“Clew up!” Thorgrim shouted and the sheets and tacks were let go, the clew garnets hauled and the big woolen sail was pulled up to the yard above, spilling her wind and flapping uselessly.
Good, good, Thorgrim thought. He had timed that right, he was sure. The ship’s momentum would carry her right up to the stranger’s side. Sea Hammer would come alongside and stop and his men would pour onto the enemy’s deck.
He heard cheering, yelling and whooping, but it was not coming from his ship but from across the water. He looked forward. The whale had stopped its flailing and seemed to have rolled on its side, one massive flipper sticking straight up, bobbing motionless like the two ships nearby.
“Get ready!” Thorgrim shouted as he pulled the tiller near, swinging Sea Hammer to starboard as the last of her way carried her up to the strange ship’s side. He could see a bustle of motion on the other ship. The crew preparing for a fight, he guessed, but he saw instead, to his surprise, they were heaving heavy rope fenders over the side of their ship. They were taking care, apparently, to see that neither ship was damaged when they came together.
Forty feet, thirty, and Thorgrim could see the men lining the side of the other ship, men much like his own in the manner of their clothing and beards and hair. But while his men stood grim and ready for battle, these men were smiling, arms up in greeting.
This is not what I was expecting… Ten feet separated Sea Hammer from the other ship and Thorgrim was about to call to his men to stay put, tell them not to fight until they knew a fight was to be had. Tell them to grab hold of Starri Deathless if he went on the attack.
Before he could speak, the men on the other ship parted to make way for another, a big man with a big beard, who was smiling even wider than the rest.
“Thorgrim Ulfsson!” he shouted. “Do you come with swords and shields to fight me like I’m some sorry Englishman?”
Bergthor Skeggjason.
He and Bergthor had gone raiding together, years before, though they had been on the crews of different ships. His farm was in Fevik, twenty miles north of Thorgrim’s. Thorgrim had seen him on and off over the years, though not for some time before he had left for Ireland with Ornolf the Restless.
Now Bergthor was there. With Harald at his side.
Chapter Ten
Tell me, Fjolsvinn!
That which I will ask thee,
and I desire to know:
whether there is any treasure,
that mortals can obtain,
at which the pale maiden will rejoice?
The Poetic Edda
Thorgrim pulled the tiller back and Sea Hammer came gently against the side of Bergthor Skeggjason’s ship, bumping noiselessly against the heavy fenders Bergthor’s men had set in place. His own men had taken a step back from the side and lowered shields and weapons. Whereas a minute ago they had looked primed for battle, now they just looked confused. But at least they had sense enough not to attack men who were waving and smiling at them.
Starri, too, seemed to understand that there would be no fight that day. He was standing amidships, and Thorgrim expected to see four men trying to hold him back, but Starri was still unrestrained, watching the goings-on, his axes held loose at his sides.
You’re getting old too, my friend, Thorgrim thought. Starri was forever suggesting that age was quenching the fire in Thorgrim’s belly, but now Thorgrim wondered if he was not alone in that. A year or more past he would have expected Starri to be launching himself into the fight whether there was a fight or not. But now he seemed to be waiting for events to unfold in a way that was…calm. Reasonable. It was a strange thing to see.
“Thorgrim!” The sound of his name shouted out with loud exuberance pulled Thorgrim from his thoughts. He let go of the now useless tiller and turned. With the vessels side by side Bergthor, still aboard his own ship, was only twenty feet away and calling across the space between them.
He was just as Thorgrim remembered him: a big man with a thick, bushy beard, remarkably thick even for the Northmen. His long hair was pulled back and braided and the gap between beard and moustache revealed a broad smile. His big arms were spread as if he meant to hug Thorgrim despite the water that separated them.
Thorgrim looked at Harald, standing next to Bergthor. Harald was looking back at him, a happy but wary look, an uncertain smile on his face, as if he was not sure what sort of reaction to expect from his father.
You’re in more trouble than you can imagine, boy, Thorgrim thought, and Harald’s smile faded quickly, as quickly as if Thorgrim had shouted the words across the space between them. Harald was soaking wet, and Thorgrim wondered how that had happened, and how he had managed to get aboard Bergthor’s ship.
“Thorgrim, by the gods it’s good to see your ugly face!” Bergthor shouted. “Who’d have thought we’d meet here? I recognized young Harald right off, though he didn’t know who I was! Just a boy when I saw him last, now he’s a man!”
“Good to see you too, Bergthor,” Thorgrim said. This was all so very strange, and only getting stranger. “How does…” he continued, but Bergthor cut him off with raucous enthusiasm.
“Oh, Thorgrim, you should have seen it! Your boy…only you could have such a son! I see these poor bastards trying some fool thing like hunting a whale, looks to me like they’re in trouble, so we come over to help. And there’s Harald! Get this, Thorgrim, he’s on the whale’s back and he’s stabbing at the rutting thing with a spear! A spear! What balls the boy has! More balls than brains, I’ll warrant!”
Thorgrim had no idea what to say to that, but Gudrid, ten feet away, called out, “Harald Whale-spear!” and that was met with laughter which turned quickly into cheering and yelling, the celebration spreading over the crews of both ships. The men all around Harald slapped him on the back and clapped hands on his shoulders as the rest shouted out their enthusiasm. The uncertain smile returned to Harald’s face as he looked around, nodding his thanks, laughing at the adulation. He was careful not to meet Thorgrim’s eyes.
Thorgrim looked astern. Dragon’s sail was clewed up and the men had broken out her oars, and she was drawing closer to Sea Hammer and Bergthor’s ship. He turned and looked to the south. His fleet and Bergthor’s were all converging on them, ten ships with sails set to a following wind making for the same patch of ocean.
“I’ll be honest with you, Night Wolf,” Bergthor continued, “Part of the reason I’m surprised to see you…back home, most thought you were dead. We had word of Ornolf’s death…what? Two years ago? And never a word about you since, so we all figured the worst.”
Thorgrim nodded. He still did not know what to say.
“How about this, Thorgrim,” Bergthor said. “I reckon this is Harald’s whale. I might have lanced it, but it’s his whale, sure. But even he can’t eat it all! Let’s tow it to the beach north of here, get it ashore and we’ll have us a grand feast! Your men and mine! By the gods, I want to hear everything you’ve been up to these years past!”
Thorgrim looked down the length of Sea Hammer, at the eager, expectant faces of his men. He looked at the rest of the fleet closing on them. He looked at the far shore, which he had hoped to reach by dark, but now was not so sure he could. They’d run pretty far downwind coming after Harald, and now they would have to work to windward to get back, and that was a much slower proposition.
“Very well,” Thorgrim said. “Do you know there’s a beach north of here?”
“I got a fellow aboard, knows this coast well,” Bergthor said. “He says there is and he’s usually right about such things.”
“I’ve got to get back aboard my ship,” Harald said, but he sounded as if he was choking on the words. Thorgrim could guess why Harald had faltered in his speech — he wasn’t sure that Dragon still was his ship. Neither was Thorgrim.
But he was willing to let Harald have it for now. Herjolf, at Dragon’s helm, brought the ship in carefully until her bow touched the stern of Bergthor’s ship and Harald was able to swing
himself across. Herjolf ordered the rowers to pull astern and Dragon backed away as Harald made his way aft to assume command. Thorgrim’s men cast off the lines that Bergthor’s had tossed over to lash the two ships together.
“I’ll pull around the larboard side of this dead beastie, hook on there!” Bergthor shouted.
“Good! I’ll hook it on its starboard side!” Thorgrim replied. The two ship, unbound from one another, began to drift apart, and soon there was space enough to run the oars out. Bergthor backed his ship away, clear of Sea Hammer, then ducked in on the whale’s other side, the maneuver neatly and skillfully done.
Forward, Hall and Bjorn stood ready with two of Sea Hammer’s grappling hooks. Thorgrim brought the ship closer alongside the whale and the two men leaned over the side and swung the hooks down onto the whale and watched them bounce off again, half a dozen times each, before they finally managed to sink them in deep enough to hold.
Thorgrim ordered the oars in and the sail set, to the great relief of the men pulling the looms. The wind had dropped a bit but it was still from the south and strong enough to drive the ships faster than the rowers could. One hundred feet away Bergthor’s men did the same, and soon the two ships, nearly even in size and complement of men, were rolling north with the swell behind and a dead whale between them.
It was not long before the rest of the fleet caught up and word was passed from ship to ship that they were bound for the beach to the north. Thorgrim ordered Godi in Blood Hawk to go ahead of the fleet and scout out the landing and make certain it was safe, free of navigational hazards and English men-at-arms.
The land to the west tended away as they sailed north, revealing a stretch of water that seemed to reach far inland. Thorgrim was sure now that they had been on an island all that time, and not on the shore of Engla-land. But he still did not care very much.
It was late in the afternoon, the sun hanging lower on their larboard side, when they finally reached shore. Godi had built a fire on the beach and piled it with driftwood to create a thick column of smoke as a marker for the landing place: a long sandy beach running for several miles east to west. The western end of the beach, about half a mile from where Godi had landed, ended at the mouth of what Thorgrim was certain was a river or the entrance to a narrow harbor.
One by one the ships beached and the crews hopped out and pulled them far enough up onto the sand to keep them in place, but not enough to make it difficult to float them again. Last of all came Sea Hammer and Bergthor’s ship, with the whale floating at the end of the towropes fifty feet astern.
Thorgrim hopped down into the surf and trudged ashore and Bergthor joined him on the warm sand. “So, how do we get this bastard up on the beach so we can eat him?” Bergthor asked.
“Not sure, exactly,” Thorgrim admitted. “But I have a man knows about this sort of thing. Thorkel!” he shouted and Thorkel broke off from the knot of men with whom he was conversing and came jogging over.
“Yes, Lord Thorgrim?”
Thorgrim nodded toward the whale. “How do we get this thing up on the beach so we can eat it?”
Thorkel turned and looked at the whale for a moment. “Not sure we have to,” he said. “We can just pull him in a little closer and me and a few others can go aboard it and cut in and fetch off all we can eat. You weren’t planning on drying any of the meat, were you? Or making oil from the blubber?”
“I wasn’t planning anything except sailing to the far shore,” Thorgrim said.
“Good, then,” Thorkel said. “I’ll get some men and we’ll be at it. Back aft on the whale, where it gets narrow by the tail, that’s where the best meat’s to be found.”
Under Thorkel’s direction, and with the considerable enthusiasm of hundreds of men ready for a feast, the whale was hauled in close to shore. They set at the massive fish with axes, knives, and seaxes, stripping away blubber and carving out great chunks of red meat which were passed lovingly to shore, while further up the beach other men built smaller fires for roasting. Soon there were fires enough, and meat enough, for the five hundred Northmen there to eat their fill. And while that was taking place, the rest of the men off-loaded the mead and ale and wine from the ships resting at the surf line.
The celebrations were full underway by the time the sun set behind the land to the west, the evening filled with the smell of roasting whale meat and the chaotic noise of drinking men. In such situations as this, two fleets of Northmen flung together, Thorgrim would have expected to see the men divide into camps, his men in one camp, Bergthor’s in another, from which each would regard the other warily. But that was not happening now.
Maybe it was the shared effort in killing the whale, or in butchering the whale, or the need for both armies to share one whale, but Thorgrim’s men and Bergthor’s were mixing as if they had been sailing in company that year past. Nor were they entirely strangers. Just as Thorgrim and Bergthor knew one another from their homes across the water, so a few of the others also knew each other from before they went a’viking, or from encounters in Frankia or Ireland or Engla-land or any of the many places where the longships carried them.
“All right, Thorgrim, now, at last, tell me what trouble you’ve been up to these years past!” Bergthor said, taking a seat next to Thorgrim on the big driftwood log that had been hauled over by the fire. Bergthor had a cup of mead in one hand, a wooden plate with a massive slab of blackened whale in the other, but he managed to seat himself gracefully despite those burdens and his ponderous size.
“Well,” Thorgrim said because he did not know where to begin. He did not particularly care to recount the death of his wife, the despair that came on the heels of that, the decision, perhaps the stupid decision, to sail with Ornolf the Restless.
A stupid decision?
No, he could not say that. Not entirely. For all the hardship of those past years, all the desperation he now felt to return to his farm in East Agder, he had to admit that the seafaring, the raiding, the adventuring had not been so bad. He was now wealthier by far, even after having made and lost several fortunes, and that wealth he would pass on to his four children.
These past years had seen Harald grow to manhood, or mostly. Thorgrim was still furious with the boy, still intent on teaching him a lesson about the stupidity of doing what he had done, but for the most part going a’viking had done for Harald what it had done for Thorgrim, when Thorgrim had been Harald’s age.
Where to begin the story? But Bergthor saved him that decision.
“I heard…we all heard…of Hallbera’s passing,” he said. “I never had the chance to say how sorry I was about that. She was well loved. Everyone loved her. But I don’t have to tell you that.”
“Thank you,” Thorgrim said. “Yes, you don’t find women like her too often. So, after she was gone, I sailed with her father, Jarl Ornolf. But you know that, too.”
Bergthor nodded.
“We reached Ireland and had some luck in raiding. Not much. Some. We took this Irish boat, and there wasn’t a thing on it, save for a crown…”
Thorgrim told Bergthor, in broad strokes, the tale of the crown and the fighting at Tara, the taking of Vík-ló, the struggles at Loch Garman and more recently in Engla-land. And though he himself had lived it, from arriving on the shores of Ireland until this chance meeting with Bergthor that afternoon over the body of a dead whale, the events of the past years seemed extraordinary laid out like that, end to end.
“Ha!” Bergthor said when Thorgrim finished. “Incredible! A story worthy of Thorgrim Night Wolf!”
“And what of you, Bergthor?” Thorgrim asked. He was curious as to how Bergthor happened to be in that place, and even more curious for the news of what was happening back home. And Bergthor, Thorgrim knew from past experience, would be eager to tell him.
But he did not get the chance, at least not just then. A voice called for attention through the general roar, and when Thorgrim looked over he saw Herjolf standing on something so that he could be seen by al
l the men on the beach, and calling and waving his arms.
“Listen to me, you drunken fools!” Herjolf shouted and was greeted with hoots and sundry insults, but high-spirited, friendly. “Listen here! We’ve seen feats today such as no men have seen before! Feats performed by the great Harald Broadarm, beloved of the gods, and you should make him stand up and tell you of them!”
Thorgrim frowned. He meant to give Harald the dressing down that he deserved, meant to do it that night, make him tremble for the stupid things he had done. He did not want the boy to be celebrated for them.
But Thorgrim seemed to be alone in that thinking. The rest of the crowd were calling for Harald to speak, demanding he tell his story, encouraging him to take his place beside Herjolf. And when he finally did, standing up on whatever Herjolf was standing on, the men assembled around them cheered louder still.
“Well, it’s not so much of a tale,” Harald began, and Thorgrim knew his reluctance to talk was not feigned. The boy was no braggart, of that Thorgrim was sure. If he had been, Thorgrim would have put a stop to that a long time ago.
“Come on,” Herjolf shouted. “It’s a whale of a tail! A whale’s tail!” That was met with a mix of laughs, hoots, boos, curses. Harald smiled and looked around and took it in.
“Very well,” Harald said at last. “We were crossing the water, do you see, when we saw a bunch of these boats, these English boats, but what they were doing we could not tell…”
He went on from there, and just as Thorgrim had related to Bergthor the past years, so Harald related to the other men the events of that afternoon, from seeing the whale to going in pursuit of the thing, to finally leaping on its back so that he might set the hook in well. As he spoke Herjolf interjected comments, urged Harald to continue the story, added his own recollections to it. He confirmed Harald’s story, bit by bit, as did others of the Dragon’s crew, standing around close by.
The Midgard Serpent Page 11
