The Wolves of Dumnonia Saga Box Set

by Peter Fox

  ‘No, Rathulf, it cannot be done,’ Sigvald whispered. ‘For the love of Odin, you’ll die.’

  Rathulf had mounted Tariq, and now they galloped back up the hill towards the mouth of the ravine. In front of them, Alrik frantically scratched at the rocks above his head, but the movement caused his fingers to slip even further off the tiny rock that held him. In a matter of moments, he would plummet to his death.

  Tariq moved too slowly, too laboriously up that steep incline. From the lower side of the ravine, a rider must not only leap across the gap but up and over it. In all the hundreds of years that boys had come here to make the passage into manhood, no one had ever attempted the reverse leap, for the simple, unassailable reason that it could not be done. Sigvald shouted again at Rathulf to stop, but his foster son either didn’t hear him, or he ignored his cries. On the clifftop above him, Eirik also ran towards the rift, shoving stunned spectators out of the way and yelling at Rathulf to pull up.

  Rathulf leaned far forward in the saddle as Tariq thundered up the slope, the stallion’s long neck arched and shoulders heaving as he threw all his strength into their forward flight. Tariq knew exactly what his master required of him, and in turn, Rathulf gave Tariq his head, focusing on keeping his balance at an optimum, just as Myran had taught him. The ravine opened higher and wider as they approached, but horse and rider ploughed on, picking up speed despite the steepening angle of the slope. Sigvald’s shout of dismay caught in his throat as Rathulf rose in his stirrups and flicked the reins in anticipation for the jump.

  Tariq took one last great stride and leapt into the air.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Rathulf fixed his gaze on his friend as he and his mount charged back up towards the ravine. It didn’t occur to Rathulf that what he was doing was impossible; the only thought that went through his head was that he must save his friend. Alrik hung a little to their left, his face suspended like a pale moon against the dark stone; his terrified eyes locked onto Tariq and his rider. Then the edge of the ravine appeared, Ingrith’s shocked face flashed by, and Tariq sprang into the air. Rathulf felt the jolt as Tariq left the ground, then his sight was filled with a towering wall of grey rock that rushed towards them, rising impossibly high above their heads. It was then, in that timeless instant when Rathulf and Tariq were suspended between land and sky, life and death, that Rathulf realised that no horse, no matter how brave or extraordinary, could ever hope to cross that gap.

  The lower edge of the chasm dropped away below them as Tariq soared across the ravine, but he simply could not gain enough height in time. The ragged lip of the opposite wall lay directly in front of them. Rathulf blurted an involuntary expletive, shut his eyes and braced himself for the impact.

  Tariq hit the rim of the chasm forelegs first with a bone-shattering crash. He shrieked as the stone tore into his flesh, but the sheer force of his momentum carried him over the breach. He slammed chest-first into the ground, throwing Rathulf forwards from the saddle. Rathulf half fell, half scrambled over his horse’s head, his first instinct to save himself. Tariq scrabbled frantically on the slippery grass, for a moment teetering on the brink of the cliff, but Rathulf snatched up the bridle and hauled with all his might. It was enough to help Tariq roll to safety, despite his battered forelegs.

  For a long moment, Rathulf kneeled on the grass, one part of him still expecting to feel the sharp impact of the rocks at the bottom of the ravine. But as each laboured breath came and went, Rathulf realised that somehow he had made it to the other side. To his right, he saw his dazed stallion’s wide-held eyes and bloodied chest and forelegs. Rathulf fought back a sudden rush of nausea as his mind reeled at the sheer insanity of what they had just done.

  I should be at the bottom of the ravine, not up here.

  He heard shouting from somewhere nearby, but it was Ingrith’s frantic screams that brought Rathulf to his senses. Rathulf swung around and saw his companions standing on the other side of the ravine, yelling at him. Alrik! With a heart-stopping stab of panic, Rathulf remembered his friend and threw himself at the precipice, hoping he was not too late to save him. He landed on his stomach and for a terrifying moment slid straight on towards the gap, but just as his head popped out over the edge, his right shoulder hit a rock and wedged against it.

  Rathulf heard Alrik scream, and he looked down to see his friend’s hand slip from its precarious hold. Rathulf instinctively snatched at the air with his right hand and caught Alrik’s belt just in time, bringing his friend’s fall to a jarring halt. Rathulf gasped as his right arm snapped taut and his shoulder jammed hard into the rock. Alrik grabbed Rathulf’s arm with both hands, clinging onto his friend, his eyes wide with terror.

  Across the other side of the Breach, his friends and all the other spectators were shouting and screaming at him to hold on. Help is on its way! Alrik swung freely in the air, unable to reach anything to ease the weight of his heavy body on Rathulf’s arm. Beyond and below him yawned the great pit, waiting to swallow them both.

  Alrik didn’t dare breathe, knowing that all that kept him from plunging to his death was Rathulf’s raw strength. He stared up at his friend’s contorted face, certain that no man, not even heroic Rathulf with all his determination and courage, could hold him for long.

  Rathulf knew it too, and he closed his eyes and turned his sight inwards, willing his body to draw together every available ounce of strength for this most crucial test of his life. Nothing had ever mattered more than this moment; not even his learning of his true British heritage, for what good was his kingship to him when he could not share it with those he loved?

  I must lift him back up over the edge, Rathulf told himself. It’s my only hope; Alrik’s only hope. One big heave, that’s all it will take. All I have to do is get him high enough, and he’ll be able to grab the edge and pull himself over. Rathulf reached out beside him with his left hand, searching for something to ease the load on his right shoulder. His fingers found a projecting knob of rock, and he clamped his hand around it, bracing himself. He warned Alrik what he was about to do, took a deep breath, then with a roar to the Gods to lend him their strength, he hauled as hard as he could.

  But what Rathulf had thought to be a small piece of a much larger rock turned out to be little more than a stone buried in the grass, and as he rolled backwards to drag Alrik up over the edge, the stone popped free, and Rathulf’s left hand shot out into space. Rathulf continued to heave, but the sudden loss of support meant that he couldn’t bring Alrik high enough.

  Rathulf crashed back down onto his face. His right elbow popped as Alrik’s fall came to a jolting halt. Rathulf felt his grip loosening. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on something other than the pain, but his straining muscles quivered as they stretched to breaking point. His arm burned as though it had been shoved into a blacksmith’s furnace and his right shoulder blazed in a pounding rhythm to his heart. He gritted his teeth as he desperately held on, aware that his muscles were beginning to tear, knowing that when that happened, nothing would save Alrik.

  He dimly heard the sound of hoof-beats and Sigvald’s and Bardi’s shouts from somewhere behind him, and he pleaded with his shattered body to stay with him. I mustn’t let go, he told himself over and over. I mustn’t let go.

  He turned his head as far as he could in an attempt to look behind him, but he could only see as far back as Tariq. His horse was trying to get up, but the stallion’s left foreleg was broken, and Rathulf realised that Tariq would be of little help to him. He turned back to his friend, knowing that he had no choice but to hold on until Sigvald and the others got down to him. It hadn’t seemed so far when I was riding down it!

  So focused was Rathulf on maintaining his grip on Alrik’s belt that he was unaware he was moving. Alrik’s weight was dragging Rathulf sideways around the fulcrum of his shoulder towards the edge of the cliff. Ingrith and the others yelled in frantic warning from the other side of the ravine, but Rathulf no longer heard their words; the noise blen
ded with the sound of his beating heart into a dull, homogenous roar that echoed dimly in his head. His muscles quivered in spasms, sending shooting bolts of fire up his arm, but the pain troubled him less and less, for his arm was beginning to feel like a separate thing. His right shoulder had gone strangely numb so that all he felt now was a spine-tingling grating as the rock ground into his shoulder. His vision shimmered before him in rippling waves of light and shadow, and little points of light flickered before his eyes like the sparks flying from a swordsmith’s wheel.

  It was not until his tunic began to pull around his throat as it twisted beneath him that Rathulf realised what was happening. His mind dully registered that he should try to stop himself from sliding over the edge, but when he tried to move his left arm, nothing happened. He felt a peculiar twang in his shoulder, then the scraping sensation on his bone stopped; the rock no longer held him, and he was sliding out into space. He felt his right arm jerk, and he looked down at his friend.

  Alrik had let go of Rathulf and was tugging at his belt, struggling against the force of his weight to unbuckle it. His face and chest glistened with Rathulf’s blood.

  ‘Alrik? What are you doing?’ Rathulf rasped, his tongue stumbling on the words. He was not even sure the words had come out.

  ‘I won’t let you do it,’ Alrik said. ‘You can’t die. Not for me.’

  ‘No!’ Rathulf croaked, realising what Alrik intended to do. ‘I can save you!’

  ‘No, Ra,’ Alrik whispered, his green eyes glistening with tears. ‘You can’t.’

  Rathulf felt himself tilt forward, and in the same instant, Alrik gave the buckle a sharp tug. The belt whipped from Alrik’s waist and suddenly he was gone.

  Released of his burden, Rathulf stopped sliding. He hung over the precipice, near to tipping. A short while later firm hands grabbed him around the ankles, and the air was filled with the frantic voices of Bardi and Sigvald and, beyond them, the distraught screams of his friends.

  Rathulf did not see Alrik fall, nor did he see the explosion of blood when Alrik hit the rocks three hundred feet below, for in his mind’s eye Rathulf still held his friend. Only much later, when Rathulf had finally succumbed to Helga’s healing tonic, was Sigvald able to prise the belt from Rathulf’s fingers.

  11. The blazing ship

  Bardisby, Sognefjorden, Norvegr

  Rathulf lay in a potion-induced stupor for three days at Helga’s insistence, during which time she concentrated her healing efforts on knitting his injured shoulder back together. The wound wasn’t as bad as she had first feared, and Sigvald accused her of putting off the inevitable, to which she agreed. ‘Do you want to be the one who tells him?’

  As it was, it fell to the golden-haired jarl to break the terrible news to his foster-son.

  Rathulf was predictably overwrought when he finally heard what Sigvald was telling him. ‘I held him,’ he said, refusing to accept the jarl’s words.

  ‘He let go, Rathulf, to save you.’

  ‘But why? I had him.’

  ‘You were going to fall too, Ra. Alrik chose the hero’s path. He gave his life so that you might live.’

  ‘No! That’s not true. I want to see him.’ Rathulf looked past Sigvald, knowing they had to be playing a joke on him; that Alrik would at any moment spring from behind the jarl, laughing at Rathulf’s gullibility and sooky tears.

  But his friend never came.

  In the end, Sigvald took Rathulf to see Alrik’s body. Helga had been against it, but Sigvald insisted it was the only way that Rathulf would accept the truth of what had happened. So Helga had relented and accompanied her husband and foster-son to say goodbye to Alrik. Alrik lay in Eirik’s cool-house in readiness for the funeral. They had done what they could, covering the worst of the damage with fine cloth, but the boy’s pale, stiff body was battered and broken, his skin mottled and yellow-grey in places, the lips oddly insipid. They had wrapped the back of his head in a bandage for his skull had been smashed by the rocks, but the ruined body was not what told Rathulf his friend was dead. It was Alrik’s eyes: colourless and unblinking, all trace of life extinguished. Rathulf sank to his knees, stricken with grief. The reckless vagabond with his mischievous grin and infectious laugh was gone; leaving nothing but silence and a huge, ragged hole in Rathulf’s heart. Helga dropped to the floor with him and held him as he sobbed.

  ‘But I had him,’ Rathulf said again and again, clenching and unclenching his fist over the imaginary belt.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Helga said gently, holding him tight. ‘Yes, you did.’

  That same day Rathulf demanded to know what had happened to Tariq. Not waiting for the answer, and fearing the worst, he stumbled out to the stable, expecting to find his heroic stallion had been put down. Instead, he arrived to see the Nisean lying bandaged in his stall. Rathulf threw himself down onto his horse, wrapping his uninjured arm around Tariq’s neck. ‘I won’t let them take you away from me too!’ he said, his voice rough with despair.

  ‘It’s the most humane thing to do, Ra,’ Sigvald said gently. ‘He’ll never be fit to ride again.’

  ‘My arm is ruined, so will you put me down too?’ Rathulf responded angrily. ‘And what of Tariq’s heroism? Is that how you want to repay him? No one has ever jumped back across the Breach, Sigvald. No one!’ He turned to the Persian slave. ‘We can fix him, can’t we Myran?’

  ‘All hurts heal with time,’ Myran agreed, ‘though sometimes it can take a whole lifetime or even the next.’

  After that, Rathulf refused to leave Tariq’s side, helping Myran apply salves and bandages to the stallion’s legs and chest. Rathulf was dismayed by how badly hurt he was. As well as the bruising and torn skin, Tariq’s left foreleg was fractured, and the stallion snorted in pain whenever Rathulf touched the tender leg. The big horse was also having trouble breathing, thanks to a cracked sternum and broken ribs caused by his collision with the rim of the ravine. For all his suffering, though, Tariq was determined to live and was plainly grateful for his master’s ministrations. Thorvald was relieved, for it gave Rathulf something positive to do amidst an otherwise bleak outlook. Ingrith also tried her best to comfort Rathulf, but there was little she could do to console him, for he felt the greatest burden of all, having failed to save his best friend.

  Eirik, meanwhile, was furious that his men had failed him, and through their failure, had brought dishonour to his household. He was especially angry with Snorri. ‘Where were you? Asleep in the sun while the assassin strung his bow?’

  Snorri had reminded his jarl that he already held the person most likely responsible: Ivar.

  ‘No,’ Eirik had replied, ‘I hold you responsible, and you will make reparations with Bardi Thorleifsson. Were I he, I know what I would demand in return for my son’s life.’ And so Eirik sent Snorri from his hall with orders not to return until he had brought him the heads of all the people involved – regardless of whether those people might be kin to Snorri. Eirik was also angry with his son for goading Alrik into taking the Leap. To Rathulf’s surprise, Gunnar was uncharacteristically contrite, although he was quick to remind everyone that it had been an assassin’s arrow, not his taunts, that had killed Alrik.

  There was also considerable discussion about why the assassin had chosen to fire at Alrik, and not Rathulf, especially as Alrik had not intended to make the Leap that day. No one could ask the assassin, for, following his capture, Bardi had flown into a rage and hacked off the man’s head before anyone could question him. ‘We all know who is behind this,’ he had snarled, ‘and that filth will be next to taste my axe.’

  Sigvald had agreed. ‘Ivar is behind this, and the sadistic bastard wants Rathulf to suffer, and what better means than to kill his friend? The assassin was probably waiting for an opportune moment, and Alrik handed it to him on a plate.’

  As for Leif, there was no sign, Eirik having sent him far away out of Bardi’s and Rathulf’s reach. Bardi, in particular, wanted retribution, illogically laying the blame squarely
at the boy’s feet. He cited Leif’s betrayal over the chest as the ultimate cause of the events which had led to Alrik’s demise. Bardi named witnesses and stated that he intended to demand Leif’s life in return for his son’s at the assembly.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Alrik was given his rites four days after Rathulf had been taken to see his friend’s body. The preparations for the funeral had been going on around Rathulf all that time, but he had refused to be a part of it, choosing to stay with his injured horse, the two of them hidden away together in their mutual suffering. Helga drew Rathulf from the sanctuary of the stable on the afternoon of the ceremony, for he had been chosen for the honour of lighting the pyre that would send Alrik to Valhalla.

  So it was that Rathulf stood on the shore next to Alrik’s grandfather, Thorleif the Lawmaker, watching the Wave Skimmer drift seaward. At the ship’s centre – just forward of the mast – was the funeral pyre, constructed of crisscrossed layers of timber. On top of it lay Alrik, dressed in his finest clothes, his sword laid lengthways along his body. Beside him was his shield, which, like Rathulf’s, was still fresh from the making and bearing only the marks of practice bouts. Many other things had been placed in the ship to ensure that the young man was suitably provisioned for his journey to the afterlife. Rathulf had known what to give his friend, but the adults had rounded on him when he told them he intended to place his Dumnonian chest on the pyre beside Alrik.

  ‘He wanted it more than I did,’ he had said, ‘and what good is it to me if all my friends have died because of it?’ In that, he also included Leif, who was as good as lost to him now too. Rathulf’s anger and bitterness over his British heritage had intensified in the days after Alrik’s death as he turned his sorrow upon the source of this whole disaster, which had started with the avalanche, caused, in Rathulf’s mind, by his father digging up the trunk then deciding not to present the chest to his son on his real birthday.