At night we found a cove or river’s mouth, and by day we rowed to sea and looked for prey, and each day we went further westwards until I was sure we were off the coast of Cornwalum, and that was enemy country. It was the old enemy that had confronted our ancestors when they first came across the North Sea to make England. That enemy spoke a strange language, and some Britons lived north of Northumbria and others lived in Wales or in Cornwalum, all places on the wild edges of the isle of Britain where they had been pushed by our coming. They were Christians, indeed Father Beocca had told me they had been Christians before we were and he claimed that no one who was a Christian could be a real enemy of another Christian, but nevertheless the Britons hated us. Sometimes they allied themselves with the Northmen to attack us, and sometimes the Northmen raided them, and sometimes they made war against us on their own, and in the past the men of Cornwalum had made much trouble for Wessex, though Leofric claimed they had been punished so badly that they now pissed themselves whenever they saw a Saxon.
Not that we saw any Britons at first. The places we sheltered were deserted, all except one river mouth where a skin boat pushed off shore and a half naked man paddled out to us and held up some crabs which he wanted to sell to us. We took a basketful of the beasts and paid him two pennies. Next night we grounded Fyrdraca on a rising tide and collected fresh water from a stream, and Leofric and I climbed a hill and stared inland. Smoke rose from distant valleys, but there was no one in sight, not even a shepherd. ‘What are you expecting,’ Leofric asked, ‘enemies?’
‘A monastery,’ I said.
‘A monastery!’ He was amused. ‘You want to pray?’
‘Monasteries have silver,’ I said.
‘Not down here, they don’t. They’re poor as stoats. Besides.’
‘Besides what?’
He jerked his head towards the crew. ‘You’ve got a dozen good Christians aboard. Lot of bad ones too, of course, but at least a dozen good ones. They won’t raid a monastery with you.’ He was right. A few of the men had showed some scruples about piracy, but I assured them that the Danes used trading ships to spy on their enemies. That was true enough, though I doubt either of our victims had been serving the Danes, but both ships had been crewed by foreigners and, like all Saxons, the crew of the Fyrdraca had a healthy dislike of foreigners, though they made an exception for Haesten and the dozen crewmen who were Frisians. The Frisians were natural pirates, bad as the Danes, and these twelve had come to Wessex to get rich from war and so were glad that the Fyrdraca was seeking plunder.
As we went west we began to see coastal settlements, and some were surprisingly large. Cenwulf, who had fought with us at Cynuit and was a good man, told us that the Britons of Cornwalum dug tin out of the ground and sold it to strangers. He knew that because his father had been a trader and had frequently sailed this coast. ‘If they sell tin,’ I said, ‘then they must have money.’
‘And men to guard it,’ Cenwulf said drily.
‘Do they have a king?’
No one knew. It seemed probable, though where the king lived or who he was we could not know, and perhaps, as Haesten suggested, there was more than one king. They did have weapons because, one night, as the Fyrdraca crept into a bay, an arrow flew from a clifftop to be swallowed in the sea beside our oars. We might never have known that arrow had been shot except I happened to be looking up and saw it, fledged with dirty grey feathers, flickering down from the sky to vanish with a plop. One arrow, and no others followed, so perhaps it was a warning, and that night we let the ship lie at its anchor and in the dawn we saw two cows grazing close to a stream and Leofric fetched his axe. ‘The cows are there to kill us,’ Haesten warned us in his new and not very good English.
‘The cows will kill us?’ I asked in amusement.
‘I have seen it before, lord. They put cows to bring us on land, then they attack.’
We granted the cows mercy, hauled the anchor and pulled towards the bay’s mouth and a howl sounded behind us and I saw a crowd of men appear from behind bushes and trees, and I took one of the silver rings from my left arm and gave it to Haesten. It was his first arm ring and, being a Dane, he was inordinately proud of it. He polished it all morning.
The coast became wilder and refuge more difficult to find, but the weather was placid. We captured a small eight-oared ship that was returning to Ireland and relieved it of sixteen pieces of silver, three knives, a heap of tin ingots, a sack of goose feathers and six goatskins. We were hardly becoming rich, though Fyrdraca’s belly was becoming cluttered with pelts, fleeces and ingots of tin. ‘We need to sell it all,’ Leofric said.
But to whom? We knew no one who traded here. What I needed to do, I thought, was land close to one of the larger settlements and steal everything. Burn the houses, kill the men, plunder the headman’s hall and go back to sea, but the Britons kept lookouts on the headlands and they always saw us coming, and whenever we were close to one of their towns we would see armed men waiting. They had learned how to deal with Vikings, which was why, Haesten told me, the Northmen now sailed in fleets of five or six ships.
‘Things will be better,’ I said, ‘when we turn the coast.’ I knew Cornwalum ended somewhere to the west and we could then sail up into the Sæfern Sea where we might find a Danish ship on its voyage from Ireland, but Cornwalum seemed to be without end. Whenever we saw a headland that I thought must mark the end of the land it turned out to be a false hope, for another cliff would lie beyond, and then another, and sometimes the tide flowed so strongly that even when we sailed due west we were driven back east. Being a Viking was more difficult than I thought, and then one day the wind freshened from the west and the waves heaved higher and their tops were torn ragged and rain squalls hissed dark from a low sky and we ran northwards to seek shelter in the lee of a headland. We dropped our anchor there and felt Fyrdraca jerk and tug like a fretful horse at her long rope of twisted hide.
All night and all next day the weather raged past the headland. Water shattered white on high cliffs. We were safe enough, but our food was getting low, and I had half decided we must abandon our plans to 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