Sword Song (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 4) by Cornwell Bernard

Author:Cornwell, Bernard [Cornwell, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2010-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

Water dripped from oar-blades, the drips spreading ripples in a sea that was shining slabs of light that slowly shifted and parted, joined and slid.

Our ship was poised on that shifting light, silent.

The sky to the east was molten gold pouring around a bank of sun-drenched cloud, while the rest was blue. Pale blue to the east and dark blue to the west where night fled towards the unknown lands beyond the distant ocean.

To the south I could see the low shore of Wessex. It was green and brown, treeless and not that far away, though I would go no closer for the light-sliding sea concealed mudbanks and shoals. Our oars were resting and the wind was dead, but we moved relentlessly eastwards, carried by the tide and by the river’s strong flow. This was the estuary of the Temes; a wide place of water, mud, sand and terror.

Our ship had no name and she carried no beast-heads on her prow or stern. She was a trading ship, one of the two I had captured in Lundene, and she was wide-beamed, sluggish, big-bellied and clumsy. She carried a sail, but the sail was furled on the yard, and the yard was in its crutches. We drifted on the tide towards the golden dawn.

I stood with the steering-oar in my right hand. I wore mail, but no helmet. My two swords were strapped to my waist, but they, like my mail coat, were hidden beneath a dirty brown woollen cloak. There were twelve rowers on the benches, Sihtric was beside me, one man was on the bow platform and all those men, like me, showed neither armour nor weapons.

We looked like a trading ship drifting along the Wessex shore in hope that no one on the northern side of the estuary would see us.

But they had seen us.

And a sea-wolf was stalking us.

She was rowing to our north, slanting south and eastwards, waiting for us to turn and try to escape upriver against the tide. She was perhaps a mile away and I could see the short black upright line of her stemhead, which ended in a beast’s head. She was in no hurry. Her shipmaster could see we were not rowing and he would take that inactivity as a sign of panic. He would think we were discussing what to do. His own oar banks were dipping slow, but every stroke surged that distant boat forward to cut off our seaward escape.

Finan, who was manning one of the stern oars of our ship, glanced over his shoulder. ‘Crew of fifty?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe more,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘How many more?’

‘Could be seventy?’ I guessed.

We numbered forty-three, and all but fifteen of us were hidden in the place where the ship would normally have carried goods. Those hidden men were covered by an old sail, making it look as though we carried salt or grain, some cargo that needed to be protected from any rain or spray. ‘Be a rare fight if it’s seventy,’ Finan said with relish.

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