‘Pray to whoever you like, sire. None of them’ll be able to hear you.’
Then the full force of the storm hit, and Harthacnut understood why his forefathers had worshipped a storm god wielding a war hammer, for this was a brutal, punishing, battering blow. The wind tore at the mast, whistling and screaming as it sought to grip the slender shaft of pine and rip it from its mount. The waves picked up the ship and hurled it down into the depths of the ocean. They threw themselves over the gunwales and crashed on to the deck, drenching the ship and everyone on it in freezing water. Harthacnut found a good strong rope and clung to it with all his might. His palms were rubbed raw and bloody. He lost all feeling in his frozen fingers. He was no longer a king bound on a great enterprise, but simply a weak and helpless mortal, no better than any other and no more powerful in the face of forces entirely beyond his command.
Somehow, amidst the chaos, Rörik Ingesson was able to keep his wits about him. He prowled the boat from stem to stern, delivering an encouraging slap on the back here, a growl of displeasure there, or joining the men in their unceasing struggle against the elements. He was with a gang of men using wooden buckets to gather up the water that was steadily accumulating within the open hull when the ship suddenly lurched around, so that instead of running with the wave, it had slewed side-on. Harthacnut looked around and saw that the great steering oar, with which all longboats were guided, had been wrenched from the helmsman’s hands by the sheer power of wind and water pushing against it, so that it was pointing out to the side of the boat rather than trailing behind it. The helmsman was desperately trying to regain control, but the oar refused to respond, no matter how hard he tried to pull it round and turn the ship back into line with the wind.
The ship was perched on the crest of a massive wave. Below it the water fell away like a precipitous hillside, and Harthacnut could not stop himself from shouting out in alarm, for they had ridden over the top of the wave and were now sliding down that black mass of furious water, plunging helplessly to the bottom. A figure raced down the deck, hurdling the oarsmen’s benches as he dashed towards the stern. It was Rörik. He grabbed the terror-stricken helmsman and threw him so hard out of the way that he crashed into the gunwale on the far side of the boat, only saving himself from toppling into the raging sea by grabbing a rope and hanging on for dear life.
Rörik wasn’t watching his crewman’s struggles. He had clasped the steering oar in his huge hands and was throwing himself into battle against the gods of the storm and the sea. Harthacnut could not see the veins standing out like thick cords on Rörik’s neck and forehead, but somehow he could almost feel the strain of the effort his captain was making, the tearing pain in the muscles of his arms, back and thighs; could almost hear the curses Rörik was shouting into the howling wind and stinging rain as he defied the elements to do their worst.
But still they were sliding to the bottom of the watery ravine, and still the ship was side-on to the fall, her mast swinging in an arc from the sky down towards the sea as the hull rolled over.
And still Rörik could not bring the oar round.
Harthacnut was struggling to keep his balance as the wooden deck tilted over, further and further. ‘Come on!’ he screamed at Rörik, though his captain could not hear him.
The roll became even more pronounced.
Harthacnut watched in impotent terror as seawater poured over the side of the submerged gunwales and flooded into the boat. It was only a matter of seconds before the ship capsized and they were all drowned as the wave crashed down upon them.
And then he felt something beneath his feet, as though the whole hull was shuddering and groaning. He looked back at Rörik and saw that the captain had somehow managed to bring the steering oar back under control. But the ship, half filled with water and as beaten down by the sheer effort of staying afloat as any of the men inside it, couldn’t seem to find the means to respond.
Now the look on Rörik’s face changed. He was no longer screaming at his nemesis, but coaxing the ship he loved, pleading with it, charming it, begging it to heed his commands. And slowly it responded.
Harthacnut watched as the bow swung round just a little. But they were almost at the bottom of the wave. High above their heads, a great overhang of water was blotting out the sky as it curled and foamed.
‘Turn!’ he screamed. ‘In the name of God, turn!’
And the ship did turn. The bow picked up pace as it swung around, and the mast came back up towards the vertical. The ship was almost straight, almost upright . . .
And then it reached the bottom of the wave, and everything that was above it, a great mountain of icy water, crashed down.
Harthacnut had taken as deep a breath as he could when he saw that the sky had completely disappeared behind the wave. But the sheer weight of the impact drove all the air from his lungs. Down and down the ship kept going, deeper and deeper into the water. Every instinct told him to let go of the rope to which he was clinging and try to kick for the surface, but he forced himself to hold on, for he knew that it would be impossible to tell which way was up in the maelstrom of churning water. And even if he did, by some miracle, make it to the surface, he had no hope of surviving as a man alone on the ocean. For better or worse, he had to stay with the ship.
But the vessel was still diving down and Harthacnut’s lungs were screaming for air, and now the voices in his head were begging him to do the natural thing: to breathe out the last gasps of stale gas and then breathe in and fill his chest with clean, fresh air. But there was no air, just water. He forced himself to keep his mouth shut, but the pain was unbearable and the need to breathe an insatiable craving, and it took every last shred of his willpower to do nothing, to have faith, to pray for deliverance and believe that it would be granted.
And then the descent stopped. An instant later, the ship started rising again, back up through the freezing wet blackness, and the water seemed to slide away as the wave completed its passage overhead, and the tip of the mast poked through the surface of the North Sea and kept going, and suddenly the longboat popped back up on to the surface. Rörik was still at the helm, a look of mad, berserker triumph on his face. Harthacnut was still hanging on to his rope, and his mouth was wide open as he sucked rain-drenched air into his lungs. All around him men were coughing and spluttering and pulling themselves to their feet. And then Harthacnut realised that the wind had dropped a little and the waves, though far from calm, were no longer quite so mountainous.
Rörik ordered the sail to be unfurled just enough to get the ship moving so that he could steer properly, and he guided it into the partial shelter of a coastal inlet. He ordered the anchor to be dropped and then, once the ship had come to rest, called for food and drink to be distributed to his crew. Harthacnut made do with the same stale, salt-water-soaked bread and smoked fish as everyone else, then collapsed exhausted on to the sodden deck: just one more body among many.
He woke to the first light of dawn as the sun rose into cold blue skies, casting a burning path of light across a sea as flat and smooth as glass from Constantinople. He counted nine other boats bobbing on the water close by. Three had clearly been dismasted, and all were visibly battered to a greater or lesser degree, yet all had survived.
It seemed to Harthacnut that his expedition had been tested with brutal severity, yet it and he had passed that test. God had brought him safe through the storm, and that surely was a sign of His favour.
‘How soon can you be ready to sail?’ he asked Rörik Ingesson.
‘Ready now,’ said the captain. ‘The day I’m not’ll be the day they put me and my ship on the pyre and burn us both.’
‘Then set a course for Bruges. Any of the others that are fit to sail can come with us. The rest can make their repairs and join us later.’
More than three years had passed since the messenger had arrived at Harthacnut’s court bea
ring a letter from his mother begging him to come to her aid. He’d kept her waiting long enough. It was time she received his answer.
3
Oxford and Coventry
Harold Harefoot lay in bed, feebly coughing his lifeblood away, his body racked with pain, his skin hot and feverish. Leofric spoke to one of the monks attending to the king and satisfied himself that His Majesty was sure to be dead by morning. Since there was nothing to be done and Leofric had vital interests to attend to, he decided to be on his way.
Godwin rushed out after him into the corridor.
‘You can’t go – not now!’ he hissed.
‘I most certainly can,’ Leofric replied, wishing that just for one instant Godwin could allow himself to be guided by something other than his insatiable ambition. ‘I have matters of my own to deal with.’
Godwin looked at him with the suspicion that hung around him like mist on a mountaintop. ‘What kind of matters?’ he asked.
‘The kind that are none of your damn business!’ Leofric snapped. ‘Not everyone spends their entire lives thinking about their self-advancement, you know. Some of us have other things on our minds than conspiring over the fate of the crown.’
Godwin said nothing.
Leofric laughed. ‘You took that to mean the exact opposite of what I said, didn’t you? I can see it on your face. You think that conspiracy is precisely what I have on my mind. Well I won’t waste my time trying to prove you wrong. My view of the succession, if you must have it, is that there is no rush. The country has been governed perfectly well by a council acting on behalf of a king who might as well not have been there. By tomorrow morning, he won’t be there. No one will notice the difference for a good while yet.’
‘Someone has to be king,’ Godwin insisted.
‘Don’t be tempted to think that someone is you, Wessex. I will tolerate you as my rival, but not as my monarch.’
‘So who will you tolerate?’
‘I have yet to decide. We can reconvene in due course and discuss who has the best claim on the throne. Until then, I’d rather be left in peace.’
Godwin said nothing, but clearly he had not been mollified.
Leofric gave a frustrated sigh. ‘If you absolutely have to communicate with me, I will be at Coventry. Send a messenger there.’
‘Coventry?’ Godwin frowned. ‘Where’s that?’
‘North of Warwick, barely an hour’s ride. Not much of a place. There are about seventy families there, most of them tenants of mine, and an old convent that Canute’s men razed to the ground the year he became king.’
‘But there’s something there that’s more important to you than the death of the king.’
Leofric shrugged and let a moment’s silence fall. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off,’ and he walked past Godwin and away down the passage without saying another word.
Godwin spent the next few hours pacing up and down the chamber where the king lay, trying to work out what Leofric was up to. His restlessness disturbed Elgiva, who left, telling him that she was going outside, and damn the weather, but would be back soon. ‘Stay with my boy,’ she pleaded. ‘Stay in his hour of need.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay here for him,’ Godwin assured her, and he might actually have done so had a messenger not burst into the chamber and, still breathless from his journey, gasped, ‘I must speak to you, my lord!’
‘How dare you? Can’t you see that the king is gravely ill?’
‘But my lord, the lady Gytha commanded me that I must speak to you the moment I saw you.’
Godwin fell silent. His wife Gytha understood power politics and the cold, ruthless calculations that it demanded as well as any woman in Christendom. If she wanted him to hear something, it had to be important. ‘Come with me,’ he said and led the messenger out of the chamber.
‘Godwin?’ croaked Harold.
But the earl paid him no heed as the bedchamber door slammed shut behind him.
‘What is it, then?’ he asked, when he and the messenger were alone.
‘My lady Gytha wishes you to know that she has heard from a Danish merchant to whom she was selling a dozen female slaves – at a good price, she said – that King Harthacnut of Denmark has set sail with a huge fleet, bound for England.’
That complacent old fool, Leofric! Godwin thought. Of course Harthacnut was bound to make a move. There was not a second to waste.
‘When will the Danes reach our shores?’ he asked.
‘I do not know, my lord,’ the messenger replied. ‘It seems the king is not coming directly to England, but going first to Flanders to meet his mother.’
Godwin felt the first shock of alarm recede a little within him. ‘He can’t possibly know . . .’ he muttered to himself.
‘I’m sorry, my lord?’
‘Nothing . . . Let me think.’
Godwin paced the corridor, trying to keep his thoughts as measured as his footsteps. There had not been time for the news that Harold was ill to reach Denmark, still less that he was dying. That mean that Harthacnut had struck lucky. He had finally answered his mother’s call just at the point when the throne was about to fall empty. The question was: how should Godwin respond?
His half-brother died because of me, he reminded himself . . . but Harthacnut never even met Alfred; why would he care about that? Because Emma will ram it down his throat and tell him to take his revenge for her sake.
Godwin needed to make it worth Emma’s while to put her anger and grief to one side. He thought a moment longer. Yes, I can do that . . . but I’ll need Leofric.
He turned back to the messenger. ‘Thank my lady for telling me about Harthacnut. Inform her that I am going to meet Leofric of Mercia at a village called Coventry, north of Warwick. Got that?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘And one other thing. Lady Gytha and I are constructing a ship, intended for our own use. Would you please tell my lady that she may be as lavish as she wishes when commissioning the gold work. When I am done, we shall not have any difficulty affording it.’
The storm that hit the North Sea with such untamed savagery had fallen upon Oxford too. It was more than matched by Elgiva’s rage. In the middle of the night, driven half mad by maternal grief and frustrated ambition, she walked outside into the rain, the wind and the lightning and screamed at the heavens. For Harold’s life was ebbing away while he was barely a full-grown man, just as his elder brother Sweyn’s had done four years earlier. And as heartbroken as she was to be losing her boy, she was equally enraged by the realisation that her power in the land would perish along with him. She had no more pieces left on the chessboard, but Emma still had two to play: Harthacnut and Edward.
Damn her! Damn her to hell!
Elgiva walked back inside the royal residence. It was a solid place, built of stone and strong enough to withstand a small-scale assault, though it was neither large enough to be classed as a proper castle nor luxurious enough to be called a palace. Still, it was grander and better staffed than any house Elgiva had known before she caught Canute’s eye, and she had little chance of living in anything half as nice once her connection to the throne was gone.
But maybe, even now, there was hope. Godwin had toyed with the suspicion that Harold might have been poisoned, but although Elgiva was cynical enough to suspect foul play in most circumstances, she could not detect it in this one. The question one always had to ask was Cui bono? Who stands to gain? There was only one person who would benefit sufficiently from Harold’s death to make it worth their while to kill him, and that was Emma. But she was in Flanders and had no ally in England willing to commit murder on her behalf. In any case, it wasn’t her style. For all her hunger for power, Emma lacked that final touch of ruthlessness necessary to seize it. Elgiva had no such scruples. That was why it was her son who had i
nherited Canute’s kingdom, and not Emma’s.
So Harold’s affliction was a matter of sickness, and that was a mysterious internal combat between a man and the invisible demons that assailed him. Sometimes God saw fit to cast the demons out and the sufferer lived. But He might equally well decide that the time had come to call a soul from this world to the next, in which case all the poultices, leeches and herbal concoctions administered to the patient would make no difference. If God had decided to take Harold from her, there was nothing to be done but pray for the poor, drunken, useless lad’s soul. But there was still a chance that the Father might show mercy, and Elgiva paused for a minute to finger the rosary that hung around her neck and pray for her son’s deliverance.
Alas, her prayers were in vain. When she returned to the chamber where Harold lay, she found a priest saying prayers over his body. And then Elgiva’s knees gave way and she fell to the floor, sobbing. Her son had died and she had not been there to comfort him in those final moments, any more than she had comforted his brother. She had failed them both, and for the first time in her adult life she found herself wondering whether she had done the right thing, working so hard to drag herself from provincial nonentity to lie in the bed of a king and stand beside a nation’s throne. Perhaps she would have been better off staying where she was, marrying a local nobleman – for her father was a respected landowner and would have given her a decent enough dowry to make her worth marrying (her looks and healthy carnal appetites had always been enough to get her bedded) – and settling down to life in the shires.
But that had not been her fate, nor had she wished it to be, and it was too late to start complaining now. She pulled herself to her feet. She needed to talk to Godwin. He would have good, sound advice about how she should position herself to survive the next few months. Even if she was no longer queen mother, she still had the fortune and landholdings she had amassed over the years as Canute’s mistress. Emma would not have forgotten the way Elgiva and Harold had stripped her of much of her fortune (though God knows it had been so vast that even a fraction of it was enough to make her rich). She would want her revenge, but Godwin would know how to outwit her.
The Leopards of Normandy: Duke: Leopards of Normandy 2 Page 13