At last we had come to the land beyond the sea. To Yrland, and, I hoped, one step closer to finding Oswynn, whatever fate had befallen her and wherever she happened to be.
To my eyes Yrland seemed a quiet country, with few villages and halls that I could make out, but such appearances, Snorri told us, belied its true nature. A seething cauldron of violence, he described it, and spoke ill of its people, too, calling them as cunning and rapacious as wolves. This was a land, he said, in which no man’s holdings were safe, where chieftains and princelings led marauding bands, despoiling everything in their paths in pursuit of their bloody feuds. Every other man called himself a king, but only one held any real claim to overlordship, and that was Diarmait, who ruled the southern half of the island, including Dyflin and the other ports, and had received the submission of the north. But he was old and frail now, and said to be in poor health besides, and the authority that once he had held over the many squabbling families was waning.
‘Already this year there has been open war between them,’ Snorri said. ‘He nearly lost his kingdom because of it. There will be worse to come when he dies, too. His last surviving son and heir perished last year, so what will happen no one knows, except that there’ll be all manner of adventurers and sellswords flocking to these shores, looking to ply their trade. Probably this Haakon you mentioned will be among them.’
Not if I found him first, I thought, though I did not say it.
It took another three days from first spying Yrland’s coast before finally we made port in Dyflin. We travelled slowly, hugging as near as Snorri dared to the spray-battered cliffs and stacks where guillemots gathered. He did this, he said, for two reasons: firstly so as to be less easily spotted, and secondly to deter any raiders who might be on the prowl for trading ships like ours. Open water was where we were most vulnerable, for whereas Hrithdyr was wide and slow, the ships the pirates favoured tended to be sleek and fast, with slender beams, high prows, and oars as well as sails. Close to land, however, the risks were greater where raiders were concerned. Floating masses of seaweed might become tangled in their oars, while there were sheltered creeks and inlets in which their prey could easily hide. Instead, Snorri explained, they usually preferred to attack when the prey was easy. And so it proved, for although on two occasions we spied sails on the horizon that we suspected might belong to such sea wolves, both kept their distance, obviously deciding that we were not worth the effort of a pursuit, and thus we were spared.
A biting easterly wind was gusting at our backs, piercing our spray-soaked tunics, its chill working its way into my very bones, when we sailed around yet another headland and at long last spotted Dyflin in the distance. Winter was on its way, it seemed. I wrapped my cloak tightly around me. We had to wait a few more hours for the flood tide, and so we anchored in the estuary in the meantime, furled the sail and gazed upon the sprawling city with its crumbling timber palisades, its wharves and slipways and beaches and landing stages where ships both large and small had been dragged high above the tideline and were being caulked in preparation for their last voyages before the snows.
My sickness had at last abated, and it was Eithne who now looked ill. Indeed I’d heard hardly a word from her throughout the entire voyage, the brashness that I recalled in her from our first meeting having ebbed away over the last few days.
‘Please, lord,’ she said now, and there was fear in her eyes. ‘I don’t want to go back there.’
‘Why not?’
She hesitated, glanced around to check that no one else was watching, and then turned around and pulled at the collar of her dress, revealing a black symbol, roughly as long as my thumb and shaped something like a letter R except more jagged, which had been branded on to her chest, just below her shoulder-bone. At once I understood.
‘You’re a slave?’ I asked.
‘Was, lord. I ran away two years ago. There’s another, if you want to see it.’ She lifted up her skirt to show me her thigh.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to see.’ Some of Snorri’s crewmen were beginning to take an interest, nudging each other and pointing in our direction, particularly the younger ones, some of whom were barely more than pups and would probably have counted themselves lucky to glimpse the merest flash of a woman’s bared ankle. ‘Is that your master’s mark?’
She nodded. ‘His name is Ravn. He’s a merchant. He lives in Dyflin, or used to, anyway.’
‘Why did you run away? Did he beat you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He was a good master, in that sense. Not cruel. He gave us warm clothes and fed us well, us Irish ones, anyway. He was fond of us, though some of the others he treated less well. The work he gave us wasn’t hard, and he looked after my mother when she was sick—’