War Lord by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell [Cornwell, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

The ships came first.

Six the first day. They were typical West Saxon ships with their heavy blunt bows, each containing between forty or fifty oarsmen. There was little wind, yet all had their sails hoisted and each sail bore Æthelstan’s symbol of the dragon holding a lightning bolt. Each prow was topped with a cross.

The ships came inshore of the Farnea Islands, a wide channel, but treacherous unless a helmsman knew the waters. They came in single file and it was clear the leading ship did have such a helmsman because they avoided the dangers and rowed until they could gaze up at our high ramparts. The oarsmen backed water, men on the steering platforms shaded their eyes to stare at us, but none returned our waves. Then the rowers backed water and turned seawards, the late afternoon sun flashing reflected light from the rising and falling oar-blades. ‘So they’re not coming here,’ Finan grunted, meaning that the ships were not coming into our harbour.

Instead they followed the lead ship into the southernmost group of the Farnea Islands and there spent the night. They were lucky, the winds stayed calm. They would have been safer in Lindisfarena’s shallow anchorage, but there they would have been vulnerable to my men. ‘So they’re not friendly?’ Benedetta asked me when, in the dawn, we saw the six masts showing above the islands.

‘They don’t seem to be,’ I said, and later I sent a fishing boat to the islands with Oswi, dressed in a fish-stinking smock, pretending to be one of the crew.

‘They’re not friendly, lord,’ he confirmed. ‘Told us to go away.’

It was midday by then and shortly after, one of my tenants rode from the south to tell of an army marching towards us. ‘Bloody thousands of them, lord,’ he said, and it was shortly afterwards that we saw the first smoke rising in the south. We had all seen such smoke pillars before, rising into a summer sky to tell of a steading being burned. I counted six. I sent two horsemen north to warn Egil.

And by nightfall another twenty-three ships had arrived. Most were similar to the first six, blunt bowed and heavy, and all well crewed. A dozen were cargo ships, and all of them, including the six that had sheltered in the islands, worked their way over the bar and so into the tangle of channels and shallows inside Lindisfarena. There were too many men there now for my garrison to challenge. We could only watch and, as night fell, see the glow of campfires in the southern sky.

Daybreak brought the army. Horsemen first, over three hundred of them, and after them came men on foot, trudging in the day’s warmth. There were packhorses and mules, women carrying burdens, more men, and more horses. I counted at least eleven hundred men and knew there were more strung out on the long road south. More horsemen went through the village to link up with the men on the fleet.

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