Raven

by Giles Kristian

  We watched the defeated dark-skins shamble off into the night, taking their dead with them on the surviving horses, which we had left, having no use for them. We knew we would have the time to load food and plunder on to our ships and sail off before they returned with more warriors. But even so it was generous of Sigurd to spare them.

  Rolf had questioned the decision, his thin face creased in puzzlement.

  ‘A fox will kill every chicken in the coop just because he can,’ the jarl said. He had put the lord of the blaumen’s gold ring round his own helmet and was carrying the man’s fine leather saddle as well as his curved sword and scale brynja. The pitch-skinned lord’s helmet was tied to the jarl’s belt, stripped of its linen wrapping which Sigurd had used to clean his sword. ‘But a wolf …’ he said to Rolf, who walked beside him equally cumbered, ‘a wolf takes one lamb at a time and the sheep grow to fear him. Next time we meet the blaumen there is a good chance that they will run and not fight.’ Sigurd smiled, obviously happy with the day’s work. ‘I don’t know about you, Rolf, but I find I can heft twice as much plunder when my arms are not tired out from fighting.’

  The Dane laughed and so did the rest of us. For our scheme had worked and the blaumen had blundered into our trap like witless animals and we had killed and robbed them of everything they had that was worth taking to our ships. We had lost a handful of good men, which always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. These men, five Danes and a Wessexman, we buried together inside a ring of stones laid out in the shape of a long-ship, which did them some honour though Sigurd sent them on their way across Bifröst with only spears and some of the Danes moaned about that. But we still had need of good swords and could not spare them for the dead. At first the Wessexmen had wanted to bury Ulfbert separately and in the Christian way. In the end, though, when the stone longship was finished, they decided to lay him in it beside the others.

  ‘He will surely find heaven eventually,’ Baldred had said, scratching his balding head, ‘but let him sail with the heathens one more time for he did so love the sea.’

  Sigurd now had enough war gear to properly equip every wolf in his pack. On the jetty before Serpent and Fjord-Elk, Wave-Steed and Sea-Arrow, by the silver light of a waxing moon, the Danes who had borrowed gear from the Norsemen returned it with thanks, complimenting the owners on the sharpness of their blades, the toughness of their shields and the comfort of their helmets. Then Sigurd doled out spears and mail, short axes, strange-looking helmets and the blaumen’s light, single-edged but wickedly sharp curved swords. Every Dane was grateful for the weapons he was given, for surely some of them were worth a heavy silver price, and when it was all done, the oath words whispered in my head. I will not flee from any man who is my equal in bravery and arms. I will avenge any of my oath-bound brothers as though we are brothers by blood. The wolves had fought for their jarl and made a slaughter to feed the crows and the worms, and Sigurd had played the part of the ring-giver, rewarding his warriors with fine arms. If I break this oath I betray my jarl and my fellowship and I am a pus-filled nithing.

  ‘They might have decent blades but that doesn’t make me happy about standing next to them in the shieldwall,’ Black Floki said, his words dispersing my thoughts like a pebble thrown into a pool. ‘They fight like wild dogs.’

  ‘Aye, but they killed their share,’ Olaf said. ‘Old Uncle Olaf will just have to teach them a few things,’ he added, his teeth white in the moon’s glow as he examined a blauman’s sword more closely, catching the reflected light on the blade as he looked along its edge.

  ‘I would not stand too close when you do, Uncle,’ Osk said, tramping along the wharf, a butchered goat’s leg over each shoulder. He passed the legs down to Bram in Fjord-Elk and Bram smacked his lips together eagerly. It felt good to be stocking our holds with fresh meat, though we would wait until we were a little further along the coast before eating it.

  ‘They’ll learn, Osk,’ Olaf said, slicing the air with the sword, which looked too small in his hands. ‘There was a time when you couldn’t hit your head on a low beam, lad. I’d seen monks of the White Christ handle whores with more skill than you did a spear.’

  Osk swore.

  ‘I remember those days too, Uncle.’ Bram snorted like a bull, passing the meat to another man, who hefted it to Fjord-Elk’s steerboard side and passed it over to a man in Serpent, moored alongside. ‘Young Osk couldn’t piss on his own shoes!’

  ‘Fuck you, Bram,’ Osk said, climbing down into Fjord-Elk. Then the crowing really started.

  ‘He couldn’t hit my wife’s arse with an oar!’ ugly Hedin called.

  ‘They used to say Osk once jumped into the sea and missed,’ Svein bellowed.

  ‘He was such a bad shot with a bow that for the first fifteen years of his life his parents thought he was blind!’ another man called, and in the end even Osk could not hide the smile in his beard.

  Laughter was coming from Sea-Arrow, too, blending with the soft crash of the surf as her crew boarded in the moon-silvered dark, lugging the booty they had taken. I hoped the shine of that well-earned plunder might hold the Danes’ eyes so that they would not linger on the newly turned earth on the ridge above the beach, in which their brothers lay beside an Englishman. I needn’t have worried from the sound of it. As I took to my sea chest a Dane began to sing:

  ‘We came to fight the blaumen,

  Their skin was dark as soot.

  We screwed their black-haired women,

  We filled our ships with loot.’

  I sometimes wonder if men’s laughter is offensive to the gods’ ears – just as the bawdy songs and laughter from Hrothgar’s mead hall Heorot made the monster Grendel’s ears ring with red-hot pain. For it often seems the way that the man who is cheerful and free of cares one moment is dead the next. It is as though the Spinners cruelly weave a golden thread into a man’s wyrd just before they cut it.

  ‘Come on, lads!’ Rolf called from Sea-Arrow’s mast step. ‘We don’t want to be left behind in this arsehole of a place now that there’s nothing left to steal!’ The last of his Danes were boarding and being none too hasty about it, boasting of their kills as they emptied their bladders on dry land one final time.

  Tufi was the last man, shouldering the big silver Christ cross he had found in the village and swaggering along the jetty like a man who has just humped a pair of whores. He came to Sea-Arrow and offered the cross to Ogn so that he could climb aboard, but seeing the thing Ogn recoiled, touching the crude carving of Thór’s hammer Mjöllnir at his neck.

  ‘You’re not bringing that thing on!’ Ogn sputtered, rattled by Tufi’s indifference to the cross.

  ‘Don’t be an old woman, Ogn,’ Tufi said. ‘Take the fucking thing. It’s solid silver!’

  ‘Ogn is right, Tufi,’ a red-haired man called Bork said, ‘you should leave it here.’

  Tufi shook his head and spat on to the jetty. ‘Out of my way, pale-livers,’ he said, putting a foot on Sea-Arrow’s sheer strake. He must have slipped, or perhaps a wave rocked the slender ship, for Tufi’s right leg plunged down and he followed it between Sea-Arrow’s hull and the jetty, and a thud and splosh was the last anyone ever heard from the man. The Danes scrambled to help and they must have thought they’d just pull him back in, for the water was not deep there, and some of us even laughed at first.

  ‘He’s gone!’ Ogn yelled, peering over the side into the dark water. Rolf was there too, his hands gripping the sheer strake as he stared in disbelief.

  ‘Shall I jump after him?’ Gorm asked in a voice edged with fear.

  Rolf shook his head, his brows reaching for the moon. ‘He’s drowned!’ he said. ‘The bone-headed son of a bitch is drowned and that silver with him.’ We were all staring now for it did not seem possible that a man could die in ten feet of water. But poor Tufi must have hit his head on the sheer strake. Ogn, who had been the closest when it happened, said he thought an arm of the Christ cross had caught in Tufi’s baldric and that was some ver
y ill luck. We all knew how heavy that cross was.

  ‘The White Christ seidr killed him!’ Beiner said, giving words to what many of us were already thinking, and maybe that was why no one talked of trying to recover the man’s corpse – in case that ill luck fastened on to them.

  Father Egfrith crossed himself and offered a prayer up to his god. Sigurd, who was watching from the platform at Serpent’s stern, looked as stunned as I felt. He was shaking his head in astonishment as Olaf beside him muttered words I could not hear. Old Asgot’s face was a twisted grimace, as though he had eaten something foul-tasting, and he looked with hatred at Egfrith. I said to Penda that I thought it was astonishing that the monk had not woken up dead before now, his blood crusting on the godi’s knife.

  ‘Let us leave this place!’ Sigurd bellowed, gesturing for his stupefied crew to take to their benches and row us out to sea. And so we did.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT WAS RAINING AND WE WERE SAILING EAST. WE HAD COME TO the southernmost reach of the coast we had been tracking and the wind had picked up, so that we had not needed to row for several days. On our steerboard side another landmass reached out, as mountainous and barren as that to the north, and Egfrith informed us that it must be the place which the Romans called the Pillars of Hercules.

  ‘Who by Baldr’s hairy left ball is Hercules?’ Bothvar asked when I had spun Egfrith’s words into Norse.

  ‘He was a great hero, Bothvar, so the monk says anyway,’ I said. ‘He was the son of the Greeks’ chief god Zeus and was the strongest man in the world.’ Bothvar scratched his chin and pursed his lips. Yrsa Pig-nose nodded in appreciation.

  ‘Sounds like Thór,’ Olaf said suspiciously.

  ‘Or Beowulf,’ Sigurd suggested.

  Egfrith seemed to be enjoying the interest the Norsemen were showing in his story. He would lean forward, telling me in English, then lean back against Serpent’s rib and study the men’s faces.

  ‘He was a great champion. A warrior of rare skill,’ I went on, addressing the next part to Sigurd, ‘but he was also cunning and full of tricks.’

  ‘Sounds like you, Sigurd!’ Uncle roared, slapping his jarl’s back and laughing.

  ‘I agree, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, a serious frown on his face. ‘It seems to me that this Hercules was the kind of man that if he pissed into the wind the wind would change direction.’ And then the jarl burst into laughter and so did we, perhaps over-wringing the cloth. For the men had been quiet since Tufi’s death. There had even been talk that we had not shaken off the bad luck that had seen us lose that Frankish hoard. Most of that talk came, as usual, from Asgot, and so I think we were all relieved that day to caulk the strakes with laughter. But that night, anchored in a steep-sided bay, the men were sullen again. Some of this, I think, was because we had run out of mead and not even Bram’s stash had survived. The trouble with not being drunk is that you think too much. Ideas fly into your head whether you want them to or not and the more you try to ignore them the louder they become.

  I was thinking about Halldor, whose face had swollen with pus and whose corpse had slowly blistered on a rain-soaked pyre. It seemed to me that there was still some nettle between Black Floki and Sigurd, because Sigurd had killed Halldor. That had hurt Black Floki’s pride, for Halldor had been his cousin and the way Floki saw it the burden of killing the man should have been his alone. There had been no hard words between Sigurd and Floki as far as I knew, but the sting was there all the same. And Halldor’s miserable death had gnawed at me ever since.

  ‘You’d be better off putting the girl out of your head, lad,’ Olaf said. Penda and I were fishing off the stern but I was hardly playing my line and Penda and I had said less than three words to each other while the low sun slipped behind the mountains to the west.

  ‘I’m not thinking about Cynethryth, Uncle,’ I said, which was true for once. Cynethryth was somewhere up near the bow, probably learning Norse from Asgot, which Egfrith had warned me about, though I had told him I did not know what I could do about it. ‘It’s Halldor that won’t leave me alone,’ I admitted.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Olaf roll his. We had three sacks of horsehair, which we had taken from the blaumen’s mounts, and Olaf was teasing apart the strands and then twisting them together to make new caulking.

  ‘You’d be best to put that from your mind, too,’ Olaf said. ‘No good can come of lingering on a thing like that.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a man die like that before. That’s all.’

  I looked at Olaf now and he frowned. ‘Halldor died a good death,’ he said. ‘By a good blade and holding one too.’

  I shook my head. ‘He was already dead,’ I said, remembering Halldor’s hideous, misshapen head. ‘I have never smelt anything so bad. The man was rotten. Týr knows how he bore the pain.’

  ‘I just had a bite,’ Penda said, tugging his line. Then he cursed, staring into the black water. ‘Bastard got away.’ We ignored him.

  ‘Sigurd did right by him,’ Olaf said. ‘He did what had to be done and Halldor would have thanked him for it too.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s still boring into Floki though,’ I said. ‘Like woodworm.’

  Olaf grunted. ‘Floki ought to just let it lie. Ought to thank Sigurd himself if you ask me. But you know Floki. He was born miserable.’

  ‘Why did Sigurd do it, Uncle? He knew Halldor had asked Floki to do it. We all did.’

  Olaf glanced round to check that no one else was close. Most of the others were in their furs, either asleep or getting there. ‘Sigurd’s boy,’ he said eventually.

  ‘He died young. Horse-kicked,’ I said, wondering what that had to do with things.

  ‘Aye. But the poor little swine didn’t die quick as he should have.’ Olaf tilted his shaggy head as though trying to weigh up whether to speak, or chew the words back down. ‘The boy was as good as dead it’s true. I’d seen rocks with more life in them. But he wasn’t dead. Still breathing, he was, though barely enough to call breathing.’

  Penda turned to say something else, then saw Olaf’s face and turned back to his fishing instead, muttering that our heathen language was scaring off the fish.

  ‘And he stayed like that for two weeks, might have been three. The poor little sod.’ Olaf cuffed a tear from his eye and I glanced away for a heartbeat.

  ‘A slow death,’ I said.

  Olaf shook his head. ‘One night, Sigurd carried the boy out into the pasture leaving Gudrid weeping at the door. He finished the boy himself. His own bairn.’

  Our eyes were locked and I felt the shards of ice in mine.

  ‘He had no choice, lad. The boy he knew was long gone. There was nothing else for it.’

  ‘The Norns are bitches,’ I said, setting my jaw.

  ‘I’ll not argue with that,’ Olaf said, twisting the horsehair again. ‘But Sigurd knows how it feels to kill your own kin. It weighs a man down. Will drag him under, like that Christ cross dragged Tufi to his end. Sigurd took that burden from Black Floki. Why? Because he’s the best son of a wolf jarl who has ever led a crew across the whale’s road. And Floki knows it too. He’s pride-stung, that’s all.’

  ‘If I ever get the wound-rot I’ll cross Bifröst before I begin to stink,’ I said.

  Olaf nodded, tugging his beard thoughtfully. ‘Just don’t ask Osk to open you up, lad. He’d bloody miss.’

  I smiled but felt the cold in it, watching Olaf’s surprisingly nimble fingers working the horsehair into fine, neat ropes.

  ‘The fish are sleeping.’ Penda broke the silence. I locked eyes with him but my mind saw Sigurd killing a small boy. Penda nodded at the line still clamped between my finger and thumb. ‘We might as well sleep too,’ he said, winding his line around the block. Then, shrugging, he turned and walked off.

  And I stayed there at Serpent’s stern, snores, farts and the low murmur of men’s voices breaking the whisper and slosh of the sea against the nearby rocks, until a crimson wash stained the eastern sky.
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br />   Three days later Bragi the Egg spotted a white sail. The small craft was cutting north-west towards the mountainous coast, making slow progress against the same westerly that kept our oars up in their trees and our salt-stained sails stretched. It was not the first vessel we had seen in these waters – there had been many – but as we came closer we knew that this one was a trader. She was broad in the beam like a knörr, so that she could not have used more than four pairs of oars and these only for docking or keeping her bows into the wind in rough weather. She sat low in the water too, meaning she had a full hold, and it was likely that there were no more than twelve crew.

  Bragi was standing at Fjord-Elk’s bow and I could see his predatory smile even from a distance.

  ‘My mother always says you should never turn down an invitation!’ he called across to Sigurd. ‘That looks like an invitation to me, hey!’

  ‘Bragi’s mother also said I was the best lover she had ever had,’ Bram the Bear growled, stirring a smattering of laughter.

  Sigurd was up on Serpent’s mast step, watching the white-sailed ship like a hawk, his golden hair loose but for two braids falling either side of his face.

  ‘Should be as easy as skinning a hare,’ Olaf suggested, leaning on the sheer strake and squinting against the glare off the water. Above us the sun had broken through a blanket of fish-scale cloud which was questing east in a golden likeness of the sea. ‘We’ll barely need to change course,’ Olaf went on, ‘just snap them up on the way by.’