Lords of the North

response, and he snarled at me again, louder this time so that Hakka heard from the bows. “They want you to die, you bastard,” Finan said, “so prove them wrong. Pull, you feeble Saxon bastard, pull.” Hakka hit him for speaking. Another time I did the same for Finan. I remember cradling him in my arms and putting gruel into his mouth with my fingers. “Live, you bastard,” I told him, “don’t let these earslings beat us. Live!” He lived.

We went north that next summer, pulling into a river that twisted through a landscape of moss and birch, a place so far north that rills of snow still showed in shadowed places. We bought reindeer hides from a village among the birches and carried them back to the sea, and exchanged them for walrus tusks and whalebone, which in turn we traded for amber and eider feathers. We carried malt and sealskin, furs and salt meat, iron-ore and fleeces. In one rock-circled cove we spent two days loading slates that would be turned into whetstones, and Sverri traded the slates for combs made from deer antlers and for big coils of sealskin rope and a dozen heavy ingots of bronze, and we took all those back to Jutland, going into Haithabu which was a big trading port, so big that there was a slave compound and we were taken there and released inside where we were guarded by spearmen and high walls.

Finan found some fellow Irishmen in the compound and I discovered a Saxon who had been captured by a Dane from the coast of East Anglia. King Guthrum, the Saxon said, had returned to East Anglia where he called himself ?thelstan and was building churches. Alfred, so far as he knew, was still alive. The East Anglian Danes had not tried to attack Wessex, but even so he had heard that Alfred was making forts about his frontier. He knew nothing about Alfred’s Danish hostages, so could not tell me whether Ragnar had been released, nor had the man heard any news of Guthred or Northumbria, so I stood in the compound’s center and shouted a question. “Is anyone here from Northumbria?” Men stared at me dully. “Northumbria?” I shouted again, and this time a woman called from the far side of the palisade which divided the men’s compound from the women’s. Men were crowded at the palisade, peering through its chinks at the women, but I pushed two aside. “You’re from Northumbria?” I asked the woman who had called to me.

“From Onhripum,” she told me. She was a Saxon, fifteen years old and a tanner’s daughter. Her father had owed money to Earl Ivarr and, to settle the debt, Ivarr had taken the girl and sold her to Kjartan.

At first I thought I must have misheard. “To Kjartan?” I asked her.

“To Kjartan,” she said dully, “who raped me, then sold me to these bastards.”

“Kjartan’s alive?” I asked, astonished.

“He lives,” she said.

“But he was being besieged,” I protested.

“Not while I was there,” she said.

“And Sven? His son?”

“He raped me too,” she said.

Later, much later, I pieced the whole tale together. Guthred and Ivarr, joined by my uncle ?lfric, had tried to starve Kjartan into submission, but the winter was hard, their armies had been struck by disease, and Kjartan had offered to pay tribute to all three and they had accepted his silver. Guthred had also extracted a promise that Kjartan would stop attacking churchmen, and for a time that promise was kept, but the church was too wealthy and Kjartan too greedy, and within a year the promise had been broken and some monks were killed or enslaved. The annual tribute of silver that Kjartan was supposed to give to Guthred, ?lfric, and Ivarr had been paid once, and never paid again. So nothing had changed. Kjartan had been humbled for a few months, then he had judged the strength of his enemies and found it feeble. The tanner’s daughter from Onhripum knew nothing of Gisela, had never even heard of her, and I thought perhaps she had died and that night I knew despair. I wept. I remembered Hild and I wondered what had happened to her, and I feared for her, and I remembered that one night with Gisela when I had kissed her beneath the beech trees and I thought of all my dreams that were now hopeless and so I wept.

I had married a wife in Wessex and I knew nothing of her and, if the truth were known, I cared nothing. I had lost my baby son to death. I had lost Iseult to death. I had lost Hild, I had lost all chance of Gisela, and that night I felt a swamping pity for myself and I sat in the hut and tears rolled down my cheeks and Finan saw me and he began weeping too and I knew he had been reminded of home. I tried to rekindle my anger because it is only anger that will keep you alive, but the anger would not come. I just wept instead. I could not stop. It was the darkness of despair, of the knowledge that my fate was to pull an oar until I was broken and then I would go overboard. I wept.

“You and me,” Finan said, and paused. It was dark. It was a cold night, though it was summer.

“You and me?” I asked, my eyes closed in an attempt to stop the tears.

“Swords in hand, my friend,” he said, “you and me. It will happen.” He meant we would be free and we would have our revenge.

“Dreams,” I said.

“No!” Finan said angrily. He crawled to my side and took my hand in both his. “Don’t give up,” he snarled at me. “We’re warriors, you and I, we’re warriors!” I had been a warrior, I thought. There had been a time when I shone in mail and helmet, but now I was lice-ridden, filthy, weak, and tearful. “Here,” Finan said, and he pushed something into my hand. It was one of the antler-combs we had carried as cargo and somehow he had managed to steal it and secrete it in his rags. “Never give up,” he told me, and I used the comb to disentangle my hair that now grew almost to my waist. I combed it out, tearing knots free, pulling lice from the teeth, and next morning Finan plaited my straight hair and I did the same for him. “It’s how warriors dress their hair in my tribe,” he explained, “and you and I are warriors. We’re not slaves, we’re warriors!” We were thin, dirty, and ragged, but the despair had passed like a squall at sea and I let the anger give me resolve.

Next day we loaded Trader with ingots of copper, bronze, and iron. We rolled barrels of ale into her stern and filled the remaining cargo space with salt meat, rings of hard bread, and tubs of salted cod. Sverri laughed at our plaited hair. “You two think you’ll find women, do you?” he mocked us. “Or are you pretending to be women?” Neither of us answered and Sverri just grinned. He was in a good mood, one of unusual excitement. He liked seafaring and from the amount of provisions we stowed I guessed he planned a long voyage and so it proved. He cast his runesticks time after time and they must have told him he would prosper for he bought three new slaves, all of them Frisians. He wanted to be well-manned for the voyage ahead, a voyage that began badly, for, as we left Haithabu, we were pursued by another ship. A pirate, Hakka announced sourly, and we ran north under sail and oars and the other ship slowly overhauled us for she was longer, leaner, and faster, and it was only the coming of night that let us escape, but it was a nervous night. We stowed the oars and lowered the sail so that Trader would make no noise, and in the dark I heard the oar-splashes of our pursuer and Sverri and his men were crouching near us, swords in hand, ready to kill us if we made a noise. I was tempted, and Finan wanted to thump on the ship’s side to bring the pursuers to us, but Sverri would have slaughtered us instantly and so we kept silent and the strange ship passed us in the darkness and when dawn came she had vanished.

Such threats were rare. Wolf does not eat wolf, and the falcon does not stoop on another falcon, and so the Northmen rarely preyed on each other, though some men, desperate, would risk attacking a fellow Dane or Norseman. Such pirates were reviled as outcasts, as nothings, but they were feared. Usually they were hunted down and the crews were killed or enslaved, but still some men risked being outcasts, knowing that if they could just capture one rich ship like Trader they could make a fortune that would give them status, power, and acceptance. But we escaped that night, and next day we sailed farther north and still farther north, and we did not put into land that night, nor for many nights. Then one morning I saw a black coast of terrible cliffs and the sea was shattering white against those grim rocks, and I thought we had come to our journey’s end, but we did not seek land. Instead we sailed on, going west now, and then briefly south to put into the bay of an island where we anchored.

At first Finan thought it was Ireland, but the folk who came to Trader in a small skin boat did not speak his language. There are islands all about the northern coast of Britain and this, I think was one of them. Savages live on those islands and Sverri did not go ashore, but traded a few paltry coins with the savages and received in return some gulls’ eggs, dried fish and goat-meat. And next morning we rowed into a brisk wind and we rowed all day and I knew we were heading into the western wastes of the wilderness sea. Ragnar the Elder had warned me of those seas, saying that there were lands beyond them, but that most men who sought the far lands never came back. Those western lands, he told me, were inhabited by the souls of dead sailors. They were gray places, fog-shrouded and storm-battered, but that was where we were going and Sverri stood at the steering oar with a look of happiness on his flat face and I remembered that same happiness. I remembered the joy of a