Read Online The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell - Free Book Online

with dirty grey feathers, flickering

down from the sky to vanish with a plop. One arrow, and no others followed, so perhaps it

was a warning, and that night we let the ship lie at its anchor and in the dawn we saw two cows

grazing close to a stream and Leofric fetched his axe.
    'The cows are there to kill us,' Haesten warned us in his new and not very good English.
    'The cows will kill us?' I asked in amusement.
    'I have seen it before, lord. They put cows to bring us on land, then they attack.'
    We granted the cows mercy, hauled the anchor and pulled towards the bay's mouth and a howl

sounded behind us and I saw a crowd of men appear from behind bushes and trees, and I took

one of the silver rings from my left arm and gave it to Haesten. It was his first arm ring and,

being a Dane, he was inordinately proud of it. He polished it all morning.
    The coast became wilder and refuge more difficult to find, but the weather was placid. We

captured a small eight-oared ship that was returning to Ireland and relieved it of sixteen

pieces of silver, three knives, a heap of tin ingots, a sack of goose feathers and six

goatskins. We were hardly becoming rich, though Fyrdraca's belly was becoming cluttered

with pelts, fleeces and ingots of tin.
    'We need to sell it all,' Leofric said.
    But to whom? We knew no one who traded here. What I needed to do, I thought, was land close

to one of the larger settlements and steal everything. Burn the houses, kill the men,

plunder the headman's hall and go hack to sea, but the Britons kept lookouts on the headlands

and they always saw us coming, and whenever we were close to one of their towns we would see

armed men waiting. They had learned how to deal with Vikings, which was why, Haesten told me,

the Northmen now sailed in fleets of five or six ships.
    'Things will be better,' I said, 'when we turn the coast.'
    I knew Cornwalum ended somewhere to the west and we could then sail up into the Saefern

Sea where we might find a Danish ship on its voyage from Ireland, but Cornwalum seemed to be

without end.
    Whenever we saw a headland that I thought must mark the end of the land it turned out to be

a false hope, for another cliff would lie beyond, and then another, and sometimes the tide

flowed so strongly that even when we sailed due west we were driven back east.
    Being a Viking was more difficult than I thought, and then one day the wind freshened from

the west and the waves heaved higher and their tops were torn ragged and rain squalls hissed

dark from a low sky and we ran northwards to seek shelter in the lee of a headland. We dropped

our anchor there and felt Fyrdraca jerk and tug like a fretful horse at her long rope of

twisted hide. All night and all next day the weather raged past the headland. Water

shattered white on high cliffs. We were safe enough, but our food was getting low, and I had

half decided we must abandon our plans to make ourselves rich and sail back to the Uisc where

we could pretend we had only been patrolling the coast, but on our second dawn under the lee

of that high cliff, as the wind subsided and the rain dropped to a chill drizzle, a ship

appeared about the eastern spit of land.
    'Shields!' Leofric shouted, and the men, cold and unhappy, found their weapons and lined

the ship's side.
    The ship was smaller than ours, much smaller. She was squat, high-bowed, with a stumpy mast

holding a wide yard on which a dirty sail was furled. A half-dozen oarsmen manned her, and the

steersman was bringing her directly towards Fyrdraca, and then, as she came closer and as

her small bows broke the water white, I saw a green bough had been tied to her short mast.
    'They want to talk,' I said.
    'Let's hope they want to buy,' Leofric grumbled.
    There was a priest in the small ship. I did not know he was a priest at first, for he looked

as ragged as any of the crewmen, but he shouted that he wished to speak with us, and he spoke