The Pale Horseman (10 page)
I took no part in that. Instead, with all of my men, I went straight to Peredur's hall. Some
Danes, reckoning that was where the silver would be, were also climbing the hill, but I
reached the hall first, pushed open the door and saw Iseult waiting there.
I swear she was expecting me for her face showed no fear and no surprise. She was sitting
in the king's throne, but stood as if welcoming me as I walked up the hall. Then she took the
silver from her neck and her wrists and her ankles and held it mutely out as an offering and
I took it all and tossed it to Leofric. 'We divide it with Svein,' I said.
'And her?' He sounded amused. 'Do we share her too?'
For answer I took the cloak from about Iseult's neck. Beneath it she wore a black dress. I
still had Serpent-Breath drawn and I used the bloodied blade to slash at the cloak until I
could tear a strip from its hem. Iseult watched me, her face showing nothing. When the strip
was torn away I gave her back the cloak, then tied one end of the cloth strip about her neck and
tied the other end to my belt. 'She's mine,' I said.
More Danes were coming into the hall and some stared wolfishly at Iseult, and then Svein
arrived and snarled at his men to start digging up the hall floor to search for hidden coins
or silver. He grinned when he saw Iseult's leash. 'You can have her, Saxon,' he said. 'She's
pretty, but I like them with more meat on the bone.'
I kept Iseult with me as we feasted that night. There was a good deal of ale and mead in the
settlement and so I ordered my men not to fight with the Danes, and Svein told his men not to
fight with us, and on the whole we were obeyed, though inevitably some men quarrelled over the
captured women and one of the boys I had brought from my estate got a knife in his belly and
died in the morning.
Svein was amused that we were a West Saxon ship. 'Alfred sent you?' he asked me.
'No.'
'He doesn't want to fight, does he?'
'He'll fight,' I said, 'except he thinks his god will do the fighting for him.'
'Then he's an idiot,' Svein said, 'the gods don't do our bidding. I wish they did.' He
sucked on a pork bone. 'So what are you doing here?' he asked.
'Looking for money,' I said, 'the same as you.'
'I'm looking for allies,' he said.
'Allies?'
He was drunk enough to speak more freely than he had when we first met, and I realised this
was indeed the Svein who was said to be gathering men in Wales. He admitted as much, but
added he did not have enough warriors.
'Guthrum can lead two thousand men to battle, maybe morel I have to match that.'
So he was a rival to Guthrum. I tucked that knowledge away.
'You think the Cornishmen will fight with you?'
'They promised they would,' he said, spitting out a shred of gristle. 'That's why I came
here. But the bastards lied. Callyn isn't a proper king, he's a village chief. I'm wasting
my time here.'
'Could the two of us beat Callyn?' I asked.
Svein thought about it, then nodded. 'We could.'
He frowned suddenly, staring into the hall's shadows, and I saw he was looking at one of
his men who had a girl on his lap. He evidently liked the girl for he slapped the table,
pointed to her, beckoned, and the man reluctantly brought her. Svein sat her down, pulled
her tunic open so he could see her breasts, then gave her his pot of ale. 'I'll think about it,'
he told me.
'Or are you thinking of attacking me?' I asked.
He grinned. 'You are Uhtred Ragnarson,' he said, 'and I heard about the fight on the river
where you killed Ubba.'
I evidently had more of a reputation among my enemies than I did among my so-called
friends. Svein insisted I tell the tale of Ubba's death, which I did, and I told him the truth
which was that Ubba had slipped and fallen, and that had let me take his life.
'But men say you fought well,' Svein said.
Iseult listened to all this. She did not speak our language, but her big eyes seemed to
follow every word. When the feast was over I took her to the small rooms at the back of the
hall and she used my makeshift leash to pull me into her wood-walled chamber. I made a bed
from our cloaks.
'When this is done,' I told her in words she could not understand, 'you'll have lost your
power.'
She touched a finger to my lips to silence me and she was a queen so I obeyed her.
In the morning we finished ravaging the town. Iseult showed me which houses might have
something of value and generally she was right though the search meant demolishing the
houses, for folk hide their small treasures in their thatch, so we scattered rats and mice as
we hauled down the mouldy straw and sifted through it, and afterwards we dug under every
hearth, or wherever else a man might bury silver, and we collected every scrap of metal,
every cooking pot or fish-hook, and the search took all day. That night we divided the hoard
on the beach.
Svein had evidently thought about Callyn and, being sober by the time he did his
thinking, he had decided that the king was too strong. 'We can easily beat him,' he said,
'but we'll lose men.'
A ship's crew can only endure so many losses. We had lost none in the fight against
Peredur, but Callyn was a stronger king and he was bound to be suspicious of Svein which
meant that he would have his household troops ready and armed. 'And he's got little enough to
take,' Svein said scornfully.
'He's paying you?'
‘He's paying me,' Svein said, 'just as Peredur paid you.'
'I split that with you,' I said.
'Not the money he paid you before the fight,' Svein said with a grin, 'you didn't split
that.'
'What money?' I asked.
'So we're even,' he said, and we had both done well enough out of Peredur's death, for Svein
had slaves and we each now possessed over nine hundred shillings' worth of silver and metal,
which was not a fortune, especially once it was divided among the men, but it was better
than I had done so far on the voyage.
I also had Iseult.
She was no longer leashed to me, but she stayed beside me and I sensed that she was happy
about that. She had taken a vicious pleasure in seeing her home destroyed and I decided
she must have hated
Peredur. He had feared her and she had hated him, and if it was true that she had been able
to see the future then she had seen me and given her husband bad advice to make that future
come true.
'So where do you go now?' Svein asked. We were walking along the beach, past the huddled
slaves who watched us with dark, resentful eyes.
'I have a mind,' I said, 'to go into the Saefern Sea.'
'There's nothing left there,' he said scornfully.
'Nothing?'
'It's been scoured,' he said, meaning that Danish and Norse ships had bled the coasts dry of
any treasure. 'All you'll find in the Saefern Sea,' he went on, 'are our ships bringing men
from Ireland.'
'To attack Wessex?'
'No!' He grinned at me. 'I've a mind to start trading with the Welsh kingdoms.'
'And I have a mind,' I said, 'to take my ship to the moon and build a feasting hall
there.'
He laughed. 'But speaking of Wessex,' he said, 'I hear they're building a church where you
killed Ubba?'
'I hear the same.'
'A church with an altar of gold?'
'I've heard that too,' I allowed. I hid my surprise that he knew of Odda the Younger's
plans, but I should not have been surprised. A rumour of gold would spread like couch grass.
'I've heard it,' I said again, 'but I don't believe it.'
'Churches have money,' he said thoughtfully, then frowned, 'but that's a strange place to
build a church.'
'Strange, why?'
'So close to the sea? An easy place to attack?'
'Or perhaps they want you to attack,' I said, 'and have men ready to defend it?'
'A lure, you mean?' He thought about that.
'And hasn't Guthrum given orders that the West Saxons aren't to be provoked,' I said.
'Guthrum can order what he wants,' Svein said harshly, 'but I am Svein of the White Horse
and I don't take orders from Guthrum.' He walked on, frowning as he threaded the fishing nets
that men now dead had hung to dry. Then say Alfred is not a fool.'
'Nor is he.'
'If he has put valuables beside the sea,' he said, 'he will not leave them unguarded.' He
was a warrior, but like the best warriors he was no madman. When folk speak of the Danes these
days they have an idea that they were all savage pagans, unthinking in their terrible
violence, but most were like Svein and feared losing men. That was always the great Danish
fear, and the Danish weakness. Svein's ship was called the White Horse and had a crew of
fifty-three men, and if a dozen of those men were to be killed or gravely wounded, then the
White Horse would be fatally weakened. Once in a fight, of course, he was like all Danes,
terrifying, but there was always a good deal of thinking before there was any
fighting.
He scratched at a louse, then gestured towards the slaves his men had taken. 'Besides, I
have these.'
He meant he would not go to Cynuit. The slaves, once they were sold, would bring him silver
and he must have reckoned Cynuit was not worth the casualties.
Svein needed my help next morning. His own ship was in Callyn's harbour and he asked me to
take him and a score of his men to fetch it. We left the rest of his crew at Peredur's
settlement. They guarded the slaves he would take away, and they also burned the place as we
carried Svein cast up the coast to Callyn's settlement.
We waited a day there as Svein settled his accounts with Callyn, and we used the time to
sell fleeces and tin to Callyn's traders and, though we received a poor enough price, it was
better to travel with silver than with bulky cargo. The Fyrdraca was glittering with
silver now and the crewmen, knowing they would receive their proper share, were happy.
Haesten wanted to go with Svein, but I refused his request.
'I saved your life,' I told him, 'and you have to serve me longer to pay for that.'
He accepted that and was pleased when I gave him a second arm ring as a reward for the men
he had killed at Dreyndynas.
Svein's White Horse was smaller than Fyrdraca. Her prow had a carved horse's head and her
stern a wolf's head, while at her masthead was a wind-vane decorated with a white horse.
I asked Svein about the horse and he laughed.
'When I was sixteen,' he said, 'I wagered my father's stallion against our king's white
horse. I had to beat the king's champion at wrestling and swordplay. My father beat me for
making the wager, but I won! So the white horse is lucky. I ride only white horses.'
And so his ship was the White Horse and I followed her back up the coast to where a thick
plume of smoke marked where Peredur had ruled.
'Are we staying with him?' Leofric asked, puzzled that we were going back west rather than
turning towards Defnascir.
'I have a mind to see where Britain ends,' I said, and I had no wish to return to the Uisc
and to Mildrith's misery.
Svein put the slaves into the belly of his boat. We spent one last night in the bay, under
the thick smoke, and in the morning, as the rising sun flickered across the sea, we rowed
away. As we passed the western headland, going into the wide ocean, I saw a man watching us
from the cliff's top and I saw he was robed in black and, though he was a long way off, I thought
I recognised Asser. Iseult saw him too and she hissed like a cat, made a fist and threw it at
him, opening her fingers at the last moment as if casting a spell at the monk.
Then I forgot him because Fyrdraca was back in the open sea and we were going to the
place where the world ended.
And I had a shadow queen for company.
Chapter Four
The Swamp
King
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.
