Thunder God

by Paul Watkins

  ‘But if the source is not the hammer, then what is?’

  ‘The answer to that is buried in the ground beneath the Altvik temple. The secret has been handed down for generations, from one chosen priest to another. Only those who wear the black hammer ever learn the truth. Once these raiders have finished with me, you will be the only one who knows. That is why you must return to Altvik. Without you to protect it, the secret will be lost.’ He took hold of my wrist and gripped it harder than I thought he could. ‘Now swear to me you will go back, no matter how long it takes.’

  I nodded, too afraid to speak.

  Tostig sat back. He closed his eyes and nodded, satisfied.

  *

  Later that day, I overheard Kalf telling Halfdan to get rid of us.

  ‘They have brought us bad luck,’ he said. ‘You must do it for your own sake, and for ours.’

  Halfdan stared at the deck, frowning and saying nothing while he listened. Then suddenly he got up, drew his sword and cut the rope which fastened me and Tostig to the mast. The sword blade sank with a dry smack into the wood. He dragged us to the side and, without a moment’s hesitation, heaved Tostig into the water.

  Before the old man fell, I thought I saw him smile at me.

  I cried out and tried to grab him, but Tostig drifted through my fingers like a shadow. He vanished under the waves.

  As I watched the place where he had disappeared, I felt a thundering inside my head, so powerful that I began to lose consciousness. Pictures began to appear before me, blurred and thrashing and streaming through my eyes like dry sand blown across a beach. They poured into my head with such force that I felt sure my skull would shatter into gritty, powdered bone.

  Then suddenly I was longer seeing through my own eyes. I was under the water, drowning, locked inside the flimsy cage of Tostig’s body, drifting down into the freezing dark. Pressure stabbed into my ears. My lungs burned as the air in them grew stale. I clawed at the water, and with a last muffled shriek, my jaw locked open and the sea poured in. A stream of bubbles slipped from my mouth, like a broken string of pearls trailing towards the light. Blue sparks flashed behind my eyes. Then nothing. Not fear. Not life. Not even the knowledge that there was such a thing as life. I saw myself as I would be if I followed the old man – hollow-eyed and white with death in the blackness at the bottom of the sea.

  As violently as I had been forced behind his eyes, I was thrown free. I looked down at Tostig’s pale hands, which trailed upwards in the silty water as he sank away, clothes billowing around him. I watched until he vanished from sight, then climbed with the bubbles from his flooded lungs until I reached the rolling tundra of the waves.

  I rose from the sea like a newborn drawn from the womb, returned into this house of blood and bone, screaming and thrashing and blind with the salt of my tears.

  Halfdan held me by the neck, my face only an arm’s length from the water rolling by. Halfdan was about to push me overboard when Kalf shouted at him to stop.

  ‘Not that one! Wait until we get to Hedeby, then sell him to one of those Slav traders.’ Kalf rubbed the tips of his fingers together in front of his face. ‘Do not let him go to waste.’

  Halfdan dragged me back to the mast and tied me up again.

  I cried until I was hoarse, howling like a dog and struggling at the rope until it choked me into silence.

  *

  The remainder of the journey lasted three days, during which time I did not eat the food they put before me nor drank the water which they ladelled from a barrel with a wooden scoop and held against my mouth. I tucked my knees against my chest and did not speak, only slept or stared out at the sea. My mind went blank. I no longer cared what happened to me. Living or dying seeemed one and the same.

  On the morning of the fourth day, we reached the port of Hedeby, a place many times the size of Altvik. Smells of smouldering peat, sour milk, roasting meat and human dirt fanned out to greet us. As we rode into the harbour, I saw two huge pillars silhouetted against the sky on a barren patch of land overlooking the water. Each was carved with a face, like the pillars in my village. Sacrificed animals hung from iron hooks embedded in the pillars. Fires smouldered on the shingle beach below and fur-clad figures hunched around them, shifting in the smoke.

  The harbour was crowded with heavy-bellied trading ships.

  Before we went ashore, Kalf divided the goods from Altvik. He carried out his work with a solemn face, selecting items from the jumble of property and laying them one by one at the feet of his men.

  The raiders sat cross-legged and silent, never taking their eyes off the growing piles, most particularly the one that Kalf made for himself. He favoured the English Danes, which seemed to be expected by the Norsemen. But even the eyes of the English Danes grew dark as Kalf’s hoard towered above their own.

  By the time Kalf had finished, I felt sure the crew would kill him. But no one complained or lifted a finger against him. They gathered up their belongings and rowed into town in one of the many small boats which ferried people back and forth from their ships.

  Kalf and his crew were not strangers in Hedeby. The arrival of their ship drew an assortment of cripples, some of them so torn from their natural shape that they barely looked human at all. Beside them stood owl-eyed merchants in gaudy fur-trimmed cloaks and long-toothed women with faces creased by scowls. They scattered when the rowboats began ferrying us ashore. The merchants looked down at their shoes as we walked by, and the cripples slunk back into the shadows, like snails retreating into their shells. Only the women held their ground, with the hard, unfocussed stares I had seen in the eyes of slaughtered sheep.

  Everywhere around us, houses were being built. The blond glare of new wood stood out against the smoked timbers of the older buildings. Some structures were roofed with tent-cloth, others turf-capped like the buildings of my home. Everybody seemed to be shouting. Their words merged into a meaningless chant, while hands clawed the air with angry urgency. Women in mud-fringed dresses carried their shoes, walking barefoot with the cautious tread of herons in a pond. In the darkness of one building, I saw the glowing outline of a red hot sword and heard the coughing hiss as a blacksmith lowered it into a vat of water. Musty-smelling steam billowed out into the street. Down an alleyway, I glimpsed an old woman in the moment that she slapped a young girl in the face. The girl’s nose immediately began to bleed.

  Halfdan tied a rope around my neck and pulled me after him, clearing a path through the crowds. I felt as if I were watching myself from a great distance in the sky. Beyond sadness. Beyond hope.

  In the market square, standing among clumps of horse-shit seething with brown flies, I was put up for sale.

  Men with dark skin and pointed beards gathered around me. Their clothes were long and draping and their breath carried a smell of smoke and sweat. They made me open my mouth. One man tapped my front teeth with a coin. They set their thumbs beneath my eyes, drawing down the skin to look under my eyelids. They made me take off my shirt and walked their fingers down my spine.

  Three of these men began to bargain with Halfdan. They sat on a rug which one of them had laid on the ground. Onto the carpet in front of him, each man emptied a pile of coins, some of which were broken into pieces. As one added to his pile, the second increased his own. The third man, seeing the amounts laid out by his friends, began to sweat even though it was a cold day. He gathered up his coins, let them rattle back into the leather pouch that he kept around his neck, stood up and walked away.

  The dealing continued. The men removed gold or silver rings from their fingers and threw them on their piles.

  Halfdan kept glancing at me and then back at the men. He began muttering to himself.

  The brown-skinned men looked at each other questioningly.

  Suddenly Halfdan climbed to his feet. He held one hand flat at the level of his chest, then made a cutting motion outwards, to show that there would be no sale.

  The other men began to protest. They babble
d sharp and fast and raised their hands to Halfdan.

  Halfdan folded his arms and looked at the ground, waiting for the noise to die down.

  But the chattering only grew louder and angrier.

  I worried they might draw the long, curved blades which they carried at their sides.

  Before that could happen, Halfdan strode right through them, pushing the men aside and treading on the carpet, which upset the piles of coins. He walked over to where I stood, grabbed my arm and hauled me away.

  The scattering of their coins distracted the brown-skinned men, who scrambled to gather up their money and immediately began to argue over which coins were whose.

  As he led me away, Halfdan paused for a moment to watch the brown-skinned men. I saw his fist loosen around the rope.

  I did not think about what I did next. The thought and the action came at the same time. I took hold of the rope and wrenched it out of his grasp. The cord slid between his palm and fingers, and Halfdan cried out as the rope burned his skin.

  I ran, hearing angry voices as I barged down the narrow, crowded street. I ducked into an alley and then into another. I sprinted through a slaughter yard. Beheaded animals hung upside-down from wooden crossbeams, bleeding into the mud. Huge piles of entrails, kinked and twisted like the rope around my neck, were being shovelled into waiting carts. I crossed another street. Not knowing where I was headed. Only to get away. I could not tell if he was following. The rope scratched at my neck. I gathered the loose end against my chest.

  A moment later, I slammed into a woman carrying a reed basket of green-and-black-backed mackerel. She was coming out of a house. The basket flew out of her hands, and the fish fell on the ground. Some of them were still twitching. The smell of freshly-caught fish, the colour of the woman’s hair and the way she had braided it shoved before my eyes a vision of my mother. For a moment, everything that had happened to me since I left Altvik took on the substance of a dream. I felt myself sliding through veils of sleep towards the instant when my eyes would open. I expected to wake, and for my mother to be there beside me, having somehow trespassed into my imagination. But then the woman screamed a crow-like cawing shriek which drilled into my head and I knew then it was no dream. I dropped the rope and with my next footstep I tangled in the coils and fell.

  When I looked up a moment later, Halfdan was standing over me.

  ‘Get up,’ he said. There was no fury in his voice, only a tired, fleeting patience.

  The woman began shouting at him about the fish.

  Slowly Halfdan brought his face close to hers. He whispered something in her ear.

  The woman’s eyes closed as he spoke. Her lips pressed tight together. Without another word, she picked up her empty basket and stepped back into the shadows of her house, leaving the fish where they had fallen.

  Now that I had a chance to see where I was, I realised I had run so blindly that I had come around in a circle and ended up back where I started.

  ‘Go on,’ Halfdan told me. ‘Run.’ He held out his hand, as if to show me the way home.

  I stared at him, and at the dirty faces which peered at me through half-closed doors, waiting to see what happened next, wide-eyed with the expectation of violence.

  Halfdan bent down, hands on his knees. ‘Where do you think you will go?’ he asked.

  I did not answer.

  ‘How far do you think you will get?’ he asked.

  I saw the brown-skinned men watching me, their mud-spattered hands clutching gold coins.

  Halfdan straightened up. ‘Where you and I are bound, no one will help you. No one will keeep you safe but me. Run again and I will not even do you the favour of killing you.’ He reached down with his reddened palm, picked up the rope and coiled it back around his hand.

  I had known before that I was lost, but I did not understand until that moment just how lost I was. I made no move to pull the rope away. Nor did he have to haul me to my feet. When he began to walk, I followed, treading in his footsteps, back towards the harbour.

  ‘Why did you not sell me?’ I asked.

  ‘They saw the colour of our hair and accused me of selling my own son,’ he replied. ‘They thought I could not understand their language.’

  Later that day, Halfdan fetched his belongings from Kalf’s ship. Jokes were made about the fact that I had not been sold. Halfdan took to swatting me on the back of the head, as if this was all my fault.

  We walked away through the muddy street. Halfdan had tied a rope around my neck. He kept the other end knotted in his fist.

  ‘Kalf cheated you,’ I said, as he dragged me along.

  Haldan looked back at me and narrowed his eyes. ‘Kalf steals it all twice,’ he replied. ‘First from places we raid and afterwards from us.’ Then he swatted me again.

  That night we jumped aboard a trading ship bound for the eastern Baltic and began the long journey to a city called Miklagard. It lay far to the south, down a river called the Dnieper. Five times we had to come ashore, while the boat was hauled across the ground over logs to avoid the rock-filled rapids, each one of which had a name – Always Fierce, Always Noisy, The Yeller, The Impassable, The Laugher. And worse than these rapids, I learned, were a people called the Petcheneg, who ambushed travellers here. When we passed through their country, rumours were still fresh of a prince named Svyatoslav, whose convoy had been attacked. After the Petchenegs had finished with him, Svyatoslav was placed on a raft, limbless, tongueless, blinded but still living, and sent downstream, where he eventually caught up with those of his caravan who had managed to flee the ambush.

  Despite what had happened at Hedeby, I thought constantly about running away. But as the distance grew between myself and home, the prospects of getting back on my own grew smaller and smaller. Each chance of escape only guaranteed a fate even worse than being this man’s slave. Any hope of fulfilling the promise I had made to Tostig now seemed beyond all possibility.

  I learned, from dozens of smacks on the head, not to talk to Halfdan unless he spoke to me first. Even then I was not to answer unless he had actually asked for a reply. This did not mean that we travelled in silence. He often talked about his home in the north country, where he came from a people called the Svear. Upon the death of his father, his older brother had inherited the family land, leaving Halfdan to seek his own fortune. He had been moving from place to place for many years and no longer seemed to know what he was searching for.

  Often Halfdan would take the black hammer from around his neck and examine it carefully. Again and again he asked me where I had found it.

  I said I had been given it, and that was all I would say.

  ‘There was another black hammer,’ he said, ‘sent down by the gods to be the anchor of our faith. But I heard that it was lost long ago.’

  From then on, until the day he died, the hammer never left its resting place, tucked against the hollow of his throat.

  Each day, wherever our boat put in to shore, Halfdan would find a secluded place to pray. The first time I saw him do this, we had come to a clearing in the vast and ghostly white birch forests south of Starya Ladoga. Sunlight filtered through the trees. Leaf shadows dappled the ground and shimmered in the branches above me. The smell of heated sap hung in the air. Halfdan’s voice remained so quiet and steady that it did not stop the birds from singing in the nearby trees.

  There were different prayers for whatever dangers faced him, as well as different gods to whom he prayed.

  I saw an unexpected gracefulness to his gestures, as he drew his sword and carved a ring around himself in the dirt. He would empty from his leather prayer bag a linen bundle containing rock salt, a tiny fat lamp made of soapstone and a shallow grey-white bowl, which was the brain-pan of the first man he had ever killed. He faced north as he prayed, judging direction from the growth of old moss on the old trees. Holding his arm out straight, he would take up a handful of dirt and let it sift slowly through his fingers. Then he sprinkled some salt, only a few crystals,
into the bone cup and added water from his drinking skin. If he had any fat for the lamp, he would light it and hold the cup over the tiny flame, dissolving the salt. He would lift the cup and pour the water over his head, then kneel with his hands on the hilt of his sword, sinking the blade into the earth.

  This ritual marked the beginning of every prayer, which was always followed with these words:

  The boundaries of time are come undone.

  I stand in the gateway between two worlds.

  Hear me through the veil that hides you from my sight.

  Help me through this day.

  Watch me. Shelter me.

  Do not forget me.

  I am your child.

  Sometimes our fellow travellers, draped in furs and weaponry, would come to watch. They kneeled at a respectful distance, swords laid out on the ground in front of them. Whatever words Halfdan had for his god, these others seemed to lack. They had no affection for Halfdan, but when it came time to ask for help in cruising the cataracts of the Dnieper, its banks strewn with wreckage and the rag-clothed bones of those whose luck ran out, these men would trust him with their lives.

  To take his mind off the cataracts and the Petcheneg, Halfdan spent his time gambling. By the time we put ashore one night, he had lost half of what he owned, and took out his frustration by striking me for some imagined offence until my front teeth were loose and one of my eyes was swollen shut. Then he walked me out onto a treeless plain through which a river twisted sluggishly.

  I wondered if he was going to kill me, and realised that I was less afraid of the beatings, or even of dying, than of the fact that I never knew what he was going to do next.

  Halfdan pushed me far out through the rustling, knee deep grass.

  ‘Here,’ he said, suddenly, and pointed to the ground.