Lords of the North

He must have peered at the pattern the fallen sticks made and found some hope in their array, for he decided we would stay with the tight-moneyed misbegotten bastard Franks, and at the end of three days he had bargained successfully for we loaded a cargo of sword-blades, spear-heads, scythes, mail coats, yew logs, and fleeces. We took that north, far north, into the lands of the Danes and the Svear where he sold the cargo. Frankish blades were much prized, while the yew logs would be cut into plow blades, and with the money he earned Sverri filled the boat with iron-ore that we carried back south again.

Sverri was good at managing slaves and very good at making money. The coins fairly flowed into the ship, all of them stored in a vast wooden box kept in the cargo hold. “You’d like to get your hands on that, wouldn’t you?” he sneered at us one day as we sailed up some nameless coast. “You sea-turds!” The thought of us robbing him had made him voluble. “You think you can cheat me? I’ll kill you first. I’ll drown you. I’ll push seal shit down your throats till you choke.” We said nothing as he raved.

Winter was coming by then. I did not know where we were, except we were in the north and somewhere in the sea that lies about Denmark. After delivering our last cargo we rowed the unladen ship beside a desolate sandy shore until Sverri finally steered us up a tidal creek edged with reeds and there he ran Trader ashore on a muddy bank. It was high tide and the ship was stranded at the beginning of the ebb. There was no village at the creek, just a long low house thatched with moss-covered reeds. Smoke drifted from the roof hole. Gulls called. A woman emerged from the house and, as soon as Sverri jumped down from the ship, she ran to him with cries of joy and he took her in his arms and swept her about in a circle. Then three children came running and he gave each a handful of silver and tickled them and threw them in the air and hugged them.

This was evidently where Sverri planned to winter Trader and he made us empty her of her stone ballast, strip her sail, mast, and rigging, and then haul her on log rollers so she stood clear of the highest tides. She was a heavy boat and Sverri called on a neighbor from across the marsh to help haul her with a pair of oxen. His eldest child, a son aged about ten, delighted in pricking us with the ox goad. There was a slave hut behind the house. It was made of heavy logs, even the roof was of logs, and we slept there in our manacles. By day we worked, cleaning Trader’s hull, scraping away the filth and weeds and barnacles. We cleaned the muck from her bilge, spread the sail to be washed by rain, and watched hungrily as Sverri’s woman repaired the cloth with a bone needle and catgut. She was a stocky woman with short legs, heavy thighs, and a round face pockmarked by some disease. Her hands and arms were red and raw. She was anything but beautiful, but we were starved of women and gazed at her. That amused Sverri. He hauled down her dress once to show us a plump white breast and then laughed at our wide-eyed stares. I dreamed of Gisela. I tried to summon her face to my dreams, but it would not come, and dreaming of her was no consolation.

Sverri’s men fed us gruel and eel soup and rough bread and fish stew, and when the snow came they threw us mud-clotted fleeces and we huddled in the slave hut and listened to the wind and watched the snow through the chinks between the logs. It was cold, so cold, and one of the Saxons died. He had been feverish and after five days he just died and two of Sverri’s men carried his body to the creek and threw him beyond the ice so that his body floated away on the next tide. There were woods not far away and every few days we would be taken to the trees, given axes and told to make firewood. The manacles were deliberately made too short so that a man could not take a full stride, and when we had axes they guarded us with bows and with spears, and I knew I would die before I could reach one of the guards with the ax, but I was tempted to try. One of the Danes tried before I did, turning and screaming, running clumsily, and an arrow took him in the belly and he doubled over and Sverri’s men killed him slowly. He screamed for every long moment. His blood stained the snow for yards around and he died so very slowly as a lesson to the rest of us, and so I just chopped at trees, trimmed the trunks, split the trunks with a maul and wedges, chopped again and went back to the slave hut.

“If the little bastard children would just come close,” Finan said next day, “I’d strangle the filthy wee creatures, so I would.”

I was astonished for it was the longest statement I had ever heard him make. “Better to take them hostage,” I suggested.

“But they know better than to come close,” he said, ignoring my suggestion. He spoke Danish in a strange accent. “You were a warrior,” he said.

“I am a warrior,” I said. The two of us were sitting outside the hut on a patch of grass where the snow had melted and we were gutting herrings with blunt knives. The gulls screamed about us. One of Sverri’s men watched us from outside the long-house. He had a bow across his knees and a sword at his side. I wondered how Finan had guessed I was a warrior, for I had never talked of my life. Nor had I revealed my true name, preferring them to think that I was called Osbert. Osbert had once been my real name, the name I was given at birth, but I had been renamed Uhtred when my elder brother died because my father insisted his eldest son must be called Uhtred. But I did not use the name Uhtred on board Trader. Uhtred was a proud name, a warrior’s name, and I would keep it a secret until I had escaped slavery. “How did you know I’m a warrior?” I asked Finan.

“Because you never stop watching the bastards,” he said. “You never stop thinking about how to kill them.”

“You’re the same,” I said.

“Finan the Agile, they called me,” he said, “because I would dance around enemies. I would dance and kill. Dance and kill.” He slit another fish’s belly and flicked the offal into the snow where two gulls fought for it. “There was a time,” he went on angrily, “when I owned five spears, six horses, two swords, a coat of bright mail, a shield, and a helmet that shone like fire. I had a woman with hair that fell to her waist and with a smile that could dim the noonday sun. Now I gut herrings.” He slashed with the knife. “And one day I shall come back here and I shall kill Sverri, hump his woman, strangle his bastard children, and steal his money.” He gave a harsh chuckle. “He keeps it all here. All that money. Buried it is.”

“You know that for sure?”

“What else does he do with it? He can’t eat it because he doesn’t shit silver, does he? No, it’s here.”

“Wherever here is,” I said.

“Jutland,” he said. “The woman’s a Dane. We come here every winter.”

“How many winters?”

“This is my third,” Finan said.

“How did he capture you?”

He flipped another cleaned fish into the rush basket. “There was a fight. Us against the Norsemen and the bastards beat us. I was taken prisoner and the bastards sold me to Sverri. And you?”

“Betrayed by my lord.”

“So that’s another bastard to kill, eh? My lord betrayed me too.”

“How?”

“He wouldn’t ransom me. He wanted my woman, see? So he let me go, in return for which favor I pray he may die and that his wives get lockjaw and that his cattle get the staggers and that his children rot in their own shit and that his crops wither and his hounds choke.” He shuddered as if his anger was too much to contain.

Sleet came instead of snow and the ice slowly melted in the creek. We made new oars from seasoned spruce cut the previous winter, and by the time the oars had been shaped the ice was gone. Gray fogs cloaked the land and the first flowers showed at the edges of the reeds. Herons stalked the shallows as the sun melted the morning frosts. Spring was coming and so we caulked Trader with cattle hair, tar, and moss. We cleaned her and launched her, returned the ballast to her bilge, rigged the mast and bent the cleaned and mended sail onto her yard. Sverri embraced his woman, kissed his children, and waded out to us. Two of his crew hauled him aboard and we gripped the oars.

“Row, you bastards!” he shouted, “row!”

We rowed.

Anger can keep you alive, but only just. There were times when I was sick, when I felt too weak to pull the oar, but pull it I did for if I faltered then I would be tossed overboard. I pulled as I vomited, pulled as I sweated, pulled as I shivered, and pulled as I hurt in every muscle. I pulled through rain and sun and wind and sleet. I remember having a fever and thinking I was going to die. I even wanted to die, but Finan cursed me under his breath. “You’re a feeble Saxon,” he goaded me, “you’re weak. You’re pathetic, you Saxon scum.” I grunted some