The Empty Throne (The Warrior Chronicles, Book 8) (26 page)

We numbered forty-six men, a considerable war-band, and Eadith had come too. Some of my men had wondered at that. Most folk consider that a woman aboard a ship brings nothing but bad luck because it provokes the jealousy of Ran, the goddess of the sea who will abide no rivals, but I dared not leave Eadith in Gleawecestre to suffer Æthelflaed’s jealousy. ‘She’ll kill the poor girl,’ I had told Finan.

‘She’ll send her to a nunnery, maybe?’

‘It’s the same thing. Besides,’ I lied, ‘Eadith knows Wales.’

‘She does, does she?’

‘Intimately,’ I said, ‘that’s why she’s going with us.’

‘Of course,’ he said and said no more.

Eadith, of course, knew nothing of Wales, but who did? Luckily Gerbruht had been to Tyddewi. He was a friend of my son’s and noted among my warriors for his appetite, which had made him fat, though much of that ox-like bulk was solid muscle. I summoned him to the stern of the boat where we sat just beside the steering platform and I made Eadith listen. ‘How do you know Wales?’ I asked Gerbruht.

‘I went on pilgrimage, lord.’

‘You did?’ I sounded surprised. Gerbruht struck me as a most unlikely pilgrim.

‘My father was a priest, lord,’ he explained.

‘He came from Frisia to visit Wales?’

‘King Alfred fetched him to Wintanceaster, lord, because my father knew Greek.’ That made sense. Alfred had brought dozens of foreign churchmen to Wessex, but only if they were learned. ‘So my father and mother liked to visit shrines,’ Gerbruht went on.

‘And they took you to Tyddewi?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘I was just a child, lord,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘there’s a dead saint there.’

‘There is, lord!’ he sounded awed and made the sign of the cross. ‘Saint Dewi.’

‘Never heard of him. What did he do?’

‘He preached, lord.’

‘They all do that!’

‘Well the folk at the back of the crowd couldn’t see him, lord.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Was he a dwarf?’

Gerbruht frowned, plainly trying to help me, but could find no answer. ‘I don’t know if he was a dwarf, lord, but they couldn’t see him so Dewi prayed to God and God made a hill under his feet.’

I stared at Gerbruht. ‘Dewi made a hill in Wales?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And they call that a miracle?’

‘Oh yes, lord!’

Gerbruht did not have the quickest mind in my shield wall, but he was staunch and strong. He could pull an oar all day or wield a war axe with savage skill. ‘So tell me about Tyddewi,’ I ordered him.

He frowned again as he tried to remember. ‘It’s not far from the sea, lord.’

‘That’s good.’

‘There are monks there. Good men, lord.’

‘I’m sure they are.’

‘And hills, lord.’

‘Dewi was there,’ I said, ‘so perhaps he made them?’

‘Yes, lord!’ He liked that idea. ‘And they have little fields, lord, with lots of sheep.’

‘I like mutton.’

‘I do too, lord,’ he said enthusiastically.

‘Did you see any warriors at Tyddewi?’

He nodded, but he could not tell me if a lord lived anywhere near the monastery, nor whether the warriors had their home near the settlement. There was evidently a church where the hill-making saint was buried, and stone cells where the monks lived, but Gerbruht could not remember much about the nearby village. ‘The church is in a hollow, lord.’

‘A hollow?’

‘In low ground, lord.’

‘You’d have thought they’d make the church on a hill,’ I said.

‘On a hill, lord?’

‘The one Dewi made.’

‘No, lord,’ he frowned, perplexed, ‘it’s in low ground. And the monks fed us fish.’

‘Fish.’

‘And honey, lord.’

‘Together?’

He thought that was funny and laughed. ‘No, lord, not together. That wouldn’t taste nice.’ He looked at Eadith, expecting her to share the joke. ‘Fish and honey!’ he said, and she giggled, which pleased Gerbruht. ‘Fish and honey!’ he said again. ‘They were herrings.’

‘Herrings?’ Eadith asked, trying not to laugh.

‘And cockles, winkles, and eels. Mackerel too!’

‘So tell me about the warriors you saw.’

‘But the bread was strange, lord,’ he said earnestly, ‘it tasted of seaweed.’

‘Warriors?’ I prompted him.

‘There were some at Dewi’s shrine, lord.’

‘They could have been visiting? Like you?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Seaweed?’ Eadith asked.

‘The bread was knobbly, my lady, and sour. But I quite liked it.’

‘How did you get there?’ I asked him.

‘They led us down a path to the food hut, lord, and we ate with the monks.’

‘No! To Tyddewi!’

He frowned. ‘We rode, lord.’

Gerbruht could tell me little more. It was plain that Tyddewi was a place of Christian pilgrimage, and, if Gerbruht’s memory was correct, strangers could travel the rough tracks of the southern Welsh kingdoms in some safety, and that thought was encouraging. Christians do like pilgrims, those pious folk who gaze at pig bones that pretend to be dead saints and then give money, lots of money, and there’s hardly a church, monastery, or nunnery that does not have the eyelid of Saint John or the bellybutton of Saint Agatha or the pickled trotters of the Gadarene swine. Many such pilgrims are poor, yet the fools will give their last bent coin to receive the blessing of a thimbleful of dirt scraped from beneath a dead saint’s toenail, but the fact that Tyddewi welcomed such gullible fools was good because it meant we could arrive there in the guise of pilgrims.

We sheltered that first night somewhere on the north coast of Defnascir. We found a cove and dropped the anchor stone and let the night fall on our tired ship. Some time that day we had passed the mouth of the river where I had killed Ubba. That fight on the sand had made my reputation, but it had happened so long ago now, and some day, I thought, a young man would cut me down as I had cut Ubba down and he would take Serpent-Breath and he would strut his fame. Wyrd bið ful
ā
ræd.

The next morning brought a hard day’s rowing, for the wind was still in our face and at times the tide tried to drive us back, and it was already dusk when we came to Lundi, an island I had visited many years before. It had hardly changed, though some folk must have tried settling there, which was a foolish thing to do because marauding Northmen would have seen their farmstead and rowed ashore. There were two piles of decayed ashes marking where the buildings had stood and a skeleton on the shingle where we grounded the
Ðrines
. Goats watched us from the heights where puffins had their burrows. We killed and butchered two goats and cooked an evening meal over a driftwood fire. The sky had cleared, the stars were a smear of light, the air cool but not cold, and we slept on the thin turf guarded by sentries.

Next day we rowed westwards through a limpid sea that heaved slowly to ripple misted light. Puffins whirred past us on their short wings, and seals lifted their whiskered faces to watch us pass. The wind rose in mid-morning and, after swerving north and south, it settled into a steady south-westerly, and we hoisted the sail and let the
Ðrines
run free. I took the steering-oar for a time, not because my son could not manage the ship, but just for the joy of feeling the sea’s tremor through the long loom. Then the effort of handling the long oar began to make my rib hurt and so I gave him back the oar and just lay on the steering platform and watched the glittering sea pass. I wondered if there were ships in Valhalla. Imagine eternity with a good ship and a shining sea and the wind in your face and a crew of good men and a woman beside you.

‘
Skidbladnir
,’ I said.

‘Skid?’ Eadith asked.

‘It’s a ship of the gods,’ I explained, ‘and it fits into a warrior’s pouch, and when you need her you just throw the ship into the sea and she grows to her full size.’

She smiled. ‘And you mock Christian miracles.’

‘I’ve yet to see a dead man raised or a blind man given sight.’

‘But you have seen a ship grow on the sea?’

‘I hate clever women,’ I growled.

She laughed. She had never been on a ship before, except to row decorously up and down the Sæfern beside Gleawecestre, and she had been nervous when our hull first met the wider sea and the short waves had buffeted us. She had seen the hull bend to the steeper waves and thought the planks must break, until I told her that if the hull did not bend then the ship would surely sink. ‘The planks bend,’ I explained, ‘and the frame just stops them bending too much. It’s like a sword. Make it too brittle and it breaks, too soft and it won’t hold an edge.’

‘And the stones?’ She had nodded at the bilge.

‘They keep us upright,’ I said, and laughed because I remembered a ridiculous sermon Father Beocca had once preached in which he had likened ballast stones to a Christian’s faith, and he had kept adding more stones to his imaginary ship until my father growled that he had just sunk the damned boat, and poor Beocca just stood by the altar with his mouth open.

‘You’re happy,’ Eadith said, sounding happy herself.

And I was happy too. The pain in my side was bearable, the ship was riding smoothly, and the only thing that worried me was Wales. I knew little of the Welsh except that they were Christian, spoke a barbarous tongue and, if Gerbruht was right, ate seaweed. Their country was divided into little kingdoms that seemed to change names with the weather, though Tyddewi, I knew, was part of a realm called Dyfed, though I had no idea who ruled that land. Some petty king, no doubt, all beard and bellyache. Yet the men of Wales were great warriors, and it had become a rule among Saxons that only fools went into their hills to be slaughtered, though that did not stop fools trying. And the Welsh, who claimed we had stolen their land, liked to raid into Mercia to steal livestock and slaves, and that constant warfare was useful training for young warriors. Indeed I had fought against Welshmen in my very first shield wall. I often wondered why the Welsh did not worship the gods who were enemies of the Saxons, for surely those gods would have helped them regain their land, but they insisted on being Christian, and a good thing too because it had been Welsh Christian warriors who had come to Teotanheale and helped defeat Cnut.

Now Cnut’s sword was in Dyfed and the
Ðrines
ran towards it with a bellied sail and a spreading wake. I saw a few other ships, all far off. The small dark sails were probably fishermen, but two larger pale sails were cargo ships heading towards the Sæfern’s mouth. I doubted they were fighting ships because, though they sailed close together, they headed sharply away from us and were soon lost in the sea’s haze.

By late afternoon we were off the Welsh coast, rowing now, for the wind was heading us again. In the two days we had spent filling the
Ðrines
’s belly with casks of ale and barrels of smoked fish and sacks of double-baked bread I had talked to a shipmaster who knew the coast. He had been a big man, full-bearded, his face darkened and lined by weather. He had assured me that finding Tyddewi would be easy. ‘Go west to the land’s end, lord,’ he had said, ‘and you pass a big inlet and come to a rocky headland with islands just off it, and you turn north there and cross a great bay, and the headland on the bay’s far side is Tyddewi. A blind man could find it on a dark night.’

‘Come with us,’ I invited him.

‘You want me to set foot in that land?’ he had asked. ‘In thirty-eight years at sea, lord, I’ve never landed in Wales and never will.’

‘We’ll be pilgrims.’

‘With swords?’ he had laughed. ‘You can’t miss it, lord. Go west till there’s no land left and then cross the bay to the north. Go east a little till you see an island with a great rock arch, and you’ll find good anchorage at the inlet there. The man who taught me the coast called it the dragon’s mouth. Sharp rocks like teeth, lord, but you can walk to Tyddewi from there.’

‘You anchored in the dragon’s mouth?’

‘Three times. One anchor stone off the bow, another off the stern, and good sentries to stay awake through the night.’

‘And didn’t go ashore? Not even to get water?’

He grimaced. ‘There were hairy bastards with axes waiting. I sheltered there, lord, from gales. And I prayed that the dragon kept his mouth open. Just cross the bay, look for the arch, and God preserve you.’

And perhaps the Christian god would preserve us. Wales was, after all, a place of Christians, but I still touched the hammer at my neck and prayed to Odin. Once upon a time he had come to this middle world, and he had made love to a girl and she had given him a mortal son, and the son had a son, and that son had another, and so it went on until I was born. I have the blood of gods, and I stroked the hammer and begged Odin to preserve me in the land of our enemies.

And that evening, as the wind lulled and the sea settled into a long swell, we crossed the wide bay and came to the arched rock and beyond it, high in the darkening sky, a great pall of smoke hung above the rocky land. Finan stood beside me and stared at the dark smear. He knew what it marked. Our whole lives had been spent seeing such smoke of destruction. ‘Danes?’ he suggested.

‘More likely Norsemen,’ I said, ‘or a Welsh quarrel? They squabble enough.’

We rowed slowly eastwards, searching for the dragon’s mouth, and there it was, a dark shadowed cleft in the coast, and I touched my hammer again as the long oars pulled us into the land’s embrace. There were sheep on the high slopes, and a huddle of thatched hovels deeper in the narrow valley, but I saw no men with or without axes. We saw no one. If folk lived in the inlet’s valley then they were hiding from whoever had smirched the sky with smoke.

‘Someone will be watching us,’ Finan said, gazing up at the high slopes. ‘We can’t see them, but they’re watching us.’

‘Probably.’

‘And they’ll send news of our coming.’

‘We have a cross on our bows,’ I said, meaning that we appeared to be a Christian-manned ship and, in a Christian land, that might protect us.

‘God help us,’ Finan said, and made the sign of the cross.

We set sentries, then tried to sleep.

But sleep came hard that night. We were in the dragon’s mouth.