Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [31]
There were two figures of particular note in the party. In the stern of the last boat sat a massive man. He did not paddle or take any active part in the proceedings, but sat very still as though conscious that he was a precious object to be taken reverently from place to place. He was middle-aged and of only middle height: his massiveness derived from his gigantic girth and weight. His head was round and bald. He had oiled both body and head so that the latter now caught the sun and shone. His watery eyes were set wide apart and were never still; he wheezed continually. This was the medicine man, and his presence would ensure that the greatest of all the gods, the sun god, looked upon the enterprise with favour.
The other, and still more striking figure was that of the leader of the band, a big thick-set bull of a man with a black beard, a huge nose that jutted out from his face like some rugged promontory, and small, angry eyes. As the boats moved swiftly across the shallow waters he stood in the prow of the foremost, directing operations. At his feet lay an enormous black club. His fierce eyes scanned the banks for signs of any enemy, but he saw that the place was deserted.
He was wrong. On the northern edge of the harbour, concealed behind a bank of reeds, a single hunter had been watching the six boats intently ever since they had first appeared in the narrow entrance that led to the sea. He was a small, wiry man; his shock of bristling black hair and his narrow face gave him the look of some small, stoat-like animal; he also had long prehensile toes, a characteristic he shared with a number of hunters in the area. He was sitting in a simple dugout – well suited to those calm waters, but slow and primitive compared with the six long boats that had just glided by. As soon as they had passed, he abandoned it and, using the track the hunters knew, loped quickly inland through the woods. In this way, he was able to head off the boats as they made their way upstream; he did not pause, however, but continued on his way.
The leader of the new arrivals was a remarkable figure and, along the coast from which he came, already a legend in his own lifetime. They called him Krona the Warrior.
He had started life as a simple farmer, undistinguished from the other modest smallholders who lived in the region. He would certainly have remained just that – an even-tempered fellow with a healthy young family – had it not been for one of those sudden tragedies which can jolt a man’s, or a community’s life, into some wholly different course.
In Krona’s case, it was the invasion of a marauding tribe which changed everything. They arrived suddenly and without warning in that coastal region early one summer; no one knew exactly where they had come from, nor what impetus had driven them to travel; but they seemed to have arrived from the east. It was a pattern that was to be repeated for thousands of years in the troubled history of Europe. Again and again such invaders – sometimes a party of raiders, sometimes an entire people – would come sweeping into Western Europe with terrifying force; they came from Scandinavia, from the Germanic plans, from the distant steppes of central Asia; some stayed and settled, others came, ravaged and departed.
The marauders who came to devastate Krona’s region were a comparatively insignificant group, a nameless but brutal tribe of tall and swarthy people who camped in huge leather tents, and whose only interest was in hunting, stealing and destroying. They had made their base about a hundred miles to the north east and each spring they had swept along the coast in war parties, burning the isolated farms and settlements who were ill-equipped to resist these surprise attacks. One day, when Krona had been away on a visit further along the coast, they had swooped down upon his area, and when he returned it was to find his farm burned, his wife and four children all dead, and his livestock taken. When he saw this, he vowed:
“There will be vengeance.