Read Sword Song Online

Authors: Bernard Cornwell

Tags: #Sagas, #General, #Historical, #Fiction

Sword Song (14 page)

BOOK: Sword Song
5.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“I need to see the gap,” Ralla called from the steering platform.

I worked my way aft again, stepping blindly between the crouching men.

“If I can’t see it,” Ralla heard me coming, “then I can’t try it.”

“How close are we?”

“Too close.” There was panic in his voice.

I clambered up beside him. I could see the old city now, the city on the hills surrounded by its Roman wall. I could see it because the fires in the city made a dull glow and Ralla was right. We were close.

“We have to make a decision,” he said. “We’ll have to land upriver of the bridge.”

“They’ll see us if we land there,” I said. The Danes would be certain to have men guarding the river wall upstream of the bridge.

“So you either die there with a sword in your hand,” Ralla said brutally, “or you drown.”

I stared ahead and saw nothing. “Then I choose the sword,” I said dully, seeing the death of my desperate idea.

Ralla took a deep breath to shout at the oarsmen, but the shout never came because, quite suddenly and far ahead, out where the Temes spread and emptied into the sea, a scrap of yellow showed. Not bright yellow, not a wasp’s yellow, but a sour, leprous, dark yellow that leaked through a rent in the clouds. It was dawn beyond the sea, a dark dawn, a reluctant dawn, but it was light, and Ralla neither shouted nor turned the steering-oar to take us into the bank. Instead he touched the amulet at his neck and kept the boat on its headlong course. “Crouch down, lord,” he said, “and hold hard to something.”

The boat was quivering like a horse before battle. We were helpless now, caught in the river’s grip. The water was sweeping down from far inland, fed by spring rains and subsiding floods, and where it met the bridge it piled itself in great white ragged heaps. It seethed, roared, and foamed between the stone pilings, but in the bridge’s center, where the gap was, it poured in a sheeting, gleaming stream that fell a man’s height to the new water level beyond where the river swirled and grumbled before becoming calm again. I could hear the water fighting the bridge, hear the thunder of it loud as wind-driven breakers assaulting a beach.

And Ralla steered for the gap, which he could just see outlined against the dull yellow of the broken eastern sky. Behind us was blackness,
though once I did see that sour morning light reflect from the water-glossed stem of Osric’s ship and I knew he was close behind us.

“Hold hard!” Ralla called to our crew, and the ship was hissing, still quivering, and she seemed to race faster, and I saw the bridge come toward us and it loomed black over us as I crouched beside the ship’s side and gripped the timber hard.

And then we were in the gap, and I had the sensation of falling as though we had tipped into an abyss between the worlds. The noise was deafening. It was the noise of water fighting stone, water tearing, water breaking, water pouring, a noise to fill the skies, a noise louder even than Thor’s thunder, and the ship gave a lurch and I thought she must have struck and would slew sideways and tip us to our deaths, but somehow she straightened and flew on. There was blackness above, the blackness of the stub ends of the bridge’s broken timbers, and then the noise doubled and spray flew across the deck and we were slamming downward, ship tipping, and there was a crack like the gates of Odin’s hall banging shut and I was spilled forward as water cascaded over us. We had struck stone, I thought, and I waited to drown and I even remembered to grip Serpent-Breath’s hilt so I would die with my sword in my hand, but the ship staggered up and I understood the crash had been the bows striking the river beyond the bridge and that we were alive.

“Row!” Ralla shouted. “Oh you lucky bastards, row!”

Water was deep in the bilge, but we were afloat, and the eastern sky was ragged with rents and in their shadowy light we could see the city, and see the place where the wall was broken. “And the rest,” Ralla said with pride in his voice, “is up to you, lord.”

“It’s up to the gods,” I said, and looked behind to see Osric’s boat fighting up from the maelstrom where the river fell. So both our ships had lived, and the current was sweeping us downstream of the place we wished to land, but the oarsmen turned us and fought against the water so that we came to the wharf from the east, and that was good, because anyone watching would assume we had rowed upriver from Beamfleot. They would think we were Danes who had come to reinforce the garrison that now readied itself for Æthelred’s assault.

There was a large sea-going ship moored in the dock where we wanted to land. I could see her clearly because torches blazed on the white wall of the mansion the dock served. The ship was a fine thing, her stem and stern rearing high and proud. There were no beast-heads on the ship, for no Northman would let his carved heads frighten the spirit of a friendly land. A lone man was on board the ship and he watched us approach. “Who are you?” he shouted.

“Ragnar Ragnarson!” I called back. I heaved him a line woven from walrus hide. “Has the fighting started?”

“Not yet, lord,” he said. He took the line and twisted it around the other ship’s stem. “And when it does they’ll get slaughtered!”

“We’re not too late, then?” I said. I staggered as our ship struck the other, then stepped over the sheer-strakes onto one of the empty rowers’ benches. “Whose ship is this?” I asked the man.

“Sigefrid’s, lord. The
Wave-Tamer
.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said, then turned back. “Ashore!” I shouted in English and watched as my men retrieved shields and weapons from the flooded bilge. Osric’s ship came in behind us, low in the water, and I realized she had been half swamped as she shot the bridge’s gap. Men began clambering onto the
Wave-Tamer
and the Northman who had taken my line saw the crosses hanging from their necks.

“You…” he began, and found he had nothing more to say. He half turned to run ashore, but I had blocked his escape. There was shock on his face, shock and puzzlement.

“Put your hand on your sword hilt,” I said, drawing Serpent-Breath.

“Lord,” he said, as if about to plead for his life, but then he understood his life was ending because I could not leave him alive. I could not let him go, because then he would warn Sigefrid of our arrival, and if I had tied his hands and feet and left him aboard the
Wave-Tamer
then some other person might have found and released him. He knew all that, and his face changed from puzzlement to defiance and, instead of just gripping his sword’s hilt, he began to pull the weapon free of its scabbard.

And died.

Serpent-Breath took him in the throat. Hard and fast. I felt her tip pierce muscle and tough tissue. Saw the blood. Saw his arm falter and the blade drop back into its scabbard, and I reached out with my left hand to grip his sword hand and hold it over his hilt. I made sure that he kept hold of his sword as he died, for then he would be taken to the feasting hall of the dead. I held his hand tight and let him collapse onto my chest where his blood ran down my mail. “Go to Odin’s hall,” I told him softly, “and save a place for me.”

He could not speak. He choked as blood spilled down his windpipe.

“My name is Uhtred,” I said, “and one day I will feast with you in the corpse-hall and we shall laugh together and drink together and be friends.”

I let his body drop, then knelt and found his amulet, Thor’s hammer, which I cut from his neck with Serpent-Breath. I put the hammer in a pouch, cleaned my sword’s tip on the dead man’s cloak, then slid the blade back into her fleece-lined scabbard. I took my shield from Sihtric, my servant.

“Let’s go ashore,” I said, “and take a city.”

Because it was time to fight.

T
hen all, suddenly, was quiet.

Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled, and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city, and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet. Dawn was now a paler yellow, half concealed by dark clouds.

“And now?” Finan appeared beside me. Steapa loomed beside him, but said nothing.

“We go to the gate,” I said, “Ludd’s Gate.” But I did not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to be back at Coccham with Gisela. It was not cowardice. Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear. It was tiredness that made me reluctant to move, but not a physical tiredness. I was young then and the wounds of war had yet to sap my strength. I think I was tired of Wessex, tired of fighting for a king I did not like, and, standing on that Lundene wharf, I did not understand why I fought for him. And now, looking back over the years, I wonder if that lassitude was caused by the man I had just killed and whom I had promised to join in Odin’s hall. I believe
the men we kill are inseparably joined to us. Their life threads, turned ghostly, are twisted by the Fates around our own thread and their burden stays to haunt us till the sharp blade cuts our life at last. I felt remorse for his death.

“Are you going to sleep?” Father Pyrlig asked me. He had joined Finan.

“We’re going to the gate,” I said.

It seemed like a dream. I was walking, but my mind was somewhere else. This, I thought, was how the dead walked our world, for the dead do come back. Not as Bjorn had pretended to come back, but in the darkest nights, when no one alive can see them, they wander our world. They must, I thought, only half see it, as if the places they knew were veiled in a winter mist, and I wondered if my father was watching me. Why did I think that? I had not been fond of my father, nor he of me, and he had died when I was young, but he had been a warrior. The poets sang of him. And what would he think of me? I was walking through Lundene instead of attacking Bebbanburg, and that was what I should have done. I should have gone north. I should have spent my whole hoard of silver on hiring men and leading them in an assault across Bebbanburg’s neck of land and up across the walls to the high hall where we could make great slaughter. Then I could live in my own home, my father’s home, forever. I could live near Ragnar and be far from Wessex.

Except my spies, for I employed a dozen in Northumbria, had told me what my uncle had done to my fortress. He had closed the landside gates. He had taken them away altogether and in their place were ramparts, newly built, high and reinforced with stone, and now, if a man wished to get inside the fortress, he needed to follow a path that led to the northern end of the crag on which the fortress stood. And every step of that path would be under those high walls, under attack, and then, at the northern end, where the sea broke and sucked, there was a small gate. Beyond that gate was a steep path leading to another wall and another gate. Bebbanburg had been sealed, and to take it I would need an army beyond even the reach of my hoarded silver.

“Be lucky!” a woman’s voice startled me from my thoughts. The
folk of the old city were awake and they saw us pass and took us for Danes because I had ordered my men to hide their crosses.

“Kill the Saxon bastards!” another voice shouted.

Our footsteps echoed from the high houses that were all at least three stories tall. Some had beautiful stonework over their bricks and I thought how the world had once been filled with these houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole world rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve. “Thirty years,” I said aloud.

“Is that how old you are?” Father Pyrlig asked me.

“It’s how long a hall lasts,” I said, “unless you keep repairing it. Our world is falling apart, father.”

“My God, you’re gloomy,” Pyrlig said, amused.

“And I watch Alfred,” I went on, “and see how he tries to tidy our world. Lists! Lists and parchment! He’s like a man putting wattle hurdles in the face of a flood.”

“Brace a hurdle well,” Steapa was listening to our conversation and now intervened, “and it’ll turn a stream.”

“And better to fight a flood than drown in it,” Pyrlig commented.

“Look at that!” I said, pointing to the carved stone head of a beast that was fixed to a brick wall. The beast was like none I had ever seen, a shaggy great cat, and its open mouth was poised above a chipped stone basin suggesting that water had once flowed from mouth to bowl. “Could we make that?” I asked bitterly.

“There are craftsmen who can make such things,” Pyrlig said.

“Then where are they?” I demanded angrily, and I thought that all these things, the carvings and bricks and marble, had been made before Pyrlig’s religion came to the island. Was that the reason for the
world’s decay? Were the true gods punishing us because so many men worshipped the nailed god? I did not make the suggestion to Pyrlig, but kept silent. The houses loomed above us, except where one had collapsed into a heap of rubble. A dog rooted along a wall, stopped to cock its leg, then turned a snarl on us. A baby cried in a house. Our footsteps echoed from the walls. Most of my men were silent, wary of the ghosts they believed inhabited these relics of an older time.

The baby wailed again, louder. “Be a young mother in there,” Rypere said happily. Rypere was his nickname and meant “thief,” and he was a skinny Angle from the north, clever and sly, and he at least was not thinking of ghosts.

“I should stick to goats, if I were you,” Clapa said, “they don’t mind your stink.” Clapa was a Dane, one who had taken an oath to me and served me loyally. He was a hulking great boy raised on a farm, strong as an ox, ever cheerful. He and Rypere were friends who never stopped goading each other.

“Quiet!” I said before Rypere could make a retort. I knew we had to be getting close to the western walls. At the place where we had come ashore, the city climbed the wide terraced hill to the palace at the top, but that hill was flattening now, which meant we were nearing the valley of the Fleot. Behind us the sky was lightening to morning and I knew Æthelred would think I had failed to make my feint attack just before the dawn and that belief, I feared, might have persuaded him to abandon his own assault. Perhaps he was already leading his men back to the island? In which case we would be alone, surrounded by our enemies, and doomed.

“God help us,” Pyrlig suddenly said.

I held up my hand to stop my men because, in front of us, in the last stretch of the street before it passed under the stone arch called Ludd’s Gate, was a crowd of men. Armed men. Men whose helmets, ax blades, and spear-points caught and reflected the dull light of the clouded and newly-risen sun.

“God help us,” Pyrlig said again and made the sign of the cross. “There must be two hundred of them.”

“More,” I said. There were so many men that they could not all stand in the street, forcing some into the alleyways on either side. All the men we could see were facing the gate, and that made me understand what the enemy was doing and my mind cleared at that instant as if a fog had lifted. There was a courtyard to my left and I pointed through its gateway. “In there,” I ordered.

I remember a priest, a clever fellow, visiting me to ask for my memories of Alfred, which he wanted to put in a book. He never did, because he died of the flux shortly after he saw me, but he was a shrewd man and more forgiving than most priests, and I recall how he asked me to describe the joy of battle. “My wife’s poets will tell you,” I said to him.

“Your wife’s poets never fought,” he pointed out, “and they just take songs about other heroes and change the names.”

“They do?”

“Of course they do,” he had said, “wouldn’t you, lord?”

I liked that priest and so I talked to him, and the answer I eventually gave him was that the joy of battle was the delight of tricking the other side. Of knowing what they will do before they do it, and having the response ready so that, when they make the move that is supposed to kill you, they die instead. And at that moment, in the damp gloom of the Lundene street, I knew what Sigefrid was doing and knew too, though he did not know it, that he was giving me Ludd’s Gate.

The courtyard belonged to a stone-merchant. His quarries were Lundene’s Roman buildings and piles of dressed masonry were stacked against the walls ready to be shipped to Frankia. Still more stones were heaped against the gate that led through the river wall to the wharves. Sigefrid, I thought, must have feared an assault from the river and had blocked every gate through the walls west of the bridge, but he had never dreamed anyone would shoot the bridge to the unguarded eastern side. But we had, and my men were hidden in the courtyard while I stood in the entrance and watched the enemy throng at Ludd’s Gate.

“We’re hiding?” Osferth asked me. His voice had a whine to it, as if he were perpetually complaining.

“There are hundreds of men between us and the gate,” I explained patiently, “and we are too few to cut through them.”

“So we failed,” he said, not as a question, but as a petulant statement.

I wanted to hit him, but managed to stay patient. “Tell him,” I said to Pyrlig, “what is happening.”

“God in his wisdom,” the Welshman explained, “has persuaded Sigefrid to lead an attack out of the city! They’re going to open that gate, boy, and stream across the marshes, and hack their way into Lord Æthelred’s men. And as most of Lord Æthelred’s men are from the fyrd, and most of Sigefrid’s are real warriors, then we all know what’s going to happen!” Father Pyrlig touched his mail coat where the wooden cross was hidden. “Thank you, God!”

Osferth stared at the priest. “You mean,” he said after a pause, “that Lord Æthelred’s men will be slaughtered?”

“Some of them are going to die!” Pyrlig allowed cheerfully, “and I hope to God they die in grace, boy, or they’ll never hear that heavenly choir, will they?”

“I hate choirs,” I growled.

“No, you don’t,” Pyrlig said. “You see, boy,” he looked back to Osferth, “once they’ve gone out of the gate, then there’ll only be a handful of men guarding it. So that’s when we attack! And Sigefrid will suddenly find himself with an enemy in front and another one behind, and that predicament can make a man wish he’d stayed in bed.”

A shutter opened in one of the high windows over the courtyard. A young woman stared out at the lightening sky, then stretched her hands high and yawned hugely. The gesture stretched her linen shift tight across her breasts, then she saw my men beneath her and instinctively clutched her arms to her chest. She was clothed, but must have felt naked. “Oh, thank you dear Savior for another sweet mercy,” Pyrlig said, watching her.

“But if we take the gate,” Osferth said, worrying at the problems he saw, “the men left in the city will attack us.”

“They will,” I agreed.

“And Sigefrid…” he began.

“Will probably turn back to slaughter us,” I finished his sentence for him.

“So?” he said, then checked, because he saw nothing but blood and death in his future.

“It all depends,” I said, “on my cousin. If he comes to our aid then we should win. If he doesn’t?” I shrugged, “then keep good hold of your sword.”

A roar sounded from Ludd’s Gate and I knew it had been swung open and that men were streaming down the road that led to the Fleot. Æthelred, if he was still readying his assault, would see them coming and have a choice to make. He could stand and fight in the new Saxon town, or else run. I hoped he would stand. I did not like him, but I never saw a lack of courage in him. I did see a great deal of stupidity, which suggested he would probably welcome a fight.

It took a long time for Sigefrid’s men to get through the gate. I watched from the shadows at the courtyard’s entrance and reckoned at least four hundred men were leaving the city. Æthelred had over three hundred good troops, most of them from Alfred’s household, but the rest of his force was from the fyrd and would never stand against a hard, savage attack. The advantage lay with Sigefrid whose men were warm, rested, and fed, while Æthelred’s troops had stumbled through the night and would be tired.

“The sooner we do it,” I said to no one in particular, “the better.”

“Go now, then?” Pyrlig suggested.

“We just walk to the gate!” I shouted to my men. “You don’t run! Look as if you belong here!”

Which is what we did.

And so, with a stroll down a Lundene street, that bitter fight began.

 

There were no more than thirty men left at Ludd’s Gate. Some were sentries posted to guard the archway, but most were idlers who had climbed to the rampart to watch Sigefrid’s sally. A big man with one leg was climbing the uneven stone steps on his crutches. He stopped
halfway and turned to watch our approach. “If you hurry, lord,” he shouted to me, “you can join them!”

He called me lord because he saw a lord. He saw a warrior lord.

A handful of men could go to war as I did. They were chieftains, earls, kings, lords; the men who had killed enough other men to amass the fortune needed to buy mail, helmet, and weapons. And not just any mail. My coat was of Frankish make and would cost a man more than the price of a warship. Sihtric had polished the metal with sand so that it shone like silver. The hem of the coat was at my knees and was hung with thirty-eight hammers of Thor; some made of bone, some of ivory, some of silver, but all had once hung about the necks of brave enemies I had killed in battle, and I wore the amulets so that when I came to the corpse-hall the former owners would know me, greet me, and drink ale with me.

BOOK: Sword Song
5.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Finely Disciplined Thoughts by Ashlynn Kenzie
Love Is the Best Medicine by Dr. Nick Trout
Lost and Found by Bernadette Marie
The First Ghost by Nicole Dennis
Lady Incognita by Nina Coombs Pykare
Worry Warts by Morris Gleitzman


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024