Raven (21 page)

We stepped from the wharf and our boots sank into the sand as we turned this way and that, half looking for warriors, half looking for anything worth having. Old fishermen sat mending their nets, having no need to fear the likes of us, for their only silver was in their hair. Two boys were pulling the stiff
dried weed and crisp small fish from another net spread across the sand. Three older boys tracked us, keeping a safe distance whilst their leader, the tallest, with a nest of curly black hair and the spiteful look of the hungry, seemed to be weighing up when would be the right time to approach us. Another group of old men were sitting in a beached skiff playing some game that looked like tafl, though their eyes were on us too, now.

Instinctively, we had followed the sweet smell of fish sizzling with onions and herbs and now Olaf handed a nervous boy a silver coin the size of a fingernail and the boy’s eyes grew and he turned to his father who gave us a wide grin and threw out his arms, inviting us to claim the delicious-looking food spitting above the coals. Olaf tossed me a fish and I threw it from hand to hand, blowing on it, then peeled back the skin and took a bite of the hot, fragrant flesh, grinning at Svein. The giant bit into his own fish and could only have looked happier if he’d had something strong to wash it down with.

‘Better than wind-flayed herring,’ I said, wiping grease from my lips and beard.

‘Better than anything Arnvid fishes out of the pot,’ Sigurd said, flashing a grin at the boy, who gave a gummy smile and puffed his little chest like a robin.

‘Arnvid could burn water,’ Black Floki put in casually, eyes scouring the length of the strand and the line of green scrub inland. Beyond that scrub to the east was a clutter of poorly built dwellings which we guessed belonged to the fishermen who would sell their catch further inland or along the coast.

The three older boys made their move, cutting across our path, the two shorter ones taking their place either side of the tall thin boy in a fluid manoeuvre that spoke of practised ease. Their feet were planted in stride rather than square, in case they should have to run for it, and they gave us well-greased smiles that did not touch their calculating eyes.

‘I’ll wager these are just the little sea-urchins we want to talk to,’ Olaf said.

‘Talk then, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, at which Olaf shrugged, coughed, and spoke, addressing the boys in Norse. Immediately the leader shook his head and wagged a finger at Olaf, spewing something in reply. Olaf turned to me, palms to the sky.

‘Monk!’ Sigurd called, and Egfrith tried speaking to them in Latin, at which one of the other boys, a callow-looking lad with a face full of pustules, tugged the leader’s sleeve and gabbled something to which the older boy simply nodded, irritation flashing across his face. The older boy then made a ring of his thumb and forefinger through which he poked the forefinger of his other hand. That was clear enough in any language and Sigurd shook his head.

I raised an invisible horn to my mouth and pretended to drink, following it with an ‘aaah’, then dragging my arm across my mouth. All three boys grinned at that and Curly Hair snapped an order at a blond-haired boy who nodded and ran off up the strand as lightly over the sand as a water snake across a pond. Then Sigurd produced an iron ring from his tunic of the kind that went round a slave’s ankle and stepped up to Egfrith and took his hand as though about to thrust it into the fetter. The two boys that were left frowned at one another, chattering all the while, then Curly Hair dared to step up to Sigurd and put a hand on his shoulder. He turned the jarl round until they were facing west, back out to sea, and then he pointed a thin arm up at the sun. He held up two fingers, which we took to mean in two days’ time, and then the boy thumped his chest with his palm and pointed to our ships at the wharf.

‘Clear as a pail of mud,’ Olaf said, shaking his head.

Sigurd gave Curly Hair a small coin which the boy examined before nodding indifferently, though he must have worked far harder for much less many times before.

‘Uncle, tell the men we’ll be staying for a couple of days,’ Sigurd said, turning his face towards the sun and closing his
eyes. The two boys ran off south-eastwards, which made me think there must be a larger settlement in that direction. ‘We’ll stay here and stretch our legs,’ the jarl added, breathing deeply of the warming air. Olaf nodded, pulling another fish from a pouch on his belt and biting into it as he turned on his heel. ‘And tell them to make the most of the blauvifs,’ Sigurd added, to which Olaf casually raised a hand as though he had already intended as much. ‘You too, Raven,’ Sigurd said. ‘The wolf that eats the farmer’s sheep loses its teeth before the wolf that must hunt in the forest.’

I glanced at Svein who now wore the face of a boy who is told he cannot play with the other boys. Then I followed Olaf back to the ships. And Amina.

That night the three boys returned, only this time they came leading an old tired ass. Across the creature’s back were slung almost its height again in bulging skins, but it plodded stolidly on, hooves flicking up flurries of sand as the boys beside it beamed with pride. They had barely got amongst the shelters we had built on the strand before Norsemen, Danes and Wessexmen fell on their hoard like men who were thirsting to death. It turned out to be not mead or ale but wine, as red as blood and at once sweet and sour and delicious. In some of the skins was fresh water and, after watching Bram swill enough wine to drown a horse, the boys took great pleasure in showing us the proper way, which was to cut the wine with water. Though many of us ignored that advice. When Sigurd had paid them they seemed more than happy to stay and spent the rest of the night flitting amongst us, filling our horns and cups over and over again. Fires crackled and popped and the moon-dappled waves spilled up on to the sand in languid sighs, each breath fresh with the scent of the sea. Having decided we meant them no harm, local folk came to sell us hot pottage made with barley, fish, olive oil and wine. They brought fresh bread and cheese and spiced vegetables and mice stuffed with pork and herbs. But my favourite dish was crusts of bread that
had been soaked in milk, fried in fat and then covered with honey, and I ate until I could eat no more.

Men and women screwed in the sand, some even swived in the sea, and all sluiced their insides with wine. Yngvar and Völund were part of our crew now, had even agreed to take Sigurd’s oath, but no one saw why the other men we had freed should still be sharing our food and drink and so Sigurd paid them what he had promised and sent them off to whatever lay in store for them in the land of the Romans. We cared nothing, so long as the wine flowed and the food kept coming, and I half watched them stalk nervously off towards the town. Bram challenged men to wrestling bouts and he won five in a row until he was eventually beaten by the wine, which put him face down in the sand, something no man had been able to do. One of the local men came with four dark-haired girls who he implied were his daughters. Three of them were beautiful and the fourth I wouldn’t have touched with a long oar, but the man happily sold their services to men who wanted a change from the blauvifs and some of those men might afterwards have wished they’d left the new girls alone judging by the scowls on the faces of those they usually shared their beds with.

Penda lay back on his elbows, bare-chested and sweating, the sand stuck to his skin making him look white as a new corpse. In one hand he gripped a drinking horn and in the other a fleshy joint of meat. He was almost as drunk as me.

‘You would have thought they had been told that tomorrow the sky is going to fall on their heads,’ he said, squinting drunkenly at the seething camp. He was right. King Hrothgar’s Geats could not have celebrated more boisterously when Beowulf returned from Heorot brandishing the corpse-maker Grendel’s severed arm. I tried to reply but the words slewed out in a wine-soaked mess. Amina lay in the crook of my arm whispering her strange words into my ear. I shuddered as her hand snaked into my breeks.

‘Tomorrow, Baldred!’ Penda called over to the Wessexman, who was grunting like a boar, busy with one of the local girls. ‘Tomorrow the sky is going to fall on our heads! Make the most of that sweet honey pot. Tomorrow the sky’s going to fall.’

Which it did. Because the next day we lost our women.

I WOKE FEELING AS THOUGH MY BRAIN HAD SHRIVELLED AND DIED
inside my skull. My mouth was so dry I could not speak, my guts rolled over themselves like eels in a trap and the bile had risen, so that I thought I would vomit but didn’t know when. Amina was still sleeping after a vigorous night, her glossy black hair spread across the furs and her breathing a soft imitation of the nearby surf. I crawled out, but halted, waiting on my hands and knees while my eyes yielded to the harsh morning light. Then I climbed to my feet and stood swaying as I looked around the camp. Piles of white ash still smouldered and drinking horns lay abandoned, half-buried in the sand. Bones and scraps of food were everywhere and further up the beach I could see Cynethryth’s wolf content as a hound as it chewed plundered scraps. Here and there lay a Norseman or a Dane who had slept where he had fallen, and there were even two or three local men who had been too drunk to make it back to their homes.

‘Raven! Here, lad!’ I turned and there was Sigurd in the sea, waving at me to join him.

‘I swim like a rock, lord!’ I called back, holding the back of my head because I feared it was about to split open.

‘That’s good! Rocks cannot drown! You will feel better afterwards. Svein!’ Svein had just emerged from his shelter like a troll from its cave and beneath that flaming hair he looked as ashen as the spent fires. He was muttering to himself. ‘Svein!’ Sigurd called again. ‘Pick Raven up and throw him this way!’ I looked at Svein who shrugged and started towards me, but I raised my palms and he shrugged again and walked off to piss. So I took off my breeks and waded into the surf.

‘Makes you feel alive again, hey,’ Sigurd said. I could not reply because I was retching.

‘Swallowed … some …’ I muttered, watching the vomit float off and trying to find my feet. Sigurd was grinning.

‘That was some night,’ he said, sweeping his sodden golden hair back from his scarred head. There were scars on his shoulders too, like the runes of battle.

‘I would rather not think about it,’ I said, spitting bitter-tasting strings of saliva. Along the strand men were pushing their skiffs into the sea. Some were already far out, nutshells bobbing on the horizon, blurs of movement as crews cast their nets. The smell of onions cooking in fat wafted down from the beach.

‘Don’t fight it, Raven,’ Sigurd said. Beneath me my legs were kicking even more frantically than my arms were flapping. ‘Watch me.’ He lay back, so that even his ears were under water, and then he let each new wave gently lift him and lower him back down and somehow his nose and eyes remained above water. ‘You just have to take a deep breath and hold it so that you float,’ he said, staring up at the sky. Then he came back upright and blew snot from his nose. ‘Try.’ A gull dived and snatched a morsel from the waves but another gull wanted the prize too and because the loot was too big the first bird dropped it and the second swooped in to snatch it up again. ‘Don’t be afraid, Raven, your wyrd is not to drown, I’d wager my sea chest on that.’ And so, gritting my teeth, I lay back in the water and just as I did a wave broke over my upturned face
and I choked as the water hit my throat. I came up retching again. Sigurd’s laughter was flat as an oar blade across the water. ‘That’s the thing about wyrd,’ he said, beginning to wade back to shore, ‘you just never know.’

Curly Hair and his urchins came back that afternoon and they brought with them a rich-looking man whose clothes were similar to those the amir had worn, though he was no blauman. He came with four bodyguards, big men with big spears who looked as if what they lacked in wits they made up for in muscle. They were nervous now though, surrounded by shambling, wine-addled warriors, and I suspected they were hoping their master did nothing that would get them killed.

The merchant’s name was Azriel and he was a slave-trader. He had come because Sigurd had shown the fetter to Curly Hair and the boy had done enough business on that strand to know when men stepped ashore looking for slaves. Only, Sigurd did not want to buy slaves. He wanted to sell them. We had been told to say our goodbyes to our blauvifs and that had been a hard thing to do. Many of the men had grown fond enough of their women to shed a tear at the prospect of losing them and I admit to having a lump in my throat as I kissed Amina for the last time. The women had been lined up along the shore and Azriel had examined each one, often shaking his head disappointedly and clicking his tongue in annoyance. But his dismay was as thin as watered wine judging by how quick he was to make Sigurd an offer and not just for some of the blauvifs but all of them. Which was only to be expected because as the amir’s women they had lived lives of comfort and this showed in their skin and their teeth and in every delicious part of them. They may have looked rougher at the edges after living with us these last months, but the merchant knew his trade well enough to recognize good flesh when he saw it.