Knut said, “I’m not sure what he taught me. Nothing about swords.” He thought Leif had taught him more, with the axe, with the stories. He was jealous of Odd, fostered at Knut’s own father’s knee.
Odd stood up again, picking up his staff. “You take too much of a backswing. There are strokes where you’ve got to start with the sword behind you, but that’s when you’re plainly winning. Mostly keep the blade in front of you. You want to drive the other man back. And don’t look where you’re going to strike. Watch my eyes. Keep your knees bent. Here, let’s try it again.”
* * *
One day Sweyn called Knut up beside him in the high end of the hall. He and Eric and Thurbrand sat at the table, half-eaten food strewn around them. Uhtred had gone down to take Lincoln, which Edmund Aetheling had abandoned when Sweyn came to Gainsburgh. Knut had been standing on the wall all evening, filling his father’s cup and starving, and his father gestured at the meaty bone in front of him.
“Here, take that. Sit.”
“Thank you,” Knut said. He seized the bone and, sitting on the bench, began to tear off the shreds of meat with his teeth.
Sweyn laid his right arm on the table. “I am going into the West, to a place called Bath, to take the homage of some important men there. While I am gone, you will have Gainsburgh in your keeping.”
Knut shot up straight, dropping the bone. “Yes, sir!” He fumbled for sufficient thanks, but Sweyn was talking on, twisting his right moustache tendril with his forefinger. His shrewd blue eyes glittered.
“Eric is going back to Norway and taking half the ships with him. Thurbrand here is going with me, and his carls, and most of the rest also, so there will be few men under you.”
“Yes, sir,” Knut said. He didn’t care if it was one ship, if he was in command.
“Good. Keep order. If these local people want to come back, sort that out. Make sure the market’s safe for the merchants. Tell them what to do when they need it. You’re captain.” The pale blue eyes narrowed, mirthful. “You and Harald.”
Knut lost his breath. He felt as if a treasure had been snatched from his hands. He kept his face still, hiding the first flash of anger; his gaze shifted slightly, looking over Sweyn’s shoulder. His temper cooled, and he saw this in another way.
He met Sweyn’s eyes again. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Good,” Sweyn said, and clapped him on the arm. “I like you, boy. I’ll see you when I get back.”
Chapter Twenty Two
Sweyn left almost at once, taking much of the fleet; ships could travel the Trent as far south as Nottingham. Thurbrand and the other carls marched overland. The city was quieter, and some of the people who had lived here before moved back.
Eric and his ships lingered. Then one morning Odd said, “My father is going back to Norway tomorrow or the next day. Somebody named Olaf is trying to take the throne there.” He and Knut were watching the smith, who had started up his forge again and was banging out a horseshoe.
“Are you going with him?” Knut thought he would miss Odd. “Don’t. There’ll be better fighting here.”
Odd said, “So far, there’s been none. But I’m staying.” He said, “You know, once my father’s gone, Harald’s going to start something with you.”
Knut began walking along the market street again, restless. “You think he’ll wait until Eric is gone?” He had already considered this.
“Oh, certainly. My father fostered him; what Sweyn says goes with him too.”
“I had the feeling Eric didn’t like Harald much.”
“Nobody likes Harald,” Odd said.
On the side of the market street the tradespeople had their baskets and casks lined up for nearly half a mile. Knut walked along, looking everything over. Looking the people over. One of the women selling bread was a girl a few years older than he was, with long brown hair hanging loose. That meant they were unmarried. He stopped, gathering his Saxon.
“You live here?”
The girl looked up, flushed, and looked away. “Once. We lived up there.” She pointed with a quick jerk of her head along the street.
Knut wished he had some coin to buy the round, crusty loaves of her bread. He said, “Come back.”
The women on either side of him were listening, and they laughed and lifted their hands, as if they pushed against him. “When you’re gone,” one said. The girl was looking down, carefully stacking her loaves, not talking anymore.
“We take—” He lost the words. “Peace. We keep peace. Sweyn is King here now. We not go.”
But they were shaking their heads. Sweyn’s name did not have its magic with them. One of the women held out her hand, palm cupped, and rattled off Saxon so fast he caught only the gist of it: Buy something or move on. He moved on.
Odd said, “What was that about?” He knew no Saxon at all.
“Practicing,” Knut said. They walked up slowly along the market street, turned, and walked down again.
At night they slept in the hall, where Eric took the high seat with the other royal carls. Harald stayed with his three friends in a house he had taken over down by the river. Knut suspected some advantage lay in this, but he could not figure how to use it. Anyhow, Odd had said that nothing would happen until Eric had left.
This made him careless. Late that night he went out to the privy, and after he stood up from the hole and pushed the door open, two men closed on him, one on either side, and poked knives in his ribs.
“Move, and we’ll stick you right now and throw you in the cesspit.” The tall one snatched Knut’s belt knife out of its scabbard. “You won’t need this.”
If he hit either of them, both would stab him. He knew them: Harald’s friends, whom he had beaten a couple of times. They had reason to hate him. One was already pulling his hands behind him, looping a cord around his wrists and yanking it tight. A bowstring, he thought. He tried to keep his hands apart, to get some slack. They took him off down to Harald’s house, by the river.
Harald was there, sitting in a big chair in the one room of the house. There was a sleeping bench against one wall, but from the blankets strewn around Knut guessed most of them slept on the floor near the fire. Harald was drunk. He smirked and lounged around his chair, gloating.
He said, “Well, well. It’s the little brother. And not looking so tough, is he? Sweyn’s gone now, brat. I’ve seen how you suck up to him, little no-name, but I am the prince and the heir to Denmark, sworn so, and that’s how it’s staying.” His smile widened. “Especially now, since I’m getting rid of you.”
The man behind him moved, and Knut knew something was coming; he yielded with the blow but it still knocked him cold.
* * *
He woke in total darkness from a dream of smothering. He was upside down, his legs doubled up to his chest and his arms behind him, and everything wrapped round and round in rope. His head was splitting. For a while all he could think of was the pain.
There was a wad of cloth stuffed into his mouth, so he could barely breathe. The space around him was close enough that he touched wood on three sides, and it tipped slightly when his weight shifted. He could see nothing. The close air smelled sweet, yeasty, like ale. He was inside a barrel.
His mind went white. In a panic he struggled violently against his bounds, gasping for air, and almost sucked the gag down into his throat. Hacking it back out again settled him. He forced himself still, to listen, to pay attention, understand.
Wherever he was, he was not moving. As he shifted his weight the barrel tipped back and forth on some uneven surface, but it was mostly level, so he was not on a beached ship. He could not hear the sound of the river. Nearby a nightjar began to chur, and faintly came the sound of the wind in the trees.
He was on the land, in Gainsburgh still. He suspected he was just outside Harald’s house.
He began chewing at the gag, wadding it up with his tongue, tearing it with his teeth. He swallowed some and spat the rest. He drew a deep breath of yeast
y air. That made him feel better, although he was still upside down and his head was pounding. His pulse was hammering in his ears. His body ached all over, his legs cramped, and his neck kinked. He could barely move his hands. Stretching out his fingers, he felt as well as he could along the curved stave wall behind him.
The staves fit perfectly together: a well-toasted barrel. He was still breathing hard. He wiggled, trying to get the pressure off his neck, and his shoulder scraped against the insloping side of the barrel and the rope around his arms slipped.
That was something. He twisted, pinning the rope again between his shoulder and the barrel. His neck twinged, but, shrugging and heaving, he dragged the rope a little higher on his shoulder. He slumped, exhausted, panting. For a moment he could not think, and he could not catch his breath. One loop of the rope came down and slapped him in the face.
He pulled and wiggled, but the rope was just as tight as before. Pushing with his head he forced his body up again toward the wider part of the barrel and jammed his arm against the side and twisted, and another loop came off, and then another, and then suddenly he was buried headfirst in a pile of rope and his legs were free.
He groaned with relief, pushing his feet up; his leg muscles were clenched, and it hurt to stretch them. His knee banged the incurving top of the barrel, and, before his legs were halfway straight, his feet came up against the lid.
He pushed as hard as he could, although it made his neck throb. The lid yielded only a little.
He paused a moment, forcing his mind to work. The rope was all over him. He was still breathing hard. The air inside the barrel was going bad. His heart began to pound.
He wondered if they had put a guard on him. He listened, but he heard nothing. He banged with his foot on the lid of the barrel and waited, and nothing happened. Nobody could hear him.
He smashed his feet against the lid; each time he struck it gave a hairsbreadth but then stopped, held fast. He kicked it again and again. Cramped in the barrel, he could not get a good angle on it. He was tired, his head muzzy. He kicked again, and something up there cracked.
At that, he pounded on the lid until his ankles were sore, but the wood held. Then in one desperate kick his heel skidded to the edge, and there was another crack, and bits of wood sprinkled down on him.
He blinked. Before him in the dark a ribbon of pale light shone down to a spot on the stave wall the size of his palm. He twisted his neck painfully and up there in the blackness saw a faint, ragged little hole, full of moonlight.
With all his strength he hammered his feet on the lid, which still did not move.
He had to get up there. For one thing, he could breathe up there. He began to work the rope down under him, rolling a little, shoving with his elbows, his shoulders, until most of it lay beneath him, cushioning his head. He rested again. His neck felt better. His head felt as if someone were pounding nails into it.
He began to work his way around upright, wedging himself against the barrel with his shoulders and feet and sliding upward, his head tucked down almost to his chest. His strength paid out and his muscles began to burn, but he could not stop. He wiggled and pushed himself around into the fat part of the barrel. The bowstring was still fast around his wrists, and there was no give to it; they had snugged it up again. The rope got wrapped around his neck and leashed him like a dog for a while until he worried it loose. He was trembling all over, gasping for breath. Twisting, he got one leg down, braced himself, and pulled his head around, scraping hard, bent forward under the lid. With a wrench he forced the other foot down also.
He squirmed sideways, his head jammed against the underside of the lid, found the little hole at the edge, and pressed his face to it. The sweet, pure air flooded into him. The pounding in his head eased. He took in a long deep breath and held it. He felt the cool air run all through him.
He was still pent in the barrel. He could neither sit down nor stand up, his hands bound behind him, his neck bent. His knees, jammed against the barrel’s side, already ached. When he shifted, the barrel tipped slightly under him. He was on the ground, on a rock.
He hunched there for a moment. A thin flag of moonlight came down through the hole; he could see the ragged edge, where the stave had rotted. That was why it had broken. The rest was not rotted and would not break. Suddenly he was worn out. The urge came over him to scream for help. He bit his lips. Harald had him well tucked away. Nobody would hear him who would help him. Tomorrow, in the daylight, he could scream then, and someone might find him. It would be a huge joke, the kind of story he would hear everywhere the rest of his life. Barrel Knut. He knew of a man at Jomsburg called Oink Gorm because, when he was dead drunk once, somebody had thrown him in to sleep with the pigs.
If they even let him live that long. They could just haul the barrel downstream, after Eric had gone, and throw him into the river.
His knees and thighs were throbbing with pain. He twisted, trying to get the pressure off. The barrel rocked in its little tilt, and he banged his head on the lid. He thought of his belt. He wrenched his bound hands around and gripped it. With his fingers he worked the belt around until the buckle was in the small of his back.
It was a plain brass half circle, common as a rock. The flat was smooth, but the edge had a little tang from the mold. He wedged his hands down, one inside and one outside the buckle, and began to saw back and forth against the rough place.
It was hard. The brass was dull even along the edge. His arms ached. He stopped once, thinking this was useless; he was getting nowhere. He smelled wax: It was a bowstring. Twisting his hand around he got his fingers on the cord.
It was fraying. Wisps of fibers fuzzed it. Encouraged, he began sawing at it again. He was tired; his muscles burned and cramped. In a fury he banged his hands down, as if he could break the cord on the buckle, which did nothing. He tried to drive the buckle between the strands of hemp and got nowhere with that either.
He collected himself. He put his mouth to the hole in the lid and sucked in the air like food. He opened the belt by two notches, careful not to drop it out of reach, and went back to the steady sawing. Now he had more room. His eyes closed, his head nodded, and he jerked himself awake again. He told himself: Barrel Knut. Or you’re dead. He wondered which was worse. Furiously, he sawed and hacked at the rope. His mind went grey with exhaustion. His legs were numb. He could not stop. He forced his hands to jerk back and forth, side to side.
Then his hands slipped and separated, and he brought them out in front of him and pressed them to his face and groaned.
He raised his hands up flat to the lid. This was not as well made as the rest of the barrel: a quick rig, the staves not even tongued together. On one he touched a flat metal ridge. He felt along the next stave and found another, and on the stave beside that another: crimped nails. A few inches beyond another row of them, two inches apart, ran edge to edge across the staves like the first. There was something nailed to the outside, holding the staves of the lid together. A handle.
He could fit two fingers through the little hole where the stave had broken. On the inside of the hole, on top of the lid, his fingertips grazed a stout piece of wood. The piece he had broken out had rotted along the edge of this crossbar. The staves on either side of the hole were solid, and he could get no purchase on them anyway.
He pushed the whole lid up again. It lifted slightly off the groove it sat on, but he could not budge it farther. He jammed his fingers into the hole and tried to turn the barrelhead in place.
It moved a few inches and then stopped. When he turned it back, it moved on about the same distance in the other direction and stopped again.
He let his hands rest. He thought of Raef, his broadmindedness, seeing this all around. He imagined what the barrel looked like, the lid on its groove, its top flush with the upper edge of the barrel, the crosspiece. He thought of every water barrel he had ever seen, tucked in by the mast of the ship, the lids held down with rocks, with axes, missing entirely. The
barrel tipped under him again.
Then in his mind, as if the barrel had talked to him, a rope appeared, wrapping around it lengthwise. At the top the one crossbar became two, and the rope ran between them, down again the other side and under the barrel. That was why the barrel was tipping back and forth: it was resting on the rope. The rope crossed the top between the two lid braces, which kept the lid from turning any farther.
He rocked the barrel back in one direction and wedged his fingers into the hole in the lid and pushed sideways. If he could move the rope along the edge of the barrel, it would slacken. His fingers hurt, and he jammed his fist as much as he could into the hole and leaned on it.
The lid jerked an inch under the pressure. He grunted with the effort of forcing it on, another inch, another, and then abruptly the lid popped up and slid sideways. Through the opening he saw the wash of the moonlight over the sky.
He pushed the lid off and stood up. The sky above him was creamy with the moonlight, more beautiful than anything he had ever known. The barrel was sitting with three others in a wagon, waiting to be loaded onto a ship. The other barrels probably had water in them and not men. He climbed out of the barrel and down to the ground and tightened his belt again.
He was behind Harald’s house, far from the street. Night lay heavy on the town. The full moon was an arrow’s length above the western horizon. He wiped his hand over his mouth. He had about two hours of darkness left. Eric was supposed to leave early, and these barrels would have to be on board by sunrise. He got up onto the wagon again to get the loose rope inside the barrel and went toward Harald’s house.
* * *
Just before dawn the bore came up the Trent from the sea, a growling, muttering wall of water like an ocean wave that had gotten lost. When it ebbed back, Eric of Lade started off down the river, and as the sun rose dragon after dragon slid back off the riverbar and followed him. Knut stood on the bank watching. He loved to see this: the glide of each ship onto the flow of the river, the call of the helmsman, and then all the oars rising at once.
Kings of the North Page 26