Sword Song. Bernard Cornwell

to witness, stayed close to me.

      We followed a path downhill to a small pasture beside what I took to be a barn, and there the torches were thrust into waiting heaps of wood that caught the fire fast so that the flames leaped up to illuminate the barn’s wooden wall and wet thatch. As the light brightened I saw that it was not a pasture at all, but a graveyard. The small field was dotted with low earth heaps, and was well fenced to stop animals rooting up the dead.

      ‘That was our church,’ Huda explained. He had appeared beside me and nodded at what I had assumed was the barn.

      ‘You’re a Christian?’ I asked.

      ‘Yes, lord. But we have no priest now.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Our dead go to their rest unshriven.’

      ‘I have a son in a Christian graveyard,’ I said, and wondered why I had said it. I rarely thought of my dead infant son. I had not known him. His mother and I were estranged. Yet I remembered him on that dark night in that wet place of the dead. ‘Why is a Danish skald buried in a Christian grave?’ I asked Huda. ‘You told me he was no Christian.’

      ‘He died here, lord, and we buried him before we knew that. Maybe that is why he is restless?’

      ‘Maybe,’ I said, then heard the struggle behind me and wished I had thought to ask for my swords before I left Eilaf’s hall.

      I turned, expecting an attack, and instead saw that two men were dragging a third towards us. The third man was slight, young and fair-haired. His eyes looked huge in the flamelight. He was whimpering. The men who dragged him were much bigger and his struggles were useless. I looked quizzically at Haesten.

      ‘To raise the dead, lord,’ he explained, ‘we have to send a messenger across the gulf.’

      ‘Who is he?’

      ‘A Saxon,’ Haesten said carelessly.

      ‘He deserves to die?’ I asked. I was not squeamish about death, but I sensed Haesten would kill like a child drowning a mouse and I did not want a man’s death on my conscience if that man had not deserved to die. This was not battle, where a man stood a chance of going to the eternal joys of Odin’s hall.

      ‘He’s a thief,’ Haesten said.

      ‘Twice a thief,’ Eilaf added.

      I crossed to the young man and lifted his head by raising his chin, and so saw that he had the brand-mark of a convicted robber burned into his forehead. ‘What did you steal?’ I asked him.

      ‘A coat, lord,’ he spoke in a whisper. ‘I was cold.’

      ‘Was that the first theft?’ I asked, ‘or the second?’

      ‘The first was a lamb,’ Eilaf said behind me.

      ‘I was hungry, lord,’ the young man said, ‘and my child was starving.’

      ‘You stole twice,’ I said, ‘which means you must die.’ That was the law even in this lawless place. The young man was weeping, yet still stared at me. He thought I might relent and order his life spared, but I turned away. I have stolen many things in my life, almost all of them more valuable than any lamb or coat, but I steal while the owner is watching and while he can defend his property with his sword. It is the thief who steals in the dark who deserves to die.

      Huda was making the sign of the cross again and again. He was nervous. The young thief shouted incomprehensible words at me until one of his guards slapped him hard across the mouth, and then he just hung his head and cried. Finan and my three Saxons were clutching the crosses they wore about their necks.

      ‘You are ready, lord?’ Haesten asked me.

      ‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound confident, yet in truth I was as nervous as Finan. There is a curtain between our world and the lands of the dead and part of me wished that curtain to stay closed. I instinctively felt for Serpent-Breath’s hilt, but of course she was not with me.

      ‘Put the message in his mouth,’ Haesten ordered. One of the guards tried to open the young man’s mouth, but the prisoner resisted until a knife stabbed at his lips and then he opened wide. An object was pushed onto his tongue. ‘A harp string,’ Haesten explained to me, ‘and Bjorn will know its meaning. Kill him now,’ he added to the guards.

      ‘No!’ the young man shouted, spitting out the coiled string. He started screaming and weeping as the two men dragged him to one of the earth mounds. They stood either side of the mound, holding their prisoner over the grave. The moon was silvering a gap in the clouds. The churchyard smelt of new rain. ‘No, please, no,’ the young man was shaking, crying. ‘I have a wife, I have children, no! Please!’

      ‘Kill him,’ Eilaf the Red ordered.

      One of the guards pushed the harp string back into the messenger’s mouth, then held the jaw shut. He tilted the young man’s head back, hard back, exposing his throat and the second Dane slit it with a quick, practised thrust and a wrenching pull. I heard a stifled, guttural sound and saw the blood flicker black in the flamelight. It spattered the two men, fell across the grave and slapped wetly onto the damp grass. The messenger’s body twitched and struggled for a while as the blood flow became weaker. Then, at last, the young man slumped between his captors who let his last blood drops spurt weakly onto the grave. Only when no more blood flowed did they drag him away, dropping his corpse beside the graveyard’s wooden fence. I was holding my breath. None of us moved. An owl, its wings astonishingly white in the night, flew close above me and I instinctively touched my hammer amulet, convinced I had seen the thief’s soul going to the other world.

      Haesten stood close to the blood-soaked grave. ‘You have blood, Bjorn!’ he shouted. ‘I have given you a life! I have sent you a message!’

      Nothing happened. The wind sighed on the church’s thatch. Somewhere a beast moved in the darkness and then went still. A log collapsed in one of the fires and the sparks flew upwards.

      ‘You have blood!’ Haesten shouted again. ‘Do you need more blood?’

      I thought nothing was going to happen. That I had wasted a journey.

      And then the grave moved.