cups of your skulls. So you have a simple choice. If you value your lives then you’ll leave. Otherwise I can promise you only death.’
‘You lie,’ Wace said. ‘You have no friends coming to lend their swords in your support.’
‘Believe what you will,’ Haakon said, ‘so long as you’re prepared to wager your life on it. I have given you my advice, for whatever it might be worth. I leave it to you to decide whether or not you heed it.’
With that once more he smiled that humourless smile, then turned and spurred his steed into a canter, followed by his retainers, and by Oswynn, who cast a desperate glance over her shoulder, holding my gaze for as long as she was able as they led her away, back across the bridge, across the valley, up towards the gates of the iron fortress.
‘I’ll come for you,’ I called after her, using the English tongue. ‘I swear it, Oswynn, I’ll come for you!’
I didn’t know whether, above the wind and the thudding of hooves upon turf, she managed to hear me, but I hoped she did.
‘He’s bluffing,’ Wace said later, when we had returned to the beach where the crews of both ships had set up camp, and spoken to the others. ‘He must be.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Eudo asked as he tore off another hunk of bread and crammed it into his mouth. The sun was high and we hadn’t eaten since daybreak, but I couldn’t so much as think about food. Seeing Oswynn, only to have her taken away yet again, had left me feeling empty and despondent.
‘If Haakon knew he had help on the way, why would he care to warn us?’ Wace asked. ‘Why not let those allies of his come, and try to catch us by surprise?’
‘Because he has nothing to gain by attacking us,’ I said. ‘If he can make us leave without having to risk battle, so much the better as far as he’s concerned. He’s made it clear that whatever our quarrels with him, he has no interest in us. Unless we come assaulting Jarnborg’s walls, there’s no pressing reason why he or his friends need cross swords with us at all.’
Like his countryman Snorri, Haakon was proving to be a cautious one, far from the reckless adventurer that I had expected. Undoubtedly I could have learnt much from his example, were I not so intent on killing him. As it was, I was wondering only how we might take advantage of that caution to bring about his downfall.
‘I think he’d prefer to destroy us if he can, rather than risk the possibility that we might return in the spring with an even larger fleet,’ said Magnus. ‘For that reason I’m inclined to agree with Wace.’
That was the first he had said in a long while. No doubt he was still thinking about those crags and that palisade, and whether there was any way of scaling them, without any siege engines or ladders, that wouldn’t cost the lives of half our retinue. As too was I.
‘What I don’t understand’, Eudo said, ‘is why he should feel the need to bluff at all, assuming he has the strength in numbers that we think he has.’
I mulled over that for a few moments, and then it came to me, and I gave a laugh. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That’s it exactly.’
For Eudo had as good as answered his own question. Haakon must be worried to some extent about his ability to defend his stronghold, or else surely he would not resort to such ruses. Did that mean his defences were perhaps not quite as sound as we had supposed?
To begin with Eudo gave me a strange look, but then he too must have realised, since he began to smile, and Wace and Magnus and Ælfhelm as well.
Four longships we had seen drawn up on the sand in the bay beneath Jarnborg at the north of this island. We’d assumed that meant he had four full ships’ crews at his disposal, but what if that weren’t the case? What if he didn’t have the ten score spears I’d hazarded, but only half that number?
Naturally all this was guesswork, and didn’t mean that Jarnborg was ours for the taking, not at all. A mere thirty spears could probably hold its gates, so strong was its position upon the promontory. But it all helped add to my conviction that, providing we could only find a way inside, we could do this. We might have struggled to hold our own against two hundred, but against a hundred, anything was possible.
Confidence. As so often, it came down to that. Haakon was trying to play on our doubts, to make us lose heart, but it hadn’t worked, and in so doing he had betrayed his own unease.
‘What do we do next, then?’ Magnus asked.
I considered. ‘If he’s bluffing, then nothing has changed as far as we’re concerned, so there’s no reason why we should go anywhere.’
‘And if he’s telling the truth?’
‘Then we know we have only a few days in which to make our assault, if we’re to do it at all, before his allies arrive.’
‘A few days?’ Ælfhelm asked. ‘How can we possibly defeat him in that time?’
He was right to have his misgivings, and yet a new sense of purpose had stirred within me, and I was not to be discouraged. ‘We’ll find a way,’ I answered.
We had made it this far, after all: further than I would have dared imagine was possible even a couple of short months ago, during the struggle for the Isle. Back then I’d all but given up hope of finding Oswynn again in this life, and this morning I had seen her with my own eyes.
‘One thing’s for certain,’ said Aubert, who must have overheard our conversation. ‘We won’t be going anywhere this afternoon.’
‘Why not?’ Eudo asked.
‘The winds have been gusting hard all morning and I’ve watched the waves growing choppier by the hour. There’s a gale on its way. Trust someone who’s spent more years out on the sea than you’ve even lived.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘we’d better make use of the time we have, and see if we can find Jarnborg’s weakness.’
Provided, that was, that it had one.
As unlikely as an attack by Haakon seemed, we nevertheless took care to post sentries along the ridge that overlooked our landing place, as well as further inland, so that those back at the ships would have plenty of warning if indeed he came. Then, while Magnus took a handful of men with him to try to get closer to Jarnborg, I set off with Serlo and Pons and Godric to learn what we could from the folk who lived close at hand: those who did not flee at the first sight of us, and whose speech Eithne could understand. I’d brought her with us, thinking she might be familiar with whatever tongue was spoken in these parts, which she was, but only barely.
‘I can only understand half of what they’re saying,’ she explained to me after we’d managed to accost a grey-bearded cowherd, whose name we learnt was Tadc, and his trembling, bone-thin wife, Aife. ‘Some of the words they use are unknown to me, and they have a strange accent.’
‘What do they know about the fort?’ I asked.
Eithne put the question to them, and I sensed her frustration both in her voice and in the set of her lips. Although I couldn’t understand her tongue, I nevertheless recognised the name of Haakon’s stronghold, at the mention of which Tadc and Aife suddenly froze, their eyes wide, before both began to babble at the same time, talking over one another, gesturing wildly with spindly fingers towards the north and all the while shaking their heads.
‘They dare not so much as set foot upon its slopes, or come within an arrow’s flight of the bay where he keeps his ships,’ Eithne said. ‘They are frightened of Haakon and his fellow warriors, with their pagan amulets and their foreign speech. He asks them for payment and they give him what he demands, but otherwise he ignores them, and they are happy enough at that. They have no reason to venture anywhere near his stronghold.’
‘So they rarely meet Haakon or his men?’
I waited, trying my hardest to remain patient while Eithne attempted first to make herself understood and then in turn to understand the answers they gave.
‘The only time they ever speak to them is when they come to collect each month’s tribute,’ she said. ‘Most days a party comes down from the fort to collect water from the spring, although no one dares disturb them.’
‘What spring?’ I asked.
Eithne translated for me, and after a few moments both husband and wife pointed towards a copse that stood on a rise some distance to the north, which I reckoned could be little more than half a mile from Jarnborg’s gates, if that.
‘Amidst those trees,’ Eithne said. ‘They come twice every day, perhaps an hour or so after first light, while the fog still lingers, and again at dusk, and lately a third time as well, around midday.’
