of men make the climb, using the cover of darkness?’
‘By night?’ Magnus asked scornfully. ‘You’d be as like to slip and break your neck. Besides, even if you did manage to make the ascent, how then would you get inside the fort? The gate is the only way in or out, so far as I know.’
That was a problem, certainly, and one to which it was hard to see a solution. It looked as if our only hope, then, was to try and draw Haakon out. But how?
One thing was for certain. We needed to see this place for ourselves, and try to ascertain just how many men he had, so that we knew exactly how strong a foe we faced. Only then could we start thinking properly about a strategy that would either get us inside Jarnborg, or else entice them out, so that we could give battle on our own terms.
‘If there’s a way, we’ll find it,’ I said, and wished that I felt more sure of that. We were close, so close, yet victory still seemed a distant dream. To think that Oswynn, my Oswynn, was only a few leagues from where we now lay at anchor. How many times this past year had I dreamt of holding her, embracing her? Now she was almost within reach, and yet at that moment she seemed further away than ever.
Tiredness clawed at my eyes that night but I could not sleep. Instead I lay awake, shivering beneath a swathe of winter blankets, my breath misting in the light of the waning moon as I thought of her and tried to imagine her lying beside me, the two of us sharing in the warmth of each other’s bodies. For some reason, though, her face would not come to my mind, and that troubled me.
Somewhere towards the prow a man began to snore. I tried to bury my head in the blankets to shut out the noise, but even then I couldn’t settle. It wasn’t just that the deck was hard and the cloth coarse and uncomfortable. My mind was filled with a thousand knotted thoughts that I could not tease apart. What if we failed? What if, in spite of all our efforts, this expedition came to naught? What if Jarnborg remained unbroken, Haakon still lived, and we were forced to leave this place, bruised and bloodied, humbled and empty-handed? What was to prevent Pons and Serlo forswearing their oaths and leaving my service? I could hardly expect them to remain bound to me for ever if I had nothing to offer them, any more than Robert could expect me to obediently follow him everywhere he led. But if my sworn swords deserted me, and my friends sailed back to England, what would become of me? Where would I go? If revenge and victory were denied me, and if I could not have Oswynn, what was there left for me?
Only then, as I lay there, eyes closed in the darkness, waiting for sleep that would not come, did I truly understand what it was I’d committed myself to. This was more than a simple feud over women and honour between rival warlords on the fringes of Christendom. What tattered scraps remained of my pride, my dignity, my reputation depended for their survival or the success of this endeavour. It was I who had started us all on this road. My shoulders would bear the responsibility if we failed, and mine alone.
But how would I be able to go on, knowing that I’d given my all and still it had been for nothing? Although I wouldn’t admit it to any of the others, in that moment I saw that, for me, there were only two ways this could possibly end. Nothing less than success would be enough for me.
It was victory, or it was death.
Eventually sleep did take me, although it was a fitful sleep in which fragments of half-formed dreams bled one into another. I saw the faces of old sword-brothers long dead, whose names no longer came to mind. I walked through places long forgotten, places I hadn’t visited since my youth: the woodlands near to the castle at Commines where the other boys and I had played and practised ambushes and, later, taken girls for secret trysts; the abbey in Brittany where I had grown up under the care of the monks. And I saw Robert, the first by that name to whom I had been sworn, but he was an old man, wrinkled and hoary-haired, which even in the midst of the dream I thought strange, since he had only been around forty years or so when he met his end. He would hardly meet my gaze, would utter not a word, and I didn’t understand why.
I woke still bone-tired and with a chill in every corner of my body, to a morning veiled by a white sea-mist that made it hard to see more than fifty paces.
‘It’s like this every morning in these parts,’ Magnus told me as we huddled in our cloaks, waiting for it to clear.
‘Every morning?’ I asked.
‘All through the winter, from when the leaves begin to fall to when the first green shoots burst through the soil. And the winters last a long time this far north.’
It must have been another hour before the fog had cleared enough for us to raise the stone rings that served as anchors and, on the ebbing tide, leave the shelter of that harbour.
And so we set out for the isle without a name, Haakon’s isle, keeping close formation as we watched that land carefully for any signs of the enemy. I glimpsed farmsteads, barns, woods, sheep-pens and pastures, cairns and burial mounds, but no scouts or sentries, until we passed a headland where stood the crumbled ruins of an old stone roundhouse. There, on the cliff-top, waited a rider mounted on a white horse. He watched us as we drew closer, no doubt counting the number of oars on both ships and trying to guess from that how many we numbered, until suddenly he kicked on and galloped away, no doubt to Jarnborg, to tell his lord the news.
If Haakon didn’t already know we were coming for him, he would shortly.
Not long after that we came upon the cove Magnus had mentioned. As expected, there was no one to prevent us landing there, and so we ran both ships aground on the sand next to one another, close to where a narrow rivulet emptied into the sea. The day was silent, save for the plaintive cries of a pair of buzzards as they circled over a small clump of trees that stood a little way to the south, and the cawing of rooks gathered in its branches.
‘I don’t like this, lord,’ Serlo, ever the morose one, muttered. We jumped down from the ship, our boots sinking into the wet sand, and trudged up towards dry land. ‘He’s plotting something. He has to be.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Or else our arrival has frightened him.’
I didn’t believe that, not for a moment, but didn’t want to admit that the silence unnerved me too. Did Haakon have a war-party hiding in that copse, waiting for the right moment to attack us? It seemed unlikely, unless they were keeping very still indeed so as not to disturb those rooks. It didn’t look big enough to hide more than fifty men, and we had more than twice that number. Not all of those were warriors, of course, but every oarsman and deck-hand knew how to handle a spear or a sword. It was no great army, not by any means, but it wasn’t a force to be dismissed readily either. I only hoped it was enough.
After holding another council, we agreed that a small group should go on ahead to scout out the island and see if we could get close enough to Jarnborg to be able to ascertain its strength. Leaving Serlo, Pons and Godric with Aubert and most of the rest of our party to help defend the ships in the event that the enemy did come, Wace, Eudo and I donned hauberks and helmets, knives and swords and shields. Together with Magnus and ten of his huscarls, Ælfhelm among them, we set out across the grassy tussocks and the outcrops of grey, lichen- covered stone that jutted from the earth, making our way towards higher ground where we might gain a better view of our surroundings.
In all that time we saw no more sign of our enemy, and none of the local folk dared approach when they saw us, instead running in from the fields to the safety of their homes. Probably they thought we were raiders, come to steal their flocks and their women. We left them alone, following Magnus as he led us half marching, half scrambling over that stony, broken land, until we descended towards a broad, flat plain that was crossed by countless tiny streams and hemmed in on both sides by high crags, and which ran for about a mile towards the sea. A few scattered barns and round wattle-and-thatch hovels lay close to the shore, where spindly-legged wading birds dug their bills into the mud in search of worms, and where a number of small fishing boats together with four longships were beached.
‘Those are Haakon’s ships, for certain,’ Magnus said, his expression darker than ever I had seen it. ‘I’d recognise them anywhere.’
By my reckoning, four longships meant at least two hundred men, and possibly as many as two hundred and fifty. I guessed the true number was smaller rather than larger, since each one would be an additional burden on his storehouses, representing a mouth that had to be fed and kept well watered, but I couldn’t be sure.
‘We’ve been seen,’ Wace said, and pointed up towards the crags on the northern side of that valley, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, where the same rider on the same white horse had stopped and seemed to be gazing down towards us. At least, I assumed it was the same man.
He must have known we were looking at him, but strangely he did not bolt at once as I might have
