doom-raven Eglaf. Niall shrugged, and thereafter, as the brothers had no more to say, gave his thoughts to escape. His hopes had diminished since morning; the English were entirely too vigilant and too many. He must wait until dusk. Even if by some marvel he could dodge the spears, overthrow Leofric and take his pony, he would easily be run down on the open tops by lighter riders.
As the afternoon wore on the heather-covered heights were left behind. The moors swooped down to rolling foothills. Forest filled the hollows, sweeping eastward in shaggy black masses that lifted again to further hills, lower and less bare. Here and there gaps had been hacked among the trees, and the varied colours of ploughland and pasture betrayed a settlement, but since the farms were usually tucked away in the valley bottoms they were seldom visible. It was a region of farmsteads and small hamlets, not of extensive clearings and populous cornland. In all that day they saw no other man. The hill-pastures were left to deer and wolves, the beasts driven into the woods, the women and children in hiding and the men away with the fyrd.
The sun was descending behind them and their shadows stretching gauntly from their feet, when Leofric turned left-handed into a slight hollow no different from the rest. Over his shoulder he called, “We will spend the night with Redwulf’s folk. They may have news of Odda.” Men grunted agreement, and pushed on the tiring ponies.
The hollow dipped into dark woods, its sides rising steeper and more rough, ribbed with grey rock. A little stream skipped down it from pool to pool. Sheep-paths wound in and out among gorse and bilberry and bracken, converging to a well-marked track, muddy and slippery under thickening trees. Now and again Niall glimpsed, between leafless branches and over the treetops below, the Severn Sea sparkling green and gold under a pale sky.
He grimaced to himself at the thought of being exhibited to Redwulf’s household like a chained bear, and reflected that a stockaded farmstead would afford him less chance of escape than an open camp. He went on stolidly beside the pony. His rawhide shoes, as he had anticipated, had worn through, and tough as his soles were from going barefoot aboard ship, he was footsore and weary, his leg-muscles protesting against the unaccustomed climbing. He looked ahead for the clearing as the valley widened. His ears pricked for the lowing of cattle, a dog’s warning bark, or the thin cries of children. A missel-thrush whistled from a high ash beside the track, a woodpigeon clattered away unseen, and somewhere rooks were squabbling, but no other sound reached him.
Darkness gathered under the trees and overflowed across the path. When it opened into a clearing he blinked at the flood of light and almost tripped over a tree-stump which showed weathered yellow axe-work, that winter’s felling. The track twisted among raw stumps, furrowed and torn by the sledges that had dragged down the timber. Lower down they were grey and decaying, entangled by thickets of brier and bramble. An arm of untouched woodland stretched along the stream’s left bank, so that he had only a narrow view over rough pasture sloiping to ploughland below. The farmstead buildings must be hidden behind the trees.
Uneasiness prickled at Niall’s scalp, and he stared across the clearing for a moment before he knew why. Daylight had still a couple of hours to run, but no beasts grazed on the common, no sheep bleated on the hill, no pigs grunted in the woods. He could hear only woodland birds singing, and the demented quarrelling in the rookery. And not a wisp of smoke climbed into the sky beyond the trees, when every household fire should be cooking supper.
"Are Redwulf’s folk all fled into the woods with their beasts?” Edric wondered aloud.
“Most likely. Too near the sea for aught else. Wind the horn, Wulfstan.”
A long blast resounded down the valley, announcing their arrival as custom and law required. Thrice Wulfstan blew, scaring the woods into silence, and no answer came. Leofric exclaimed under his breath, kicked his mount briskly in the ribs and cut directly across the rough ground to the point of woodland. Niall, taken by surprise, was almost jerked from his feet. He was hauled across the clearing at a run, dodging and jumping obstacles as best he could.
A hooded crow flapped up from a bramble-patch with an angry squawk, followed by another and then a third. Something grey and dull-red lay beyond the brambles, a dead sheep, he guessed.
The pony shied, and Leofric reined in so abruptly that it reared back on its haunches with a squealing neigh of fear. The thong wrenched Niall's's arm almost from its socket, he evaded the flailing hooves by sheer luck, and then Leofric was forcing the trembling beast round the trails of bramble. Niall stumbled with him, and then stopped as if stunned, staring at the crows’ meat with writhing entrails and the colour drained from his face.
A boy of ten or twelve, he judged, though there was little indeed to judge by; wolves had been before the crows. Rags of an undyed woollen garment clung to the remnants. He crossed himself automatically, and above his head Leofric whispered prayers and curses. The others gathered round in dreadful silence. A youngster plunged away to vomit. Another wept. Edric dismoun
ted and stooped.
“Skull split from behind,” he said flatly.
Leofric jerked his horse’s head round and kicked the weary little beast into a scuttering run. Niall had barely time to catch his stirrup-leather and save himself from being dragged. He bounded alongside with his black mane flying, and kept his feet by a frantic clutch when they reached the corner of the woods and Leofric wrenched his pony ruthlessly back on its haunches.
On the slope beyond, white ash mingled with black charcoal in desolate rain-flattened patches, with fragments of seared timber sticking up at odd angles here and there. Parts of the half-burned stockade sagged crazily, black and crooked. They stared white-faced at each other, and in heavy silence moved reluctantly down to where the gate had hung. More gorged crows squawked at them and flapped to perch on the charred stakes, and a fox streaked away down the valley and across the ploughland.
They left the sweating, terrified horses near the gateway, in charge of the three youngest lads. Leofric freed Niall’s bleeding wrist, tugging at the knots with shaking hands, and ordered him forward with a jerk of his head. No one spoke. In the gaping gateway lay the body of a great dog, its head almost severed, torn by the crows. Niall stepped across it, Eglaf’s spear jabbing through his clothes, and the first thing he saw in the open garth was a woman’s corpse, naked and bloody. There were other bodies, some in the open, some charred and black in the burned ruins of hall and cottages, barns and sheds. The wolves had not ventured within the enclosure, but the crows had feasted. Over all hung the stink of burned, damp-quenched wood, of burned flesh and cloth. Niall’s skin crept coldly on his flesh as he saw that there was not a dead man among them. Leofric turned terrible eyes upon him.
“Women and bairns! Your heathen kindred’s work!”
Niall nodded. Speech was beyond his frozen tongue. All his years of sea-faring had never shown him such horror. Leofric’s seax was in his hand, and Niall expected its point in his breast. He had no blame for him. This vileness filled him with the same sick fury, and a searing shame that he had ever claimed kinship with a man of Ubba’s. His steady gaze somehow checked the blow.
Leofric gulped and thrust the blade into its sheath. Niall looked about him again, and then walked steadily towards the dead woman. Edric reached her first, stooped, and then lifted a grey face on which the freckles stood out like ink-blots on parchment.
“Redwulf’s sister Wulfthryth,” he said, his voice half-strangled. Niall looked down once on the used and butchered girl. Himself of entirely normal desires, he could not imagine any man’s taking pleasure in an unwilling woman, much less slaughtering her when he had eased his lust, though warfare bred such men as carrion bred maggots. Edric had moved away, and halted by the two half-burned posts that stood where a cottage door had been. He bent over something beside one, a toddling boy half-buried in damp grey ash that failed to hide his smashed head. Almost at Niall’s feet lay a long strip of blood-dabbled linen, an infant’s swaddling-band. He clenched his hands so that his nails bit into his palms, shivering with nausea.
Edric came back, his lean young face a dead man’s but for his eyes. “Surprised in their beds. Half-dressed at most. Last night.” His lips closed into a white line, and his gaze fastened on Niall in hatred and loathing. They were about him like wolves on a bayed deer, and he waited to be torn in pieces.
“Elfwyn!” Leofric whispered under his breath. “Ah, God!” He lifted his hands to his eyes. Cynric beside him dropped suddenly to his knees in the damp ashes and wept like a child at his first sight of war’s grimmest face, and none rebuked him. The Thane mastered himself, and said in a shaking whisper, “We cannot leave them—not to the wolves—”
“Not to the wolves,” Edric agreed, in a high unnatural voice. Leofric stared blindly about him, and then turned on Niall. “You will bury your kindred’s victims, Dane!” he snarled, his seax at his breast again.
It was just. Leofric could never be less than that. Niall's face stiffened. He nodded. “Dig a pit. I will see to—to all else.”
It was the only atonement he could make, and he made it willingly, sparing the men who had known these dead as friends, though sickness curdled his heart within him. The Englishmen dug a broad trench in the rain-softened earth with spear points, sticks and bare hands, while he carried up the stiff, distorted bodies one by one and laid them in it. Eglaf stalked after him like his shadow, among the ashes and wreckage, up to the woods’ edge and back, through all the burned ruins again in search of the baby in the swaddling-bands until he found her under the stockade where the spear had tossed her. Five women and eleven children made the tally, but it was the baby that finished him. He ripped off his fouled tunic and wrapped her riven body in it; he stood aside as the Englishmen began to throw back the earth, his belly knotting and cold sweat breaking out over all his body, and suddenly his hard-held control broke. He fled down the slope to the stream, never seeing the javelin that flew over his shoulder and thudded into the ground ahead for the tears blinding him, fell on his face among the dead brown rushes and was sick as he had never been in all his days.
Spent and shivering, he crawled at last to the water’s edge. It was icy cold, but he scrubbed at his hands and soused his head in it again and again in a kind of frenzy. When at last he sat up to wring out his dripping hair he was dully surprised to find Leofric standing over him and a half-circle of English steel around him. He stumbled somehow to his feet. He would die standing, not crouching on his knees like a craven. He clasped his hands behind his back and straightened to his great height, his dark eyes fixed on the Englishman’s grey ones instead of on the seax.
“I do not blame you,” he said tonelessly. “May God acquit you of it also. Only let it be at your own hand, and quickly.”
4
Slowly, fumbling a little, Leofric slipped the long knife into its sheath. Niall’s hands locked more tightly over each other. It was to be a harder way, then; the dishonour of a rope. Indeed, how could he have imagined that they would grant him a better death for what had been done in the burned farm? It was vengeance they asked. Under his breath, his lips moving soundlessly, he began to repeat the prayers for the dying remembered from his boyhood in the great monastery.
Leofric said violently, “Blame? What fault of yours it is?”
Niall stared at him. “They were of my blood who did that vileness.”
“Let each man bear his own guilt!” cried Leofric over the muttering of his livid men.
“It is not good to me to live after I saw,” Niall said in the lifeless voice extreme shock had left him. “Let blood pay for blood, Thane of Wessex.”
"Do you think innocent blood will pay us?” snarled Leofric, and turned sharply to plunge through the murderous ring. “Bring him along!” he ordered over his shoulder, and made furiously for the horses.
Niall went with them like a sheep. He stood dumbly at Leofric's stirrup and held out his wrist, his head hanging so that his long hair screened his grey face. Rough hands made him fast, but he did not look up to see whose. Crows squawked from the unburned posts of the stockade, a row of them waiting to resume their interrupted meal. He shivered at the sound and stared at the trampled grass beneath his feet. Then the thong jerked him away, and he shambled along beside the pony like a drunken man, neither knowing nor caring where he went.
They did not go far; back up the valley they had descended, until the woods hid the dead farmstead from sight. In a sheltered hollow among the trees they unsaddled and made camp, tethering the hardy ponies where they could graze on the new young grass, building a fire and dispiritedly preparing a meal. The immediate flare of rage had died in them to a steady, bitter glow; they were grim and silent, haunted by memory of what they had seen and by fear for their own women and children left unprotected. Niall, released and pushed into the midst of their activities, sank down against a tree-bole with his head on his knees, paying no more heed to his captors. The horrors he could not thrust aside came between his closed eyelids and the
darkness. He shivered even though a fire was beginning to snap and crackle close by.
Men moved about him. The fire grew hotter, drying his clammy shirt where it was exposed and his long hair. Scents of cooking overbore the cold scents of wet earth and crushed herbage, but the woodsmoke was like death in his nostrils. Someone growled a disparaging comment on his manhood; he heard the words as from a great distance, but they meant nothing. Eglaf jerked his head up by the hair and thrust a lump of bread under his nose. He struck the hand aside and buried his face in his crossed arms, his entrails heaving within him. Thereafter they left him alone in his shame and abasement, and gathered round the fire to eat a gloomy meal, devoid of conversation.
A toe prodded briskly at Niall’s thigh. “You take it hard, Dane,” said Leofric’s grim voice. He moved his head on his knees, but made no answer. The toe prodded him again. “Have you not seen before how Ubba’s host makes war?”
Niall drew a ragged breath. “It was the baby,” he muttered without lifting his head, his voice muffled. “The baby tossed on the spear. By my kin.”
“They were my kin who died,” said the wintry voice.
“You should have slain me there.”
“No.”
Niall looked up at last, and blinked stupidly in surprise. Darkness had come down while he crouched under the tree, and Leofric stood over him in red firelight, his face reflecting its glow from its angular bones, dark-shadowed in its hollows. “I did not tell you,” he said steadily, “that my father’s cousin is one of Ubba’s captains.”
“Who?”
“Rorik Cropear.”
“Aye, now we have the truth,” Leofric said contemptuously. “We know his name in Wessex. You came to join him?”
“I did not lie. I have never met him.”
“Then why name him now?”
“It is not good to me that I should live.”
“I did not know that a Dane had a conscience,” Edric commented savagely from the other side of the tree.
The Price of Blood Page 5