‘He knows we’re coming,’ Magnus said. ‘He must do. So why hasn’t he shown himself yet?’
‘Perhaps he’s weaker than we’ve been led to believe,’ I suggested.
‘Or else that’s what he wants us to think,’ Wace put in, ‘so that he can draw us in closer.’
‘Into his snare,’ Eudo added, his expression sour.
‘What would be the purpose of that?’ I asked. ‘He has no need to risk an open battle with us. More likely he’s simply decided to stay behind his walls at Jarnborg, and wait to see what we do.’
They all were silent for a few moments while they contemplated that. We sat in a circle on oak sea chests aboard Wyvern as she rocked gently from one side to another on the incoming tide. The wind was up, howling through the bare branches of the trees on the shore.
‘How do we find this fortress of his, then?’ Wace asked.
‘Finding it is easy,’ Magnus said. ‘If you sail a few miles further up the fjord you can see it clearly from the water. It stands atop a rocky promontory that juts out to the north, at the far end of the island from here, overlooking a wide bay where he keeps his ships.’
Eudo raised an eyebrow. ‘You know it well, do you?’
‘I came here once before, two years ago,’ Magnus said flatly. ‘Just as Haakon murdered your lord, so he was responsible for the deaths of my two brothers. I wanted revenge, and tried to storm Jarnborg, but only succeeded in leading several of my retainers to their deaths. Now their blood is on my hands.’
Suddenly I understood what he’d meant before, when he’d told me that hosts numbering in the hundreds had not managed to take Haakon’s fortress. The thought that he himself had been there, had thrown himself and his army against its walls, hadn’t so much as entered my head. But if he had already tried and failed, what made him think things would be any different this time? Even with Eudo and Wace and the crew of Wyvern to swell our numbers, we only had around one hundred and thirty men at our disposal, and he could not have expected their support when he had first agreed to this venture, back in Dyflin. Was it desperation that had driven Magnus on this course, as it had driven me?
‘In that case you’ll be able to tell us the best way of approaching Jarnborg,’ Eudo said.
‘There’s a sandy cove about halfway along the island, on the north-western side, if I remember rightly,’ Magnus replied. ‘It can’t be much more than an hour’s march from Jarnborg. We can land there, providing that he doesn’t send forces to drive us off.’
‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘Not if his nearest refuge is an hour’s march away. He’ll wait for us to come to him.’
‘Assuming that we land without meeting any trouble,’ Eudo said, ‘what then?’
‘Somehow we have to draw Haakon out.’
‘Either that, or find a way into his stronghold that doesn’t involve a direct assault on its walls,’ Wace suggested.
I turned to Magnus. ‘Is there such a way?’
‘Not that I can recall. The promontory’s summit is ringed all around with a high palisade, beyond which steep bluffs lead down nearly all the way to the water’s edge. There’s only one gate leading in, and only one way, too, of reaching that gate, across a narrow neck of land to the south of the crag. It’s exposed, and the enemy would see you coming from half a mile away or more.’
‘What about an approach by water?’ Wace asked. ‘Is that possible?’
‘There are landing places at the foot of the bluffs, yes, but you can only reach them in a rowing boat or coracle or some other small craft. You couldn’t get a whole army up that way.’
‘Perhaps not, but Haakon is less likely to be expecting an attack from that direction,’ I said. ‘Could a handful of men make the climb, using the cover of darkness?’
‘By night?’ Magnus asked scornfully. ‘You’d be as like to slip and break your neck. Besides, even if you did manage to make the ascent, how then would you get inside the fort? The gate is the only way in or out, so far as I know.’
That was a problem, certainly, and one to which it was hard to see a solution. It looked as if our only hope, then, was to try and draw Haakon out. But how?
One thing was for certain. We needed to see this place for ourselves, and try to ascertain just how many men he had, so that we knew exactly how strong a foe we faced. Only then could we start thinking properly about a strategy that would either get us inside Jarnborg, or else entice them out, so that we could give battle on our own terms.
‘If there’s a way, we’ll find it,’ I said, and wished that I felt more sure of that. We were close, so close, yet victory still seemed a distant dream. To think that Oswynn, my Oswynn, was only a few leagues from where we now lay at anchor. How many times this past year had I dreamt of holding her, embracing her? Now she was almost within reach, and yet at that moment she seemed further away than ever.
Tiredness clawed at my eyes that night but I could not sleep. Instead I lay awake, shivering beneath a swathe of winter blankets, my breath misting in the light of the waning moon as I thought of her and tried to imagine her lying beside me, the two of us sharing in the warmth of each other’s bodies. For some reason, though, her face would not come to my mind, and that troubled me.
Somewhere towards the prow a man began to snore. I tried to bury my head in the blankets to shut out the noise, but even then I couldn’t settle. It wasn’t just that the deck was hard and the cloth coarse and uncomfortable. My mind was filled with a thousand knotted thoughts that I could not tease apart. What if we failed? What if, in spite of all our efforts, this expedition came to naught? What if Jarnborg remained unbroken, Haakon still lived, and we were forced to leave this place, bruised and bloodied, humbled and empty-handed? What was to prevent Pons and Serlo forswearing their oaths and leaving my service? I could hardly expect them to remain bound to me for ever if I had nothing to offer them, any more than Robert could expect me to obediently follow him everywhere he led. But if my sworn swords deserted me, and my friends sailed back to England, what would become of me? Where would I go? If revenge and victory were denied me, and if I could not have Oswynn, what was there left for me?
Only then, as I lay there, eyes closed in the darkness, waiting for sleep that would not come, did I truly understand what it was I’d committed myself to. This was more than a simple feud over women and honour between rival warlords on the fringes of Christendom. What tattered scraps remained of my pride, my dignity, my reputation depended for their survival or the success of this endeavour. It was I who had started us all on this road. My shoulders would bear the responsibility if we failed, and mine alone.
But how would I be able to go on, knowing that I’d given my all and still it had been for nothing? Although I wouldn’t admit it to any of the others, in that moment I saw that, for me, there were only two ways this could possibly end. Nothing less than success would be enough for me.
It was victory, or it was death.
Eventually sleep did take me, although it was a fitful sleep in which fragments of half-formed dreams bled one into another. I saw the faces of old sword-brothers long dead, whose names no longer came to mind. I walked through places long forgotten, places I hadn’t visited since my youth: the woodlands near to the castle at Commines where the other boys and I had played and practised ambushes and, later, taken girls for secret trysts; the abbey in Brittany where I had grown up under the care of the monks. And I saw Robert, the first by that name to whom I had been sworn, but he was an old man, wrinkled and hoary-haired, which even in the midst of the dream I thought strange, since he had only been around forty years or so when he met his end. He would hardly meet my gaze, would utter not a word, and I didn’t understand why.
I woke still bone-tired and with a chill in every corner of my body, to a morning veiled by a white sea-mist that made it hard to see more than fifty paces.
‘It’s like this every morning in these parts,’ Magnus told me as we huddled in our cloaks, waiting for it to clear.
‘Every morning?’ I asked.
‘All through the winter, from when the leaves begin to fall to when the first green shoots burst through the soil. And the winters last a long time this far north.’
It must have been another hour before the fog had cleared enough for us to raise the stone rings that served as anchors and, on the ebbing tide, leave the shelter of that harbour.
And so we set out for the isle without a name, Haakon’s isle, keeping close formation as we watched that land carefully for any signs of the enemy. I glimpsed farmsteads, barns, woods, sheep-pens and pastures, cairns and burial mounds, but no scouts or sentries, until we passed a headland where stood the crumbled ruins of an old stone roundhouse. There, on the cliff-top, waited a rider mounted on a white horse. He watched us as we drew closer, no doubt counting the number of oars on both ships and trying to guess from that how many we numbered, until suddenly he kicked on and galloped away, no doubt to Jarnborg, to tell his lord the news.
If Haakon didn’t already know we were coming for him, he would shortly.
Not long after that we came upon the cove Magnus had mentioned. As expected, there was no one to prevent us landing there, and so we ran both ships aground on the sand next to one another, close to where a narrow rivulet emptied into the sea. The day was silent, save for the plaintive cries of a pair of buzzards as they circled over a small clump of trees that stood a little way to the south, and the cawing of rooks gathered in its branches.
‘I don’t like this, lord,’ Serlo, ever the morose one, muttered. We jumped down from the ship, our boots sinking into the wet sand, and trudged up towards dry land. ‘He’s plotting something. He has to be.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Or else our arrival has frightened him.’
I didn’t believe that, not for a moment, but didn’t want to admit that the silence unnerved me too. Did Haakon have a war-party hiding in that copse, waiting for the right moment to attack us? It seemed unlikely, unless they were keeping very still indeed so as not to disturb those rooks. It didn’t look big enough to hide more than fifty men, and we had more than twice that number. Not all of those were warriors, of course, but every oarsman and deck-hand knew how to handle a spear or a sword. It was no great army, not by any means, but it wasn’t a force to be dismissed readily either. I only hoped it was enough.
After holding another council, we agreed that a small group should go on ahead to scout out the island and see if we could get close enough to Jarnborg to be able to ascertain its strength. Leaving Serlo, Pons and Godric with Aubert and most of the rest of our party to help defend the ships in the event that the enemy did come, Wace, Eudo and I donned hauberks and helmets, knives and swords and shields. Together with Magnus and ten of his huscarls, Ælfhelm among them, we set out across the grassy tussocks and the outcrops of grey, lichen-covered stone that jutted from the earth, making our way towards higher ground where we might gain a better view of our surroundings.
In all that time we saw no more sign of our enemy, and none of the local folk dared approach when they saw us, instead running in from the fields to the safety of their homes. Probably they thought we were raiders, come to steal their flocks and their women. We left them alone, following Magnus as he led us half marching, half scrambling over that stony, broken land, until we descended towards a broad, flat plain that was crossed by countless tiny streams and hemmed in on both sides by high crags, and which ran for about a mile towards the sea. A few scattered barns and round wattle-and-thatch hovels lay close to the shore, where spindly-legged wading birds dug their bills into the mud in search of worms, and where a number of small fishing boats together with four longships were beached.
‘Those are Haakon’s ships, for certain,’ Magnus said, his expression darker than ever I had seen it. ‘I’d recognise them anywhere.’
By my reckoning, four longships meant at least two hundred men, and possibly as many as two hundred and fifty. I guessed the true number was smaller rather than larger, since each one would be an additional burden on his storehouses, representing a mouth that had to be fed and kept well watered, but I couldn’t be sure.
‘We’ve been seen,’ Wace said, and pointed up towards the crags on the northern side of that valley, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, where the same rider on the same white horse had stopped and seemed to be gazing down towards us. At least, I assumed it was the same man.
He must have known we were looking at him, but strangely he did not bolt at once as I might have expected. Instead he stayed where he was for a while longer, before once more galloping away, soon disappearing over the crest of the hill.
‘We ought to turn back, lord,’ Ælfhelm said to Magnus. ‘We’re too exposed here. If Haakon has a trap laid for us-’
‘He hasn’t,’ I interrupted him.
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘What would be the point of sending us such a warning if he meant to ambush us?’ I countered.
‘A warning?’
I sighed. ‘That horseman wasn’t trying to stay hidden. If he were, he’d have kept to the trees, and wouldn’t be riding anything as visible as a white steed. No, he wanted us to see him.’
‘Where’s the sense in that?’ Ælfhelm asked.
For all his years, the huscarl still had much to learn, but I was too tired to explain it myself. ‘Wace?’ I asked. ‘Eudo?’
It was Wace who spoke up first. ‘Haakon wants only to remind us that he’s still watching us and that he knows what we’re up to, and so make us a little more cautious.’
And his warning was working, too, on Ælfhelm at least, for although he said nothing more on the matter, I could see from the look in his eyes that he remained less than convinced.
So much in war comes down not to individual prowess of arms, or weight of numbers, or deftness of strategy, but to confidence. Confidence in one’s scouts and their information. Confidence in one’s ability to survive and succeed against the odds. Confidence in one’s friends and allies to stand firm in the shield-wall and protect one’s flanks in the charge. Even small raiding-bands can accomplish momentous deeds if they have sufficient nerve, while I’d heard tales of great hosts that in times past have been cowed into fleeing without so much as giving battle, merely because their commander lacked the stomach for the impending clash of arms, or because the enemy by their clever ruses had convinced him that victory was impossible.
In the end, it is very often not the side that is largest or most experienced that gains possession of the field of slaughter, but the one that is most confident. For that reason we did not turn back, but chose to carry on, keeping to the open where the enemy could clearly see us and where, if they did show themselves, we would be easily able to spot them coming. In doing so, we were letting Haakon know in turn that we had no fear of him.
We trudged on down that valley, across lush grassland made soft and heavy by the previous day’s rain. We watched the crags on both sides lest any more riders should appear, but they didn’t, and before long we glimpsed the forbidding slopes of the promontory rising to the north, just as Magnus had described it, ringed by steep scarps and crowned with a high stockade. A gatehouse looked out over the neck of land that lay to its south, and the golden, freshly laid thatch of the halls inside was just visible above the sharpened points of the walls’ timber posts.
Jarnborg.
This, then, was the iron fortress about which we had heard so much. I’d harboured half a hope that Magnus had been exaggerating, and that it would turn out to be little more than a simple ringwork of banks and ditches surmounted with stakes, like the refuges in which the folk who lived on the Marches sometimes sought shelter from the marauders who came across the dyke. But that half-hope was stifled the instant I set eyes on Jarnborg, and my heart sank, for it was every bit as impressive as its name suggested, as formidable a fastness as I had ever seen and easily a rival to any castle that we Normans, who were known and admired across the length and breadth of Christendom as master builders
, had ever erected. Indeed it might as well have been wrought from iron, for it seemed like a place that could withstand the passing of ages and perhaps even the world’s end itself.
‘There it is,’ Magnus said. ‘Haakon’s winter stronghold.’
Desperately I scanned its walls, searching for some weakness we might exploit, but could find none, not from this approach at least. A cart-track wound its way up the incline towards the gates, between the boulders that everywhere jutted up from the ground, but it was narrow, the land on either side falling away sharply towards the shore, where the waves pounded and the seabirds flocked to feast upon whatever the tide had washed up.
And it was while we were all gazing, unspeaking, upon that fortress, that the gates opened, and from them issued forth seven horsemen. Too few to pose much threat to us, and so we waited to see what they would do, watching them carefully as they descended the track that led down towards the valley, until there could be no doubt that they were making towards us. They made no particular haste; even once they were on the level ground they rode merely at a gentle trot, as if enjoying a morning’s ride around their estates.
They hadn’t come to fight, I realised, but to talk.
‘Keep your eyes open and your wits about you,’ I told the others nonetheless.
‘You think this might be a ruse?’ Eudo asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said as the wind flapped at our cloaks and buffeted our cheeks. ‘But keep your hand close by your sword-hilt just in case.’
Six of the riders halted around two hundred paces away, close to where a wooden bridge crossed one of the many streams, leaving the seventh to ride on alone, giving flight to the banner in his hand. The black dragon, exactly as I remembered it, with eyes of fire and an axe gripped in its claws. The man who carried it was powerfully built and broad of shoulder; his greying hair was tied in a braid in the Danish style at the back of his head. A thick beard adorned his chin, his arms were decorated with rings made from rods of gold twisted around one another, and he wore a sealskin cloak over a mail shirt that looked in places to be missing a few links, but which nevertheless had been polished to a shine. His face was lined with the creases of age, but there was a wolfish keenness to the way his eyes darted about that somehow made him seem younger than his years.
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