The Price of Blood

by Doris Sutcliffe Adams

  “It will tear your heart to sell her,” said Judith, scrambling to join him before he could offer a hand. “Where can you sell her?”

  “Dublin is the market for doubtfully-won goods, if I can be there and away before any Dane who might tell how I had her,” he answered, blithely thrusting aside the obstacle. The swan’s path opened before him, dazzling brighter than ever because he had thought it closed to him. He had a ship. The rest would follow, best of all, he had Judith, who would stand beside him in Rome and Miklagard and Jerusalem at the world’s navel, however he had to win her.

  She slipped a hand into his as naturally as a child. “What goods do you trade, Niall?” she asked, her face alive with interest. No man would ever call her fair, but the sun turned her hair to a wonder of flame, and her clear grey eyes were fringed with long dark lashes like feathers, though grief had smudged shadows beneath them. He could scarcely keep his arms from her, in his longing to give her comfort.

  “Aught that offers. Amber, furs, pitch, walrus-teeth from the North. Salt, hides, cheese, honey. From Africa, gold and feathers, elephants’ teeth, mastic and incense. And Miklagard is the world’s treasure-house. Silks woven like rainbows, gold and jewels, carvings and paintings, more than any man can tell.”

  The cold hand tightened. “All the wonders of this world?” she asked softly.

  Without intending it he spoke his desire. “Come with me to Miklagard, Judith?”

  “To the earth’s edge if you go. Dare I let you beyond my reach?”

  He gaped at her, and she lifted her eyes with a queer shy look that pointed her hard words, before it vanished in a smile that left him no doubts. “Judith!” he gasped, and caught her up. Her slim body came eagerly into his arms, her unpractised mouth met his, and she clung to his shoulders, pressing tightly to him. His salt-sticky hair fell over her face and mingled with her red curls, and her breasts were soft against his hard body. But her lips tasted salt as the tears she had shed, and he snatched at sanity and set her on her feet. She reached up on tiptoe to pull his head down to her mouth. Her lips trembled, and new tears sparkled in her eyes.

  “Judith, my heart, forgive me! I had not meant to touch you before I spoke with Edric!” he whispered remorsefully.

  “Edric?”

  “Your honour is mine, and I will make no breach in it. When I ask Edric to give his sister in wedlock to a Northman, what will he answer?”

  “That there is no man he would sooner call brother!”

  He smiled wryly, his brows lifting. “Fair hearing, Judith, but a most unlikely guess.”

  “Guess? It is what he told me when he wished me God speed.”

  It struck him like a blow. He had never imagined that Edric regarded him with any feeling warmer than tolerance. Judith eyed him sardonically as he tried to realize that he had no opposition to wear down, no obstacles to overcome, no long campaign to wage. There would be no resentments left to fester in the future and poison his marriage as his father’s had been poisoned, no heritage of contempt for his children to bear. “But I thought he would hate me!” he blurted foolishly.

  “Lackwit, what should any of us do but love you?”

  He could only marvel. Comradeship of a sort they had shared, but Edric, hard, cool and practical as a sound sword-blade, had shown little sign of personal regard. Niall liked him more than a little, but for his part, though easy in his manners as a trader needs to be, he was reserved in friendship, schooled too long by the rejections engendered by his anomalous status. He drew Judith close to his side. “I am luckier than ever I dreamed,” he said simply.

  “You must remember that red-haired shrews are not easily disposed of,” she mocked him. Her head fitted very neatly into his shoulder, and her red hair, blown into a thousand little tendrills, curled into his short beard and mingled with his own tangled mane.

  “She is no home to offer a woman,” he said soberly, glancing over the rowing-benches and realizing with compunction that the cramped and crowded shipboard life must sorely irk a woman alone in that essentially masculine world.

  “Should I sit ashore reckoning the perils you will plunge into? I go with you.”

  He bent and kissed her hair, proud of her gallant spirit and humbled by her perfect trust in him, a stranger and an outlander. Some day she would desire a home and a household, when their children were born if not before. He put that knowledge aside for future pondering, too dazzled by his dreams’ brightness to consider aught that might break them. The sea was his life, and she was eager to share the ventures of a sailor who knew nothing of ploughs and beasts and harvests.

  He remembered then that he was a seaman and looked briskly about him. Now the point was past the shore trended away south and west in a broad bay, wider than any he had yet seen along this coast of low cliffs and steep narrow valleys. Behind a broad shingle ridge glinted yellow sand, and beyond that lifted green pasture, brown ploughland, high dark woods and the hills rising to the blue moors. At the bay’s western end cliffs humped steeply into a tree-covered hill whose crest showed like a bald man’s crown. Wisps of smoke drifted thin and blue against the green-misted woods, and he discerned, in a slight hollow, a stockade’s weathered logs. But for the smoke he might easily have missed it. He turned for a last look up-channel before the point hid it, and saw the prowling longships again, closer than before.

  He cursed them inwardly and scanned the bay. An ant-like figure was scuttling across the pasture. Niall grinned as he pictured the alarm and confusion seething behind that stockade like an ants’ nest overset, at sight of a Viking vessel in the bay. He wondered aloud how long it would take the English to see that she was helplessly adrift and crewless. They were fishermen along this shore, seamen of a sort. He steadied himself and Judith against the ship’s antics; as they came inshore the tide swung her broadside to the wind, making her plunge and roll like a playful porpoise.

  Eymund called, “A Devon welcome is on its way!”

  From a concealed inlet under the hill first one and then a second fishing-boat was rowed out, followed by a third and a fourth. Steel twinkled in the sunshine. The first boat’s square sail went up, and it came ducking and butting through the choppy waves. “Speak for me, Judith,” Niall requested placidly. “A Danish voice will be answered with steel.”

  Thirty yards away the leading boat went about, the sail flapped down and the oars were run out again. She bobbed off the Firedrake’s starboard side, where the four waited. A stocky man stood straddle-legged in her bows, his helmed head lifted to stare in puzzlement even as he poised his javelin. Niall's heart thumped uncomfortably as he saw that fierce flat face, grizzle-bearded to the cheekbones; it was not a face to be reasoned with.

  “Baldred Kenelm’s son of Meliscombe?” Judith called across the heaving water. Her hand was fast on Niall’s. He could feel the quickened beat of a pulse as it closed harder, but there was no tremor in her voice.

  The stocky man lowered his point, his eyes rounding in unbelief. “Aye,” he said harshly. “Who are you, girl, to drift here in a Danish ship and speak for men?”

  “God save you, Baldred. I am Judith, sister to Leofric Ethelric’s son of Brockhurst. We come in peace.”

  “Let men speak for themselves!” Baldred ordered, scowling up at Niall and Eymund on the foredeck. The other boats had gathered about his; points twinkled menace, and as many goggling eyes were turned on the unaccountable arrival as might stare from a netful of mackerel. Eymund lightly swung the captured Danish axe, and Niall made a little warning sign with one hand. He crossed himself deliberately.

  “God save all here,” he saluted them composedly. The Christian greeting in his Norse voice froze them with javelins lifted. “I am Niall Egil’s son out of Waterford in Erin, and Christian. Will you take peace from us?”

  “Peace—Danes?” he spluttered.

  “If you come in peace, come aboard freely.”

  “And if you do not, you will be first to die,” Eymund said calmly.

  Bal
dred looked wildly from sea to sky for wisdom. “Peace let it be,” he agreed in a strangled voice. Then his mouth snapped shut, he signalled fiercely to his rowers and the boat surged alongside. As she bumped gently against the Firedrake’s planking he hitched his shield over his shoulder by its strap, caught the gunwale and swung himself heavily inboard. His men tumbled after him as he rolled forward, and the other boats closed in.

  Niall freed his hand from Judith’s grip and stepped to the edge of the little foredeck, his heart hammering violently.

  “No more of you?” Baldred spat, glowering about him as though he expected armed heathens to leap howling out of the empty benches. “Come down!”

  “As you see,” Niall answered, ignoring the order. He had too few advantages to surrender that small one of position. More men were scrambling aboard, a dozen or so, hungry eyes on them and ready hands on their weapons. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw an oar lunge from one of the boats, a violent blow took him between the shoulders and beat him headlong from the foredeck.

  Baldred’s reactions were far from fast, so he fell softly. They crashed together upon an oarbench and rolled over it. An anguished grunt blew in Niall’s ear, his skull thwacked solidly against timber and filled with sparks, bony knees thumped upon him, and before he could do more than gasp, his arms had been twisted up behind him and his wrists lashed together. Rough hands hauled at his heavy bulk, lugging it off something that squirmed, and slammed him against wood. Dizzily he lifted his ringing head, and blinked through something wet and warm that ran into his eyes. He was propped against the Firedrake’s side. Judith was struggling with a lanky fisherman, and from the other side of the bench Eymund’s voice cursed Baldred and seven generations of his female forebears in distempered detail.

  His men hoisted Baldred, flattened and gulping, onto the opposite bench and hovered over him as he tenderly explored the contused parts of his carcase. Niall dragged himself up a little, and tried to smile at Judith through the blood trickling down into his beard.

  Judith’s white face flamed. She ducked her head and snapped vixen’s teeth on her captor’s hand, and as he yelped in pain and surprise she kicked free and ran to Niall. With her sleeve she smeared the blood from his brow and eyes, pressed one fierce kiss on his mouth and then whirled to stand over him.

  “Before God, you will answer with your lives to my brothers and to Odda himself, for any harm you do my betrothed husband!” she stated icily.

  Niall lurched awkwardly to his feet, hampered by his bound arms. “Is your word of peace worth nothing?” he demanded contemptuously of Baldred, gasping tallow-faced on the oarbench.

  The fellow with the bleeding hand pounced snarling on Judith and hauled her back by the hair, grappling her to his body with one long arm that pinned her arms.

  “Whores that lie with Danes should hang with them!” officiously squeaked a beardless whelp sprung from among the men’s feet, and not one clouted him headlong for his presumption. Instead Baldred heaved himself erect and nodded weightily.

  “No peace for Danes,” he announced flatly. “Hang them all.”

  13

  The Englishmen penned them against the foredeck, where the boy Alfgar already stood bound, his ice-blue eyes fixed on Baldred in fathomless disgust. Eymund, always vocal, seemed unlikely to end his commentary on Baldred’s genealogy until he had traced it to the sons of Noah, and sea-faring had salted his tongue. Judith’s arms were tied and she was thrust among them. She pressed close to Niall, her red head high, and her bound hands reached across for his and her fingers fumbled at the knots. Neither uttered a word. Niall briefly stooped his head to lay his cheek against her bright hair, and she looked up into his eyes and smiled, still worrying unavailingly at his bonds.

  Unhandily, for they had obviously never before wrestled with a longship’s great oars, the Englishmen manned eight pairs, enough to get the Firedrake under way. Baldred limped aft to take the tiller, the cub trailing at his heels. Slowly the awkward crew tugged her across the bay towards the shingle ridge, where another four or five men were waiting. The boats bobbed along with her, bumping and swinging free as she wallowed, like a brood of ungainly cygnets about a stately swan. The sight was enough to make any captain wince. Yet seamen they were, of a sort, and presently they found the weight and swing of the work so that she crawled crab-wise to the shore.

  The Firedrake’s keel grated upon the shingle. Only a full crew of muscular Vikings trained to the task could manhandle a long-ship up a beach, and Baldred did not attempt to break out the rollers. They left her to strand on the falling tide, and thrust the prisoners into the fishing-boats to row ashore. Those waiting on the beach were a group of half-grown boys, who crossed themselves at sight of the black-maned giant, staring as though he had sprung all smoking through Hell’s gate.

  Baldred of Meliscombe looked about him to select a tree that would make a brave showing of four warnings to other marauders, but there was none at hand fit to do full justice to his purpose. The Englishmen debated the matter with much gesticulation. Eymund, completing his last masterpiece of invective, turned a bleakly scornful eye upon his hangmen. “It would have been a worthy deed to paunch the swine when the chance offered,” he commented.

  “By nightfall he will hang from his own tree,” Judith answered, her hard clear voice stilling the dispute. “My brothers will see to that.”

  Baldred turned on her, his hand lifting to strike, and Niall spoke swiftly to draw his wrath upon himself. “Waste no words on a forsworn nithing,” he said bitingly. “Had he been a man he would have fought with Odda—”

  A blow on the mouth finished his sentence for him, and Baldred blared like an angry bull. “That tree yonder—make haste!” He started up the shingle-ridge, and his men prodded the captives forward at javelin-point towards a wind-warped oak growing a little apart on the edge of the pasture. If it would make no conspicuous display, its wide limbs would accommodate more than four. Niall measured with his eye the scant half-mile of life left them, and chilled. He took one look over his shoulder at the wide bay sparkling under the sun, the Firedrake settling on her beam-ends as the tide receded, and then gazed in sharp anguish at those his wilfulness had brought to this; the cool boy, valiant Eymund and his dearest on earth.

  “It was my fault—all my fault!” he whispered aloud. He swung round to face Baldred of Meliscombe, saw the smile of vindictive satisfaction spread across his face, and yet for their sakes humbled himself to appeal, knowing forlornly that it was useless; no one more merciless than a coward once his skin is out of jeopardy. “The lady is sister to the Thane of Brockhurst! Will you—”

  A spear-butt under the ribs jolted him backwards, another between the shoulders beat him on. He gazed dumbly at Judith, his dark eyes full of grief and bitter remorse, and she smiled at him, though her freckles were dark upon pallor. The whelp squealed in gleeful mockery of their torment, and raised his javelin to prick them on. Then his face changed, eyes and mouth rounding in horror, and he loosed a screech that halted every man in his stride to gape where he pointed.

  “Danes! Danes!”

  Less than a mile away to their left riders were spilling from the woods, following the rough turf and the sandbanks that curved round the bay towards them. They gathered into a close group and then broke into a trot, two-score or more of horsemen with a small tail of men afoot loping after. Steel twinkled; these were no ill-armed country folk of the Wessex fyrd. Niall’s heart thumped; they might yet live. The English stared wildly about them, not knowing whether to stand or to run when neither would preserve them.

  Baldred’s heavy face sagged flabbily from slack jaws. Then desperation hardened it. “Stand fast!” he shouted hoarsely. “We hold these hostages!” He dropped his spear and lifted his seax to Niall’s throat. Eymund laughed.

  The riders were coming as fast as the rough ground permitted. A ship’s crew that had accomplished a successful foray, perhaps, mistaking the Firedrake for their own craft. Then, as he sa
w more clearly, Niall noted something odd. Neither men nor horses were burdened with aught that might be plunder—and how should a ship’s crew that had surprised a farmstead or two have come by so many horses ? He screwed up his eyes against the sun, ignoring the knife. The foremost rider wore a red cloak, a gay mark against green turf and dark woods. He reined in and turned in the saddle. His arm swept round, a spear-point gleaming in a wide arc, and the strung-out tail of unmounted men slanted across the sands towards the grey pebble ridge and the stranded Firedrake.

  Niall stiffened, staring at the man beside the leader. A blue cloak, a shield of blue splashed with black and red, a bulky square-set body and a confident lift of the head—even at nearly half a mile he could not be mistaken. A grin of pure delight transfigured his strained face, and he filled his lungs to span the narrowing space with a jubilant hail.

  “Odda of Devon! Odda!”

  The blue-cloaked man flung up an arm and spurred his horse into a full gallop. Baldred looked wildly over his shoulder, and for want of any better inspiration continued to hold his knife to Niall’s throat.

  “It is Ealdorman Odda!” yelped a man among the milling English.

  Then Odda was upon them, roaring Niall’s name, hauling his pony back on its haunches, flinging himself from its back with a broad grin splitting his beard. His grin turned to a snarl. One swing of his massive arm bowled the palsied Baldred headlong in a flurry of tunic-skirts and heels. Lathered ponies slid to a turf-tearing halt about them. Strong arms grappled Niall in a bear’s embrace, a heavy paw thwacked him on the shoulder, and then a knife coldly touched his wrists and the thongs jerked and parted. Odda’s rough fingers gripped his bare arms.