I was not even sure that the approaching ship was the one we wanted, but she did have a mast, and no ship with a mast could get under the bridge, so any that did come this far upriver were trying to reach one of the very few wharves that lay this close to where the Temes foamed and fell between the bridge piers.
Finan and I went back into the warehouse where Benedetta was playing with the smaller children. Their laughter, I thought, was a rare sound in this grim place and it was a pity to interrupt it. I clapped my hands. ‘Everyone be quiet now! Not a sound! Beornoth! If any of those bastards makes a noise you can kill them.’ I meant the four captured guards who were shackled inside the smallest cage. Beornoth would keep the captives quiet, while Father Oda and Benedetta would make sure that none of the children or freed slaves made any noise.
Finan and I stood just behind the half-open door that led to the wharf. Five men, all in mail and all with swords, waited behind us. I took a pace forward, still in shadow, and saw the mast coming closer and then the ship’s bows came into sight. A small wooden cross was mounted on her prow. The ship was making painfully slow headway against the tide and the fierce current. ‘They’re tired,’ Finan said of the oarsmen.
‘They’ve come a long way.’
‘Poor bastards,’ he said, remembering our own time chained to the benches when we had hauled on oar looms with calloused hands and tried not to catch the eyes of the men carrying whips. ‘But that’s our ship,’ Finan added grimly.
It was plainly a slave-driven ship because two men with whips were stalking between the benches. Three more men stood at the stern, where one, a fair-haired man wearing high boots and a white jerkin, handled the steering-oar. The other two crewmen were standing at the prow. One was holding a horn, the other had a looped berthing line. ‘Seven men,’ Finan said.
I grunted, watching as the ship turned towards the empty wharf. The river was flowing through the bridge arches with violent speed, heaping up on the far side, then churning white as it seethed through the gaps. The speed of the current caught the steersman by surprise and the ship was being swept back downriver. ‘Pull, you bastards!’ the steersman shouted, and the two men with whips lashed the rowers’ backs. They were too late. The ship drifted out of sight behind the wall and it was a minute or two before it came back into view. The slaves were pulling harder now, encouraged by the whips, and the steersman had the sense to aim his prow well upriver of the wharf. ‘Pull!’ he shouted. ‘Pull!’ The horn sounded, demanding help, but we stayed in the doorway’s deep shadow.
The whips cracked, the rowers heaved on their long oars, and the ship surged towards the wharf, but even so it was being driven downstream. ‘Pull!’ the steersman screamed. The oar-blades dipped, they hauled, and the ship came into the gap between the wreck and the empty wharf, but again the steersman had misjudged, and he was now too far from the empty wharf and the current was driving him back towards the wrecked ship. ‘Bring in the oars!’ he bellowed, not wanting his precious blades splintered against the wreck.
Finan chuckled. The Irishman was no seaman, but he recognised a clumsy display of ship handling when he saw it. The slaving ship drifted and struck, pinned against the wreck, and with no one on the wharf to take the lines. ‘Ælfrin!’ the steersman shouted towards us. ‘Ælfrin, you lazy bastard! Come here!’ Ælfrin, we had learned, had commanded the guards left at the yard and was the first man I had killed. By now his body was somewhere downriver, presumably stranded on a mudbank where the gulls would be feasting on his bloated corpse.
One man had to struggle across the half sunken wreck, taking the bitter end of a line, then walk around to the empty wharf where he hauled the ship’s bow into the western wharf. He tied off the line, then caught a second line hurled from the stern and so pulled the ship into its berth. The oarsmen were slumped on their benches. I could see blood on some backs. My own back still carried the scars.
‘Ælfrin!’ the steersman bellowed towards us, and again there was no answer. I heard a muttered curse, then the clattering sound of heavy oars being stowed amidships. One of the crewmen was unshackling the rowers on the two benches nearest the prow and I remembered my days on the Trader, the slave-driven ship where Finan and I had been chained to a bench, and how cautious the crew was when it came time to unshackle us. We were released two at a time and escorted by men with whips and swords to whatever hovel would be our home. It seemed Gunnald’s son was just as cautious. Another crewman made sure the two berthing lines were well secured, then added a third.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
I had deliberately waited until the ship was firmly tied to the wharf so it could not back out into the current when the crew saw us. Now, with three lines lashed down, it was too late for them to escape. Nor did they even try. The fair-haired man who had made such a mess of docking the ship just stood at the stern and stared at us. ‘Who are you?’ he shouted.
‘Lord Varin’s men,’ I called back, strolling down the wharf.
‘Who in God’s name is Lord Varin?’
‘The man who captured the city,’ I said, ‘welcome
