Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

The man addressed hawked loudly and spat over the side without looking at me. "I say Tearlach has the right of it. Donuil did not come home. This one should not go home, either."

The navigator reappeared and joined us, glancing from one to the other of his companions, trying to gauge their temper.

"We are talking still of Donuil and his fate," Connor informed him. " Tearlach and Padraic think this man should die. Do you?"

The navigator shrugged. " The babby's going to die. Donuil has been dead to us all for years. Everybody dies."

"The baby will not die," I interrupted him, addressing myself to Connor. "I told you, I know of a worm—"

"Be silent! You will hold your peace until required to speak." The reprimand was whiplash quick, savage and implacable. I subsided. Connor looked back at the navigator. "Scan?"

The navigator shook his head gently and with finality. "Throw him over the side."

"He can swim, Sean."

Sean sniffed. "Lachie could swim, too, but not after this one clove him with the axe. Could he do any better than Lachie?"

"Diarmid?"

Diarmid was the only one of the four who had so far remained silent, a large, red-faced man with a wild beard and a head of hair to match, judging by the thick, coarse ringlets that hung from beneath his big, horned helmet. Now, addressed directly by his leader, he turned his gaze on me and I saw his eyes, pale blue and cold. "He's an Outlander. Kill'im."

I followed all of this with disbelief, amazed at the change this Connor had undergone in the space of moments. When I had told him of my friendship with his brother, I had thought he believed me. He himself had said as much. What I was witnessing now, however, gave the lie to all of that. He stood, looking down towards his knees, the fingers of his right hand scratching idly in the hair that swept back behind his ears. He finally withdrew his hand, inspecting the tips of his fingers as he rubbed them pensively with his thumb, then made a tutting sound and heaved a quick, sharp sigh.

"Well, Yellow Head," he said. "You hear the verdict of my trusted friends. 'They want you dead." He sucked air reflectively between his teeth. "But the decision is mine. And what do I have to guide me in the making of it? You!" He shot out an arm and pointed a long finger in my face. "You tell me that my brother is alive, and well, and living in Britain as your friend. As proof of that, you offer me words that he could have told you at any time, under any kind of duress, and I have said I do believe that lie is here in Britain." The arm fell back to his side.

"But Tearlach could have the right of it. Donuil might be dead in Britain. How am I to know?

"And what of the child, the starving babby there? Whose child is he? Not yours, for you said you did not know beyond a doubt your cousin killed your wife. Your wife is dead, but had the child been yours and taken by your cousin, then you would know, beyond a doubt, his guilt. And then the 'cousin' that you found was not your cousin, but someone who had killed him and stripped his armour for his own purpose. Did he take the babby, too, for his own use? Or are we to believe you bore the infant with you, into war, new-born just weeks ago, in all your armour?

"So . . . the child's not yours. And yet you value it enough to risk your life to save it, not once, but twice? Whose child is this? And what could be his value to you, to me, to anyone? Here is a mystery, Yellow Head, and too profound for me. If the babby be not yours, and not your cousin's, then whose can it be, for it must belong to someone? And then I mind me that there were women among the slain whom you arrived too late to help. But who were the women? You say Ygraine, my sister, was one of them. I doubt that, Yellow Head, since you yourself have said you did not know my sister, other than by name. You may be lying, although to what end I could not guess, other than to extend your life, which might be good and ample reason."

"Deck, there!" The hail from above brought every eye sweeping up to the two lookouts on the spar above. "There's a body in the water!"

As everyone thronged to the side, I looked towards the shore and recognized the dunes and the rising hills I had descended earlier that day. Connor stood beside me, staring down, searching the water. I nudged him and pointed towards the land. We were close inshore now.

"This is the place. Look, you can see bodies up there on the sand."

He glanced to where I pointed and swung to the navigator. "Take her ashore, as soon as we have secured that body!"

II

The business with the bereaved woman, potential wetnurse for the child, turned out to be quite simply taken care of. Once on shore, escorted by a group of warriors hand-picked by Connor, I had no difficulty finding my horse and my abandoned bow and quiver, after which I retraced my path to the clearing that contained the ruined farmstead and its scattered, pathetic corpses. The woman was still there, although she no longer knelt by her dead baby. Prompted by some motive known to her reeling mind alone, she had moved away and we found her wandering close by, among the bushes surrounding the ruin of her home. She gave no response to our greetings, her maddened, empty eyes betraying no awareness even of our presence, but she responded to the gentle urgings of guiding hands and accompanied us without protest. Only once did she resist, at the point where she was led from the clearing. She tugged her arms free and turned around, staring back, then made as if to return, but she had little fight left in her and quickly submitted to the restraining hands that held her again, after which she went where she was led, in a state of utter, uncaring docility.

Night fell as we made our way back towards Connor's galley, through a war-ravaged landscape that was almost completely alien to me. The moon broke through a gap in the clouds just as we approached the end of the solid, flint-strewn ground, marked by a ragged, eroded edge where the highest of spring tides had penetrated inland. Beyond that edge and less than the height of a tall man below its lip, the domain of the sea began in a flat-bottomed stretch of arid land composed of shale and clay and advancing sand. This barren, pebble-strewn strip, stippled with clumps of hardy grass that fought for life against the saline, briny sourness clogging its roots, extended southward and to the east, its clay and shale quickly giving way to sand and more sand, to where a series of tall, weed-crowned dunes swept up to block all sight or sound of the distant sea.

I drew rein, and my companions stopped with me, grouped around me motionless in that stillness that descends instantly from time to time upon men moving uncertainly in darkness through hostile territory. I ignored them, standing in my stirrups to look about me in the hush of total silence, my ears listening in vain for any sound of waves from the distant shore. Ahead of me and several hundred paces to my right, the first hill began to swell upward, angling southwest to where its steep-soaring might would also be truncated by the hungry sea to become the first of the frowning cliffs that stretched unbroken from there all the way to the farthest tip of the rugged peninsula of Cornwall. The moon was enormous, almost full, and its brightness lit the distant hillside well enough to throw shadows visible from where I sat, but it revealed no glimmer of water, south or east. None of my escort had sought to question mc, or to comment on the route I chose to follow. None could, for they were strangers here, more alien than I to these bleak lands that had belonged to Gulrhys Lot, the self-styled Duke, and later King, of Cornwall.

There were fifteen of us, and I the only one astride a horse. The others stood grouped around me, waist deep and deeper in the sturdy, stunted brush that coated the terrain here in wild, haphazard clumps and thickets separated by skeins of stony, lichen-covered ground too inhospitable to accommodate even these bushes' hardy roots. The biggest of the men, their leader Tearlach, glanced up at me.