A Vengeful Wind: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 8)

by Nelson, James L.

  “Dearly beloved,” Ealhstan started in, his jowls and chins quivering a bit as he spoke. “We are gathered here, in the sight of God and our Savior Jesus Christ, to witness...”

  Those gathered shifted a little where they stood, leaned in a bit closer. Silks and fine linens rustled, calfskin shoes shuffled in the rushes strewn over the smooth stone floor. These were not the common people, the ceorl . They were the elite of the shire. All of them. Because no one of any rank in Dorsetshire would have dared miss this ceremony for fear of angering the ealdorman or finding himself the object of some intrigue arranged in their absence.

  At Merewald’s side stood his brother, Nothwulf, two years his junior, but taller than Merewald by a good two inches and two stone heavier. It was Nothwulf, not Merewald, who most favored their father, Osric, in nearly every way. But where Merewald had been fortunate in his birth, Nothwulf had been less so, and now he could do little but serve as best man at the wedding of his brother, the ealdorman of Dorsetshire.

  There were the churchmen also in attendance, the priests who served at Bishop Ealhstan’s pleasure, the men in the highest ranks of the ecclesiastic see. There was Oswin, the shire reeve, who wore a deep green tunic and a red sash and sword as marks of his office. And behind them, standing in ranks, their wives at their sides, stood the more prosperous of the thegns, those minor noblemen who formed the base of the ealdorman’s power.

  While some thegns were little more than peasants, puffed up ceorl who had managed to scrape together five hides of land, others owned considerable property and commanded hundreds of men in the fyrd . These were the thegns who were invited to an ealdorman’s wedding, and they were not likely to refuse.

  Foremost among them, standing in the front rank, was a man named Leofric. Leofric’s land, a considerable amount of land, which yielded a considerable amount in rent and taxes, lay to the southeast of Sherborne. It centered on the town of Wimborne, home to a Benedictine nunnery founded by St. Cuthburga, the sister of some ancient king of Wessex, and one of the wealthiest and most influential of its ilk.

  Nothwulf stole a glance over at Leofric. The man was wearing his finest, of course, his gray hair swept neatly back, his salt-and- pepper moustache and goatee trimmed to perfection. His face wore no expression. Typical. Leofric was a hard one to fathom.

  What do you think of this, old man? Nothwulf wondered. As one of the most influential men in Dorset, and a man close to King Æ thelwulf, Leofric’s concerns mattered a great deal. That was why both Merewald and Nothwulf, and their father before them, were careful to stay in Leofric’s favor.

  At the same time, what happened in the ealdorman’s house in Sherborne mattered a great deal to Leofric.

  “Do you, Merewald, ealdorman of Dorsetshire, take this woman to be your wife?” the bishop intoned, pulling Nothwulf back to the business at hand, though Ealhstan’s voice gained no more enthusiasm as he neared the climactic moment of the long afternoon’s ceremony.

  Merewald straightened a bit, and when he spoke his voice was strong and certain. “I do.”

  Ealhstan turned to Cynewise. He asked if she would take Merewald for husband. Cynewise spoke, and her voice was soft, carrying to just the first few ranks of the thegns standing in attendance.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Then in the eyes of God and His church, I pronounce you man and wife,” Ealhstan said, and he sounded as relieved as any in the cathedral.

  Merewald turned to Cynewise. He lifted the veil that hung over her face and she looked up at him, her eyes a good five inches below his. He did not smile as he leaned down and dutifully kissed her, and she did not flinch as he did.

  A ripple of applause was just moving through the watchers when the shouting started. It was a sharp scream, a wild sound, and a man named Werheard, a minor thegn from the west, burst out of the second row, a dagger flashing in his hand. He charged at the altar, screaming as he ran, and the shocking sound and the sudden flurry left the others standing frozen and dumbfounded.

  It was fifteen feet to the steps where Merewald and Cynewise stood and Werheard covered it in the space of a heartbeat or two, but that was time enough for the others to react. Merewald spun around, a look of horror on his face. Cynewise half crouched, her hands up as if she could defend herself from the wicked blade. Nothwulf spun toward the sound. His hands were coming up from his side when Werheard ran hard into him, shoulder first, knocking him right off his feet and sending him sprawling over the red carpet that covered the dais in the front of the church.

  “Bastard! Bastard!” Werheard screamed as he stepped toward Merewald. Now the ealdorman had his hands up as well, palms out, warding off the attack, but he might as well have done nothing at all. Werheard thrust the dagger forward, straight arm, and the stiletto point drove right into Merewald’s chest, right into his heart. His eyes went wide, his mouth gaped open, and Werheard pulled the blade free and thrust again, a needless gesture. The knife ripped through Merewald’s neck and he toppled sideways, the blood spurting like a fountain from the wounds, already soaking his fine linen tunic.

  Werheard turned to the others. “To me!” he shouted, his voice loud, his tone part defiance, part confusion. He looked left and right, eyes sweeping the shocked and frozen thegns from whose ranks he had come.

  “To me!” he shouted again and there was more confusion in his voice now, his face more panicked and wild.

  The priests who flanked Bishop Ealhstan had pushed him back a few feet and put themselves between him and the killer. The thegns and their wives looked on, stunned, unwilling or unable to move. But Oswin the shire reeve had recovered before Merewald had even come to rest. He drew his sword as he came at Werheard, shouting, “Murder! Damnable murder!”

  He pulled the sword back over his head. Behind Werheard, Nothwulf was struggling to stand, and as he did he shouted, “Don’t kill him! Oswin, don’t kill him!” But if Oswin heard the words he did not heed them. His long sword came sailing around in a powerful backhand stroke. Werheard was still shouting when the blade caught him in the neck and barely hesitated as it passed on through. His head flew off toward the south wall, his long hair whipping as it spun like a falling stone. His body remained upright for a second more, then it slumped down, dropping across the motionless legs of Merewald.

  Then everything stopped. The priests, the bishop, Oswin, Nothwulf, the thegns all stood motionless. No one was quite sure what had happened, or what would happen next. Only one sound filled the cathedral, adding another layer of shock and horror to the thing: Cynewise, crumpled on the steps, legs drawn up, shrieking over and over again.

  Chapter Two

  Little the sand if little the seas, little are minds of men,

  for ne'er in the world were all equally wise,

  'tis shared by the fools and the sage.

  Wisdom for Wanderers and Counsel to Guests

  It was Gudrid who saw the ships first. The morning was well on, a gray and uninviting morning, and the view to the horizon was limited, with the far end of the wide harbor just on the edge of visible. For that reason, the ships were already through the harbor entrance and making for the longphort when he spotted them.

  Gudrid saw them because he was the one charged with looking out, a dull task that was shared by all, save for those with eyesight so poor that it was pointless to put them to that job. Gudrid was standing on the top of the earthen wall that surrounded the makeshift longphort at a place that the Irish called Loch Garman, though Thorgrim Night Wolf called it Waesfiord, which meant inlet of the mudflats. It was not a place that Thorgrim loved.

  The wall had been built up to a height of fifteen feet. That was high enough for a watchman standing there to see trouble coming from a good distance, at least when the land was not under a blanket of gray fog and rain, which was about half the time. But that morning, despite the hovering threat of rotten weather, a man could see two or three miles in any direction. That was how far away the ships were when Gudrid spotted them.

&
nbsp; Thorgrim Night Wolf was not looking out to sea. He could see nothing but the dark planks of his ship Sea Hammer , a foot away from his face. He was on his back, the shingle of the beach starting to dig through his tunic, and halfway under the larboard side of the ship, which was pulled up on the beach and resting on its starboard side.

  With a hammer in one hand and a caulking iron, like a dull chisel, in the other, Thorgrim was gently tapping a bit of tarred twine between two of the planks where water insisted on seeping through. When Sea Hammer had been built, a length of rope was sandwiched between the planks to keep the water out, and it still did its job, mostly. But with the great abuse that the ship had suffered in the months since it had first been rolled into the sea, there were places where she was not as tight as Thorgrim would have wished.

  “Thorgrim!” He heard Gudrid’s voice clearly over the ring of hammers, the chopping sound of axes and adzes shaping wood. “Thorgrim, ships!”

  There was not much Gudrid might have said that would get Thorgrim’s attention quicker than that. He dropped the hammer and the iron and rolled out from under Sea Hammer and up onto his feet.

  Anyone approaching the longphort was a potential threat, but if they were coming from the land, they were undoubtedly Irish, and there was the wall to stop them. There was no such barrier to stop anyone coming from the sea. Ships meant Northmen, Norwegians or Danes, but there was no reason to think they were any friendlier than the Irish.

  Thorgrim squinted and looked out over the water, running his eyes from the headland to the north across the wide sweep of horizon. The thick blanket of clouds limited how far he could see, as did eyes that were growing old, and he could make out nothing out of the ordinary.

  He turned and jogged over to the wall and up the crude ladder leaning there. All hundred or so men and one woman at Waesfiord had heard Gudrid’s cry, and now all work ceased, all eyes turned seaward.

  Thorgrim stepped up beside Gudrid. He squinted and turned his head and stared in the direction that Gudrid pointed, but he still could not see them, not at first. Then finally they came into view, four small dots near the edge of the visible world, four ships’ sails seen from several miles away. They were just coming through the mile-wide gap between the headland to the north and the sand bar to the south that made up the entrance to the vast harbor, three miles wide east to west and six north to south.

  “Well done, Gudrid,” Thorgrim said. “Well spotted.” There was a flurry of motion below and Starri Deathless scrambled up the ladder and stood at Thorgrim’s side. Starri was a berserker, one of those men gifted or cursed by the gods with a madness in battle beyond that of normal men. His senses were sharp, his eyesight, his hearing more acute than that of any man among the crews of Thorgrim’s ships. Thorgrim might have used him as a lookout, but Starri could not concentrate on any single task for longer than it took most men to urinate.

  “What?” Starri asked, incredulous. “You only just saw those ships, Gudrid? Are you blind? Why, they’re all but run up on the beach!”

  Gudrid made no reply and neither did Thorgrim. Gudrid would not have suffered such a remark from any other man, but Starri was not like other men, and no one who knew him took offense at his words.

  “Four sail, Gudrid, do I see right?” Thorgrim asked.

  “Yes, four sail,” Starri said before Gudrid could make reply. “I’m happy you can see them, Night Wolf. You’ve grown half-blind with your advancing age.”

  Thorgrim grunted. He was not in fact terribly old, just into his fifth decade, but he was feeling the effects of hard years, and he did not care to be reminded of it.

  “I suppose,” Gudrid said, still ignoring Starri, “that it was only a matter of time before we had company here.”

  Thorgrim nodded. Gudrid was right. Summer had come to Ireland, the weather warm and as free of rain as it would ever be, the days long and the seas calm. It was the time for raiding, for men from the north to take to the sea, to appear over the horizon and fall on some unlucky town or monastery, to plunder it for valuables and carry off the people as slaves. It was what brought the Northmen swarming to those shores.

  It was what Thorgrim and his men should have been doing as well. But raiding meant ships, seaworthy ships, and those things they were lacking.

  They did not want for ships. They had four of those. The mighty Sea Hammer , which had been built under Thorgrim’s watchful eye and skilled hands back in V ík-ló, and Blood Hawk , her near sister. There was the smaller Fox and Dragon as well. They were all pulled up on the beach. They were ships, to be sure, but they were not seaworthy.

  A storm in the early summer had rolled over them, just as they were tangled in a sea-fight with a Frisian slaver, and Njord, god of the wind and seas, had driven them ashore and smashed strakes and spars, snapped oars and torn sails to shreds. And so, at a time of year when they should have been driving their ships along the coast, they were struggling just to get them afloat.

  Sea Hammer and Blood Hawk had needed the bulk of the work. They had been nearly shattered as they were thrown ashore. Since then they had been brought around to this sheltered place, all but sinking during the short passage, and hauled far up the beach on rollers. Broken planks had been cut away and new sections of wood scarfed in, cracked ribs had been pried off and new ones fashioned and pegged in place. New spars had been shaped from pine trees felled further inland. The work had been hard, exacting and extensive, but it was nearly done. Soon the ships would be rolled back into the sea where they belonged.

  More men had climbed up onto the wall now and were staring off to the northeast. Thorgrim considered ordering them all back to work but decided against it. They had been hard at their labors for quite some time, with little in the way of distraction, no women and a limited supply of ale and mead. Now here was the most interesting thing to come their way in weeks, and Thorgrim knew he should let them have some pleasure from it.

  Harald Broadarm, Thorgrim’s son, sixteen years old and strong as any of the men, stronger than most, climbed up the ladder and stood at his father’s side. Wisps of his long yellow hair had escaped the thong that bound them and now they danced in the light on-shore wind as he turned and faced seaward with the others.

  “Who is this, Father?” he asked. Thorgrim smiled, just a bit. Harald often asked such questions, as if he thought the gods told his father things that other men could not know.

  “I’m not sure,” Thorgrim said. “Northmen, I have little doubt. The Irish don’t go in for ships much, and no trader would be coming on so bold as these fellows.”

  Harald nodded. Thorgrim wondered if the boy thought that answer was some vision from another realm, some revelation, or just the simple, logical guess that it was.

  “Four ships,” Harald said. “Four ships to our two.”

  Thorgrim understood what Harald meant. There were, in fact, four ships in Thorgrim’s little fleet, but Sea Hammer and Blood Hawk were in no condition to take to the water. Only Fox and Dragon , left on the beach during the storm and the fighting, were seaworthy. They had been missing only their oars, which had been stolen by the Irishmen who found them. For weeks the men at Waesfiord had felled ash trees, floated them down to the longphort, split them with great hammers and wedges and shaped the sections of blond wood into the long, tapering sweeps that would drive the ships when the wind failed them.

  The ships could move under oar, of course, but none of them could be considered truly ready for sea until they had sails, which they did not. They had lost their sails to the storm, the fabric shredded in the brutal wind. And while the Northmen could fashion every other part of their ships, they could not make cloth. So, for that they had made a bargain with a nearby monastery at a place called Ferns. The monastery would provide them with the wide bolts of thick, oiled wool they would need, and the Northmen would pay for it with silver.

  There were some misunderstandings at first, but once they had sorted out the problems, the cloth had begun to arrive as quickly as it
could be produced. Every week or so, nearly, a wagon would roll groaning through the open gate of the longphort, and behind it, an escort of a dozen Irish warriors. The soldiers were led by a monk named B é cc mac Carthach, who had given up his life as a man-at-arms and was known now as Brother B é cc.

  He did not look like a man of God, however, on those occasions when he rode into Waesfiord at the head of his small band. The brown robe and long knotted belt were gone, and in their place he wore a mail shirt, polished bright, leather boots and a sword at his waist. On his head was a helmet, shining as bright as the mail. Half of his face was a mask of scar tissue, the remnants of a battle wound that should have killed him, but instead drove him into the service of God.

  Even though B é cc was acting the warrior, he was still doing his Christ-God’s work, Thorgrim knew. B é cc hated the Northmen and considered them vermin, a curse on the land, and worse, an enemy of his God. His attitude was understandable. Thorgrim had to admit as much, though he thought the Irish would be more justified in their outrage if they spent less time killing one another.

  So when B é cc arrived at the longphort, Thorgrim greeted him in a courteous way, with Failend there to translate. And B é cc returned the greeting with his own strained courtesy. But Thorgrim knew he was not really there to see that the cloth made it safe to the longphort. The dozen armed men guarding the wagons did not need his help. He came so he could see what his enemy was about, judge the strength of the fortifications, make certain the fin gall were really preparing to leave as they said they were.

  It was one of the reasons that Thorgrim maintained a lookout on top of the walls during the day, and at night or in fog sent scouts out half a mile from the longphort to see that no one approached unseen. Though he had given his word that he would not attack the monastery at Ferns, and the abbot whom B é cc served had given his word that the Irish would not attack them, Thorgrim did not trust the abbot or B é cc. And he knew they did not trust him.