make ourselves rich and sail back to the Uisc where we could pretend we had only been patrolling the coast, but on our second dawn under the lee of that high cliff, as the wind subsided and the rain dropped to a chill drizzle, a ship appeared about the eastern spit of land.
'Shields!' Leofric shouted, and the men, cold and unhappy, found their weapons and lined the ship's side.
The ship was smaller than ours, much smaller. She was squat, high-bowed, with a stumpy mast holding a wide yard on which a dirty sail was furled. A half-dozen oarsmen manned her, and the steersman was bringing her directly towards Fyrdraca, and then, as she came closer and as her small bows broke the water white, I saw a green bough had been tied to her short mast.
'They want to talk,' I said.
'Let's hope they want to buy,' Leofric grumbled.
There was a priest in the small ship. I did not know he was a priest at first, for he looked as ragged as any of the crewmen, but he shouted that he wished to speak with us, and he spoke Danish, though not well, and I let the boat come up on the flank protected from the wind where her crewmen gazed up at a row of armed men holding shields. Cenwulf and I pulled the priest over our side. Two other men wanted to follow, but Leofric threatened them with a spear and they dropped back and the smaller ship drew away to wait while the priest spoke with us.
He was called Father Mardoc and, once he was aboard and sitting wetly on one of Fyrdraca's rowing benches, I saw the crucifix about his neck.
'I hate Christians,' I said, 'so why should we not feed you to Njord?'
He ignored that, or perhaps he did not know that Njord was one of the sea gods. 'I bring you a gift,'
he said, 'from my master,' and he produced, from beneath his cloak, two battered arm rings.
I took them. They were poor things, mere ringlets of copper, old, filthy with verdigris and of almost no value, and for a moment I was tempted to toss them scornfully into the sea, but reckoned our voyage had made such small profit that even those scabby treasures must be kept.
'Who is your master?' I asked.
‘King Peredur.'
I almost laughed. King Peredur? A man can expect a king to be famous, but I had never heard of Peredur which suggested he was little more than a local chieftain with a high-sounding title.
'And why does this Peredur,' I asked, 'send me miserable gifts?'
Father Mardoc still did not know my name and was too frightened to ask it. He was surrounded by men in leather, men in mail, and by shields and swords, axes and spears, and he believed all of its were Danes for I had ordered any of Fyrdraca's crew who wore crosses or crucifixes to hide them beneath their clothes. Only Haesten and I spoke, and if Father Mardoc thought that strange he did not say anything of it, instead he told me how his lord, King Peredur, had been treacherously attacked by a neighbour called Callyn, and Callyn's forces had taken a high fort close to the sea and Peredur would pay us well if we were to help him recapture the fort that was called Dreyndynas.
I sent Father Mardoc to sit in the Fyrdraca's bow while we talked about his request. Some things were obvious. Being paid well did not mean we would become rich, but that Peredur would try to fob us off with as little as possible and, most likely, having given it to us he would then try to take it back by killing us all.
'What we should do,' Leofric advised, 'is find this man Callyn and see what he'll pay us.'
Which was good enough advice except none of us knew how to find Callyn, whom we later learned was King Callyn, which did not mean much for any man with a following of more than fifty armed men called himself a king in Cornwalum, and so I went to the Fyrdraca's bows and talked with Father Mardoc again, and he told me that Dreyndynas was a high fort, built by the old people, and that it guarded the road eastwards, and so long as Callyn held the fort, so long were Peredur's people trapped in their lands.
‘You have ships,' I pointed out.
‘And Callyn has ships,' he said, 'and we cannot take cattle in ships.'
'Cattle?'
'We need to sell cattle to live,' he said.
So Callyn had surrounded Peredur and we represented a chance to tip the balance in this little war.
'So how much will your king pay us?' I asked.
'A hundred pieces of silver,' he said.
I drew Serpent-Breath. 'I worship the real gods,' I told him, 'and I am a particular servant of Hoder, and Hoder likes blood and I have given him none in many days.'
Father Mardoc looked terrified, which was sensible of him. He was a young man, though it was hard to tell for his hair and beard were so thick that most of the time he was just a broken nose and pair of eyes surrounded by a greasy black tangle. He told me he had learned to speak Danish when he had been enslaved by a chieftain called Godfred, but that he had managed to escape when Godfred raided the Sillans, islands that lay well out in the western sea-wastes.
'Is there any wealth in the Sillans?' I asked him.
I had heard of the islands, though some men claimed they were mythical and others said the islands came and went with the moons, but Father Mardoc said they existed and were called the Isles of
the Dead.
'So no one lives there?' I asked.
'Some folk do,' he said, 'but the dead have their houses there.'
'Do they have wealth as well?'
'Your ships have taken it all,' he said. This was after he had promised me that Peredur would be more
