For a shield is not only a knight’s protection, it is also his pride, and any warrior who values his life knows to pay as much attention to his shield as to his mail and his blades. That said, even the sturdiest of them rarely lasts long in the hands of one who lives his life by the sword, and this one had seen happier days. The boss was scuffed and dented, and there were grimy marks upon the paintwork, which might have been mud or blood or a combination of both. How much longer this one would last until the iron rim cracked and the limewood began to splinter, I couldn’t say with any certainty, but none of that mattered right now. Eudo held it out to me and I took it gratefully, passing the long guige strap over my head and then working my forearm through the brases, adjusting the buckles with my other hand until it felt secure.
And all the while I could not stop smiling. I might have been landless and lordless, lacking so much as a horse to ride and a hall to call my home, with hardly a penny left in my coin-purse and so few friends that I could have probably counted them on my two hands alone, yet in that moment I felt rich beyond imagination. For those friends that I did have were worth more to me than all those other things put together. On my behalf they had taken risks that other men would baulk at. After everything that I’d done, they were still prepared to fight by my side.
And that thought alone was enough to give me confidence that we could do this. That somehow, I did not know how, but somehow, we would prevail.
Twenty-four
THE LAST THING we wanted to do was to rush in, in the hope of gaining the advantage of surprise, only to find ourselves caught in a snare. Thus we proceeded cautiously, with lookouts posted at all times at bow and at stern.
More than a week after leaving Dyflin, we found ourselves entering a narrow strait between two islands: one of gently sloping hills that Magnus called Ile; and another that he called Dure, which was steeper, with slate-grey peaks that rose like the burial mounds of giants, dwarfing us and our tiny craft. There was, Magnus had told us, a shorter route we could have chosen, to the east of the steeper island, which he had used once before and where there was less chance of being spotted, but those were treacherous waters. A vicious whirlpool churned off the northernmost point of Dure, around which waves had been known to rise to the height of ten men, enough to overwhelm even the sturdiest vessel and cause it to founder and sink.
‘Some believe that on the sea floor dwells a sea serpent whose jaws are large enough to swallow even a forty-bencher whole,’ he said solemnly, and I wasn’t sure whether he meant that was what he believed. ‘Others say it’s the washtub of an ancient hag-spirit, who comes down at night to clean her filthy, lice-ridden robes in its waters, although no one has ever seen her.’
Whether either of those stories was true or not, since Magnus was our guide and he knew these waters better than anyone else among us, I thought it wise to take his advice. Even for those who knew the currents well, he said, that was a dangerous channel, for the winds and the tides could conspire to dash unlucky travellers upon the rock-bound shore, on the sharp skerries that rose out of the water, and the dark shoals that lay just beneath the surface.
Instead, then, we took the safer, longer route, although as we neared the strait that joined the two passages, we glimpsed one of those whirlpools from afar, and saw those immense waves of which Magnus had spoken, rearing up like wild sea stallions that charged at one another before erupting in clashes of white-glistening spume, as if the sea were at war with itself. Even from several leagues away the roar of that maelstrom was loud enough to make many men cross themselves against the evil of that place.
No evil befell us, however, nor did we spy any other ships approaching, and so that same afternoon under grim skies Aubert steered Wyvern to the north-east, following Nihtegesa. With a gusting breeze at our backs, we sailed into a wide sea-lake, bounded on both shores by dark-towering mountains the likes of which I had never before seen, whose peaks were lost amidst the clouds. And in the middle of that sound, stretching along the length of the fjord, rose a long, low finger of land, its crags and grassy slopes dotted with wind-stunted, bare-branched trees. From the other ship, one of the Englishmen waved to attract our attention, pointing towards that island as his crew reefed her sail and the oarsmen slackened their pace.
‘That’s it,’ Magnus called to us, once Aubert had brought us level with Nihtegesa, and even above the gusting wind I could hear his excitement. ‘That’s Haakon’s isle.’
‘What now?’ I shouted back.
‘We find shelter!’ He spread his arms wide and gestured upwards to the darkening heavens. The upper slopes of the mountains had suddenly become lost amidst the swelling cloud, and with every moment the wind was increasing in strength, turning white the tips of the waves that ran up the fjord, a sure sign of worse weather on the way. Perhaps that was the reason why we hadn’t spied any other vessel out, not even a coracle or fishing boat, although it still concerned me that the waters were so quiet. I wasn’t alone in that opinion, either, as Magnus told me after we had steered our ships into a bay on the fjord’s northern shore that offered a good natural harbour. There, with the light fading, we dropped anchor to ride out the coming squall, and conferred on our best course of action.
‘He knows we’re coming,’ Magnus said. ‘He must do. So why hasn’t he shown himself yet?’
‘Perhaps he’s weaker than we’ve been led to believe,’ I suggested.