“Damn you, Felix, can you possibly believe I have betrayed anyone?” he managed to shout. “My brother, that bastard, he sent me…I never…”
Felix nodded toward the door and the guards half dragged Louis away, his heels kicking at the soft carpet. “Damn you, you bastard!” he shouted, but before he got the words out the heavy oak door was shut tight once again.
Chapter Thirty-Six
So might be heard,
when together came
the tempest's sister
and the long keels,
as when rock and surge
on each other break.
The Poetic Edda
With every violent roll of the boat, water came shooting in through the shattered planks like high surf hitting a rocky cliff. Six or seven men were frantically bailing; the rest were still lying on the bottom where they had fallen, looking on stupidly.
Skorri Thorbrandsson was one of those looking on stupidly. He was up near the bows, too stunned to move. The blow from the iron pot had stunned him. The speed with which he had gone from having Amundi and Odd in his hands to being on the verge of drowning stunned him.
He pushed himself to his feet as the boat took another roll. He staggered and grabbed the sheer strake before he went down again. He knew he had to live. As long as he was alive he could still drag Odd and Amundi before Halfdan and reap those rewards, and that was reason enough. But if the idiots he commanded were left to act on their own they would all be dead by the time another three sets of waves passed under them.
Before he moved forward Skorri looked out to windward and saw what he dreaded seeing, but what he knew he would see. Amundi’s boat was intact, the rig still standing, the sail still drawing. They were clawing their way north, rising and falling in the seas, and unless something went very wrong they would weather the point of land and escape.
“Ah, you bastards!” Skorri shouted, furious at the ill luck that had befallen him. Amundi could not have planned to do what he did, he could not have intended for his boat to hit Skorri’s so perfectly. He had been lucky, the gods had favored him above the others.
But Skorri knew what the gods wanted — bold and ruthless action — and he knew how to give them that.
“Move aside, you fools!” Skorri roared and he let go of the sheer strake and stepped across the boat, timing his steps with the wild rolling underfoot. The mast had snapped a few feet above the bilge and gone over the leeward side in a great tangle of spars and rigging and sail. It was half on the boat and half dragging in the water now, but that was not the most immediate concern.
One of the men was standing right in Skorri’s path and Skorri shoved him aside, tumbling him back into the bilge as he made his way forward. “Get out of my way, you idiot!” he shouted and as his words registered the other men began to back away.
He stopped a few feet from the stove-in planks, holding the shattered end of the mast for balance. Two of the strakes were buckled inward far enough that he could see through the gap to the foaming sea on the other side, and a third plank was cracked and threatening to go completely. The hole they made was a few inches above the waterline, which meant that the water was not flooding in, just jetting in when the boat rolled to starboard.
The men who had not moved out of Skorri’s way were still bailing like mad.
“Don’t just bail, find something to stuff in that hole!” Skorri roared. He turned around and grabbed the corner of the sail that was draped over the thwarts and pulled it toward him. He drew his knife and stabbed it down through the heavy linen canvas and began to slice sideways, then up and back until he had cut out a square section, three feet on either side. That done, he cut four pieces of rope from the tangled rigging and tied one to each corner.
He turned back to the men at the shattered planks. Some were trying to work a bundle of cloth into the hole, while the others continued to bail.
“Lambi!” he shouted, handing his canvas and rope lash-up to the man. “Take this and spread it out over the hole, from the outside! Let two of the lines snake under the boat!”
Lambi nodded and took the canvas from him. The others stepped back as Lambi turned and leaned far out over the edge of the boat. He tossed two of the lines to windward in hope that they would be swept under the boat, then leaned farther still, spreading the canvas over the shattered planks as he did.
“Someone see if those lines are under the boat, grab them up from the larboard side!” Skorri shouted. If they could get the lines under the boat they could effectively tie the canvas in place over the hole, and it would greatly reduce the amount of water gushing in.
The boat rolled off to larboard, lifting Lambi and the starboard side high. Then it dipped down again and as it did a breaking crest slammed against the bow. The boat shuddered from stem to stern and Lambi shouted in surprise. His arms flailed for something to grab but there was only air. He pivoted head first over the rail, feet high, screaming as he hit the water.
“Son of a bitch!” Skorri shouted. “Grab that canvas, grab it before it gets away!” He leaped for the rope lying on the bottom of the boat but it snaked over the side before he could put his hand on it. He watched it go, and as he followed its path he saw Lambi in the water, ten feet away. Just his head and mail-clad arms were visible, his mouth open, his eyes wide with terror as he thrashed at the sea around him.
Wonder if he can swim… Skorri thought. He saw a rope go flying out over the water, one of the other men tossing a line to Lambi. It landed just a foot away but in the same instant Lambi slipped below the surface, first his head and then his flailing arms, then hands and then he was gone.
Guess not, Skorri thought.
He pushed himself back onto his feet. “Any of you bastards grab that piece of canvas?” He turned fore and aft. The others were just looking at him, saying nothing, and he knew they had failed.
“You sons of whores!” he shouted. Now he would have to waste time making another canvas patch. “Keep bailing! And take your mail off, you fools!”
With that he unbuckled his belt and dropped it, then pulled his own mail shirt over his head and tossed it aside. Balancing against the roll of the boat, he strapped his belt on again. He grabbed another part of the sail and pulled his knife and cut out another square, and then a length of line.
When he was done he handed the canvas to a man named Hrolf. “Spread this out like Lambi was doing, but hold onto it and don’t fall overboard like an idiot!” he shouted over the rain and the wind. Hrolf took the canvas and nodded.
“And some of you others, hold onto Hrolf’s belt like you should have done with Lambi!” Skorri shouted next. In truth he had not thought about holding Lambi’s belt either, but he was not about to admit as much.
Hrolf leaned over the side while two others took a firm grip on his belt. He streamed two of the lines under the boat and Kolbein on the larboard side grabbed them up and tied them off. Hrolf spread the canvas over the hole and when he had done Kolbein grabbed the other two lines and made them fast as well, holding the canvas in place over the shattered planks. The water that had been gushing in was reduced to a trickle.
“All right, let’s cut this rig away!” Skorri shouted next. “Just cut it free, toss it over the side!” The men drew knives and went at the tangle of ropes and canvas and broken poles, shoving what was still on board into the sea. It drifted away and the boat began to roll more violently still, with the drag of the wreckage gone.
And with that there was nothing more to do. It was pointless to try and row against those forces, and the wind and sea were driving them toward the shore in any event, pushing them in the direction they wished to go. The men sat as low in the boat as they could get, where the motion was less violent, but Skorri resumed his place in the stern, looking west through the rain. If there was land anywhere near, he could not see it through the storm, and if the waves were breaking he could not hear them.
“Are the oars free to be used, if we need ’em?” Skorri shouted over the wind. They coul
dn’t row against the gale, but they might be able to gain some control over the boat as they went ashore.
The oars were in the bottom of the boat and the men were leaning or sitting on them, so they began to shuffle and move and pull the oars free. Skorri looked along the sheer strake. He could see two of the thole pins that would hold the oars in place were broken and one was missing.
“See if there are any spare thole pins on this miserable dung-heap of a boat!” he called next, and a few men began to rummage around in the bow to see what they could find.
Skorri was watching the men rifling their purloined boat when another sound caught his ear, something that stood out from the constant monotony of the driving rain, the slam of waves against the hull. He turned quick and looked aft. The wind and sea were driving them stern-first toward the shore and now, through the gloom, he could see a gray, undulating form, a rolling, surging mass, like something alive but in its death throes.
“Breakers! Breakers!” Kolbein shouted. Skorri had not been the only one to hear the sound, and to recognize the dim shape made by waves slamming into something immovable. Granite ledge, most likely.
“Get the oars in the tholes! Get ready to pull, you bastards!” Skorri shouted, and the men who a second before had been sitting miserable and despondent in the bottom of the boat suddenly began crawling and stumbling in every direction. The oars were passed up from the bilge and others took them up and dropped them between the thole pins that were left, and still others took seats on the thwarts and grabbed the handles of the oars and began to pull.
“Come on, pull, pull, pull!” Skorri shouted. If they could keep the boat off the rocks they might be able to work their way along the shoreline until they found a beach or some place they could safely land. But there were thole pins for only three of the six oars, two to starboard and one to larboard — not enough. Even with all the oars in action it would not be easy to buck that wind and tide.
“Pull!” Skorri yelled. “And find some more rutting thole pins!” Three men dove forward to resume their search as the rowers leaned back and pulled hard. Rainwater streamed down their faces and Skorri could see the exertion as they put every bit of remaining strength into the task. He grabbed the tiller and pushed it to larboard. If they could make any headway against the seas then he would be able to steer them away from the rocks.
He braced his feet to turn and look back, to see if they were making any progress, when one of the men in the bow shouted, “Thole pins!”
Skorri looked forward. The man was still on his knees but he was holding up a half dozen thole pins in one hand, a look of triumph on his face. And then the boat hit rock.
The stern rose up under them in the same way it had with every passing wave, rising high and then sinking in the trough as the wave passed under. But there was no trough this time. The aft end of the boat came down on solid granite, engulfed in an explosion of spray.
Skorri was once again knocked off his feet, and as he went down he saw the boat actually bending in the middle, forming an odd angle, the planks splitting and shattering as it did. He heard men shouting and wood cracking and water rushing all around them. He grunted as he hit, his body like a dead weight, but his brain was screaming at him to stand, to get off the boat, to get to shore, get to shore.
The next wave lifted the boat and slammed it down again and Skorri could see it was indeed coming apart in the middle. A third of the men were aft of where it was breaking in two, the rest forward. Underfoot Skorri could feel the planks grinding against the ledge, and he could see the wet rock over the side of the boat.
“Come on, come on, get ashore!” he shouted. There was a coil of rope lying on the bottom of the boat and Skorri snatched it up and stood. He could feel the boat lifting again as he flung himself over the rail. His feet came down on the rough, wet granite just as the wave hit. He held onto the side of the boat and the water slammed into him like a fist, rushing around his legs up to his waist, trying to toss him free.
Then it rushed back and Skorri let go of the boat and took a dozen steps along the ledge, moving higher on the rock. He stopped and looked back and saw four of his men crawling up after him, and beyond them the shattered boat and the men still clinging to it as the next wave rolling in to break it further apart.
Skorri grabbed the end of the rope in his left hand, the coil in his right, just as the four men reached him. “Get ready to tail onto the rope, we’ll see if we can’t pull some of these bastards ashore!” he shouted as he cocked his arm and flung the coil away.
The rope spun through the air, unwinding, and dropped across the disintegrating boat. “Grab ahold, grab ahold!” Skorri cried but he did not think they would hear him over the roaring all around them.
Hear him or not, the men in the boat saw the rope and they knew what it meant. A lifeline, a chance. One by one they grabbed it and rushed aft, hand over hand. The first man on the rope, Kolbein Thordarson, reached the stern and climbed over onto the ledge, as did the man behind. Skorri tossed the tail end of the rope behind him and the four men there grabbed it up, and together they heaved away, pulling the others in as much as they could, aiding their efforts to climb.
There were still six men left in the forward end of the boat when the next wave rose up under it. Three of them were grabbing for the rope when that half of the vessel twisted free, ripped completely away from the stern end and rolled over in the breaking surf. Skorri saw, just for an instant, the looks of shock and confusion, and then the forward half of the boat lifted and turned over and came down again, the seas piling up on the vessel’s rounded, glistening bottom.
“Heave!” Skorri called. Six men gone, but that was better than losing them all. “Heave!”
One by one the men on the rope reached the high place where Skorri and the others stood, high enough that each surging wave came up to their calves and no higher, high enough that they could keep their footing with only a little difficulty. The surge was bringing with it shattered planks and oars and broken thwarts now as the last of the boat fell apart forty feet away.
Skorri dropped the rope. It could not do any more good. “Let’s get off this miserable rock,” he said. He pushed his way through the men and continued along the ledge, beyond the reach of the sea, and finally the rock yielded to scrubby brush and dirt. The driving rain still pelted them, but they were finally clear of the killing sea.
They stopped there, breathing hard, silent, as if they were all trying to make sense of what had happened. All save for Skorri. For him the wreck of the boat, the death of the men, was already history, forgotten. His mind was on to something else.
Bastard Amundi…must have got around that point. But he wouldn’t stay in the boat…no, he’d get ashore quick as he could.
If Odd was still alive, which Skorri had to think was unlikely, then Amundi and the others would want to get him ashore and get him to some place where they could tend to him. Even if he was dead, Amundi would want to get his people ashore before they suffered the same fate that Skorri’s men had.
“Let’s go,” Skorri said and moved past the gaggle of men and headed off inland, across an open field. The day was getting late, what little light there was was starting to fade, but Skorri had no intention of stopping for anything: not dark, not the storm, not the battered condition he and his men were in. Nothing.
There was nothing but open country as far as Skorri could see, though he could not see terribly far. There were no farms or clusters of houses that marked some sort of village. Wherever those other fishing boats had gone when they ran to shore in the face of the storm, it was nowhere near there.
But he guessed there would be a road. That part of the country, Fevik, had enough people that there would undoubtedly be a road running roughly along the shoreline. He would find that and head north, because he imagined that Amundi would take that road as well.
The men followed behind and no one spoke. Skorri would tell them where they were going and what he planned to do once
they reached the road, and not before. They might be surprised when they learned he had no intention of returning to Halfdan’s camp empty-handed.
But then again, they probably would not be so surprised.
It was not long before they saw it, a dark band rising and falling with the hills a little farther inland, the road that Skorri had guessed must be there. He thought of Amundi and his people somewhere along that same road. They would have a significant head start. It would be no easy task to catch up with them, even assuming they did not leave the road and head off for some other shelter.
Skorri walked through the last of the knee-high grass and stepped onto the road, now a puddled and muddy swamp, the ruts from cart wheels like rivers running down the edges. Once they were all standing there, shoes sunk a half an inch into the mud, they stopped and Skorri looked down the road, south, then up the road to the north. Nothing. No one moving. He had not imagined there would be. Not on such a day.
He turned to the others. “We go north,” he said. “We’re still hunting Odd, and we won’t stop until we have him.”
He could see the lack of enthusiasm on their faces, the sense of exhaustion and defeat they felt, and he did not care at all. And he had no intention of explaining or arguing or even saying one more word about it. They would follow him without question and he would kill anyone who did otherwise.
Once again Skorri led the way with the men now walking in a single file at the very edge of the road where the going was easiest. Skorri could hear the squishing sound their feet made in the mud as they walked. He looked up. It would be night soon. He hoped there would be a moon behind those thick clouds, one bright enough to give just a bit of illumination to the sky. Without that it would be hard going in the dark. Even with that it would be hard going.
They had covered a mile or so when Skorri heard a sound he did not recognize immediately: not an unknown sound, just one he had not heard for a while. His mind had been far off as his feet had carried him along. He was thinking about Amundi. He was thinking about how pointless this all might be. If they had horses then there would be a chance that they might overtake the fugitives, but on foot the chances seemed very slim indeed.
The Midgard Serpent Page 41
