We’d retrieved the horses that Haakon’s men had arrived upon, but while the path was wide and even enough for us to ride up it, I was all too aware of the sharp precipice to our right, where the ground fell sharply away towards the rocks and the pounding waves below, and so we dismounted and went on foot. Magnus and ?lfhelm led the way, with the girls behind them, bearing their now-filled pails of water on the short poles across their shoulders. Godric and I brought up the rear.
With every step we took towards Jarnborg’s gates, my heart thudded harder in my chest, and my throat grew drier as my doubts began to multiply. All it needed was for one person to challenge us, and they would surely see through these feeble disguises of ours at once. And mine was feeblest of all. While the Englishmen’s longer hair would allow them to pass, at a glance, for Danes, my own, cut short as it was in the French style, clearly marked me out as a Norman. Fortunately one of the corpses had been wearing a helmet with a chain curtain to protect the neck. It was a little too large for my head, but it was better than nothing.
The palisade loomed ever larger before us. Yesterday, from half a mile away, it had seemed formidable enough. Now that we were almost upon Haakon’s winter fastness, however, it became clear just how powerful a position it commanded, perched as it was atop the rocky promontory. Gradually I began to make out the rough shadows of two sentries standing atop the gatehouse, behind the parapet, with spears in hand, the points presented to the sky. They saw us as surely as we saw them. Recognising us for the party that had been sent to the spring, straightaway they called down to whoever was manning the gates. With a long creak of timbers, those great doors swung open. This was the moment of reckoning. All our careful planning would be for naught if we failed here.
Loose pebbles crunched beneath my feet as I led my horse up the track towards the open gates, and I breathed deeply to try to still the pounding in my chest, convinced that someone would hear it.
The sentries on the gatehouse called out something that might have been either a greeting or a challenge; I guessed it was the former, because Magnus, at the head of the column, raised a hand in acknowledgement. He and ?lfhelm passed beneath the gatehouse’s arch, followed by Eithne and the girls, and then Godric and myself. Two fair-haired boys, both no older than thirteen or fourteen, their cloaks huddled about them to guard against the cold, stood just inside the gates. From the red rims around their eyes, the sorry-looking expressions on their faces and their unsteadiness on their feet, I reckoned they were suffering from having overindulged the previous night. Perhaps that was why they had been placed on gate duty this cold morning, as a punishment for their drinking, and perhaps if they had been more awake then they might have spotted that we were not the same men who had ridden out from the fortress earlier. But, as I’d often found, folk will often see only what they expect to see. The thought that we might attempt such a ruse wouldn’t even have entered their heads, and so they had no reason to pay us close attention.
Nevertheless I dared not meet their eyes, but instead fixed my gaze on the way ahead, concentrating merely on putting one foot in front of the other, and on coaxing my stubborn horse on. Behind us, I heard the great oak gates creak as they were closed once more.
We were inside Jarnborg. Against the odds, against even my expectations, we had done it. I could scarcely believe it. Under the very noses of Haakon’s men, we had slipped inside his precious stronghold, his so-called iron fortress, against the walls of which Magnus’s assault had been broken and scores of his loyal followers had been killed. The place that not so long ago we had considered all but unassailable.
All was deathly still, and strangely so, considering that it had to be more than an hour since first light. Usually by this time I would have expected to hear shouting and laughing as men trained at arms in the yard, and the steady ring of hammer upon anvil as a farrier worked at his forge. But there was none of that. Save for those at the gate, no one seemed yet to have risen. Instead there was only an eerie hush, broken occasionally by a dog’s bark or a cock’s crow, as if the whole of Jarnborg were still asleep, its defenders all snoring soundly in their beds.