The Lantern Bearers (book III) by Rosemary Sutcliff, Charles Keeping

might stand by Britain. And all he had done was to fall into the hands of the barbarians himself. He had served more than two years’ thraldom on a Jutish farm, and now—he was to take an oar in this barbarian longship, his share in bringing her down the Saxon wind against his own land. The laughter in his throat knotted itself into a sob, and he bent his head between his shoulders and splashed down into the surf with the rest, feeling the galley grow light and buoyant as a sea bird as the water took her.
    The cattle had already been loaded into the hold of the Sea-Witch , and at last it was over, the remaining stores loaded, the last farewells said; those who were to be left behind stood dry-eyed, for they were a people not used to weeping, on the landing-beach. Aquila was in his place at the oar. After more than two years among these people, he was no longer strange in the ways of boats as he had been the first time he felt the oar-loom under his hands. Wulfnoth the Captain stood at the steer-oar; and behind him, behind the high, painted stern of the Sea-Snake , the settlement with its dwindling figures on the landing-beach, and the dark line of the moors beyond, all grew fainter—fainter. Something that was over and done with, sinking away into the distance.
    Presently, when they were clear of the shoal-water, Wulfnoth ordered, ‘In oars. Up sail,’ and the Storm-Wind , the Sea-Witch and the Sea-Snake slipped down the firth before the light north-east wind, the Saxon wind.
    They lost the wind after two days, and had to take to the oars again, rowing almost blind in a grey murk mingling with the oar-thresh, in which they all but lost the rest of the squadron. Some of the young warriors grew anxious, though they made a jest of it, saying, ‘Ran the Mother of Storms is brewing, and how may one find the way with so much steam rising from her vats?’ But old Haki, the Chieftain’s uncle, who was as wise as a grey seal in the ways of the sea, sniffed the mist with his wide, hairy nostrils and said, ‘By the smell, children.’
    Sure enough, when at last the mist gave them up, and at noon they were able to check their position by the dimly seen sun, with a spar set up on the half deck, they were not much off their course. There were other troubles on the voyage: many of the women were sick; a child was lost overboard; one night there was a sudden panic among the cattle that all but capsized the Sea-Witch , and in the morning two of the best heifers were dead and one of the men in charge of them had a badly gored shoulder. But on the seventh day the gulls met them; and suddenly, towards sunset, there was a long, dark line that might have been a cloud-bank on the western rim of the sea, and a distant shout came back to them, thin as the cry of a sea bird, from the look-out clinging to the rigging of the Storm-Wind ’s mast head.
    ‘Land ho!’
    Aquila, craning round to gaze over his shoulder as the galley lifted to the crest of the next sea, was suddenly blind with more than the salt hair whipping across his eyes.
    For three days they ran down the coast, drawing in slowly, until, long after noon on the third day, they were nosing in towards the low, marshy shores of Tanatus. The wind had fallen light and they had had to take to the oars again to aid the scarcely swelling sails. They had hung the shields, black and crimson, blue and buff and gold, along the bulwarks just clear of the oar-ports, and shipped at their prows the snarling figureheads that had lain until now under the half-decks, safe from the pounding of the seas. And so, proud and deadly, the little wild-goose skein of barbarian keels swept down on Britain, and their appointed landing-beaches.
    Aquila rowed with his chin on his shoulder, his gaze raking the tawny shore-line as it crept by, drawing always nearer, until, afar off, he caught the familiar whale-backed hump with its grey crown of ramparts, and knew as Wulfnoth put over the steer-oar that they were