Sword Song

They spoke English, but in such a strange way that it was like a foreign language, yet I understood them to say that Fughelness was a barren island in a waste of marshes and creeks. A place of birds, emptiness, and a few poor folk who lived in the mud by trapping birds, catching eels, and netting fish. They said Olaf had captured them a week before and forced them to his rowing benches. There had been eleven of them, but six had died in the fury of Finan’s assault before these survivors had managed to convince my men that they were prisoners, not enemies.

We stripped the enemy of everything, then piled their mail, weapons, arm rings, and clothes at the foot of Sea-Eagle’s mast. In time we would divide those spoils. Each man would receive one share, Finan would take three, and I would take five. I was supposed to yield one third to Alfred and another third to Bishop Erkenwald, but I rarely gave them the plunder I took in battle.

We threw the naked dead into the trading ship where they made a grisly cargo of blood-spattered bodies. I remember thinking how white those bodies looked, yet how dark their faces were. A cloud of gulls screamed at us, wanting to come down and peck the corpses, but the birds were too nervous of our proximity to dare try. By now the ship that had been coming downtide from the west had reached us. She was a fine fighting ship, her bow crowned with a dragon’s head, her stern showing a wolf’s head and her masthead decorated with a raven wind- vane. She was one of the two warships we had captured in Lundene and Ralla had christened her Sword of the Lord. Alfred would have approved. She slewed to a stop and Ralla, her shipmaster, cupped his hands. “Well done!”

“We lost three men,” I called back. All three had died in the fight against Olaf’s boarders, and those men we carried aboard Sea-Eagle. I would have dropped them into the sea and let them sink to the seagod’s embrace, but they were Christians and their friends wanted them carried back to a Christian graveyard in Lundene.

“You want me to tow her?” Ralla shouted, gesturing at the trading ship.

I said yes, and there was a pause while he fixed a line to the stem-post of the cargo ship. Then, in consort, we rowed northward across the estuary of the Temes. The gulls, emboldened now, were plucking at the dead men’s eyes.

It was close to midday and the tide had gone slack. The estuary heaved oily and sluggish under the high sun as we rowed slowly, conserving our strength, sliding across the sun-silvered sea. And slowly, too, the estuary’s northern shore came into view.

Low hills shimmered in the day’s heat. I had rowed that shore before and knew that wooded hills lay beyond a flat shelf of waterlogged land. Ralla, who knew the coast much better than I, guided us, and I memorized the landmarks as we approached. I noted a slightly higher hill, a bluff and a clump of trees, and I knew I would see those things again because we were rowing our ships toward Beamfleot. This was the den of sea-wolves, the sea- serpent’s haunt, Sigefrid’s refuge.

This was also the old kingdom of the East Saxons, a kingdom that had long vanished, though ancient stories said they had once been feared. They had been a sea-people, raiders, but the Angles to their north had conquered them and now this coast was a part of Guthrum’s realm, East Anglia.

It was a lawless coast, far from Guthrum’s capital. Here, in the creeks that dried at low tide, ships could wait and, as the tide rose, they could slip out of their inlets to raid the merchants whose goods were carried up the Temes. This was a pirates’ nest, and here Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten had their camp.

They must have seen us approach, but what did they see? They saw the Sea- Eagle, one of their own ships, and with her another Danish ship, both boats proudly decorated with beast-heads. They saw a third ship, a tubby cargo ship, and would have assumed Olaf was returning from a successful foray. They would have thought Sword of the Lord a Northmen’s ship newly come to England. In short, they saw us, but they suspected nothing.

As we neared the land I ordered the beast-heads taken from stern and stem-posts. Such things were never left on display as a boat entered its home waters, for the animals were there to frighten hostile spirits and Olaf would have assumed that the spirits inhabiting the creeks at Beamfleot were friendly, and he would have been loath to frighten them. And so the watchers from Sigefrid’s camp saw the carved heads heaved off and they would have thought we were friends rowing homeward.

And I stared at that shore, knowing that fate would bring me back, and I touched the hilt of Serpent-Breath, for she had a fate too, and I knew she would come to this place again. This was a place for my sword to sing.

Beamfleot lay beneath a hill that sloped steeply down to the creek. One of the fishermen, a younger man who seemed blessed with more wit than his companions, stood beside me and named the places as I pointed at them. The settlement beneath the hill, he confirmed, was Beamfleot, and the creek he insisted was a river, the Hothlege. Beamfleot lay on the Hothlege’s northern bank while the southern bank was a low, dark, wide and sullen island. “Caninga,” the fisherman told me.

I repeated the names, memorizing them as I memorized the land I saw.

Caninga was a sodden place, an island of marsh and reeds, wildfowl and mud. The Hothlege, which looked to me more like a creek than a river, was a tangle of mudbanks through which a channel twisted toward the hill above Beamfleot, and now, as we rounded the eastern tip of Caninga, I could see Sigefrid’s camp crowning that hill. It was a green hill, and his walls, made of earth and topped with a timber palisade, lay like a brown scar on its domed summit. The slope from his southern wall was precipitous, dropping to where a crowd of ships lay canted on the mud exposed by low tide. The Hothlege’s mouth was guarded by a ship that blocked the channel. She lay athwart the waterway, held against the tides by chains at stem and stern. One chain led to a massive post sunk on Caninga’s shore, while the other was attached to a tree that grew lonely on the smaller island that formed the northern bank of the channel’s mouth. “Two-Tree Island,” the fisherman saw where I was looking and named the islet.

“But there’s only one tree there,” I pointed out.

“In my father’s day there were two, lord.”

The tide had turned. The flood had begun, and the great waters were surging into the estuary so that our three ships were being carried toward the enemy’s camp. “Turn!” I shouted to Ralla, and saw the relief on his face, “but put the dragon’s head back first!”

And so Sigefrid’s men saw the dragon’s head replaced, and the eagle’s beaked head put high on Sea-Eagle’s stem, and they must have known something was wrong, not just because we displayed our beasts, but because we turned our ships and Ralla cut the smaller cargo boat loose. And, as they watched from their high fort, they would have seen my banner unfurled from Sea-Eagle’s mast. Gisela and her women had made that flag of the wolf’s head, and I flew it so that the watching men would know who had killed the Sea-Eagle’s crew.

Then we rowed away, pulling hard against that flooding tide. We turned south and west about Caninga, then let the strong new tide carry us upriver toward Lundene.

And the cargo ship, its hold filled with blood-laced gull-pecked corpses, rode the same tide up the creek to bump against the longship moored athwart the channel.

I had three fighting ships now while my cousin possessed fifteen. He had moved those captured boats upriver where, for all I knew, they rotted. If I had possessed ten more ships and had the crews to man them I could have taken Beamfleot, but all I had was three ships and the creek beneath the high fort was crammed with masts.

Still, I was sending a message.

That death was coming to Beamfleot.

Death visited Hrofeceastre first. Hrofeceastre was a town close to Lundene on the southern bank of the Temes estuary in the old kingdom of Cent. The Romans had made a fort there, and now a sizable town had grown in and around the old stronghold. Cent, of course, had long been a part of Wessex and Alfred had ordered the town’s defenses to be strengthened, which was easily done for the old earth walls of the Roman fort still stood, and all that had to be added was a deepening of the ditch, the making of an oak palisade, and the destruction of some buildings that were outside and too close to the ramparts. And it was well that the work had been completed because, early that summer, a great fleet of Danish ships came from Frankia. They found refuge in East Anglia, from where they sailed south, rode the tide up the Temes, and then beached their ships on the River Medw?g, the tributary on which Hrofeceastre stood. They had hoped to storm the town, sacking it with fire and terror, but the new walls and the strong garrison defied them.