low, and our bows rode up across her strakes, plunging her low in the water, and we staggered with the impact, but then I jumped down into the wolf-headed ship’s belly. Cenwulf and his men were behind me, and there we began the killing.
The enemy ship was so loaded with men that they probably outnumbered us, but they were bone weary from a long day’s rowing, they had not expected an attack, and we were hungry for wealth. We had done this before and the crew was well trained, and they chopped their way down the boat, swords and axes swinging, and the sea was slopping over the side so that we waded through water as we clambered over the rowers’ benches. The water about our feet grew red. Some of our victims jumped overboard and clung to shattered oars in an attempt to escape us. One man, big-bearded and wild-eyed, came at us with a great sword and Eadric drove a spear into his chest and Leofric struck the man’s head with his axe, struck again, and blood sprayed up to the sail that was furled fore and aft on its long yard. The man sank to his knees and Eadric ground the spear deeper so that blood spilled down to the water. I almost fell as a wave tilted the half-swamped ship. A man screamed and lunged a spear at me, I took it on my shield, knocked it aside and rammed Serpent-Breath at his face. He half fell, trying to escape the lunge, and I knocked him over the side with my shield’s heavy boss. I sensed movement to my right and swung Serpent-Breath like a reaping scythe and struck a woman in the head. She went down like a felled calf, a sword in her hand. I kicked the sword away and stamped on the woman’s belly. A child screamed and I shoved her aside, lunged at a man in a leather jerkin, raised my shield to block his axe blow and then spitted him on Serpent-Breath. The sword went deep into his belly, so deep that the blade stuck and I had to stand on him to tug it free. Cenwulf went past me, his snarling face covered in blood, sword swinging. The water was up to my knees, and then I staggered and almost fell as the whole ship lurched and I realised we had drifted ashore and struck rocks. Two horses were tethered in the ship’s belly and the beasts screamed at the smell of blood. One broke its tether and jumped overboard, swimming white-eyed towards the open sea.
‘Kill them! Kill them!’ I heard myself shouting. It was the only way to take a ship, to empty her of fighting men, but she was now emptying herself as the survivors jumped onto the rocks and clambered away through the sucking backwash of blood-touched water. A half-dozen men had been left aboard Fyrdraca and they were fending her off the rocks with oars. A blade stabbed the back of my right ankle and I turned to see a wounded man trying to hamstring me with a short knife and I stabbed down again and again, butchering him in the weltering water, and I think he was the last man to die on board, though a few Danes were still clinging to the ship’s side and those we cut away.
The Fyrdraca was seaward of the doomed ship now, and I shouted at the men aboard to bring her close. She heaved up and down, much higher than the half-sunk ship, and we threw our plunder up and over the side. There were sacks, boxes and barrels. Many were heavy, and some clinked with coin. We stripped the enemy dead of their valuables, taking six coats of mail and a dozen helmets and we found another three coats of mail in the flooded bilge. I took eight arm rings off dead men. We tossed weapons aboard Fyrdraca, then cut away the captured ship’s rigging. I loosed the remaining horse that stood shivering as the water rose. We took the ship’s yard and sail, and all the time her survivors watched from the shore where some had found a precarious refuge above the sea-washed rocks. I went to the space beneath her sleeping platform and found a great war-helm there, a beautiful thing with a decorated face-plate and a wolf’s head moulded in silver on the crown, and I tossed my old helmet onto Fyrdraca and donned the new one, and then passed out sacks of coin. Beneath the sacks was what I thought must be a small shield wrapped in black cloth and I half thought of leaving it where it was, then threw it into Fyrdraca anyway. We were rich.
‘Who are you?’ a man shouted from onshore.
‘Uhtred,’ I called back.
He spat at me and I laughed. Our men were climbing back on board Fyrdraca now. Some were retrieving oars from the water, and Leofric was pushing Fyrdraca away, fearful that she would be caught on the rocks. ‘Get on board!’ he shouted at me, and I saw I was the last man, and so I took hold of Fyrdraca’s stern, put a foot on an oar, and heaved myself over her side. ‘Row!’ Leofric shouted, and so we pulled away from the wreck.
Two young women had been thrown up with the plunder and I found them weeping by Fyrdraca’s mast. One spoke no language that I recognised and later we discovered she was from Ireland, but the other was Danish and, as soon as I squatted beside her, she lashed out at me and spat in my face. I slapped her back, and that made her lash out again. She was a tall girl, strong, with a tangled mass of fair hair and bright blue eyes. She tried to claw her fingers through the eye-holes of my new helmet and I had to slap her again, which made my men laugh. Some were shouting at her to keep fighting me, but instead she suddenly burst into tears and leaned back against the mast root. I took off the helmet and asked her name, and her only answer was to wail that she wanted to die, but when I said she was free to throw herself off the ship she did not move. Her name was Freyja, she was fifteen years old, and her father had been the owner of the ship we had sunk. He had been the big man with the sword, and his name had been Ivar and he had held land at Dyflin, wherever that was, and Freyja began to weep again when she looked at my new helmet which had belonged to her father. ‘He died without cutting his nails,’ she said accusingly, as if I were responsible for that ill luck, and it was bad fortune indeed because now the grim things of the underworld would use Ivar’s nails to build the ship that would bring chaos at the world’s end.
‘Where were you going?’ I asked her.
To Svein, of course. Ivar had been unhappy in Dyflin, which was in Ireland and had more Norsemen than Danes and also possessed savagely unfriendly native tribes, and he had been lured by the prospect of land in Wessex and so he had abandoned his Irish steading, put all his goods and wealth aboard his ships, and sailed eastwards.
‘Ships?’ I asked her.
‘There were three when we left,’ Freyja said, ‘but we lost the others in the night.’
I guessed they were the two ships we had seen earlier, but the gods had been good to me for Freyja confirmed that her father had put his most valuable possessions into his own ship, and that was the one we had captured, and we had struck lucky for there were barrels of coin and boxes of silver. There was amber, jet and ivory. There were weapons and armour. We made a rough count as the Fyrdraca wallowed offshore and we could scarce believe our fortune. One box contained small lumps of gold, roughly shaped as bricks, but best of all was the wrapped bundle which I had thought was a small shield, but which, when we unwrapped the cloth, proved to be a great silver plate on which was modelled a crucifixion. All about the death scene, ringing the plate’s heavy rim, were saints. Twelve of them. I assumed they were the apostles and that the plate had been the treasure of some Irish church or monastery before Ivar had captured it. I showed the plate to my men. ‘This,’ I said reverently, ‘is not part of the plunder. This must go back to the church.’
Leofric caught my eye, but did not laugh.
‘It goes back to the church,’ I said again, and some of my men, the more pious ones, muttered that I was doing the right thing. I wrapped the plate and put it under the steering platform.
‘How much is your debt to the church?’ Leofric asked me.
‘You have a mind like a goat’s arsehole,’ I told him.
He laughed, then looked past me. ‘Now what do we do?’ he asked.
I thought he was asking what we should do with the rest of our charmed lives, but instead he was gazing at the shore where, in the evening light, I could see armed men lining the clifftop. The Britons of Dyfed had come for us, but too late. Yet their presence meant we could not go back into our cove, and so I ordered the oars to be manned and for the ship
