The Pale Horseman. Bernard Cornwell

We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners’ fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it. Wyrd bið ful aræd, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable, and the spinners had decided my fate because, a week after the Witan had met, when Exanceaster was quiet again, they sent me a ship.

      The first I knew of it was when a slave came running from Oxton’s fields saying that there was a Danish ship in the estuary of the Uisc and I pulled on boots and mail, snatched my swords from their peg, shouted for a horse to be saddled and rode to the foreshore where Heahengel rotted.

      And where, standing in from the long sandspit that protects the Uisc from the greater sea, another ship approached. Her sail was furled on the long yard and her dripping oars rose and fell like wings and her long hull left a spreading wake that glittered silver under the rising sun. Her prow was high, and standing there was a man in full mail, a man with a helmet and spear, and behind me, where a few fisherfolk lived in hovels beside the mud, people were hurrying towards the hills and taking with them whatever few possessions they could snatch. I called to one of them. ‘It’s not a Dane!’

      ‘Lord?’

      ‘It’s a West Saxon ship,’ I called, though they did not believe me and hurried away with their livestock. For years they had done this. They would see a ship and they would run, for ships brought Danes and Danes brought death, but this ship had no dragon or wolf or eagle’s head on its prow. I knew the ship. It was the Eftwyrd, the best named of all Alfred’s ships which otherwise bore pious names like Heahengel or Apostol or Cristenlic. Eftwyrd meant judgement day which, though Christian in inspiration, accurately described what she had brought to many Danes.

      The man in the prow waved and, for the first time since I had crawled on my knees to Alfred’s altar, my spirits lifted. It was Leofric, and then the Eftwyrd’s bows slid onto the mud and the long hull juddered to a halt. Leofric cupped his hands. ‘How deep is this mud?’

      ‘It’s nothing!’ I shouted back, ‘a hand’s depth, no more!’

      ‘Can I walk on it?’

      ‘Of course you can!’ I shouted back.

      He jumped and, as I had known he would, sank up to his thighs in the thick black slime, and I bent over my saddle’s pommel in laughter, and the Eftwyrd’s crew laughed with me as Leofric cursed, and it took ten minutes to extricate him from the muck, by which time a score of us were plastered in the stinking stuff, but then the crew, who were mostly my old oarsmen and warriors, brought ale ashore, and bread and salted pork, and we made a midday meal beside the rising tide.

      ‘You’re an earsling,’ Leofric grumbled, looking at the mud clogging up the links of his mail coat.

      ‘I’m a bored earsling,’ I said.

      ‘You’re bored?’ Leofric said, ‘so are we.’ It seemed the fleet was not sailing. It had been given into the charge of a man named Burgweard who was a dull, worthy soldier whose brother was bishop of Scireburnan, and Burgweard had orders not to disturb the peace. ‘If the Danes aren’t off the coast,’ Leofric said, ‘then we aren’t.’

      ‘So what are you doing here?’

      ‘He sent us to rescue that piece of shit,’ he nodded at Heahengel. ‘He wants twelve ships again, see?’

      ‘I thought they were building more?’

      ‘They were building more, only it all stopped because some thieving bastards stole the timber while we were fighting at Cynuit, and then someone remembered Heahengel and here we are. Burgweard can’t manage with just eleven.’

      ‘If he isn’t sailing,’ I asked, ‘why does he want another ship?’

      ‘In case he has to sail,’ Leofric explained, ‘and if he does then he wants twelve. Not eleven, twelve.’

      ‘Twelve? Why?’

      ‘Because,’ Leofric paused to bite off a piece of bread, ‘because it says in the gospel book that Christ sent out his disciples two by two, and that’s how we have to go, two ships together, all holy, and if we’ve only got eleven then that means we’ve only got ten, if you follow me.’

      I stared at him, not sure whether he was jesting. ‘Burgweard insists you sail two by two?’

      Leofric nodded. ‘Because it says so in Father Willibald’s book.’

      ‘In the gospel book?’

      ‘That’s what Father Willibald tells us,’ Leofric said with a straight face, then saw my expression and shrugged. ‘Honest! And Alfred approves.’

      ‘Of course he does.’

      ‘And if you do what the gospel book tells you,’ Leofric said, still with a straight face, ‘then nothing can go wrong, can it?’

      ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘So you’re here to rebuild Heahengel?’

      ‘New mast,’ Leofric said, ‘new sail, new rigging, patch up those timbers, caulk her, then tow her back to Hamtun. It could take a month!’

      ‘At least.’

      ‘And I never was much good at making things. Good at fighting, I am, and I can drink ale as well as any man, but I was never much good with a mallet and wedge or with adzes. They are.’ He nodded at a group of a dozen men who were strangers to me.

      ‘Who are they?’

      ‘Shipwrights.’

      ‘So they do the work?’

      ‘Can’t expect me to do it!’ Leofric protested. ‘I’m in command of the Eftwyrd!’

      ‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re planning to drink my ale and eat my food for a month while those dozen men do the work?’

      ‘You have any better ideas?’

      I gazed at the Eftwyrd. She was a well-made ship, longer than most Danish boats and with high sides that made her a good fighting platform. ‘What did Burgweard tell you to do?’ I asked.

      ‘Pray,’ Leofric said sourly, ‘and help repair Heahengel.’

      ‘I hear there’s a new Danish leader in the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘and I’d like to know if it’s true. A man called Svein. And I hear more ships are joining him from Ireland.’

      ‘He’s in Wales, this Svein?’

      ‘That’s what I hear.’

      ‘He’ll be coming to Wessex then,’ Leofric said.

      ‘If it’s true.’

      ‘So you’re thinking …’ Leofric said, then stopped when he realised just what I was thinking.

      ‘I’m thinking that it doesn’t do a ship or crew any good to sit around for a month,’ I said, ‘and I’m thinking that there might be plunder to be had in the Sæfern Sea.’

      ‘And if Alfred hears we’ve been fighting up there,’ Leofric said, ‘he’ll gut us.’

      I nodded up river towards Exanceaster. ‘They burned a hundred Danish ships up there,’ I said, ‘and their wreckage is still on the riverbank. We should be able to find at least one dragon’s head to put on her prow.’

      Leofric stared at the Eftwyrd. ‘Disguise her?’

      ‘Disguise her,’ I said, because if I put a dragon head on Eftwyrd no one would know she was a Saxon ship. She would be taken for a Danish boat, a sea raider, part of England’s nightmare.

      Leofric smiled. ‘I don’t need orders to go on a patrol, do I?’

      ‘Of course not.’

      ‘And we haven’t fought since Cynuit,’ he said wistfully, ‘and