The Emperor's Elephant(20)

‘Redwald is worried that King Offa will get to know that I’m in Kaupang,’ I said to Osric as we walked up the beach and out of earshot of the skiff’s crew.

‘Then we must take care not to draw attention to ourselves,’ he answered. ‘If Kaupang’s a seasonal market, there’ll be plenty of strangers who arrive here just for a short visit. We should be able to blend in.’

We stood aside to allow the pony and loaded sledge to go past at a lunging trot, the driver slapping the reins and shouting encouragement. Then we followed them along the track as it led up the slope of the beach to where it skirted the grove of alder trees and then crested the low ridge. On the far side, we found an untidy straggle of humble single-storey dwellings, their walls and roofs made of weathered grey planks. Among them were several much larger buildings shaped like huge upturned boats and roofed with turf. It took a moment to realize that this was Kaupang and our footpath, where it broadened, was Kaupang’s one and only street, unpaved and chaotic.

‘So this is the great market place of the north!’ observed Osric dubiously.

Scores of makeshift sales booths were little more than crude hutches. Rocks and turf sods had been piled up to make their walls, and sheets of canvas rigged to keep out the rain. Other shops were open-sided sheds. Much of what was for sale was merely heaped up on the ground, jumbled together, and left for prospective buyers to browse. Despite the chaos and clutter, the place was swarming with customers.

We strolled forward, picking our way around untidy displays or squeezing between rickety stalls set up at random.

‘I don’t see many takers for Redwald’s shipment of household querns,’ I murmured. There were some women in the crowd, but not many. They wore loose linen dresses reaching to their ankles and most of them had tied up their hair in scarves. That was a shame because, from what I glimpsed, they had fine, lustrous hair and wore it long. By far the majority of Kaupang’s customers were men. In general, they were burly, heavily bearded and exuded a certain swaggering arrogance. One passerby stared into my face, and then gave me an odd look – he must have seen my different-coloured eyes – and I was glad that Redwald’s dagger was very obvious in my belt. A drunk came swaying out of a ramshackle building that did duty for a tavern. He pitched forward on his face in the dirt in front of us. Like everyone else, we skirted around him and carried on walking.

In the area where foodstuffs were for sale, the most common offering was fish: split, dried and hung up like laundry, dangling in long strings that gave off a pungent smell. I could see little sign of the sort of farm produce normally found in a country market. There were no vegetables or fruit or fresh meat, just a few eggs and some soft white cheese in tubs being sold by one of the very few women stall holders.

‘I wouldn’t risk my teeth on that lot,’ Osric commented, nodding towards a handful of knobbly oatmeal loaves displayed in a wheelbarrow.

We drifted on to where farm implements were for sale. Here the traders had laid out axes, saws, cauldrons, hammers, chisels, lengths of chain and barrels of massive iron nails. It was also possible to purchase rough slabs of raw iron, ready to be heated and moulded into tools. I thought sourly of Osric’s nickname of Weyland, and that made me look more closely at some of the men in the crowd. A big ox of a man standing near me was examining an axe. His shirt front was open. Hanging from a leather thong around his neck was a T-shaped amulet. I recognized Thor’s hammer.

‘Let’s see if we can track down a seller of hunting birds,’ I suggested.

‘Maybe over there.’ Osric pointed towards one of the larger open-sided sheds. Some sort of unidentifiable animal skin had been nailed to a cross-beam high enough to be seen above the heads of the crowd.

We pushed our way through the press of people and found ourselves in front of a display of anchors, rolls of sailcloth, fishing line and hooks, balls of twine, ropes and nets. The air reeked of pine tar. The proprietor was a scrawny, pockmarked fellow who was trying to sell a coil of rope to a customer. The local language was close enough to Saxon for me to understand most of his sales talk. The rope was dark, greasy and – if the man was to be believed – cut from the thick leathery skin of a large animal he called a hross-hvalr, and far superior to rope made from strands of flax. His client, a thick-necked man with half an ear missing, was fingering the rope doubtfully and saying that he preferred thin strips of good-quality stallion hide so that he could plait his own rope. ‘One horse’s skin is as good as another. You will save yourself the labour of all that plaiting,’ wheedled the shopkeeper.