Raven: Sons of Thunder

by Giles Kristian

  ‘What is it, Raven?’ he asked.

  ‘The gospel book, my lord,’ I said, my mind grasping like a hand breaking the water’s surface to clutch at a salmon. ‘What will you do with it?’ I felt the weight of the Fellowship’s eyes upon me, crushing my chest and turning the breath in my belly into molten iron.

  Sigurd scratched his beard. ‘I don’t know. We will decide that when this turd is no longer breathing the air meant for better men.’ Sodden jeers fused with the low roof of grey cloud and Thór’s iron-wheeled chariot rolled across the sky.

  ‘Ealdred was going to sell it to the emperor of the Franks,’ I said, cutting through the abuse being hurled at Ealdred, ‘we know that much. Which means the book must be worth a fat hoard.’ I gestured at the ealdorman. ‘This one is sick with silver greed.’

  ‘So?’ Sigurd said, flicking out an impatient hand.

  ‘So we sail up the river and we sell the book to this emperor,’ I blurted, resisting the urge to glance at Cynethryth to weigh how well I was doing. There were rumbles amongst the Wolfpack, echoes of the thunder cracks in the west.

  ‘We would be dead before our feet were dry,’ Olaf scoffed, shaking his beard as though it was the worst idea since Týr put his hand in the mouth of the fettered wolf Fenrir. ‘The emperor has no love of heathens, lad, haven’t you heard?’

  ‘We’d sprout Christian arrows thick as Bram’s nose hairs,’ Black Floki added, spitting vainly into the rain.

  ‘Not if we had a Christian lord speaking for us. Negotiating for us,’ I said, nodding at Ealdred. ‘And a Christ monk, too. The fat hoard that would have been Ealdred’s will be ours. Frankish silver for all the good men lost.’

  After a moment’s silence that was as heavy as a mountain, Svein the Red’s beard was parted by a roguish smile. ‘I’ve heard it said this king of the Franks is so rich that his balls are made of solid gold,’ he said.

  ‘And I have heard that he pisses holy water,’ Olaf said, a thick finger raised in warning, ‘which will melt the skin right off a dirty heathen like you, Red.’

  ‘So, we’ll cut off his snake before we steal his balls,’ Bram Bear blurted, raising a laugh which flowed to an excited murmur that spread through the Fellowship as the idea took wing in each man’s mind.

  ‘We could put crosses at the prows as they did,’ Knut said, nodding at the Wessexmen.

  ‘And what would our gods make of that, Knut?’ Asgot spat, but no one heard him because their heads were filled with the rattle of coins and the clinking of treasure. I felt a smile creep on to my lips and silently thanked Loki, for surely it had been the Father of Cunning who had drawn his bow and shot the idea into my head. All around me the wolves were grinning, yellow fangs flashing amongst the gloom. And I knew that I had them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SO, EALDRED WAS SAVED, AT LEAST FOR NOW. FAR FROM SEEMING happy the ealdorman if anything looked disappointed, dispirited and ashamed. Later, he would begin to scheme again, to believe that there might be something to be gained through guile and greed, but for now he was a shadow man. He had lost his household warriors, his fortune and his son. His daughter might have woven a new strand into his life’s thread, which had seemed about to be cut, but now she wanted nothing more to do with him. Death, the only escape from shame, had been denied him, had run from Ealdred like the rain dripping from the blade that had promised deliverance, so that my hate for him turned to pity. It is hard to hate a broken man, no matter what he has done in the past.

  I had expected Cynethryth to throw her arms around me, to kiss me and thank me for speaking up and stealing Ealdred’s life from the grave. Perhaps she would even lead me to some secluded place and those grateful lips would reward me in soul-shuddering ways. I was still young enough to weave such fancies.

  But Cynethryth said nothing, did nothing, led me nowhere. I supposed her mind still coiled over itself like two snakes fighting, one for Ealdred’s death and the other for his life, and that was one hólmgang in which I wanted no part. And so I did not encroach on the space she put between us, but kept to myself and listened to the men’s talk of Karolus, this emperor of the Franks.

  Most captains would not have sailed in such weather, but Sigurd was not most captains and Knut and Olaf both agreed that the distant rumbles of thunder and flashes against the roof of the world were the last throes of a spent storm. Somewhere up there, Thór was slaying giants, but we would be safe enough so long as we stuck close to the shore. Serpent’s shallow hold was full to the brim with silver and amber and furs, deer antler and weapons, and so we took half of her cargo and placed it in Fjord-Elk’s belly, first putting a layer of skins over the smooth ballast stones we had taken from higher up the beach to replace the old ones which were covered with green slime and stank. Then we untethered the dragons from the mooring posts buried in the sand, put our shoulders against their rumps and shoved for all we were worth. We pushed and grunted and swore and the muscles in my thighs burnt as though my leg bones had been replaced with rods of red-hot iron, but the ships refused to move, which an ugly, long-faced Norseman named Hedin said stank to him like a bad omen. Bjorn, though, called Hedin a horse-faced bollock nose, grunting that it had less to do with omens and more to do with all the rain, which had soaked the beach so that the sand and grit now sucked the ships’ hulls down hungrily. The keel and lowest two strakes were completely buried and in the end we had to break up the sucking silt with our spears and then dig the ships free with our hands, by which time the tide had retreated fully, meaning we had even further to push them.

  The Wessexmen were put aboard Serpent because although they had rowed Fjord-Elk and might be more familiar with her, that ship’s seasoned timbers had soaked up much Wessex blood and Sigurd thought it unwise to antagonize the warriors or stir them to some foolish action.

  ‘There is nothing to be gained by reminding a man of his defeat and of the deaths of his friends,’ the jarl said, ‘not if you want him to row for you. Better to let them come to love Serpent as we do.’

  ‘Aye, and besides, this way I will be able to keep my eye on them,’ Olaf added crabbily as the Englishmen took to their new row benches, puffing from the labour of digging Serpent free and grimacing at their fingernails, which were bloody and broken. Luckily for all of us there was enough wind to enable us to hoist the sails and leave the oars stowed. It blew from the south-east and we were heading south, so we were prepared for slow progress, happy enough not to have to row. Those at the foreship handled the front of the sail, attaching the thick rope to the tacking boom to ensure that the edge of the sail was firmly held towards the bow and into the wind. This prevented Serpent’s great woollen wings being taken aback, leaving Olaf and Bram free to tack us with the bowline.

  Everything aboard was soaked through and in just seven days had become covered with snot-like slime; our journey chests, the deck, the mast, the water barrels, the rigging and blocks, and the edges of the sail. All had to be scraped with blades, scrubbed with rough cloth and smeared with grease, for life aboard a ship is hard enough without sliding around in moss and filth. But it feels good to clean a longship, especially a dragon like Serpent or Fjord-Elk. You catch yourself murmuring, whispering to her tenderly. There you go, let’s get that dirt off you, that’s better, isn’t it? Yes, now we are all clean and beautiful again. Because when you love a ship she will love you back. Even when the waves are mast-high or fat and swollen so that there is only a fingernail’s length of free board above the water line, she will flex and ride and work for you, keeping your lungs full of air instead of brine.

  I looked skyward, watching black marks push and jostle through the thick grey, then my eyes sifted them into gulls and swallows, like little arrow heads, and above them all three crows whose cawing cut through the mist and cloud every now and then.

  Sigurd kept Ealdred at the stern with him and Knut the steersman, but the other Wessexmen were put just behind the mast so they could learn about the ship from watching the Norsemen work the
sail. It took three men to constantly tighten the mast stays and this was a simple enough job, which Olaf had the Wessexmen doing before long. They did it well enough, too, and I swear their backs were pride-stiff as they worked.

  ‘My father used to say that Englishmen sail as well as chickens fly,’ Sigurd said in English for Ealdred’s benefit, though I suspected these Wessexmen had it in them to prove Sigurd’s father wrong. Sigurd suspected it too, for he caught my eye and nodded at the English, one eyebrow cocked and his lips pursed on the edge of amusement.

  We tracked the coast slowly but steadily and at one point we sailed right into a dirty cloud of biting gnats. They got into our mouths and down our tunic necks and even bit some of us on our eyeballs, which we all agreed was a very low thing to do. We roared at Olaf and Knut to tack us out of that Hel, but even when they tried the movement of the wind across the sail was pitiful and so we had to endure it, cowering under furs and skins like frightened women. Afterwards, we laughed about it, for when Svein huddled beneath a white reindeer skin it looked as if a mountain of snow had dropped on the deck! We laughed and we teased each other and we scratched and when we saw three broad knörrs ploughing their own sea roads west and south we knew we had come to the mouth of the Sicauna. Sure enough we rounded a stubby peninsula upon which dozens of houses sat coughing black smoke into the grey sky. Once round that Olaf said we would see the river.

  We were not close enough to land to see the people of that place, but they would certainly see Serpent’s and Fjord-Elk’s sails, even though the low line of their hulls would probably be obscured from view by waves.

  ‘Christ alone knows what the Franks will make of us,’ Penda said behind me.

  ‘When Serpent came to my village, not even Griffin, the most experienced warrior, had ever seen or heard of nearly sixty men in brynjas,’ I said, remembering the terror I had felt at the sight of so many armed men. ‘Let alone each with his own sword, spear and axe. Let us hope these Franks have not either. It will be better if they are wary of us.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll be wary, lad, when they clap eyes on this murderous lot. I’d wager my best teeth on that. What happened to Griffin?’

  Those words tugged at my guts. ‘There was a fight. He killed one of them. Their shipwright,’ I said, a distant, warm pride blooming for a heartbeat somewhere inside my soul, ‘so they cut open his back, hacked the ribs to pieces, then pulled out his lungs.’ I felt the twist of my own grimace. ‘They call it the blood eagle.’

  ‘I know what they call it, lad,’ Penda said, ‘blood-loving heathen bastards.’

  Before we had set off, Bjorn and his brother Bjarni had hewn four of the mooring posts and lashed them together to make two crosses, and now Sigurd gave the order to stow the dragon heads and mount these Christ symbols instead. Asgot countered this abhorrence by untying a sack that had been squirming by his feet and pulling out a seal cow, whose throat he cut, letting its blood spatter into the cream whipped by Serpent’s bow. That foam churned pink and the godi held up the twitching animal for us all to see, then cast it over the side with a tangle of strange prayers.

  It was certainly better than the mangy hare he had given to Njörd when we left the Wessex coast, and afterwards Bram joked that we should have eaten the seal meat first, then stuffed its skin with grass before chucking it overboard and hoping the gods were none the wiser.

  ‘I’d wager old Njörd’s belly never rumbles like mine,’ Bram proclaimed, slapping his stomach, which was barrel-shaped yet solid.

  ‘Thór’s chariot does not rumble like your belly,’ ashen-skinned Bothvar said, at which Bram Bear simply nodded and smiled proudly.

  Now past the headland we were in the mouth of the great river and could see the green land closing in from either side beyond the wooden cross at Serpent’s prow – could feel it too. Hedin Long Face said the place looked like Fensfjord, where most of the Fellowship came from, but Olaf barked that that was hjem lengsel, homesickness, talking. Hedin considered this for a while during which you would have thought he had been asked to recall and recount the creation of the world in every detail. Finally, he admitted that Olaf had the right of it. The sea here was not as clear or deep, the land not as high and the air not as sweet as a Norwegian fjord. He even mumbled an apology to Frey the harvest god, who decides when the sun shall shine or the rain come down, for the insult.

  We began to see boats of all sizes and shapes: broad merchant knörrs, poorly made pilgrim vessels with sails as tattered as the skeletons of old leaves, fishing skiffs, a levy vessel of twenty oars whose captain wisely pointed his prow away from us, and even a sleek dragon heading south, which must have been a raider, probably Danish according to Knut, for it was longer than Serpent and arrow thin. To me it did not look too seaworthy with that narrow hull. I could imagine a wave slamming against its side and rolling it like a log, but when I said as much to Penda he scratched his long scar and pointed out that it had got this far and so its makers must have known something of sea-craft.

  ‘As a rule I’ll not climb aboard any ship that needs bailing more than three times in two days,’ Olaf said, ‘but I wouldn’t mind if these strakes leaked some more.’ He was standing on the mast step, scouring the channel with his experienced eyes. ‘I like to see you lambs back bent and bailing. In my father’s day . . . and in mine . . . we rowed! Churned the sea till it was as thick as porridge. None of this sitting around waiting for the wind to blow us here and there.’ This was met with a chorus of jeers from men who had heard Olaf hawk up the same bile a hundred times, but old Uncle took no notice. ‘Soft as hot horse shit, you lot. Like all young men these days. Óðin knows what the world’s coming to and I wager it makes his one eye weep.’ Above his head Serpent’s faded red sail rippled and flapped, whilst around him men were beginning to prickle with excitement and nerves because we were coming to an unknown land whose people and spirits were likely to prove hostile, especially if they found out we were heathens. I became aware of the creaking of Serpent’s timbers and ropes and those sounds, those squeaks and moans seemed somehow human, like questions from a frightened child. Are you sure we should be here? Is it safe? What if they hurt us like last time? It was strange, but without the dragon Jörmungand at our prow, the Christ cross being fixed there instead, Serpent felt different, even vulnerable, and I was not alone in feeling that strange seidr-weight of being watched. All along the Frankish shore eyes bored into Serpent like so many keen-edged spoon augers and even though we had not mounted our shields along the rack and were not wearing our mail and helmets, it would not be long before the powerful lords of this kingdom came to sniff us out, for surely ships like ours were rare in those waters.

  The levy knörr, which I had thought long gone, was in fact entering the estuary along the far shore, stalking us from a safe distance, biding its time like a carrion bird around feeding wolves. This in itself was not enough to worry us, but it did tell us that the Franks were wary of outsiders and that even these seaward frontiers were patrolled, despite being far from the centres of power. As Sigurd explained, this Karolus was after all king of lands far and wide, a self-proclaimed emperor in the old Roman way, and he had not won such power without caution, organization and, perhaps most worryingly as far as we were concerned, many spears at his command. And now that we had left the safety of the open sea behind and were entering the gullet, let alone the mouth, of the river, I could not melt the lump of ice-cold fear that had grown in my belly.

  I watched Father Egfrith carry a rolled skin to Serpent’s bow, where Cynethryth stood awkwardly. Dutifully, Egfrith unrolled the skin and held it up as a screen and Cynethryth half smiled before disappearing to relieve herself in a bucket. Egfrith turned his face away and I felt a grudging gratitude towards the man for looking to Cynethryth’s needs aboard this ship of rough men. Poor Cynethryth. It cannot have been an easy thing to live amongst us. She was after all the daughter of a lord of Wessex. Now she was in as much danger as the rest of us. Father Egfrith had enjoyed tellin
g us that many of the Saxon people to the east, between the rivers Elbe and Ems, had been put to death under Karolus’s laws because they had observed heathen ways rather than embracing the White Christ. Simply refusing to be pushed under the water by a Christ priest was enough, it seemed, to see your head and neck parted never to meet again. When I translated all this for the others, Bram’s hairy eyebrows wove together.

  ‘This Karolus does not sound like a Christ follower to me,’ he said, biting a hunk of bread from the lump in his fist.

  ‘Perhaps these Saxons stank like a sheep’s arse,’ Bjorn suggested, ‘and the king was tired of holding his nose, so he ordered his priests to wash them and when they refused . . .’ He drew the edge of his hand across his neck.

  ‘It’s called baptism,’ I said. ‘A Christ priest pushes you under the water a heathen and when you come up you’re a Christian.’ This idea was clearly absurd to the Norsemen and I was met with sceptical expressions. I shrugged. ‘Maybe there is more to it than that,’ I said. ‘But that much is true.’

  ‘They think they can wash Óðin and Thór out of us with a little water?’ Arnvid said, his face screwed up like a weasel’s arsehole.

  ‘I would like to see a Christ priest try to push my head under the water,’ Svein the Red announced, smiling at Father Egfrith, who was watching us, trying to pick apart the threads of our words, or so it seemed to me.

  ‘There isn’t a river deep enough, Svein,’ I said, meaning you could not wash the gods out of him any more than you could harpoon the moon and pull it out of the sky, and this simple statement seemed to settle it all.

  I glanced at Ealdred, wondering if he would speak for us when the time came as I had hoped and told Sigurd he would. He did not have much choice of course, but then again he did not have much to lose either, other than his miserable life, and so we could not be sure. The other problem was that the Franks might not believe him anyway, which I thought likely looking at him hunched at Serpent’s stern like a ship’s dog that has been beaten for shitting in a man’s bed roll.