heard only last week that they want to make Erkenwald into a saint. Priests come to my home beside the northern sea where they find an old man, and they tell me I am just a few paces from the fires of hell. I only need repent, they say, and I will go to heaven and live for evermore in the blessed company of the saints.
And I would rather burn till time itself burns out.
Water dripped from oar-blades, the drips spreading ripples in a sea that was shining slabs of light that slowly shifted and parted, joined and slid.
Our ship was poised on that shifting light, silent.
The sky to the east was molten gold pouring around a bank of sun-drenched cloud, while the rest was blue. Pale blue to the east and dark blue to the west where night fled towards the unknown lands beyond the distant ocean.
To the south I could see the low shore of Wessex. It was green and brown, treeless and not that far away, though I would go no closer for the light-sliding sea concealed mudbanks and shoals. Our oars were resting and the wind was dead, but we moved relentlessly eastwards, carried by the tide and by the river’s strong flow. This was the estuary of the Temes; a wide place of water, mud, sand and terror.
Our ship had no name and she carried no beast-heads on her prow or stern. She was a trading ship, one of the two I had captured in Lundene, and she was wide-beamed, sluggish, big-bellied and clumsy. She carried a sail, but the sail was furled on the yard, and the yard was in its crutches. We drifted on the tide towards the golden dawn.
I stood with the steering-oar in my right hand. I wore mail, but no helmet. My two swords were strapped to my waist, but they, like my mail coat, were hidden beneath a dirty brown woollen cloak. There were twelve rowers on the benches, Sihtric was beside me, one man was on the bow platform and all those men, like me, showed neither armour nor weapons.
We looked like a trading ship drifting along the Wessex shore in hope that no one on the northern side of the estuary would see us.
But they had seen us.
And a sea-wolf was stalking us.
She was rowing to our north, slanting south and eastwards, waiting for us to turn and try to escape upriver against the tide. She was perhaps a mile away and I could see the short black upright line of her stemhead, which ended in a beast’s head. She was in no hurry. Her shipmaster could see we were not rowing and he would take that inactivity as a sign of panic. He would think we were discussing what to do. His own oar banks were dipping slow, but every stroke surged that distant boat forward to cut off our seaward escape.
Finan, who was manning one of the stern oars of our ship, glanced over his shoulder. ‘Crew of fifty?’ he suggested.
‘Maybe more,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘How many more?’
‘Could be seventy?’ I guessed.
We numbered forty-three, and all but fifteen of us were hidden in the place where the ship would normally have carried goods. Those hidden men were covered by an old sail, making it look as though we carried salt or grain, some cargo that needed to be protected from any rain or spray. ‘Be a rare fight if it’s seventy,’ Finan said with relish.
‘Won’t be any fight at all,’ I said, ‘because they won’t be ready for us,’ and that was true. We looked like an easy victim, a handful of men on a tubby ship, and the sea-wolf would come alongside and a dozen men would leap aboard while the rest of the crew just watched the slaughter. That, at least, was what I hoped. The watching crew would be armed, of course, but they would not be expecting battle, and my men were more than ready.
‘Remember,’ I called loudly so the men beneath the sail would hear me, ‘we kill them all!’
‘Even women?’ Finan asked.
‘Not women,’ I said. I doubted there would be women aboard the far ship.
Sihtric was crouching beside me and now squinted up. ‘Why kill them all, lord?’
‘So they learn to fear us,’ I said.
The gold in the sky was brightening and fading. The sun was above the cloud bank and the sea shimmered with its new brilliance. The reflected image of the enemy was long on the light-flickering, slow-moving water.
‘Steorbord oars!’ I called, ‘back water. Clumsy now!’
The oarsmen grinned as they deliberately churned the water with clumsy strokes that slowly turned our prow upriver so that it appeared as though we were trying to escape. The sensible thing for us to have done, had we been as innocent and vulnerable as we looked, would have been to row to the southern shore, ground the boat and run for our lives, but instead we turned and started rowing against tide and current. Our oars clashed, making us look like incompetent, scared fools.
‘He’s taken the bait,’ I said to our rowers, though, because our bows now pointed westwards, they could see for themselves that the enemy had started rowing hard. The Viking was coming straight for us, her oar banks rising and falling like wings and the white water swelling and shrinking at her stem as each blade-beat surged the ship.
We kept feigning panic. Our oars banged into each other so that we did little except stir the water around our clumsy hull. Two gulls circled our stubby mast, their cries sad in the limpid morning. Far to the west, where the sky was darkened by the smoke of Lundene that lay beyond the horizon, I could just see a tiny dark streak, which I knew to be the mast of another ship. She was coming towards us, and I knew the enemy ship would have seen her too and would be wondering whether she was friend or foe.
Not that it mattered, for it would take the enemy only five minutes to capture our small, under-manned cargo ship and it would be the best part of an hour before the ebbing tide and steady rowing could bring that western ship to where we struggled. The Viking boat came on fast, her oars working in lovely unison, but the ship’s speed meant that her oarsmen would be tired as well as unprepared by the time she reached us. Her beast-head, proud on her high stem, was an eagle with an open beak painted red as if the bird had just ripped bloody flesh from a victim, while beneath the carved head a dozen armed men were crowded on the bow platform. They were the men supposed to board and kill us.
Twenty oars a side made forty men. The boarding party added a dozen, though it was hard to count the men who were crowded so close together, and two men stood beside the steering-oar. ‘Between fifty and sixty,’ I called aloud. The enemy rowers were not in mail. They did not expect to fight, and most would have their swords at their feet and their shields stacked in the bilge.
‘Stop oars!’ I called. ‘Rowers, get up!’
The eagle-prowed ship was close now. I could hear the creak of her oar tholes, the splash of her blades and the hiss of the sea at her cutwater. I could see bright axe blades, the helmeted faces of the men who thought they would kill us, and the anxiety on the steersman’s face as he attempted to lay his bows directly on ours. My rowers were milling about, feigning panic. The Viking oarsmen gave a last heave and I heard their shipmaster order them to cease rowing and ship oars. She ran on towards us, water sliding away from her stem and she was very close now, close enough to smell, and the men on her bow platform hefted their shields as the steersman aimed her bows to slide
