beam wind was too strong to carry yards or sailcloth aloft and so their heavy sails were stowed on deck.
‘Who are they?’ my son asked, spurring his horse alongside mine. The wind lifted his cloak and whipped his horse’s mane and tail.
‘How would I know?’ I asked.
‘You’ve not seen them before?’
‘Never,’ I said. I knew most of the ships that prowled the Northumbrian coast, but these four were strangers to me. They were not trading vessels, but had the high prows and low freeboard of fighting ships. There were beast-heads on their prows, marking them as pagans. The ships were large. Each, I reckoned, held forty or fifty men who now rowed for their lives in spiteful seas and bitter wind. The tide was rising, which meant the current was running strongly northwards and the ships were battling their way south, their dragon-crested prows bursting into spray as the cross-seas smashed into their hulls. I watched the nearest ship rear to a wave and half vanish behind the cold seas that shattered about her cutwater. Did they know there was a shallow channel that curled behind Lindisfarena and offered shelter? That channel was easily visible at low tide, but now, in a flooding sea that was being wind-churned to frenzy, the passage was hidden by scudding foam and seething waves, and the four ships, oblivious of the safety the channel offered, rowed past its entrance to struggle on towards the next anchorage that would give them safety.
They were heading for Bebbanburg.
I turned my horse southwards and led my sixty men along the beach. The wind was stinging sand against my face.
I did not know who they were, but I knew where the four ships were going. They were heading for Bebbanburg, and life, I thought, had suddenly become more difficult.
It took us only moments to reach the Bebbanburg channel. The breaking waves pounded the beach and seethed into the harbour mouth, filling the narrow entrance with a swirling grey foam. That entrance was not wide, as a child I had often swum across it, though never when an ebbing tide ran strong. One of my earliest memories was of watching a boy drown as the tide swept him from the harbour channel. His name had been Eglaf, and he must have been six or seven years old when he died. He was the son of a priest, the only son. Strange how names and faces from the distant past come to mind. He had been a small, slight boy, dark-haired and funny, and I had liked him. My elder brother had dared him to swim the channel, and I remember my brother laughing as Eglaf vanished in the welter of dark sea and whipping white caps. I had been crying, and my brother had slapped me around the head. ‘He was weak,’ my brother said.
How we despise weakness! Only women and priests are allowed to be weak. Poets too, perhaps. Poor Eglaf had died because he wanted to appear as fearless as the rest of us, and in the end he had merely proved he was just as stupid. ‘Eglaf,’ I said his name aloud as we cantered down the sand-blown beach.
‘What?’ my son shouted.
‘Eglaf,’ I said again, not bothering to explain, but I think that so long as we remember names, so long those people live. I am not sure how they live; whether they are spirits drifting like clouds or whether they live in an afterworld. Eglaf could not have gone to Valhalla because he did not die in battle, but of course he was a Christian too, so he must have gone to their heaven, which made me feel even more sorry for him. Christians tell me they spend the rest of time singing praises to their nailed god. The rest of time! Eternity! What kind of swollen-headed god wants to hear himself being praised for ever? Which thought put me in mind of Barwulf, a West Saxon thegn who had paid four harpists to chant songs of his battle-deeds, which were next to none. Barwulf had been a fat, selfish, greedy pig of a man; just the sort who would want to hear himself being praised for ever. I imagined the Christian god as a fat, scowling thegn brooding in his mead hall and listening to lackeys telling him how great he was.
‘They’re turning!’ my son called, breaking my thoughts, and I looked to my left and saw the first ship turning towards the channel. It was a straightforward entrance, though an inexperienced shipmaster could be fooled by the strong tidal currents close inshore, but this man was experienced enough to anticipate the danger and he drove his long hull straight and true. ‘Count the men on board,’ I ordered Berg.
We reined the horses on the channel’s northern bank where the sand was heaped with dark bladderwrack, sea shells, and bleached scraps of wood. ‘Who are they?’ Rorik asked me. He was a boy, my new servant.
‘They’re probably Norse,’ I said, ‘like you.’ I had killed Rorik’s father and wounded Rorik in a messy battle that had driven the pagans from Mercia. I had felt remorse at injuring a child, he had been only nine when I struck him with my sword, Wasp-Sting, and my guilt had driven me to adopt the boy, just as Ragnar the Elder had adopted me so long ago. Rorik’s left arm had healed, though it would never be as strong as his right, but he could hold a shield and he seemed happy. I liked him.
‘They’re Norse!’ he echoed happily.
‘I think so,’ I said. I was not certain, but there was something about the ships that suggested they were Norse rather than Danish. The great beasts on the prow were more flamboyant, and the short masts were raked further aft than on most Danish ships. ‘Don’t go too deep!’ I called to Berg, who had spurred his horse up to its fetlocks in the swirling shallows.
The tide surged through the channel, the waves flicked white by the wind, but I was staring at the further shore that lay just fifty or sixty yards away. There was a small strip of sand on that far shore that would soon be covered by the flooding tide, then dark rocks that climbed to a high wall. It was a stone wall, which, like so much else in Bebbanburg, had been built since my father’s time, and in the centre of that wall was the Sea Gate. Years before, terrified that I would attack him, my uncle had sealed both the Low Gate and the High Gate, which together formed the main entrance to the fortress, and he had built the Sea Gate, which could only be approached by ship or by a path along the beach that led beneath the seaward ramparts. In time his terror had subsided, and, because supplying Bebbanburg through the Sea Gate was both inconvenient and time-consuming, he had reopened the two southern gates, but the Sea Gate still existed. Behind it was a steep path climbing to a higher gate that pierced the wooden palisade surrounding the whole long summit of the rock on which Bebbanburg was built.
Men were gathering on the fighting platform of the high palisade. They waved, not to us, but to the arriving ships, and I thought I heard a cheer from those high ramparts, but perhaps that was my imagination.
I did not imagine the spear. A man hurled it from the palisade, and I watched it fly dark against the dark clouds. For a heartbeat it seemed to hang in the air, and then, like a stooping falcon, it plummeted to thump hard into the shallow water just four or five paces short of Berg’s horse. ‘Get it,’ I told Rorik.
I could hear jeers from the ramparts now. The spear might have fallen short, but it had been a mighty throw all the same. Two more spears fell, both splashing uselessly into the channel’s centre. Then Rorik brought me the first spear. ‘Hold the blade low,’ I said.
‘Low?’
‘Close to the sand.’
I dismounted, hauled up the heavy mail coat, pulled open the laces, and took aim. ‘Hold it still,’ I ordered Rorik, and then, when I was sure the men in the bows of the leading ship were watching, I pissed on the blade. My son chuckled, and Rorik laughed. ‘Now give it to me,’ I ordered the boy, and took the ash-haft from him. I waited. The leading ship was racing into the channel now, the breaking waves seething along her hull as the oarsmen dragged on their blades. Her high prow, a dragon with open mouth and glaring eyes, reared above the white water. I drew my arm back, waited. It would be a difficult throw, made even more difficult by the force of the wind and
