LITMIR.BIZ

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all morning.

      The coast became wilder and refuge more difficult to find, but the weather was placid. We captured a small eight-oared ship that was returning to Ireland and relieved it of sixteen pieces of silver, three knives, a heap of tin ingots, a sack of goose feathers and six goatskins. We were hardly becoming rich, though Fyrdraca’s belly was becoming cluttered with pelts, fleeces and ingots of tin. ‘We need to sell it all,’ Leofric said.

      But to whom? We knew no one who traded here. What I needed to do, I thought, was land close to one of the larger settlements and steal everything. Burn the houses, kill the men, plunder the headman’s hall and go back to sea, but the Britons kept lookouts on the headlands and they always saw us coming, and whenever we were close to one of their towns we would see armed men waiting. They had learned how to deal with Vikings, which was why, Haesten told me, the Northmen now sailed in fleets of five or six ships.

      ‘Things will be better,’ I said, ‘when we turn the coast.’ I knew Cornwalum ended somewhere to the west and we could then sail up into the Sæfern Sea where we might find a Danish ship on its voyage from Ireland, but Cornwalum seemed to be without end. Whenever we saw a headland that I thought must mark the end of the land it turned out to be a false hope, for another cliff would lie beyond, and then another, and sometimes the tide flowed so strongly that even when we sailed due west we were driven back east. Being a Viking was more difficult than I thought, and then one day the wind freshened from the west and the waves heaved higher and their tops were torn ragged and rain squalls hissed dark from a low sky and we ran northwards to seek shelter in the lee of a headland. We dropped our anchor there and felt Fyrdraca jerk and tug like a fretful horse at her long rope of twisted hide.

      All night and all next day the weather raged past the headland. Water shattered white on high cliffs. We were safe enough, but our food was getting low, and I had half decided we must abandon our plans to make ourselves rich and sail back to the Uisc where we could pretend we had only been patrolling the coast, but on our second dawn under the lee of that high cliff, as the wind subsided and the rain dropped to a chill drizzle, a ship appeared about the eastern spit of land.

      ‘Shields!’ Leofric shouted, and the men, cold and unhappy, found their weapons and lined the ship’s side.

      The ship was smaller than ours, much smaller. She was squat, high-bowed, with a stumpy mast holding a wide yard on which a dirty sail was furled. A half-dozen oarsmen manned her, and the steersman was bringing her directly towards Fyrdraca, and then, as she came closer and as her small bows broke the water white, I saw a green bough had been tied to her short mast.

      ‘They want to talk,’ I said.

      ‘Let’s hope they want to buy,’ Leofric grumbled.

      There was a priest in the small ship. I did not know he was a priest at first, for he looked as ragged as any of the crewmen, but he shouted that he wished to speak with us, and he spoke Danish, though not well, and I let the boat come up on the flank protected from the wind where her crewmen gazed up at a row of armed men holding shields. Cenwulf and I pulled the priest over our side. Two other men wanted to follow, but Leofric threatened them with a spear and they dropped back and the smaller ship drew away to wait while the priest spoke with us.

      He was called Father Mardoc and, once he was aboard and sitting wetly on one of Fyrdraca’s rowing benches, I saw the crucifix about his neck. ‘I hate Christians,’ I said, ‘so why should we not feed you to Njord?’

      He ignored that, or perhaps he did not know that Njord was one of the sea gods. ‘I bring you a gift,’ he said, ‘from my master,’ and he produced, from beneath his cloak, two battered arm rings.

      I took them. They were poor things, mere ringlets of copper, old, filthy with verdigris and of almost no value, and for a moment I was tempted to toss them scornfully into the sea, but reckoned our voyage had made such small profit that even those scabby treasures must be kept. ‘Who is your master?’ I asked.

      ‘King Peredur.’

      I almost laughed. King Peredur? A man can expect a king to be famous, but I had never heard of Peredur which suggested he was little more than a local chieftain with a high-sounding title. ‘And why does this Peredur,’ I asked, ‘send me miserable gifts?’

      Father Mardoc still did not know my name and was too frightened to ask it. He was surrounded by men in leather, men in mail, and by shields and swords, axes and spears, and he believed all of us were Danes for I had ordered any of Fyrdraca’s crew who wore crosses or crucifixes to hide them beneath their clothes. Only Haesten and I spoke, and if Father Mardoc thought that strange he did not say anything of it, instead he told me how his lord, King Peredur, had been treacherously attacked by a neighbour called Callyn, and Callyn’s forces had taken a high fort close to the sea and Peredur would pay us well if we were to help him recapture the fort that was called Dreyndynas.

      I sent Father Mardoc to sit in the Fyrdraca’s bow while we talked about his request. Some things were obvious. Being paid well did not mean we would become rich, but that Peredur would try to fob us off with as little as possible and, most likely, having given it to us he would then try to take it back by killing us all. ‘What we should do,’ Leofric advised, ‘is find this man Callyn and see what he’ll pay us.’

      Which was good enough advice except none of us knew how to find Callyn, whom we later learned was King Callyn, which did not mean much for any man with a following of more than fifty armed men called himself a king in Cornwalum, and so I went to the Fyrdraca’s bows and talked with Father Mardoc again, and he told me that Dreyndynas was a high fort, built by the old people, and that it guarded the road eastwards, and so long as Callyn held the fort, so long were Peredur’s people trapped in their lands.

      ‘You have ships,’ I pointed out.

      ‘And Callyn has ships,’ he said, ‘and we cannot take cattle in ships.’

      ‘Cattle?’

      ‘We need to sell cattle to live,’ he said.

      So Callyn had surrounded Peredur and we represented a chance to tip the balance in this little war. ‘So how much will your king pay us?’ I asked.

      ‘A hundred pieces of silver,’ he said.

      I drew Serpent-Breath. ‘I worship the real gods,’ I told him, ‘and I am a particular servant of Hoder, and Hoder likes blood and I have given him none in many days.’

      Father Mardoc looked terrified, which was sensible of him. He was a young man, though it was hard to tell for his hair and beard were so thick that most of the time he was just a broken nose and pair of eyes surrounded by a greasy black tangle. He told me he had learned to speak Danish when he had been enslaved by a chieftain called Godfred, but that he had managed to escape when Godfred raided the Sillans, islands that lay well out in the western sea-wastes. ‘Is there any wealth in the Sillans?’ I asked him. I had heard of the islands, though some men claimed they were mythical and others said the islands came and went with the moons, but Father Mardoc said they existed and were called the Isles of the Dead.

      ‘So no one lives there?’ I asked.

      ‘Some folk do,’ he said, ‘but the dead have their houses there.’

      ‘Do they have wealth as well?’

      ‘Your ships have taken it all,’ he said. This was after he had promised me that Peredur would be more generous, though he did not know how generous, but he said the king was willing to pay far more than a hundred silver coins for our help, and so we had him shout to his ship that they were to lead us around the coast to Peredur’s settlement. I did not let Father Mardoc go back to his ship for he would serve as a hostage if the tale he had told us was false and Peredur was merely luring us to an ambush.

      He was not. Peredur’s home was a huddle of buildings built on a steep hill beside a bay and protected by a wall of thorn bushes. His people lived within the wall and some were fishermen and some were cattle herders and none was wealthy, though the king himself had a high hall where he welcomed us, though not before we had taken more hostages.

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