Thunder God

by Paul Watkins

  ‘I will do it.’ The words jumped out of my mouth. For the chance of being accepted again, I would have agreed to anything.

  My mother looked as if she had been slapped in the face. ‘If that is your choice, Hakon, you can go with him now.’ The tone of her voice made it sound as if she were saying goodbye to me forever.

  Guthrun smiled. ‘Tomorrow is soon enough.’ From his pocket, he pulled a cross cut from a kind of shiny black stone which I had never seen before. The ends of the cross were flared out and flattened at the tips. It was wrapped with an old leather cord, which Guthrun unravelled and then hung around my neck.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Mjolnir. Thor’s hammer. That cross is like no other. Tostig wanted you to have it.’ He nodded to my mother and started walking back to town.

  ‘You took your time coming!’ she called after him.

  Guthrun did not turn around. He just shook his head. ‘Always the last word!’ he shouted.

  *

  That night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a noise outside the house.

  ‘It should have been me,’ said a voice.

  I sat up in bed. My heart jumped into my throat.

  ‘What was that sound?’ asked my mother, sitting up in bed.

  Kari stirred under her blankets, too lost in sleep to hear.

  Then the voice came again. ‘It should have been me.’

  ‘Who is that?’ asked my mother. She was afraid.

  The voice was moving around the house, now at the door, now outside the shutters, now in the garden. ‘It should have been me. It should have been me.’

  My mother lit the oil lamp with an ember from the fire. Its feeble glow spread through the room. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders and her linen nightshirt was crumpled.

  Kari pushed back her blanket. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Stay in bed,’ my mother whispered.

  But I did not stay in bed. I went to the door and flung it wide, because I had guessed who it was.

  There stood Olaf, his face pale in the light of a cloud-veiled moon.

  ‘He is drunk,’ said Kari and pulled the blanket over her head again.

  ‘What are you doing here in the middle of the night?’ asked my mother.

  Olaf nodded at me. ‘He knows!’

  ‘Can this not wait until morning?’ asked my mother.

  Olaf laughed. ‘Until morning. Until the morning after. And the day after that. Until the day of Ragnarok, it can wait.’

  ‘Go home,’ said my mother.

  ‘Home to what?’ Olaf held open his hands. ‘It should have been me. I cared more about it than you ever did. Everyone knows that. Tostig should have chosen me.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Turn it down!’ he shouted. ‘You should have turned it down!’

  ‘And live up here by myself for the rest of my life?’

  His eyes looked sleepy. He waved his hand in front of his face, as if he had walked into a spider’s web. ‘I do not care,’ he said. ‘It should have been me.’ He turned around and staggered away.

  My mother closed the door.

  From under her blanket came Kari’s muffled voice. ‘He will be sick in the morning, and it will serve him right.’

  I pushed past my mother and out into the night, ignoring her orders to return. I tried to find Olaf, but he seemed to have vanished. I went up to the temple, looking for him, but the place was empty.

  While I was there, it began to rain and then to thunder.

  I left the doors open and sat down on one of the benches, waiting for the storm to pass, but it only seemed to grow stronger. The rain which fell in front of the door looked like a grey veil, and the smell of it sifted into the room.

  Lightning flickered, and in its flash I saw Olaf.

  He was standing in the middle of the fields. His arms were raised, as if to touch the fire branching from the sky.

  I called to him, but either he did not hear me or the sound of thunder stole my voice away.

  When the lightning flashed again, he was gone.

  I woke up in the temple, amongst the charred bones of old sacrifices.

  Sun was shining through the open doors, puddles from last night’s rain reflecting a clear blue sky.

  As I started walking home, I saw flames rising from the town. Houses were burning. Half hidden in the smoke were two boats, moored in shallow water near the beach. Long and thin with dirty square sails and curved prows, I recognised them from my father’s stories. They were Drakkar warships, the greatest nightmare to come trampling through the sleep and waking dreams of every person on this coast.

  Raiders with long and braided hair were loading their ships with everything they could find. They carried off goats and sheep, some of the animals still alive, with their legs bound together. Others were dead, broken necks lolling on the shoulders of the men. The raiders brought out trunks of clothing, which they tipped into the street and began trying on to see what fitted. I saw men from our town chased into the water and killed with long-handled axes. One woman reached out towards her attacker, as if to stop the sharpened steel with her bare hands. Her screaming reached me on the wind.

  While I stood there on the crest of the hill, too shocked to move, one of the raiders spotted me. He dumped the armful of rope he had been carrying and began running up the path towards me. His shirt was made of countless iron links, its sleeves reached down to his elbows and its skirt stopped just above his knees. The salt of dried sea-spray was etched around the metal like a frost. Under this he wore a bright red tunic and baggy trousers made of heavy brown wool, which were bound at the calves but left to billow about his thighs. He carried a sword and a large round shield slung across his back in a way that seemed to twist his shape out of its human form. He wore a helmet with a heavy plate running down the bridge of his nose. The salty iron seemed to grow like some deformity out of his weather-beaten face, from which sprouted a tangle of beard as red as my own hair.

  Smoke spread above the town and twisted away over the sea, snuffing out the gleam of sun off the water. Down in the village, fire curled like a breaking wave from the doorway of Guthrun’s forge. The roof of my father’s boat shed collapsed in an upward-falling rain of sparks. The walls tumbled in after it, as if the whole structure were being sucked into the ground.

  The sound of the cracking timbers brought me to my senses and I ran, muscles turned to fire under my sweating skin. I sprinted down the rows of drying fish, brushing past them so the husks of their fins rattled together, spinning light to dark to light again, like leaves in the breeze.

  I glanced back to see the raider closing in on me and at last, when I could go no further, I stopped and turned towards him.

  We faced each other, both gasping for air.

  He reached out to the black stone hammer which hung around my neck and, with one tug, snapped the old leather. The cord trailed over the sides of his hand.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, in a language I half understood.

  ‘It was given to me,’ I replied.

  Carefully, he wrapped the cord around the medallion and put it in his pocket. Then he closed his fist in the tangle of my hair and pulled me down to the town, past screaming children and women and men who lay bleeding in the mud.

  I called out for my mother and Kari, but there was no reply. Both of them would have left for town soon after sun up; Kari to go to the tailor’s and my mother to the market for bread and milk. But I did not see them now among the corpses in the street.

  I noticed a horse lying dead in the traces of a cart it had been pulling. The cart had been flipped over and a face was peering out from under it. It was Olaf, his skin blackened with soot, staring wide-eyed at the man who dragged me along.

  The raider and I reached the water’s edge. Bodies rolled in the surf. The scudding foam was tinted pink with blood.

  The raiders waded out to their boats, piling in what they h
ad stolen. They muttered under their breath as their eyes passed over me and seemed to disapprove of my being brought on board.

  The man still held me by my hair. We had just begun to wade out to his ship when a door slammed in one of the houses and we both turned to see Tostig emerge from the darkness of his hut. He must have hidden himself or else had been of so little interest that the raiders left him alone. He was carrying an old war axe, whose wide, grey blade showed a band of silver along the edge. Tostig raised the axe above his head, snake-veined hands knotted around the wooden shaft. Then he began, very slowly, to move towards us. Tostig’s lips were pulled back from his gums with the effort of holding the axe.

  The other raiders turned to watch. Some of them began to laugh.

  Tostig stumbled forwards.

  The raider let go of my hair.

  I should have run then. Perhaps that was what Tostig had intended for me to do, but I was as stunned as everyone else to see this ancient man waving an axe that he could barely lift above his head.

  The metal-shirted raider smiled as he unslung the shield from his back and held it close against his chest. He drew his sword and braced his legs in the shallow water.

  The other raiders cheered at Tostig, as if he were winning a race.

  Tostig took no notice of them. He moved like a man in a trance. With ten paces still to go, he suddenly tipped forward. At first it looked as if he had fallen, but then the axe left his hands and flashed through the air, end over end, and the gasp that went up from the raiders came at the same moment as the crash of the blade against my captor’s shield. He staggered back as the axe blade cut clean through the metal strapping which held his shield together and jutted through the other side, a finger’s width from his chest.

  Tostig was on his hands and knees in the sand, head down, fighting for breath.

  The raider threw aside his ruined shield and strode across to him.

  I thought he would kill Tostig then, but instead he hooked his arm around the old man’s body and lifted him up the way I had seen sheep hoisted from pens. He carried Tostig out to the boat, pushing me along in front of him.

  When the warships left our bay a short while later, Tostig and I were on board, tied by our necks to the mast, side by side with our backs against the wood. On deck were bags of money from almost every family in town and chests filled with silver cups and amber beads. Clothes lay heaped upon the planks.

  Despite its size, Altvik had been a wealthy town. The few who had refused to give up their money were dead and burning in their houses or staring up through bloodied water from the bottom of the bay. The flames of Altvik reached into the sky. Above them, thick smoke gathered like some distorted shadow of the ships that had brought these men here. Then even that disappeared.

  The second ship kept close behind us, following in our wake.

  Soon after we lost sight of land, another boat appeared, coming towards us.

  Instead of trying to get away, the raiders slackened sail and waited, curious who would be so bold as to come out to meet them.

  It was my father. He stood at the tiller and his wild yelling reached me on the breeze. He must have returned to the town and found out what had happened.

  Tostig’s hand settled on my shoulder. ‘It is no use,’ he whispered.

  I felt my muscles twitch, ready to hurl me into the water, but even if I could have untied the knot around my neck and jumped overboard, the cold would have dragged me down long before I closed the gap between us. I slumped back, as if the weight of Tostig’s hand was too much for me to bear.

  Across the foam-slicked waves, I heard my father call my name.

  When the raiders saw that it was just a small fishing smack, nothing they could use, they tightened the sail lines, hauling them until their knuckles turned a bloodless white. The man at the steerboard arched his body like a bow, arm muscles taut under his skin. The Drakkar seemed to gasp as we lunged forward over the swells. My father’s boat fell far behind, his shouting lost on the wind. His boat slipped behind the waves, then re-emerged and slid away again. Each time, I saw less of it, until the boat had disappeared for good.

  A sudden, bone-hollowing emptiness spread through my body, as all the memories of my home, which until that moment had flickered through my head as if they were alive, like a flock of birds in the blue sky of my eyes, became still, their bright colours already fading.

  *

  Soon after, we ran into thick fog rolling off the land. It smelled of pine and mossy earth, mixing with the salt breath of the sea. The fog wrapped so thickly around us that we lost sight of the other Drakkar. Our boat hauled down its sail and waited. The crew lit torches, shot burning arrows out into the mist and called with hands cupped round their mouths, but the fog had swallowed up their friends.

  As darkness settled on us, Tostig mumbled prayers to his wooden-faced gods.

  The raiders discussed what to do. They were speaking in the Eastern Norse of the Danes and Swedes, not the Western Norse of my own people. They talked of the bad luck they’d seen this year, and how the haul at Altvik had made up for all of it. But now this. The quietest among them was the captain, a short, wide man named Kalf, with eyes almost hidden under a bony ledge of brow and calves that were thicker than my thighs. He covered a bald patch on the top of his head with a small round cap of blue wool and wore a brown cape with a hood. When the night grew cold, he pulled this up and peered from it like a badger from its burrow. He was a Christian and prayed to a brass cross nailed to the mast of his ship, but when the wind picked up, he prayed to Norse gods too. I heard him called an English Dane and learned through my eavesdropping that there were other Norsemen on the crew who had settled in England. They were heading back as soon as they sold off their cargo at a place called Hedeby, which lay further to the south. At Hedeby, the crew would split. Those who lived in the northlands would find their own ways home. The English Danes would take their ships and sail away. From the things they said, it seemed clear that Kalf had made a life’s work of raiding. He came across the sea most years and recruited people from the coastal towns. Some of these men would wait every year for the sight of Kalf’s sails on the horizon, then drop everything and go raiding with him.

  Sitting among them, I felt the impossible frailty of my own life. Each time I raised my head, seeing only tar-black waves beyond the boat, I knew that Tostig and I were beyond all help except what we could pray for or could find inside ourselves.

  I overheard that I was now the property of a man named Halfdan. Now and then, I caught him looking at me the way he might look at an animal, wondering if it could understand what he was saying.

  Halfdan had few friends on the crew. Those he had, he didn’t seem to want. It was clear that they respected him, but what he had done to earn their admiration I did not discover until later.

  As the night wore on, Kalf’s men grew quiet and peered suspiciously at Tostig, as if he might somehow be responsible for this fog.

  I began to wonder as well, as I drifted from rage to tears to sleep. The faces of my friends and family seemed to hover in front of me, with the same flickering light as that which catches on the wings of insects when the sun is going down.

  When morning came, the fog still lingered round us and there was no sign of the other ship. Kalf said they must have carried on to Hedeby, so we raised our sail and caught the wind, leaving the ghostly mist behind.

  It would be many years before I found out what happened to those missing men. Until that time, I often saw them in my dreams. They sailed the red ocean of my sleep, caught in its currents, which steered them again and again to the shore of Altvik. They burned it down a thousand times, as weary of the slaughter as the ghosts they came to kill. But in my dreams they were powerless to stop themselves, helplessly reliving the butchery they had begun.

  The sun came out, and I slept with its warmth on my face, too exhausted even to think. I woke as Tostig’s hand gripped my knee. He set a finger against his lips, motioning
for me to be silent.

  The raiders lay strewn across the deck, wrapped in heavy cloaks. They had rigged a cloth awning just forward of the mast, and it was under this that most of the men were sleeping. Halfdan stood at the tiller.

  ‘You must get home again, no matter how long it takes,’ whispered Tostig, his lips brushing against my ear and the warmth of his breath on my cheek. ‘The purpose of your life has been made clear. You are to be a messenger between the gods and men. Yours is a gift beyond all the riches stolen from us today, even the black stone cross, which points towards the very source of our faith – the only thing to pass bodily from the land of the gods into ours and from which our world draws all its meaning and its strength.’

  This was the source my father had spoken about, the greatest secret of the Norse religion.

  ‘You children,’ he continued, ‘are brought up to believe that Sasser Greycloak was a thief, but he was the great protector of our people. His sacrifice is to be thought of as a monster, when everything he did was for the cause of our religion. To call him a beast is the only way to keep the truth hidden. He, like you, was struck by lightning and chosen as a messenger. That thing, which people say he stole, was the hammer you were given yesterday. It has been worn by every guardian of our temple since the source was sent down by the gods. I myself lifted that hammer from around the old priest’s neck and gave it to Greycloak to wear. Soon afterwards, a man arrived in Altvik. He claimed that the hammer was his and believed that it alone held all the power of our faith. When Greycloak saw the man coming, he fled into the hills, but not before he showed me that the hammer is only an illusion, hiding the truth from all but a few. Greycloak lured him up into the mountains, away from the true source. After Greycloak fell through the ice bridge, the man believed that hammer lost for good. But year after year I searched the ice caves until I found his frozen body and the cross which he still carried. That day the lightning struck you down, I knew you were chosen to wear it.’