The Reluctant Berserker (3 page)

Soothed, he looked at the young man trailing obediently after him and said, “You are a traveller.”

Quick flash of those leaf-green eyes, and he realized he had been wrong—they were willow green, not beech. “I have been, lord.”

“You’ve seen uncanny things? Wondrous things?”

He thought the soft voice took on a hint of amusement, but didn’t trust his perceptions enough to take offence. “Perhaps I haven’t been far enough, lord. It was little but men in different clothes. And men are all the same.”

“Not so.” Wulfstan paused before a display of knives, picked one up to test its heft, ignoring the craftsman’s fawning deference. It occurred to him that the lad had seen him almost throttle a man who accused him of being willing to lie with his lord, and yet he was assumed to go to it willingly.

How did you speak across such a chasm? Perhaps you didn’t. Perhaps you assumed that crossing that gap cut a man off from mankind. Perhaps it was his willingness to treat the slave as though he counted for anything that had marked him out for the taunt in the first place? Either that, or his inward nature showed on his skin like a mark.

He had a quick, suicidal urge to ask “What is it like? I dream sometimes…” and stifled it. He would not tell that to any creature, let alone this one with no fondness nor ties to him. Nor could he expect to get a useful answer from one who had come by his defilement unwillingly. “Ecgbert is a good man,” he said instead. “You will not be mistreated here, whatever impression the lads may have made on you.”

This time the slave’s smile was open, open like a smoke hole to give a glimpse of white nothingness behind it, empty and unknown. “I have no fear, lord, in as much as I have no expectations at all. Let come what will come. I will endure it.”

Wulfstan no more knew the answer to this question than his friends had. It tore out of him, trailing confusion like gouts of blood on its barbs. “
Why
?”

Brid met his gaze, and it was as though his body was empty of a soul, as though no one was there. For a moment it seemed he would not answer, but something in Wulfstan’s face, perhaps, moved him to say, quietly, “It seemed to me braver to live than to die.”

A stir at the end of the street, where bodies were packed in tight between the fishermen’s huts, caught Wulfstan’s attention. A roar of laughter and of applause came rolling up the hill towards them. Wulfstan felt it break over him like a wave as he stood with the slave’s words chiming within him—making something ring inside that he had not known was there.

“What was your name?” he asked. “Your true name?”

The boy laughed—very gently, very apologetically—and said, “Brid, my lord. That is all that is left of the truth.”

The crowd had begun parting, and Wulfstan spotted Judith, throwing something silver-bright on the ground in front of a skinny old man. The man rose and bowed, and next to him, a slight and slender youngster did the same, offering Wulfstan a good view of his cap of wild gold curls and the harp in its bag on his back.

Wulfstan’s unease slid without warning into urgency. “So here is the source of that music I’ve been hearing all day,” he said, mostly to himself—to Brid only as an excuse to talk out loud. “I thought it was spirits, but now, see, it’s only one young imp and his master, drawn here to play to the crowd. Let’s go and make them sing for us.”

He walked as fast as he wished, and Brid followed him at the same pace, so as not to tug on the leash.

There were wives hunkered on the street, selling everything out of baskets. There were bales of salted fish, hard as bark. There was honey-bread flavoured with ginger, and a tray of little custards with the last of the season’s cherries wrinkled and tart inside them. There were tablet-woven laces and edgings for tunics, bright with new colours and intricate designs. Arrowheads, and feathers to fletch the arrows with, and leather quivers to carry them in. There were dried apples, and belt buckles, shoes and lampreys, eels and eggs.

All of these wares their sellers shoved in his face, urging him in loud voices to sample, try and buy, to smell and squeeze and feel the quality. So by the time he had pushed past them all, made his way to Judith’s side, the harper and his boy had dodged up an alley and were nowhere to be seen.

He swallowed unreasonably acute disappointment—a desire to know at once if these two had really been his portent, or if he should look for something else.

Under the scrutiny of ladies in waiting, he accepted Judith’s hug before tugging Brid forward to stand in front of his lord’s wife, sparing a moment to worry about what she would say. “My lady, Ecgbert bought this slave, and bids you wash and clothe him more suitably. His name is Brid.”

Judith looked the young man up and down, adjusted the set of her wimple, the curve of her hands not quite concealing a brief expression of weariness. It had gone by the time she lowered her hands again. “My husband is always so thoughtful. I am too old to safely bear any more children, and I would strangle at birth any get that threatened my own sons. This was a wise purchase. I will do as he asks.”

To Brid she said only, “You see those two?” and indicated the slaves she had with her, both of them dressed in undyed wool and cast-off shoes, without weapon or ornament and with their greying hair cropped close. They were reshouldering a great pile of baskets and sacks, while ostentatiously pretending neither to look nor listen to the conversation.

“Yes, lady.”

“You can help them with the baggage for now, while I consider where to house you. Wulfstan, I won’t be left with an untested slave and no sword to guard me. You will have to spend the day accompanying me after all.”

“I’d be honoured to, lady.”

At that she laughed, the heaviness lifting from her face and her back straightening. “I do believe you mean that, strange boy.”

He did. There was too much to look at in the market. It would have been a waste to spend the day fighting, gambling and drinking with his companions as he did every day at home, and miss it all. “I do,” he agreed, good-humouredly. “I was hoping to find the harpers again. I’ve been hearing music on and off all day, and I need to track them down just to prove to myself that they and it fit together.”

“Ah,” she said, and her head was turned, so that some of the sigh was for Brid, who had joined the other slaves, had his hands untied and the leash removed. The collar remained for Ecgbert to remove or not as he pleased. “But we are just off to the salt merchants, and they are tucked behind the dunes on the coast. We will leave your scops behind, I’m afraid.”

As he trailed down the coast path behind her, keeping a wary eye on Brid and an indulgent one on the gossip of the maids, Wulfstan thought back on the day. He had disappointed Ecgbert, been accused of the unthinkable and broken a friendship as a result. Ecgbert had disappointed and worried him in return—manly though it was to fuck one’s defeated and enslaved enemies, it hardly seemed Christian, or kind. It was all of a part of the day that he should have set his heart on a music he was now going to be denied.

His fretfulness must have showed, for at length, Judith put a hand on his arm. Evening was falling and the ladies drooping. The slaves staggered under their blocks of salt. “They’ll be at the hall,” she said quietly. “I’ve never known a harper to turn away from a captive audience or a free meal.”

It was true. As they were packing away the burdens in the chest set aside for Judith’s use, he heard the tune from this morning come winding through the twilight on the firelit smoke of the hall. He was drawn there as if under a spell, throwing the door wider, finding a wall of backs, thicker than the reek of sweat and fish and smoke. Somewhere near the high seat pillars, a glint of gold accompanied a sound like honey. Plunging in, he swore to himself that this time would count for all. With this encounter he was going to mend the whole day.

Wulfstan took a moment to let his eyes adjust. Outside, a yellow sunset filled the streets with saffron light. Inside, only the great hearth’s amber glow and the few smoky dishes of fish oil, hanging alight from the crossbeams of the hall, provided any relief from the brown darkness. Talk and laughter surged all around him, almost drowning out the soothing lilt of the harp—it stitched together the little pauses, formed a homely backdrop for the many conversations.
Don’t be so impatient,
it said,
you have all night. You have me here trapped.

As his sight grew accustomed to the dim, the colours of the wall hangings grew deeper, richer. The gilded paint on the wolves’ heads above the door began to gleam out. The pillars of the hall were blood-red, carved and painted with ships and whales and sea monsters, white and green and blue. Now he could see the guests in all their finery—the great silver brooches that held back their cloaks, the glisten of silk and bone and gold.

Pushing past the lower tables, where common fishermen and traders ate their meals off wooden trenchers and supped from beakers of leather, he found Ecgbert already seated on a cushioned bench at the high table. This—stretching from side to side of the end wall—was covered in finely woven lawn cloth, white with bands of indigo and red. It glittered all over with glassware—claw beakers and horns of glass held up by delicate iron supports, and conical beakers, refilled to be drained in one gulp, because they could not be set down full.

Servants had just begun taking down the spitted boar that sizzled over the fire in the great central firepit, and others were ladling pottage from the larger of the two cauldrons. Its chain wound up like fighting serpents into the dark of the roof, where it coiled around one of the beams. Ecgbert beckoned, and Wulfstan ran up the stairs of the dais and went to the place set for him at his lord’s right hand.

Just at the edge of the dais, between the feasting lords and their folk, a three-legged stool had been set, and there sat the old man from the market, his eyes closed and his head bent over the carved harp in his lap. Music spilled out from his moving fingers like mead, soothing and sweet.

Wulfstan’s fellows were at the table already, and there was a brief uneasiness as he sat, a shuffling to put a little more distance between himself and them. He harvested looks out of the corners of a dozen eyes as they tried to gauge whether the battle madness had left him. Then Cenred leaned forward and pressed a full mug of ale into his hand, and all the backs around him eased, slumping.

He answered a few questions, returned a few taunts absentmindedly, watching the harper, waiting for that sensation of magic to return. This music, beautiful though it was, and clearly powerful enough to soothe the angry souls of a hundred young warriors eager for glory and seated together, was not what he had been hoping for.

The old man was not meanly dressed. His garments were well made and fine, but of a dozen diverse ages—good shoes worn shabby, a green cloak rubbed thin over the shoulders. A cast-off tunic of indigo, too big for him, with the sleeves rolled back so that his skinny wrists showed beneath. Dear Lord, he was skinny. The hall’s umber light made hollows of his cheeks and his eye sockets, gouged out the thinness of his jaw and the fragile collarbones that showed where the ample tunic had slipped off one shoulder.

Still, there was silver at his throat, and a silver bracelet over one of his sleeves. His face might have been that of welcome death, serene in its gauntness, with deep scores of laughter around the mouth and eyes. He was all but bald—a few brave hairs clinging to the base of his skull, but his moustache was a glorious thing, a great moony sickle, the ends hanging down to brush his thin chest.

Where was his imp—his servant, his young helper? Wulfstan earned himself a glare of disapproval from his lord by shovelling down meat and barley stew in heaped spoonfuls, untasting, and cramming bread so fast after it that half the portion tore off and landed on the floor. He slowed down, remembered his manners, picked up the bread he had dropped among the fresh scented reeds and made the sign of the cross over it to dislodge any ill-giving demons that might have hopped on board before he returned it to his plate.

Looking up at the hall’s high wind holes, he saw it was dark outside, and excused himself from the table to go and find an alley to piss in. That too did not go down well with Ecgbert or with their host, Alfric, but Wulfstan was feeling itchy and ill done by—thwarted at every turn in the one, single thing he had set himself to do this day—and he did not take the hint of their vinegar looks.

Outside, the autumn evening had grown chill and a dew was beginning to rise from every flat surface. A green haze hung about the silver-blue moon and bruised all the shadows that fell around him. The day’s voices had fallen silent, and now the town was filled with the whispering of the sea.

Finding an angle between two walls, Wulfstan hauled up his skirts and relieved himself swiftly. This was not a time of night to be out of doors, alone in a world that sunset had handed over to the powers of darkness. They drew close, at night, the things that lived in the wilderness and listened with envious hearts to the laughter of men. At that thought he adjusted his linen, tightened his hose and turned back, no longer annoyed. Better Cenred and Aelfsi, Ecgbert and Alfric. Better Manna, than whatever might lurk out here.

Coming in to the porch, a little too fast, his eyes dazzled from the light indoors and his mind mazed with thoughts, he didn’t hear the other man until he collided with him. The breath went out of him in a round thump. There was a brief impression of long limbs, slim and bony. Then a resonant voice went “Oh!” without any of the apology or the instant deference Wulfstan knew himself entitled to.