The Pale Horseman Read online

  I thought Asser would translate, but the monk stayed silent.

  Iseult still stared at me and I stared back. She had flawless skin, untouched by illness, and a strong face, but sad. Sad and beautiful. Fierce and beautiful. She reminded me of Brida, the East Anglian who had been my lover and who was now with Ragnar, my friend. Brida was as full of fury as a scabbard is filled with blade, and I sensed the same in this queen who was so young and strange and dark and lovely.

  “I am Uhtred Ragnarson,” I heard myself say as I spoke again, though I had scarcely been aware of any urge to talk, “and I work miracles.”

  Why I said that I do not know. I later learned that she had no idea what I had said, for at that time the only tongue she spoke was that of the Britons, but nevertheless she seemed to understand me and she smiled. Asser caught his breath. “Be careful, Dane,” he hissed. “She is a queen.”

  “A queen,” I asked, still staring at her, “or the queen?”

  “The king is blessed with three wives,” the monk said disapprovingly.

  Iseult turned away and spoke to the king. He nodded, then gestured respectfully toward the door through which Iseult had come. She was evidently dismissed and she obediently went to the door, but paused there and gave me a last, speculative look. Then she was gone.

  And suddenly it was easy. Peredur agreed to pay us a hoard of silver. He showed us the hoard that had been hidden in a back room. There were coins, broken jewelry, battered cups, and three candleholders that had been taken from the church, and when I weighed the silver, using a balance fetched from the marketplace, I discovered there was three hundred and sixteen shillings’ worth, which was not negligible. Asser divided it into two piles, one only half the size of the other. “We shall give you the smaller portion tonight,” the monk said, “and the rest you will get when Dreyndynas is recovered.”

  “You think I am a fool?” I asked, knowing that after the fight it would be hard to get the rest of the silver.

  “You take me for one?” he retorted, knowing that if he gave us all the silver then Fyrdraca would vanish in the dawn.

  We agreed in the end that we would take the one-third now and that the other two-thirds would be carried to the battlefield so that it was easily accessible. Peredur had hoped I would leave that larger portion in his hall, and then I would have faced an uphill fight through his dung-spattered streets, and that was a fight I would have lost, and it was probably the prospect of such a battle that had stopped Callyn’s men from attacking Peredur’s hall. They hoped to starve him, or at least Asser believed that.

  “Tell me about Iseult,” I demanded of the monk when the bargaining was done.

  He sneered at that. “I can read you like a missal,” he said.

  “Whatever a missal is,” I said, pretending ignorance.

  “A book of prayers,” he said, “and you will need prayers if you touch her.” He made the sign of the cross. “She is evil,” he said vehemently.

  “She’s a queen, a young queen,” I said, “so how can she be evil?”

  “What do you know of the Britons?”

  “That they stink like stoats,” I said, “and thieve like jackdaws.”

  He gave me a sour look and, for a moment, I thought he would refuse to say more, but he swallowed his British pride. “We are Christians,” he said, “and God be thanked for that great mercy, but among our people there are still some old superstitions. Pagan ways. Iseult is part of that.”

  “What part?”

  He did not like talking about it, but he had raised the subject of Iseult’s evil and so he reluctantly explained. “She was born in the springtime,” he said, “eighteen years ago, and at her birth there was an eclipse of the sun, and the folk here are credulous fools and they believe a dark child born at the sun’s death has power. They have made her into a”—he paused, not knowing the Danish word—“a gwrach,” he said, a word that meant nothing to me. “Dewines,” he said irritably and, when I still showed incomprehension, he at last found a word. “A sorceress.”

  “A witch?”

  “And Peredur married her. Made her his shadow queen. That is what kings did with such girls. They take them into their households so they may use their power.”

  “What power?”

  “The skills the devil gives to shadow queens, of course,” he said irritably. “Peredur believes she can see the future. But it is a skill she will retain only so long as she is a virgin.”

  I laughed at that. “If you disapprove of her, monk, then I would be doing you a favor if I raped her.” He ignored that, or at least he made no reply other than to give me a harsh scowl. “Can she see the future?” I asked.

  “She saw you victorious,” he said, “and told the king he could trust you, so you tell me?”

  “Then assuredly she can see the future,” I said.

  Brother Asser sneered at that answer. “They should have strangled her with her own birth cord,” he snarled. “She is a pagan bitch, a devil’s thing, evil.”

  There was a feast that night, a feast to celebrate our pact, and I hoped Iseult would be there, but she was not. Peredur’s older wife was present, but she was a sullen, grubby creature with two weeping boils on her neck and she hardly spoke. Yet it was a surprisingly good feast. There was fish, beef, mutton, bread, ale, mead, and cheese, and while we ate Asser told me he had come from the kingdom of Dyfed, which lay north of the Sæfern Sea, and that his king, who had an impossible British name that sounded like a man coughing and spluttering, had sent him to Cornwalum to dissuade the British kings from supporting the Danes.

  I was surprised by that, so surprised that I looked away from the girls serving the food. A harpist played at the hall’s end and two of the girls swayed in time to the music as they walked. “You don’t like Danes,” I said.

  “You are pagans,” Asser said scornfully.

  “So how come you speak the pagan tongue?” I asked.

  “Because my abbot would have us send missionaries to the Danes.”

  “You should go,” I said. “It would be a quick route to heaven for you.”

  He ignored that. “I learned Danish among many other tongues,” he said loftily, “and I speak the language of the Saxons, too. And you, I think, were not born in Denmark?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your voice,” he said. “You are from Northumbria?”

  “I am from the sea,” I said.

  He shrugged. “In Northumbria,” he said severely, “the Danes have corrupted the Saxons so that they think of themselves as Danes.” He was wrong, but I was scarcely in a position to correct him. “Worse,” he went on, “they have extinguished the light of Christ.”

  “Is the light of Thor too bright for you?”

  “The West Saxons are Christians,” he said, “and it is our duty to support them, not because of a love for them, but because of our fellow love for Christ.”

  “You have met Alfred of Wessex?” I asked sourly.

  “I look forward to meeting him,” he said fervently, “for I hear he is a good Christian.”

  “I hear the same.”

  “And Christ rewards him,” Asser went on.

  “Rewards him?”

  “Christ sent the storm that destroyed the Danish fleet,” Asser said, “and Christ’s angels destroyed Ubba. That is proof of God’s power. If we fight against Alfred then we range ourselves against Christ, so we must not do it. That is my message to the kings of Cornwalum.”

  I was impressed that a British monk at the end of the land of Britain knew so much of what happened in Wessex, and I reckoned Alfred would have been pleased to hear Asser’s nonsense, though of course Alfred had sent many messengers to the British. His messengers had all been priests or monks and they had preached the gospel of their god slaughtering the Danes, and Asser had evidently taken up their message enthusiastically. “So why are you fighting Callyn?” I asked.

  “He would join the Danes,” Asser said.

  “And we’re goin
g to win,” I said, “so Callyn is sensible.”

  Asser shook his head. “God will prevail.”

  “You hope,” I said, fingering Thor’s hammer. “But if you are wrong, monk, then we’ll take Wessex and Callyn will share the spoils.”

  “Callyn will share nothing,” Asser said spitefully, “because you will kill him tomorrow.”

  The Britons have never learned to love the Saxons. Indeed they hate us, and in those years when the last English kingdom was on the edge of destruction, they could have tipped the balance by joining Guthrum. Instead they held back their sword arms, and for that the Saxons can thank the church. Men like Asser had decided that the Danish heretics were a worse enemy than English Christians, and if I were a Briton I would resent that, because the Britons might have taken back much of their lost lands if they had allied themselves with the pagan Northmen. Religion makes strange bedfellows.

  So does war, and Peredur offered Haesten and myself two of the serving girls to seal our bargain. I had sent Cenwulf back to Fyrdraca with a message for Leofric, warning him to be ready to fight in the morning, and I thought perhaps Haesten and I should retreat to the ship, but the serving girls were pretty and so we stayed, and I need not have worried for no one tried to kill us in the night, and no one even tried when Haesten and I carried the first third of the silver down to the water’s edge where a small boat carried us to our ship. “There’s twice as much as that waiting for us,” I told Leofric.

  He stirred the sack of silver with his foot. “And where were you last night?”

  “In bed with a Briton.”

  “Earsling,” he said. “So who are we fighting?”

  “A pack of savages.”

  We left ten men as ship guards. If Peredur’s men made a real effort to capture Fyrdraca then those ten would have had a hard fight, and probably a losing fight, but they had the three hostages who may or may not have been Peredur’s sons, so that was a risk we had to take, and it seemed safe enough because Peredur had assembled his army on the eastern side of the town. I say army, though it was only forty men, and I brought thirty more, and my thirty were well armed and looked ferocious in their leather. Leofric, like me, wore mail, as did half a dozen of my crewmen, and I had my fine helmet with its faceplate so I, at least, looked like a lord of battles.

  Peredur was in leather, and he had woven black horsetails into his hair and onto the twin forks of his beard so that the horsetails hung down wild and long and scary. His men were mostly armed with spears, though Peredur himself possessed a fine sword. Some of his men had shields and a few had helmets, and though I did not doubt their bravery I did not reckon them formidable. My crewmen were formidable. They had fought Danish ships off the Wessex coast and they had fought in the shield wall at Cynuit and I had no doubt that we could destroy whatever troops Callyn had placed in Dreyndynas.

  It was afternoon before we climbed the hill. We should have gone in the morning, but some of Peredur’s men were recovering from their night’s drinking, and the women of his settlement kept pulling others away, not wanting them to die, and then Peredur and his advisers huddled and talked about how they should fight the battle, though what there was to talk about I did not know. Callyn’s men were in the fort. We were outside it, so we had to assault the bastards. Nothing clever, just an attack, but they talked for a long time, and Father Mardoc said a prayer, or rather he shouted it, and then I refused to advance because the rest of the silver had not been fetched.

  It came, carried in a chest by two men, and so at last, under the afternoon sun, we climbed the eastern hill. Some women followed us, shrieking their battle screams, which was a waste of breath because the enemy was still too far away to hear them.

  “So what do we do?” Leofric asked me.

  “Form a wedge,” I guessed. “Our best men in the front rank and you and me in front of them, then kill the bastards.”

  He grimaced. “Have you ever assaulted one of the old people’s forts?”

  “Never.”

  “It can be hard,” he warned me.

  “If it’s too hard,” I said, “we’ll just kill Peredur and his men and take their silver anyway.”

  Brother Asser, his neat black robes muddied about their skirts, hurried over to me. “Your men are Saxons!” he said accusingly.

  “I hate monks,” I snarled at him. “I hate them more than I hate priests. I like killing them. I like slitting their bellies. I like watching the bastards die. Now run off and die before I cut your throat.”

  He ran off to Peredur with his news that we were Saxons. The king stared at us morosely. He had thought he had recruited a crew of Danish Vikings, and now he discovered we were West Saxons and he was not happy, so I drew Serpent-Breath and banged her blade against my limewood shield. “You want to fight this battle or not?” I asked him through Asser.

  Peredur decided he wanted to fight, or rather he wanted us to fight the battle for him, and so we slogged on up the hill, which had a couple of false crests so it was well into the afternoon before we emerged onto the long, shallow summit and could see Dreyndynas’s green turf walls on the skyline. A banner flew there. It was a triangle of cloth, supported on its pole by a small cross-staff, and the banner showed a white horse prancing on a green field.

  I stopped then. Peredur’s banner was a wolf’s tail hung from a pole. I carried none though, like most Saxons, mine would have been a rectangular flag. I only knew one people who flew triangular banners and I turned on Brother Asser as he sweated up the hill. “They’re Danes,” I accused him.

  “So?” he demanded. “I thought you were a Dane, and all the world knows the Danes will fight anyone for silver, even other Danes. But are you frightened of them, Saxon?”

  “Your mother didn’t give birth to you,” I told him, “but farted you out of her shriveled arsehole.”

  “You’ve taken Peredur’s silver,” Asser said, “so you must fight.”

  “Say one more word, monk,” I said, “and I’ll cut off your scrawny balls.” I was gazing uphill, trying to estimate numbers. Everything had changed since I had seen the white horse banner because instead of fighting against half-armed British savages we would have to take on a crew of lethal Danes, but if I was surprised by that, then the Danes were equally surprised to see us. They were crowding Dreyndynas’s wall, which was made of earth fronted with a ditch and topped with a thorn fence. It would be a hard wall to attack, I thought, especially if it was defended by Danes. I counted over forty men on the skyline and knew there would be others I could not see, and the numbers alone told me this assault would fail. We could attack, and we might well get as far as the thorn palisade, but I doubted we could hack our way through, and the Danes would kill a score of us as we tried, and we would be lucky to retreat down the hill without greater loss.

  “We’re in a cesspit,” Leofric said to me.

  “Up to our necks.”

  “So what do we do? Turn on them and take the money?”

  I did not answer because the Danes had dragged a section of the thorn fence aside and three of them now jumped down from the ramparts and strolled toward us. They wanted to talk.

  “Who the hell is that?” Leofric asked.

  He was staring at the Danish leader. He was a huge man, big as Steapa Snotor, and dressed in a mail coat that had been polished with sand until it shone. His helmet, as highly polished as his mail, had a faceplate modeled as a boar’s mask with a squat, broad snout, and from the helmet’s crown there flew a white horsetail. He wore arm-rings over his mail, rings of silver and gold that proclaimed him to be a warrior chief, a sword Dane, a lord of war. He walked the hillside as if he owned it, and in truth he did own it because he possessed the fort.

  Asser hurried to meet the Danes, going with Peredur and two of his courtiers. I went after them and found Asser trying to convert the Danes. He told them that God had brought us and we would slaughter them all and their best course was to surrender now and yield their heathen souls to God. “We shall ba
ptize you,” Asser said, “and there will be much rejoicing in heaven.”

  The Danish leader slowly pulled off his helmet and his face was almost as frightening as the boar-snouted mask. It was a broad face, hardened by sun and wind, with the blank, expressionless eyes of a killer. He was around thirty years old and had a tightly cropped beard and a scar running from the corner of his left eye down across his cheek. He gave the helmet to one of his men and, without saying a word, hauled up the skirt of his mail coat and began pissing on Asser’s robe. The monk leaped back.

  The Dane, still pissing, looked at me. “Who are you?”

  “Uhtred Ragnarson. And you?”

  “Svein of the White Horse.” He said it defiantly, as though I would know his reputation, and for a heartbeat I said nothing. Was this the same Svein who was said to be gathering troops in Wales? Then what was he doing here?

  “You’re Svein of Ireland?” I asked.

  “Svein of Denmark,” he said. He let the mail coat drop and glared at Asser, who was threatening the Danes with heaven’s vengeance. “If you want to live,” he told Asser, “shut your filthy mouth.” Asser shut his mouth. “Ragnarson.” Svein looked back to me. “Earl Ragnar? Ragnar Ravnson? The Ragnar who served Ivar?”

  “The same,” I said.

  “Then you are the Saxon son?”

  “I am. And you?” I asked. “You’re the Svein who has brought men from Ireland?”

  “I have brought men from Ireland,” he admitted.

  “And gather forces in Wales?”

  “I do what I do,” he said vaguely. He looked at my men, judging how well they would fight. Then he looked me up and down, noting my mail and helmet, and noting especially my arm rings, and when the inspection was done he jerked his head to indicate that he and I should walk away a few paces and talk privately.

  Asser objected, saying anything that was spoken should be heard by all, but I ignored him and followed Svein uphill. “You can’t take this fort,” Svein told me.

  “True.”

  “So what do you do?”