The Reluctant Berserker (21 page)

I want no master. I don’t want…
Despite the depths of his revulsion, he could not force himself to hurt the man as hard as it would take to make him stop. “Please don’t do this! Please!”

Tatwine pinned him down with a hand on the back of his neck, and robbed him even of the possibility. He scrunched closed his eyes and concentrated on cornflowers, the smell of them. What else was there, stuffed into this mattress? Sweet drowsiness of red poppy. Straw, lots of straw, and mugwort, the physician’s favourite, mightiest of the nine magical herbs…

He was not going to notice anything else, neither the chill of the night air on his bared back, nor Tatwine’s weight landing ungently on his spine like a rock. It was perverse of his mind—honestly, he could almost laugh at it—to choose this moment to begin running through the fates of men as though his life depended entirely on rightly remembering every word:

One shall be found at the feet of his lord

With his harp he shall win a harvest of wealth;

Quickly he tightens the twangling strings,

They ring and they swing as his spur-shod finger

Dances across them: deftly he plays.

Another shall tame the towering falcon,

Hawk in hand, till the haughty flier

Grows meek and gentle; he makes him jesses,

Feeds in fetters the feather-proud bird,

With dainty morsels, the dauntless soarer,

Until the wild one is weakened and humbled,

Belled and tasselled, obeys his master

Hooded and tamed and trained to his hand.

Chapter Twelve

Wulfstan watched as his harper was stolen away, standing in front of the holy house as if he had accepted this. He had not. He waited until the tail of the last horse was hidden behind hedges before taking his bloodstained tunic from his saddlebags and ripping it up into four pieces. Bending down, he carefully wrapped each of Fealo’s hooves in the soft cloth. There was no real thought in his mind. He saw that Leofgar must not be a pilgrim at all, but only a runaway making off without his lord’s permission. He saw too that this did not relieve him of his debt to the man, and he—under a mother’s curse as he was—could not afford to make demands on another man’s sanctity.

Had not Leofgar admitted, last night, that he was not a holy man nor a wise one? Well then, Wulfstan could not claim to have been lied to. And he owed the man his life. Time, perhaps, to repay.

Once Fealo’s hooves were muffled, he mounted and set off in pursuit of Leofgar’s party. Here Akeman Street cut through marsh and fields reclaimed from the marsh by dykes. Built up by the race of giants, it lay old and strange and straight over the land for miles. He could not lose them on such a path. The only difficulty there was to follow without being seen himself.

Through the day he simply followed the road, leaning over his horse’s neck to check from side to side whether any tracks left the beaten path and meandered out into the wild. Off the great hog’s back that supported the road, the ground swiftly became boggy. Muddy islands choked with twisted alder gave way to reeds in great rustling sheets, standing up from water that reflected the empty sky.

Here and there he passed a marsh dweller’s hut, on stilts in the brackish ponds, thin blue smoke curling out of their thatch. Once a woman came out to watch him pass, and he asked, “Did a party of warriors come past? With a harper amongst them? Where did they go?”

She waved an arm to indicate the road, and shouted, “Along awhile, lord. Going slow but steady. You’ll catch up with them if you canter.”

Waist deep in the watery mud beneath the pylons of the house, one of the woman’s children—probably a girl, though it was hard to tell—ladled a clump of oozy grass into a slingshot and pelted the path in front of Fealo’s feet. Fealo danced back, snorting in fear of this flying thing. Another warrior might have taken this as an insult, sloshed his way into the marsh and cracked the child’s head against one of the pillars of the house.

Wulfstan was drawing breath to warn the woman of this—to suggest she might keep her offspring in order for their own sake. From the lightning strike of fear that showed on her face, she had got there before him. Her house had doors in every direction. She moved the wicker screen from the bottom of one and leaned out into the clammy dark to shout at her daughter, her voice steely with suppressed panic.

As she harangued one child, a second—this one a naked infant—came crawling and rolling out of the opposite door. She had a brood of imps, he thought, noting the look of determination on the baby’s face. He was still foolishly smiling when its hand went over the edge of the platform, it fell forward and, jerking its body in shock, kicked itself over the side and fell into the marsh.

The soupy water closed over it without making a splash. Caught up in arguing at the other side of the house, the woman’s head didn’t turn.

“Goodwife!” Wulfstan yelled, and waded in to the muck, keeping his eyes fixed on the spot where the baby fell. “Your child!”

It was a pale blur beneath the murk when he got there. He seized it fast, though it was slippery, and raised it out. A little boy, who bawled at his bruising grip as soon as he was out in the air to do so.

Both woman and daughter had run to him by this time, so he could hand the wet and outraged infant up to its mother and let her deal with soothing it. “My lord, my lord!” she said, taking it and crushing it to her chest, turning its face to press her cheek to its. “Thank you. Thank you! How could that…? The screen should have…”

On all four doors a similar wattle screen had been set against the underside and tied with coarse string, as a precaution against just this mishap. This one had come undone. The child must have pushed its way through, too fearless and curious for his own safety.

“What can I do to repay you?”

Wulfstan waded back to the path. Inappropriate laughter struck him as though blown in his face by a demon. He struggled to keep it inside. “Nothing. Nothing, just keep a closer eye on your brood in future. Not all warriors are such mild men as I.”

Perhaps the laughter was carried on something in the air, for she caught it too now. “Oh, I will, lord. I do not think my daughter will forget this fast. Bless you, sir. Thank you. Good luck to you in your quest.”

So he returned to the hunt for Leofgar with a mother’s blessing, and though it did not counteract his curse, he felt a little stronger for it nevertheless.

At noon he chewed on some salted meat and gave an apple from the nuns’ store to his horse, riding on. It was not until twilight that things began to change.

Wulfstan dismounted when the shadows crept out from beneath the hawthorns and slithered under Fealo’s feet. Leofgar’s captors would not keep on going through the darkness. They would find somewhere to camp, and thus he must be nearing them. He walked on, conscious of every footfall and every whicker from his steed.

Rings on his bridle chimed faintly as Fealo champed, and every so often the horse would put his nose down and lip at the side of Wulfstan’s face, slicking his cheek with horse spit. He began to lunge to the side, trying to pull Wulfstan over to the verges where he could crop the long grass and lean down to drink his fill from the narrow ditch that ran alongside the road and drained it.

Finding a place where grime had choked the ditch, Wulfstan carefully led Fealo across and down into a thicket of willow. He left the horse haltered there to graze and drink and recoup his strength, but he did not unbridle him. Not yet.

The waning light had darkened when he donned his helmet and came back onto the road. Tilting back his head he snuffed the air and smelled smoke. Grimly pleased, he pulled himself heavily up on the willow’s gnarled branches and saw, not too far off, an area of sky painted faint madder red from the underglow of a fire.

Quietly as he could, clutching at the skirts of his mail so that they should not rustle, he walked through the darkest shadows to the edge of that stain of flames.

The light showed the outline of a man on watch, hand on his spear. Wulfstan’s own hand went, without thought, to the horn that hung from his belt. He had closed his fingers on it and pulled it free, was halfway through lifting it to his lips before he caught himself. Ancient custom required that he announce himself with a horn blast or be accounted a thief. His honour revolted over the thought of sneaking into another man’s camp to take something of his without giving his name, without offering him a chance to fight back. Could he do that? Could he sacrifice one more piece of his warrior’s virtue and have anything left of it when the deed was done?

Yet the manly way was to challenge and fight all three, openly, without deceit. Could he do that? Take on three hale men-at-arms, and he with a wound in his shoulder barely healed, strapped tight and sore?

A few steps back from the sentry, halfway down the ditch that lined the road, a fallen tree branch had lodged and stuck. Wulfstan stepped onto it, and across, picking his way among the trees to the sentry’s left, worming around until he was behind the man and could see the two tents in their clearing—the soldier’s shelter and the lord’s pavilion lit from within by lantern and brazier.

The silver banding of the horn dug into his fingers. This was wrong. It was wrong to come in here like a wolfshead, like an evil spirit. His honour, such as it was, would not bear it. No, he would announce himself, they could talk. There was surely some negotiated settlement they could come to that did not mean he should utterly abandon the niceties of civilized—

“No!” Leofgar’s voice split the silence, ringing with horror and denial. “No, no, no!”

He didn’t hear words in the reply, just the tone of voice, the self-satisfied deep growl of a hunting wolf on its patch, but he was already moving. Gently, gently, silently. Biting his lip to keep from yelling a challenge, and letting all thoughts of his own dishonour fall from him like rain from swans’ feathers, he worked his way further around the clearing until he was directly behind the large tent.

Light shone straight as the road from a gash someone had made in the canvas. Wulfstan shoved the little knife he shaved with—sharpest of blades—back into his pouch. Encouraged by the thought that someone had already made a doorway for him, he looked once round the edge of the tent. The sentry still faced the road, the second man lay swathed and sleeping under his awning. Good.

“Don’t! Please!”

Bile rose in his throat, and rage trembled in his fingers. No one on this middle earth had the right to make
his
harper
plead
. No one!

Swallowing rage and curses, his hand not so steady as it might have been, he took hold of the edges of that gash and pulled it apart, squinting through the flood of lantern light that poured out. He took one glimpse—Leofgar, face pushed into the pillow, clothes in disarray, the man atop him, crouched bearlike and laughing, laughing very quietly, his brown teeth bared.

One glimpse was enough. Wulfstan tore the fabric asunder, took two steps and swung at the man with the only thing he had in his hand. The round mouthpiece of the horn, bound with silver, hard as aurochs’ bone, caught his enemy beneath the ear and knocked him out.

He sprawled forward, all his weight coming down at once on Leofgar’s back, and Leofgar gave a tiny noise of despair that made Wulfstan wish with all his soul that the rescue had been harder—that he had been given better excuse to hack the limbs from his friend’s lord and burn the wounds shut and leave him a living stump as the Vikings were wont to do.

He strode forwards and kicked the man off his friend. Even as he did, someone in the outer camp called “My lord?” with a note of concern, and he wondered how much had been heard, how much suspected.

Leaning down, he grabbed Leofgar by the collar. The slighter man had gone somewhere inside his head. It took hauling him up and shaking him before his face creased in confusion, then it cleared and sharpened and he was himself again.

“Quickly!” Wulfstan whispered, “I think they’ve heard me.”

“They’ll have seen…” Holding up his trousers with one hand, Leofgar made a quick sweep of the tent, resisting as Wulfstan tried to haul him bodily away. “Your shadow on the walls.”

“I’ll—” Wulfstan moved to douse the candle that stood upright as an angel in its waxed horn lantern.

“No!” Leofgar interrupted him, his resolute look turning to panic as he fumbled amongst the chests and heaps of discarded armour around the perimeter of the tent. “Where is she? I can’t go without her. Where did he put her?”

“My lord?” The voice was closer now and sharper. Wulfstan considered gentleness but thought he knew this mood—he’d seen it before after many battles, when the spirit had been tried beyond its endurance. The querulous need for one thing, one thing only, to make the broken right again. With warmth, rest and food, it would pass, and he could not indulge it and force a fight they might both lose.

He grabbed Leofgar by the hips and hoisted him over his shoulder—he was a light man, easy to carry, even squirming, through the rip in the tent. Some inkling of the danger must have bitten through his fell mood, for he didn’t fight the hold or the rescue. Indeed, he went very, very quiet, lying like the dead over Wulfstan’s shoulder.

If there had been more time to think, perhaps that too would have worried him. But as he wormed his way out into the night he was all too conscious there were hands unlacing the tent door behind him. One could not fit even one recitation of the Grace into the time they had before the alarm was sounded and the pursuit on, and Wulfstan didn’t have the time to think.