River of Destiny

For Jon, who keeps the wheels on the wagon

… rich swords lay … eaten with rust, as they had lain buried in the bosom of the earth for a thousand years … the princes who placed their treasure there had pronounced a solemn curse on it which was to last until doomsday: that whoever rifled the place should be guilty of sin, shut up in dwelling-places of devils, bound in bonds of hell, and tormented with evil …

Beowulf

Table of Contents

The woman was watching, flattened against the wall of the house, her eye to a knothole. She hardly dared breathe as she watched the scene unfolding inside.

With the kiss of steam wreathing round the blade, her husband raised his hammer and struck sparks from the iron. The forge was hot from the blazing charcoal and sweat dripped into his eyes. Even she, his wife, could sense his power, sense the magic he was creating as he conjured the alchemy of metal and fire.

‘Is it ready?’ The thegn’s reeve, Hrotgar, stood in the doorway, his huge bulk blocking out the light.

‘Not until the gods say so,’ Eric said curtly.

‘The gods!’ Hrotgar echoed wryly. ‘Maybe the gods see no need to hurry, but everyone in this village sees clearly why Lord Egbert is so anxious for it.’

‘Tell him he’ll have to wait.’ Eric didn’t bother to look up. He could picture the shocked anger on the other man’s face. He bent back to his task, his tongue between his teeth, a soundless whistle drowned by the hiss of the fire. At his feet the flames reflected in the deep iron-bound yew-wood bucket of water. Like most of the tools in the forge he had made it himself. ‘You’re blocking my light,’ he yelled suddenly. ‘Get out of here. When it’s ready I’ll tell you.’

For a moment Hrotgar hesitated, then with an angry growl he stepped outside and disappeared. The forge was lit by torches thrust into brackets on the wall, by the red glow of the furnace, but even so, the sudden low shaft of sunlight through the doorway illuminated the dark corners and spun reflections off the blade. Eric gave a grunt of satisfaction. The magic was growing stronger.

‘Eric?’ The voice behind him was tentative. ‘It is true, you are making Lord Egbert angry with your delays.’

‘Go away, Edith!’ Eric spun round furiously. ‘Out! Now!’ Her very presence was weakening. He could sense the carefully built tension in the blade wavering. He could sense it in the air. Only warriors could come near the sword now, new born as it was, in its birthing pangs of fire and water. He muttered the sacred charms, feeling the vibrating waves of Wyrd settle. He wasn’t sure how he knew what to do but the smith’s magical art was in his blood, in the memory of his veins and bones, handed down to him by his father and his father’s father going back into the mists of time. Through that memory he knew the sorcerer was right. There was no place for a woman in the forge or in his bed while he was creating this particular weapon. He had called it Destiny Maker and it was his greatest challenge.

Outside, Hrotgar was standing staring down towards the river, shading his eyes with his hand against the glare of sunlight on the water. Behind him the villagers went about their business calmly stacking the storehouses against the coming winter.

‘Is the Lord Egbert improving?’ Edith had come up behind him silently, her shoes making no sound on the scatter of bright autumn leaves. For a moment he didn’t answer and she nodded sadly. ‘Will he live?’

His jaw tightened fractionally. ‘If it is God’s will.’

The thegn was a comparatively young man, strong, in his prime, but a month ago he had fallen ill and before the shocked eyes of his followers and his family he had begun to waste away, racked by fever and pain. Hrotgar glanced down at her. She was beautiful, the smith’s wife. Her long fair hair, plaited into a rope which hung to her slender waist, had broken free of its binding and blew in soft curls around her temples. He felt a quick surge of desire and sternly dismissed it. This was forbidden territory. He looked away, narrowing his eyes as she scanned the river. The sun was almost gone, the last dazzling rays turning the water red as blood. He shivered as the thought hung for a moment in his mind. Then his expression cleared. A fishing boat was rounding the bend, the slender prow breaking up the crimson ripples, turning the wavelets to gold. He smiled grimly as a breeze swept up the river and threw spray across the men bending to their nets, hauling them up on deck.

‘Try and make him hurry,’ he said at last. ‘The thegn wants, needs, that sword.’

‘You know I can’t go near him,’ she retorted. ‘It is forbidden.’

He looked at her quickly and then back at the river. ‘I know what is forbidden,’ he said quietly.

Neither spoke for a long time, both watching the fishermen with exaggerated concentration. At last she stepped away from him. ‘I have to go.’

‘To an empty house?’

‘To an empty house,’ she echoed.

He watched her as she retraced her steps across the hard-baked ground. In another day or so the rain would come. He could smell it in the air, and this place would become a quagmire. Further up the hill the thegn’s house and the great mead hall were on quick-draining soil on the edge of the heath. They would stay reasonably dry, at least for the time being. He sighed. For how long would it stay so quiet, so calm? As the thegn’s health failed so the restlessness had grown. The warriors were watching, waiting, his brother and his two sons keeping their counsel; the brother, Oswald, was hungry, the sons, Oswy and Alfred, too young yet to do more than hope and strut and dream. He glanced up at a flight of birds heading up from the river, arrow straight towards the thegn’s hall. Gulls. White winged. No sinister message there.

The river was thick with mist. It lay like a soft white muffler on the water between the trees, hiding the mud banks and the lower woods. Above, where the cluster of old barns stood on the edge of the fields, brilliant sunshine touched gold into the autumnal leaves, still holding some of the warmth of summer. Zoë Lloyd was standing at the kitchen sink of the oldest and to her mind the most beautiful of the three barn conversions, gazing out of the window down through the trees towards the river. She shivered. The room had grown suddenly cold in spite of the sunlight. A huge sail had appeared, hazy in the fog, sailing slowly up-river towards Woodbridge. It was curved, cross-rigged, straining before the wind, decorated with some sort of image; she couldn’t quite see it behind the trees. She watched it for several seconds. There was no wind, surely; it had to be moving under power. If she were outside she would probably be able to hear the steady purr of an engine. She gazed at the trees, which were motionless, and then back at the sail. The mist was thickening, wrapping itself ever more densely over the river. In a moment the vessel would be out of sight.

‘It’s there again. The Viking ship. Look, Ken,’ she said over her shoulder to her husband.

There was no reply and she turned with a sudden stab of panic. The kitchen was empty. But she had heard him seconds before, felt him, sensed him behind her, sitting at the table in the sunshine. She looked at the empty chair, the unopened newspaper and she groped with shaking hands for her phone. ‘Ken? Where are you?’

‘Still down here on the boat.’ The voice broke up with a crackle. ‘Did you want something special?’

‘No.’ For a moment she wondered if she were going mad. ‘Ken? Did you see it? The Viking ship going up-river. It must have gone right past you.’

‘I didn’t see anything. The fog is thick as porridge down here on the water!’

‘OK. Don’t worry. See you soon.’ She switched off the phone and slowly put it down. Of course he hadn’t seen anything. Out on their boat on the mooring, with his head no doubt down in the engine compartment as he tinkered with the motor, he wouldn’t have seen or heard the entire Seventh Fleet. Glancing out, she saw that the sail had gone. Rays of sunlight were slowly breaking up the mist. Her momentary panic was subsiding.

It was a couple of minutes later as she hung up the dish-cloth and turned to walk through into the high-beamed living space which formed the greater part of the building that she paused and looked back into the kitchen, which had been constructed in what had once been a side aisle of the barn. The house was empty. There was no one there. If Ken had not been sitting in the chair at the table behind her, who had?

It was barely three months since they had moved into the barn conversion overlooking the River Deben in Suffolk. Part of a group of medieval barns, theirs, somewhat prosaically known as The Old Barn, was the closest to the river. Below them the ground fell away steeply across mown lawns and through a narrow strip of woodland towards the water. Looking through the huge picture window to her left, Zoë watched as a small yacht appeared, moving steadily upstream towards Woodbridge, the morning sunlight reflecting through the trees onto the gently curved sails. The mist had lifted as suddenly as, in the evening, it would probably return. It was moments like this which reassured her that they had done the right thing in moving to the country. The view was utterly beautiful.