Finan looked up to see where the sun was. ‘This isn’t the way to Bebbanburg,’ he said.
‘We’re going to Frisia.’
‘Frisia!’
‘I can’t go to Bebbanburg yet,’ I explained, ‘and I can’t stay on the Northumbrian coast because Ælfric will discover we’re here, so we must hide for a few days. We’ll hide in Frisia.’
And so we crossed the sea to that strange place of islands and water and mudbanks and reeds and sand and driftwood, and of channels that shift in the night, and land that is there one day and not the next. It is a home for herons, for seals and for outcasts. It took us three days and two nights to make the crossing, and in the third day’s dusk, when the sun had turned all the west into a cauldron of glowing fire, we crept into the islands with a man in our bows testing the depth by probing with an oar.
I had spent time here. It was in these shoals that I had ambushed Skirnir and watched him die, and in his hall on the island of Zegge I had discovered his paltry treasure. I had left his hall intact and we searched for it now, but the island had gone, washed out by the relentless tides, though we did find the crescent-shaped sandbank where we had tricked Skirnir into dividing his forces, and so we beached Middelniht there and made a camp on the dunes.
I needed two things: a second ship and bad weather. I did not dare search for the ship because we were in waters where another man held sway, and if I took the ship too early that man would have time to seek me out and demand to know why I poached in his waters. He found us anyway, arriving on our second day in a long, low vessel rowed by forty men. His ship came fast and confident through the unmarked channel that twisted towards our refuge, then the prow grated on the sand as the steersman bellowed at the oarsmen to back water. A man leaped ashore; a big man with a face as broad and flat as a spade’s blade and with a beard reaching to his waist. ‘And who,’ he bellowed cheerfully, ‘are you?’
‘Wulf Ranulfson,’ I answered. I was sitting on a bleached driftwood log and I did not bother to stand.
He paced up the beach. It was a warm day, but he wore a thick cloak, high boots, and a chain-mail hood. His hair was matted and long, hanging to his shoulders. He had a long-sword strapped at his waist and a tarnished silver chain half hidden by his beard. ‘And who is Wulf Ranulfson?’ he demanded.
‘A traveller out of Haithabu,’ I answered mildly, ‘and on his way back there.’
‘So why are you on one of my islands?’
‘We’re resting,’ I said, ‘and making repairs.’
‘I charge for rest and repairs,’ he said.
‘And I don’t pay,’ I responded, still speaking softly.
‘I am Thancward,’ he boasted, as if he expected me to recognise the name. ‘I have sixteen crews, and ships for all of them. If I say you pay, you pay.’
‘And what payment do you want?’
‘Enough silver to make two more links for this chain,’ he suggested.
I stood slowly, lazily. Thancward was a big man, but I was taller and I saw the slight surprise on his face. ‘Thancward,’ I said, as if trying to remember the name. ‘I have not heard of Thancward, and if he had sixteen ships why would Thancward come to this miserable beach himself? Why would he not send his men to run his paltry errand? And his ship has benches for fifty rowers, yet only forty are at the oars. Maybe Thancward has mislaid his men? Or perhaps he believes we’re a trading ship? Perhaps he thinks he didn’t need to bring many warriors because we’re weak?’
He was no fool. He was just a pirate, and I suspected he had two or three ships, of which perhaps only the one he was using was seaworthy, but he was trying to make himself lord of these shoals so that any passing ship would pay him passage money. But to do that he needed men, and if he fought me then he would lose men. He smiled suddenly. ‘You’re not a trading ship?’
‘No.’
‘You should have said!’ He managed to make his surprise sound genuine. ‘Then welcome! You need supplies?’
‘What do you have?’
‘Ale?’ he suggested.
‘Turnips?’ I countered. ‘Cabbages? Beans?’
‘I shall send them,’ he said.
‘And I shall pay for them,’ I promised, and each of us was satisfied. He would receive a scrap of silver, and I would be left alone.
The weather stayed obstinately warm and calm. After that bleak, cold, wet summer there were three days of burning sun and small wind. Three days of practising sword-craft on the beach and three days of fretting because I needed bad weather. I needed a north wind and high seas. I needed the view from Bebbanburg’s ramparts to be of chaos and white water, and the longer that sun shone on a limpid sea the more I worried that Father Byrnjolf might have sent another warning to Bebbanburg. I was fairly sure the priest had died when Middelniht crushed the fishing boat, but that did not mean he had not sent a second message by some trader travelling north on the old roads. That was unlikely, but it was a possibility and it gnawed at me.
But then on the fourth morning the north-eastern sky slowly filled with dark cloud. It did not pile up with a ragged edge, but made a line straight as a spear-shaft across the sky; one side of the line was a deep summer blue and the rest of the sky was dark as a pit. It was an omen, but of what I could not tell. The darkness spread, a shield wall of the gods advancing across the heavens, and I took the omen to mean that my gods, the northern gods, were bringing a great storm south. I stood on top of a dune and the wind was strong enough to blow the sand off the dune’s crest and the sea was stirring into whitecaps and the breakers were seething white on the long shoals and I knew it was time to sail into the storm.
It was time to go home.
Weapons sharp and shields stout. Swords, spears and axes had been ground with whetstones, shields bound with leather or iron. We knew we were sailing to battle, but the first fight was against the sea.
She is a bitch, the sea. She belongs to Ran, the goddess, and Ran keeps a mighty net in which to snare men, and her nine daughters are the waves that drive ships into the snare. She is married to a giant, Ægir, but he is an indolent beast, preferring to lie drunk in the halls of the gods while his bitch-wife and her vicious daughters gather ships and men to their cold unloving breasts.
So I prayed to Ran. She must be flattered, she must be told she is lovely, that no creature in the sky or on the earth or beneath the earth can compare to her beauty, that Freyja and Eostre and Sigyn and all the other goddesses of the heavens are jealous of her beauty, and if you tell her that over and over again she will reach for her polished silver shield to gaze at her own reflection, and when Ran looks upon herself the sea calms. And so I told the bitch of her loveliness, how the gods themselves shuddered with desire when she walked by, how she dimmed the stars, how she was the most beautiful of all the gods.
Yet Ran was bitter that night. She sent a storm out of the north-east, a storm that raced from the lands of ice and whipped the sea to anger. We had sailed westwards all day in a hard, lashing wind, and if that wind had lasted we would have been cold, wet and safe, but as night fell the wind increased, it howled and screamed, and we had to drop the sail and use the oars to hold Middelniht’s head towards the vicious seas that crashed about her prow, that reared in the darkness as unseen, white-topped monsters that heaved the hull up and then let it fall into a trough so that the timbers creaked, the hull strained and the water swirled about wet oarsmen. We bailed, hurling water over the side before the Middelniht was swallowed into Ran’s net, and still the wind shrieked and the waters clawed at us. I had two men helping me on the steering oar, and there were times I thought it must break, and times I thought we were sinking, and I shouted my prayers to the bitch goddess and knew every man aboard was also praying.
The dawn showed chaos. Just grey light revealing white horrors on top of short, steep waves, and the light grew greyer to reveal a sea whipped to fury. Our faces stung from the spray, our bodies ached, we wanted nothing but sleep, but still we fought the sea. Twelve
men rowed, three fought the loom of the steering oar, and the others used helmets and buckets to empty the boat of the water that crashed over the prow or poured over the side as the hull tipped or a wave suddenly rose like a beast from the deep. When we were at the peak of a wave I could see nothing but turmoil, and then we would plunge into a swirling valley and the wind would vanish for a few heartbeats and the water would reach for us as the next sea roared from ahead and threatened to fall and break us.
I told that bitch Ran that she was beautiful, I told that sea-hag that she was the dream of men and the hope of gods, and perhaps she heard me and looked at her reflection in the silver shield because slowly, imperceptibly, the fury allayed. It did not die. The sea was still ragged ruin and the wind was like a madman, but the waves were lower and men could pause in their bailing, though the oarsmen still had to struggle to keep the bows headed into the anger. ‘Where are we?’ Finan asked. He sounded exhausted.
‘Between the sea and the sky,’ was all the answer I could give. I had a sunstone, which was a slab of glassy pale rock the size of a man’s hand. Such stones come from the land of ice, and it had cost me precious gold, but by holding a sunstone to the sky and sweeping it from horizon to horizon, the stone will betray the sun’s position behind the clouds, and when a man knows where the sun is, whether it is high or low, he can judge which way to travel. The sunstone glimmers when it looks toward the hidden sun, but that day the clouds were too dense and the rain too hard, and so the sunstone stayed sullen and mute. Yet I sensed the wind had shifted eastwards, and, around mid-morning, we half raised the sail and that snarling wind bellied the rope-strengthened cloth so that Middelniht raced ahead, crashing her prow into waves, but riding them now instead of fighting them. I blessed the Frisians who had built her, and I wondered how many men had gone to their wet graves that night, and then I turned Middelniht’s prow to what I thought was halfway between north and west. I needed to go north and west, always north and west, and I had no idea where we were, or which way to steer, except to follow the whisper of instinct that is a shipmaster’s friend. It is a warrior’s friend too, and as that day passed my mind wandered as a ship wanders in a ship-killing wind. I thought of battles long ago, of shield walls, of the fear, and of the prickling sense that an enemy is near, and I tried to find an omen in every cloud, every sea-bird, and every breaking wave. I thought of Bebbanburg, a fortress that had defied the Danes for all my lifetime, and the madness of planning to capture it with a small band of tired, wet, storm-beaten men, and I prayed to the Norns, those three goddesses who weave our fate at the foot of the world’s tree, to send me a sign, an omen of success.
We sailed and I had no idea where we were, only that my weary men could sleep while I steered, and when I could stay awake no longer Finan took the oar and I slept like the dead. I woke at night and still that sea seethed and the wind screamed, and I struggled forward, past sleeping men and half-woken men, to stand beneath the dragon’s head and peer into the darkness. I was listening rather than looking, listening for the sound of breakers crashing against the land, but all I could hear was the roar of water and wind. I shivered. My clothes were soaked, the wind was cold, I felt old.
The storm still blew in the early grey light, though nowhere near so fiercely as before, and I turned Middelniht west as if we fled the dawn. And the Norns loved us because we found land, though whether it was Northumbria or Scotland I had no idea. I was sure it was not East Anglia because I could see high rocky bluffs where breakers splintered into great gouts of spray. We turned northwards, and Middelniht battled the waves as we sought some place to rest from the sea’s assault, and then at last we rounded a small headland and I saw a sheltered cove where the water shivered rather than broke and the cove was edged with a great long beach and the gods must have loved me because there was the ship I sought.
She was a trading ship, half Middelniht’s length, and she had been driven ashore by the storm, but the impact had not broken her. Instead she stood canted on the beach, and three men were trying to dig a channel through the sand to refloat her. They had already lightened their stranded ship because I could see the unloaded cargo heaped above the high-tide line, and nearby was a great driftwood fire where the crew must have warmed and dried themselves. That crew had seen us, and, as Middelniht drew closer, they backed away, retreating to some dunes that overlooked the beach. ‘That’s the ship we need,’ I told Finan.
‘Aye, she’ll do well,’ he said, ‘and those poor bastards have done half the work of salvage already.’
The poor bastards had made a beginning, but it still took most of the day to wrestle the stranded ship off the sand and back into the water. I took twenty men ashore and we ended up emptying the ship of all her ballast, unstepping the mast, and then putting oars beneath the hull to lift her from the sand’s sucking embrace. The impact of her stranding had sprung some of her planks, but we stuffed the seams with seaweed. She would leak like a sieve, but I did not need her to float for long. Just long enough to deceive Ælfric.
The crew of the ship found the courage to come back down to the beach while we were still digging the trenches that would let us slide the lifting oars beneath the hull. There were two men and a small boy, all Frisians. ‘Who are you?’ one of the men asked nervously. He was a big man, broad-shouldered, with the weather-worn face of a sailor. He carried an axe low in one hand, as if to demonstrate that he meant me no harm.
‘I’m no one you know,’ I said, ‘and you are?’
‘Blekulf,’ he growled the name, then nodded at the ship, ‘I built her.’
‘You built her and I need her,’ I said bluntly. I walked to where he had piled his cargo. There were four barrels in which glassware had been packed in straw, two barrels of copper nails, a small box of precious amber, and four heavy quern stones, shaped and finished. ‘You can keep all this,’ I said.
‘For how long?’ Blekulf asked sourly. ‘What good is cargo without a ship?’ He looked inland, though there was little to be seen except rain clouds hanging low over a bleak landscape. ‘The bastards will strip me bare.’
‘What bastards?’ I asked.
‘Scots,’ he said. ‘Savages.’
So that was where we were. ‘Are we north or south of Foirthe?’ I asked him.
‘South,’ he said, ‘I think. We were trying to make the river when the storm came.’ He shrugged.
‘You were taking that cargo to Scotland?’ I asked him.
‘No, to Lundene. There were eight of us.’
‘Eight crew?’ I asked, surprised that so many had been aboard.
‘Eight ships. As far as I know we’re the only one left.’
‘You did well to survive,’ I said.
He had survived through good seamanship. He had realised the sudden storm was going to be brutal so he had taken the sail off the yard, split it so that it could be fitted around the mast, then used the nails from his cargo to fasten the sail to the ship’s sides to fashion a makeshift deck. It had kept the small boat from being swamped, but made it almost impossible to row, and so he had been driven onto this long, lonely strand. ‘There was a savage here this morning,’ he said glumly.
‘Just one?’
‘He had a spear. He watched us, then went.’
‘So he’ll be coming back with his friends,’ I said, then looked at the small boy who I reckoned was eight or nine years old. ‘Your son?’
‘My only son,’ Blekulf said.
I called to Finan. ‘Take the boy on board Middelniht,’ I ordered him, then looked back to the Frisian. ‘Your son is my hostage, and you’re coming with me. If you do everything I say then I’ll give you the ship back, with its cargo.’
‘And what must I do?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘For a start,’ I said, ‘keep your ship safe through tonight.’
‘Lord!’ Finan called, and I turned to see him pointing northwards. A dozen men mounted on small ponies had appeared on the dunes. They carried spears. But we outnumbere
d them and they had the sense to keep their distance as we struggled to relaunch Blekulf’s ship, which he said was named Reinbôge. It seemed an odd name to me.
‘It rained all the time we built her,’ he explained, ‘and on the day we launched her there was a double rainbow.’ He shrugged. ‘My wife named her.’
We finally had the Reinbôge lifted and could move her. We chanted Ran’s mirror song as we edged her down the beach and into the water. Finan went back aboard Middelniht and we fastened a line from the warship’s stern to the Reinbôge’s bow, and towed the smaller ship clear of the breaking waves. Then we had to pile ballast and cargo back into her fat belly. We stepped the mast and tensioned it with braided leather lines. The pony-riders watched us, but did not try to interfere. They must have thought the stranded ship would be easy prey, but Middelniht’s arrival had spoiled their hopes, and, as dusk fell, they turned and rode away.
I left Finan to command Middelniht, while I sailed in Reinbôge. She was a good ship, taut and solid, though we needed to bail her constantly because of the sprung planks, but she rode the uneasy sea with competent ease. The wind dropped in the night. It still blew fiercely, but the anger was gone from the waves. The sea was now a confusion of scudding whitecaps that faded into the darkness as we rowed offshore. All night the wind blew, gusting sometimes, but never reaching the rage of the storm’s height, and in the clouded dawn we set Reinbôge’s torn sail and surged ahead of Middelniht. We went southwards.
And at midday, under a torn sky and on a broken sea, we came to Bebbanburg.
That is where it all began, a lifetime ago.
I had been a child when I saw the three ships.
In my memory they slid from a bank of sea mist, and perhaps they did, but memory is a faulty thing and my other images of that day are of a clear, cloudless sky, so perhaps there was no mist, but it seemed to me that one moment the sea was empty and the next there were three ships coming from the south.
The Pagan Lord Page 9