The Pale Horseman

  The Fyrdraca was seaward of the doomed ship now, and I shouted at the men aboard to bring her close. She heaved up and down, much higher than the half-sunk ship, and we threw our plunder up and over the side. There were sacks, boxes, and barrels. Many were heavy, and some clinked with coin. We stripped the enemy dead of their valuables, taking six coats of mail and a dozen helmets and we found another three coats of mail in the flooded bilge. I took eight arm rings off dead men. We tossed weapons aboard Fyrdraca, then cut away the captured ship’s rigging. I loosed the remaining horse that stood shivering as the water rose. We took the ship’s yard and sail, and all the time her survivors watched from the shore where some had found a precarious refuge above the sea-washed rocks. I went to the space beneath her sleeping platform and found a great war-helm there, a beautiful thing with a decorated faceplate and a wolf’s head molded in silver on the crown, and I tossed my old helmet onto Fyrdraca and donned the new one, and then passed out sacks of coin. Beneath the sacks was what I thought must be a small shield wrapped in black cloth and I half thought of leaving it where it was, then threw it into Fyrdraca anyway. We were rich.

  “Who are you?” a man shouted from onshore.

  “Uhtred,” I called back.

  He spat at me and I laughed. Our men were climbing back on board Fyrdraca now. Some were retrieving oars from the water, and Leofric was pushing Fyrdraca away, fearful that she would be caught on the rocks. “Get on board!” he shouted at me, and I saw I was the last man, and so I took hold of Fyrdraca’s stern, put a foot on an oar, and heaved myself over her side. “Row!” Leofric shouted, and so we pulled away from the wreck.

  Two young women had been thrown up with the plunder and I found them weeping by Fyrdraca’s mast. One spoke no language that I recognized and later we discovered she was from Ireland, but the other was Danish and, as soon as I squatted beside her, she lashed out at me and spat in my face. I slapped her back, and that made her lash out again. She was a tall girl, strong, with a tangled mass of fair hair and bright blue eyes. She tried to claw her fingers through the eyeholes of my new helmet and I had to slap her again, which made my men laugh. Some were shouting at her to keep fighting me, but instead she suddenly burst into tears and leaned back against the mast root. I took off the helmet and asked her name, and her only answer was to wail that she wanted to die, but when I said she was free to throw herself off the ship she did not move. Her name was Freyja, she was fifteen years old, and her father had been the owner of the ship we had sunk. He had been the big man with the sword, and his name had been Ivar and he had held land at Dyflin, wherever that was, and Freyja began to weep again when she looked at my new helmet, which had belonged to her father. “He died without cutting his nails,” she said accusingly, as if I was responsible for that ill luck, and it was bad fortune indeed because now the grim things of the underworld would use Ivar’s nails to build the ship that would bring chaos at the world’s end.

  “Where were you going?” I asked her.

  To Svein, of course. Ivar had been unhappy in Dyflin, which was in Ireland and had more Norsemen than Danes and also possessed savagely unfriendly native tribes, and he had been lured by the prospect of land in Wessex and so he had abandoned his Irish steading, put all his goods and wealth aboard his ships, and sailed eastward.

  “Ships?” I asked her.

  “There were three when we left,” Freyja said, “but we lost the others in the night.”

  I guessed they were the two ships we had seen earlier, but the gods had been good to me for Freyja confirmed that her father had put his most valuable possessions into his own ship, and that was the one we had captured, and we had struck lucky for there were barrels of coins and boxes of silver. There was amber, jet, and ivory. There were weapons and armor. We made a rough count as the Fyrdraca wallowed offshore and we could scarce believe our fortune. One box contained small lumps of gold, roughly shaped as bricks, but best of all was the wrapped bundle that I had thought was a small shield, but, when we unwrapped the cloth, proved to be a great silver plate on which was modeled a crucifixion. All about the death scene, ringing the plate’s heavy rim, were saints. Twelve of them. I assumed they were the apostles and that the plate had been the treasure of some Irish church or monastery before Ivar had captured it. I showed the plate to my men. “This,” I said reverently, “is not part of the plunder. This must go back to the church.”

  Leofric caught my eye, but did not laugh.

  “It goes back to the church,” I said again, and some of my men, the more pious ones, muttered that I was doing the right thing. I wrapped the plate and put it under the steering platform.

  “How much is your debt to the church?” Leofric asked me.

  “You have a mind like a goat’s arsehole,” I told him.

  He laughed, then looked past me. “Now what do we do?” he asked.

  I thought he was asking what we should do with the rest of our charmed lives, but instead he was gazing at the shore where, in the evening light, I could see armed men lining the cliff top. The Britons of Dyfed had come for us, but too late. Yet their presence meant we could not go back into our cove, and so I ordered the oars to be manned and for the ship to row eastward. The Britons followed us along the shore. The woman who had escaped in the night must have told them we were Saxons and they must have been praying we would seek refuge on land so they could kill us. Few ships stayed at sea overnight, not unless they were forced to, but I dared not seek shelter and so I turned south and rowed away from the shore, while in the west the sun leaked red fire through rifts in the cloud so that the whole sky glowed as if a god had bled across the heavens.

  “What will you do with the girl?” Leofric asked me.

  “Freyja?”

  “Is that her name? You want her?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “She’ll eat you alive,” I warned him. She was probably a head taller than Leofric.

  “I like them like that,” he said.

  “All yours,” I said, and such is life. One day Freyja was the pampered daughter of an earl and the next she was a slave.

  I gave the coats of mail to those who deserved them. We had lost two men, and another three were badly injured, but that was a light cost. We had, after all, killed twenty or thirty Danes and the survivors were ashore where the Britons might or might not treat them well. Best of all, we had become rich and that knowledge was a consolation as night fell.

  Hoder is the god of the night and I prayed to him. I threw my old helmet overboard as a gift to him, because all of us were scared of the dark that swallowed us, and it was a complete dark because clouds had come from the west to smother the sky. No moon, no stars. For a time there was the gleam of firelight on the northern shore, but that vanished and we were blind. The wind rose, the seas heaved us, and we brought the oars inboard and let the air and water carry us for we could neither see nor steer. I stayed on deck, peering into the dark, and Iseult stayed with me, under my cloak, and I remembered the look of delight on her face when we had gone into battle.

  Dawn was gray and the sea was white-streaked gray and the wind was cold, and there was no land in sight, but two white birds flew over us and I took them for a sign and rowed in the direction they had gone, and late that day, in a bitter sea and cold rain, we saw land and it was the Isle of Puffins again where we found shelter in the cove and made fires ashore.

  “When the Danes know what we’ve done—” Leofric said.

  “They’ll look for us.” I finished the sentence for him.

  “Lots of them will look for us.”

  “Then it’s time to go home,” I said.

  The gods had been good to us and, next dawn, in a calming sea, we rowed south to the land and followed the coast toward the west. We would go around the wild headlands where the porpoises swam, turn east, and so find home.

  Much later I discovered what Svein had done after we parted company and, because what he did affected my life and made
the enmity between me and Alfred worse, I shall tell it here.

  I suspect that the thought of a gold altar at Cynuit had gnawed into his heart, for he carried the dream back to Glwysing where his men gathered. Glwysing was another kingdom of the Britons in the south of Wales, a place where there were good harbors and where the king welcomed the Danes, for their presence prevented Guthrum’s men from raiding across the Mercian border.

  Svein ordered a second ship and its crew to accompany him and together they attacked Cynuit. They came in the dawn, hidden by a mist, and I can imagine their beast-headed ships appearing in the early grayness like monsters from nightmare. They went upriver, oars splashing, then grounded the boats and the crews streamed ashore, men in mail and helmets, spear Danes, sword Danes, and they found the half-built church and monastery.

  Odda the Younger was making the place, but he knew it was too close to the sea and so he had decided to make it a fortified building. The church’s tower was to be of stone, and high enough for men to keep a watch from its summit, and the priests and monks were to be surrounded by a palisade and a flooded ditch, but when Svein came ashore none of the work was finished and so was indefensible, and besides, there were scarce forty troops there and those all died or fled within minutes of the Danes landing. The Danes then burned what work had been done and cut down the high wooden cross that customarily marked a monastery and had been the first thing the builders had made.

  The builders were monks, many of them novices, and Svein herded them together and demanded they show him where the valuables were hidden and promised them mercy if they told the truth. Which they did. There was not much of value, certainly no altar of gold, but supplies and timber needed to be purchased and so the monks had a chest of silver pennies, which was reward enough for the Danes, who then pulled down the half-constructed church tower, wrecked the unfinished palisade, and slaughtered some cattle. Then Svein asked the monks where Ubba was buried and was met by sullen silence, and the swords were drawn again and the question asked a second time, and the monks were forced to confess that the church was being built directly over the dead chieftain’s grave. That grave had been an earth mound, but the monks had dug it up and thrown the body into the river, and when the Danes heard that story the mercy fled from their souls.

  The monks were made to wade in the river until some bones were found, and those bones were placed on a funeral pyre made from the timbers of the half-constructed buildings. It was, by all accounts, a huge pyre, and when it was lit, and when the bones were at the heart of a furnace blaze, the monks were thrown onto the flames. While their bodies burned the Danes selected two girls, captured from the soldiers’ shelters, raped them, and then strangled them, sending their souls to be company for Ubba in Valhalla. We heard all this from two children who survived by hiding in a nettle patch, and some folk from the nearby town who were dragged to see the end of the funeral pyre. “Svein of the White Horse did this,” they were told, and made to repeat the words. It was a Danish custom to leave some witnesses to their horror, so that the tales would spread fear and make cowards of other folk who might be attacked, and sure enough the story of the burned monks and murdered girls went through Wessex like a high wind through dry grass. It became exaggerated, as such tales do. The number of dead monks went from sixteen to sixty, the raped girls from two to twenty, and the stolen silver from a chest of pennies to a hoard worthy of the gods. Alfred sent a message to Guthrum, demanding to know why he should not slaughter the hostages he held, and Guthrum sent him a present of gold, two captured gospel books, and a groveling letter in which he claimed that the two ships had not been from his forces, but were pirates from beyond the sea. Alfred believed him and so the hostages lived and the peace prevailed, but Alfred commanded that a curse should be pronounced on Svein in every church of Wessex. The Danish chieftain was to be damned through all eternity, his men were to burn in the fires of hell, and his children and his children’s children were all to bear the mark of Cain. I asked a priest what the mark was, and he explained that Cain was the son of Adam and Eve and the first murderer, but he did not know what mark he had carried. He thought God would recognize it.

  So Svein’s two ships sailed away, leaving a pillar of smoke on the Wessex shore, and I knew none of it. In time I would know all of it, but for now I was going home.

  We went slowly, sheltering each night, retracing our steps that took us past the blackened hillside where Peredur’s settlement had stood, and on we went, under a summer’s sun and rain, until we had returned to the Uisc.

  The Heahengel was afloat now and her mast was stepped, which meant Leofric could take her and the Eftwyrd, for the Fyrdraca was no more, back to Hamtun. We divided the plunder first and, though Leofric and I took the greater share, every man went away wealthy. I was left with Haesten and Iseult, and I took them up to Oxton where Mildrith wept with relief because she had thought I might be dead. I told her we had been patrolling the coast, which was true enough, and that we had captured a Danish ship laden with wealth, and I spilled the coins and gold bricks onto the floor and gave her a bracelet of amber and a necklace of jet, and the gifts distracted her from Iseult who watched her with wide, dark eyes, and if Mildrith saw the British girl’s jewelry she said nothing.

  We had come back in time for the harvest, though it was poor for there had been much rain that summer. There was a black growth on the rye, which meant it could not even be fed to the animals, though the straw was good enough to thatch the hall I built. I have always enjoyed building. I made the hall from clay, gravel, and straw, all packed together to make thick walls. Oak beams straddled the walls, and oak rafters held a high, long roof that looked golden when the thatch was first combed into place. The walls were painted with powdered lime in water, and one of the local men poured oxblood into the mix so that the walls were the color of a summer sky at sunset. The hall’s great door faced east toward the Uisc and I paid a man from Exanceaster to carve the doorposts and lintels with writhing wolves, for the banner of Bebbanburg, my banner, is a wolf’s head. Mildrith wanted the carving to show saints, but she got wolves. I paid the builders well, and when other men heard that I had silver they came looking for employment, and though they were there to build my hall I took only those who had experience fighting. I equipped them with spades, axes, adzes, weapons, and shields.

  “You are making an army,” Mildrith accused me. Her relief at my homecoming had soured quickly when it was apparent that I was no more a Christian than when I had left her.

  “Seventeen men? An army?”

  “We are at peace,” she said. She believed that because the priests preached it, and the priests only said what they were told to say by the bishops, and the bishops took their orders from Alfred. A traveling priest sought shelter with us one night and he insisted that the war with the Danes was over.

  “We still have Danes on the border,” I said.

  “God has calmed their hearts,” the priest insisted, and told me that God had killed the Lothbrok brothers, Ubba, Ivar, and Halfdan, and that the rest of the Danes were so shocked by the deaths that they no longer dared to fight against Christians. “It is true, lord,” the priest said earnestly. “I heard it preached in Cippanhamm, and the king was there and he praised God for the truth of it. We are to beat our swords into ard points and our spear blades into reaping hooks.”

  I laughed at the thought of melting Serpent-Breath into a tool to plow Oxton’s fields, but then I did not believe the priest’s nonsense. The Danes were biding their time, that was all, yet it did seem peaceful as the summer slid imperceptibly into autumn. No enemies crossed the frontier of Wessex and no ships harried our coasts. We threshed the corn, netted partridges, hunted deer on the hill, staked nets in the river, and practiced with our weapons. The women spun thread, gathered nuts, and picked mushrooms and blackberries. There were apples and pears, for this was the time of plenty, the time when the livestock was fattened before the winter slaughter. We ate like kings and, when my hall was
finished, I gave a feast and Mildrith saw the ox head over the door and knew it was an offering to Thor, but said nothing.

  Mildrith hated Iseult, which was hardly surprising, for I had told Mildrith that Iseult was a queen of the Britons and that I held her for the ransom that the Britons would offer. I knew no such ransom would ever come, and the story went some way to explaining Iseult’s presence, but Mildrith resented that the British girl was given her own house. “She is a queen,” I said.

  “You take her hunting,” Mildrith said resentfully.

  I did more than that, but Mildrith chose to be blind to much of it. Mildrith wanted little more than her church, her baby, and an unvarying routine. She had charge of the women who milked the cows, churned the butter, spun wool, and collected honey, and she took immense pride that those things were done well. If a neighbor visited there would be a flurry of panic as the hall was cleaned, and she worried much about those neighbors’ opinions. She wanted me to pay Oswald’s wergild. It did not matter to Mildrith that the man had been caught thieving, because to pay the wergild would make peace in the valley of the Uisc. She even wanted me to visit Odda the Younger. “You could be friends,” she pleaded.

  “With that snake?”

  “And Wirken says you have not paid the tithe.”

  Wirken was the priest in Exanmynster, and I hated him. “He eats and drinks the tithe,” I snarled. The tithe was the payment all landholders were supposed to make to the church, and by rights I should have sent Wirken part of my harvest, but I had not. Yet the priest was often at Oxton, coming when he thought I was hunting, and he ate my food and drank my ale and was growing fat on them.