The Pale Horseman (3 page)

Those were my thoughts as we rode to Oxton. That was the estate Mildrith had brought me in
marriage and it was a beautiful place, but so saddled with debt that it was more of a burden
than a pleasure. The farmland was on the slopes of hills facing east towards the broad
sea-reach of the Uisc and above the house were thick woods of oak and ash from which flowed
small clear streams that cut across the fields where rye, wheat and barley grew. The house, it
was not a hall, was a smoke-filled building made from mud, dung, oak and rye-straw, and so
long and low that it looked like a green, moss-covered mound from which smoke escaped through
the roof's central hole. In the attached yard were pigs, chickens and mounds of manure as big
as the house. Mildrith's father had farmed it, helped by a steward named Oswald who was a
weasel, and he caused me still more trouble on that rainy Sunday as we rode back to the
farm.

I was furious, resentful and vengeful. Alfred had humiliated me which made it
unfortunate for Oswald that he had chosen that Sunday afternoon to drag an oak tree down
from the high woods. I was brooding on the pleasures of revenge as I let my horse pick its way
up the track through the trees and saw eight oxen hauling the great trunk towards the river.
Three men were goading the oxen, while a fourth, Oswald, rode the trunk with a whip. He saw me
and jumped off and, for a heartbeat, it looked as if he wanted to run into the trees, but then
he realised he could not evade me and so he just stood and waited as I rode up to the great oak
log.

'Lord,' Oswald greeted me. He was surprised to see me. He probably thought I had been
killed with the other hostages, and that belief had made him careless.

My horse was nervous because of the stink of blood from the oxen's flanks and he stepped
backwards and forwards in small steps until I calmed him by patting his neck. Then I looked
at the oak trunk that must have been forty feet long and as thick about as a man is tall. 'A fine
tree,' I said to Oswald.

He glanced towards Mildrith who was twenty paces away. 'Good day, lady,' he said, clawing
off the woollen hat he wore over his springy red hair.

'A wet day, Oswald,' she said. Her father had appointed the steward and Mildrith had an
innocent faith in his reliability.

'I said,' I spoke loudly, 'a fine tree. So where was it felled?'

Oswald tucked the hat into his belt. 'On the top ridge, lord,' he said vaguely.

'The top ridge on my land?'

He hesitated. He was doubtless tempted to claim it came from a neighbour's land, but that
lie could easily have been exposed and so he said nothing.

'From my land?' I asked again.

'Yes, lord,' he admitted.

'And where is it going?'

He hesitated again, but had to answer. 'Wigulf's mill.'

'Wigulf buys it?'

'He'll split it, lord.'

'I didn't ask" what he will do with it,' I said, but whether he will buy it.'

Mildrith, hearing the harshness in my voice, intervened to say that her father had
sometimes sent timber to Wigulf's mill, but I waved her to silence.

'Will he buy it?' I asked Oswald.

'We need the timber, lord, to make repairs,' the steward said, 'and Wigulf takes his fee in
split wood.'

'And you drag the tree on a Sunday?' He had nothing to say to that. 'Tell me,' I went on,
'if we need planks for repairs, then why don't we split the trunk ourselves? Do we lack men? Or
wedges? Or mauls?'

'Wigulf has always done it,' Oswald said in a surly tone.

'Always?' I repeated and Oswald said nothing. 'Wigulf lives in Exanmynster?' I
guessed. Exanmynster lay a mile or so northwards and was the nearest settlement to
Oxton.

'Yes, lord,' Oswald said.

'So if I ride to Exanmynster now,' I said, 'Wigulf will tell me how many similar trees
you've delivered to him in the last year?'

There was silence, except for the rain dripping from leaves and the intermittent burst
of birdsong. I edged my horse a few steps closer to Oswald, who gripped his whip's handle as
if readying it to lash out at me.

'How many?' I asked.

Oswald said nothing.

'How many?' I demanded, louder.

'Husband,' Mildrith called.

'Quiet!' I shouted at her and Oswald looked from me to her and back to me.

'And how much-has Wigulf paid you?' I asked. 'What does a tree like this fetch? Eight
shillings? Nine?'

The anger that had made me act so impetuously at the king's church service rose again. It
was plain that Oswald was stealing the timber and being paid for it, and what I should have
done was charge him with theft and have him arraigned before a court where a jury of men would
decide his guilt or innocence, but I was in no mood for such a process. I just drew
Serpent-Breath and kicked my horse forward. Mildrith screamed a protest, but I ignored her.
Oswald ran, and that was a mistake, because I caught him easily, and Serpent-Breath swung
once and opened up the back of his skull so I could see brains and blood as he fell. He twisted
in the leaf mould and I wheeled the horse back and stabbed down into his throat.

'That was murder!' Mildrith shouted at me.

'That was justice,' I snarled at her, 'something lacking in Wessex.' I spat on Oswald's
body, which was still twitching. 'The bastard's been stealing from us.'

Mildrith kicked her horse, leading the nurse who carried our child uphill. I let her go.
'Take the trunk up to the house,' I ordered the slaves who had been goading the oxen. 'If it's
too big to drag uphill then split it here and take the planks to the house.'

I searched Oswald's house that evening and discovered fiftythree shillings buried in the
floor. I took the silver, confiscated his cooking pots, spit, knives, buckles and a
deerskin cloak, then drove his wife arid three children off my land. I had come home.

My anger was not slaked by Oswald's killing. The death of a dishonest steward was no
consolation for what I perceived as a monstrous injustice. For the moment Wessex was
safe from the Danes, but it was only safe because I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson and my
reward had been humiliation.

Poor Mildrith. She was a peaceable woman who thought well of everyone she met, and now she
found herself married to a resentful, angry warrior. She was frightened of Alfred's
wrath, terrified that the church would punish me for disturbing its peace, and worried that
Oswald's relatives would demand a wergild from me. And so they would. A wergild was the blood
price that every man, woman and child possessed. Kill a man and you must pay his price or else
die yourself, and I had no doubt that Oswald's family would go to Odda the Younger, who had
been named the Ealdorman of Defnascir because his father was too badly wounded to
continue as ealdorman, and Odda would instruct the shire reeve to pursue me and place me
on trial, but I did not care. I hunted boar and deer, I brooded and waited for news of the
negotiations at Exanceaster. I was expecting Alfred to do what he always did which was
to make peace with the Danes and so release them, and when he did I would go to Ragnar.

And as I waited I found my first retainer. He was a slave and I discovered him in
Exanmynster on a fine spring day. There was a hiring-fair where men looked for employment
through the busy days of hay-making and harvest, and like all fairs there were jugglers,
storytellers, stilt walkers, musicians and acrobats. There was also a tall, white-haired
man with a lined, serious face, who was selling enchanted leather bags that turned iron
into silver. He showed us how it was done, and I saw him place two common nails into the beg
and a moment later they were pure silver. He said we had to place a silver crucifix in the
bag and then sleep one night with it tied around our necks before the magic worked and I paid
him three silver shillings for one bag, and it never worked. I spent months searching for the
man, but never found him. Even these days I come across such men and women, selling
sorcerous pouches or boxes, and now I have them whipped and run off my land, but I was only
twenty then and I believed my own eyes. That man had attracted a large crowd, but there were
even more people gathered by the church gate where shouts erupted every few minutes. I
pushed my horse into their rear ranks, getting dirty looks from folk who knew I had killed
Oswald, but none dared accuse me of the murder for I carried both Serpent-Breath and
Wasp-Sting.

A young man was by the church gate. He was stripped to the waist, barefooted and had a rope
around his neck, and the rope was tied to the gatepost. In his hand was a short, stout stave. He
had long unbound fair hair, blue eyes, a stubborn face and blood all over his chest, belly and
arms. Three men guarded him. They too were fair-haired and blue-eyed, and they shouted in a
strange accent.

'Come and fight the heathen! Three pennies to make the bastard bleed! Come and fight!'

'Who is he?' I asked.

'A Dane, lord, a pagan Dane.' The man tugged off his hat when he spoke to me, then turned
back to the crowd. 'Come and fight him! Get your revenge! Make a Dane bleed! Be a good
Christian! Hurt a pagan!'

The three men were Frisians. I suspected they had been in Alfred's army and, now that he
was talking to the Danes rather than fighting them, the three had deserted. Frisians come
from across the sea and they come for one reason only, money, and this trio had somehow
captured the young Dane and were profiting from him so long as he lasted. And that could have
been some time, for he was good. A strong young Saxon paid his three pence and was given a
sword with which he hacked wildly at the prisoner, but the Dane parried every blow, wood
chips flying from his stave, and when he saw an opening he cracked his opponent around the
head hard enough to draw blood from his ear. The Saxon staggered away, half stunned, and the
Dane rammed the stave into his belly and, as the Saxon bent to gasp for breath, the stave
whistled around in a blow that would have cracked his skull open like an egg, but the Frisians
dragged on the rope so that the Dane fell backwards. 'Do we have another hero?' a Frisian
shouted as the young Saxon was helped away. 'Come on, lads! Show your strength! Beat a Dane
bloody!'

'I'll beat him,' I said. I dismounted and pushed through the crowd. I gave my horse's reins
to a boy, then drew Serpent-Breath. 'Three pence?' I asked the Frisians.

'No, lord,' one of them said.

'Why not?'

'We don't want a dead Dane, do we?' the man answered.

'We do!' someone shouted from the crowd. The folk in the Uisc valley did not like me, but
they liked the Danes even less and they relished the prospect of watching a prisoner being
slaughtered.

'You can only wound him, lord,' the Frisian said. 'And you must use our sword.' He held out
the weapon. I glanced at it, saw its blunt edge, and spat.

'Must?' I asked.

The Frisian did not want to argue. 'You can only draw blood, lord,' he said.

The Dane flicked hair from his eyes and watched me. He held the stave low. I could see he was
nervous, but there was no fear in his eyes. He had probably fought a hundred battles since
the Frisians captured him, but those fights had been against men who were not soldiers, and he
must have known, from my two swords, that I was a warrior. His skin was blotched with bruises
and laced by blood and scars, and he surely expected another wound from Serpent-Breath,
but he was determined to give me a fight.

'What's your name?' I asked in Danish.

He blinked at me, surprised.

'Your name, boy,' I said. I called him 'boy', though he was not much younger than me.

'Haesten,' he said.

'Haesten who?'

'Haesten Storrison,' he said, giving me his father's name.

'Fight him! Don't talk to him!' a voice shouted from the crowd. I turned to stare at the man
who had shouted and he could not meet my gaze, then I turned fast, very fast, and whipped
Serpent-Breath in a quick sweep that Haesten instinctively parried so that Serpent-Breath
cut through the stave as if it was rotten. Haesten was left with a stub of wood, while the rest
of his weapon, a yard of thick ash, lay on the ground.

'Kill him!' someone shouted.

'Just draw blood, lord,' a Frisian said, 'please, lord. He's not a bad lad, for a Dane. Just
make him bleed and we'll pay you.'

I kicked the ash stave away from Haesten. 'Pick it up,' I said.

He looked at me nervously. To pick it up he would have to go to the end of his tether, then
stoop, and at that moment he would expose his back to Serpent-Breath. He watched me, his eyes
bitter beneath the fringe of dirty hair, then decided I would not attack him as he bent
over. He went to the stave and, as he leaned down,

I kicked it a few inches further away. 'Pick it up,' I ordered him again.

He still held the stub of ash and, as he took a further step, straining against the rope, he
suddenly whipped around and tried to ram the broken end into my belly. He was fast, but I
had half expected the move and caught his wrist in my left hand. I squeezed hard, hurting
him.

'Pick it up,' I said a third time.

This time he obeyed, stooping to the stave, and to reach it he stretched his tether tight
and I slashed Serpent-Breath onto the taut rope, severing it. Haesten, who had been
straining forward, fell onto his face as the hide rope was cut. I put my left foot onto his
back and let the tip of Serpent-Breath rest on his spine.

'Alfred,' I said to the Frisians, 'has ordered that all Danish prisoners are to be taken
to him.'

The three looked at me, said nothing.

'So why have you not taken this man to the king?' I demanded.

'We didn't know, lord,' one of them said, 'no one told us,' which was not surprising
because Alfred had given no such order.

'We'll take him to the king now, lord,' another reassured me.

'I'll save you the trouble,' I said. I took my foot off Haesten. 'Get up,' I told him in
Danish. I threw a coin to the boy holding my horse and hauled myself into the saddle where I
offered Haesten a hand.