River of Destiny

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading Barbara Erskine’s Novels (#litres_trial_promo)

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About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Barbara Erskine (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

In the age of the Anglo-Saxons it is the year AD 865

Prologue (#ulink_28b13533-6900-5b06-9b69-1437c6516a1f)

The woman was watching, flattened against the wall of the house, her eye to a knothole. She hardly dared breathe as she watched the scene unfolding inside.

With the kiss of steam wreathing round the blade, her husband raised his hammer and struck sparks from the iron. The forge was hot from the blazing charcoal and sweat dripped into his eyes. Even she, his wife, could sense his power, sense the magic he was creating as he conjured the alchemy of metal and fire.

‘Is it ready?’ The thegn’s reeve, Hrotgar, stood in the doorway, his huge bulk blocking out the light.

‘Not until the gods say so,’ Eric said curtly.

‘The gods!’ Hrotgar echoed wryly. ‘Maybe the gods see no need to hurry, but everyone in this village sees clearly why Lord Egbert is so anxious for it.’

‘Tell him he’ll have to wait.’ Eric didn’t bother to look up. He could picture the shocked anger on the other man’s face. He bent back to his task, his tongue between his teeth, a soundless whistle drowned by the hiss of the fire. At his feet the flames reflected in the deep iron-bound yew-wood bucket of water. Like most of the tools in the forge he had made it himself. ‘You’re blocking my light,’ he yelled suddenly. ‘Get out of here. When it’s ready I’ll tell you.’

For a moment Hrotgar hesitated, then with an angry growl he stepped outside and disappeared. The forge was lit by torches thrust into brackets on the wall, by the red glow of the furnace, but even so, the sudden low shaft of sunlight through the doorway illuminated the dark corners and spun reflections off the blade. Eric gave a grunt of satisfaction. The magic was growing stronger.

‘Eric?’ The voice behind him was tentative. ‘It is true, you are making Lord Egbert angry with your delays.’

‘Go away, Edith!’ Eric spun round furiously. ‘Out! Now!’ Her very presence was weakening. He could sense the carefully built tension in the blade wavering. He could sense it in the air. Only warriors could come near the sword now, new born as it was, in its birthing pangs of fire and water. He muttered the sacred charms, feeling the vibrating waves of Wyrd settle. He wasn’t sure how he knew what to do but the smith’s magical art was in his blood, in the memory of his veins and bones, handed down to him by his father and his father’s father going back into the mists of time. Through that memory he knew the sorcerer was right. There was no place for a woman in the forge or in his bed while he was creating this particular weapon. He had called it Destiny Maker and it was his greatest challenge.

Outside, Hrotgar was standing staring down towards the river, shading his eyes with his hand against the glare of sunlight on the water. Behind him the villagers went about their business calmly stacking the storehouses against the coming winter.

‘Is the Lord Egbert improving?’ Edith had come up behind him silently, her shoes making no sound on the scatter of bright autumn leaves. For a moment he didn’t answer and she nodded sadly. ‘Will he live?’

His jaw tightened fractionally. ‘If it is God’s will.’

The thegn was a comparatively young man, strong, in his prime, but a month ago he had fallen ill and before the shocked eyes of his followers and his family he had begun to waste away, racked by fever and pain. Hrotgar glanced down at her. She was beautiful, the smith’s wife. Her long fair hair, plaited into a rope which hung to her slender waist, had broken free of its binding and blew in soft curls around her temples. He felt a quick surge of desire and sternly dismissed it. This was forbidden territory. He looked away, narrowing his eyes as she scanned the river. The sun was almost gone, the last dazzling rays turning the water red as blood. He shivered as the thought hung for a moment in his mind. Then his expression cleared. A fishing boat was rounding the bend, the slender prow breaking up the crimson ripples, turning the wavelets to gold. He smiled grimly as a breeze swept up the river and threw spray across the men bending to their nets, hauling them up on deck.

‘Try and make him hurry,’ he said at last. ‘The thegn wants, needs, that sword.’

‘You know I can’t go near him,’ she retorted. ‘It is forbidden.’

He looked at her quickly and then back at the river. ‘I know what is forbidden,’ he said quietly.

Neither spoke for a long time, both watching the fishermen with exaggerated concentration. At last she stepped away from him. ‘I have to go.’

‘To an empty house?’

‘To an empty house,’ she echoed.

He watched her as she retraced her steps across the hard-baked ground. In another day or so the rain would come. He could smell it in the air, and this place would become a quagmire. Further up the hill the thegn’s house and the great mead hall were on quick-draining soil on the edge of the heath. They would stay reasonably dry, at least for the time being. He sighed. For how long would it stay so quiet, so calm? As the thegn’s health failed so the restlessness had grown. The warriors were watching, waiting, his brother and his two sons keeping their counsel; the brother, Oswald, was hungry, the sons, Oswy and Alfred, too young yet to do more than hope and strut and dream. He glanced up at a flight of birds heading up from the river, arrow straight towards the thegn’s hall. Gulls. White winged. No sinister message there.

1 (#ulink_2d9ce7f9-031e-5ebe-9e8e-4b154928e892)

The river was thick with mist. It lay like a soft white muffler on the water between the trees, hiding the mud banks and the lower woods. Above, where the cluster of old barns stood on the edge of the fields, brilliant sunshine touched gold into the autumnal leaves, still holding some of the warmth of summer. Zoë Lloyd was standing at the kitchen sink of the oldest and to her mind the most beautiful of the three barn conversions, gazing out of the window down through the trees towards the river. She shivered. The room had grown suddenly cold in spite of the sunlight. A huge sail had appeared, hazy in the fog, sailing slowly up-river towards Woodbridge. It was curved, cross-rigged, straining before the wind, decorated with some sort of image; she couldn’t quite see it behind the trees. She watched it for several seconds. There was no wind, surely; it had to be moving under power. If she were outside she would probably be able to hear the steady purr of an engine. She gazed at the trees, which were motionless, and then back at the sail. The mist was thickening, wrapping itself ever more densely over the river. In a moment the vessel would be out of sight.

‘It’s there again. The Viking ship. Look, Ken,’ she said over her shoulder to her husband.

There was no reply and she turned with a sudden stab of panic. The kitchen was empty. But she had heard him seconds before, felt him, sensed him behind her, sitting at the table in the sunshine. She looked at the empty chair, the unopened newspaper and she groped with shaking hands for her phone. ‘Ken? Where are you?’

‘Still down here on the boat.’ The voice broke up with a crackle. ‘Did you want something special?’

‘No.’ For a moment she wondered if she were going mad. ‘Ken? Did you see it? The Viking ship going up-river. It must have gone right past you.’

‘I didn’t see anything. The fog is thick as porridge down here on the water!’

‘OK. Don’t worry. See you soon.’ She switched off the phone and slowly put it down. Of course he hadn’t seen anything. Out on their boat on the mooring, with his head no doubt down in the engine compartment as he tinkered with the motor, he wouldn’t have seen or heard the entire Seventh Fleet. Glancing out, she saw that the sail had gone. Rays of sunlight were slowly breaking up the mist. Her momentary panic was subsiding.

It was a couple of minutes later as she hung up the dish-cloth and turned to walk through into the high-beamed living space which formed the greater part of the building that she paused and looked back into the kitchen, which had been constructed in what had once been a side aisle of the barn. The house was empty. There was no one there. If Ken had not been sitting in the chair at the table behind her, who had?

It was barely three months since they had moved into the barn conversion overlooking the River Deben in Suffolk. Part of a group of medieval barns, theirs, somewhat prosaically known as The Old Barn, was the closest to the river. Below them the ground fell away steeply across mown lawns and through a narrow strip of woodland towards the water. Looking through the huge picture window to her left, Zoë watched as a small yacht appeared, moving steadily upstream towards Woodbridge, the morning sunlight reflecting through the trees onto the gently curved sails. The mist had lifted as suddenly as, in the evening, it would probably return. It was moments like this which reassured her that they had done the right thing in moving to the country. The view was utterly beautiful.

It had all happened in such a rush. They had been sitting late over dinner with some friends in London, just after Christmas, discussing their mutual plans for the summer. Both couples were childless and Zoë sometimes wondered if that wasn’t one of the main things that held them together. ‘We’re not having a holiday this year,’ John Danvers had announced. He and Ken had been at school together some twenty-five years earlier and there was still an edge of competitiveness between them which their respective wives alternately ignored and gently mocked. ‘We’re moving out of town. Can’t stand the pressure any more. And anyway, why not? What’s keeping us? With fast broadband we can work from anywhere. We’re going down to Sussex. Just think of it, Ken. Sailing every evening if we want to, no traffic jams, no rushing down at dawn on Saturdays and crawling back into town on Sunday evenings. Just fresh air all the time.’

Sussex. Chichester harbour, where both couples kept their boats, moored near Bosham. Looking at Ken’s face, Zoë had felt a sudden sick foreboding deep in her gut. Their base was London. She loved London, she adored their life there. She enjoyed her job. Although they had often sailed together as a foursome and Zoë did enjoy it on a relatively calm day when the others were there, sailing was not her thing.

Zoë’s relationship with her husband’s passion for sailing was complex and slightly ambiguous. She enjoyed being in the boat. She loved pottering about at the anchorage and often found herself wishing she had a suitable hobby, sketching perhaps, or bird watching, to employ her while Ken endlessly played with his boat’s engine or the rigging or the sails. Her enthusiasm dimmed somewhat, however, once they cast off the mooring and headed out into the open water. It had taken her a long time to realise it but finally on one of their voyages out of the harbour and into the choppy seas of the Solent she had forced herself to acknowledge the fact that she was scared. When the boat was gently heeling before the wind, with the ripple of water creaming under the bow, she was perfectly happy, but the moment something happened – the wind changed, the boom swung over, the sails momentarily thundered and snapped, the speed increased – she began to feel nervous. She didn’t like the unpredictability, the sudden veering, the water lapping dangerously close to the rail. And here, on the Deben, there was something else; for all its beauty and comparative calmness in good weather, the river under cloud and rain and mist had a thick opacity which frightened her; inexplicably it seemed deeper and more sinister and far more dangerous than the seas and harbours of the south.

Because of her discomfort it became the usual practice, more often than not, that Ken would sail on his own or with John, or occasionally with someone else as crew, while she and John’s wife, Amanda, would take the car and retreat to Chichester and the Sussex hinterland in the quest for antiques and picture galleries and soft country villages out of the reach of the stinging salt air of the coast. She had come to love Sussex, but not as a full-time home, centred on sailing, no.

There was no point in arguing. There never was. In the wake of Ken’s enthusiasm and determination she was swept away like some helpless duckling in the wake of a passing speedboat and he had convinced her that she too wanted more than anything to leave London with all its noise and pollution and crowds. It was not as though they hadn’t discussed it before. They had. And now, he insisted, was the time to invest in the country.

As it turned out, he agreed with her that they couldn’t go south. Not to the same place as John and Amanda. Of course not. That would be too obvious. Nevertheless, their flat was put up for sale, and within weeks was under offer and a decision was made on the strength of the property pages in a couple of Sunday papers. Suffolk was the county Ken favoured. Far enough away from London for the property to be good value, but not so far he couldn’t get on a train and be there in less than two hours. Beautiful, unspoiled, far less crowded than Sussex. It was worth some exploratory visits, he told her, nothing for certain, just look, just test the water, and she had agreed, had gone along with it. Why? Why had she given in so easily? It was only now, from time to time, that she asked herself this. Was it that she was too tired to argue, or was she also, at base, tired of London, and therefore, following the axiom of Samuel Johnson, tired of life? They had spent just four weekends house hunting, and viewed the barn conversion in March. He had fallen in love with it on that first viewing.

That had been her chance, the moment she could have said no. She hadn’t. Instead, she had felt two emotions, she realised later, one a faint stirring of excitement, the other a strange sense that some unavoidable fate was reeling them in. And there was another reason for coming to Suffolk, a reason Zoë barely acknowledged, wasn’t sure about, had never been able to prove. Anya. It would remove Ken from Anya’s orbit: ‘A wife always knows,’ Amanda had said to her once, when Zoë reluctantly had confided her suspicions.

‘But I don’t know, that’s the point,’ Zoë had replied, frustrated. ‘I don’t even know her name for sure. One of his colleagues mentioned someone called Anya once and I remember how shifty Ken looked and I wondered then. But apart from that he’s never given me any reason to suspect him. No lipstick on the collar, no panties in the glove box.’ She had shuddered. ‘No unexplained calls. It’s just a feeling.’

Amanda had frowned thoughtfully. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me. He’s a dark horse, your husband. And very sexy.’

Zoë had glanced at her and smiled. ‘He is, isn’t he.’ But if he and Anya had been having an affair, he appeared to have turned his back on it without regret. Unless she had dumped him. Was that part of the reason for leaving so abruptly? Perhaps it was better not to know. The important thing was they would be starting afresh.