craft close in beneath the grassy bank, at a spot where it was child’s play to leap aboard over the low rim into the rowers’ benches in the waist of the vessel. Mark saw the tide of fierce, fair men flow inboard, coaxing the loaded packhorse after them, and stowing their booty under the tiny foredeck and in the well between the benches. In with them went Cadfael, perforce, and yet it seemed to Mark that he went blithely where he was persuaded. Small chance to avoid, but another man would have been a shade less apt and adroit about it.
The boy on horseback had kept his firm hold of Heledd until the flaxen-haired young giant, having seen his men embarked, reached up and hoisted her in his arms, as lightly as if she had been a child, and leaped down with her between the rowers’ benches, and setting her down there on her feet, stretched up again to the bridle of Cadfael’s horse, and coaxed him aboard with a soft-spoken cajolery that came up strangely to Mark’s ears. The boy followed, and instantly the steersman pushed off strongly from the bank, the knot of men busy bestowing their plunder dissolved into expert order at the oars, and the lean little dragon-ship surged out into midstream. She was in lunging motion before Mark had recovered his wits, sliding like a snake southwestward towards Carnarvon and Abermenai, where doubtless her companions were now in harbour or moored in the roads outside the dunes. She did not have to turn, even, being double-ended. Her speed could get her out of trouble in any direction; even if she was sighted off the town Owain had nothing that could catch her. The rapidity with which she dwindled silently into a thin, dark fleck upon the water left Mark breathless and amazed.
He turned to make his way back to where his horse was tethered, and set out in resolute haste westward towards Carnarvon.
Plumped aboard into the narrow well between the benches, and there as briskly abandoned, Cadfael took a moment to lean back against the boards of the narrow afterdeck and consider their situation. Relations between captors and captives seemed already to have found a viable level, at surprisingly little cost in time or passion. Resistance was impracticable. Discretion recommended acceptance to the prisoners, and made it possible for their keepers to be about the more immediate business of getting their booty safely back to camp, without any stricter enforcement than a rapidly moving vessel and a mile or so of water on either side provided. No one laid hand on Cadfael once they were embarked. No one paid any further attention to Heledd, braced back defensively into the stern-post, where the young Dane had hoisted her, with knees drawn up and skirts hugged about her in embracing arms. No one feared that she would leap overboard and strike out for Anglesey; the Welsh were not known as notable swimmers. No one had any interest in doing either of them affront or injury; they were simple assets to be retained intact for future use.
To test it further, Cadfael made his way the length of the well amidships, between the stowed loot of flesh and provisions, paying curious attention to the details of the lithe, long craft, and not one oarsman checked in the steady heave and stretch of his stroke, or turned a glance to note the movement at his shoulder. A vessel shaped for speed, lean as a greyhound, perhaps eighteen paces long and no more than three or four wide. Cadfael reckoned ten strakes a side, six feet deep amidships, the single mast lowered aft. He noted the clenched rivets that held the strakes together. Clincher-built, shallow of draught, light of weight for its strength and speed, the two ends identical for instant manoeuvring, an ideal craft for beaching close inshore in the dunes of Abermenai. No use for shipping more bulky freight; they would have brought cargo hulls for that, slower, more dependent on sail, and shipping only a few rowers to get them out of trouble in a calm. Square-rigged, as all craft still were in these northern waters. The two-masted, lateen-rigged ships of the unforgotten midland sea were still unknown to these Norse seafarers.
He had been too deeply absorbed in these observations to realise that he himself was being observed just as shrewdly and curiously by a pair of brilliant ice-blue eyes, from under thick golden brows quizzically cocked. The young captain of this raiding party had missed nothing, and clearly knew how to read this appraisal of his craft. He dropped suddenly from the steersman’s side to meet Cadfael in the well.
“You know ships?” he demanded, interested and surprised at so unlikely a preoccupation in a Benedictine brother.
“I did once. It’s a long time now since I ventured on water.”
“You know the sea?” the young man pursued, shining with pleased curiosity.
“Not this sea. Time was when I knew the middle sea and the eastern shores well enough. I came late to the cloister,” he explained, beholding the blue eyes dilate and glitter in delighted astonishment, a deeper spark of pleasure and recognition warming within them.
“Brother, you put up your own price,” said the young Dane heartily. “I would keep you to know better. Seafaring monks are rare beasts, I never came by one before. How do they call you?”
“My name is Cadfael, a Welsh-born brother of the abbey of Shrewsbury.”
“A name for a name is fair dealing. I am Turcaill, son of Turcaill, kinsman to Otir, who leads this venture.”
“And you know what’s in dispute here? Between two Welsh princes? Why put your own breast between their blades?” Cadfael reasoned mildly.
“For pay,” said Turcaill cheerfully. “But even unpaid I would not stay behind when Otir puts to sea. It grows dull ashore. I’m no landsman, to squat on a farm year after year, and be content to watch the crops grow.”
No, that he certainly was not, nor of a temper to turn to cloister and cowl even when the adventures of his youth were over. Splendidly fleshed, glittering with animal energy, this was a man for marriage and sons, and the raising of yet more generations of adventurers, restless as the sea itself, and ready to cleave their way into any man’s quarrel for gain, at the fair cost of staking their own lives.
He was away now, with a valedictory clap on Cadfael’s shoulder, steady of stride along the lunging keel, to swing himself up beside Heledd on the afterdeck. The light, beginning to fade into twilight now, still showed Cadfael the disdainful set of Heledd’s lips and the chill arching of her brows as she drew the hem of her skirt aside from the contamination even of an enemy touch, and turned her head away, refusing him the acknowledgement of a glance.
Turcaill laughed, no way displeased, sat down beside her, and took out bread from a pouch at his belt. He broke it in his big, smooth young hands, and offered her the half, and she refused it. Unoffended, still laughing, he took her right hand by force, folded his offering into the palm, and shut her left hand hard over it. She could not prevent, and would not compromise her mute disdain by a vain struggle. But when he forthwith got up and left her so, without a glance behind, to do as she pleased with his gift, she neither hurled it into the darkening water of the strait nor bit into its crust by way of acceptance, but sat as he had left her, cradling it between her palms and gazing after his oblivious flaxen head with a narrow and calculating stare, the significance of which Cadfael could not read, but which at once intrigued and disquieted him.
In the onset of night, in a dusk through which they slid silently and swiftly in midstream, only faint glimmers of phosphorescence gilding the dip of the oars, they passed by the shore-lights of Owain’s Carnarvon, and emerged into a broad basin shut off from the open sea only by twin rolling spits of sand-dunes, capped with a close growth of bushes and a scattering of trees. Along the water the shadowy shapes of ships loomed, some with stepped masts, some lean and low like Turcaill’s little serpent. Spaced along the shore, the torches of the Danish outposts burned
