Viking Tales- Saga of the Lost Ship by Jason Vail

Author:Jason Vail [Vail, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781721548149
Published: 2018-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

The village had a farmer who made sausages for his own use, and sold what his family could not eat in Dul Blaan and Iddew. He never offered them to us, but I had heard from the cook that they were very good. A diet of porridge and occasional boiled beef is not satisfying, and the thought of a sausage weighed on my mind for some time before I resolved to try this delicacy for myself. So I walked to the village to buy one that afternoon.

The sausage maker received me with more coldness that I expected, even though the villagers and the garrison were not friendly. But he agreed to the sale and vanished behind his house to fetch my sausage from the smoking shed. While I waited, a gnarled fellow with bowed legs and arms waddled into the yard with a boy of ten. I recognized them as shepherds who managed the flocks during the summer on the northern fields that lay on the frontier with our lands and those of the Picts that surrounded us. The boy took one look at me and ran out of the yard and up the street.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked the old shepherd.

The shepherd shrugged and avoided my eyes.

I put this down to the hostility the local people felt toward us, and thought nothing about it.

The sausage maker came around the corner of the house with my sausage.

“My silver,” he said.

I laid a sliver of hack silver in the maker’s palm. He answered by dropping the sausage in the dirt.

“What is the matter with you people?” I demanded so hotly that both the sausage maker and the shepherd recoiled a step or two as if they expected me to lop off their heads as I might well have done, I was so angry.

“Murderer,” muttered the shepherd.

I was on him then and had him by the throat before he could flee, as I drew my sax. The sausage maker did not stick around to see what happened next. He dashed out of the yard calling for help.

“What did you call me?” I growled.

The shepherd’s lips quivered. “You killed Cadman! My boy saw you!”

“I didn’t kill him. I found him by the road.”

“One of you did! One of you from the fort!”

“How do you know it was one of us?”

“Because the boy saw it.”

“It couldn’t have been one of us. It must have been the Picts.”

“It was. We know by the paintings on your shields. And the killers rode off toward the fort.”

I loosened my grip on the shepherd. There might be something to this. We had different designs painted on our shields than the Picts did. It was one way that members of one war band distinguished themselves from their enemies.

I would have questioned the shepherd further, but a crowd of about a dozen local men came running up with the sausage maker. They were armed with an assortment of shovels, rakes, staves and a couple of spears — enough to be the dangerous because I had only the sax.

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