The Pale Horseman (10 page)

I love the sea. I grew up beside it, though in my memories the seas off Bebbanburg are
grey, usually sullen, and rarely sunlit. They are nothing like the great waters that roll
from beyond the Isles of the Dead to thunder and shatter against the rocks at the west of
Britain. The sea heaves there, as if the ocean gods flexed their muscles, and the white birds
cry endlessly, and the wind rattles the spray against the cliffs and Fyrdraca, running
before that bright wind, left a path in the sea and the steering oar fought me, pulsing with
the life of the water and the flexing of the ship and the joy of the passage. Iseult stared
at me, astonished by my happiness, but then I gave her the oar and watched her thin body
heave against the sea's strength until she understood the power of the oar and could move
the ship, and then she laughed. 'I would live on the sea,' I told her, though she did not
understand me. I had given her an arm ring from Peredur's hoard and a silver toe ring and
a necklace of monster's teeth, all sharp and long and white, strung on a silver
wire.

I turned and watched Svein's White Horse cut through the water. Her bows would sometimes
break from a wave so that the forepart of her hull, all green and dark with growth, would rear
skywards with her horse's head snarling at the sun, and then she would crash down and the seas
would explode white about her timbers. Her oars, like ours, were inboard and the oar-holes
plugged, and we both ran under sail and Fyrdraca was the faster ship, which was not because
she was more cunningly built, but because her hull was longer.

There is such joy in a good ship, and a greater joy to have the ship's belly fat with
other men's silver. It is the Viking joy, driving a dragon-headed hull through a
wind-driven sea towards a future full of feasts and laughter. The Danes taught me that and
I love them for it, pagan swine though they might be. At that moment, running before
Svein's White Horse, I was as happy as a man could be, free of all the churchmen and laws and
duties of Alfred's Wessex, but then I gave orders that the sail was to be lowered and a
dozen men uncleared the lines and the big yard scraped down the mast.

We had come to Britain's ending and I would turn about, and I waved to Svein as the White
Horse swept past us. He waved hack, watching the Fyrdraca wallow in the long ocean
swells.

'Seen enough?' Leofric asked me.

I was staring at the end of Britain where the rocks endured the sea's assault.
'Penwith,' Iseult said, giving me the British name for the headland.

'You want to go home?' I asked Leofric.

He shrugged. The crew was turning the yard, lining it fore and aft so it could be stowed
on its crutches while other men were binding the sail so it did not flap. The oars were
being readied to take us eastwards and the White Horse was getting smaller as it swept up
into the Saefern Sea.

I stared after Svein, envying him. 'I need to be rich,' I said to Leofric.

He laughed at that.

'I have a path to follow,' I said, 'and it goes north. North back to Bebbanburg. And
Bebbanburg has never been captured, so I need many men to take it. Many good men and many
sharp swords.'

'We have silver,' he said, gesturing into the boat's bilge.

'Not enough,' I answered sourly. My enemies had money and Alfred claimed that I owed the
church money, and the courts of Defnascir would be chasing me for wergild. I could only go
home if I had enough silver to pay off the church, to bribe the courts and to attract men to
my banner. I stared at the White Horse, which was now little more than a sail above the
wind-fretted sea and I felt the old temptation to go with the Danes. Wait till Ragnar was
free and give him my sword arm, but then I would be fighting against Leofric and I would
still need to make money, raise men, go north and fight for my birthright. I touched Thor's
hammer and prayed for a sign. Iseult spat. That was not quite true. She said a word which
sounded like someone clearing their throat, spitting and choking all at the same time, and
she was pointing over the ship's side and I saw a strange fish arching out of the water. The
fish was as big as a deerhound and had a triangular fin.

'Porpoise,' Leofric said.

'Llamhydydd,' Iseult said again, giving the fish its British name.

'They bring sailors luck,' Leofric said.

I had never seen a porpoise before, but suddenly there were a dozen of the creatures.
They were grey and their backs glistened in the sun and they were all going north.

'Put the sail back up,' I told Leofric.

He stared at me. The crew was unlashing the oars and taking the plugs from the
oar-holes.

'You want the sail up?' Leofric asked.

'We're going north.' I had prayed for a sign and Thor had sent me the porpoise.

'There's nothing in the Saefern Sea,' Leofric said. 'Svein told you that.'

'Svein told me there was no plunder in the Saefern Sea,' I said, 'because the Danes have
taken it all, so that means the Danes have the plunder.' I felt a surge of happiness so
intense that I punched Leofric's shoulder and gave Iseult a hug. 'And he told me that their
ships are coming from Ireland.'

'So?' Leofric rubbed his shoulder.

‘Men from Ireland!' I told Leofric. 'Danes coming from Ireland to attack Wessex. And
if you brought a ship's crew from Ireland, what would you bring with you?'

'Everything you possess,' Leofric said flatly.

'And they don't know we're here! They're sheep, and we are a fire-dragon.'

He grinned. 'You're right,' he said.

'Of course I'm right! I'm a lord! I'm right and I'm going to be rich! We're all going to
be rich! We shall eat off gold plates, piss down our enemies' throats and make their wives
into our whores.' I was shouting this nonsense as I walked down the boat's centre, casting
off the sail's lashings. 'We'll all be rich with silver shoes and golden bonnets. We'll be
richer than kings! We'll wallow in silver, shower our whores with gold and shit lumps of
amber! Tie those oars up! Plug the holes, we're going north, we're going to be rich as
bishops, every man of us!' The men were grinning, pleased because I was roaring my
enthusiasm, and men like to be led.

They did have qualms about going north, for that would take us out of sight of land, and I
had never been that far from the shore, and I was frightened too, for Ragnar the Elder had
often told me tales of Norsemen who had been tempted out into the sea-wastes, to sail
ever farther westwards, and he said there were lands out there, lands beyond the Isles of
the Dead, lands where ghosts walked, but I am not sure if he told the truth. I am sure, though,
that he told me that many of those ships never returned. They voyage into the dying sun
and they go onwards because they cannot bear to turn hack and so they sail to where the lost
ships die at the world's dark ending.

Yet the world did not end to the north. I knew that, though I was not certain what did lie
northwards. Dyfed was there, somewhere, and Ireland, and there were other places with
barbarous names and savage people who lived like hungry dogs on the wild edges of the land,
but there was also a waste of sea, a wilderness of empty waves and so, once the sail was
hoisted and the wind was thrusting the Fyrdraca northwards, I leaned on the oar to take
her somewhat to the east for fear we would otherwise be lost in the ocean's vastness.

'You know where you're going?' Leofric asked me.

'No.'

'Do you care?'

I grinned at him for answer. The wind, which had been southerly, came more from the west,
and the tide took us eastwards, so that by the afternoon I could see land, and I thought it
must be the land of the Britons on the north side of the Saefern, but as we came closer I saw
it was an island. I later discovered it was the place the Northmen call Lundi, because
that is their word for the puffin, and the island's high cliffs were thick with the birds,
which shrieked at us when we came into a cove on the western side of the island. It was an
uncomfortable place to anchor for the night because the big seas rolled in and so we
dropped the sail, took out the oars, and rowed around the cliffs until we found shelter on
the eastern side.

I went ashore with Iseult and we dug some puffin burrows to find eggs, though all were
hatched so we contented ourselves with killing a pair of goats for the evening meal. There
was no one living on the island, though there had been because there were the remains of a
small church and a field of graves. The Danes had burned everything, pulled down the church
and dug up the graves in search of gold. We climbed to a high place and I searched the evening
sea for ships, but saw none, though I wondered if I could see land to the south. It was hard
to be sure for the southern horizon was thick with dark cloud, but a darker strip within
the cloud could have been hills and I assumed I was looking at Cornwalum or the western
part of Wessex. Iseult sang to herself.

I watched her. She was gutting one of the dead goats, doing it clumsily for she was not
accustomed to such work. She was thin, so thin that she looked like the a lfcynn, the
elf-kind, but she was happy. In time I would learn just how much she had hated Peredur. He
had valued her and made her a queen, but he had also kept her a prisoner in his hall so
that he alone could profit from her powers. Folk would pay Peredur to hear Iseult's
prophecies and one of the reasons Callyn had fought his neighbour was to take Iseult for
himself. Shadow queens were valued among the Britons for they were part of the old
mysteries, the powers that had brooded over the land before the monks arrived, and Iseult
was one of the last shadow queens. She had been born in the sun's darkness, but now she was
free and I was to find she had a soul as wild as a falcon.

Mildrith, poor Mildrith, wanted order and routine. She wanted the hall swept, the
clothes clean, the cows milked, the sun to rise, the sun to set and for nothing to change, but
Iseult was different. She was strange, shadow-born, and full of mystery. Nothing she said
to me those first days made any sense, for we had no language in common, but on the island,
as the sun set and I took the knife to finish cutting the entrails from the goat, she
plucked twigs and wove a small cage. She showed me the cage, broke it and then, with her long
white fingers, mimed a bird flying free. She pointed to herself, tossed the twig scraps
away and laughed.

Next morning, still ashore, we spotted boats. There were two of them and they were
sailing to the west of the island, going northwards. They were small craft, probably
traders from Cornwalum, and they were running before the south-west wind towards the
hidden shore where I assumed Svein had taken the White Horse.

We followed the two small ships. By the time we had waded out to Fyrdraca, raised her
anchor and rowed her from the lee of the island both boats were almost out of sight, but
once our sail was hoisted we began to overhaul them. They must have been terrified to see
a dragon ship shoot out from behind the island, but I lowered the sail a little to slow us
down and so followed them for much of the day until, at last, a blue-grey line showed at the
sea's edge. Land. We hoisted the sail fully and seethed past the two small, tubby boats and
so, for the first time, I came to the shore of Wales. The Britons had another name for it,
but we simply called it Wales which means 'foreigners', and much later I worked out that we
must have made that landfall in Dyfed, which is the name of the churchman who converted the
Britons of Wales to Christianity and had the westernmost kingdom of the Welsh named for
him.

We found a deep inlet for shelter. Rocks guarded the entrance, but once inside we were
safe from wind and sea. We turned the ship so that her bows faced the open sea, and the cove
was so narrow that our stern scraped stone as we slewed Fyrdraca about, and then we slept on
board, men and their women sprawled under the rowers' benches. There were a dozen women
aboard, all captured from Peredur's tribe, and one of them managed to escape that night,
presumably sliding over the side and swimming to shore. It was not Iseult. She and I slept
in the small black space beneath the steering platform, a hole screened by a cloak, and
Leofric woke me there in the dawn, worried that the missing woman would raise the country
against us.

I shrugged. 'We won't be here long.'

But we stayed in the cove all day. I wanted to ambush ships coming around the coast and
we saw two, but they travelled together and I could not attack more than one ship at a
time. Both ships were under sail, riding the south-west wind, and both were Danish, or
perhaps Norse, and both were laden with warriors. They must have come from Ireland, or
perhaps from the east coast of Northumbria, and doubtless they travelled to join Svein,
lured by the prospect of capturing good West Saxon land.

'Burgweard should have the whole fleet up here,' I said. 'He could tear through these
bastards.'

Two horsemen came to look at us in the afternoon. One had a glinting chain about his
neck, suggesting he was of high rank, but neither man came down to the shingle beach. They
watched from the head of the small valley that fell to the cove and after a while they went
away. The sun was low now, but it was summer so the days were long.

'If they bring men,' Leofric said as the two horsemen rode away, but he did not finish
the thought.

I looked up at the high bluffs on either side of the cove. Men could rain rocks down from
those heights and the Fyrdraca would be crushed like an egg.

'We could put sentries up there,' I suggested, but just then Eadric, who led the men who
occupied the forward starboard benches, shouted that there was a ship in sight.

I ran forward and there she was. The perfect prey.

She was a large ship, not so big as Fyrdraca, but large all the same, and she was riding
low in the water for she was so heavily laden. Indeed, she carried so many people that her
crew had not dared raise the sail for, though the wind was not heavy, it would have bent her
leeward side dangerously close to the water. So she was being rowed and now she was close
inshore, evidently looking for a place where she could spend the night and her crew had
plainly been tempted by our cove and only now realised that we already filled it. I could
see a man in her bows pointing further up the coast and meanwhile my men were arming
themselves, and I shouted at Haesten to take the steering oar. He knew what to do and I was
confident he would do it well, even though it might mean the death of fellow Danes. We cut
the lines that had tethered us to the shore as Leofric brought me my mail coat, helmet and
shield. I dressed for battle as the oars were shipped, then pulled on my helmet so that
suddenly the edges of my vision were darkened by its faceplate.