Lords of the North

talking. The stranger left before darkness hid his ship and Sverri seemed pleased with the conversation, for in the morning he shouted his thanks to the other boat and ordered us to haul the anchor and take the oars. It was a windless day, the sea was calm, and we rowed northward beside the shore. I stared inland and saw smoke rising from settlements and thought that freedom lay there.

I dreamed of freedom, but now I did not think it would ever come. I thought I would die at that oar as so many others had died under Sverri’s lash. Of the eleven oarsmen who had been aboard when I was given to Sverri only four still lived, of whom Finan was one. We now had fourteen oarsmen, for Sverri had replaced the dead and, ever since the red ship had come to haunt his existence, he had paid for more slaves to man his oars. Some shipmasters used free men to row their boats, reckoning they worked more willingly, but such men expected a share in the silver and Sverri was a miserly man.

Late that morning we came to a river’s mouth and I gazed up at the headland on the southern bank and saw a high beacon waiting to be lit to warn the inland folk that raiders came, and I had seen that beacon before. It was like a hundred others, yet I recognized it, and I knew it stood in the ruins of the Roman fort at the place where my slavery had begun. We had come back to the River Tine.

“Slaves!” Sverri announced to us. “That’s what we’re buying. Slaves, just like you bastards. Except they’re not like you, because they’re women and children. Scots. Anyone here speak their bastard language?” None of us answered. Not that we needed to speak the Scottish language, for Sverri had whips that spoke loudly enough.

He disliked carrying slaves as cargo for they needed constant watching and feeding, but the other trader had told him of women and children newly captured in one of the endless border raids between Northumbria and Scotland, and those slaves offered the best prospect of any profit. If any of the women and children were pretty then they would sell high in Jutland’s slave markets, and Sverri needed to make a good trade, and so we rowed into the Tine on a rising tide. We were going to Gyruum, and Sverri waited until the water had almost reached the high- tide mark of sea-wrack and flotsam, and then he beached Trader. He did not often beach her, but he wanted us to scrape her hull before going back to Denmark, and a beached ship made it easier to load human cargo, and so we ran her ashore and I saw that the slave pens had been rebuilt and that the ruined monastery had a thatched roof again. All was as it was.

Sverri made us wear slave collars that were chained together so we could not escape and then, while he crossed the salt-marsh and climbed to the monastery, we scraped the exposed hull with stones. Finan sang in his native Irish as he worked, but sometimes he would throw me a crooked grin. “Tear the caulking out, Osbert,” he suggested.

“So we sink?”

“Aye, but Sverri sinks with us.”

“Let him live so we can kill him,” I said.

“And we will kill him,” Finan said.

“Never give up hope, eh?”

“I dreamed it,” Finan said. “I’ve dreamed it three times since the red ship came.”

“But the red ship’s gone,” I said.

“We’ll kill him. I promise you. I’ll dance in his guts, I will.”

The tide had been at its height at midday so all afternoon it fell until Trader was stranded high above the fretting waves, and she could not be refloated until long after dark. Sverri was always uneasy when his ship was ashore and I knew he would want to load his cargo that same day and then refloat the ship on the night’s tide. He had an anchor ready so that, in the dark, we could push off from the beach and moor in the river’s center and be ready to leave the river at first light.

He purchased thirty-three slaves. The youngest were five or six years old, the oldest were perhaps seventeen or eighteen, and they were all women and children, not a man among them. We had finished cleaning the hull and were squatting on the beach when they arrived, and we stared at the women with the hungry eyes of men denied partners. The slaves were weeping, so it was hard to tell if any were pretty. They were weeping because they were slaves, and because they had been stolen from their own land, and because they feared the sea, and because they feared us. A dozen armed men rode behind them. I recognized none of them. Sverri walked down the manacled line, examining the children’s teeth and pulling down the women’s dresses to examine their breasts. “The red-haired one will fetch a good price,” one of the armed men called to Sverri.

“So will they all.”

“I humped her last night,” the man said, “so perhaps she’s carrying my baby, eh? You’ll get two slaves for the price of one, you lucky bastard.”

The slaves were already shackled and Sverri had been forced to pay for those manacles and chains, just as he had to buy food and ale to keep the thirty-three Scots alive on their voyage to Jutland. We had to fetch those provisions from the monastery and so Sverri led us back across the salt-marsh, over the stream, and up to the fallen stone cross where a wagon and six mounted men waited. The wagon had barrels of ale, tubs of salt herring and smoked eels, and a sack of apples. Sverri bit into an apple, made a wry face, and spat out the mouthful. “Worm- ridden,” he complained and tossed the remnants to us, and I managed to snatch it out of the air despite everyone else reaching for it. I broke it in half and gave one portion to Finan. “They’ll fight over a wormy apple,” Sverri jeered, then spilled a bag of coins onto the wagon bed. “Kneel, you bastards,” he snarled at us as a seventh horseman rode toward the wagon.

We knelt in obeisance to the newcomer. “We must test the coins,” the newcomer said and I recognized the voice and looked up and saw Sven the One-Eyed.

And he looked at me.

I dropped my gaze and bit into the apple.

“Frankish deniers,” Sverri said proudly, offering some of the silver coins to Sven.

Sven did not take them. He was staring at me. “Who is that?” he demanded.

Sverri looked at me. “Osbert,” he said. He selected some more coins. “These are Alfred’s pennies,” he said, holding them out to Sven.

“Osbert?” Sven said. He still gazed at me. I did not look like Uhtred of Bebbanburg. My face had new scars, my nose was broken, my uncombed hair was a great tangled thatch, my beard was ragged, and my skin was as dark as pickled wood, but still he stared at me. “Come here, Osbert,” he said.

I could not go far, because the neck chain held me close to the other oarsmen, but I stood and shuffled towards him and knelt again because I was a slave and he was a lord.

“Look at me,” he snarled.

I obeyed, staring into his one eye, and I saw he was dressed in fine mail and had a fine cloak and was mounted on a fine horse. I made my right cheek quiver and I dribbled as if I were halfway mad and I grinned as though I were pleased to see him and I bobbed my head compulsively and he must have decided I was just another ruined half-mad slave and he waved me away and took the coins from Sverri. They haggled, but at last enough coins were accepted as good silver, and we oarsmen were ordered to carry the barrels and tubs down to the ship.

Sverri clouted me over the shoulders as we walked. “What were you doing?”

“Doing, master?”

“Shaking like an idiot. Dribbling.”

“I think I’m falling ill, master.”

“Did you know that man?”

“No, lord.”

Sverri was suspicious of me, but he could learn nothing, and he left me alone as we heaved the barrels onto Trader that was still half stranded on the beach. But I did not shake or dribble as we stowed the provisions, and Sverri knew something was amiss and he thought about it further and then hit me again as the answer came to him. “You came from here, didn’t you?”

“Did I, lord?”

He hit me again, harder, and the other slaves watched. They knew a wounded animal when they saw one and only Finan had any sympathy for me, but he was helpless. “You came from here,” Sverri said. “How could I have forgotten that? This is where you were given to me.” He pointed toward Sven who was across the marsh on the ruin-crowned hill. “What’s Sven the One-Eyed to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”