Watch they had said and watch he would. But he didn’t have to do it as dry as a reluctant virgin. Godwin bellowed downwind to the slaves, for the hot spiced ale he had commanded half an hour before. Instantly one of them came running out, the leather mug in his hand. Godwin eyed him with deep disfavor as he trotted over to the palisade and up the ladder to the watchkeeper’s walkway. A damned fool, this one. Godwin kept him because he had sharp eyes, but that was all. Merla, his name. He had been a fisherman once. Then there had been a hard winter, little to catch, he had fallen behind with the dues he owed to his landlords, the black monks of St. John’s Minister at Beverley, twenty miles off. First he had sold his boat to pay his dues and feed his wife and bairns. Then, when he had no money and could not feed them any longer, he had had to sell his family to a richer man, and in the end had sold himself to his former landlords. And they had lent Merla to Godwin. Damned fool. If the slave had been a man of honor he would have sold himself first and given the money to his wife’s kin, so at least they would have taken her in. If he had been a man of sense he would have sold his wife and the bairns first and kept the boat. Then maybe he would have had a chance to buy them back. But he was a man of neither sense nor honor. Godwin turned his back on the wind and the sea and took a firm swallow from the brimming mug. At least the slave hadn’t been sipping from it. He could learn from a thrashing if from nothing else.
Now what was the wittol staring at? Staring past his master’s shoulder, mouth agape, pointing out to sea.
“Ships,” he yelled. “Viking ships, two mile out to sea. I see ’em again. Look, master, look!”
Godwin spun automatically, cursed as the hot liquid slopped over his sleeve, peered out into the cloud and rain along the pointing arm. Was there a dot there, out where the cloud met the waves? No, nothing. Or… maybe. He could see nothing steadily, but out there the waves would be running twenty feet high, high enough to shelter any ship trying to ride out a storm under bare poles.
“I see ’em,” yelled Merla again. “Two ships, a cable apart.”
“Longships?”
“No, master, knorrs.”
Godwin hurled the mug over his shoulder, seized the slave’s thin arm in an iron grasp, and slashed him viciously across the face, forehand, backhand, with a sodden leather gauntlet. Merla gasped and ducked but did not dare to try to shield himself.
“Talk English, you whore’s get. And talk sense.”
“A knorr, master. It’s a merchant ship. Deep-bellied, for cargo.” He hesitated, afraid to show further knowledge, afraid to conceal it. “I can recognize ‘un by… by the shape of the prow. They must be Vikings, master. We don’t use ’em.”
Godwin stared out to sea again, anger fading, replaced by a cold, hard feeling at the base of his stomach. Doubt. Dread.
“Listen, Merla, to me,” he whispered. “Be very sure. If those are Vikings I must call out the entire coast-watch, every man from here to Bridlington. They are only churls and slaves, when all is said and done. No harm if they are dragged from their greasy wives.
“But I must do something else. As soon as the watch is called I must also send riders in to the minister at Beverley, to the monks of good St. John—your masters, remember?”
He paused to note the terror and the old memories in Merla’s eyes.
“And they will call out the mounted levy, the thanes of Ella. No good keeping them here, where the pirates could feint at Flamborough and then be twenty miles off round Spurn Head before they could get their horses out of the marsh. So they stay back, so they can ride in any direction once the threat is seen. But if I call them out, and they ride over here in the wind and the rain on a fool’s errand… And especially if some Viking sneaks in through the Humber while their backs are turned…