Sword Song

by Bernard Cornwell

“You want Ragnar to fight for you?” I asked. “Why should he?”

  “Because you ask him to,” Erik said firmly. “Æthelflaed says you love each other like brothers.”

  “We do.”

  “Then ask him,” he demanded.

  I sighed and stared at those distant clouds and thought how love wrenches our lives and drives us to such sweet insanity. “And what will you do,” I asked, “against the murderers who come in the night? Against the vengeful men who will burn your hall?”

  “Guard against them,” he said stubbornly.

  I watched the clouds pile higher and thought that Thor would be sending his thunderbolts down to the fields of Cent before the summer evening was over. “Æthelflaed is married,” I said gently.

  “To a vicious bastard,” Erik said angrily.

  “And her father,” I went on, “regards marriage as sacred.”

  “Alfred won’t fetch her back from Northumbria,” Erik said confidently, “no West Saxon army could reach that far.”

  “He will send priests to gnaw her conscience, though,” I said, “and how do you know he won’t send men to fetch her? It doesn’t have to be an army. One crew of determined men might be enough.”

  “All I ask,” Erik said, “is a chance! A hall in some valley, fields to till, beasts to raise, a place to be at peace!”

  I said nothing for a while. Erik, I thought, was building a ship in his dreams, a beautiful ship, a swift-hulled ship of elegance, but it was all a dream! I closed my eyes, trying to frame my words. “Æthelflaed,” I finally said, “is a prize. She has value. She is a king’s daughter and her marriage portion was land. She’s rich, she’s beautiful, she’s valuable. Any man who wants to be rich will know where she is. Any scavenger wanting a fast ransom will know where to find her. You will never have peace.” I turned and looked at him. “Every night when you bar your door you will fear the enemies in the dark and every day you will look for enemies. There will be no peace for you, none.”

  “Dunholm,” he said flatly.

  I half smiled. “I know the place,” I said.

  “Then you know that it is a fortress that cannot be captured,” Erik said stubbornly.

  “I captured it,” I said.

  “And no one else will do what you did,” Erik said, “not till the world falls. We can live in Dunholm.”

  “Ragnar holds Dunholm.”

  “Then I will swear oaths to him,” Erik said fervently, “I will become his man, I will swear my life to him.”

  I thought about that for a moment, testing Erik’s wild dream against the harsh realities of this life. Dunholm, cradled in its loop of the river and poised on its high crag, was indeed almost unassailable. A man might think of dying in his bed if he held Dunholm, because even a handful of troops was sufficient to defend the steep rocky path that was its only approach. And Ragnar, I knew, would be amused by Erik and Æthelflaed, and so I felt myself being seduced by Erik’s passion. Maybe his dream was not as crazy as I thought? “But how,” I asked, “do you take Æthelflaed from here without your brother knowing?”

  “With your help,” he said.

  And with that answer I could hear the three Norns laughing. A horn blew in the camp, a summons, I supposed, to the feast that Sigefrid had promised. “I am sworn to Alfred,” I said flatly.

  “I don’t ask you to break that oath,” Erik said.

  “Yes, you do!” I said sharply. “Alfred gave me a mission. I have fulfilled half of it. The other half is to retrieve his daughter!”

  Erik’s big fists curled and uncurled on the palisade’s top. “Three thousand pounds of silver,” he said, “and five hundred pounds of gold. Think how many men that will buy.”

  “I have thought of it.”

  “A crew of seasoned warriors can be purchased for a pound of gold,” Erik said.

  “True.”

  “And we have enough men now to challenge Wessex.”

  “You can challenge Wessex, but not defeat it.”

  “But we will, when we have the gold and the men.”

  “True,” I allowed again.

  “And the gold will bring more men,” Erik went on relentlessly, “and more ships, and either this autumn or next spring we will lead a horde into Wessex. We will make the army you defeated at Ethandun look small. We shall blacken the land. We shall bring spears and axes and swords to Wessex. We will burn your towns, enslave your children, use your women, take your land, and kill your men. Is that what serving Alfred means to you?”

  “That is what your brother plans?”

  “And to do it,” Erik said, ignoring my question for he knew I already knew its answer, “he must sell Æthelflaed back to her father.”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged. If no ransom was paid then the men already encamped in and around Beamfleot would vanish like dew on a hot morning. No more ships would come and Wessex would not be threatened.

  “Your oath, as I understand it,” Erik said respectfully, “is to serve Alfred of Wessex. Do you serve him, Lord Uhtred, by allowing my brother to become rich enough to destroy him?”

  So love, I thought, had turned Erik against his brother. Love would make him slash a blade through every oath he had ever sworn. Love has power over power itself. The horn blew again, more urgently. Men were hurrying toward the great hall. “Your brother,” I said, “knows you love Æthelflaed?”

  “He believes I love her for now, but will lose her for silver. He thinks I use her for my pleasure and he is amused by that.”

  “And do you use her?” I asked harshly, looking into his honest eyes.

  “Is that your business?” he asked defiantly.

  “No,” I said, “but you do want my help.”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “I would not call it that,” he said, sounding defensive, “but we love each other.”

  So Æthelflaed had drunk the bitter water before the sin and that, I thought, was very clever of her. I smiled for her, then went to Sigefrid’s feast.

  Æthelflaed was seated in the place of honor to Sigefrid’s right, and I was next to her. Erik was on the farther side of Sigefrid, with Haesten beside him. Æthelflaed, I noticed, never looked at Erik. No one watching, and plenty of men in the hall were curious about the King of Wessex’s daughter, could surely have guessed that she had become his lover.

  The Northmen know how to give a feast. The food was plentiful, the ale was generous and the entertainment diverting. There were jugglers and stilt walkers, musicians and acrobats, and lunatics who dissolved the lower tables into gusts of laughter. “We should not laugh at the mad,” Æthelflaed told me. She had hardly eaten, except to nibble at a bowl of seethed cockles.

  “They get treated well,” I said, “and it’s surely better to be fed and housed than left to the beasts.” I was watching a naked madman convulsively search his groin. He kept peering around at the laughing tables, unable to understand the noise. A tangle-haired woman, egged on by raucous shouts, took off her clothes one by one, not knowing why she did it.

  Æthelflaed stared at the table. “There are monasteries that will look after the insane,” she said.

  “Not where the Danes rule,” I said.

  She was silent for a while. Two dwarves were dragging the now naked woman to the naked man and the watching men were collapsing with laughter. Æthelflaed looked up briefly, shuddered, and stared down at the table again. “You talked to Erik?” she asked. We could talk English safely for no one could overhear us, and even if they could they would not have understood most of what we said.

  “As you meant me to,” I observed, realizing that was why she had insisted on taking Father Willibald into the hall. “Did you make a proper confession?”

  “Is that any business of yours?”

  “No,” I said, then laughed.

  She looked at me and offered a very shy grin. She blushed. “So will you help us?”

  “To do what?”

  She frowned. “Erik didn’t tell you?”

  “He said
you wanted my help, but what sort of help?”

  “Help us to leave here,” she said.

  “And what will your father do to me if I help you?” I asked, and got no answer. “I thought you hated the Danes.”

  “Erik is Norse,” she said.

  “Danes, Norse, Northmen, Vikings, pagans,” I said, “they’re all your father’s enemies.”

  She glanced down at the open space beside the hearth where the two naked lunatics were now wrestling instead of making love as the audience had doubtless anticipated. The man was much bigger, but more stupid, and the woman, to huge cheers, was beating him on the head with a handful of floor rushes. “Why do they let them do that?” Æthelflaed asked.

  “Because it amuses them,” I said, “and because they don’t have a pack of black-robed clergy telling them what’s right and what’s wrong, and that, my lady, is why I like them.”

  She looked down again. “I didn’t want to like Erik,” she said in a very small voice.

  “But you did.”

  There were tears in her eyes. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I prayed that it wouldn’t happen, but the more I prayed the more I thought about him.”

  “And so you love him,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a good man,” I assured her.

  “You think so?” she asked eagerly.

  “I do, truly.”

  “And he’s going to become a Christian,” she went on enthusiastically. “He’s promised me that. He wants to. Really!”

  That did not surprise me. Erik had long shown a fascination with Christianity, and I doubted it had taken much persuasion on Æthelflaed’s part. “And what of Æthelred?” I asked her.

  “I hate him,” she hissed those words so vehemently that Sigefrid turned to stare at her. He shrugged, unable to comprehend her, then looked back at the naked fight.

  “You will lose your family,” I warned her.

  “I will make a family,” she said firmly. “Erik and I will make a family.”

  “And you’ll live among the Danes whom you told me you hate.”

  “You live among the Christians, Lord Uhtred,” she said with a flash of her old mischief.

  I smiled at that. “You’re sure about this?” I asked her, “about Erik?”

  “Yes,” she said intensely, and that was love speaking, of course.

  I sighed. “If I can,” I said, “I will help you.”

  She laid a small hand on mine. “Thank you.”

  Two dogs had begun to fight now and the guests were cheering the beasts on. Rushlights were lit and candles brought to the top table as the summer evening dimmed outside. More ale came, and birch wine too, and the first drunks were singing raucously. “They’ll start fighting soon,” I told Æthelflaed, and they did. Four men suffered broken bones before the feast was over, while another had an eye gouged out before his angry drunken assailant was pulled away from him. Steapa was seated next to Weland, and the two men, though they spoke different languages, were sharing a silver-rimmed drinking horn and appeared to be making disparaging comments about the brawlers who spilled across the floor in drunken rage. Weland was obviously drunk himself, for he draped a huge arm around Steapa’s shoulders and began to sing.

  “You sound like a calf being gelded!” Sigefrid roared at Weland, then demanded that a real singer be fetched, and so a blind skald was given a chair by the hearth and he struck his harp and chanted a song of Sigefrid’s prowess. He told of the Franks whom Sigefrid had killed, of the Saxons cut down by Sigefrid’s sword, Fear-Giver, and of the Frisian women who had been widowed by the bear-cloaked Norseman. The poem mentioned many of Sigefrid’s men by name, recounting their heroism in battle, and as each new name was chanted the man would stand and his friends would cheer him. If the named hero was dead then the listening men beat three times on the tables so that the dead man would hear the solemn ovation in Odin’s hall. But the biggest cheers were for Sigefrid, who hoisted an ale-horn every time his name was mentioned.

  I stayed sober. That was hard, for I was tempted to match Sigefrid horn for horn, but I knew I had to return to Lundene next morning and that meant Erik had to finish his talk with me that same night, though in truth the eastern sky was already lightening by the time I left the hall. Æthelflaed, escorted by sober and older guards, had left for her bed hours before. Drunken men were sprawled in noisy sleep beneath the benches as I walked out, while Sigefrid was slumped on the table. He had opened one eye and frowned as I left. “We have agreement?” he asked sleepily.

  “We have an agreement,” I confirmed.

  “Bring the money, Saxon,” he growled, and fell back to sleep.

  Erik was waiting for me outside Æthelflaed’s quarters. I had expected him to be there, and we took our old places on the rampart from where I watched the gray light spread like a stain across the calm waters of the estuary.

  “That’s Wave-Tamer,” Erik said, nodding down at the ships drawn up on the muddy beach. He might have been able to discern the beautiful boat he had made, but to me the whole fleet was nothing but black shapes in the gray. “I have scraped her hull clean,” he told me, “caulked her, and made her swift again.”

  “Your crew can be trusted?”

  “They are my oath-men. They can be trusted.” Erik paused. A small wind lifted his dark hair. “But what they will not do,” he went on in a low voice, “is fight my brother’s men.”

  “They might have to.”

  “They will defend themselves,” he said, “but not attack. There are kinsmen on both sides.”

  I stretched, yawned, and thought of the long ride home to Lundene. “So your problem,” I said, “is the ship that blocks the channel?”

  “Which is manned by my brother’s men.”

  “Not Haesten’s?”

  “I would kill his men,” he said bitterly, “there’s no kinship there.”

  Nor affection either, I noted. “So you want me to destroy the ship?” I asked him.

  “I want you to open the channel,” he corrected me.

  I stared at that dark blocking ship with her reinforced sheerline. “Why don’t you just demand that they get out of your way?” I asked. That seemed to me to be the least complicated and safest way for Erik to escape. The chained ship’s crew was accustomed to moving the heavy hull to allow vessels to enter or leave the creek, so why would they stop Erik?

  “No ships are to sail before the ransom arrives,” Erik explained.

  “None?”

  “None,” he said flatly.

  And that made some sense, because what was to stop some enterprising man taking three or four ships upriver to wait in a reed-shrouded creek for Alfred’s treasure fleet to pass, then slide out, oars beating, swords drawn and men howling? Sigefrid had pinned his monstrous ambition on the arrival of the ransom and he would not risk losing it to some Viking even more scoundrelly than himself, and that thought suggested the person who probably embodied Sigefrid’s fear. “Haesten?” I asked Erik.

  He nodded. “A sly man.”

  “Sly,” I agreed, “and untrustworthy. An oath-breaker.”

  “He will share the ransom, of course,” Erik said, ignoring the fact that if he got his wish then no ransom would ever be paid, “but I’m certain he would rather have it all.”

  “So no ships sail,” I said, “until you sail. But can you take Æthelflaed to your ship without your brother knowing?”

  “Yes,” he said. He drew a knife from its sheath on his belt. “It’s a fortnight till the next full moon,” he went on, then scored a deep mark in the sharpened top of an oak log. “That’s today,” he said, tapping the fresh cut, then carved another deep mark with the blade’s sharp edge. “Tomorrow’s dawn,” he continued, indicating the new cut, then went on slashing the palisade’s top until he had made seven raw scars in the timbers. “Will you come at dawn one week from now?”

  I nodded cautiously. “But the moment I attack,” I pointed out, “someone blows a horn and wak
es the camp.”

  “We’ll be afloat,” he said, “ready to go. No one can reach you from the camp before you’re back out at sea.” He looked worried at my doubts. “I’ll pay you!”

  I smiled at those words. Dawn was bleaching the world, coloring the low long wisps of cloud with streaks of pale gold and edges of shining silver. “Æthelflaed’s happiness is my pay,” I said. “And one week from today,” I went on, “I’ll open your channel for you. You can sail away together, make landfall at Gyruum, ride hard to Dunholm and give Ragnar my greetings.”

  “You’ll send him a message?” Erik asked anxiously, “to warn him of our coming?”

  I shook my head. “Carry the message for me,” I said, and some instinct made me turn to see that Haesten was watching us. He was standing with two companions outside the big hall where he was strapping on his swords, brought by Sigefrid’s steward from the place where we had all surrendered our weapons before the feast. There was nothing strange in what Haesten did, except my senses prickled because he seemed so watchful. I had a horrid suspicion that he knew what Erik and I talked about. He went on looking at me. He was very still, but at last he gave me a low, mocking bow and walked away. Eilaf the Red, I saw, was one of his two companions. “Does Haesten know about you and Æthelflaed?” I asked Erik.

  “Of course not. He just thinks I’m responsible for guarding her.”

  “He knows you like her?”

  “That’s all he knows,” Erik insisted.

  Sly, untrustworthy Haesten, who owed me his life. Who had broken his oath. Whose ambitions probably outstretched even Sigefrid’s dreams. I watched him until he went through the doorway of what I assumed was his own hall. “Be careful with Haesten,” I warned Erik, “I think he is easily underestimated.”

  “He’s a weasel,” Erik said, dismissing my fears. “What message do I take to Ragnar?” he asked.

  “Tell Ragnar,” I said, “that his sister is happy and let Æthelflaed give him news of her.” There was no point in writing anything, even if I had possessed parchment or ink, because Ragnar could not read, but Æthelflaed knew Thyra and her news of Beocca’s wife would convince Ragnar that the runaway lovers told the truth. “And one week from now,” I said, “as the upper edge of the sun touches the world’s rim, be ready.”