Forged in Blood

by Ken Hagan

  ‘Don’t count on seeing them!’ I repeat, adding laughter to my taunting. ‘Ragni and the others? Forget them! They won’t be waiting. Their days of waiting for you — or anyone — are gone. They fell at the ford. The ironsmith and I, we spear-spiked every last one in the river!’

  Einar howls like a beast. His body leaps over the boulders. His shape bounds on all fours — hind legs with toes like claws. Through the mist of the plunging falls, Einar springs at me with the form, features and jaws of a white wolf.

  I don’t wait for him. I release the axe; I send it spinning upward into the mist. A long-handled axe, thrown underarm — spinning, as it flies, head over shaft — has little chance of splitting its target.

  *

  ‘The wolf is dead. It was only a wolf.’

  I wade thigh-deep in the pool at the foot of the falls. Einar’s pale body hangs face-down in the water, oozing blood. My brother hadn’t time to draw his battle-axe. His axe — the axe that felled Drak on the Vigtyr — is still in his belt. Under the thudding water, the pool foams around my thighs. My new axe — the long-handled axe that felled the white wolf — is missing somewhere under the falls.

  I keep muttering to myself that I have killed a wolf.

  I can’t see a thing in dimming woodland light. I wade in circles, trying to feel for the axe-shaft with my bare feet. A splash over my head. The shape of a deer — a doe in full stretch over the stream. The deer freezes for a moment, caught between fear of me in the water and making good her escape. She bounds downstream. This time no flight under the hazel branches. She must sense some danger lurking in the woods.

  A man’s footfall on the woodland floor. Fjak come to find me?

  The man’s face appears from out of the shadows: Finn-buna. His blood-shot eye catches mine. Finn is one-eyed, his left ear missing; his mouth gapes through his half-bearded face. Finn’s tar-burns have misshapen his already ugly muzzle. With wrinkled eye and nose, and shrivelled brow, he has the snout of a brinded bull.

  Finn lingers long enough to be certain that I know who he is, and tramps back into the woods.

  Chapter 53

  The refectory at Kildobhan, newly built by Thrandt and his sons, smells of freshly sawed wood. The roof of reeds and thatch was finished only yesterday. The rafters haven’t had time to darken with smoke. The under-croft has no water leaks and no mildew stains. Stains will come with fires, with ageing, and with storms. There is no escaping the inclement weather on the headland. The doors are opened wide, letting in sunshine and a savour of salt from the sea. Pollen dust from spring flowers floats in off the unsown monastery fields. There are no oblates to tend the fields — the novices are dead or have run away, never to return. The monks’ land will lie fallow until labour can be found.

  Brother Eli decants wine from one earthen jug to another. The frail little monk is flustered. He pours nervously. The serving-trestle, on which Brother Gufa has placed wine-jugs, is almost beyond Eli’s reach. The trestle is a fine piece of oak carpentry put together by Vermund and Stein, but too high for Eli’s slight build. The young monk spills a drip of wine, syrupy-red, on the board of the trestle. Father Abban coughs gently to show his disapproval. Eli’s spidery hands grip the jug-handle tighter. He trembles all the more. Abban leans across, wipes his fore-finger on the offending drip of wine and holds it to his lips. Brother Gufa grimaces behind Abban’s back — a sly grimace shared with Paperkali and me; but as soon as Abban has moved to the other side of the trestle and is facing us again, Gufa’s face returns to a solemn, monkly expression.

  The decanting of wine in the monastery was the preserve of Lorcan — a task he guarded secretively from other monks until his untimely death. Brother Lorcan prided himself on how his wine tubs in the cellar were turned at intervals and matured in his care. According to him, the precious wine had to be tasted regularly and drained from one tub to another ‘for an airing of the grapes’, and he alone had keys to the cellar — but, as Paperkali says irreverently of the martyred monk, ‘Brother Red-nose has gone to meet his Maker. No doubt he will have enquired from Our Lord how he might turn water into wine.’ Paperkali’s wry smile is followed, as are all his words of innocent jest, by a pious sign of the cross.

  In order that Abban may sample the decanted wine — the purpose of our being in the refectory — Brother Eli pours a portion from jug to wooden beaker. A set of shallow wooden beakers, turned by Thrandt on his lathe, was presented to the Holy Father as a parting gift on Thrandt’s last day of work at Kildobhan. There were thirty-nine beakers in the gift, in special remembrance: one for each monk murdered in the massacre; one for each of ‘the blessed seven’ (as Abban is wont to call them), who survived to renew the church of Saint Dobhan. No wooden beakers for ‘the demon oblates’ (again Abban’s words), who took to their heels at the first sign of danger, and were never seen again.

  *

  Not a single drinking vessel of pewter, copper or stone was left in the monastery after the raid by Iron-knee and Half-beard Finn last summer. Holy chalices, crosses of silver, gold shavings for ink from the scriptorium, copper cauldrons, even monks’ rosary chains with glass prayer-beads — all were gathered as loot and dumped into the holds of Glun’s over-laden ships. The Ostmen made off with everything they could squeeze on board: horses and cattle; tubs of wine; jars of honey; bags of spelt.

  Whatever the warriors had no use for, they torched and left ablaze. Leather-bound sacred books were not spared in the fires, nor were the twelve wicker bee-hives of Paperkali. The monastery’s wooden buildings and wattle fences around the cattle pens were razed to the ground. When Glun and Finn set sail for Linn-dubh with their ill-gotten plunder, the blackened stone walls of the roofless chapel — its entrance doors charred and half-burned — were all that remained of the compound.

  Father Abban sips sparingly from the beaker and returns it to the trestle. He clasps his hands formally across his white vestment, small hands that were once delicate, but are now raw and calloused from a long winter of labour.

  ‘My dear Skipper Thralson,’ says he softly. ‘Please convey our thanks to Lady Aghamora for her gift of wine. Be sure to tell her that it will be consecrated at the inauguration of the new church, and used for fulfilment of holy sacraments, a spiritual purpose, which will redound greatly to her benefit.’ After a pause he adds, ‘We mention her little grand-daughter constantly in our prayers. We pray for the passing of her daughter Clithna, too. It was God’s will that she was taken in childbirth, may God rest the young woman’s soul.’

  ‘Amen,’ says Paperkali.

  *

  On the morning of inauguration — chosen for being Christ’s ‘awakening-day’ at Easter — Abban leads a small procession into the new chapel. Behind him are Oengus, Eli, Gufa, and Paperkali, the four monks who escaped with their lives. Abban is preceded through the chapel doors by M’lym-kun and an oblate named Fodhla. Together this group makes up Abban’s ‘blessed seven’. M’lym carries a sacred book opened at a page of ornate beauty — images in coloured inks, etched with gold. She sets the heavy leather-bound book on the altar. Thanks to her presence of mind, this one precious book of the saints was saved from destruction — the only book to escape the fire.

  The young man Fodhla carries across his breast two wands cut from silver birch. The wands will be blessed and fashioned later today into the shape of a slender cross — a humble replacement for the jewelled silver piece stolen by the Ostmen.

  My crewmen of the Meuris and widow Derdriu, now wife to Dantzk, stand either side of the charred doors as the monks pass through. We follow them into a dimly-lit space. We close the doors, made of sturdy Ekvith oak — again the joinery work of Thrandt. One small candle burns on the altar. Derdriu, Dantzk, Baldr and Kru fall to their knees in prayer behind the holy brothers. M’lym and Fodhla are favoured to kneel near the altar. They are at Abban’s right hand.

  Fjak, Halpin, Hrut and I observe the rituals from the back.

  *

  Father Abban fled
from the attack, a calculated retreat on his part. He had judged, rightly, that there could be no reasoning with the invaders. He had M’lym with him and a holy book. With four monks and the young oblate they took refuge for three days and nights in a sea-cave on the west of the headland. The coast was battered by an unseasonal summer storm and high waves leapt up as high as the cave, a stroke of good fortune — or a miracle — that kept them from being discovered. They hid until Glun, his henchman Finn, and sixty wine-crazed scavengers had taken off in their ships.

  The Ostmen exacted a cruel punishment on the monastery. They chose a soft target for their wrath in retaliation for the massacre they had suffered at Inis-tioc — a humiliating disaster for them, and a crushing defeat. Glun Amlavson and his warriors were routed on the water-meadows. From the ten hundreds of fighting men who came upriver, only a few score survived. With only two ships left to his name from a fleet of nineteen vessels, Amlav’s son needed to strike out at something. His men needed to fill their boots and restore a little of their wounded pride.

  The compound of Kildobhan, home to generations of monks, beacon to ships in darkness, was destroyed in three days. It had been a haven of peaceful labour and prayer for centuries. Many of the monks were cut down where they stood in the fields. Others, including five faithful old scribes — M’lym’s erstwhile teachers of holy script — were burned alive in the scriptorium. They had assembled in the cellar, thinking that there they would be safe. They had knelt and prayed under their writing-lecterns in a mistaken belief that they would be saved by the presence of the sacred books.

  ‘They were true martyrs.’ I heard little Eli say with a longing in his eyes.

  *

  Abban stands with his back to us before the altar, a thin halo of candlelight glimmering about his head. I can make out in the dimness the outline of M’lym’s and Fodhla’s bowed heads, hear the clicking of monks’ new wooden rosary-beads. Abban’s voice is clear and assured:

  Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam.

  Nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem frustra vigilat qui custodit eam.

  In a hot sweat I awake from my troubled dream to hear night waves crashing on the shore at Slaidh. I kick off the leather sleeping-sack, get to my feet on fore-deck, and lean, panting, over the prow of the Meuris. No moon, but stars are out. Sea air cools my brow; my chest heaves with the after-ache of the dream. Baldr is on ship-watch. He doesn’t see me. As he patrols past the fire, I catch a glimpse of a pig-tailed head and stocky figure in the outline of the flame. His boots crunch quietly as they sink in the shingle. Baldr — ever considerate of others — will be anxious, while he is on watch, to keep the noise down, so as not to disturb his crewmates’ repose.

  Some of the crew, Halp, Fjak and Hrut — occasionally joined by Dantzk — choose to sleep within burrowed holes of shingle by the beached ship. They lie close to the fire with sleeping-sacks rolled up as pillows for their heads. They chatter quietly, hum and sing, and break into snatches of laugher at some lewd jest of Halp’s, before succumbing to sleep.

  Others, like Baldr, Kru and myself, and usually Dantzk with his wife Derdriu — if the big man is not on ship-watch — find a quiet corner on the leeward side of the tilted deck. Within the speckled shadows of mast and rigging, we roll out our sleeping-sacks and disappear under the covers. After that, only a persistent snoring — from Kru loudest of all — is proof of our hidden presence on the ship.

  Once the monastery buildings were completed, Abban offered me a roof over my head, either as his guest in the refectory, or by myself in one of the empty barns — but I declined. While I am ashore, I will follow the same habit as Hakon and spend my nights as skipper alongside the crew.

  *

  Lunan and Kotter, the murdered crewmen of the Meuris, appeared in my dream. Hakon buried their pebble-weighted bodies in the deep channel, by Inis-deilg, off the Isle of Thorns. They went to the sea-bottom to be the food of fish. But in the crazy rush of my dream, father and son were alive again and cheerful, despite their bloodied serks and gaping throats, taking ship’s orders from the helm in a battering storm, not from Hakon, but from me.

  ‘Aye-Aye, Skip!’ Kotter, more alert than his father, returns a snappy reply.

  ‘Aye-aye, Master, aye-ayeeeee!’ Between cupped hands, Lunan shouts above the wind and hail. His lingering seafarer’s cry lasts longer than his son’s.

  The rest of the crew, fore-deck, amidships, and aft, yell their ‘aye-ayes’. Halpin, Hrut, and Fjak, even mute Kru in my storm-dream has a voice to yell.

  Baldr watches; waits for my call. With both fists he grips the scroud to steer-board; Dantzk waits, his sound left hand locked to larboard gunnels, his maimed right arm held stiffly behind his back.

  Waves rise higher than a ship’s mast. The swell crests against our bows. The ‘Meuris’ rides the storm. Dipping downward on the back-wave, we are lifted off our feet. With the upward wave, we smack down on the boards with the soles of our feet, scramble to regain a foothold, only to be thrust in mid-air by a plummeting sea.

  Arrows of hail spatter our faces. To larboard a monstrous sea-wolf grows atop the inbound wave. The sea-wolf is jaws and body of the wave. Sea swells across deck, flooding amidships, under the billowing sail. No time to think. No time to wait. Flung underarm from my hand, my battle-axe spins, head over shaft, into the teeth of the wolf, smashes through his watery jaws.

  Sea becalms. Storm drops. Sail tightens; hull heels; mast agley. Seawater swills to steer-board. The sea-wolf writhes amidships. Spewed out of the dying wave, within falling foam and spill and spoil, a man’s white body — my brother’s — slumps to deck at young Kotter’s feet.

  *

  Brother Oengus was forced to relinquish his vow of silence. Father Abban had had enough of it. He considered it a selfish indulgence for Oengus — and an inconvenience for him, as Holy Father, when he had so few monks after the massacre to labour and pray. Oengus rarely invokes his new freedom to speak. But today, on the beach at Slaidh, Oengus has found his tongue with a vengeance. He has begun to quarrel with Gufa. Oengus’s booming voice carries from the far side of the beach.

  If I am not mistaken, M’lym is mentioned. I have heard her name crop up more than once. I leave my crew rigging the Meuris — we are to sail up-estuary to Vadrar-fiord on the afternoon tide — and, with no other purpose than sheer nosiness, while we wait for the tide to turn, I take a stroll along the shingle beach, ambling this way and that, as a skipper does to check sky and wind, but all the while moving closer to the holy brothers. My intention is to come within hearing.

  Oengus and Gufa are assembling a new fishing-curach. This is the first of its kind to be built since their old skin-hulled boats were destroyed by the departing Ostmen last summer. Through winter, no fishing or lobster-baiting could be done in squally seas around the headland — too great a risk bouncing afloat in a flimsy, rudderless shell. The monks had wood-work to do, boat-building was far from their minds. But now that the monastery buildings are complete, and the moon tides bring fish in abundance to these shores, Gufa is keen to get back to his old fishing haunts.

  *

  Hakon’s loot has been put to good use. Half his life earnings that were held in trust in Lodin’s treasury has been spent on Kildobhan. Lady Aghamora feels the loss of Hakon deeply, almost as deeply as she grieves the passing of her daughter Clithna — ‘a crushing double blow’, she says. But she has found time to help me with the reckoning of Hakon’s dues in the treasury. Lord Lodin, at his wife’s prompting, has added to the Skip’s store of coin a generous excess derived from the trading surplus at Vadrar-fiord. He and Aghamora are convinced that Hakon, had he lived, would not have begrudged the use of his loot to restore the monastery at Kildobhan after its destruction by Glun.

  Hakon was a man of no great beliefs, whether in Thor or in Christ, or in anything beyond his ken, but he had utmost respect for Abban, having bartered and traded with the Holy Father for years. As an old sea-dog, Sk
ip would have wanted monks to remain settled at Kildobhan, monks to light beacons, by night, on the dark headland and warn ships like the Meuris from the rocks.

  The gift to the church from Hakon’s loot has shed a distant light to seas and shores far from Kildobhan. In truth, I had hoped that it might. Abban has agreed to relinquish his hold on M’lym-kun. He has given his blessing, however reluctantly, for our voyage to Brythuniog. I am taking the girl to search for her father and brother. The crew of the Meuris, to a man — and woman, not to forget Dantzk’s wife — will voyage with us.

  *

  Without timber and labour, without victuals, without tools and supplies, the monastery could not have been raised from the ashes. Silver coin has been dispensed in instalments from Hakon’s pot in the treasury; lodins to pay for timber-felling at Ekvith; lodins to pay for iron nails and copper cauldrons from the smiths; lodins to pay the wherrymen to transport reeds and straw-thatch down-river from Inis-tioc; lodins to buy beef and mutton, stock-fish and barley; lodins for bull-hides and fleeces to see us through the wintry months, when dark skies hung mild, wet and blustery over the headland.

  Often, for days on end, we holed up in the chapel, supping barley-ale, waiting for a spell of windless weather to work on the roofs. Only on fair days could timber lathes be jointed, joists straddled between walls, straw bundles dry-stooked and bound for weather-proofing the thatch roofs — a task skilfully done by Derdriu and M’lym-kun.

  All of us, monks and crewmen alike, have been under Thrandt’s watchful eye, while trenches were dug, footings laid, and timber walls raised for barn and byre. I insisted on having Thrandt in charge. My choice of master builder wasn’t to Abban’s liking. He was too courteous or too shrewd to refuse. The Holy Father was fearful that the presence of Thrandt — a man of Thor — might defile a sacred Christian site. I reminded him that, if he had accepted the gift of a dead Ostman’s loot, it should present no burden of conscience to have a man of Thor as his carpenter. Abban could not fully overcome his objections — no one in holy authority likes to be overruled — but in the end he was generous in his praise of the reconstruction. Thrandt’s leaving gift of wooden beakers brought a tear to his eye.