Paths of Exile

by Carla Nayland

  Eadwine leaped again to avoid the blow, but this time he stumbled as he landed. Black Dudda roared in triumph and brought his sword slashing down.

  Ashhere started forward with a cry, his heart in his mouth, but Treowin, who had trained with Eadwine since boyhood, flung out his shield-arm and held Ashhere back.

  The stumble had been a feint. Eadwine pivoted on his toes, and Black Dudda’s blow whistled harmlessly past his head. Black Dudda lurched, off-balance now that the stroke had failed to connect with anything except empty air, and Eadwine’s sword cut hard into Black Dudda’s wrist. Bright blood spangled the snow, and Black Dudda staggered, his sword drooping uselessly from nerveless fingers. Eadwine dropped his shattered shield and swung his sword in a great two-handed blow. The blade struck Black Dudda in the angle of neck and shoulder, between the helmet and the mail shirt, and bit deep into muscle and bone. The big warrior crumpled to his knees. Even then, dying, he drew his dagger and slashed left-handed at Eadwine’s legs, trying to bring his enemy down with him. Eadwine stepped back – no need to jump this time – and Black Dudda toppled forward into the snow, his weight wrenching the sword from Eadwine’s grasp. He twitched once, and lay still. Snowflakes began to settle gently on his back.

  The remaining Bernicians cried out in dismay. Their leader was dead. The gods were not on their side. They stared for a heartbeat in frozen horror, and then they fled.

  Now the farmhands came into their own again. The hated occupiers were on the run, frightened men trying only to save their own lives, and a fleeing warrior is no match for two or three farmers – or even women and boys – with scavenged spears and fish-gutting knives.

  Eadwine heaved the dead slave off the Bernician stunned by Beortred, slashed the warrior’s throat to make sure, and picked up the severed end of the neck rope.

  “Where’s Beortred?”

  Weasel looked up from rifling Black Dudda’s belt pouch, and pointed. “He went that way.”

  A trampled line in the fresh snow headed out into the moors, going east and a little north. Straight into the teeth of the approaching storm.

  “Drust!” Eadwine shouted. “Take half Fulla’s men and clear up here. No prisoners! Do whatever your people do to enemy bodies, collect all the war gear and anything else worth having. Leave a Pictish shield and spear here. Ashhere, Fulla, take the rest of Fulla’s men and see to our dead. There mustn’t be anything left here to show the locals were involved. Treowin, Lilla, take everyone else and the slaves and carry our wounded into shelter, then get down to the hall. Clear up any of Black Dudda’s men left there, find the stored food and distribute as much as you can before nightfall. Deornoth will tell you who’s most in need. And take Weasel in case there’s a hoard hidden. I’m going after Beortred. I’ll meet you at the hall.”

  Lilla grabbed his arm. “No, lord, no!”

  Eadwine shook him off as if he was brushing an unwelcome insect from his coat. The battle-fury was still on him, his face set and his eyes wild.

  “I must find Beortred!”

  “The snow!” It was snowing steadily now, already difficult to see more than fifty yards, and the heather stalks drooped under a soft white blanket. Lilla grasped Eadwine’s arm again. “Eadwine, the moors are deadly in snow and darkness! If you can’t reach the Esk before nightfall, don’t try to cross the moors. Fulla has cabins and sheepfolds on the stream draining into Boggle Bay, you can’t miss it, just follow the stream. Take shelter there. Promise me, lord!”

  “All right, Lilla, I promise. Now let me go!”

  Eadwine ran on over the moors, alone. The snow was falling faster now, a few inches already covering the ground and beginning to form drifts. Beortred’s track was fast disappearing. It was gloomy under the leaden sky, and low cloud brushed the highest ground. Wind-driven snow scoured Eadwine’s face like icy needles. He came labouring to the top of a rise and realised he had lost the trail.

  “Beortred!”

  No answer. But – yes – there was a dark figure slipping through the gloom ahead, outlined against the snowy ground.

  “Beortred!” Eadwine yelled again, and gave chase.

  This was the last rise before the sea, and ahead the land sloped away north-eastwards for a mile of rich clay farmland and pasture before ending abruptly in high sea cliffs. Beortred was just visible in glimpses ahead, ducking in and out of gorse bushes and hedges. He was a heavy man, and finding the combination of slippery clay and fresh snow hard work. Eadwine, lighter and more sure-footed, was gaining fast.

  “Beortred!” he shouted. “Wait!”

  He plunged through a tangle of gorse and paused for breath. The gradient steepened ahead of him, the last sloping field before the sea. To his left, a stream had cut a little wooded ravine. There was no sign of Beortred.

  “Beor –”

  Some soldier’s instinct, some sixth sense, gave him warning. He twisted aside in the instant that a spear hurtled out of the bushes edging the ravine and flew past inches from his waist. Beortred erupted from the ravine like a wild boar and butted head-first into Eadwine’s stomach, sending both men skidding backwards down the slope in a welter of churned mud and flying snow. Beortred had no weapon, but he was getting on for twice Eadwine’s weight and strength. One mighty fist crashed into the side of Eadwine’s head, the other punched up under his ribs. Eadwine fought back as best he could, half-winded and half-stunned, and managed to jab his elbow hard into Beortred’s belly. A sword was no use at close quarters and he could not reach to draw his dagger. Besides, there had been quite enough of knives in the back where Beortred was concerned. It was like hitting an oak plank, but Beortred grunted and his grip slackened a little. Eadwine thrashed sideways to avoid the next blow and the struggle tumbled a little further down the slope.

  “Beortred!” Eadwine choked. “Bloody fool – the cliffs –!”

  Pinned flat under Beortred’s bulk, he had no way of knowing how near they were to the edge, but he could hear the thunder of surf on rocks mingling with the howling of the wind. These cliffs where the moors met the sea were notoriously unstable, built of crumbling shale and soft boulder-studded clay, and it was not unknown for several feet worth of cliff to collapse into the sea in a winter storm. It was not a good place for a brawl.

  He tried to gouge his thumbs into Beortred’s eyes, but Beortred seized his wrists and slammed them back against the ground.

  “You won’t kill me!”

  “Not – trying – to – ” Eadwine gasped, dizzy with the pain. He applied all the leverage he could to his back and shoulders, managed to shift Beortred’s crushing weight, and crunched his knee up into the big man’s groin. Beortred groaned, his grip broke, and Eadwine succeeded in scrambling out from under.

  “Not trying to kill you!” he got out, but Beortred came for him again. He rolled to avoid the punch in the throat that would have broken his neck, but the other hammered into his chest like the kick of an enraged stallion and felled him, helpless, to the ground.

  “Now leave me alone!” Beortred roared, raising his foot to stamp on Eadwine’s head.

  But the foot never connected. Eadwine jerked sideways, Beortred’s foot met the earth in a shuddering shock, and Beortred lurched, arms flailing for balance. Eadwine saw the ground tilt and start to slide, understood in a flash and threw himself forward as Beortred dropped in a shower of soil and stones. His fingers encountered and grasped a clutching hand, and he cried out in pain as all Beortred’s weight came on his left shoulder. The instinct was to let go and relieve the crushing agony but he overrode it and held on, gritting his teeth and reaching forward and down with his right hand. He found Beortred’s wrist and grasped it, spreading the weight onto both his shoulders. A few loose stones skittered away but most of the remaining cliff edge held firm. He was lying flat on his face, only his head and shoulders projecting over the edge, and it did not feel as if Beortred’s weight would be sufficient to pull him into the gulf. Not yet, at least.

  “Get hold of something!�
� he yelled.

  Beortred’s panic-stricken face peered up. Below his dangling feet, gulls soared on the storm and a flat pool-pitted rock platform stretched from the foot of the cliff out into the hungry waves. “Don’t let go!”

  “Not going to!” Eadwine panted. The effort of holding Beortred’s weight was like iron bands crushing his chest. It was hard to breathe. Another chunk of clay broke away under his elbow and plummeted down to smash apart on the scar two hundred feet below. “By the Hammer, man, get a grip! I can’t hold you much longer!”

  Beortred’s feet were scrabbling without success for a hold. “You’re sworn to kill me!” His left hand clawed at the cliff face and caught a jagged chunk of sandstone embedded in the clay. The weight on Eadwine’s shoulders eased.

  “I’m not trying to kill you, you bloody fool! Can you pull yourself up?”

  Beortred pulled on the sandstone rock, which shook alarmingly. “But you know I killed your brother!”

  “Yes, and I know why.” The rock came loose in Beortred’s hand, and his full weight crashed onto Eadwine’s shoulders again. Eadwine felt the sharp pain in his left shoulder as a muscle tore under the strain. “Get hold of something, Beortred! You’re too heavy for me.” He gasped, sweating with pain and effort. “I know he was a murderer, I know he’d sold out to the Twister, it wasn’t your fault –”

  Beortred howled, a terrible cry of desolation and despair. “Nobody knows that and lives!”

  Eadwine saw a blur of movement. Beortred’s left arm, still clutching the sandstone rock, lashed upwards with savage force. A blinding, splintering pain in his head, and then everything dissolved in a white flash.

  Chapter 21

  Eadwine lay staring vacantly at the dust motes swirling above a slab of mouldy cheese, wondering idly whether Severa knew the dairy roof had blown off and why there were seagulls crying overhead in a landlocked mountain hafod. Probably Severa had never seen a seagull, so he ought to find her and show her these, just as soon as he felt well enough to move.

  “Yaaark – aark-aark-aark!” in his ear, and a herring gull sailed past inches from his face, tilted a wing and side-slipped with masterful grace down towards the slab of cheese.

  The world came back into focus with a sickening lurch. The slab of cheese was the flat rock scar at the base of the cliffs two hundred feet below. The dust motes were fat snowflakes. He was lying on his belly at the edge of a sea cliff, his arms and head dangling forward over a sheer drop.

  He scrabbled back away from the edge, a little avalanche of soft snow sliding off his back. The movement made his head spin and his stomach turn over, and he vomited weakly into the snow. His bruised abdominal muscles complained vigorously at this further punishment, his chest and back ached, and there was a burning pain in his left shoulder. It felt as if he had come off worst in a more than usually murderous fist fight. Which, of course, he had.

  He put his hand up to the throbbing pain centred in the right side of his forehead. A deep jagged cut just above the eyebrow, slimy with clotted blood, a large and very painful swelling, but – he probed tenderly, shrinking from the pain – the bone seemed to be intact. No doubt that the blow had been meant to kill, but not even Beortred had the strength to smash a man’s skull when he had to strike upwards and left-handed.

  “Beortred!” he shouted into the storm. The cliffs were not absolutely vertical. Bands of soft clay and shale formed steep slopes, sometimes stable enough to support vegetation, between short walls of harder rock. Beortred might be lying on a ledge. He deserved to be. It was not fair that a good man should die because of Eadric’s treachery.

  No answer. He tried again, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Beortred!”

  Still no answer. Kneeling, he peered very cautiously over the edge, but there was no ledge big enough to support anything more than a kittiwake’s nest. And there was a suggestion of something dark and indistinct on the scar below, glimpsed through the whirling snow.

  Eadwine dragged himself to his feet. He had to know. Wearily, his head pounding, his damaged shoulder screaming its protest, he descended the ravine. The rocky bed of the stream was rough and choked with undergrowth, but it dropped at a safe angle through the cliffs until it terminated in a trickling waterfall about thirty feet above beach level. A slither down mud and slippery disintegrating shale delivered him safely to a narrow beach.

  “Beortred!”

  No answer. But he knew the site of their struggle had been above the headland to the right. After a few yards the beach gave way to a platform of slabby rock, almost level but treacherous with slippery seaweed and water-filled hollows. Barnacles crunched under his feet. These flat reefs, known locally as scars, were covered by the sea at high tide.

  He rounded the point of the headland. Yes, something dark was lying on the scar. A seal, he told himself, until he was close enough to see its shape. Then he thought: A shipwrecked sailor. It couldn’t be Beortred. Beortred could not be dead. It would not be fair.

  He stooped over the body. “Beortred?”

  No answer. There could not be, of course, not with the back of the head smashed like that and the brains spilling out over the rocks, nor with the splintered shards of rib gleaming through the crushed chest.

  “Well, Eadric,” he said aloud, “I suppose this means you’re avenged. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  He dropped to his knees on the rocks and took Beortred’s flaccid hand.

  “Your loyalty was greater than mine,” he whispered. “You were prepared to die, and kill, for him even when you knew what he had done. I was not. You deserved a better lord.”

  He could not leave Beortred there, to be squabbled over by seagulls and tossed by the waves until all that remained were slimy rags of flesh clinging to bleached bones. A good man deserved an honourable resting place. A funeral pyre or a grave were impossible in this place, and he was not strong enough to haul Beortred’s body up the ravine, but there was one thing he could do. He unpinned Beortred’s cloak and wrapped the body in it, scooping up as much of the spilled brain as possible and laying a large flat stone on the chest. Beortred’s belt and brooch secured the cloak, and Eadwine grasped the shoulders and began laboriously dragging the body over the scar to the thundering surf. He would send Beortred to Njord, the god of the sea, the father of Lord Frey and Lady Frija. Njord’s handmaidens were said to search the sea bed for the bodies of drowned sailors and carry them to his hall, which was much like Woden’s hall but under water and not quite as boisterous. There would be no shame for Beortred in that company.

  The air was full of salt spray driven on the wind, and the larger waves broke over the scar in a surging wash that briefly floated Beortred’s body and tugged it to follow as the wave ran back to the sea. Njord was eager to welcome his new guest. The waves grew deeper and greedier as Eadwine neared the edge of the reef, and it was a struggle to keep his footing on the slippery rocks. At the edge he kneeled, breathless and sore, and rolled Beortred’s body into position. The next wave broke right over his head, he heaved Beortred’s body off the scar into the sucking backwash, and seized hold of a rock to avoid being swept with it. For a fleeting moment he was sure he saw the shrouded body gliding down into the green depths as serenely as a seal, and then wave and body were gone and he was coughing and clutching the rock while the icy wind howled and his body shrank from the cold. It was a great temptation to let go of the rock and let the next big wave take him out to join Beortred in the tranquil depths. But he had made Lilla a promise, and the promise was on land.

  The journey back without the burden took far longer than the journey out, and the crumbling shale by the waterfall came near to defeating him. At the top he fell in a heap in the bed of the ravine, wishing that the pounding in his head and the red-hot needles in his shoulder would stop so that he could go to sleep. They did not, and he retained enough awareness to know that if he slept he would be frozen to death by morning. Boggle Bay, Lilla had said, and follow the stream to Fulla’s cabin. That
sounded straightforward enough. Very slowly, he began to clamber up the ravine.

  The daylight was almost gone by the time he emerged onto the clifftops, and snow lay thick on the ground. All signs of his struggle with Beortred were already obliterated. But the snow was a blessing in one respect, for it made the white edge of the land visible in contrast to the dark sea below. Three miles along the clifftop would take him to Boggle Bay. An hour’s pleasant stroll on a summer evening. Huddled into his wet cloak, he set off. The buffeting wind was at his back now, pushing and bullying him. The cold ate into his bones. Soft snow took him up to mid-calf at every step, and deeper windblown drifts filled every dip and hollow. Soon he could no longer feel his hands or feet, and he stumbled on every irregularity in the ground. He fell waist-deep into snowdrifts and had to burrow his way out like a mole. After a while, standing up proved to require too much co-ordination and he was reduced to crawling. His left shoulder was unreliable in taking his weight, though mercifully the pain had faded. Indeed, he could hardly feel his limbs at all. When he fell and found his head resting on his arm in the snow, it was as if he was lying on a piece of wood. He lost all track of time and place. It was difficult to see much in the howling dark, except the white line of the cliffs stretching ahead, and even that blurred into two and writhed snakelike through the dancing snowflakes. He had forgotten what he was doing or why, but he still knew vaguely that he had a promise to keep. It was like being drunk, or in a high fever.

  A sliding tumble down a long slope terrified him back to a vague grasp on reality. This must be the descent into Boggle Bay. He was supposed to do something here, though he could not remember what. Something about a stream. Streams were generally to be found at the bottom of slopes, so he floundered downhill until he stumbled across a thin ribbon of icy black water, and recalled hazily that he was supposed to follow it for some reason. But he was so tired. All he wanted was to lie down and sleep. He was no longer cold. In fact, he felt quite warm, and would be able to move much more easily if only he could get rid of the heavy cloak that was weighing him down, but his fingers were too numb to work the brooch. The snow no longer stung at his face and eyes but instead seemed soft and caressing, like gently floating feathers or apple blossom whirling in the first gale of spring. He tried to catch some, but unaccountably the ground seemed to tip sideways so that he was climbing up it, and that was not fair for he had climbed the shale and the ravine already and did not see why he should have to do it again. The drifts were warm and welcoming, feather beds inviting him to snuggle up in one. But he had a promise to keep. He could not sleep yet.