The Pale Horseman. Bernard Cornwell

‘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 which 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 going to win,’ I said, ‘so Callyn is sensible.’

      Asser shook his head. ‘God will prevail.’

      ‘You hope,’ I said, touching the small amulet of Thor’s hammer I wore on a thong around my neck. ‘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 face-plate 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