‘Halfdan,’ I still crouched close to the shivering Gunnald, ‘liked to rape his slaves. Do you rape your slaves?’
Gunnald, terrified, retained enough cunning to understand that I had this strange dislike of slavers raping their own property. ‘No, lord,’ he lied.
‘I can’t hear you,’ I said, standing again, this time taking his abandoned sword with me.
‘No, lord!’
‘So you treat your slaves well?’
‘Yes, lord. I do, lord!’ He sounded frantic now.
‘I am glad to hear it,’ I said. I tossed Gunnald’s sword to Finan, then drew Wasp-Sting and held the seax hilt first towards Benedetta. ‘You’ll find this easier,’ I told her.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Father Oda began to say something, then looked at my face and thought better of it. ‘One last thing,’ I said, and turned back to the kneeling Gunnald. I stood behind him and dragged the ragged mail coat over his head so that all he wore was a thin woollen robe. When the coat was free of his face and he could see again, he gasped because Benedetta had pushed back her hood. He stammered something, then, as he saw the hatred on her face and the blade in her hand, the stammering turned into a moan. ‘You two know each other, I think,’ I said.
Gunnald’s mouth still moved, or at least quivered, but no sound came now. Benedetta turned the sword so that the attic’s small light glinted on the steel. ‘No, lord!’ Gunnald managed to say in a panicked voice as he shuffled backwards. I kicked him hard, he went still, then moaned again as his bladder gave way.
‘Porco!’ Benedetta spat at him.
‘Father Oda,’ I said, ‘come downstairs with us. Vidarr, you stay here.’
‘Of course, lord.’
‘Don’t interfere. Just make sure it’s a fair fight.’
‘A fair fight, lord?’ Vidarr asked, puzzled.
‘He’s got a cock, she’s got a sword. Seems fair to me.’ I smiled at Benedetta. ‘There’s no hurry. We won’t leave for a while. Come, Finan! You, girl!’ I looked at the bed. ‘Are you dressed?’ She nodded. ‘Then come!’
There was a coiled whip made of braided leather hanging on a nail driven into the newel post of the stairs. I took it and saw dried blood crusted in the whip’s tip. I tossed the whip to Vidarr, then went downstairs.
Leaving Benedetta, Vidarr, and Gunnald in the attic.
And Gunnald was screaming before I reached the middle floor.
‘The church,’ Father Oda said to me when we reached the bottom of the two stairways, ‘does not condone slavery, lord.’
‘Yet I’ve known churchmen own slaves.’
‘It is not seemly,’ he said, ‘yet the scriptures do not forbid it.’
‘What are you telling me, father?’
He flinched as another scream sounded, this one more terrible than any that had assaulted our ears as we came downstairs. ‘Well done, girl,’ Finan muttered.
‘Vengeance must belong to God,’ Father Oda said, ‘and only to God.’
‘Your god,’ I said harshly.
He flinched again. ‘In his epistle to the Romans,’ the priest said, ‘Paul tells us to leave revenge to the Lord.’
‘The lord took his time revenging Benedetta,’ I said.
‘And the fat bastard deserves it, father,’ Finan put in.
‘I don’t doubt it, but by encouraging her,’ he was looking at me now, ‘you have encouraged her to commit a mortal sin.’
‘Then you can shrive her,’ I said curtly.
‘She is a fragile woman,’ Oda said, ‘and I would not burden her fragility with a sin that separates her from Christ’s grace.’
‘She’s stronger than you think,’ I said.
‘She is a woman!’ he said sternly. ‘And women are the weaker vessels. I was at fault,’ he paused, plainly disturbed, ‘and I should have stopped her. If the man deserved death then it should have been at your hands, not hers.’
He was right, of course. I did not doubt that Gunnald deserved death for a multitude of crimes, but what I had just unleashed in the slaver’s attic was cruel. I had condemned him to a long, terrible, and painful death. I could have satisfied justice with a swift killing, as swift as the one I had given Halfdan so many years before, but I had chosen cruelty instead. Why? Because I knew that choice would please Benedetta. Another scream sounded, faded, grew again. ‘It is not seemly,’ Father Oda repeated, ‘that you have put that woman’s mortal soul at risk!’ He spoke fervently and I wondered if the Danish priest was attracted to Benedetta and that thought gave me a pulse of jealousy. She was beautiful, undeniably beautiful, but there was a darkness in that beauty and an anger in her soul. I told myself she was ridding herself of that shadow with Wasp-Sting.
‘You pray for her, father,’ I said dismissively, ‘and I’m going to look at the ship that will take us home.’ I led Finan into the early sunlight. Gunnald’s screams had faded and the loudest noise came from the gulls fighting over a carcass stranded on the mud at the far side of the Temes. A small breeze, too small to be of any use to a sailor, rippled the river. Gunnald, while he still lived, owned two wharves, both protected by walls of wooden staves. His ship was on the left-hand wharf, a long, big-bellied ship, made for distant voyages. She looked heavy. Her timbers were dark, almost pitch-black, and weed was thick at her waterline. A sail was furled on the yard, but its ragged cloth was crusted with bird droppings. I
