Raven (14 page)

WE NAMED YNGVAR’S BLAUMAN FRIEND VÖLUND. I SUPPOSE HE
must have had a name already, but the chances were it was one our tongues couldn’t wriggle round. And so because he was muscle-bound, and for his skin which was as black as a smith’s covered with the soot of the forge, we named him after the smith god. After the fight Rolf had taken our dead aboard
Sea-Arrow
and beached a little further along the coast. The Danes buried Bag-eyed Orm and Kveldulf along with one of their own who had, incredibly, taken an arrow in each eye. Those men went to their graves with decent weapons, for having stripped the blaumen of theirs we now had so many blades that each of us would need four hands to wield them all. Sigurd said it was a strange thing to bury his men this far from their home, but he also said their kinfolk would be proud to know they had journeyed so far and won so many hard fights and we could not disagree with that.

We had also found plenty of food aboard the blaumen’s ship: bread mostly but also some salted meat, grain and cheese. There was also a basket of strange yellow fruits that were so sour that when Svein bit into one, being the first brave enough to try one, his face almost turned inside out. We laughed as the
juice ran through his beard and his mouth puckered and the cords in his neck looked about to break through the skin.

‘This is more sour than Borghild!’ he announced at last when he had straightened out his mouth.

‘You don’t know my wife very well then, Red,’ Bram said, wafting Svein away. ‘For nothing is as sour as Borghild.’ And we roared because Bram did not seem to be joking.

We sailed in an arrow formation like a skein of geese.
Serpent
was the tip, with
Wave-Steed
and
Sea-Arrow
off our steerboard side and
Fjord-Elk
and
Goliath
, which was our name for the blaumen’s ship, on our port side. Despite her enormous white sail,
Goliath
was slow and lumbering and we could only think that the other ship, the one which had fled from the fight, was faster.

‘I’ll wager the other one would catch their prey and this one would come along to finish the kill,’ Bragi had suggested when we had taken a closer look at the vessel. We had named it
Goliath
after a story of a giant from ancient times which Father Egfrith had told us one night in Frankia. We had all liked the beginning of the story, how the giant Philistine warrior had stridden from his ranks, his beautiful armour glinting in the hot sun, his sword-brothers chanting his name. But few of the Norsemen had liked the ending. They were troubled that a mere boy had killed the Philistines’ greatest hero with nothing more than a smooth pebble, and they sulked when Egfrith told it.

‘I think young David finished Goliath off with the giant’s own sword,’ Egfrith had explained in an attempt to rescue his story, but by now men were grumbling and farting and rolling over into their furs to sleep, leaving the monk upset that his tale, which had begun so well, was trickling away like piss in a ditch.

Even so, we had all remembered Egfrith’s story and
Goliath
seemed a good name for the ship because of its size, and so it was. But that ship was like a rock around our necks for we could only sail as fast as it could. And yet all agreed that it was
too rich a prize to cut loose. We must have looked a force to be reckoned with, though, and from then on we saw many ships’ sterns as they changed course to avoid us the way dogs skulk away from their drunken masters to escape the boot.

The jagged mountains and scrub-crowned peaks on our port side gave way to land that sloped gently into the sea, which was warm and so clear in places that you thought you could just reach down and pull in the fish with your bare hands. Even when we were far from the beach our fat-smeared fathom weights came back up crusty with sand, warning us to stay further from the shore than you would have thought necessary. It was because of this long slope that the waves gathered such force for their assault on the shore, and we watched them surge and roll from far out until they flung themselves up the strand in frothy white billows and vanished.

Nevertheless, we did risk landfall on a few occasions, and so had the chance to learn more of
Goliath
’s crew. It turned out that Völund spoke better Norse than Yngvar gave him credit for, and he was happy to give answers where Yngvar could not. It seemed he had been a raider before Beak Nose’s blaumen captured his ship and made a slave of him. He was a fierce-looking man, Völund, and he had muscles on his muscles. But smiles came easily to him and I admit I liked him better than I liked Yngvar.

It was from Völund we learnt that the strange building we had named Gerd’s Tit was rightly called a mosque, which is indeed a church for the blaumen’s god – it seems they are all built with those bulging roofs the likes of which none of us had ever seen before.

On this latest landfall conversation turned to an island we had sighted to the north-east, which Völund said he recognized from his raider days. It seemed to burst up from the blue sea, craggy white rock studded with dark green bushes. By the water’s edge, on the narrow, pebble-strewn margin, giant boulders sat sentinel. Having long ago broken and crashed
down from the heights, they would rest there, wave-licked, until the doom of the gods, as immovable as Yggdrasil. According to Völund, there was a mosque on the island’s north side, where many rich men stopped to pray. As far as I could make out from him, this island’s remoteness kept it clean of man’s sin and if you made the effort to go there to pray then Allah would surely reward you, though with what I had no idea. Egfrith said there were storm-bashed Christian churches and monasteries like that where the most devout and God-fearing men could dedicate their lives to Him without the distractions of others.

‘We know of such places, monk,’ Olaf said, winking at Sigurd, who nodded, grinning.

‘Gerd’s Tit had nothing in it worth stealing,’ Rolf said, which was true enough and I said so as the Dane sat combing his tangled beard and squashing the lice that were left on the comb’s teeth.

‘That was not our target; we were going to wait near that mosque until a rich amir came,’ Völund explained, shaking his head at the memory, ‘but sometimes there is a bigger fox hunting the—’ He frowned.

‘Chicken?’ Sigurd suggested helpfully, to which Völund nodded.

It emerged that it was on this island that Völund’s lot had fallen prey to Beak Nose’s crew. Most had been killed, though the blaumen’s lord had spared the strongest to pull his oars. Some time after that Beak Nose had tangled with a crew of Danes. Yngvar had been one of the men using oars to heave the enemy ship off their hull, but it had been his ill luck to fall overboard. He was still dripping wet when the fetters went on and he was put on a bench next to Völund. Olaf glanced at me during that part of the story, for I had been put to one of
Serpent
’s oars even as the smoke from my burning village dirtied the sky. And yet that seemed so very long ago now and I returned Olaf’s gaze, trying to remember the fear I had once felt at the sight of him.

‘Maybe we should visit this mosque, Uncle,’ Sigurd suggested, fingering the ridge of scarred flesh on his right cheek where Mauger had desperately clawed at a wound. But Mauger was long dead now.

‘Do you need to wash your ears out, lad?’ Uncle asked. ‘You just heard what happened to Völund.’

‘How many ships did you have?’ Sigurd asked the blauman.

‘One,’ Völund replied, at which Sigurd turned to Olaf, a haughty smirk lifting his beard.

‘And the blaumen lords travel with their silver?’ Olaf asked Völund.

‘And gold, Norseman,’ Völund replied, his white teeth flashing, ‘much gold.’

So now our prows were pointed towards Yebisah, which Völund told us was the island’s name, though Sigurd had said we would avoid a fight if we could. Men were still grimacing from cuts and bruises taken against the blaumen and none of us really wanted another fight so soon, however much we liked the idea of some amir’s gold.

We moored in a deserted cove on the island’s north-west side. There were hundreds of such bays but this one could not be seen from the sea and we likely would have sailed by it had Völund not recognized a cairn high up on a bluff. It was from this very same anchorage that Beak Nose had swooped out to capture the small ship Völund had sailed in.

‘That brave turd would have made a good Norseman, I think,’ Olaf said admiringly, ‘for it seems he used to catch ships the way a spider catches flies.’

‘His web could not hold us, Uncle,’ I said with a grin.

‘That was like a spider trying to catch an eagle,’ Svein the Red put in, which was well said, specially from Red who was not known for his clever words.

Those of us who would make up the raiding party prepared to disembark. There were ten of us and that would be more
than enough, Sigurd said, to steal anything worth stealing and get back to the ships before anything went amiss. If there were too many blaumen for us ten to deal with then we would not fight anyway, so ten it was. And we were armed like war gods: Sigurd, Svein, Bram, Floki, Aslak, Bjarni, Penda, Wiglaf, Völund and me, all in shining brynjas and polished helmets. Völund looked awe-inspiring in Kveldulf’s old war gear, though some of the Norsemen had griped about a blauman wearing their dead sword-brother’s brynja and helmet. Worse still, they grumbled, was that the blauman spent half the day on his hands and knees for his god, which was no way to treat good war gear. Even Yngvar had moaned that it should be him accompanying Sigurd on to the island and not his old oar-mate. But Sigurd had explained that of the two of them Völund was the more useful, blauman or not, because he knew the island and spoke the Allah-worshippers’ tongue. No one could argue with that, though some clamoured that Völund had better put the arms back in Kveldulf’s sea chest the moment we returned. Kveldulf had a son back home, they said, and the war gear should be his.

Using
Sea-Arrow
as a tender we were able to get close enough to some rocks to clamber ashore without so much as getting our feet wet, which is always a good way to begin a raid. We looked around, blinking against the glare of the midday sun off the white rocks, then followed the blauman, scrambling up the rocks, the sweat already soaking our beards and running down our backs. Gods it was hot! We carried swords and shields, spears and axes, and some had brought bows, for even though we would not be able to carry so much if we did get lucky, it was decided that it was a better thing to be able to kill anyone who wanted to kill us. We also had food, bad-weather skins and furs, so that we could spend a night or two on the island without having to return to the ships.

Apart from some scraggy goats who eyed us indifferently, Yebisah looked deserted. We climbed over rocks that
showed no sign that men had ever stepped foot on the place, yet Völund assured us that the blaumen had built a temple to their god here and that we would see it for ourselves soon enough. I was glad there were only ten of us, as our boots raised a cloud of white dust and if we had been more that cloud would have been big enough to announce us as surely as a war horn.

The sun was in the west when we climbed, dry-mouthed, up the last escarpment, picking our way through thorny bushes to get to the edge. Völund gestured for us to make ourselves low and so we did, as he bent his legs and peered over the crumbling ridge. He had taken us round so that we came to the mosque from the south-east and would be able to use this high ground to our advantage, like ernes watching for hares from a craggy peak.

‘Gerd’s Tit was bigger,’ Svein grumbled, his face flushed beneath his sweat-soaked red beard.

‘We haven’t come for the mosque,’ Sigurd reminded him, slapping the big Norseman’s back, so that dust puffed up from his cloak.

I used my spear to push aside a bunch of gorse and got my first look at the Allah temple below. An arrow’s flight away, it was surrounded by a low wall and had the same rounded roof as the other one we had seen, but this one had no balustrade crowning it from which men could look out. Instead it had a stone tower on its east side, which Völund told us was called a
ma’dhanah
, and the whole thing was as white as
Goliath
’s sail, so that I had to half close my eyes against the brightness. The only part of the whole structure that was not white was the doors, which were of dark wood. In the courtyard a succession of stone troughs, each set lower than the one before, channelled running water so that at several places you would be able to fill a bucket from the flow.

‘There’s no one down there,’ I said.

‘Someone will come,’ Völund said. But the only person we
saw the remainder of that day was a man in white robes who twice climbed the steps of the
ma’dhanah
and sang that eerie song we had heard from the blaumen before. And at that sound Völund would kneel and touch his forehead to the ground and perform other strange acts whose meaning was lost on us. In the morning we were up before the sun and we crawled to the ledge to watch as the white stone blushed pink with the new day’s light. It had been a hard thing not to go down and fill our skins with that fresh running water which glistened in the sun, for ours was stale and warm, but Sigurd would not risk us being caught down there.