Raven (11 page)

‘We came to fight the blaumen,

Their skin was dark as soot.

We screwed their black-haired women,

We filled our ships with loot.’

I sometimes wonder if men’s laughter is offensive to the gods’ ears – just as the bawdy songs and laughter from Hrothgar’s mead hall Heorot made the monster Grendel’s ears ring with red-hot pain. For it often seems the way that the man who is cheerful and free of cares one moment is dead the next. It is as though the Spinners cruelly weave a golden thread into a man’s wyrd just before they cut it.

‘Come on, lads!’ Rolf called from
Sea-Arrow
’s mast step. ‘We don’t want to be left behind in this arsehole of a place now that there’s nothing left to steal!’ The last of his Danes were boarding and being none too hasty about it, boasting of their kills as they emptied their bladders on dry land one final time.

Tufi was the last man, shouldering the big silver Christ cross he had found in the village and swaggering along the jetty like a man who has just humped a pair of whores. He came to
Sea-Arrow
and offered the cross to Ogn so that he could climb aboard, but seeing the thing Ogn recoiled, touching the crude carving of Thór’s hammer Mjöllnir at his neck.

‘You’re not bringing that thing on!’ Ogn sputtered, rattled by Tufi’s indifference to the cross.

‘Don’t be an old woman, Ogn,’ Tufi said. ‘Take the fucking thing. It’s solid silver!’

‘Ogn is right, Tufi,’ a red-haired man called Bork said, ‘you should leave it here.’

Tufi shook his head and spat on to the jetty. ‘Out of my way, pale-livers,’ he said, putting a foot on
Sea-Arrow
’s sheer strake. He must have slipped, or perhaps a wave rocked the slender ship, for Tufi’s right leg plunged down and he followed it between
Sea-Arrow
’s hull and the jetty, and a thud and splosh was the last anyone ever heard from the man. The Danes scrambled to help and they must have thought they’d just pull him back in, for the water was not deep there, and some of us even laughed at first.

‘He’s gone!’ Ogn yelled, peering over the side into the dark water. Rolf was there too, his hands gripping the sheer strake as he stared in disbelief.

‘Shall I jump after him?’ Gorm asked in a voice edged with fear.

Rolf shook his head, his brows reaching for the moon. ‘He’s drowned!’ he said. ‘The bone-headed son of a bitch is drowned and that silver with him.’ We were all staring now for it did not seem possible that a man could die in ten feet of water. But poor Tufi must have hit his head on the sheer strake. Ogn, who had been the closest when it happened, said he thought an arm of the Christ cross had caught in Tufi’s baldric and that was some very ill luck. We all knew how heavy that cross was.

‘The White Christ seidr killed him!’ Beiner said, giving words to what many of us were already thinking, and maybe that was why no one talked of trying to recover the man’s corpse – in case that ill luck fastened on to them.

Father Egfrith crossed himself and offered a prayer up to his god. Sigurd, who was watching from the platform at
Serpent
’s stern, looked as stunned as I felt. He was shaking his head in astonishment as Olaf beside him muttered words I could not hear. Old Asgot’s face was a twisted grimace, as though he had eaten something foul-tasting, and he looked with hatred at Egfrith. I said to Penda that I thought it was astonishing
that the monk had not woken up dead before now, his blood crusting on the godi’s knife.

‘Let us leave this place!’ Sigurd bellowed, gesturing for his stupefied crew to take to their benches and row us out to sea. And so we did.

IT WAS RAINING AND WE WERE SAILING EAST. WE HAD COME TO
the southernmost reach of the coast we had been tracking and the wind had picked up, so that we had not needed to row for several days. On our steerboard side another landmass reached out, as mountainous and barren as that to the north, and Egfrith informed us that it must be the place which the Romans called the Pillars of Hercules.

‘Who by Baldr’s hairy left ball is Hercules?’ Bothvar asked when I had spun Egfrith’s words into Norse.

‘He was a great hero, Bothvar, so the monk says anyway,’ I said. ‘He was the son of the Greeks’ chief god Zeus and was the strongest man in the world.’ Bothvar scratched his chin and pursed his lips. Yrsa Pig-nose nodded in appreciation.

‘Sounds like Thór,’ Olaf said suspiciously.

‘Or Beowulf,’ Sigurd suggested.

Egfrith seemed to be enjoying the interest the Norsemen were showing in his story. He would lean forward, telling me in English, then lean back against
Serpent
’s rib and study the men’s faces.

‘He was a great champion. A warrior of rare skill,’ I went on,
addressing the next part to Sigurd, ‘but he was also cunning and full of tricks.’

‘Sounds like you, Sigurd!’ Uncle roared, slapping his jarl’s back and laughing.

‘I agree, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, a serious frown on his face. ‘It seems to me that this Hercules was the kind of man that if he pissed into the wind the wind would change direction.’ And then the jarl burst into laughter and so did we, perhaps over-wringing the cloth. For the men had been quiet since Tufi’s death. There had even been talk that we had not shaken off the bad luck that had seen us lose that Frankish hoard. Most of that talk came, as usual, from Asgot, and so I think we were all relieved that day to caulk the strakes with laughter. But that night, anchored in a steep-sided bay, the men were sullen again. Some of this, I think, was because we had run out of mead and not even Bram’s stash had survived. The trouble with not being drunk is that you think too much. Ideas fly into your head whether you want them to or not and the more you try to ignore them the louder they become.

I was thinking about Halldor, whose face had swollen with pus and whose corpse had slowly blistered on a rain-soaked pyre. It seemed to me that there was still some nettle between Black Floki and Sigurd, because Sigurd had killed Halldor. That had hurt Black Floki’s pride, for Halldor had been his cousin and the way Floki saw it the burden of killing the man should have been his alone. There had been no hard words between Sigurd and Floki as far as I knew, but the sting was there all the same. And Halldor’s miserable death had gnawed at me ever since.

‘You’d be better off putting the girl out of your head, lad,’ Olaf said. Penda and I were fishing off the stern but I was hardly playing my line and Penda and I had said less than three words to each other while the low sun slipped behind the mountains to the west.

‘I’m not thinking about Cynethryth, Uncle,’ I said, which
was true for once. Cynethryth was somewhere up near the bow, probably learning Norse from Asgot, which Egfrith had warned me about, though I had told him I did not know what I could do about it. ‘It’s Halldor that won’t leave me alone,’ I admitted.

From the corner of my eye I saw Olaf roll his. We had three sacks of horsehair, which we had taken from the blaumen’s mounts, and Olaf was teasing apart the strands and then twisting them together to make new caulking.

‘You’d be best to put that from your mind, too,’ Olaf said. ‘No good can come of lingering on a thing like that.’

‘I’ve never seen a man die like that before. That’s all.’

I looked at Olaf now and he frowned. ‘Halldor died a good death,’ he said. ‘By a good blade and holding one too.’

I shook my head. ‘He was already dead,’ I said, remembering Halldor’s hideous, misshapen head. ‘I have never smelt anything so bad. The man was rotten. Týr knows how he bore the pain.’

‘I just had a bite,’ Penda said, tugging his line. Then he cursed, staring into the black water. ‘Bastard got away.’ We ignored him.

‘Sigurd did right by him,’ Olaf said. ‘He did what had to be done and Halldor would have thanked him for it too.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s still boring into Floki though,’ I said. ‘Like woodworm.’

Olaf grunted. ‘Floki ought to just let it lie. Ought to thank Sigurd himself if you ask me. But you know Floki. He was born miserable.’

‘Why did Sigurd do it, Uncle? He knew Halldor had asked Floki to do it. We all did.’

Olaf glanced round to check that no one else was close. Most of the others were in their furs, either asleep or getting there. ‘Sigurd’s boy,’ he said eventually.

‘He died young. Horse-kicked,’ I said, wondering what that had to do with things.

‘Aye. But the poor little swine didn’t die quick as he should have.’ Olaf tilted his shaggy head as though trying to weigh up whether to speak, or chew the words back down. ‘The boy was as good as dead it’s true. I’d seen rocks with more life in them. But he wasn’t dead. Still breathing, he was, though barely enough to call breathing.’

Penda turned to say something else, then saw Olaf’s face and turned back to his fishing instead, muttering that our heathen language was scaring off the fish.

‘And he stayed like that for two weeks, might have been three. The poor little sod.’ Olaf cuffed a tear from his eye and I glanced away for a heartbeat.

‘A slow death,’ I said.

Olaf shook his head. ‘One night, Sigurd carried the boy out into the pasture leaving Gudrid weeping at the door. He finished the boy himself. His own bairn.’

Our eyes were locked and I felt the shards of ice in mine.

‘He had no choice, lad. The boy he knew was long gone. There was nothing else for it.’

‘The Norns are bitches,’ I said, setting my jaw.

‘I’ll not argue with that,’ Olaf said, twisting the horsehair again. ‘But Sigurd knows how it feels to kill your own kin. It weighs a man down. Will drag him under, like that Christ cross dragged Tufi to his end. Sigurd took that burden from Black Floki. Why? Because he’s the best son of a wolf jarl who has ever led a crew across the whale’s road. And Floki knows it too. He’s pride-stung, that’s all.’

‘If I ever get the wound-rot I’ll cross Bifröst before I begin to stink,’ I said.

Olaf nodded, tugging his beard thoughtfully. ‘Just don’t ask Osk to open you up, lad. He’d bloody miss.’

I smiled but felt the cold in it, watching Olaf’s surprisingly nimble fingers working the horsehair into fine, neat ropes.

‘The fish are sleeping.’ Penda broke the silence. I locked eyes with him but my mind saw Sigurd killing a small boy. Penda
nodded at the line still clamped between my finger and thumb. ‘We might as well sleep too,’ he said, winding his line around the block. Then, shrugging, he turned and walked off.

And I stayed there at
Serpent
’s stern, snores, farts and the low murmur of men’s voices breaking the whisper and slosh of the sea against the nearby rocks, until a crimson wash stained the eastern sky.

Three days later Bragi the Egg spotted a white sail. The small craft was cutting north-west towards the mountainous coast, making slow progress against the same westerly that kept our oars up in their trees and our salt-stained sails stretched. It was not the first vessel we had seen in these waters – there had been many – but as we came closer we knew that this one was a trader. She was broad in the beam like a knörr, so that she could not have used more than four pairs of oars and these only for docking or keeping her bows into the wind in rough weather. She sat low in the water too, meaning she had a full hold, and it was likely that there were no more than twelve crew.

Bragi was standing at
Fjord-Elk
’s bow and I could see his predatory smile even from a distance.

‘My mother always says you should never turn down an invitation!’ he called across to Sigurd. ‘That looks like an invitation to me, hey!’

‘Bragi’s mother also said I was the best lover she had ever had,’ Bram the Bear growled, stirring a smattering of laughter.

Sigurd was up on
Serpent
’s mast step, watching the white-sailed ship like a hawk, his golden hair loose but for two braids falling either side of his face.

‘Should be as easy as skinning a hare,’ Olaf suggested, leaning on the sheer strake and squinting against the glare off the water. Above us the sun had broken through a blanket of fish-scale cloud which was questing east in a golden likeness of the sea. ‘We’ll barely need to change course,’ Olaf went on, ‘just snap them up on the way by.’

Like a wolf snatching a moth from the air
, I thought.

Sigurd seemed to consider it a moment longer, then he nodded and slapped the smooth mast before jumping down. ‘Bragi! Rolf! Today we are sea eagles and there is our mackerel! Let us see which of us has the wings to match our talons!’ And with that men whooped and hollered, because their jarl had made a contest of it and we would now see which of us was the fastest. Squalls raged aboard all four ships as crews worked the lines to best catch the wind on their sails whilst others grabbed their helmets and spears and bows. A few put on their brynjas but I was one of those who did not bother, because no one expected the trader to make a fight of it against four dragons.

‘The poor bastards must be wishing they had not put to sea this morning,’ Penda said, shaking his head.

‘Leave them be, Sigurd!’ Father Egfrith implored, wringing his hands.

‘Out of my way, monk,’ Sigurd growled, putting on his own helmet with its new gold band.