by Norman Crane
unable to turn back. When their ale ran out, they drank seawater. When they had no more food, they caught and ate fish. When the fish disappeared, they decided to die but couldn't. They couldn't drown or starve or freeze, and all the salt they'd ingested began corroding them from the inside, leaving them writhing in the boat like fish pulled out of the water and thrown onto an overheated slab of rock...
A sudden movement ended the nightmare.
Erlandr wasn't sure whether the movement was his, a nervous tick, or somebody else's. He remained still. His immediate emotion was fear: of the monsters that Goll had taken such glee in scaring him with on the voyage to Greenland. He shook that fear out of his head and studied first Dvalinn, then Drudge. Neither of them were moving. Drudge was snoring.
The movement repeated.
It was a gentle bulging of the cloth covering their supplies.
Erlandr rose, unslung his axe and covered the short distance between where he'd been sitting and the cargo. His axe raised, ready to swing, he grabbed the cloth with his other hand, yelled, and pulled it free, exposing a tangle of supplies and:
The startled face of Kaspar, moving desperately to cover with his own body the body of another—
"Agata," Dvalinn said.
The axe in Erlandr's hand shook. It took all of his willpower to prevent it coming down and inserting its blade into Kaspar's head, whose face beseeched him even as his fist brandished a knife pointed at Dvalinn. Goll's knife.
"Please," Agata said, "it will do you no good to kill us.” She turned to look at Drudge. “I beg you. I'm not my father. You weren't my slave. I always treated you well and with respect. Repay me my kindness, please."
Erlandr noticed that a third of their supplies were missing, the casualties of two stowaways making space for themselves.
"Let us go when you make landfall in the east," Kaspar said. "That is all we want, all we've ever wanted, to be together in peace. We are—" He wrung as much pathos out of the words as possible. "—in love."
But whereas his words were melodramatic, their body language was painfully sincere. The way she clung to him despite her age and the way he shielded her despite the slenderness of his body, it truly was the two of them against the world, come what may and take no prisoners. That was what made it so heartbreaking to Erlandr when Drudge said, "We are not eastward bound, Agata. We are sailing westward."
"Get up," Dvalinn said.
Kaspar got up first. Agata rose behind him. "Westward?"
Erlandr wondered whether it was vile that it calmed him to no longer be the only distraught passenger on the boat. At least he had agreed to come along, however much he now regretted it. Kaspar and Agata had stolen aboard mistakenly.
"How much of the supplies did you remove?" Dvalinn asked, clear headed as always.
Kaspar stammered out an indistinct answer. "Most of the food," Agata said. "We decided you needed the drink and you might have a use for the other things, but that you didn't need that much food to sail... east. We wanted to be thoughtful."
Dvalinn pulled at one of the ends of his moustache. He directed a question to Drudge. "You know her best. Do you vouch for this woman?"
"I do," Drudge said.
"And I vouch for the boy," Erlandr blurted out a little too quickly, surprising everyone, including himself. "He is good at navigating the forest and accurate with a bow, traits I assume will serve us well in the new land." He felt a kinship with his fellow herder.
Kaspar bowed his head in thank you. "But if there is no new land?"
"There is. I stake my life on it," Drudge said.
"You stake all of ours."
"I did not accept your coming aboard this boat," Dvalinn told Kaspar, before addressing Agata as well. "You are both stowaways. I will not kill you, but we are not heading back to Greenland. This you must understand. You have no say here. When we make landfall you are mine to command. If you disobey or become a burden to this expedition, I will put you to the sword. I have killed men, women and children in my time."
"I'm not a child," Kaspar said, no longer stammering.
"We shall see."
"When do we reach this new land?" Agata asked.
Drudge shrugged his shoulders.
"I do not know," Dvalinn said. After Agata scoffed, he pointed to the moon in the sky. "How far away is that?"
"Too far to go by boat," Kaspar said, probably intending it as a joke—but neither Erlandr nor any of the others reacted, because after having followed Dvalinn's outstretched arm to the sky, the sky is where their attentions had remained. Ahead, Erlandr saw it being ripped alight by flashes of lightning.
The first raindrops splashed against his face.
"Storm,” Dvalinn said.
17
By the next day, the rain had become a downpour and their wet bodies clung to the sides of the boat like drenched remnants of stew to the sides of a bowl. It was not a pleasant feeling, to say nothing of the motion, which victimized even Erlandr's stomach. They ate and drank little. Yet for all their misery, the heart of the storm seemed as distant as before. To Erlandr, it meant they were standing in place, a bobbing, useless piece of scrap upon the sea.
The only positive development belonged to Kaspar, who'd devised a device to catch the rainwater for drinking later. In this weather, water went down, and stayed down, easier than ale.
They took turns huddling under the cloth that covered their supplies, some of which were soaked beyond usefulness, and always Erlandr was envious of Kaspar and Agata, who had each other to huddle with, because when it came his turn, he was alone, and in the relative dryness his imagination hissed into his ear, playing the cruellest tricks on him.
Day ceased to disturb night.
The air around them became so wet it was inseparable from the raging water below.
But when Erlandr, rain pouring off his upper lip, draining into his eyes, suggested to Dvalinn that they turn back, if only for a day, if only until the storm weakened, Dvalinn laughed and shook his head—water shooting out in streaks from the ends of his hair. "Ahead, Erlandr. Always ahead. You pass a storm by going through it."
When Erlandr and the others cowered against the sides of the boat, attempting to escape the growing maelstrom around them, Dvalinn would stand and, holding himself vertical by grabbing the boat's mast, roar into the wind whatever the wind was roaring at him, and let it pummel his face until his beard was flat and his hair wild...
"This is madness!" Erlandr yelled to Kaspar when he could no longer tell one day from the last or how long they had been at sea, six days or sixteen. The storm had drifted closer, and the bolts of lightning pierced the sky above them, but what good was that when they still hadn't sighted land, and were as likely to sail off the edge of the world, which Erlandr pictured as a kind of terrible waterfall, as they were ever to set foot upon dry earth again.
Despite being a few paces apart, they barely heard each another. Kaspar screamed back, "A hideous paralysis, a monstrous vulnerability. Madness, yes! Incredible, isn't it? Like love! To be with your beloved and together, arms around your bodies, be ripped apart by these winds, it would be absolutely divine!"
Erlandr awoke to a roll of thunder. Had he been dreaming?
Kaspar and Agata were hugging each other.
Drudge was a giant ball, arms holding knees, head tucked somewhere between both.
Dvalinn lay prone on the deck. Only his eyes peeked over the edge of the boat, concentrating on—
"I see it!"
Kaspar stirred.
Erlandr crawled forward, closer to where Dvalinn was.
Above, the storm blew through the tattered remains of their sail, which had been torn to shreds. How long ago, Erlandr couldn't guess. Time was an illusion.
"Land," Dvalinn said, louder. "Land ahead!"
Erlandr didn't see it.
Drudge uncurled himself, spread his legs to almost the entire width of the boat and looked, too, from a higher vantage point.
The sky crashed.
The sea rolled and the boat with it.
"It's the truth. It exists. The new land," Drudge yelled, losing his balance and falling, and not caring, but bouncing right back up to look again.
That's when Erlandr saw:
All around them was blackness and grey, but if he squinted and stared long enough, the grey acquired depth and the blackness receded, until parts of the grey were the plumes of rain and the shape of land and the wind was gusting, and the boat was no longer on the surface of the water but flying and everything was blackness until—
The grey—
Rocks.
18
Dvalinn gasped for air. The fall had knocked the wind out of him. After regaining his breath, he got up and took his bearings.
He was on solid ground, on shore.
Erlandr ran past him toward the water, which was beating and frothing as it surged onto land. Dvalinn rubbed his head, which was beating, too. Or was it his heart that was beating and his mouth that was frothing? He had no time to arrive at the answer because reality provided it for him. He buckled over and vomited a mixture of ale and saltwater.
When he refocused, he saw the boat nearby—or, more precisely, its skeletal remains, which had been discarded by the sea.
He walked forward.
Erlandr was pulling Drudge out of the water. Kaspar and Agata were wading up to their shoulders in it, disappearing and reappearing under the weight of the incoming waves, salvaging whatever supplies they could.
Dvalinn helped Erlandr pull Drudge to safety. When he was on his back they took turns pounding on his chest with their fists until he coughed out the sea and opened his
