The Pale Horseman

  “Monasteries have silver,” I said.

  “Not down here, they don’t. They’re poor as stoats. Besides.”

  “Besides what?”

  He jerked his head toward the crew. “You’ve got a dozen good Christians aboard. Lots of bad ones, too, of course, but at least a dozen good ones. They won’t raid a monastery with you.” He was right. A few of the men had showed some scruples about piracy, but I assured them that the Danes used trading ships to spy on their enemies. That was true enough, though I doubt either of our victims had been serving the Danes. But both ships had been crewed by foreigners and, like all Saxons, the crew of the Fyrdraca had a healthy dislike of foreigners, though they made an exception for Haesten and the dozen crewmen who were Frisians. The Frisians were natural pirates, bad as the Danes, and these twelve had come to Wessex to get rich from war and so were glad that the Fyrdraca was seeking plunder.

  As we went west we began to see coastal settlements, and some were surprisingly large. Cenwulf, who had fought with us at Cynuit and was a good man, told us that the Britons of Cornwalum dug tin out of the ground and sold it to strangers. He knew that because his father had been a trader and had frequently sailed this coast. “If they sell tin,” I said, “then they must have money.”

  “And men to guard it,” Cenwulf said drily.

  “Do they have a king?”

  No one knew. It seemed probable, though where the king lived or who he was we could not know, and perhaps, as Haesten suggested, there was more than one king. They did have weapons because, one night, as the Fyrdraca crept into a bay, an arrow flew from a cliff top to be swallowed in the sea beside our oars. We might never have known that arrow had been shot except I happened to be looking up and saw it, fledged with dirty gray feathers, flickering down from the sky to vanish with a plop. One arrow, and no others followed, so perhaps it was a warning, and that night we let the ship lie at its anchor and in the dawn we saw two cows grazing close to a stream and Leofric fetched his ax. “The cows are there to kill us,” Haesten warned us in his new and not very good English.

  “The cows will kill us?” I asked in amusement.

  “I have seen it before, lord. They put cows to bring us on land. Then they attack.”

  We granted the cows mercy, hauled the anchor, and pulled toward the bay’s mouth. A howl sounded behind us and I saw a crowd of men appear from behind bushes and trees. I took one of the silver rings from my left arm and gave it to Haesten. It was his first arm ring and, being a Dane, he was inordinately proud of it. He polished it all morning.

  The coast became wilder and refuge more difficult to find, but the weather was placid. We captured a small eight-oared ship that was returning to Ireland and relieved it of sixteen pieces of silver, three knives, a heap of tin ingots, a sack of goose feathers, and six goatskins. We were hardly becoming rich, though Fyrdraca’s belly was becoming cluttered with pelts, fleeces, and ingots of tin. “We need to sell it all,” Leofric said.

  But to whom? We knew no one who traded here. What I needed to do, I thought, was land close to one of the larger settlements and steal everything. Burn the houses, kill the men, plunder the headman’s hall, and go back to sea. But the Britons kept lookouts on the headlands and they always saw us coming, and whenever we were close to one of their towns we would see armed men waiting. They had learned how to deal with Vikings, which was why, Haesten told me, the Northmen now sailed in fleets of five or six ships.

  “Things will be better,” I said, “when we turn the coast.” I knew Cornwalum ended somewhere to the west and we could then sail up into the Sæfern Sea where we might find a Danish ship on its voyage from Ireland, but Cornwalum seemed to be without end. Whenever we saw a headland that I thought must mark the end of the land, it turned out to be a false hope, for another cliff would lie beyond, and then another, and sometimes the tide flowed so strongly that even when we sailed due west we were driven back east. Being a Viking was more difficult than I thought, and then one day the wind freshened from the west and the waves heaved higher and their tops were torn ragged and rain squalls hissed dark from a low sky and we ran northward to seek shelter in the lee of a headland. We dropped our anchor there and felt Fyrdraca jerk and tug like a fretful horse to her long rope of twisted hide.

  All night and all the next day the weather raged past the headland. Water shattered white on high cliffs. We were safe enough, but our food was getting low, and I had half decided we must abandon our plans to make ourselves rich and sail back to the Uisc where we could pretend we had only been patrolling the coast, but on our second dawn under the lee of that high cliff, as the wind subsided and the rain dropped to a chill drizzle, a ship appeared about the eastern spit of land.

  “Shields!” Leofric shouted, and the men, cold and unhappy, found their weapons and lined the ship’s side.

  The ship was smaller than ours, much smaller. She was squat, high-bowed, with a stumpy mast holding a wide yard on which a dirty sail was furled. A half dozen oarsmen manned her, and the steersman was bringing her directly toward Fyrdraca, and then, as she came closer and as her small bow broke the water white, I saw a green bough had been tied to her short mast. “They want to talk,” I said.

  “Let’s hope they want to buy,” Leofric grumbled.

  There was a priest in the small ship. I did not know he was a priest at first, for he looked as ragged as any of the crewmen, but he shouted that he wished to speak with us, and he spoke Danish, though not well, and I let the boat come up on the flank protected from the wind where her crewmen gazed up at a row of armed men holding shields. Cenwulf and I pulled the priest over our side. Two other men wanted to follow, but Leofric threatened them with a spear and they dropped back and the smaller ship drew away to wait while the priest spoke with us.

  He was called Father Mardoc and, once he was aboard and sitting wetly on one of Fyrdraca’s rowing benches, I saw the crucifix about his neck. “I hate Christians,” I said, “so why should we not feed you to Njord?”

  He ignored that, or perhaps he did not know that Njord was one of the sea gods. “I bring you a gift,” he said, “from my master,” and he produced, from beneath his cloak, two battered arm rings.

  I took them. They were poor things, mere ringlets of copper, old, filthy with verdigris, and of almost no value, and for a moment I was tempted to toss them scornfully into the sea, but reckoned our voyage had made such small profit that even those scabby treasures must be kept. “Who is your master?” I asked.

  “King Peredur.”

  I almost laughed. King Peredur? A man can expect a king to be famous, but I had never heard of Peredur, which suggested he was little more than a local chieftain with a high-sounding title. “And why does this Peredur,” I asked, “send me miserable gifts?”

  Father Mardoc still did not know my name and was too frightened to ask it. He was surrounded by men in leather, by men in mail, and by shields and swords, axes and spears, and he believed all of us were Danes for I had ordered any of Fyrdraca’s crew who wore crosses or crucifixes to hide them beneath their clothes. Only Haesten and I spoke, and if Father Mardoc thought that strange, he did not say anything of it. Instead he told me how his lord, King Peredur, had been treacherously attacked by a neighbor called Callyn, and Callyn’s forces had taken a high fort close to the sea and Peredur would pay us well if we were to help him recapture the fort that was called Dreyndynas.

  I sent Father Mardoc to sit in the Fyrdraca’s bow while we talked about his request. Some things were obvious. Being paid well did not mean we would become rich, but that Peredur would try to fob us off with as little as possible and, most likely, having given it to us he would then try to take it back by killing us all. “What we should do,” Leofric advised, “is find this man Callyn and see what he’ll pay us.”

  Which was good enough advice except none of us knew how to find Callyn, whom we later learned was King Callyn, which did not mean much, for any man with a following of more than fifty armed men called him
self a king in Cornwalum, and so I went to the Fyrdraca’s bow and talked with Father Mardoc again, and he told me that Dreyndynas was a high fort, built by the old people, and that it guarded the road eastward, and so long as Callyn held the fort, so long were Peredur’s people trapped in their lands.

  “You have ships,” I pointed out.

  “And Callyn has ships,” he said, “and we cannot take cattle in ships.”

  “Cattle?”

  “We need to sell cattle to live,” he said.

  So Callyn had surrounded Peredur and we represented a chance to tip the balance in this little war. “So how much will your king pay us?” I asked.

  “A hundred pieces of silver,” he said.

  I drew Serpent-Breath. “I worship the real gods,” I told him, “and I am a particular servant of Hoder, and Hoder likes blood, and I have given him none in many days.”

  Father Mardoc looked terrified, which was sensible of him. He was a young man, though it was hard to tell for his hair and beard were so thick that most of the time he was just a broken nose and pair of eyes surrounded by a greasy black tangle. He told me he had learned to speak Danish when he had been enslaved by a chieftain called Godfred, but that he had managed to escape when Godfred raided the Sillans, islands that lay well out in the western sea-wastes. “Is there any wealth in the Sillans?” I asked him. I had heard of the islands, though some men claimed they were mythical and others said the islands came and went with the moons, but Father Mardoc said they existed and were called the Isles of the Dead.

  “So no one lives there?” I asked.

  “Some folk do,” he said, “but the dead have their houses there.”

  “Do they have wealth as well?”

  “Your ships have taken it all,” he said. This was after he had promised me that Peredur would be more generous, though he did not know how generous. He said the king was willing to pay far more than a hundred silver coins for our help, and so we had him shout to his ship that they were to lead us around the coast to Peredur’s settlement. I did not let Father Mardoc go back to his ship for he would serve as a hostage if the tale he had told us was false and Peredur was merely luring us to an ambush.

  He was not. Peredur’s home was a huddle of buildings built on a steep hill beside a bay and protected by a wall of thorn bushes. His people lived within the wall. Some were fishermen and some were cattle herders and none was wealthy. The king himself, however, had a high hall where he welcomed us, though not before we had taken more hostages. Three young men, all of whom we were assured were Peredur’s sons, were delivered to Fyrdraca and I gave the crew orders that the three were to be killed if I did not return, and then I went ashore with Haesten and Cenwulf. I went dressed for war, with mail coat and helmet polished, and Peredur’s folk watched with frightened eyes as the three of us passed. The place stank of fish and shit. The people were ragged and their houses mere hovels that were built up the side of the steep hill that was crowned with Peredur’s hall. There was a church beside the hall, its thatch thick with moss and its gable decorated with a cross made from sea-whitened driftwood.

  Peredur was twice my age, a squat man with a sly face and a forked black beard. He greeted us from a throne, which was just a chair with a high back, and he waited for us to bow to him, but none of us did and that made him scowl. A dozen men were with him, evidently his courtiers, though none looked wealthy and all were elderly except for one much younger man who was in the robes of a Christian monk, and he stood out in that smoke-darkened hall like a raven in a clutch of gulls for his black robes were clean, his face close shaven, and his hair and tonsure neatly trimmed. He was scarcely older than I, was thin and stern-faced, and that face looked clever. It also carried an expression of marked distaste for us. We were pagans, or at least Haesten and I were pagans, and I had told Cenwulf to keep his mouth shut and his crucifix hidden, and so the monk assumed all three of us were heathen Danes. The monk spoke Danish, far better Danish than Father Mardoc. “The king greets you,” he said. He had a voice as thin as his lips and as unfriendly as his pale green eyes. “He greets you and would know who you are.”

  “My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,” I said.

  “Why are you here, Uhtred Ragnarson?” the priest asked.

  I contemplated him. I did not just look at him, but I studied him as a man might study an ox before killing it. I gave him a look that suggested I was wondering where to make the cuts, and he got my meaning and did not wait for an answer to his question, an answer that was obvious if we were Danes. We were here to thieve and kill, of course. What else did he think a Viking ship would be doing?

  Peredur spoke to the monk and they muttered for some time and I looked around the hall, searching for any evidence of wealth. I saw almost nothing except for three whalebones stacked in a corner, but Peredur plainly had some treasure for he wore a great heavy torque of bronze about his neck and there were silver rings on his grubby fingers, an amber brooch at the neck of his cloak, and a golden crucifix hidden in the cloak’s lice-ridden folds. He would keep his hoard buried, I thought, but I doubted any of us would become rich from this alliance; in truth we were not becoming rich from our voyage either, and at least Peredur would have to feed us while we haggled.

  “The king,” the monk interrupted my thoughts, “wishes to know how many men you can lead against the enemy.”

  “Enough,” I said flatly.

  “Does that not depend,” the monk observed slyly, “on how many enemy there are?”

  “No,” I said. “It depends on this,” and I slapped Serpent-Breath’s hilt. It was a good, arrogant reply, and probably what the monk expected. And, in truth, it was convincing for I was broad in the chest and a giant in this hall where I was a full head taller than any other man. “And who are you, monk?” I demanded.

  “My name is Asser,” he said. It was a British name, of course, and in the English tongue it meant a he-ass, and ever after I thought of him as the Ass. And there was to be a lot of the ever after for, though I did not know it, I had just met a man who would haunt my life like a louse. I had met another enemy, though on that day in Peredur’s hall he was just a strange British monk who stood out from his companions because he washed. He invited me to follow him to a small door at the side of the hall and, motioning Haesten and Cenwulf to stay where they were, I ducked through the door to find myself standing beside a dung heap, but the point of taking me outside had been to show me the view eastward.

  I stared across a valley. On the nearer slope were the smoke-blackened roofs of Peredur’s settlement. Then came the thorn fence that had been made along the stream that flowed to the sea. On the stream’s far side the hills rose gently to a far-off crest and there, breaking the skyline like a boil, was Dreyndynas. “The enemy,” Asser said.

  A small fort, I noted. “How many men are there?”

  “Does it matter to you?” Asser asked sourly, paying me back for my refusal to tell him how many men I led, though I assumed Father Mardoc had made a count of the crew while he was on board Fyrdraca so my defiance had been pointless.

  “You Christians,” I said, “believe that at death you go to heaven. Isn’t that right?”

  “What of it?”

  “You must surely welcome such a fate?” I asked. “To be near your god?”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I don’t threaten vermin,” I said, enjoying myself. “How many men are in that fort?”

  “Forty? Fifty?” He plainly did not know. “We can assemble forty.”

  “So tomorrow,” I said, “your king can have his fort back.”

  “He is not my king,” Asser said, irritated by the assumption.

  “Your king or not,” I said, “he can have his fort back so long as he pays us properly.”

  That negotiation lasted until dark. Peredur, as Father Mardoc had said, was willing to pay more than a hundred shillings, but he feared we would take the money and leave without fighting and so he wanted some kind of surety from me
. He wanted hostages, which I refused to give, and after an hour or more of argument we had still not reached an agreement, and it was then that Peredur summoned his queen. That meant nothing to me, but I saw the Ass stiffen as though he were offended, then sensed that every other man in the hall was strangely apprehensive. Asser made a protest, but the king cut him off with an abrupt slice of his hand and then a door at the back of the hall was opened and Iseult came to my life.

  Iseult. Finding her there was like discovering a jewel of gold in a midden. I saw her and I forgot Mildrith. Dark Iseult, black-haired Iseult, huge-eyed Iseult. She was small, thin as an elf, with a luminous face and hair as black as a raven’s feathers. She wore a black cloak and had silver bands about her neck and silver bracelets at her wrists and silver rings at her ankles and the jewelry clinked gently as she walked toward us. She was maybe two or three years younger than I, but somehow, despite her youth, she managed to scare Peredur’s courtiers, who backed away from her. The king looked nervous, while Asser, standing beside me, made the sign of the cross, then spat to ward off evil.

  I just stared at her, entranced. There was pain on her face, as if she found life unbearable, and there was fear on her husband’s face when he spoke to her in a quiet, respectful voice. She shuddered when he talked and I thought that perhaps she was mad, for the grimace on her face was awful, disfiguring her beauty, but then she calmed and looked at me and the king spoke to Asser.

  “You will tell the queen who you are and what you will do for King Peredur,” Asser told me in a distant, disapproving voice.

  “She speaks Danish?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he snapped. “Just tell her and get this farce over.”

  I looked into her eyes, those big, dark eyes, and had the uncanny suspicion that she could see right through my gaze and decipher my innermost thoughts. But at least she did not grimace when she saw me, as she had when her husband spoke. “My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,” I said, “and I am here to fight for your husband if he pays what I am worth. And if he doesn’t pay, we go.”