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Summer comes to Ireland and an uneasy peace holds at Loch Garman. The Northmen, eager to get to sea, work relentlessly on their ships, with the aid of their unlikely allies, the Irish, who are just as eager to see them go. But not everyone is willing to just let them sail away. Certain that God demands the heathens be punished, the one-eyed warrior-turned-monk Brother Bécc is determined that Thorgrim and his men will not simply go free. And when another band of raiders arrives, Bécc finds the excuse he needs to take action.
Meanwhile, in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, murder leads to a violent struggle for the seat of ealdorman, ruler of the shire of Dorset. Desperate as each side is to tip the balance of power their way, no one imagines that the upper hand might come from the direction they least expect – from the sea. |
A Vengeful Wind sample chapter
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Little the sand if little the seas, little are minds of men,
for ne'er in the world were all equally wise, 'tis shared by the fools and the sage. – Wisdom for Wanderers and Counsel to Guests |
It was Gudrid who saw the ships first. The morning was well on, a gray and uninviting morning, and the view to the horizon was limited, with the far end of the wide harbor just on the edge of visible. For that reason, the ships were already through the harbor entrance and making for the longphort when he spotted them.
Gudrid saw them because he was the one charged with looking out, a dull task that was shared by all, save for those with eyesight so poor that it was pointless to put them to that job. Gudrid was standing on the top of the earthen wall that surrounded the makeshift longphort at a place that the Irish called Loch Garman, though Thorgrim Night Wolf called it Waesfiord, which meant inlet of the mudflats. It was not a place that Thorgrim loved.
The wall had been built up to a height of fifteen feet. That was high enough for a watchman standing there to see trouble coming from a good distance, at least when the land was not under a blanket of gray fog and rain, which was about half the time. But that morning, despite the hovering threat of rotten weather, a man could see two or three miles in any direction. That was how far away the ships were when Gudrid spotted them.
Thorgrim Night Wolf was not looking out to sea. He could see nothing but the dark planks of his ship Sea Hammer, a foot away from his face. He was on his back, the shingle of the beach starting to dig through his tunic, and halfway under the larboard side of the ship, which was pulled up on the beach and resting on its starboard side.
With a hammer in one hand and a caulking iron, like a dull chisel, in the other, Thorgrim was gently tapping a bit of tarred twine between two of the planks where water insisted on seeping through. When Sea Hammer had been built, a length of rope was sandwiched between the planks to keep the water out, and it still did its job, mostly. But with the great abuse that the ship had suffered in the months since it had first been rolled into the sea, there were places where she was not as tight as Thorgrim would have wished.
“Thorgrim!” He heard Gudrid’s voice clearly over the ring of hammers, the chopping sound of axes and adzes shaping wood. “Thorgrim, ships!”
There was not much Gudrid might have said that would get Thorgrim’s attention quicker than that. He dropped the hammer and the iron and rolled out from under Sea Hammer and up onto his feet.
Anyone approaching the longphort was a potential threat, but if they were coming from the land, they were undoubtedly Irish, and there was the wall to stop them. There was no such barrier to stop anyone coming from the sea. Ships meant Northmen, Norwegians or Danes, but there was no reason to think they were any friendlier than the Irish.
Thorgrim squinted and looked out over the water, running his eyes from the headland to the north across the wide sweep of horizon. The thick blanket of clouds limited how far he could see, as did eyes that were growing old, and he could make out nothing out of the ordinary.
He turned and jogged over to the wall and up the crude ladder leaning there. All hundred or so men and one woman at Waesfiord had heard Gudrid’s cry, and now all work ceased, all eyes turned seaward.
Thorgrim stepped up beside Gudrid. He squinted and turned his head and stared in the direction that Gudrid pointed, but he still could not see them, not at first. Then finally they came into view, four small dots near the edge of the visible world, four ships’ sails seen from several miles away. They were just coming through the mile-wide gap between the headland to the north and the sand bar to the south that made up the entrance to the vast harbor, three miles wide east to west and six north to south.
“Well done, Gudrid,” Thorgrim said. “Well spotted.” There was a flurry of motion below and Starri Deathless scrambled up the ladder and stood at Thorgrim’s side. Starri was a berserker, one of those men gifted or cursed by the gods with a madness in battle beyond that of normal men. His senses were sharp, his eyesight, his hearing more acute than that of any man among the crews of Thorgrim’s ships. Thorgrim might have used him as a lookout, but Starri could not concentrate on any single task for longer than it took most men to urinate.
“What?” Starri asked, incredulous. “You only just saw those ships, Gudrid? Are you blind? Why, they’re all but run up on the beach!”
Gudrid made no reply and neither did Thorgrim. Gudrid would not have suffered such a remark from any other man, but Starri was not like other men, and no one who knew him took offense at his words.
“Four sail, Gudrid, do I see right?” Thorgrim asked.
“Yes, four sail,” Starri said before Gudrid could make reply. “I’m happy you can see them, Night Wolf. You’ve grown half-blind with your advancing age.”
Thorgrim grunted. He was not in fact terribly old, just into his fifth decade, but he was feeling the effects of hard years, and he did not care to be reminded of it.
“I suppose,” Gudrid said, still ignoring Starri, “that it was only a matter of time before we had company here.”
Thorgrim nodded. Gudrid was right. Summer had come to Ireland, the weather warm and as free of rain as it would ever be, the days long and the seas calm. It was the time for raiding, for men from the north to take to the sea, to appear over the horizon and fall on some unlucky town or monastery, to plunder it for valuables and carry off the people as slaves. It was what brought the Northmen swarming to those shores.
It was what Thorgrim and his men should have been doing as well. But raiding meant ships, seaworthy ships, and those things they were lacking.
They did not want for ships. They had four of those. The mighty Sea Hammer, which had been built under Thorgrim’s watchful eye and skilled hands back in Vík-ló, and Blood Hawk, her near sister. There was the smaller Fox and Dragon as well. They were all pulled up on the beach. They were ships, to be sure, but they were not seaworthy.
A storm in the early summer had rolled over them, just as they were tangled in a sea-fight with a Frisian slaver, and Njord, god of the wind and seas, had driven them ashore and smashed strakes and spars, snapped oars and torn sails to shreds. And so, at a time of year when they should have been driving their ships along the coast, they were struggling just to get them afloat.
Sea Hammer and Blood Hawk had needed the bulk of the work. They had been nearly shattered as they were thrown ashore. Since then they had been brought around to this sheltered place, all but sinking during the short passage, and hauled far up the beach on rollers. Broken planks had been cut away and new sections of wood scarfed in, cracked ribs had been pried off and new ones fashioned and pegged in place. New spars had been shaped from pine trees felled further inland. The work had been hard, exacting and extensive, but it was nearly done. Soon the ships would be rolled back into the sea where they belonged.
More men had climbed up onto the wall now and were staring off to the northeast. Thorgrim considered ordering them all back to work but decided against it. They had been hard at their labors for quite some time, with little in the way of distraction, no women and a limited supply of ale and mead. Now here was the most interesting thing to come their way in weeks, and Thorgrim knew he should let them have some pleasure from it.
Harald Broadarm, Thorgrim’s son, sixteen years old and strong as any of the men, stronger than most, climbed up the ladder and stood at his father’s side. Wisps of his long yellow hair had escaped the thong that bound them and now they danced in the light on-shore wind as he turned and faced seaward with the others.
“Who is this, Father?” he asked. Thorgrim smiled, just a bit. Harald often asked such questions, as if he thought the gods told his father things that other men could not know.
“I’m not sure,” Thorgrim said. “Northmen, I have little doubt. The Irish don’t go in for ships much, and no trader would be coming on so bold as these fellows.”
Harald nodded. Thorgrim wondered if the boy thought that answer was some vision from another realm, some revelation, or just the simple, logical guess that it was.
“Four ships,” Harald said. “Four ships to our two.”
Thorgrim understood what Harald meant. There were, in fact, four ships in Thorgrim’s little fleet, but Sea Hammer and Blood Hawk were in no condition to take to the water. Only Fox and Dragon, left on the beach during the storm and the fighting, were seaworthy. They had been missing only their oars, which had been stolen by the Irishmen who found them. For weeks the men at Waesfiord had felled ash trees, floated them down to the longphort, split them with great hammers and wedges and shaped the sections of blond wood into the long, tapering sweeps that would drive the ships when the wind failed them.
The ships could move under oar, of course, but none of them could be considered truly ready for sea until they had sails, which they did not. They had lost their sails to the storm, the fabric shredded in the brutal wind. And while the Northmen could fashion every other part of their ships, they could not make cloth. So, for that they had made a bargain with a nearby monastery at a place called Ferns. The monastery would provide them with the wide bolts of thick, oiled wool they would need, and the Northmen would pay for it with silver.
There were some misunderstandings at first, but once they had sorted out the problems, the cloth had begun to arrive as quickly as it could be produced. Every week or so, nearly, a wagon would roll groaning through the open gate of the longphort, and behind it, an escort of a dozen Irish warriors. The soldiers were led by a monk named Bécc mac Carthach, who had given up his life as a man-at-arms and was known now as Brother Bécc.
He did not look like a man of God, however, on those occasions when he rode into Waesfiord at the head of his small band. The brown robe and long knotted belt were gone, and in their place he wore a mail shirt, polished bright, leather boots and a sword at his waist. On his head was a helmet, shining as bright as the mail. Half of his face was a mask of scar tissue, the remnants of a battle wound that should have killed him, but instead drove him into the service of God.
Even though Bécc was acting the warrior, he was still doing his Christ-God’s work, Thorgrim knew. Bécc hated the Northmen and considered them vermin, a curse on the land, and worse, an enemy of his God. His attitude was understandable. Thorgrim had to admit as much, though he thought the Irish would be more justified in their outrage if they spent less time killing one another.
So when Bécc arrived at the longphort, Thorgrim greeted him in a courteous way, with Failend there to translate. And Bécc returned the greeting with his own strained courtesy. But Thorgrim knew he was not really there to see that the cloth made it safe to the longphort. The dozen armed men guarding the wagons did not need his help. He came so he could see what his enemy was about, judge the strength of the fortifications, make certain the fin gall were really preparing to leave as they said they were.
It was one of the reasons that Thorgrim maintained a lookout on top of the walls during the day, and at night or in fog sent scouts out half a mile from the longphort to see that no one approached unseen. Though he had given his word that he would not attack the monastery at Ferns, and the abbot whom Bécc served had given his word that the Irish would not attack them, Thorgrim did not trust the abbot or Bécc. And he knew they did not trust him.
“Here, they’re taking sail in now,” Gudrid said, nodding toward the distant ships. Thorgrim’s eye had been sweeping the wide estuary at the mouth of the River Slaney which formed the harbor there. The longphort was on the west side of that harbor, directly opposite the entrance, which was three miles away. The newly arrived ships had cleared the entrance, the light air from the east driving them at an easy pace.
As he stared, Thorgrim could barely discern what Gudrid had seen, the change in shape of the distant vessels as they lowered their wide, square sails and no doubt ran oars out through the oar ports, though it was impossible even for Starri to see such a thing from that distance.
“Here, that one’s run aground!” Starri said, nearly shouting with delight. “See how they just stopped? Hard on the sand.”
Thorgrim grunted. He could not see that, could not even hope to, but he took Starri’s word for it. When the tide was up, which it was, the wide harbor looked like a great unbroken stretch of open water. But in truth it was a hazard of sandbars and mudflats lurking just below the surface. That made it very easy to run aground, though there was little chance of damage hitting that soft bottom, and little problem getting free when you did.
The distant ships continued their slow progress across the harbor, and Thorgrim thought he could make out the grounded vessel backing off the sand and then following behind the others, but he was not certain.
“Do they know we’re here?” Harald asked.
“They might be able to see the earthworks,” Thorgrim said. “From that distance. But I don’t think they’ll know who we are.” He could not imagine how word of the ad hoc longphort at Waesfiord might have spread abroad, and if it had, he could not imagine why anyone would wish to come there.
If they mean to land here, we must be ready, Thorgrim thought. Four ships, if fully manned, could be as many as two hundred men, twice the number of warriors in Thorgrim’s band. If these newcomers came to fight, then the time to hit them, and hit them hard, would be just as they were making the disorganized leap from the sides of their ships into the shallow water.
There was time enough to prepare for a fight. Even pulling as hard as they could at the oars, the far ships would not reach the longphort until well after the sun had passed the noon hour.
But as it happened, they did not come to Waesfiord, and if they did see the earthworks, then they paid them no attention. As all of Thorgrim’s men watched across miles of open water, the four ships pulled along the far shore of the bay, then swung north and ran their bows up on the beach. Starri claimed he could see men leaping ashore, but Thorgrim was not so certain.
“They’ve come to sack Beggerin!” Harald said. “The monastery at Beggerin, that’s what they’ve come for.”
Thorgrim grunted again. Harald was probably right. From where the four ships had put ashore it was an easy march over open ground to the small monastery set back from the bay.
“So, what do we do about this, Night Wolf?” Starri asked. Thorgrim knew he hoped the answer would involve battle of some sort, though who Starri hoped to fight he did not know. Probably Starri did not know either, and he probably did not care, as long as there was fighting involved.
“Nothing,” Thorgrim said. “We do nothing. It’s not our affair.”
What became of an Irish monastery was of no concern to Thorgrim and his men. In this case, Thorgrim was not particularly happy at the thought of Beggerin being sacked. They had been purchasing food and ale from the place, the easiest way to keep themselves supplied while they set their ships to rights. If Beggerin was burned and the people there marched off to the slave markets, it would be an inconvenience. But not enough so that Thorgrim felt the need to waste his men’s lives defending the place.
Besides that, they were not so far from having their ships repaired and ready to leave those miserable shores, and so would not have need of Beggerin for much longer. And that was Thorgrim’s only real concern. Leaving. Back to Norway. Or back to Vík-ló. Whichever the gods decreed.
They watched for a short time more, then Thorgrim called for everyone to get back to their work. The strangers were apparently of no consequence to them, and there was a lot yet to be done; the final repairs on the ships’ planks, stitching sails, splicing and tarring rigging, shaping oars, building sea chests and a dozen other things. He sent four men to relieve Gudrid and the other sentries on the wall.
Thorgrim climbed back down to the ground and returned to Sea Hammer and his own work. He shuffled back under the hull, picked up his tools and began to tap the old rope into the gap between strakes, but now his ears were alert for the telltale sound of the Northmen launching their attack.
Will I hear it from here? he wondered. Sound traveled easily over water, he knew that, but Beggerin was at least half a mile inland from the bay.
There’ll be smoke, for sure, he thought. Great columns of smoke. They were the inevitable marker of a vicious and bloody raid.
Thorgrim finished his work on the seam, all the while keeping an ear cocked toward the north shore, listening for the sound of destruction, the shouting, the screams of terror or agony. He was certain that every other man in the longphort was doing the same. But he heard nothing. He shuffled back out from under the hull, stood, and looked off to the north. No smoke. No sign that anything had changed, save for the four ships on the beach, four tiny dark slashes against the lighter sand, barely discernible to his eyes.
“Nothing, Night Wolf! Nothing at all!” It was Starri’s voice, loud and enthusiastic, which was not a surprise. But it seemed to be coming from somewhere over Thorgrim’s head, which was a surprise. Thorgrim turned and looked up. Sea Hammer’s mast had been unstepped and set on the beach, and the figurehead at the bow removed. Starri was standing where the figurehead was normally mounted, precariously balanced twenty feet above the beach, though it seemed as effortless to him as standing on the ground, as such things generally were.
“What do you see?” Thorgrim called.
“Nothing,” Starri said again. “No smoke. I can see men moving on the beach, but they seem in no hurry. I’ve seen nothing like a raiding party going over the dunes.”
Thorgrim turned back, looked north again. What are they about? he wondered.
“Wait!” Starri called. “I see smoke now…coming from the beach. Yes, from the beach. A cooking fire or some such. Idiots! They might as well send a messenger to the monastery, announcing that they’re there. There won’t be a thing left worth taking. Night Wolf, I’m going to go over and slap someone in the head for being such a fool!”
Once again Harald appeared at Thorgrim’s side. “What do you think they’re up to, Father?” he asked.
“Not raiding the monastery, that’s for certain,” Thorgrim said, and that was the only thing he knew for sure. But he could not leave it like that. He could not have a band of armed men, outnumbering his own and within sight of the longphort, and not even know why they were there.
He turned to Harald. “In truth, I don’t know what they’re doing. So I guess we better go ask them."
Gudrid saw them because he was the one charged with looking out, a dull task that was shared by all, save for those with eyesight so poor that it was pointless to put them to that job. Gudrid was standing on the top of the earthen wall that surrounded the makeshift longphort at a place that the Irish called Loch Garman, though Thorgrim Night Wolf called it Waesfiord, which meant inlet of the mudflats. It was not a place that Thorgrim loved.
The wall had been built up to a height of fifteen feet. That was high enough for a watchman standing there to see trouble coming from a good distance, at least when the land was not under a blanket of gray fog and rain, which was about half the time. But that morning, despite the hovering threat of rotten weather, a man could see two or three miles in any direction. That was how far away the ships were when Gudrid spotted them.
Thorgrim Night Wolf was not looking out to sea. He could see nothing but the dark planks of his ship Sea Hammer, a foot away from his face. He was on his back, the shingle of the beach starting to dig through his tunic, and halfway under the larboard side of the ship, which was pulled up on the beach and resting on its starboard side.
With a hammer in one hand and a caulking iron, like a dull chisel, in the other, Thorgrim was gently tapping a bit of tarred twine between two of the planks where water insisted on seeping through. When Sea Hammer had been built, a length of rope was sandwiched between the planks to keep the water out, and it still did its job, mostly. But with the great abuse that the ship had suffered in the months since it had first been rolled into the sea, there were places where she was not as tight as Thorgrim would have wished.
“Thorgrim!” He heard Gudrid’s voice clearly over the ring of hammers, the chopping sound of axes and adzes shaping wood. “Thorgrim, ships!”
There was not much Gudrid might have said that would get Thorgrim’s attention quicker than that. He dropped the hammer and the iron and rolled out from under Sea Hammer and up onto his feet.
Anyone approaching the longphort was a potential threat, but if they were coming from the land, they were undoubtedly Irish, and there was the wall to stop them. There was no such barrier to stop anyone coming from the sea. Ships meant Northmen, Norwegians or Danes, but there was no reason to think they were any friendlier than the Irish.
Thorgrim squinted and looked out over the water, running his eyes from the headland to the north across the wide sweep of horizon. The thick blanket of clouds limited how far he could see, as did eyes that were growing old, and he could make out nothing out of the ordinary.
He turned and jogged over to the wall and up the crude ladder leaning there. All hundred or so men and one woman at Waesfiord had heard Gudrid’s cry, and now all work ceased, all eyes turned seaward.
Thorgrim stepped up beside Gudrid. He squinted and turned his head and stared in the direction that Gudrid pointed, but he still could not see them, not at first. Then finally they came into view, four small dots near the edge of the visible world, four ships’ sails seen from several miles away. They were just coming through the mile-wide gap between the headland to the north and the sand bar to the south that made up the entrance to the vast harbor, three miles wide east to west and six north to south.
“Well done, Gudrid,” Thorgrim said. “Well spotted.” There was a flurry of motion below and Starri Deathless scrambled up the ladder and stood at Thorgrim’s side. Starri was a berserker, one of those men gifted or cursed by the gods with a madness in battle beyond that of normal men. His senses were sharp, his eyesight, his hearing more acute than that of any man among the crews of Thorgrim’s ships. Thorgrim might have used him as a lookout, but Starri could not concentrate on any single task for longer than it took most men to urinate.
“What?” Starri asked, incredulous. “You only just saw those ships, Gudrid? Are you blind? Why, they’re all but run up on the beach!”
Gudrid made no reply and neither did Thorgrim. Gudrid would not have suffered such a remark from any other man, but Starri was not like other men, and no one who knew him took offense at his words.
“Four sail, Gudrid, do I see right?” Thorgrim asked.
“Yes, four sail,” Starri said before Gudrid could make reply. “I’m happy you can see them, Night Wolf. You’ve grown half-blind with your advancing age.”
Thorgrim grunted. He was not in fact terribly old, just into his fifth decade, but he was feeling the effects of hard years, and he did not care to be reminded of it.
“I suppose,” Gudrid said, still ignoring Starri, “that it was only a matter of time before we had company here.”
Thorgrim nodded. Gudrid was right. Summer had come to Ireland, the weather warm and as free of rain as it would ever be, the days long and the seas calm. It was the time for raiding, for men from the north to take to the sea, to appear over the horizon and fall on some unlucky town or monastery, to plunder it for valuables and carry off the people as slaves. It was what brought the Northmen swarming to those shores.
It was what Thorgrim and his men should have been doing as well. But raiding meant ships, seaworthy ships, and those things they were lacking.
They did not want for ships. They had four of those. The mighty Sea Hammer, which had been built under Thorgrim’s watchful eye and skilled hands back in Vík-ló, and Blood Hawk, her near sister. There was the smaller Fox and Dragon as well. They were all pulled up on the beach. They were ships, to be sure, but they were not seaworthy.
A storm in the early summer had rolled over them, just as they were tangled in a sea-fight with a Frisian slaver, and Njord, god of the wind and seas, had driven them ashore and smashed strakes and spars, snapped oars and torn sails to shreds. And so, at a time of year when they should have been driving their ships along the coast, they were struggling just to get them afloat.
Sea Hammer and Blood Hawk had needed the bulk of the work. They had been nearly shattered as they were thrown ashore. Since then they had been brought around to this sheltered place, all but sinking during the short passage, and hauled far up the beach on rollers. Broken planks had been cut away and new sections of wood scarfed in, cracked ribs had been pried off and new ones fashioned and pegged in place. New spars had been shaped from pine trees felled further inland. The work had been hard, exacting and extensive, but it was nearly done. Soon the ships would be rolled back into the sea where they belonged.
More men had climbed up onto the wall now and were staring off to the northeast. Thorgrim considered ordering them all back to work but decided against it. They had been hard at their labors for quite some time, with little in the way of distraction, no women and a limited supply of ale and mead. Now here was the most interesting thing to come their way in weeks, and Thorgrim knew he should let them have some pleasure from it.
Harald Broadarm, Thorgrim’s son, sixteen years old and strong as any of the men, stronger than most, climbed up the ladder and stood at his father’s side. Wisps of his long yellow hair had escaped the thong that bound them and now they danced in the light on-shore wind as he turned and faced seaward with the others.
“Who is this, Father?” he asked. Thorgrim smiled, just a bit. Harald often asked such questions, as if he thought the gods told his father things that other men could not know.
“I’m not sure,” Thorgrim said. “Northmen, I have little doubt. The Irish don’t go in for ships much, and no trader would be coming on so bold as these fellows.”
Harald nodded. Thorgrim wondered if the boy thought that answer was some vision from another realm, some revelation, or just the simple, logical guess that it was.
“Four ships,” Harald said. “Four ships to our two.”
Thorgrim understood what Harald meant. There were, in fact, four ships in Thorgrim’s little fleet, but Sea Hammer and Blood Hawk were in no condition to take to the water. Only Fox and Dragon, left on the beach during the storm and the fighting, were seaworthy. They had been missing only their oars, which had been stolen by the Irishmen who found them. For weeks the men at Waesfiord had felled ash trees, floated them down to the longphort, split them with great hammers and wedges and shaped the sections of blond wood into the long, tapering sweeps that would drive the ships when the wind failed them.
The ships could move under oar, of course, but none of them could be considered truly ready for sea until they had sails, which they did not. They had lost their sails to the storm, the fabric shredded in the brutal wind. And while the Northmen could fashion every other part of their ships, they could not make cloth. So, for that they had made a bargain with a nearby monastery at a place called Ferns. The monastery would provide them with the wide bolts of thick, oiled wool they would need, and the Northmen would pay for it with silver.
There were some misunderstandings at first, but once they had sorted out the problems, the cloth had begun to arrive as quickly as it could be produced. Every week or so, nearly, a wagon would roll groaning through the open gate of the longphort, and behind it, an escort of a dozen Irish warriors. The soldiers were led by a monk named Bécc mac Carthach, who had given up his life as a man-at-arms and was known now as Brother Bécc.
He did not look like a man of God, however, on those occasions when he rode into Waesfiord at the head of his small band. The brown robe and long knotted belt were gone, and in their place he wore a mail shirt, polished bright, leather boots and a sword at his waist. On his head was a helmet, shining as bright as the mail. Half of his face was a mask of scar tissue, the remnants of a battle wound that should have killed him, but instead drove him into the service of God.
Even though Bécc was acting the warrior, he was still doing his Christ-God’s work, Thorgrim knew. Bécc hated the Northmen and considered them vermin, a curse on the land, and worse, an enemy of his God. His attitude was understandable. Thorgrim had to admit as much, though he thought the Irish would be more justified in their outrage if they spent less time killing one another.
So when Bécc arrived at the longphort, Thorgrim greeted him in a courteous way, with Failend there to translate. And Bécc returned the greeting with his own strained courtesy. But Thorgrim knew he was not really there to see that the cloth made it safe to the longphort. The dozen armed men guarding the wagons did not need his help. He came so he could see what his enemy was about, judge the strength of the fortifications, make certain the fin gall were really preparing to leave as they said they were.
It was one of the reasons that Thorgrim maintained a lookout on top of the walls during the day, and at night or in fog sent scouts out half a mile from the longphort to see that no one approached unseen. Though he had given his word that he would not attack the monastery at Ferns, and the abbot whom Bécc served had given his word that the Irish would not attack them, Thorgrim did not trust the abbot or Bécc. And he knew they did not trust him.
“Here, they’re taking sail in now,” Gudrid said, nodding toward the distant ships. Thorgrim’s eye had been sweeping the wide estuary at the mouth of the River Slaney which formed the harbor there. The longphort was on the west side of that harbor, directly opposite the entrance, which was three miles away. The newly arrived ships had cleared the entrance, the light air from the east driving them at an easy pace.
As he stared, Thorgrim could barely discern what Gudrid had seen, the change in shape of the distant vessels as they lowered their wide, square sails and no doubt ran oars out through the oar ports, though it was impossible even for Starri to see such a thing from that distance.
“Here, that one’s run aground!” Starri said, nearly shouting with delight. “See how they just stopped? Hard on the sand.”
Thorgrim grunted. He could not see that, could not even hope to, but he took Starri’s word for it. When the tide was up, which it was, the wide harbor looked like a great unbroken stretch of open water. But in truth it was a hazard of sandbars and mudflats lurking just below the surface. That made it very easy to run aground, though there was little chance of damage hitting that soft bottom, and little problem getting free when you did.
The distant ships continued their slow progress across the harbor, and Thorgrim thought he could make out the grounded vessel backing off the sand and then following behind the others, but he was not certain.
“Do they know we’re here?” Harald asked.
“They might be able to see the earthworks,” Thorgrim said. “From that distance. But I don’t think they’ll know who we are.” He could not imagine how word of the ad hoc longphort at Waesfiord might have spread abroad, and if it had, he could not imagine why anyone would wish to come there.
If they mean to land here, we must be ready, Thorgrim thought. Four ships, if fully manned, could be as many as two hundred men, twice the number of warriors in Thorgrim’s band. If these newcomers came to fight, then the time to hit them, and hit them hard, would be just as they were making the disorganized leap from the sides of their ships into the shallow water.
There was time enough to prepare for a fight. Even pulling as hard as they could at the oars, the far ships would not reach the longphort until well after the sun had passed the noon hour.
But as it happened, they did not come to Waesfiord, and if they did see the earthworks, then they paid them no attention. As all of Thorgrim’s men watched across miles of open water, the four ships pulled along the far shore of the bay, then swung north and ran their bows up on the beach. Starri claimed he could see men leaping ashore, but Thorgrim was not so certain.
“They’ve come to sack Beggerin!” Harald said. “The monastery at Beggerin, that’s what they’ve come for.”
Thorgrim grunted again. Harald was probably right. From where the four ships had put ashore it was an easy march over open ground to the small monastery set back from the bay.
“So, what do we do about this, Night Wolf?” Starri asked. Thorgrim knew he hoped the answer would involve battle of some sort, though who Starri hoped to fight he did not know. Probably Starri did not know either, and he probably did not care, as long as there was fighting involved.
“Nothing,” Thorgrim said. “We do nothing. It’s not our affair.”
What became of an Irish monastery was of no concern to Thorgrim and his men. In this case, Thorgrim was not particularly happy at the thought of Beggerin being sacked. They had been purchasing food and ale from the place, the easiest way to keep themselves supplied while they set their ships to rights. If Beggerin was burned and the people there marched off to the slave markets, it would be an inconvenience. But not enough so that Thorgrim felt the need to waste his men’s lives defending the place.
Besides that, they were not so far from having their ships repaired and ready to leave those miserable shores, and so would not have need of Beggerin for much longer. And that was Thorgrim’s only real concern. Leaving. Back to Norway. Or back to Vík-ló. Whichever the gods decreed.
They watched for a short time more, then Thorgrim called for everyone to get back to their work. The strangers were apparently of no consequence to them, and there was a lot yet to be done; the final repairs on the ships’ planks, stitching sails, splicing and tarring rigging, shaping oars, building sea chests and a dozen other things. He sent four men to relieve Gudrid and the other sentries on the wall.
Thorgrim climbed back down to the ground and returned to Sea Hammer and his own work. He shuffled back under the hull, picked up his tools and began to tap the old rope into the gap between strakes, but now his ears were alert for the telltale sound of the Northmen launching their attack.
Will I hear it from here? he wondered. Sound traveled easily over water, he knew that, but Beggerin was at least half a mile inland from the bay.
There’ll be smoke, for sure, he thought. Great columns of smoke. They were the inevitable marker of a vicious and bloody raid.
Thorgrim finished his work on the seam, all the while keeping an ear cocked toward the north shore, listening for the sound of destruction, the shouting, the screams of terror or agony. He was certain that every other man in the longphort was doing the same. But he heard nothing. He shuffled back out from under the hull, stood, and looked off to the north. No smoke. No sign that anything had changed, save for the four ships on the beach, four tiny dark slashes against the lighter sand, barely discernible to his eyes.
“Nothing, Night Wolf! Nothing at all!” It was Starri’s voice, loud and enthusiastic, which was not a surprise. But it seemed to be coming from somewhere over Thorgrim’s head, which was a surprise. Thorgrim turned and looked up. Sea Hammer’s mast had been unstepped and set on the beach, and the figurehead at the bow removed. Starri was standing where the figurehead was normally mounted, precariously balanced twenty feet above the beach, though it seemed as effortless to him as standing on the ground, as such things generally were.
“What do you see?” Thorgrim called.
“Nothing,” Starri said again. “No smoke. I can see men moving on the beach, but they seem in no hurry. I’ve seen nothing like a raiding party going over the dunes.”
Thorgrim turned back, looked north again. What are they about? he wondered.
“Wait!” Starri called. “I see smoke now…coming from the beach. Yes, from the beach. A cooking fire or some such. Idiots! They might as well send a messenger to the monastery, announcing that they’re there. There won’t be a thing left worth taking. Night Wolf, I’m going to go over and slap someone in the head for being such a fool!”
Once again Harald appeared at Thorgrim’s side. “What do you think they’re up to, Father?” he asked.
“Not raiding the monastery, that’s for certain,” Thorgrim said, and that was the only thing he knew for sure. But he could not leave it like that. He could not have a band of armed men, outnumbering his own and within sight of the longphort, and not even know why they were there.
He turned to Harald. “In truth, I don’t know what they’re doing. So I guess we better go ask them."
