In those hours after our flight from Dyflin, though, I found no place in my thoughts for worry or doubt. The seas were calm that night, which meant that for once my gut was not churning, and so instead of sickness swelling in my stomach, there was hunger. My heart was filled with delight, my head giddy not just with the salt air but with the prospect of adventure and the feeling of freedom: a feeling I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Tancred a Dinant, the Breton, the lord of Earnford, was once more going to war, but this time it was different, for this was a war of my own choosing.
Under the cover of night, we ran north for a couple of hours or more, taking advantage of the stiff breeze that blew athwart our course, until the clouds began to veil the stars, when Magnus at last took us in towards shore, where a wide beach stretched between two high cliffs. We pushed Nihtegesa high up the sand, then took down her mast and made a tent over her deck with an oilskin sheet to keep out the thin rain which by then was beginning to fall, and bedded down under it for shelter, with our cloaks rolled up as pillows. By morning the skies had cleared, and with the sun glistening off the wave-tips and a favourable wind filling our sail, we set off again, following the whale-road north.
The sun was past its highest when first we glimpsed the ship on the horizon. It lay some way off our stern, and a little out to sea, on our steerboard side. The keenest eyes among us could not make out whether she was trader or longship, however, and we soon lost sight of her. Still, it served to put me on edge all that afternoon and the evening too, which was probably why I was in such a foul mood as we sat around the campfire, where ?lfhelm and his comrades were cooking some kind of stew made from fish and beans that was apparently a favourite dish in Defnascir, the place many of them hailed from.
‘What was it that Haakon stole from you?’ Magnus asked me later that evening, when the last light of day was all but gone. I was sitting upon a boulder high up on the beach, above the tideline, running a whetstone up the edge of my sword, the one I’d brought from Earnford. It was not as well balanced as I would have liked, and I was still getting used to its weight, but the least I could do was keep it sharp and free of rust.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What business is it of yours?’
‘It’s my business because it’s my ship.’
I didn’t answer straightaway, but simply took an oilcloth from my pack and worked at polishing the flat of the blade until the coiling, smoke-like pattern ingrained in the steel glimmered in the moon’s wan light.
‘Well?’ Magnus asked.
‘He took my woman.’
At first he must have thought I was joking, for he gave me a strange look. ‘Your woman?’ he asked with a snort. ‘Is that all?’
‘If you had ever seen her,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t be laughing.’
‘It’s not my place to judge, I suppose,’ said Magnus. ‘All I can say is that she must be a precious jewel indeed if you’re travelling to the ends of Britain just to find her.’
‘She is,’ I answered, closing my eyes, recalling her face, just as I had many times during the dark, lonely nights since she’d been taken from me. I remembered the wild gleam in her eyes that spoke of her mischievous, restless spirit, the feel of her skin upon my fingertips, her round, firm breasts that I had caressed so many times in those short months that we had been together.
How I missed her.
It was often said that only for the sake of reputation will a man risk everything, but now I realised that wasn’t true. For here I was. What fame I’d earned myself was all but squandered, and my name tarnished, perhaps for ever. But if it wasn’t riches or land or duty or honour that had set me on this path, then what? Love? That was one name for it, I supposed, although this didn’t feel to me like the love that the poets often sang of: overpowering, obsessive and jealous. No, this was different. Even though we had not been together long, somehow with Oswynn I had sensed a kinship of souls, a closeness that I had never been able to forge with any other. Not even with Leofrun, for all that she had been dear to me. That closeness was what I yearned for above everything. All my striving for fame and glory had not made me happy. Now I went in search of the one thing that would.
The boulder on which I perched was wide enough for two, and Magnus sat down beside me. ‘I got into a fight over a girl once myself,’ he said as he gazed out across the cove at the breakers lapping gently upon the sand. ‘I didn’t know she was married until her husband stumbled upon us while we were tumbling together. I was fortunate to get away without a scratch upon me. He wasn’t.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It always seems to end badly when there are women involved. And yet we never learn, for we’re always fighting over them, aren’t we?’
I thought back to that summer’s day, long years ago. The day when I had claimed my first kill. That fight had been over a woman, too.
I was nearly twice the age now that I’d been then, but clearly the last twelve years had taught me nothing, nothing at all. For I was back where my journey along the sword-path had begun, as reckless and as dim-witted now as ever, and with barely anything to show for all my struggles.