The Price of Blood

by Doris Sutcliffe Adams

  Eymund was whispering to him. “Niall, trust me to aid you whatever happens! If Rorik learns—he is murderous with grief! He has followed Ubba so long—”

  “Did you find it to your liking to follow Ubba?” Niall asked sternly.

  Eymund shot a quick glance at him and coloured sulkily. “Well enough,” he muttered, and would not meet his gaze.

  “Ravishing maids and tossing babies on spears?” Niall persisted grimly.

  “These—such things happen when men go to war. You were always soft—I have not—and they are only enemies! And it is more profitable than trading!”

  “And less risky, waged that way,” Niall answered bitingly. Eymund had always derided his faith and the scruples it engendered in him, and loot was the abiding interest of his life. Yet there was shame behind his defiance. He had not, after all, liked the way Ubba waged war.

  “I heard you won great treasure last voyage,” he said after a moment, pursuing a train of thought that Niall had no difficulty in following.

  “Aye.”

  “But where are Gorm and Helgi and the others—and the Raven?”

  “All dead, and the Raven too.”

  “Dead? All dead? But—Niall, they are coming!” He glanced belatedly at the helmsman, a few feet away on the starboard side, but the man had not turned his head, and Eymund drew a relieved breath. If he had heard the muttered conversation above the gurgle of water he would doubtless have reacted violently.

  Two men were striding down the central gangway. The foremost was a tall man with a bony dangerous face and sandy hair under a plain conical helmet. The other was Rorik Cropear. Niall knew him only by repute, but his appearance matched that. He was elderly for a Viking, in his early forties, shortish and stocky, a brown man with a fierce flat snub-nosed face. His left ear had been sliced off flush with his head save for half an inch or so of lobe, a disfigurement which was peculiarly conspicuous because his remaining ear was outstanding as a jug-handle and large enough for two.

  “The other is Skuli Skullsplitter,” Eymund whispered. “This is his Firedrake—the only ship we could reach. It was the last to escape.”

  Skuli Skullsplitter had also achieved a certain fame as a chieftain, most of it from Frisia to the Baltic, and he notoriously found co-operation so uncongenial that he had never followed any commander for longer than one season. Niall felt his pulse quickening. He stood up, putting out a hand to the dragon-tail stern-post to steady himself. He would have gone forward to meet them, but by the time he could trust his legs to uphold him firmly it was too late; Skuli Skullsplitter was on the poop, standing aside for Rorik to be first in greeting his kinsman. Eymund, wallowing nervously, made him known.

  'Rorik, this is Niall, your mother’s brother’s grandson.”

  "I am glad at last to know you, kinsman,” declared Rorik, and looked him up and down with no apparent pleasure. “Your sire for size and your dam for colour,” he commented, and by his tone the latter was to be deplored. “So at last you have forsaken the foul error of your rearing and come to the old faith and the true gods?” he demanded in deep satisfaction.

  Niall opened his lips to deny it, but a hand gripped viciously at his elbow and Eymund rushed into speech to prevent him. “Skuli, this is Niall Southfarer, my kinsman and a valiant captain.”

  “That any man learns who spends a day in your company,” Skuli said dryly, and smiled at Niall in friendly fashion. He had the very pale blue eyes that combine with light red hair to form the most inflammable of mixtures, but his mouth showed humour. “You are welcome aboard. I have wished to meet you since I heard of your voyage southward. It is true that you sailed under the sun until it stood behind you?”

  “True. East and west stayed on either hand, and the sun at noon was in the north. But no man ever believes it.”

  “Oh, I believe you. I have seen the sun stand in the north myself.”

  Niall’s eyebrows lifted in surprise and interest. “But you have not sailed south?”

  "North. One summer I sailed for Shetland and was storm-driven far north. The sun swung round the sky day and night without setting, and at midnight stood in the north.”

  Niall had heard before of this phenomenon, and he would have liked an eye-witness’s account of it as much as Skuli would obviously have enjoyed hearing of his own experiences; each sea-captain’s face was alight with curiosity, his tongue quivering with questions. Rorik, who was not a sea-captain and whose mind was irremoveably set on battle, loot and present disaster, grunted impatiently and spat to leeward. Skuli grimaced wryly at Niall and shouted orders to the weary, battered rowers. The anchor was dropped, the oars lifted inboard, and the Firedrake swung gently on her cable as the tide swept past, chuckling against her sides. In the distance Niall could see two more ships standing over to the Welsh coast, and a third and fourth further down the channel. His legs were steady now, and his ears had almost ceased to ring. He could stand unsupported, though Eymund stayed beside him with a hand under his arm, his face anxious.

  Another man advanced down the gangway between the oarsmen sprawled gloomily on their benches, a huge hairy bear who overtopped even Niall by a couple of inches and must have outweighed him by forty pounds. He hoisted himself to the poop, and Skuli made him known. “My half-brother Aslak.” Something in his voice suggested to Niall that the kinship would not have been of his choosing.

  The two giants measured each other in instant, mutual antipathy. Aslak had the mottled skin, bloated features and bloodshot eyes of the habitual heavy drinker, a scowl that suggested a grievance against all mankind, and a mouth like a shark’s. He made some inarticulate, surly noise of acknowledgement and slouched to his half-brother’s side. The crew disposed itself to wait while the leaders took counsel after disaster. Niall courteously stepped back to the starboard side of the poop, but the space was too small to allow him to withdraw more than two strides. Eymund moved with him, screwing up his face in urgent warning. Eymund would not betray him, but there could be only one way out of this predicament and he postponed it but to recover a little more strength. There was half a mile of running tide between him and the shore, and only Heaven knew how far they had come on the ebb while he lay senseless.

  Rorik stared gloomily at the rocks and woods and the hills rising behind them. “We never even brought his body off!” he growled. “Ubba Ragnar’s son left to feed English wolves and ravens, after he gave them meat all these years! Are we to creep out of Wessex with our bare lives, and leave him unavenged? Wessex owes us man-price!”

  Skuli nodded heavily, his hands on the larboard gunwale gripping tightly as he, too, stared at the shore. “Evil was the hour when I chose to follow Ubba, for I left my youngest brother beside him.”

  Aslak growled again, and spat noisily into the sea.

  “Evil the hour indeed,” mourned Rorik, “and for Ubba of all captains, who has trampled England under his feet from end to mid!”

  “No man’s luck holds for ever, and the gods break it in the hour of his high pride,” Skuli murmured. Niall looked at his lean back in quickened interest; Skuli was that oddity among Vikings, a man who thought.

  “Luck, pride or what you will, he is dead,” Aslak snarled in scant courtesy. “What do we do who live?”

  “Wessex owes us wergild, and we owe Ubba vengeance!” Rorik persisted.

  “I say close our hands on what is nearest,” Aslak advised. Slaves and a quick run for Dublin market. The men are all with the army.”

  "There are watchers on all the hills and headlands, the folk have fled from the shore villages, and no stranger could surprise them in their woods,” Skuli objected.

  “Land a strong force to march inland and surprise a village. Women and brats, and a few beasts for a strand-slaughter, so that we do not row to Dublin on empty bellies,” Rorik suggested.

  Skuli gazed intently at the hills and woods of the shore-line, still and secret, at once inviting and forbidding, and made no answer.

  Aslak snorted disgus
t. “Left your manhood in young Kari’s split guts, that you will not take blood for his?” he demanded brutally.

  His half-brother merely turned his head, but at the flash of his blue eyes Aslak recoiled as from a blow. Skuli ignored him and spoke to Rorik. “The gods have laid ill-luck on Ubba and all his venture. Will you run against their will?”

  “What profit is there in these hill farmsteads beyond stinking fish and a bony pig or two?” Eymund suddenly joined the argument. “I say, let us go where the payment comes in gold and not edged steel! Niall here can pilot you to wealth enough to freight the Firedrake, and only merchants and soft townsmen to guard it!" He pressed Niall’s arm in warning as the other three turned on him.

  Where?” asked Aslak simply, licking his thin lips.

  “Last summer Niall brought out of Spain the richest plunder that ever came into Waterford harbour!”

  “Dragon’s gold,” said Niall curtly, as all eyes fixed on his face. “It brought death.”

  They did not heed him. Eymund was plunging eagerly on. “Wessex is a picked bone beside the Middle Sea! All its shores shine with cities and palaces never sacked in an old man’s lifetime, and Niall knows every harbour and market!”

  Niall’s lips twitched. This was more than the childish greed apparent, but a frantic attempt to protect him should they later discover the truth. He was in no humour to use that shield. They were looking at each other and at him with wakening interest. Cupidity shone in their eyes as they considered the proposal, doubtfully at first and then as a possibility. Rorik was regarding his young kinsman with the first respect he had accorded him, a respect which was not reciprocated. Niall had listened to the ruthless discussion of slave-raiding in a mounting fury that he made no attempt to conceal, for all Eymund’s urgent signals, longing for a weapon in his hand.

  “If half what Eymund says is true, he did not waste trouble hauling you aboard,” Rorik conceded, too intent on his own greedy thoughts to trouble about reading Niall’s, plain in his grim young face. “Then a voyage south offers more plunder than the Abbeys of East Anglia?”

  “East Anglia?” Niall echoed, his face darkening at that name. East Anglia’s fate had made all England shudder.

  Rorik’s brows lifted in mild surprise. “I was there with Ubba and Ivar.”

  “Those hell-spawned monsters!”

  Eymund grabbed him by both arms, but Niall threw him off so violently that he fell headlong. He would shelter no longer behind his evasions.

  “You should have left squeamishness in Erin with your Christian faith!” Rorik sneered. “How did a whey-blooded whelp like you come into Ubba’s hosts?”

  “Cutting my path through it with Odda, for Wessex and Christian faith!” Niall snarled, and laughed harshly into their astonished faces as he stepped back until the gunwale touched his legs. Eymund, picking himself up from among their feet, stayed frozen helplessly on hands and knees.

  Skuli and Rorik were entangled with him. Aslak grabbed out his dagger and lurched forward. Niall kicked him in his ale-vat of a belly with all his power, snatched up the dagger as it clattered from his paralysed hand, and as the giant collapsed retching, threw himself backward over the gunwale in a somersaulting dive.

  He sounded deeply, striking powerfully beneath the Firedrake’s keel through cold green water, and the tide gripped him; when he surfaced with bursting lungs he was a good thirty yards aft and inshore. He gulped a great breath, tucked the dagger into his belt, and glanced back once to see an empty gunwale as all looked for him to starboard. Then he drove hard for the shore, quartering across the tide at an angle to gain what help he could from it. He was well beyond effective javelin range when the yell of discovery came faintly through the water in his ears, and he doubted that they had a javelin aboard after the battle.

  The Vikings hoisted overside the light skiff she carried, and five men dropped into it. Looking back occasionally from a wave’s crest he could see the oars biting the sea as they followed him. One man stood in the bows with poised spear, Rorik by his shape. Niall swam for his life, knowing that he had none too long a start; they could make as good use of the tide as he could, and every wave seemed to bring them nearer.

  The shore was close now, but the boat was closer and coming in fast. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed movement, and instantly rolled sideways and under. The spear grazed by him so narrowly that the shaft of it touched his shoulder, and he continued his roll into a long, shallow dive, swimming under water as far as he could. His hand touched stone, and he twisted, kicked against it and shot to the surface. The boat had checked for Rorik to recover his spear, apparently their only missile, which was a sorry error when they could have overtaken him and battered him to death with oar-blades. It gave him the few moments that meant life rather than death. He was in the breakers, going in with a great surging comber, riding it until the last moment before it crashed down and then pulling back into the trough so that he was not dashed upon the shingle. He found his feet, waist-deep in the tugging backwash, and waded up the beach over rolling pebbles.

  He splashed out of the shallows, gasping and stumbling, as the boat came in and the five men swung overside to run it up the beach. They were less than thirty yards behind him as he pounded up the slope, over the pebbles and the sand and the bright flower-starred turf towards the woods that offered his only hope of escape. His pursuers wasted breath shouting threats. He ran, his heart hammering at his ribs, his water-logged clothes grappling at his limbs. He crashed through a thicket of wind-stunted thorn, his arms up to protect his face, grimly aware that his white shirt made a clear mark among the leafless trees.

  He doubled right. The valley was narrowing, as so many of them seemed to do, to a tree-choked ravine. He climbed along the side of it, recovering his wind as he went, until a yell from below told him that he had been sighted, and the chase was on. They hunted him up the valley, howling like wolves at a stag’s heels, for over a mile. He gave up trying to dodge or take cover, conspicuous as he was among the greens and browns that betrayed him, and risked all on outdistancing them in one great burst of speed that exhausted breath and hunger-sapped strength. In a wild valley of rocks where two streams met he went to ground at the mouth of a badger-sett. He writhed into the deep cleft behind a high rock, and lay pressed face-down to the loose soil behind a rank screen of elder and young nettles.

  The Danes beat about quite close to where he lay and shivered in the chill air, so close that he wondered wryly why they did not trace him by the chattering of his teeth. He clutched the dagger and prayed that Rorik or Aslak might be the one to find him if his luck were out; he would reckon his life not ill-lost if he sent either before him. He heard them go up the first stream, calling to each other. Their voices faded into the distance, and then returned. Every word came clearly to him as they debated whether to try the other valley, and regretfully decided that the fugitive had won clear away. They tramped off.

  Niall lay unmoving until the woods were still again, except for the laughter of the streams. He waited until the first robin began to whistle before he crawled out, rubbed his nettle-stung face and grinned ruefully at an inquisitive squirrel eyeing him from a low branch. The squirrel chattered indignantly, streaked up the trunk and out of sight. Niall got stiffly to his feet, stretched and shivered. He regarded his plight with mingled amusement and dismay, silently pledged his future protection to the hospitable race of badgers, and made for the water. Sea and earth had mingled to mud on him; his clothes were heavy with it, his skin caked and his hair clogged and dripping.

  At the first pool he stripped and went in, scouring himself with handfuls of sand. He pounded his clothes clean of mud and blood, wrung them and flung them over bushes to dry. He had flint and iron in his purse, which had been left on his belt by Leofric’s people. He gathered dead sticks, found touchwood in a rotten stump, and after some trouble got a fire going. Utterly spent, he curled up on the dead leaves and slept.

  He wakened when the fire bur
ned low, piled on more wood and sat beside it, wondering what he should do. He had no idea how far the ebb-tide and the Firedrake had carried him from Odda and the battleground, but he must somehow make his way to the Englishmen whose cause he had chosen. At last he bestirred his reluctant body, dragged on his woefully ragged clothing, and then tore away the better part of his shirt to bind up his battered feet. He cut a stout ash-pole, trimmed and sharpened it, and hardened the point in the fire. So equipped, he started up the valley. There was very little left of the young trader who had walked Waterford’s harbour side in scarlet and jewels. The lasses who had competed to catch his fancy today would flee screaming as from a troll’s embraces.

  The slope eased as he reached the crest, and the stream was a quiet little brook in a fold of the broad hills. He looked for a crossing-place, and then checked; a silver flick of movement caught his kindling eye. He had not forgotten his boyhood knack of tickling trout, and his belly cried out for filling.

  When he left the stream behind him he had half a dozen grilled trout inside him, and his head only reminded him of the clout he had taken when he moved it incautiously. He mounted with new vigour to the moor’s edge, and knew at last where he was, on the eastward edge of the hills he had crossed as a tethered prisoner. Quite near, maybe in the next valley, lay the farmstead Ubba’s wolves had ravaged. He thrust the memory from him. The shadows stretched north-eastward; he had maybe three hours of daylight left. He must be more than half a day’s march from the place of battle, and he turned his face towards it.

  Another thought halted him. He was within a day’s journey of brockhurst, where defenceless women and children waited in dread. He thought of valiant Judith and pretty, gentle Elfwyn, so near her time. Ubba’s beaten veterans were still haunting the coast; they might have need of a man’s strength. He could comfort them with news of victory, if he could not give exact tidings of each man’s fate. Even the red lass might reckon that worth a welcome. He turned west.