Loch Garman: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 7)

by James L. Nelson

  I guess this is when we fight, Thorgrim thought. This is when we fight our way free or die trying. It seemed they were out of choices.

  And then another thought came to him, something else he might say, the exact words he needed for that moment. The very thing that might win them safe passage. The gods, he was sure, had whispered the words in his ear.

  “These two, they’re the only ones you caught?” Thorgrim asked. Failend translated. A flicker of doubt played over Bécc’s face. He replied with a single word.

  “Bécc says yes,” Failend said.

  “Very well,” Thorgrim said. “That means we just have to wait. A week maybe, I doubt more.”

  Failend translated and waited for Bécc’s reply. “Bécc says whatever trick you think you’re pulling, he won’t fall for it.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” Thorgrim said. “He’ll learn. Six men snuck out last night. The four that got away, they’ll reach our longphort and send word back to Dubh-linn. News of what we discovered. The Mine of St. Aiden. And then the longships will sail for this place.”

  Thorgrim was sure he had butchered the pronunciation of St. Aiden, but Failend understood, and when she translated it she pronounced it correctly. That was obvious from the expression on the abbot’s face, and to a lesser degree, Bécc’s. The old man scowled, looked at Bécc, looked at Thorgrim.

  Once again, it was Bécc who spoke.

  “Bécc says there is no such thing,” Failend said. “You have heard rumors and you think you can use them to talk your way out of here.”

  Thorgrim shrugged. “Tell Bécc and the abbot they can believe what they wish, but I won’t surrender my men for the lives of those two. Not when we need only wait for a thousand Northmen to arrive.” With that he turned and stepped back through the door into the dark interior of the church. He nodded toward Godi and Gudrid who were flanking the hostage, and the two men shoved him unceremoniously back out the door. Gudrid shut the door behind him.

  “Bécc has Harald and the Frank tied to stakes and he’s ready to burn them,” Thorgrim said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “It’s time for us to fight. Now. I’ll try to free Harald and get a sword in his hand. We’ll form a shield wall and try to cut our way to the gate. Good?”

  Heads nodded. From the other side of the door they could hear muffled words, raised voices. Thorgrim guessed that orders were being given to set the brush and wood on fire.

  “No time left,” Thorgrim said. “Make two lines behind me; we come out fighting.” Starri was already there, head of the line, at Thorgrim’s side. His shirt was off, and he held battle axes in both hands.

  Thorgrim reached for the iron handle on the door and he heard a voice from the other side, a single voice. “Thorgrim!”

  Thorgrim turned to Failend. “Bécc?”

  “Sounds like,” Failend said.

  Bécc called again, more words this time. “He says he would speak with you again,” Failend said.

  Thorgrim frowned. He had already given up hope that his bluff might work, and had set his mind to the final option. He pulled the door open and he and Failend stepped out.

  Things had not changed much. The men-at-arms were still in their lines. Apparently it had not occurred to Bécc that the Northmen might try and break out just then, or he had been too busy arguing with the abbot to get them in line for battle.

  There’s an opportunity lost, Thorgrim thought. We could have done great slaughter. On the other hand, Louis and Harald had not yet been set on fire, which was good.

  Bécc and the abbot seemed not to have moved. Bécc was scowling. But now a third man stood with them, wearing the tattered and dirty clothes of one whose living involved hard work. Thorgrim thought he had seen the man before, but he could not recall where.

  The abbot turned to this newcomer and spoke. The newcomer replied, his voice soft. He pointed toward Thorgrim. He half turned and pointed toward Harald, tied to the stake.

  “The abbot asked the man if he knew you,” Failend said, speaking in a loud whisper. “The man said you were the leader of the heathens who captured him. He said Harald was the one they took prisoner.”

  Ah, that’s it! Thorgrim thought. This was one of the men from the boat who had been taking Harald prisoner to Ferns. Cathal, or something like that. The Northmen in turn had taken him and his companions prisoner, had brought them to Ferns, but they had escaped during the fighting. Now the abbot had summoned him, no doubt wanting to find out what Thorgrim might know about the Mine of St. Aiden.

  The Irish miner was still talking, pointing at Harald, pointing at Thorgrim, pointing to himself. Thorgrim could see the man was terrified, spilling out this tale for the abbot and Bécc. As well he might be. Things would go hard for him if he took the blame for giving away the monastery’s most closely held secret.

  “This fellow is saying that Harald came sneaking around the mine,” Failend continued. “They caught him and took him prisoner, but not before he had discovered the truth about what the mine is. They were taking him back to Ferns for the abbot to pass judgment when they were captured by the other heathens. He means us,” Failend added.

  Thorgrim nodded. It was not exactly the same story that Harald had told, but Thorgrim could see why he might not wish for the abbot to know the truth: that this man and the others had actually invited Harald to accompany them to the mine, even if they meant to keep the truth from him.

  The Irishman stopped. Bécc and the abbot shifted their gaze toward Thorgrim. They did not look happy. They looked, in fact, furious, frightened, and defeated all at once, an expression Thorgrim would not have thought possible.

  “So you see,” Thorgrim said, “I do in fact know the truth about the Mine of St. Aiden.”

  Bécc spoke, spitting the words. The abbot looked at him, irritated and making no effort to hide it. Failend translated.

  “Bécc says, maybe you do know the truth, but you’re lying about the others getting away from here, bringing word of it to Dubh-linn.”

  Thorgrim nodded. “Tell Bécc…tell the abbot…this,” he said to Failend. “Tell them that they will only know the truth of my words when the longships arrive in the river. Tell them if they choose to not believe me, then they will lose many men in a great and bloody fight trying to get us out of the church. And then they can wait for the Northmen from Dubh-linn to arrive.”

  Failend translated the words. Thorgrim tried to judge the effect they were having by the expressions on Bécc’s and the abbot’s faces, but it was not easy. Those men were not strangers to this sort of negotiation.

  “Now tell them,” Thorgrim said when Failend had finished, “that when I first came here I told them I wanted nothing more than to repair my ships and sail away. That has not changed. If they let us go, and give us the wool we came here for, we’ll do that. And I’ll stop the men from sending word to Dubh-linn. It will cost them nothing. No lives lost. No sacking of the monastery or the mine. But there’s little time. The men who escaped this place will sail soon.”

  It was a game of chance Thorgrim was offering them, a gamble on the truth of his words. But it was not an even chance. Thorgrim made sure of that. If they just let him go, no harm would come to them, whether Thorgrim was telling the truth or not. If, however, he was telling the truth, if others had escaped and word was going to Dubh-linn, then it would mean a bloody fight that morning and, soon after, the fiery end to the monastery at Ferns.

  A gamble, but then, nearly all of the affairs of men were a gamble. And this was an easier choice than most.

  Thorgrim studied the two Irishmen’s faces as Failend said the words. They revealed little. But they did reveal something. Thorgrim could see their resolve melt away, and in its place, resignation.

  “Tell them,” Thorgrim said to Failend, “that before we return to Loch Garman I expect them to give us a good portion of the cloth that we’re owed.”

  Epilogue

  The events indeed are numerous, killings and deaths and raids and battles. />
  No one can relate them all…

  Annals of Ulster

  The air smelled of salt water and marsh, and it was filled with the sounds of hammers ringing out, saws grinding through wood, the steady chop of axes and adzes, the musical ring on the blacksmith’s work. The ad hoc longphort, Waesfiord, as Thorgrim called it, Loch Garman to the Irish, was once again alive with the cumulative effort of getting a small fleet of battered ships ready to take to the sea. To leave the shores of Ireland. To return, perhaps, to Norway.

  Thorgrim Night Wolf did not like to think on that. He would not, even if asked directly, say that such was his plan. It was bad luck, it was an irresistible temptation to the gods, for him to say such a thing. Some men, he knew, could declare that they would sail for Norway and the gods would not stand in their way. Rather they would send the winds that would fill their sails and drive them to the eastward, their ships brimming with plunder and crewed by those happiest of sailors, the ones who were homeward bound.

  Such was not the case with Thorgrim. He had come to understand that. So he tried to not tempt the gods in any way.

  He was not, at that moment, thinking of those things. He was not paying attention to men working on the ships. He was looking instead at Failend, delicate as a bird, tough as leather.

  She was seated on a makeshift bench. Three weeks before, they had had to carry her on a litter to the boat tied up on the Bann, and float her down to where the longships remained pulled up on shore, where the Bann and the Slaney met. She had used the very last of her strength standing straight at Thorgrim’s side as he had negotiated the safe passage of his men, the rolls of oiled wool cloth to be delivered to Loch Garman.

  She spent three days on her back once they reached the longphort, sleeping, drinking broth. The Northmen, who had not known what to make of her at first, had come to love her. She had marched with them, fought with them, been wounded in a desperate defense of their shield wall. She had suffered her wound without complaint. Now the men treated her like the privileged noblewoman Thorgrim suspected she once had been.

  By the fourth day she was done with being an invalid. She forced herself to her feet, to the visible and almost comic concern of the others, and hobbled around the place. She insisted on more solid food, on ale. She walked until she was exhausted, and then sat, and then walked again.

  Three weeks since the spear had ripped through her side, and now there was nothing left but a wound that was mostly healed and the beginning of what would be an impressive scar. Two nights before, she and Thorgrim had been lying together under the blanket they shared, on the bed of boughs and bearskin that Thorgrim had fashioned. She was wearing a leine—Irish dress—rather than the clothes of the Northmen. She had been doing so more often, and Thorgrim was not sure if it was because they were more comfortable, or because she felt secure enough in the company of the Northmen that she no longer had to prove herself as one of them.

  It never occurred to him to ask her. It was not the sort of thing he would do.

  Failend was seated now, but she was not resting. Spread across her lap was a wide swath of red wool cloth, and over her knees an equally wide swath of white. Her hand was moving with a swift and regular motion, stitching the red to the white. When she was done, two more panels of Sea Hammer’s sail would be completed, and only six more to go. And then, once she was shown how, she could begin sewing the bolt rope around the sail’s perimeter.

  Thorgrim had not expected the abbot to produce much when he had insisted the monastery provide some of the cloth he had been promised. After all, it had been no more than a few weeks from the time he had first handed over Failend’s little silver casket as payment for the work. He assumed that Ferns would not have produced much in that time.

  But he was wrong. A cart had been rolled out and into it the monks had piled a dozen wide rolls of the stuff, some white, some died red. Louis the Frank laughed as he saw the cart piled high, because he, like Thorgrim, understood what it meant. The abbot had had the cloth all along. He had told Thorgrim that Ferns would be sacked before the cloth was woven just to get the Northmen to defend the place.

  Clever, clever bastard, Thorgrim thought. He had genuine respect for a man that cunning, even if the cunning had been used against him and his men. But he did not laugh because he did not think it was funny.

  They had returned to the longphort, set to work on the ships. Thorgrim made good on his promise and stopped any of his men from going to Dubh-linn. That was easy enough, since none of them were going there in the first place.

  A week later the rest of the sailcloth arrived from Ferns.

  The few men who were good with sail needle and twine were set to stitching up the panels for the new sails. Once Failend had recovered enough of her strength, she joined in, and soon left the rest of the sailmakers in her wake. Sewing was a task that Irish women, and women the world over, were set to from an early age, and Failend was good at it. She quickly made the shift from the needlework needed to hem a brat to that needed to build a sail, and by then she was flat stitching at a furious rate.

  Now she looked up, as if sensing that Thorgrim’s eyes were on her. She smiled and he smiled back. The sun was spilling down on her, lighting up her black hair and her face, much more tan now than it had been when he had first set eyes on her.

  Thorgrim felt an odd stirring in his breast, the cumulative sensation of the sunshine and the sight of Failend, the sails coming together, the ships near ready to be pushed back into the sea. It was contentment, he realized, a sense that all was well.

  He looked around, over the sandbars, the reed-filled marshes, the rolling green hills, out toward the blue sea, winking in the sunlight. He had always cursed this place, this Ireland. But on such a day, a rare day when the rain was not falling and the fog not hanging over the land, he had to admit that it was a fine country, even a beautiful country.

  And he thought, for the first time that he had ever thought such a thing, that if the gods would not allow him to leave, it might not be such a tragic thing.

  The sun fell equally on the shoulders of Bécc mac Carthach, known more commonly these days as Brother Bécc, though he was having a harder time thinking of himself that way. Nor was the sunshine lifting his dark mood in the least. He was thankful for it, but for one reason only—it allowed him to see farther than he could when the mist hung over the hills.

  He was sitting on his horse, at the crest of a hill, and the place he was looking at was about a mile away. He had the use of only one eye—indeed he had only one eye—and the sight in his remaining eye was not great. He could pick out no details from that distance. He could see the wide blue stretch of water, the bay formed by the mouth of the River Slaney. He could see the hunched, light brown backs of the sandbars, breaking the surface of the water like Leviathan cresting the waves. He could see the crescent moon beach on which the heathens had made their camp, and could make out the shapes of the four ships hauled up there, and the tents and such set further back.

  He knew what the camp looked like, the longphort, as the heathens called it. He had been there. He had personally seen to the delivery of the last of the wool cloth promised to the Northmen by Abbot Columb. He told the abbot that he and a handful of his men-at-arms would accompany the carts to make sure they arrived safe, and that there was no mischief on the part of the heathens. The abbot was grateful. He did not understand that Bécc’s stated reason was not in fact the real reason for his making that journey.

  Bécc wanted to see the heathen’s camp. He wanted to see how many men there were, how their defenses were arranged. He wanted to make a professional estimate of what it would take to stamp the vermin out.

  So he had lied to Abbot Columb. It was a thing he had never done before, a thing that caused him greater agony than the sword stroke that had taken his eye and half his face. But the truth was that Bécc mac Carthach was starting to have doubts.

  It was not his God or his faith that he doubted. It was the abbot. Nev
er once, since he had come to the monastery at Ferns and given his life over to God, had he ever doubted the abbot. Nor did he now doubt the abbot’s holiness or the sincerity of his faith. But he did, for the first time, question the man’s judgment.

  Abbot Columb is a man, Bécc thought to himself. There’s only one man who ever walked this earth who made no mistakes, and the abbot is not him. Bécc knew he was right, but he could not help but feel disloyal about doubting the old man.

  Worse, Abbot Columb was his confessor. Bécc did not know if doubting the man’s wisdom was a sin, but he would have liked the chance to confess it anyway. Going to another confessor, however, would have certainly smacked of disloyalty. Bécc had been a soldier long before he was a monk, had been a soldier most of his life, and loyalty was as deeply ingrained in him as was his love of the Lord.

  Bécc had not believed a word that the lying heathen Thorgrim had said. He did not believe that four other men had escaped from Ferns. He had urged the abbot to let him light the fires under the prisoners tied to the stakes, let their screams draw the rest of the heathens from the church as he was sure they would, and let his men cut them down as they came.

  But Abbot Columb would not take the risk. To him the chance to crush the heathens underfoot was not enough to risk having the Mine of St. Aiden exposed. He reminded Bécc that the heathens hoped only to sail away. Bécc reminded the abbot that he had only the word of the heathens on that point, and their word was of little value.

  But the abbot would not be convinced, so Bécc accompanied the bolts of wool to the heathens’ camp and surreptitiously looked for weaknesses. And he often donned his mail and strapped on his sword and rode down from Ferns to Loch Garman, where he sat on his horse on the hill and watched from a distance. He watched to see the heathens push their ships into the sea, waited to see if they would sail off toward the horizon or row up the Slaney to sack Ferns.