Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [5]
They turned away in pure panic and I gestured at the shepherd to let them go. He whistled to call the dogs off and both men and sheep scattered. The men were running, all but the first archer who was still on the ground, stunned by the stone that had struck his head. The young man, braver than the others, came towards me, perhaps thinking his companions would help him, then realised he was alone. A look of pure fright crossed his face, he turned, and just then the bitch leaped at him, sinking her teeth in his sword arm. He shouted, then tried to shake her off as the dog hurtled in to join his mate. He was still shouting when I hit him across the back of the skull with the flat of my sword-blade. ‘You can call the dogs off now,’ I told the shepherd.
The first archer was still alive, but there was a patch of blood-matted hair above his right ear. I kicked him hard in the ribs and he groaned, but he was insensible. I gave his bow and arrow-bag to the shepherd. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Egbert, lord.’
‘You’re a rich man now, Egbert,’ I told him. I wished that were true. I would reward Egbert well for this morning’s work, but I was no longer rich. I had spent my money on the men, mail and weapons that had been needed to defeat Haesten and I was desperately poor that winter.
The other outlaws had vanished, gone back northwards. Willibald was shaking. ‘They were searching for you, lord,’ he said through chattering teeth, ‘they’ve been paid to kill you.’
I stooped by the archer. The shepherd’s stone had shattered his skull and I could see a ragged, splintered piece of bone among the blood-matted hair. One of the shepherd’s dogs came to sniff the wounded man and I patted its thick wiry pelt. ‘They’re good dogs,’ I told Egbert.
‘Wolf-killers, lord,’ he said, then hefted the sling, ‘though this is better.’
‘You’re good with it,’ I said. That was mild, the man was lethal.
‘Been practising these twenty-five years, lord. Nothing like a stone to drive a wolf away.’
‘They’d been paid to kill me?’ I asked Willibald.
‘That’s what they said. They were paid to kill you.’
‘Go into the hut,’ I said, ‘get warm.’ I turned on the younger man who was being guarded by the larger dog. ‘What’s your name?’
He hesitated, then spoke grudgingly, ‘Wærfurth, lord.’
‘And who paid you to kill me?’
‘I don’t know, lord.’
Nor did he, it seemed. Wærfurth and his men came from near Tofeceaster, a settlement not far to the north, and Wærfurth told me how a man had promised to pay my weight in silver in return for my death. The man had suggested a Sunday morning, knowing that much of my household would be in church, and Wærfurth had recruited a dozen vagrants to do the job. He must have known it was a huge gamble, for I was not without reputation, but the reward was immense. ‘Was the man a Dane or a Saxon?’ I asked.
‘A Saxon, lord.’
‘And you don’t know him?’
‘No, lord.’
I questioned him more, but all he could tell me was that the man was thin, bald and had lost an eye. The description meant little to me. A one-eyed, bald man? Could be almost anyone. I asked questions till I had wrung Wærfurth dry of unhelpful answers, then hanged both him and the archer.
And Willibald showed me the magic fish.
A delegation waited at my hall. Sixteen men had come from Alfred’s capital at Wintanceaster and among them were no less than five priests. Two, like Willibald, came from Wessex, and the other pair were Mercians who had apparently settled in East Anglia. I knew them both, though I had not recognised them at first. They were twins, Ceolnoth and Ceolberht who, some thirty years before, had been hostages with me in Mercia. We had been children captured by the Danes, a fate I had welcomed and the twins had hated. They were close to forty years