Bern found that his hands were shaking. He looked at his sword, which he was still holding, and sheathed it. He went to the side of the ship, by his own oar, next to the roped ship beside them, and stood there listening as Attar sang, deep-voiced in the dark.
Hard the journey
heavy the waves,
Brief our lingering
on land or sea.
Ingavin ever mind
his Erling-folk,
Thünir remember
who honour you.
Let no angry spirit
still be here,
No soul be lost
without a home.
Salt the sea-foam
by ship’s prow,
White the waves
before us and behind.
Bern looked down at the water and then away to the emerging stars, trying to keep his mind empty, to just listen. But then it seemed he was thinking—found himself unable not to think—of his father again. In a stream with him under these same stars last night.
He had felt such anger moments ago, looking down at Ivarr Ragnarson, watching—knowing—what the man was doing. The need to kill had crashed over him like nothing in his life before; he’d had his sword out, and driving, before he’d realized what he was doing.
Was this the way it had happened for Thorkell—twice, ten years apart, in two taverns? Was this his father’s fury awakening inside him? And Bern was sober as death right now; light-headed with fatigue, but not so much as a beaker of ale since the tavern in Esferth the evening before. Yet even with that, rage had taken him.
If Brand had not been quicker, Bern would have killed the man on the deck and he knew it. His father had done that, twice, exiled for it the second time. Ruining their lives was what Bern had always thought, and his heart had been cold as a winter sea, bitter as winter foraging.
Ruining his father’s own life was more true, he thought now: Thorkell had turned himself, in a moment, from a settled landowner in a place where he had real stature into an exile, no longer young, without hearth or family. How had he felt that day, leaving the isle? And the next day, and in the nights that had followed, sleeping among strangers, or alone? Did he lie down and rise up with heimthra, the heart’s hard longing for home? Bern had never even put his mind to this.
Are you drunk? he had said to Thorkell in the river. And been struck a blow for that. Open hand, he remembered; a father’s admonition.
The wind had died, but now a breeze came again from the east. The lashed ships swayed with it, lanterns bobbing. Jormsvik mariners, best in all the world. He was one of them. A new home, for him. The sky was dark now.
The song came to an end. His hands weren’t trembling any more. Thorkell was somewhere north in the night, having crossed the sea again, long past when he’d have thought himself done with raiding. It was a time for home and hearth, wood chopped and piled up for winter winds and snow. Land of his own, fences and tilled fields, tavern fires in town, companionship at night. Gone with one moment’s ale-soaked fury. And his youth long gone as well. Not a time of life to be starting again. What was a son—a grown son—to think about all of this? No soul be lost without a home.
Bern reached into his tunic and touched the hammer on its silver chain. He shook his head slowly. Thorkell had actually saved all of the men here, sending Bern south at speed, with that added warning about Ivarr.
You needed to be strong enough to say these things to yourself, acknowledge them, even through bitterness. And there was more, another thing sliding into awareness now, the way the fainter stars slipped into sight against the darkened sky. Don’t let Ivarr Ragnarson know you’re my son.
He hadn’t understood that. He’d asked; his father hadn’t answered. Not an answering sort of man. But Ragnarson’s pale eyes had seen something here on the deck, in Bern’s face by torchlight, or in something he’d said. Some kind of resemblance. He had thought through—fox’s mind—to a truth about Bern, and about Thorkell. He’d been about to say it, an accusation, when swords came out and he died. I think his father was with—
“Brand! We’ve rowing to do, best set a course.” It was Isolf, at the helm of the ship tied to their starboard side.
“I say south first, head for Ferrieres coast, or Karch coast, whoever holds it this year.” That was Carsten, from the other side.
“Ferrieres,” said Brand absently. He walked past Bern towards the helm. Attor followed him.
“Aeldred’ll have ships in the water by now, certain as Ingavin carries a hammer.” Isolf again.
Someone laughed derisively. “They don’t know what they’re doing. Anglcyn, at sea?” Other voices joining in.
“He’ll use Erlings,” Brand said. The amusement subsided. “Believe it. Ingemar Svidrirson’s his ally here in Erlond, remember? Pays him tribute.”
“Fuck him, then!” someone shouted.
A sentiment that found much endorsement, even more crude. Bern stayed where he was, listening. He was too new, had no idea what their best course was. They’d lost almost a third of their company, could manage five ships, but if they ended up in a fight at sea …
“We’ll do that another time,” called Carsten Friddson. “Right now let’s just get home with all ships and bodies left. South’s best, say I, to the other coast, then we beat back east along it. Aeldred won’t venture so far from his own shore just on a chance of finding us at sea.”
It did make sense, Bern thought. The new Anglcyn ships at Drengest might be ready, but they wouldn’t have had any experience with them yet. And those ships—if they were even on the water—were all that lay between them and home. Surely they could slip past them?
He had a sudden, unexpectedly vivid image of Jormsvik. The walls, gate, barracks, the stony, wave-battered strand, the crooked town beside the fortress where he’d almost died the night before he won his way inside. He thought of Thira. His whore now. He’d killed Gurd, who’d laid claim to her before.
That was how it worked in Jormsvik. You bought your warmth in winter, one way or another. Whores, not wives, was the order of things. But there was warmth to be found, a fireside, companionship: he wasn’t alone, wasn’t a servant, might have a chance, if he was good enough at killing and staying alive, to shape a name for himself in the world. Thorkell had done that.
And it was on that thought of his father that Bern heard Brand Leofson say, with what seemed an unnaturally precise, carrying clarity, “We’re not going home yet.”
A silence again, then, “What in Thünir’s name does that mean?” Garr Hoddson, shouting from the fourth ship.
Brand looked towards him across the other deck. They were all shapes in darkness now, voices, unless standing beside one of the lanterns. Bern had taken a step away from the rail.
“Means the snake said one thing true. Listen. This raid’s the worst we’ve had in years, any of us. It’s a bad time for that, with Vidurson making plans up north.”
“Vidurson? What of it?” Garr shouted. “Brand, we’ve lost a full boat of—”
“I know what we’ve lost! I want to find, now. We need to. Listen to me. We’re going to go west to get the Volgan’s sword back. Or to kill the man who took it. Or both. We’re going to that farm, whatever it’s called.”
“Brynnfell,” Bern heard himself saying. His voice sounded hollow.
“That’s it,” Brand Leofson said, nodding his head. “Ap Hywll’s farm. We run enough of us ashore, leave some to the ships, find the place, burn it down, there should be hostages.”
“How do we get home, after?” Carsten asking.
Bern could hear a new note in his voice: he was interested, engaged. This had been a disastrous raid, nothing to show for it but their own deaths. No man here wanted to spend a winter hearing about that.
“Decide that when we’re done. Back this way, or we go the north route—”
“Too late in the year,” Garr Hoddson said. He had stepped across to Carsten’s ship, Bern saw.
“Then back this way
. Aeldred’ll be ashore by then. Or we overwinter west if need be. We’ve done that before, too. But we’ll do something before we show our faces home. And if we get that blade back, we have something to show Kjarten Vidurson, too, if that northerner gets ideas we don’t like. Anyone here actually decided we need a king, by the way?”
A shout of anger. Jormsvik had its views on this. Kings put limits on you, set taxes, liked to tear down walls that weren’t their own.
“Carsten?” Brand lifted his voice over the shouting.
“I’m for it.”
“Garr?”
“Do it. We’ve shipmates to avenge.”
But not in the west, Bern thought. Not there. It didn’t matter. He felt, with genuine surprise, a quickening of his own heartbeat. His father hadn’t wanted them to go west, but Ivarr was dead, they weren’t listening to his tune, they didn’t have to listen to Thorkell’s, either.
To get the Volgan’s lost sword back from the Cyngael. On his first raid. That would be remembered, it would always be remembered. Bern touched Ingavin’s hammer, his father’s hammer, at his throat.
There was another part of the verse he’d spoken to his father in the stream; they all knew it, throughout the Erling lands:
Cattle die kinsmen die.
Every man born will die.
Fierce hearth fires end in ash.
Fame once won endures ever.
The ships were being unlashed. Bern moved to help. The risen wind was from the east, a message in that. Ingavin’s wind, carrying them in the night, dragon-prows on a summer sea.
PART THREE
CHAPTER XII
Jadwina was never quite clear, looking back, whether they received the tidings of the earl’s death (she always got his name wrong, but it was difficult to remember things from so long ago) and the slaughtered Erling raiders before or after the evening her life changed—or even that same night, though she didn’t think so. It felt as though it had come afterwards. It had been a bad time for her, but she was fairly certain she’d have remembered if it had been that same night.
The troubles had begun a fourteen-night earlier, when Eadyn lost his hand. An accident, an entirely stupid accident, clearing trees with his father, bending a branch for Osca’s axe. A clean severing, at the wrist. His life marred, all hope of good fortune spurting from him with his blood. The hand on the grass, fingers still flexed, a thing of its own now. Discarded. A young man, broad-shouldered, fair-haired, picked to marry her, and her own inward choice for that (by Jad’s pure grace), turned cripple in a moment’s inattention at the edge of wood and scrubland.
He lived. Their cleric, summoned, knew more than most about leechcraft. Eadyn lay in fever for days, his wrist wrapped in a poultice his mother changed at sunrise and sunset. Osca wasn’t at the bedside or even at home. He spent those days drinking, swearing, weeping, cursing the god, abusing those who tried to comfort him. What comfort was there under the heavens? He had only the one living son, and a farm that needed Eadyn’s strength as his own began to fail.
It was a calamity. Lives turned, lives ended, with such moments. The cleric, wisely, kept his distance until Osca had drunk himself into a vomiting stupor and awoke, a day and night later, ashen and heart-scalded. The god had made the world this way, in his unknowable wisdom, the cleric said to the villagers in their small chapel. But it was hard, he conceded. It could be intolerably hard.
Jadwina thought so too. Her own father had shaken his head grimly when he heard the tale. He had politely waited to see if Eadyn would conveniently die, before calling off the proposed match. What else could he do? A cripple was no marriage. He could never swing an axe properly, handle a plough, mend a fence alone, kill a wolf or wild dog. Couldn’t even practise with a bow as they were ordered by the king to do now.
It was a sorrow for Eadyn and his family, a lesson for everyone else, as the cleric said, but you didn’t have to make it your sorrow, too. There were healthy lads in the village, or near enough. You needed to marry daughters usefully. It was a matter of survival. The world, here in the north, or anywhere else probably, wasn’t going to make life easy for you.
At some point during that time—it blurred for Jadwina, looking back—Bevin, the smith, had appeared at their door and asked to speak with her father. Gryn had gone walking with him and returned to say that he’d accepted an offer for her.
The younger son of the village smith wasn’t the match Eadyn, son of Osca, had been—land was land, after all—but he was better than a one-handed cripple. Jadwina received the tidings and—as best she remembered—she dropped a pitcher on the floor. It might have been on purpose; she couldn’t recall. Her father beat her about the back and shoulders, with her mother calling approval. It had been a new-bought pitcher.
Raud, the smith’s son, now plighted to her, never even spoke with Jadwina. Not then, at any rate.
Some days later, however, towards twilight, as she was bringing the cow back from the northernmost field, Raud stepped out from a copse by the path. He stood before her. He had come from the forge; there was soot in his clothing and on his face.
“Be wed come harvest,” he said, grinning. He had poxed cheeks and long, skinny shanks.
“Not by my will,” Jadwina replied, tossing her head.
He laughed. “Wha’ matters that? You’ll spread legs by will or wi’out.”
“Eadyn is two men to your one!” she said. “And you knows it.”
He laughed again. “He’s one hand to my two. Can’t even do this now.”
He grabbed at her. Before she could twist away, he had a hand twisted in her hair, spilling her kerchief, and another over her mouth, too tightly for her to bite, or scream. He smelled of ash and smoke. He pulled the hand away quickly and hit her on the side of the head, hard enough for the world to rock and sway. Then he hit her again.
The sun was going down. End of summer. She remembered that. No one on the path, home a long walk from where they were. She couldn’t even see the nearest houses of the village.
“Take what’s mine now,” Raud said. “Get a baby in you, they’ll just make me wed you, won’ they? What matters that?” She was on the ground by the path, beneath him. He straddled her, a boot on either side, started untying the rope around his trousers, fumbling in his haste. She drew breath to shout. He kicked her in the ribs.
Jadwina gasped, began to weep. It hurt to breathe. He dragged his leggings down around his muddy boots. Lowered himself to his knees then forward onto her. Began pushing, clumsily, at her lower clothes. She hit him, scratching at his face. He swore, then laughed, his hand groped hard at her, down there.
Then his whole body lurched crazily to one side, his head most of all. Jadwina had a confused, frightening sense of wetness. She was in pain, dizzy and terrified. It took her a moment to understand what had happened. Raud’s blood was all over her. He’d been hit in the neck from above, behind, by an axe. She looked up.
An axe swung one-handed.
Raud’s body, his sex exposed, still erect, his trousers around his ankles, lay sprawled on one side, next to her in the shallow ditch where he’d thrown her down. Instinctively, she shifted away from him. He was, Jadwina saw, already dead. She was afraid she was going to be sick. She put a hand to her side where the worst pain was, then brought it to her face. It came away wet with Raud’s blood.
Eadyn, his face ghost-pale, stood above her. She struggled to sit up. Her side felt as if a blade were in it, as if something were broken and sliding within. He stepped back a little. Her cow was behind him, in the grass on the other side of the path, cropping. No sound but that, and the birds flying to branches at end of day; fields and trees, dark green grass, the sun almost down.
“Was out here trying,” Eadyn said, finally, gesturing with the axe. “See if I can chop. You know? Saw you.”
She seemed able to nod her head.
“Can’t do it rightly,” he said, lifting the axe a little again, letting it fall. “No good.”
Jadwina
drew a careful breath, a hand to her side again. She was covered in blood. “Just started, though. You’ll get better at it.”
He shook his head. “Useless man.” She tried not to look at the bandaged stump of his right hand. His good hand, it had been.
“You … you were man enough to save me,” she said.
He shrugged. “From behind him.”
“What matters that?” she said. Her capacity to speak, to think, was coming back. And she had a thought. It frightened her, so she spoke quickly, before fear could take hold. “Lie with me now,” she said. “Give me a child. No one else will want me then. You’ll have to.”
What she saw in him, that moment, in the last fading of the summer daylight, and remembered ever after, was fear, and defeat. It could be read, the way some clerics read words in books.
He shook his head again. “Na, that’ll not do. I’m cripple, girl. They’ll not wed you to me. And how could I fend for a wife and little ones now?”
“We’ll fend the both of us together,” she said.
He was silent. The axe—dark with Raud’s blood—held in his left hand. “Jad rot it forever,” he said finally. “I’m done.” He looked at the dead man. “His brothers’ll kill me now.”
“They’ll not that. I’ll tell the cleric and reeve what happened here.”
“And that’ll matter to them?” He laughed, bitterly. “No. I’m away this night, girl. You clean yourself, say nothing. Maybe take a bit of time before they find this. Give me a chance to be gone.”
Her heart was aching by then, more than her side, a dull, hard pain, but there was—even in that moment—a part of her that had begun despising him. It was like a death, actually, feeling that.
“Where … where will you go?”
“As if I have the least idea,” he said. “Jad be with you, girl.”
He said that over his shoulder, had already turned away.
He left her there, walked north, back up the grassy path the way that she had come, and then on, beyond the pasture. Jadwina watched until she couldn’t see him any more in the twilight. She got herself up, reclaimed her hazel switch, and began leading the cow back home, moving slowly, a hand to her side, leaving a dead man in the grass.