‘That’s okay,’ Raymond spoke soothingly. ‘You are a big dope, aren’t you? You’ve made yourself all red in the face for nothing. We’ll have to come up with an appropriate name for you, won’t we?’
‘Rufus,’ said Alice before she could stop. As soon as the words left her mouth she ducked back behind the tree root for fear that down below on the beach, Raymond would have heard her.
‘That’s right,’ Raymond continued to talk to the horse as he wound up the rope fence. ‘You didn’t like being stowed in a ship, did you … Rufus.’
As he said the gelding’s name Alice cringed and realised that her former paramour knew that she was watching. She steeled herself and rose to her feet.
‘Hello, Raymond.’
‘Lady,’ he replied. ‘I did not see you there. Would you like to walk back to Dun Domhnall with Rufus and me?’
Her first impulse was to shake her head, offer scorn, and return to the privacy of the small cove, but Raymond did not even bother to wait for an answer and started walking away with the gelding close upon his heels.
‘Hey!’ Alice exclaimed and jumped out of her hiding place to follow, her coldness forgotten as she climbed down the cliff face. It was only difficult due to her skirts, but she did not give up even when her feet went from beneath her fleetingly, leaving her grasping the toothed black rocks by only her fingertips. ‘Raymond,’ she shouted crossly as her feet touched the sand. He was some way up the beach and turned to look at her, tossing her an apple as he abruptly leapt up onto the gelding’s back. Alice was shocked, not at Raymond’s actions but at the speed at which the gelding calmed down and allowed the Norman captain to walk him towards her.
‘He’s a good horse,’ he said as he rolled off Rufus’s black back and to the sand, ‘a big softy. Would you like a ride?’ He held out his hand to her and she nodded slowly.
The horse was nervous and looked towards Raymond for direction as Alice slowly made her way to his side. The apple in her hand sealed the deal, however, and as Rufus chewed she hoisted herself onto his back. They didn’t speak as they walked back, but Alice felt herself relax as Raymond led her past Waverider and, with some difficulty, up the steep slope to where the Norman fortifications rose out of the headland like a whale breaching green waves.
‘I’m sorry I was so angry with you,’ Alice told him suddenly when they were almost at the outer gate, but Raymond did not turn. ‘And I wanted to thank you for saving Geoffrey and I. My cousin would have killed us, and Harry … he was not coming to save us.’
Raymond brought Rufus to a stop and turned to look at Alice of Abergavenny, a serious frown upon his face. ‘You never need to thank me. You are my friend.’ With that he clicked his tongue twice and led the gelding into the shadow under the wooden barbican. Alice felt the horse’s skin crawl at the sight of the darkness, but without missing a step he ploughed into the depths between the fences behind his new master. It was an environment that he would never have experienced before, but Raymond’s hand instinctively soothed Rufus’ flank and the horse took comfort from the contact.
Alice’s stare shifted from the horse to the back of Raymond’s head, his short blonde lock curling slightly as if touched by heat. Like Rufus, everyone in Dun Domhnall followed him, not because they had to and not because they were being forced. They trusted him. In all the time she had been with the Young King she had never seen him inspire anyone with anything other than money and, though she had immediately been dazzled by it, she now saw in Raymond all that was missing from King Harry’s character. With him she would be safe and respected. He would probably never be able to provide her brother with an army to capture Abergavenny but, if he would have her, she would try everything to make him happy until he could. However, that would have to wait for, as they passed through the inner gate and made their way past the cattle pens and into the bailey of the fort, a much-agitated Sir Hervey de Montmorency ran up to them looking even more bedraggled than ever.
‘Ostmen, Raymond,’ he stated, the fear obvious on his lined face, ‘thousands and thousands of them.’
The Uí Dubhgain woman below him had finally stopped screaming, but Jarl Sigtrygg slapped her one last time to make sure her struggles were over. Instead she attempted to cover her breasts with what remained of her cheap woollen clothes. That annoyed Jarl Sigtrygg and the warrior wrested both her arms away from her chest and forced them above her head so that he could see her naked body. The woman whimpered and pressed her tear-soaked face into the shards of her clothing which gathered on her shoulder, but the jarl did not allow that and, with his free hand, forced her to look at him before planting a kiss on her mouth.
Around him his warriors killed or subdued the men who remained in the small fishing homestead at Dun Conán. Screams of anger and fear surrounded the jarl, but he did not let that interrupt his grunting efforts. A number of sheep, two goats and a slave were chivvied past him by two of his crewmen and one greedily eyed the woman under Jarl Sigtrygg before grabbing the slave and forcing her behind the empty cattle pen on her knees. The jarl laughed as he watched three small children who huddled together in the doorway of the wattle house and watched him assault their naked mother.
‘Those three,’ he shouted as he stood up and hoisted his hose back around his middle, fixing them in place with his long leather belt. ‘And this one,’ he said as he placed his big foot on their naked mother’s stomach. The woman whimpered and flinched as he touched her. ‘They’ll fetch a pretty price in Dubhlinn despite her being an ugly whore.’ He said the last three words in harsh Irish so that the woman could understand, a huge smile beaming from behind his braided red beard. The woman sobbed again and rolled onto her shoulder, flapping her hand in the direction of her dead husband. Jarl Sigtrygg laughed at her anguish and grabbed his battle-axe which was buried in the man’s belly. The husband’s spilled innards were almost dry as they lay beside him, but more blood escaped from the fissure as the weapon was pulled free.
‘Is there time for all of us to have a go?’ Amlaith, his ship-master, asked the jarl as he pulled the part-naked and bruised mother to her feet and shook her into silence.
‘We’ll see,’ Jarl Sigtrygg replied as he stuck his head inside the door, his large hand gripping the wooden lintel, and looked around the tumbledown building. ‘Ragnall will be here by nightfall. Then we cross the river and make for the foreigner’s fort.’ He flapped a hand southwards over the muddy estuary which flowed across the wooded landscape like a battle scar rent by a giant of old. Twenty ships had left Veðrarfjord on the morning before under Jarl Sigtrygg’s command. It had been a long haul at the oar, with the summer sun blazing down upon the necks of his crew, but his army had arrived safely and their vessels now filled the sandy inlet on the western side of the peninsula. Six hundred seaborne warriors stared across the stream at the edge of the forest beyond which stood the den of their enemy.
By the end of the day another two and a half thousand would join them under Ragnall’s white raven standard though, of those warriors, Jarl Sigtrygg only valued the few from Veðrarfjord who accompanied the konungr. The remainder were savage Gaels under Donnchadh Ua Riagháin and Máel Sechlainn Ua Fhaolain, useless in the jarl’s opinion. But what did that matter? Ragnall’s information said that there could be as few as three hundred warriors at the promontory fort at Dun Domhnall, defended by a measly earth and timber wall.
‘Four more miles,’ Jarl Sigtrygg told his ship-master, ‘and then we’ll have them all in chains.’ His eyes flashed and he bared his porcine teeth. ‘Except for Raymond de Carew,’ he added, his left hand massaging the bridge of his broken nose. He had set the bone himself and it remained misshapen and bent upwards like a snout. ‘Him, I will rip and burn.’ The jarl looked down at his longship, River-Wolf, which nestled amongst the sand and reeds at the riverside, and towards which the living inhabitants of Dun Conán would be herded like cattle. ‘Make sure those slaves are not damaged,’ he ordered Amlaith. ‘We’ll make for Dubhlinn straight
after we get our share of the slaves from the fort and get them sold there.’
‘Not Veðrarfjord?’
‘The other jarls will all head straight home with their takings. They’ll flood the market and lower the asking price. We’ll head north and make a killing from the foreigners.’
Amlaith’s response was interrupted by the Uí Dubhgain mother who made one last, desperate appeal to Jarl Sigtrygg on the behalf of her children. ‘Please, great lord,’ she cried in her native tongue, still clutching her tattered clothes to her chest to hide her nakedness, ‘do not rob my children of their lives.’
The jarl shook his head in disbelief at the stupidity of the woman. ‘I’m not going to kill them,’ he told her. ‘I’m going to sell them.’ He couldn’t understand her grumbles. The children’s lives as slaves would hardly be any different to those they would have had on the miserable farm. With another shake of his head he turned away from her screams and walked back towards the wattle and mud-built hovel. The walls stank in the heat, but Jarl Sigtrygg reckoned that it would serve as a shelter for one night while he prepared for battle. Inside, the straw bedding seemed fresh and a small dung fire already burned in the middle of the circular room. Closer investigation revealed a thin stew of vegetables and roots in a pot, bubbling away. He rubbed his hands together, thanking his ship’s black cat for good fortune. Crouching down beside the pot, Jarl Sigtrygg pulled his cache of weapons from his belt and propped them against the wooden bed area which took up one wall. His chainmail he kept wrapped around his body. Too often he had heard tales of his kinsmen stabbed in their sleep when they believed themselves safe from the vengeful knives of the Gael. He found a heel of baked oatcake in his robes and plunged it into the heart of the stew.
‘It’ll do,’ he said as he gobbled down as much as he could soak up. His hunger somewhat sated, Jarl Sigtrygg investigated what little remained of the woman’s hovel. He cast aside a large wattle panel which would have hidden the sleeping pallet of the parents from the children, but there was little of value other than a pair of leather sabatons and some cheap woollen clothes. To make sure there was nothing of worth hidden, Jarl Sigtrygg kicked the loose straw away from the corner of the room and used his long dagger to scrape away a few inches of earth, snorting with the effort of shifting the dry dirt.
‘Hunting for truffles, pig?’ asked a voice behind him.
Jarl Sigtrygg turned angrily with his dagger ready to stab whoever had spoken. Only a man sick of life insulted Sigtrygg, jarl and captain of River-Wolf. Fear stayed his hand and the death strike did not fall. The man who had spoken was the one man who truly terrified him: Ragnall Mac Giolla Mhuire, Konungr of Veðrarfjord. His father.
‘Lord?’ he stumbled and lowered his knife. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to arrive until nightfall.’ As usual the Konungr of Veðrarfjord’s presence made an uneasy feeling rise in Jarl Sigtrygg’s chest. His father was old and thin, bald and weak of arm, but he did not blink as he gazed at his son. Ragnall’s mouth, behind a wispy grey beard, was like that of a frog, stretched and reedy, and his voice was high pitched. He was demon-born, Jarl Sigtrygg was sure, and he knew secrets about him that no man could know. Half the time, he felt his body urging him to cut Ragnall’s throat; he didn’t know why he wanted to do it to his father, or why his mind was so scared to see it through, but again he felt the murderous pull of the dagger in his right hand.
‘We left the Gael to make their own way through the forests,’ Ragnall told him as he plunged a large wooden spoon into the depths of the stew and withdrew it, ‘so we made good time.’ He sniffed the food without taking his eyes from Jarl Sigtrygg and dropped the spoon on the floor of the shelter when the aroma disappointed. ‘Everything is as it should be with the fleet?’
Jarl Sigtrygg nodded. ‘I was going to send out scouts –’
A gnarled hand silenced him. ‘The Ui Fhaolain will send some men south. They are better suited to the work. If they spring a trap they can be easily replaced. You killed all the inhabitants of Dun Conán?’
‘No,’ Jarl Sigtrygg replied. ‘We took them for slaves?’ He cursed himself for squeaking a question.
The konungr did not speak for many seconds, instead warming his long, thin hands by the fire. It was summer and it was hot, yet Ragnall seemed cold.
‘You will release your slaves,’ his father stated. ‘There will be plenty when we take Dun Domhnall and the ones you took here will only slow you down.’
‘There will be no women or children in the foreigner’s fortress,’ Jarl Sigtrygg grumbled as two men entered the house, longhaired Gaels wrapped in saffron robes with gold at their wrists and neck. Both were kings of a sort, Jarl Sigtrygg knew; Donnchadh Ua Riagháin ruled the Uí Drona, far to the north, while Máel Sechlainn Ua Fhaolain was chief of the Déisi, a powerful tribe from the lands beyond Veðrarfjord. Both were moustachioed and wrapped in the mustard-yellow robes which the Gaelic princelings preferred.
‘My friends,’ Ragnall greeted the two men with a lift of his chin. ‘Your scouts have returned?’
‘My tánaiste led them through the forest and crossed three streams before they came to the walls of Dun Domhnall,’ the younger man, who Jarl Sigtrygg recognised as the Uí Fhaolain chieftain, confirmed. ‘You were correct about the wall, though the foreigner’s ship has gone from the beach.’
‘Then they are trapped,’ Jarl Sigtrygg interrupted. ‘We should take our ships and land them on the beach, then assault the walls. We will be victorious by nightfall tomorrow!’ And with my need for slaves and vengeance sated, he thought.
‘Two of my people were killed by their archers,’ the grey-haired Donnchadh Ua Riagháin warned Ragnall as he too investigated the pot in the middle of the room. ‘They were two hundred paces from those who shot them. More would’ve died had they not retreated.’
Jarl Sigtrygg snorted and struck himself in the middle of his chainmailed chest. ‘We men of Veðrarfjord are harder to kill than you Vestmen. Armour and a good shield will keep you alive from archers if you Gael had the sense to carry them.’
Ragnall of Veðrarfjord swapped a knowing glance with Donnchadh and Máel Sechlainn before slowly turning to stare at his son. He watched him until Jarl Sigtrygg’s smile disappeared. ‘If we land our ships on the shore they will have us at their mercy until we get our warriors off the beach,’ he told him, his voice full of scorn. ‘Armour or no, they will perish under the arrow storm. My ships will remain here at Dun Conán. The army will march to Dun Domhnall.’
Jarl Sigtrygg scowled. He hated the thought of going to war without his beloved River-Wolf. She, rather than the city of Veðrarfjord, was his real home; she was safety, his rallying point when all else had failed him. That Ragnall wanted him to leave his ship at Dun Conán infuriated him, but he knew better than to put up a fight. ‘And what of Trygve of Cluainmín?’ he asked instead. ‘He helped our enemy. He helps them still.’
The konungr nodded his head. ‘First, we shall deal with Dun Domhnall and then we will march on Trygve.’ Ragnall sat down on the floor next to the fire, studying Jarl Sigtrygg. ‘You make enemies too easily, boy,’ he said. ‘My friends,’ he raised an eyebrow towards the two Gaelic kings, ‘would like nothing better than to string you up. Máel Sechlainn says that you raided his lands over the last two summers, stole women and cattle.’
‘I…’
Ragnall held up his hand. ‘Save it. As long as you serve me well, you are safe from his retribution.’ The konungr took a long slug of water from a skin and studied his son. ‘As long as you are truthful to me. So where is it?’
Jarl Sigtrygg shook his head in confusion at the sudden question. ‘Where is what?’
‘Don’t play me for a fool, boy. You will tell me where Trygve has his silver mine.’
‘What silver mine?’
Ragnall bit his lip and produced a long dagger from the scabbard at his side. ‘I won’t be toyed with, Sigtrygg.’ He began whittling a stick into a point. ‘I know that two of your crewmen were
killed, that you were thrown out of Cluainmín, and that you were accused of theft ‘
‘And murdering his son,’ Jarl Sigtrygg shook his head. ‘And I didn’t do that either. The Norman lied ‘
‘You whoreson,’ exclaimed Ragnall, casting the wooden stick aside and climbing to his feet. ‘You are a liar,’ he accused, the whites of his eyes huge as he started forwards at Jarl Sigtrygg. ‘You want the mine for yourself! I know your secrets, boy. Do you remember that? And do you think I would hesitate to give you to Trygve? Or let Máel Sechlainn have you to kill?’ He pointed a finger at the moustachioed Gael. ‘I want that silver mine.’
The jarl felt the anger rise in his chest. ‘I know of no mine, silver or otherwise. All I know is that two of my men were killed in the forest and that Raymond de Carew spoke against me.’ He had never reacted well to accusations and he took a step forward, hoping to dominate his father with his size.
The Konungr of Veðrarfjord, though old, was not daunted by anyone. ‘You won’t tell me where it is?’
‘I don’t know where it is.’
Ragnall snorted in repugnance. ‘After everything I have done for you? Well, you can think about your future while you are watching over our ships, boy.’
‘What do you mean?’ the jarl asked suspiciously.
‘My army will march to Dun Domhnall tomorrow at first light, but you will remain here at Dun Conán.’ Ragnall stared at Jarl Sigtrygg, daring him to argue. Behind him, the jarl watched the door of the hovel open. A number of warriors entered led by Jarls Gufraid and Sigtrygg Fionn, his father’s closest cronies.
‘There will be no slaves and no booty at Dun Conán for you. Your name will be remembered in no songs,’ Ragnall told him. ‘For you, there shall be no glory. So are you still sure you don’t want to tell me where Trygve has his mine?’
Jarl Sigtrygg looked over his shoulder to where his weapons still lay. He then glanced at his father’s bodyguard, men loyal only to the Konungr of Veðrarfjord. ‘I have told you that I don’t know anything about any mine. I did not know it even existed until you spoke of it.’
Lord of the Sea Castle Page 27