The wagon reached the end of the ground where the English had stood. Armod pulled on the reins and the horse kicked and bucked and thrashed its head, but it slowed enough for Thorgrim and the others to jump off.
Thorgrim hit the ground, stumbled, then stood and looked out over the open ground and the fighting men there. There was no battle any more, just dozens of smaller fights. He searched for the place where he might most effectively join in, but there was nowhere that he could see.
Most of the fighting had stopped, with the English either dead or knocked out cold or kneeling with arms raised and faces that looked as if they expected to be killed then and there. Thorgrim walked around to the back end of the wagon. Three men were struggling to hold Starri back as the berserker screamed and thrashed, which, to Thorgrim, had come to mark the end of any fight.
“Get their weapons! Make them lie face down!” Thorgrim shouted. His mind was working through the myriad things to which he had to attend. In battle there was no time for such worry or consideration. A man’s thoughts were blown out like a candle in a breeze and he moved and reacted with pure, mindless drive. It was a beautiful thing. But then the fighting ended and the world reasserted itself, and victory meant many, many decisions to make.
The Northmen were shoving the kneeling, terrified English warriors to the ground and Thorgrim had no doubt that each of them lying face down was braced for a sword through the back.
Would their God welcome a man who was killed with no weapon in his hand? Killed having surrendered? Thorgrim wondered. He was not sure about that. He would have to ask Failend. He was curious.
“Jorund!” Thorgrim shouted. Jorund was about thirty feet away. He had just shoved a prisoner to the ground and he stood with his back to Thorgrim. “Jorund!”
Jorund turned and looked over. There was a big gap in the front of his shield where a section of the wood had been hacked away. Half his face was covered in blood from a slash high up on his cheek. The two long braids in his beard were stuck to the blood that coated his mail shirt.
“Yes, Thorgrim?” he shouted.
“Get the men from your crew, and any more you might need, and sweep through this place. Take any prisoners you find and see them secured. Don’t kill them if you don’t have to. Make sure none of these Christ priests make off with any of our silver or gold.”
“Right!” Jorund said, nodding.
“Are there any of your men who are good with the wounded?” Thorgrim asked next. “Who know about healing?”
“Some,” Jorund said.
“Good,” Thorgrim said. “Tell those to look to the wounded. Take the rest of your men with you.”
Jorund nodded again and began to shout out orders, calling for the men of Long Serpent and Black Wing to rally to him. Thorgrim would have preferred to set Godi or Harald to this task—there was too much mischief that men could get into when securing prisoners and plunder. But it was important to show Jorund that he was trusted, and just as important to put Jorund and his men to the test, to see if that trust was warranted.
Jorund was just leading his men off when Harald came over from across the ground. He, too, had a great deal of blood on his mail and his face and his leggings.
“Are you hurt?” Thorgrim asked.
Harald looked surprised, then looked down at himself, at the blood that was splattered all over him. “No,” he said, as if he did not understand the question. Behind them, Starri had stopped fighting and now, as the berserker state left him and he found himself still alive, still trapped in the drudgery of Midgard, he was weeping loudly, as was his custom.
“Good fight, good victory, Father,” Harald said. “The gods are still smiling on you.”
“Perhaps,” Thorgrim said. What the gods felt was not at all clear to him. They had not favored him in his fight with Bécc, but then again they had blown him free of Ireland at last. It seemed impossible for a man such as himself to know what the gods were about.
Nor did Thorgrim have a moment to ponder it. “Anyway,” he said, “things have turned about. You used to try to imitate me, and now I’m imitating you.”
Harald looked even more puzzled. “How so?”
“The wagon,” Thorgrim said. “What I did, running it into the enemy. You did just that thing once, back at Glendalough.”
Harald frowned and looked off into the distance, as if trying to peer back though a great expanse of time, which Thorgrim found amusing, given Harald’s mere seventeen years on earth. “Oh, yes, I suppose I did!” Harald said, remembering at last.
Thorgrim nodded. He could understand Harald’s forgetting. It had been a busy time, these last few years. Thorgrim himself felt certain he did not remember half of it.
He looked around him. A dozen men were tending the wounded, some kneeling and examining groaning and bleeding men, some tearing up strips of cloth taken from the dead to bind the wounds of the still living. There were shields and spears and axes and swords and helmets scattered around the trampled earth. Above them all, the sky was blue, the sun was shining, the weather not at all in keeping with the suffering on the ground.
How many did we lose? Thorgrim wondered. It did not seem too many, not in proportion to the plunder they found, the hostages they had taken. Jorund and his people had sworn their oath to Thorgrim because they thought they were joining with a lucky man. So far he had given them no reason the keep thinking that. Until now.
He turned and looked in the other direction. His men had finished stripping the prisoners of their weapons and mail. The gear they had liberated was now heaped in a big pile and the English soldiers, wearing just tunics and leggings, and some not even that, remained face down on the ground.
“Gudrid!” Thorgrim called and Gudrid jogged over to where he stood. “You’re the only one among us who can speak the language they speak here, as far as I know. Harald, it looks like you lose your job as translator.”
“Thank the gods,” Harald said.
“For now,” Thorgrim said. “If we don’t get clear of Engla-land soon, you’ll meet some pretty thing who’ll steal your heart, and next you’ll be speaking this language, too, just to get under her skirts.” Harald blushed and Thorgrim turned to Gudrid. “My son has a gift for languages, but the motivation has to come through his leggings.”
Gudrid smiled and Harald blushed harder.
Thorgrim looked out over the field of battle. “We’ll put these men, these prisoners, in the temple there, best way to keep them out of mischief. Tell them to get on their feet.”
Gudrid nodded and rendered Thorgrim’s orders in English, loud and direct. The prisoners stood, warily, eyes wide, still expecting to be cut down at any second. Or at least that was how they looked.
“Tell them if any of them try to fight, they’ll die. If they don’t fight, then they can live.”
Gudrid translated, but the prisoners did not look any less concerned, and Thorgrim hoped that Gudrid had as good a command of the language as he claimed. He called out to his own men to make a circle around the prisoners, weapons ready, though he did not think the English would put up a fight. They were without their weapons and armor. He had given them the hope of living if they did not fight, and they had to know they would certainly die if they did.
Once more he wondered if their god looked favorably on men who died fighting. That would be a good thing to know. It could have a big influence on how a man might act as a prisoner.
Must ask Failend about that , he thought again.
With the English on their feet, those still able to stand, Thorgrim told Gudrid to order them into the temple. At first they seemed to not understand the words, but when Gudrid pointed and shoved one of the men in that direction, the others caught his meaning. Slowly and sullenly they began to shuffle off, herded along by the circle of Northmen.
The church was dark and cool and voluminous inside. Thorgrim came in behind the prisoners and their guards. He told Gudrid to tell the English to sit on the floor. Gudrid yelled, pointed, a
nd the prisoners obeyed, still slow and sullen.
It was not long after that Jorund returned. He had a bag over his shoulder, filled to bulging, odd shapes visible where the cloth was stretched tight. He stepped over to Thorgrim and dropped the bag on the stone floor. Thorgrim could see the dull gleam of silver. More chalices and plates and such. He grunted at the sight.
“Caught one of the dogs hiding in the stable with this,” Jorund explained. “Trying to make off with our plunder.”
“The dogs,” Thorgrim agreed and he started to ask about prisoners when the first of what turned out to be two dozen priests in brown robes were herded through the door. Behind them came a score of men, women and children. The men appeared to be smiths and stable hands and bakers and tanners and others of various trades, the women their wives, stout and strong and worn down from years of labor and bearing children. These were the people who did not follow the Christ God as the priests did, but who did the actual work of the monastery. Soon they, too, were sitting on the ground. They looked to be waiting for something, and not expecting it to be good.
Jorund remained at Thorgrim’s side, and Godi and Harald and Halldor and Hardbein joined them. They would be looking to him for decisions.
“Well, Thorgrim?” Jorund asked. “What now?”
It was something Thorgrim had been considering, and he gave the only answer he had been able to come up with.
“I think we had better find some breakfast,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Five
It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith.
Even though it came about late, I recognized my failings.
So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God.
St. Patrick’s Confessio
Father Finnian arrived at the monastery at Ferns just in time to help Brother Bécc mac Carthach to his final reward. The peripatetic priest had been traveling south along the coast, attending to the business of the Abbot of Glendalough, and to other business of which the abbot was not aware. He had arrived at Beggerin and found, to his surprise, that the monastery was all but deserted.
All, but not completely. A few of the local sheep herders were there, tending their flocks in the fields surrounding the monastery, unwilling to leave their charges until the threat to their own lives was clear and immediate. Finnian blessed them. He told them that they cared for their flocks with the same love and dedication with which Christ cared for them. He asked them where everyone had gone.
The shepherds told him of the heathens’ attack, of the Irish men-at-arms under the command of a monk from Ferns, of the fighting on the beach. The more they talked, the more Finnian realized that they were repeating things that they had only heard, second or third hand. But from the evidence before his eyes he could see that their tale was not too far wrong.
He was ready to move on to Ferns when two extraordinary things happened nearly at once.
The first was a battle on some beach at the far side of the bay of Loch Garman. Finnian went down to the water’s edge and stared out to the west. He was no stranger to that area, and he was fairly certain that there was nothing of note on the other side of the bay, and yet the sound of fighting came clearly over the water.
Finnian squinted and stared at the far shore, three miles away. He could not tell for certain what he was seeing, but he thought he saw movement, dark points moving on the lighter colored earth, men maneuvering on a beach. It made sense, considering the sounds that were coming to him, faint but distinct. The ping of steel on steel heard from far off, the muted, barely discernable sound of shouting. But the sky was covered by a dark overcast, and between that and the distance, he could not tell anything for certain.
Not long after that, the second phenomena made its appearance: a storm the likes of which Finnian had never seen. It started with the wind, which built quickly from a stiff breeze into something unearthly. It tore out of the north, howling in his ears, ripping the normally still water of the bay into a steep chop topped with whitecaps that looked gray in the dull light. After that came the rain, driving nearly sideways, stinging like the lash of a whip. Finnian knew that he should make his way back to the deserted monastery and find some shelter, and suggest to the handful of shepherds that they do the same. But he could not tear himself from the beach.
He did at last, fighting his way back to the walls of Beggerin where he found the sheep herders had driven their flocks into a few of the larger buildings. But not the church, he was happy to find.
For three days Finnian sheltered himself in the church. He spent most of his time prostrate before the altar. He thought it quite possible that this was the end of time, and if so, that was the position he intended to be in when the Lord returned.
But it was not the end of time, and on the fourth day he was able to leave the monastery, walking over sodden roads and fields north toward Ferns. The destruction was everywhere—trees blown flat, cottages with not a shred of a roof left, sheep and cows wandering lost across the countryside—but Finnian feared that the battle he had witnessed, the men fighting on the beach, had left destruction far worse.
He arrived at Ferns at last, and was ushered in to see Abbot Columb, who met him with a mixture of pleasure and wariness, which was how abbots tended to greet him. Finnian told Columb about the battle at Loch Garman, and Columb told him what he knew of it, pieced together from the tales of various participants. He told Finnian that Brother Bécc’s leg had been shattered.
“Brother Bécc?” Finnian said, crossing himself. He knew Bécc well, knew his qualities, his skill as a fighting man, the depth of his devotion to God. It did not surprise him that Bécc had been in the middle of this. As much as Bécc loved the Lord, he hated the heathens even more. “Will he recover from this? Will he walk again?”
“He won’t walk,” the abbot said, “I don’t think he’ll even live through the night. The leg was ruined so one of the brothers who has some knowledge of surgery, he took it off, but Bécc does not seem much improved.”
“Has he made his confession?” Finnian asked. “Has he had the final sacraments?”
“He’s been anointed,” Columb said. “But he has not made his confession, or received the Eucharist. He will not speak. Not to me, or anyone who has spoken to him.”
Finnian frowned. “Let me try, please, abbot,” he said.
The abbot sighed. “You may as well,” he said. “Bécc, I think, is in great pain, and his leg is but a part of it. A small part.”
The abbot led Finnian to the cell where Bécc lay on a rough wooden bed, a priest sitting by his side, bent over and murmuring in prayer.
“Father Niall, leave us please,” Abbot Columb said. The priest looked up and Finnian could see he had been crying. He nodded, stood and hurried out.
Finnian looked down at Brother Bécc. Finnian had known Bécc for many years and he knew he had never been a pretty man. The horrible wound he had suffered from the Northman’s sword, which had taken off half his face, had made his condition much worse.
Incredibly, he looked even worse now, lying on his deathbed, ashen and bathed in sweat, the scar tissue that made up half his face taut and hard-looking. What teeth he still had were clenched. But when he rolled his head and looked up at Finnian there was a flash of recognition on the man’s ruined face, and Finnian was glad to see it.
He pulled the stool that Father Niall had been using closer to the bed and sat down, leaning close to Bécc. “Brother, it’s me, Father Finnian. Do you hear me?” he said. He was not sure Bécc actually recognized him, or was aware of what was going on around him.
But Bécc nodded his head. “Yes, Father, bless you…” he said, his voice horse and no louder than a whisper.
Behind him, Finnian heard the abbot clear his throat. “I’ll leave you two,” he said and Finnian heard him turn and move toward the door. He leaned closer still.
“Listen, Brother, the end is near,” Finnian said. “You know it is. Let me hear your confession and re
ceive the Lord before you pass.”
Bécc shook his head, so weakly that Finnian was not certain at first that that was what he was doing. “No, Father,” he said. “My sins are too great…the Lord cannot forgive me.”
“Don’t presume to know what the Lord will and will not do,” Finnian said, but gently. “There is your first sin, your pride. It’s the first sin of most men. Men like you, most especially.”
Bécc looked at Finnian and for a moment he did not respond. Then he shook his head again.
For a moment the two men looked at one another and said nothing. Then Bécc began to cough, and he coughed for some time, heaving and spitting up blood, his face twisted with the agony of it.
Finnian waited. When Bécc had settled back down he said, “Very well. Forget God. Tell me your sins.”
Bécc looked at him once again. Again he said nothing.
“We have known each other a long time, Bécc mac Carthach,” he said. “And I have seen many sins though the years, those of other men and mine as well. You will not surprise me. And you will not lose my love.”
For a long moment Bécc continued in silence. And then he spoke, and his voice was weaker than it had been before the last bout of coughing. “Very well, Father. I’ll speak. You’re right about pride, of course…” Bécc paused and collected his thoughts and his last bits of strength. “And I am the most prideful of men. Which is why I thought that I knew better than God himself….”
Bécc continued to speak. The words built in momentum as he told Finnian the tale of his decision to betray the Northmen, of his desire to kill them all, how prideful and blind he had become. Of the ghastly sins, the deception, the murder he had committed in that passionate and consuming rage. And Finnian listened and he did not interrupt. He could hear the pure contrition in the man’s voice, the agony he suffered over what he had done. Bécc’s tale did not surprise him, and it did not shock him, though it was the most surprising and shocking thing he had heard in many years.
A Vengeful Wind: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 8) Page 36