Yet uneasiness nagged him, and on the headland he paused to search down-channel for the prowling longships. A sense of men and events converging on Meliscombe filled him with vague foreboding. Two longships’ crews, or even one, would eat them up in one red mouthful. They might reckon it worth while to aid a comrade helplessly adrift, and if they were embroiled with Rorik and a horde of vengeful Danes assailed their backs, the cliffside would make a very tight trap.
They reached the clearing about the stockade to see the company’s last stragglers and its tail of boys and dogs disappearing inside the gateway. Edric and Odda waited for them and came to meet them. Niall instinctively glanced down to the deserted beach and the Firedrake lying helpless and forlorn like a stranded whale, with the incoming waves lapping at her stern. He halted to gaze on her who would give him back the freedom of all the seas her keel could furrow.
Odda gripped his arm. “Put that folly from your mind, lad,” he growled. “Where will you find a sea without Danish sails, or a port they do not moor in? They raid the Middle Sea. The tale of this work will run before you, and you will never be safe afloat from vengeance!”
“What man goes to sea for safety?” Niall retorted, his longing eyes on the craft that was his and yet not his.
“Lad, I will take you into my household, or grant you land in Wessex. I will speak for you with the King—”
“I thank you, but I am a seaman and a trader.”
Odda let be with a grunt and a shrug of heavy shoulders, and Edric spoke to cover his disappointment. “The King has forbidden our cutting any but Danish throats and persuaded Baldred to feed us. Come within.”
14
“It will make an end,” said the King, toying absently with his empty horn. He looked up suddenly from the littered board, his thin strong hand stilled, his grey-blue eyes intent on Niall’s. “You know what it is you do?”
“Aye, lord King.”
“They are your kinsmen. I know Christian faith has sundered you, but blood is blood, and you go to spill it.”
“They deserve killing,” Niall said in a very low voice, staring at his own clasped hands on the table. Beyond them the long brown fingers played restlessly with the horn. He heard the King sigh.
“The greater pity, going ignorantly to Hell. But I am saying this to you because you are a man of conscience. If your near kinsman dies by your act or contriving, he will haunt the rest of your days.”
Niall jerked up his head. “Haunt me when he comes to justice?”
“But to your profit.”
A flush burned to Niall’s brow. “Did I do wrong to seize the ship?” he asked bluntly.
“Your lawful spoil?” He smiled and shook his head. “But we do not yet know the outcome, and it will lie on you for your lifetime. That is why I meddle in your concerns, though I am no King of yours.”
“You honour me,” This was yet another problem to chew upon. In life, it seemed, these matters were less simple than in the old tales, where one struck and had done. He had a strong but totally irrational feeling that some power outside himself was thrusting him he knew not where, to a purpose beyond his own. They were all in the hands of God, Who alone used all men to His ends, but it was a discomforting sensation. He jerked his wits together. “I go with you. It was my doing they are brought to your hands.”
“And you are too honest to disown your handiwork.”
Niall looked along the hall for his own people, from whom he had been summoned to the King’s side. Judith was watching him with no attention for any other, and they exchanged love-smiles openly. Eymund was conversing amicably enough with Edric, but as though he felt Niall’s glance light on him like a touch he turned his head. His eyes asked an urgent question, and Niall nodded.
“Lord King, have you a priest with you?” He had already noted, with relief rather than regret, that Father Oswald was not of the company.
“You would lay this problem before a priest? I am sorry, no.” He saw Niall shake his head slightly, followed his gaze along the hall, and uttered a little gasp of scandalized laughter. “By the Mass, you—you heathen pirate, do you think to marry your lady here and now?”
Niall gave him a startled glance and then grinned. “A good thought, but mine were more seemly. My kinsman Eymund seeks baptism.”
The King dropped his horn, and for a moment he was speechless. When surprised or amused, he betrayed that for all his lined and hollowed face he was a young man who had not reached thirty. He drew a long breath, and studied Eymund curiously. “What does he know of Christian faith?”
“The desire is there. Can not teaching follow baptism?”
“You prove I know less than I thought of Danes,” he said with a wry grin, and watched Eymund a little longer as he turned back to answer some word from Cynric. “That one will never make a monk—but then, neither do most men of Wessex. You give me hope. If Danes can make Christians, we may yet live to see peace in England.”
He stood, and with a surge and clatter the throng got to its feet, grabbing up spears and shields. The hall was crammed, so that most had been sitting on the floor to eat. Assembled in the garth in some sort of disorderly array they made a formidable force of some four-score, though nearly half were the farmers and fishermen of Meliscombe and Brockhurst. Three or four of Baldred’s older men were left behind to get the women and children to safety if need arose. A hurried bustle of farewells, and they started round the hill behind Alfred and Odda amid prayers, good wishes and some whimpers.
Niall found himself close behind the King and Odda, with Eymund at his heels and the brothers following closely. A slim hand gripped his.
“I am coming to the point with you,” Judith announced calmly. “No place for a maid!” Odda growled.
“Why not?” she asked coolly. “I shall have so much longer a start if we come to running.”
Niall hid a grin. He had known that his love had been insufficiently birched in tender youth, but her vigorous indiscipline could still surprise him. Odda, who could have answered anything from a man, grunted in outrage and very prudently let her be. Niall kept glancing over his shoulder at the bay. The tide was fingering along the Firedrake’s hull and reaching a long arm up the muddy inlet, and the channel was empty as far as he could see.
“What troubles you?” the King challenged him.
“There were two longships up-channel earlier this morning.”
“Two? They put their noses inshore, but at sight of us made off for Wales,” Odda told him heartily. “Forget them.”
They climbed on. In a low voice Judith asked, “How many men will those longships carry?”
“With full war-crews, between three and five score each.”
Her hand closed more tightly. After a moment she asked, with apparent irrelevance, “Danes set a high worth on vengeance?”
“Yes.”
“I was sure of it.”
At the track’s fork the King halted to order his forces. “Odda and the warriors of his household will bar the way below, since the hottest fighting will be ours. Baldred and Edric, your men will close the trap. Lie in the woods below until they are past the point and then creep round behind them. Niall, yours was the plan, so you command.” His chilly eye quelled Baldred’s purple outrage to sour acquiescence, and flicked smiling to Niall’s surprised face.
“Lord King, I thank you for the trust,” was all he could say.
“Wessex has use for you. God be with you, Niall.”
“And with all of us, lord King.”
They dropped down the slope, hard men in shabby clothes and good mail, and the woods swallowed them with no sign beyond an agitation of branches. A blurred slithering of rawhide shoes on sodden ground, a muffled threshing and the occasional crack of a dead twig under a hasty foot, faded into silence. The men of Niall’s command looked at their thanes and then at their leader, Baldred’s doubtfully and Edric’s expectantly.
“Here I stay,” said Judith calmly, “and pray for all of you.”
But calm though her voice was, her face was colourless but for the freckle-splashes, her lips stiff, and her grey eyes wide with dread as she turned them from Niall to her brothers and back. Love and pity wrenched at Niall’s vitals. It was easier for them to match their bodies against the Danes’, than for her to wait and pray.
“Heart up, lass!” Edric said roughly, and gripped her in a fierce hug. “The Saints have a particular care for madmen!” He passed her quickly to Cynric, and then jerked his head imperatively at his men. “Lead on, Baldred! These are your woods.”
They were briefly alone, and Judith was clinging fast to him, her white face upturned. He stooped to her, his black hair swinging forward to veil it and mingle with hers. Her stiff lips quivered into warmth as he kissed them. Then he steadied her on her feet, smiled down at her, and said with an attempt at lightness, “Trust me, my heart, to take particular pains to stay alive!”
“I love you, and would wed you, and bear tall sons with crow-black hair.”
“And never a red-headed daughter?” he mocked her gently, sliding his hands down from her elbows to grip hers.
“That is as God shall will,” she said, caught his hands to her breast for a moment and then loosed them. He plunged away after his troop, and her voice followed him. “I will watch the channel for you, Niall!”
She would keep faith with her life, and he dared not look on her again lest he shame her with the tears that thickened his throat. He blundered after his company, seized on self-command savagely, overtook the rearmost and lengthened his stride to join Baldred in the lead.
Baldred scowled at him, furiously resentful that the outlander had been preferred to himself, the senior thane and lord of these very woods. He had not even sense enough to know his own limitations—but that was a rare kind of sense indeed. He brought them sullenly to a knoll overlooking the cove, from which they could watch the western headland and the narrowing space of golden sand between rocks and sea, themselves screened by the thickets’ unfolding leaves. They settled to wait. The tide came in, each wave running a little higher up the shining sand. The birds they had scared returned to whistle. A woodpecker hammered steadily nearby. Gulls’ peevish cries came thinly from the headland.
A spark of brightness flashed among the rocks, and at the same moment Eymund touched his arm. A murmur of discovery ran through their company as the flash became a helmet. Heads bobbed beyond the rocks, and the first Vikings tramped round the point. Hands fumbled at hilts or tightened on ashen spear-shafts.
Rorik’s squat bulk was unmistakable in the lead, and behind him tall Skuli and taller Aslak. Their followers straggled after them over the firm sand in a disorderly tail, and even from so far it was plain that the raiders had long out-distanced their enthusiasm. They plodded doggedly across the cove, close to the edge of the incoming sea, and Eymund chuckled softly in Niall’s ear.
“What did I foretell about their legs?”
“The gift of prophecy was doubtless vouchsafed you,” Niall agreed solemnly. He shook his head quickly as one or two of the more impatient men made to start down for the point; their screen of thin leaves would only serve if they stayed still. There would be wary eyes down there scanning the cliffs for any sign of a hostile presence, though fortunately they were out of the sunlight and not likely to be revealed by its reflecting from their arms. He waited until the last man had passed so far that the edge of the cliff hid him from their sight, and then signalled with lifted arm.
They had not gone a score of paces when a breathless voice hailed him by name, and brought him about in his tracks with every man there. Bushes crackled and swayed, violently agitated, and Judith plunged out of them and at him, her hair flying and her skirts shortened almost to her knees above her scratched white legs.
“Niall! Niall! The longships—in the channel—heading for Meliscombe!”
His entrails turned to ice. He had anticipated this blow all along, and all its doom-laden consequences came to his mind in one flash of awareness: the friendly, valiant King and Odda, trapped between two foes and utterly destroyed; Rorik vengefully joined to the newcomers to hunt down him and his comrades; the women and children enslaved, the Firedrake taken. And as he stood frozen, the first yell of alarm rang below, and clearly he heard the cry, “Wessex and Christian faith! Out, out!” If Alfred fell Wessex and Christian faith died too, and all England was lost to blood and fire and heathen darkness.
“Niall!” Judith cried, stumbling white-faced to him. “Niall, what can we do?”
They were all gaping at him in stricken horror, and realization came like a lightning-flash across his eyeballs. “The Fire-drake!” he cried, and in that moment knew surely for what purpose she had been lent him, to what end God had used him. “Judith, get down to the King and bid him beat off Rorik and then follow us with all speed!” he bade her urgently, and threw up an arm to summon his bewildered peasants. “Come!” he shouted, and flung himself up the hill.
The followed him like sheep following a bell-wether, but he never glanced behind, and the drumming of the blood in his ears drowned the noise of their toiling at his back. He went up that hill in a direct line, swerving only for obstacles too solid for him to crash through; running, scrambling, hauling himself upwards by branches and sapling trunks, his bare arms and legs raked by thorns he never felt in the fury of effort that possessed him. Gasping for air, streaming sweat, he outdistanced every man to the point and flung up his head to catch his breath, dash an arm across his dripping brow and take one swift look at the bay. A strangled cry of thankfulness escaped him.
The longships were rounding the further headland in the teeth of wind and tide, and in some trouble with the grappling eddies round the reef. The flood was making fast, the waves lapping the Firedrake’s bows, though she still lay on her beam-ends, helpless on the shingle. Behind him Edric gasped, “What will you do, madman?”
“Stop them!” he answered, and hurtled along the hillside, leaping and bounding, slithering and crashing without heed for his neck. He never looked for path nor knew one when his feet blundered into it, but ran like a crazy creature, a brief prayer on his lips to God that he would preserve his legs for him. They followed after with oaths and grunts, uncomprehending but gallant. He did not turn his head; he knew they were there and would be there while they could stand or run for Alfred of Wessex and Christian faith, for their homes and their women and their little ones.
He emerged into the clearing by the deserted stockade, veered left for the shore path, and took the bridge in four thundering leaps that set the planks bounding under his feet and the uprights shuddering at the impact. Then he was over the ridge and racing down across the rough turf and the clogging sand to flounder over the pebbles, sobbing for breath, his eyes darkened and his lungs afire with that effort. Then the little waves were hissing coldly about his ankles, the shingle roaring and rattling under their blows, and his outspread hands came to rest on rough planking that stirred and quivered with every incoming wave. No longer a dead and stranded hulk, the Firedrake was rousing to the work before her. He leaned against her hull, his eyes shut, his hammering heart trying to break from the cage of his ribs, his skull bursting from the beat of his pulses, and a croak of thankful laughter broke from his gasping mouth.
His comrades came panting and reeling to join him, stumbling purple-faced by twos and threes over the smooth-ground speckled pebbles, and looking helplessly to him for orders and explanations. He straightened. The longships were still out by the further point, making little headway against sharp wind and racing tide. He drew a deep breath of relief, and slapped the Firedrake’s, heeling stempost.
“Run her out! We are going to meet them!”
They set their shoulders to her planking, and Eymund gave them the oar-bank count to time their efforts. The sea was with them, or without rollers they could never have done it; lifting at her stern and washing along her sides. They heaved and grunted, their feet scrabbling for purchase on the stones, and she grated, stuck, r
olled and floated free. Wading thigh-deep, waist-deep, they thrust her head round and swung aboard. Seamen of a sort they were, and with Niall and Eymund to order them they swayed up the tall mast, made fast the stays, and hoisted the great yard and its striped sail.
“What will you do? Will you slay us all?” Baldred demanded, catching at Niall’s arm with his broad paw. Niall shook him off with scant courtesy.
“Get you ashore to the women if you have no stomach for war!” he snarled, and as Baldred continued protesting, threw him down. “Take the sheet, Eymund!” he shouted, his own hands now ready on the tiller. The sail swung round as Eymund barked commands and eager hands hauled on the braces, the wind swooped to fill it, and as the great stripes bellied into a taut bow the Firedrake came to life under him, lovely and splendid, shuddering through the curling breakers in a glitter of silver spray as they struck at her flank, riding the blue-green crests beyond, steadying to her way on the broad channel at his will. His hair whipped past his face, his great body braced itself to the tiller’s tug and the ship’s lift and dip, and he looked forward at the proud painted dragon-head snarling defiance through its glittering shroud of spray and quoted aloud, “ ‘Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners!’ ” For the first and last time she was truly his, and his heart exulted.
Eymund, at the sheet, grinned at him with a flash of fine teeth under the raw wound blackening along his cheekbone. Eymund of course, alone of all his companions, could guess at his intentions. Baldred sullenly picked himself up and was quietly hustled away from the mad Dane who ventured their lives on the sea. The others lined the bulwarks still mazed with unprecedented happenings, staring from him to the enemies’ flashing yellow oars, rising and falling like birds’ wings. The Firedrake leaped across the white-tipped rollers, closing the blue gap at speed, while for all their straining the longships’ crews could only crawl against wind and tide.
The Price of Blood Page 21