I touched Thor’s hammer, then tucked it under my mail. “Bring the men fast when you see the Danes go to the ships,” I said.
“We’ll come fast,” he promised me, “if the marsh lets us.”
I had seen Danes cross the marsh in the daylight and had noted that it was soft ground, but not rank bogland. “You can cross it fast,” I said, then pulled the cloak’s hood over my helmet. “Time to go,” I said.
Leofric said nothing and I dropped down from the rampart into the shallow ditch. So now I would become what I had always wanted to be, a shadowwalker. Childhood’s dream had become life and death, and touching SerpentBreath’s hilt for luck, I crossed the ditch’s lip. I went at a crouch, and halfway down the hill I dropped to my belly and slithered like a serpent, black against the grass, inching my way toward a space between two dying fires.
The Danes were sleeping, or close to sleep. I could see them sitting by the dying fires, and once I was out of the hill’s shadow there was enough moonlight to reveal me and there was no cover for the meadow had been cropped by sheep, but I moved like a ghost, a bellycrawling ghost, inching my way, making no noise, a shadow on the grass, and all they had to do was look, or walk between the fires, but they heard nothing, suspected nothing, and so saw nothing. It took an age, but I slipped through them, never going closer to an enemy than twenty paces, and once past them I was in the marsh and there the tussocks offered shadow and I could move faster, wriggling through slime and shallow water, and the only scare came when I startled a bird from its nest and it leapt into the air with a cry of alarm and a swift whirr of wings. I sensed the Danes staring toward the marsh, but I was motionless, black, and unmoving in the broken shadow, and after a while there was only silence. I waited, water seeping through my mail, and I prayed to Hoder, blind son of Odin and god of the night. Look after me, I prayed, and I wished I had made a sacrifice to Hoder, but I had not, and I thought that Ealdwulf would be looking down at me and I vowed to make him proud. I was doing what he had always wanted me to do, carrying SerpentBreath against the Danes.
I worked my way eastward, behind the sentries, going to where the ships were beached. No gray showed in the eastern sky. I still went slowly, staying on my belly, going slowly enough for the fears to work on me. I was aware of a muscle quivering in my right thigh, of a thirst that could not be quenched, of a sourness in the bowels. I kept touching SerpentBreath’s hilt, remembering the charms that Ealdwulf and Brida had worked on the blade. Never, Ravn had said, never fight Ubba. The east was still dark. I crept on, close to the sea now so I could gaze up the wide S?fern and see nothing except the shimmer of the sinking moon on the rippled water that looked like a sheet of hammered silver. The tide was flooding, the muddy shore narrowing as the sea rose. There would be salmon in the Pedredan, I thought, salmon swimming with the tide, going back to the sea, and I touched the sword hilt for I was close to the strip of firm land where the hovels stood and the ship guards waited. My thigh shivered. I felt sick.
But blind Hoder was watching over me. The ship guards were no more alert than their comrades at the hill’s foot, and why should they be? They were farther from Odda’s forces, and they expected no trouble; indeed they were there only because the Danes never left their ships unguarded, and these ship guards had mostly gone into the fishermen’s hovels to sleep, leaving just a handful of men sitting by the small fires. Those men were motionless, probably half asleep, though one was pacing up and down beneath the high prows of the beached ships.
I stood.
I had shadowwalked, but now I was on Danish ground, behind their sentries, and I undid the cloak’s cords, took it off, and wiped the mud from my mail, and then walked openly toward the ships, my boots squelching in the last yards of marshland, and then I just stood by the northernmost boat, threw my helmet down in the shadow of the ship, and waited for the one Dane who was on his feet to discover me. And what would he see? A man in mail, a lord, a shipmaster, a Dane, and I leaned on the ship’s prow and stared up at the stars. My heart thumped, my thigh quivered, and I thought that if I died this morning at least I would be with Ragnar again. I would be with him in Valhalla’s hall of the dead, except some men believed that those who did not die in battle went instead to Niflheim, that dreadful cold hell of the Norsemen where the corpse goddess Hel stalks through the mists and the serpent CorpseRipper slithers across the frost to gnaw the dead, but surely, I thought, a man who died in a hallburning would go to Valhalla, not to gray Niflheim. Surely Ragnar was with Odin, and then I heard the Dane’s footsteps and I glanced at him with a smile. “A chilly morning,” I said.
“It is.” He was an older man with a grizzled beard and he was plainly puzzled by my sudden appearance, but he was not suspicious.
“All quiet,” I said, jerking my head to the north to suggest I had been visiting the sentries on the S?fern’s side of the hill.
“They’re frightened of us,” he said.
“So they should be.” I faked a huge yawn, then pushed myself away from the ship and walked a couple of paces north as though I was stretching tired limbs, then pretended to notice my helmet at the water’s edge. “What’s that?”
He took the bait, going into the ship’s shadow to bend over the helmet, and I drew my knife, stepped close to him, and drove the blade up into his throat. I did not slit his throat, but stabbed it, plunging the blade straight in and twisting it and at the same time I pushed him forward, driving his face into the water and I held him there so that if he did not bleed to death he would drown, and it took a long time, longer than I expected, but men are hard to kill. He struggled for a time and I thought the noise he made might bring the men from the nearest fire, but that fire was forty or fifty paces down the beach and the small waves of the river were loud enough to cover the Dane’s death throes, and so I killed him and no one knew of it, none but the gods saw it, and when his soul was gone I pulled the knife from his throat, retrieved my helmet, and went back to the ship’s prow.
And waited there until dawn lightened the eastern horizon. Waited till there was a rim of gray at the edge of England.
And it was time.
I strolled toward the nearest fire. Two men sat there. “Kill one,” I sang softly, “and two then three, kill four and five, and then some more.” It was a Danish rowing chant, one that I had heard so often on the WindViper. “You’ll be relieved soon,” I greeted them cheerfully. They just stared at me. They did not know who I was, but just like the man I had killed, they were not suspicious even though I spoke their tongue with an English twist. There were plenty of English in the Danish armies.
“A quiet night,” I said, and leaned down and took the unburned end of a piece of flaming wood from the fire. “Egil left a knife on his ship,” I explained, and Egil was a common enough name among the Danes to arouse no suspicion, and they just watched as I walked north, presuming I needed the flame to light my way onto the ships. I passed the hovels, nodded to three men resting beside another fire, and kept walking until I had reached the center of the line of beached ships. There, whistling softly as though I did not have a care in the world, I climbed the short ladder left leaning on the ship’s prow and jumped down into the hull and made my way between the rowers’ benches. I had half expected to find men asleep in the ships, but the boat was deserted except for the scrabble of rats’ feet in the bilge. I crouched in the ship’s belly where I thrust the burning wood beneath the stacked oars, but I doubted it would be sufficient to set those oars aflame and so I used my knife to shave kindling off a rower’s bench. When I had enough scraps of wood, I piled them over the flame and saw the fire spring up. I cut more, then hacked at the oar shafts to give the flames purchase, and no one shouted at me from the bank. Anyone watching must have thought I merely searched the bilge and the flames were still not high enough to cause alarm, but they were spreading and I knew I had very little time and so I sheathed the knife and slid over the boat’s side. I lowered myself into the Pedredan, careless what the water would do to my mail and weapons, and once in the river I waded northward from ship’s stern to ship’s stern, until at last I had cleared the last boat and had come to where the graybearded corpse was thumping softly in the river’s small waves, and there I waited.
And waited. The fire, I thought, must have gone out. I was cold. And still I waited. The gray on the world’s rim lightened, and then, suddenly, there was an angry shout and I moved out of the shadow and saw the Danes running toward the flames that were bright and high on the ship I had fired, and so I went to their abandoned fire and took another burning brand and hurled that into a second ship, and the Danes were scrambling onto the burning boat that was sixty paces away and none saw me. Then a horn sounded, sounded again and again, sounding the alarm, and I knew Ubba’s men would be coming from their camp at Cantucton, and I carried a last piece of fiery wood to the ships, burning my hand as I thrust it under a pile of oars. Then I waded back into the river to hide beneath the shadowed belly of a boat.
The horn still sounded. Men were scrambling from the fishermen’s hovels, going to save their fleet, and more
