They were widely scattered, and the sodden daylight was fading into the dusk before I had them all gathered up; and it was the edge of dark when I got them back to the rest. They were still huddled in the shelter of the outcrop, with Brindle watchfully in charge. She wagged her tail in greeting when I came out of the murk, and I spared a moment to fondle her great rough head and praise her. ‘So, so, that was well done, my girl. Home now.’
She gathered the cattle as she had been taught, and together we began the homeward drove, down the windward slope and over towards the combe head and the herd and gleam of firelight from the doorway of Gyrth’s bothy.
But we never got there.
Only as far as the place where a rough path, half lost among rocks and long sea grasses, left the track we were following and plunged over the cliff edge down to the inlet below. The rain seemed to blow aside like a curtain just as we got there, and for a moment I had a clear view of the cove, and a flickering blur of light among the rocks that made me check and peer down. Someone had lit a fire down there on the shingle, where the long jagged comb of rock running seaward gave shelter from the pounding waves. There was always driftwood to be found among the boulders and sea-fretted crannies of the cliff foot that would be dry from the rain. There was something else down there too, that had not been there earlier: a long slim shape of darkness on the paler shingle. I peered down through the wind and rain, and realized that it was a ship. Some ship that had come running for shelter before the storm, and either by luck or superb seamanship, was now beached safe in the lea of the rocks above the boiling tideline.
Merchantman or raider? It could be the same thing at times, for many a trading vessel of the Northmen turned riever on the way home from an unsuccessful voyage, or when they themselves had met with raiders and lost their cargo.
My heart began to race, and something within me shouted ‘Danger!’ as I pulled back from the cliff edge and turned in frantic haste to get the cattle away. But it was too late. We hadn’t pushed on another spear throw, Brindle weaving to and fro at the heels of the jostling yearlings, when all at once the darkness among the wind-lashed furze bushes was alive with men.
Maybe there were no more than six or eight, but in the stormy darkness they might have been an army. The world burst into a reeling chaos of shouting men and bellowing cattle. The yearling were all ways at once. It did not last long. I pulled my knife from my belt and went for a big man who loomed suddenly before me. My foot slipped on the sodden turf, and naked steel went whitt-t-t past my ear as I pitched down. In all likelihood that fall saved my life. I had a moment’s confused awareness of men and cattle above and all around me, and of Brindle springing with a snarl at the throat of one of the raiders; and then a flying hoof caught me on the side of the head, there was a burst of bright sparks inside my skull, and I went out into jagged darkness.
When I came back to myself, the rain had stopped, and I was sprawled on my back staring up at a blurred moon riding high in a sky of racing cloud-wrack. I lay for a while vaguely wondering where I was, and why my head hurt so much, until suddenly the memory of what had happened kicked me in the belly. I rolled on to my face and vomited, then got slowly on to one elbow and clawed myself up to my knees.
Under the booming of the wind and the surf, there was silence all about me. Nothing moved but the lashing furze branches: no men, no cattle. I managed to get up, the world dipping and swimming round me; and with my first step fell over something that brought me to my knees again. It was the body of old Brindle. I put out my hand and felt a sodden mass of hair with no life under it; and my hand came away sticky from the gaping hole in her throat. I wiped it on the grass. And as I did so, a kind of red wave rose from somewhere deep within me, engulfing all things save the thirst to kill.
In the years since then, I have come to know how large a part the blow on my head must have played in what followed after. Such a blow may make a man seem quite foolish, or see two of everything and wish only to sleep; or be for hours, maybe days, as though he were fighting drunk.
I felt about and found my knife, then got once more to my feet, and stumbled back to the place where I had first seen the fire in the cove. It was still there, and the long ship-shadow beyond it, and a movement of figures, half seen in the flame-light. They would not care who saw their blaze, I thought, for when the Viking Kind come ashore, sensible folk stay away. It seemed to me that I was thinking quite clearly, and yet I did not think it at all foolish that I should be scrambling down the cliff path towards them, with a knife in my hand. They had killed my dog, the only thing I had to love, and I was going to kill as many of them as I could, in return.
I slipped and half fell the last part of the way, picked myself up, knife still in hand, and charged on towards the dark figures round the fire. I was seeing everything through a red haze, but sharp-edged and for one instant frozen into stillness like a picture on a wall: the battered ship, the wind-torn fire, the carcasses of three yearlings lying on the blood-stained shingle while great joints hacked from them were already half-cooking, half-scorching on spear points over the heart of the blaze, the men in rough dark seamen’s clothes, their faces all turned towards me as I ran.
Why they did not kill me then, I shall never know. A flung spear would have brought me down easily enough. Maybe, seeing that I was alone, it seemed scarce worth the trouble at least until they had had a bit of fun with me first.
Then I was among them, and the scene splintered out of its stillness. Someone stepped into my path, grinning. I saw the white animal flash of teeth in a wind-burned face, and the firelight on the blade of a dirk, and hurled myself forward, choking with the rage and grief that was in me. ‘You killed my dog! Devils! You killed my dog!’ There was a blare of laughter, and an arm came round me from behind, crushing me back against somebody’s body. My dagger hand was caught and wrenched upward. I fought like a trapped animal, and when the knife was twisted from my grasp, ducked my head and bit into the arm that held me. I tasted blood between my teeth, and the laughter turned to a bellow of surprise and pain, but the grip never slackened.
‘Ach! It bites like a wolf-cub!’ somebody said. The Norse is kin to the Saxon tongue, and even through the red haze, I could understand after a fashion.
‘It’s the herdboy. Didn’t you kill it, then?’
‘Seems not. But that’s a matter easy to set right.’
‘You killed my dog!’ I yelled again.
‘It gives tongue like a wolf-cub, too.’
The grip shifted, a giant of a man loomed up in front of me, and the point of a dagger was tickling my throat. ‘So now we kill you too, and that will make all neat and ship-shape,’ he said gravely. The rest crowded round, laughing. I had ceased to struggle, and stood still, knowing – but as though I were standing aside and knowing it of somebody else – that in a few more breaths I should be dead.
But another man, who seemed to be the chief, struck the dagger aside. ‘Leave that.’
The giant turned on him, showing his teeth a little, but lowering his dagger-hand nonetheless. ‘Why? Is he a long lost brother of yours?’
‘Do not you be a fool, Aslak; what use is he to us dead? We can’t eat him as we can the cattle –’
‘There’s not a good mouthful on his bones anyway,’ someone guffawed, ‘and wolf meat’s too strong for my stomach.’
‘And alive, he’ll fetch his price in the Dublin Slave Market. We haven’t done so well, this trip, that we can afford to toss aside a bit of easy profit that falls into our hands.’
There was a general growl of agreement; and the giant with the dagger shrugged, half laughing, and thrust the blade back into his belt.
‘Tie him up and dump him against the rocks yonder, out of the way.’ The man who seemed to be their chief jerked his thumb towards the sheltering outcrop.
So they bound my ankles together, and lashed my wrists behind me, with cords that somebody brought from the boat; and hauled me over to the rocks and flung me down the
re like a calf for branding; and went back to their own affairs.
Everything had begun to go far off and hazy; and I knew very little more, until suddenly – it must have been a good while later – the meat was cooked, and somebody was jabbing a sizzling lump of it against my mouth on the point of a dagger, shouting, ‘Eat! If we do not kill you, eat!’
The chief nodded, grinning from ear to ear, with a lump of fat hanging half out of his mouth. ‘It is you – your people that give the meat; now it is fair that you feast with the rest of us.’
And a third man struck in: ‘A good host should always set his guests at their ease by eating with them himself.’
‘And since no other one of your people seems coming to join the feast . . .’
‘I am thinking it’s not often you fill your belly full of the good red beef you herd for them.’
And that was true enough; and the lump of meat was still jabbing against my teeth. And I opened my mouth and ate.
Not because I was afraid they would kill me if I did not, but for a mingling of reasons that went deeper than that. I thought what did I owe to my mother’s kind? And what did it matter? What did anything matter? Old Brindle was dead.
So I ate the meat, and knew, even as I did so, that now I could never go back to the world that was only just behind me. Even if I were not, in all likelihood, going to be killed, even if I were not going to be sold in the Dublin slave market, I could not go back. I had broken the Tabu, the unwritten Law of the Spirit, that binds all herdsmen, eaten the stolen flesh of the cattle I herded; I had done the Forbidden Thing. I threw most of it up again soon after, but that was merely the blow on my head. I had done the Forbidden Thing, and there could be no going back.
I ate, and threw up, and slept. And when I woke, still with a splitting head, it was morning, and the seas had gentled, and the men were running their ship down into the surf.
They stowed the uneaten meat below the thwarts, and myself along with it. They had slackened off my ankle ropes and rebound my hands in front of me. (Every cattleman knows that the better the condition of his steers when they come to market, the better price they will fetch.)
So, they pushed out into the shallows; and lying among the cargo bales and the meat, I looked up past the swinging backs of the rowers, and saw against the drifting sky, and the cliff tops sinking astern, the dark figure of the Ship-Chief standing braced at the steering oar. I heard his rhythmic shout – ‘Lift her! Lift her!’ – and felt for the first time the liveness of a ship beneath me, lifting and twisting and dipping into the long swell of the Western seas.
The red haze of my rage had left me, and I felt cold and sick, and empty of all things. I could not even grieve for old Brindle any more. It all seemed so long ago.
3 The Viking Breed
DUBLIN IS A fine town. And through its streets the Danes and Northmen ruffle up and down like fighting-cocks, rubbing shoulders and picking quarrels with Saracens from Spain and merchants of Venice and the Frankish lands. It was the first and finest of the Norse settlements in Ireland, so I have heard, though when I was there it still had to pay tribute to King Malachy in his high Hall at Tara. But for the first few days, all I saw of the town was the open sheds down by the ship-strand, where the slaves were housed and the merchants who were interested in such goods came to buy.
Sometimes a ship’s crew with a full cargo of thralls to sell would handle the business themselves, but with only one or two, it was simpler to sell to one of the dealers, though of course the price was lower that way. So I was passed over to a middleman, who had a thrall-ring riveted on to my neck, and kept me in the back of the slave-shed for a few days, until the cut on my head had near enough finished healing. After that he brought me out front, and tethered me with a few others of my kind, on show to the passers-by.
I was still in the same state of cold emptiness, and everything and everyone around me seemed not quite real; and only one of my fellows comes to my mind with any clearness. And that, maybe, was only because he was the one tethered next to me. A huge man with a simple face, who told me that he came from Bristow town, and that his folk were poor, so that his father had had to sell either him or the cow. He seemed quite resigned, and sat with his arms across his knees, staring out at the shipping along the keel strand, and the grey waters of the bay.
Soon after noon, a trader came along the slave-sheds, picking out this one and that, to complete a cargo that he was shipping up to Orkney for the Jarl’s private purchase. We all knew that while he was yet afar off, for he had a loud voice, and there was always a stillness along the slave-sheds when a possible buyer came past. He picked out the Bristow man, and there was the usual haggling over the price.
‘He’s not much more than a mazelin. I could get a man with all his wits for that.’
‘Look at his shoulders! That man could pull a plough as well as any ox, and does an ox need wits, so long as he has a man behind him with a whip?’
But the amount was agreed at last, and the man led away by a rope slipped through his thrall-ring. He looked back once, but the merchant’s man jerked the rope, and they disappeared into the crowd.
I never knew his name, and I never saw him again.
My own turn came next day.
I had squatted there so long, while buyers came and went along the open space before the slave-sheds, that I had passed into a kind of dream of passing feet – nothing else, just the feet – and when another knot of them came by, mostly in some kind of deerskin boots or raw-hide shoes and leggings, I did not bother to look up. Not until they ambled to a halt, and the shadows of their owners, long in the evening sunlight, fell across me.
‘What about this one?’ said a voice.
I looked up then; and saw the reason for a certain jinking and chiming of metal that had come with them. The men who stood there glancing me over, were of the true Viking Kind that I had heard of in stories and been told to pray God I might never see in life. Men with grey ring-mail strengthening their leather byrnies, iron-bound war-caps, long straight swords. One had a silver arm-ring, one had studs of coral in the clasp of his belt, one wore a rough wolfskin cloak.
‘I still don’t see why we want a thrall, anyway,’ said the one with the arm-ring.
Another laughed. A man with a fierce narrow face and a sprig of late bell-heather thrust into the neck-buckle of his byrnie. ‘Because I am aweary of cleaning my own gear.’
‘And what do we do with him when the time comes for heading homeward in the spring?’
‘Sell him off again.’
The merchant had appeared from somewhere, and his man kicked me to my feet. ‘Up, you.’
I doubt if either of them had much hope of a sale; the Northmen had the look of men just passing an idle hour. But there was always the chance, and you don’t make a fortune by letting even the slimmest chances go whistling down the wind.
The man with the arm-ring shrugged. ‘How much do you want for him?’
‘Twelve gold pieces.’
‘You’re jesting, of course; we could buy a good pony for that.’
The dealer hunched his shoulders to his ears. ‘Then go you and buy a pony. I thought it was a thrall your honours wanted.’
‘Seven gold pieces,’ said another of the Northmen, leaning against the corner-post.
‘Now it is you who jest.’
‘Na na, no jest. But now that I look at the dunt in his head . . .’ He glanced round at the rest. ‘Let’s be getting on. It’s never worth while buying damaged goods.’
‘What!’ protested the dealer. ‘That little scathe he got when he was taken? Why, in a month, you’ll not be able to run your thumbnail along the scar.’
‘Tell that to the sea-mews.’
‘Eight gold pieces,’ said the man in the wolfskin, suddenly.
It was the first time he had spoken, and something in his voice, a level voice but very alive and with a hint of laughter, reached me through the daze in which I was still living, so that I looked rou
nd quickly, and saw him, real among all the rest who were only shadows. A man not more than two or three years older than myself, somewhat short for a Northman, with his head held on a strong neck above shoulders that were too broad for his height; eyes as grey as a sword blade, thick russet brows that almost met above his nose, a mouth that matched his voice – wide and straight, with laughter quirking at the corners.
I suppose it was not a particularly memorable face, but it was the first to seem real to me in a long while; and I have remembered it well enough for more than half a lifetime.
‘Don’t be a fool, Thormod,’ said he of the arm-ring. ‘We don’t need a thrall. If we want to waste all that gold, there are more interesting ways of doing it.’
Nobody paid any heed to him.
‘I want a thrall,’ said the man Thormod. Our eyes met and held.
‘Ten,’ said the dealer. ‘I shall lose by it, but it’s getting late in the season, and I’d not grieve to have him off my hands. Ten gold pieces, and that’s my last word.’
‘Nine,’ said Thormod.
The man leaning against the corner-post pushed off impatiently. ‘Leave it, Thormod, we’ve wasted enough time here.’
‘I have not,’ said Thormod.
‘Nine then, and may your soul rot!’ Somehow it had ceased to have to do with the rest of the band, and become a matter between the dealer and the man in the wolfskin cloak. Thormod had pulled a slim leather pouch from the breast of his byrnie, and was shaking it out into the palm of the dealer’s hand. Watching, I saw a shower of silver and bronze, and the glint of gold. But not enough gold. Surely not nearly enough gold . . .