The Pale Horseman

‘Who are they?’

‘Shipwrights.’

‘So they do the work?’

‘Can’t expect me to do it!’ Leofric protested. ‘I’m in command of the Eftwyrd!’

‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re planning to drink my ale and eat my food for a month while those dozen men do the work?’

‘You have any better ideas?’

I gazed at the Eftwyrd. She was a well-made ship, longer than most Danish boats and with high sides that made her a good fighting platform. ‘What did Burgweard tell you to do?’ I asked.

‘Pray,’ Leofric said sourly, ‘and help repair Heahengel.’

‘I hear there’s a new Danish leader in the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘and I’d like to know if it’s true. A man called Svein. And I hear more ships are joining him from Ireland.’

‘He’s in Wales, this Svein?’

‘That’s what I hear.’

‘He’ll be coming to Wessex then,’ Leofric said.

‘If it’s true.’

‘So you’re thinking …’ Leofric said, then stopped when he realised just what I was thinking.

‘I’m thinking that it doesn’t do a ship or crew any good to sit around for a month,’ I said, ‘and I’m thinking that there might be plunder to be had in the Sæfern Sea.’

‘And if Alfred hears we’ve been fighting up there,’ Leofric said, ‘he’ll gut us.’

I nodded up river towards Exanceaster. ‘They burned a hundred Danish ships up there,’ I said, ‘and their wreckage is still on the riverbank. We should be able to find at least one dragon’s head to put on her prow.’

Leofric stared at the Eftwyrd. ‘Disguise her?’

‘Disguise her,’ I said, because if I put a dragon head on Eftwyrd no one would know she was a Saxon ship. She would be taken for a Danish boat, a sea raider, part of England’s nightmare.

Leofric smiled. ‘I don’t need orders to go on a patrol, do I?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And we haven’t fought since Cynuit,’ he said wistfully, ‘and no fighting means no plunder.’

‘What about the crew?’ I asked.

He turned and looked at them. ‘Most of them are evil bastards,’ he said, ‘they won’t mind. And they all need plunder.’

‘And between us and the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘there are the Britons.’

‘And they’re all thieving bastards, the lot of them,’ Leofric said. He looked at me and grinned. ‘So if Alfred won’t go to war, we will?’

‘You have any better ideas?’ I asked.

Leofric did not answer for a long time. Instead, idly, as if he was just thinking, he tossed pebbles towards a puddle. I said nothing, just watched the small splashes, watched the pattern the fallen pebbles made, and knew he was seeking guidance from fate. The Danes cast rune sticks, we all watched for the flight of birds, we tried to hear the whispers of the gods, and Leofric was watching the pebbles fall to find his fate. The last one clicked on another and skidded off into the mud and the trail it left pointed south towards the sea. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any better ideas.’

And I was bored no longer, because we were going to be Vikings.

We found a score of carved beasts’ heads beside the river beneath Exanceaster’s walls, all of them part of the sodden, tangled wreckage that showed where Guthrum’s fleet had been burned and we chose two of the least scorched carvings and carried them aboard Eftwyrd. Her prow and stern culminated in simple posts and we had to cut the posts down until the sockets of the two carved heads fitted. The creature at the stern, the smaller of the two, was a gape-mouthed serpent, probably intended to represent Corpse-Ripper, the monster that tore at the dead in the Danish underworld, while the beast we placed at the bow was a dragon’s head, though it was so blackened and disfigured by fire that it looked more like a horse’s head. We dug into the scorched eyes until we found unburned wood, and did the same with the open mouth and when we were finished the thing looked dramatic and fierce. ‘Looks like a fyrdraca now,’ Leofric said happily. A fire-dragon.

The Danes could always remove the dragon or beast-heads from the bows and sterns of their ships because they did not want the horrid-looking creatures to frighten the spirits of friendly land and so they only displayed the carved monsters when they were in enemy waters. We did the same, hiding our fyrdraca and serpent head in Eftwyrd’s bilges as we went back down river to where the shipwrights were beginning their work on Heahengel. We hid the beast-heads because Leofric did not want the shipwrights to know he planned mischief. ‘That one,’ he jerked his head towards a tall, lean, grey-haired man who was in charge of the work, ‘is more Christian than the Pope. He’d bleat to the local priests if he thought we were going off to fight someone, and the priests will tell Alfred and then Burgweard will take Eftwyrd away from me.’

‘You don’t like Burgweard?’

Leofric spat for answer. ‘It’s a good thing there are no Danes on the coast.’

‘He’s a coward?’

‘No coward. He just thinks God will fight the battles. We spend more time on our knees than at the oars. When you commanded the fleet we made money. Now even the rats on board are begging for crumbs.’

We had made money by capturing Danish ships and taking their plunder, and though none of us had become rich we had all possessed silver to spare. I was still wealthy enough because I had a hoard hidden at Oxton, a hoard that was the legacy of Ragnar the Elder, and a hoard that the church and Oswald’s relatives would make their own if they could, but a man can never have enough silver. Silver buys land, it buys the loyalty of warriors, it is the power of a lord, and without silver a man must bend the knee or else become a slave. The Danes led men by the lure of silver, and we were no different. If I was to be a lord, if I was to storm the walls of Bebbanburg, then I would need men and I would need a great hoard to buy the swords and shields and spears and hearts of warriors, and so we would go to sea and look for silver, though we told the shipwrights that we merely planned to patrol the coast. We shipped barrels of ale, boxes of hard-baked bread, cheeses, kegs of smoked mackerel and flitches of bacon. I told Mildrith the same story, that we would be sailing back and forth along the shores of Defnascir and Thornsæta. ‘Which is what we should be doing anyway,’ Leofric said, ‘just in case a Dane arrives.’

‘The Danes are lying low,’ I said.

Leofric nodded. ‘And when a Dane lies low you know there’s trouble coming.’

I believed he was right. Guthrum was not far from Wessex, and Svein, if he existed, was just a day’s voyage from her north coast. Alfred might believe his truce would hold and that the hostages would secure it, but I knew from my childhood how land-hungry the Danes were, and how they lusted after the lush fields and rich pastures of Wessex. They would come, and if Guthrum did not lead them then another Danish chieftain would gather ships and men and bring his swords and axes to Alfred’s kingdom. The Danes, after all, ruled the other three English kingdoms. They held my own Northumbria, they were bringing settlers to East Anglia and their language was spreading southwards through Mercia, and they would not want the last English kingdom flourishing to their south. They were like wolves, shadow-skulking for the moment, but watching a flock of sheep fatten.

I recruited eleven young men from my land and took them on board Eftwyrd, and brought Haesten too, and he was useful for he had spent much of his young life at the oars. Then, one misty morning, as the strong tide ebbed westwards, we slid Eftwyrd away from the river’s bank, rowed her past the low sandspit that guards the Uisc and so out to the long swells of the sea. The oars creaked in their leather-lined holes, the bow’s breast split the waves to shatter water white along the hull, and the steering oar fought against my touch and I felt my spirits rise to the small wind and I looked up into the pearly sky and said a prayer of thanks to Thor, Odin, Njord and Hoder.

A few small fishing boats dotted the inshore waters, but as we went south and west, away from the land, the sea emptied. I looked back at the low dun hills slashed brighter green where rivers pierced the coast, and then the green faded to grey, the land became a shadow and we were alone with the white birds crying and it was then we heaved the serpent’s head and the fyrdraca from the bilge and slotted them over the posts at stem and stern, pegged them into place and turned our bows westwards.

The Eftwyrd was no more. Now the Fyrdraca sailed, and she was hunting trouble.

Three (#ulink_96599ffe-1d5d-5e75-af5a-1b101bde7ff7)

The crew of the Eftwyrd turned Fyrdraca had been at Cynuit with me. They were fighting men and they were offended that Odda the Younger had taken credit for a battle they had won. They had also been bored since the battle. Once in a while, Leofric told me, Burgweard exercised his fleet by taking it to sea, but most of the time they waited in Hamtun. ‘We did go fishing once, though,’ Leofric admitted.

‘Fishing?’

‘Father Willibald preached a sermon about feeding five thousand folk with two scraps of bread and a basket of herring,’ he said, ‘so Burgweard said we should take nets out and fish. He wanted to feed the town, see? Lots of hungry folk.’

‘Did you catch anything?’

‘Mackerel. Lots of mackerel.’

‘But no Danes?’

‘No Danes,’ Leofric said, ‘and no herring, only mackerel. The bastard Danes have vanished.’