Thunder God

by Paul Watkins

  ‘What kind of gratitude is this?’ asked Brand.

  ‘Why should we show you gratitude?’ asked Cabal. ‘You give us something we did not ask for and then expect to be paid for it. Now you say we are in your debt.’

  ‘I told you to stay out of this, Celt!’ Brand’s voice cracked. ‘This is none of your concern.’

  ‘This is my home now,’ replied Cabal, ‘and these people are my people. We are all each other’s concern.’

  There were noises of agreement from the crowd.

  ‘Do you not understand,’ said Brand, still trying to force authority into his words, ‘that when you offend me, you offend God himself?’

  ‘He is not as offended as we are!’ shouted Tola, shaking her bird-claw fist at the priest.

  It was then that Brand noticed the black hammer around my neck. One of the buttons had fallen off my shirt when he struck me. Now the front of the shirt had come open, revealing the stone against my chest.

  Brand stared in disbelief. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but the shouting of the crowd drowned out his voice.

  Brand looked at the faces which had closed in around him, searching for one that might show him some pity. But they were blind to him now.

  Slowly, Brand put on the cape, sliding his body into it with the same look of distaste as a man getting dressed in wet clothes. He tightened it around him, knotting the charred black cord. Then he reached for the stick, which only smouldered now. He touched it against the hem of the cape and quickly pulled it away again. ‘You see?’ he said. Then his eyes grew bright with defiance. ‘It will not burn!’

  But even as his voice rose up in triumph, the cloak began to smoulder. Suddenly, the flames jumped up, enveloping him. His voice kept rising, past words, past screaming, to a terrible wail which none of us had ever heard before. Brand flailed his arms, splashes of fire arcing out into the night sky. The cape clung to him now. He could not shake it loose. For a long time, he stood facing us, painted with flames. The wailing continued, beyond what any one breath could spend. Slowly he raised his arms. He seemed to be looking at his hands. Smoke slithered from his fingertips. Then he staggered back into the water and a rush of steam hid everything. A great silence followed, broken only by a rustle of the incoming tide over the sand.

  When the crowds had sifted away into the night, Cabal and I dragged Brand’s body from the surf and brought it out to his boat.

  Once on board, we lit torches and moved cautiously around the deck, almost tripping over a wooden cage of snakes, whose tiny heart-shaped heads and skin decorated with dark red lozenges told me they were poisonous. They were hidden under a blanket and writhed when I pulled it away, as if the light of our torches caused them pain.

  Cabal found a bucket of wax and a thick horsehair brush for painting it on Brand’s cape. The smell of it was in everything on the boat.

  I opened a trunk and discovered it was filled with animal bones. Another trunk held hundreds of small wooden crosses, each one the same. There were many dried and salted hams hanging from hooks below deck, and at the head of Brand’s bed.

  We set Brand’s body on his bed, which was strewn with feather-stuffed pillows, a silk-brocaded tapestry which he had been using as a blanket, and many crumbs of food. For a moment, we both looked down on the charred remains of what had once been a man, and then we left him where he lay.

  After hauling up the anchor, which was a huge piece of white stone bound with ropes, we moved the boat out onto the open sea, towing the rowboat behind us. We ran up the sail and roped the steerboard in place.

  Then Cabal and I pitched our torches into the water and climbed down into the rowboat, taking nothing with us. We did not speak as we rowed back to shore, nor had we said a single word when we were aboard Brand’s ship.

  We left Brand’s ship to sail away into the night, rather than burn it in the bay and risk having pieces of it wash up on the beach, where they might be recognised by traders passing through.

  The last I saw of the boat, it was riding a calm ocean towards the north. The blind man’s eye of a full moon glared down through the tumbling clouds.

  Back in my house that night, as I lay down to sleep, a single, overwhelming thought came rolling through my mind, like a boulder come loose from the sheer cliffs of the mountains. It was a realisation that the war in which Brand and I had found ourselves was no longer a struggle for faith but a war over property, whether it was taxes, land or the black rock for which I had sworn my life away.

  I could not get out of my head what Brand had said about the fire of the Norse gods burning out and how we were living in the ashes. What if the prophecy of Ragnarok, the great war between the gods, had already been fought? Did their world lie in ruins far above us, strewn with the dead to whom we were still praying? Had one new god survived to rise above them all? Was I simply blind? Doubt perched like some great raven in the rafters of my mind, clacking its iron-hard beak, claws hooked into the softness of my brain.

  But it was too late for doubt. The war had already begun, and the death of this man had not silenced his message. It had only killed the messenger.

  PART III

  I was in the temple, sweeping the floor and stacking firewood. My mind was taken up by thoughts of the King’s tax men. Word had spread through the village that they would soon be here. Some favoured gathering our money now, to pay them as soon as they arrived, but since we did not know how much they would demand, the decision had been made to wait. I wondered how we would be able to pay them anything at all, since we had so little already. I had become so preoccupied that I did not hear someone approach until a rustling in the doorway brought me to my senses.

  It was Kari. ‘I came to talk with you,’ she said.

  ‘About what?’ I asked, wiping the sweat from my forehead onto my sleeve.

  She came inside and sat down on one of the benches which lined the walls. With the expanse of empty seats stretching out on either side of her, she looked small and pale and lost. ‘About Cabal,’ she said.

  I went and sat beside her.

  ‘I am frightened,’ she said. ‘What I saw in him last night, I had not known was there.’

  ‘He has a hatred for the Christians,’ I told her.

  ‘But he will not tell me why.’ Now she set her hand upon my arm. ‘You must know. You were with him all those years.’

  I shook my head. ‘He has told no one. Not even me.’

  ‘I love him,’ she sighed, as if she had made some terrible and irreversible mistake, ‘but last night he seemed to be a different person than the one I thought I knew.’

  I remembered the second shadow, the Ail Gysgod which Cabal said lived inside him. I turned to her and took her hands in mine. ‘When we spoke to you of our days in the Varangian, we did not tell you all of it. Nor could we. He and I have seen terrible things and have done terrible things, the memories of which we cannot lose, no matter how deeply we bury them inside our brains. They will always be there, and sometimes they will claw their way back to the surface. But who we were, Cabal and I, we do not want to be again. What you saw in him last night was his old self, the one he is trying to forget. I have trusted him so many times with my own life that I know I can trust him with yours.’

  She brushed the hair from her tear-stained eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  At that moment, Cabal appeared in the doorway. ‘I wondered where you had gone,’ he said to Kari.

  Kari rose and walked across to him. Standing on the tips of her toes, she set her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.

  As they left, heading down the path into town, I climbed to my feet and slapped the dirt from the seat of my trousers. I stood in the doorway and filled my lungs with the cold air coming down from the mountains.

  Cabal and Kari spoke softly to each other as they walked. Cabal reached across and took her hand.

  I realised suddenly how Olaf must have felt to be left up here alone.

  Wind sifted through the tall
grass in the field. Soon the sun would dip beneath the waves.

  I turned back to my work, stacking wood under the unblinking gaze of the faces on the pillars, their wolf-toothed jaws cracked wide in a endless silent scream.

  *

  The next morning, I awoke before dawn to find myself standing outside my house, wearing my old battle gear, everything from the chain-mail vest to the shield and helmet. I had no idea how I had come to be there. I had never walked in my sleep before.

  I looked down at the bay, expecting to see the tax collector’s ship riding into the harbour on the incoming tide. But there was no ship, so I went back inside.

  It seemed as if I had only just fallen asleep when Cabal shook me awake. I sat up. The door was open. The clouds had been swept away like cobwebs from the corners of the sky. It was a sunny, windy day. By the quality of light, I could tell I had slept away most of the morning.

  I smiled at Cabal, but he did not smile back.

  Then I knew they had arrived.

  The King’s men had come in two large, deep-hulled traders. The first ship stayed out in the bay. There was a large crew on board and many warshields hung against the side. The second ship had anchored closer to the beach and ferried ashore a tall and dignified-looking man. He wore a dark-blue cloak trimmed with wolf’s fur. Held to his chest was a large, leather-bound book.

  With him came four men wearing tunics made from the same dark-blue cloth. Their swords were too large and ornate to be of much practical use. Behind their rowboat, they towed a second skiff, which was covered with a piece of dirty sail cloth.

  Word of their arrival spread, hissed through half-open shutters from house to house.

  I went down to meet them, as no one else had volunteered.

  When the men reached shore, they set up a table on the sand, attaching the legs with wooden pegs which they hammered into place. In front of the table, they rigged a set of scales, which hung from an iron scaffold. Brass block weights with lead-filled centres had been stacked beside it. Each weight had a ring for lifting it, like rings I had seen in the noses of bulls.

  The dignified man sat on a stool beside the table. From a small leather bag, he brought a silver bowl and two small stoppered glass jars. One was filled with black liquid and the other with a syrupy, clear liquid. He mixed some of each in the silver bowl, then brought out a feather, which he sliced at the end to make a writing point. The four men watched this with reverent fascination, as if he were about to perform some kind of magic.

  The guards watched me approach, eyes narrowed and arms folded, muttering to each other. They looked like hard people, more used to breaking the law than enforcing it.

  The man at the table had been writing in his book. Now he looked up, blinking me into focus after the concentration of his writing. His eyes were brown and he was bald except for a few strands of grey hair above his ears. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Hakon Magnusson. I am the priest here.’

  ‘You represent the town?’

  ‘Only because no one else wants to talk to you.’

  His eyebrows rose slightly, then settled back again. ‘I am Egil Arneson,’ he said as he climbed to his feet, ‘tax collector for the King. He has charged me to deliver to him 150 pounds of silver from the town of Altvik, unless you have begun construction of a Christian church, in which case the amount is set at 100 pounds. But I see no church here. Only a temple of the old faith, up there on the hill.’

  I stared at him in shock. ‘We have nothing like 150 pounds of silver, nor even 100.’

  ‘You are the priest, you say?’ A breeze blew off the water, twitching the fur on his cloak.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And you have met with Brand? He should have passed through here some days ago.’

  ‘He was here,’ I said.

  Arneson looked confused. ‘Did he not explain that you were to receive a portion of this amount, provided that you became the guardian of Christianity in this town?’

  ‘He did explain that.’

  Arneson scratched at his chin. ‘You are either very stubborn or very foolish.’

  ‘We are very poor,’ I told him.

  Arneson breathed in sharply. ‘You are also short of time. I will give you until the end of the day to raise 150 pounds of silver. After that, I must turn matters over to the soldiers who are travelling with me.’ He gestured out to the second ship at anchor in the bay. ‘I assume it is not necessary to explain what they will do to this town.’

  ‘It is not,’ I said. I set off from door to door, in the hopes of raising the money before the end of the day. There was no doubt in my mind that I would fail. If we could not come up with 150 pounds, there seemed to be no choice except to settle for 100 pounds, for me to be baptised, and to begin construction of a church, whether anyone prayed there or not. In the end, it did not matter, as I collected only one bucket full of silver. The people with whom I spoke had no doubts about the job that Trygvasson’s soldiers had come to do. If there had been silver, they would have handed it over. Memories of the day the raiders sacked this town were still clear in the minds of many. But the money simply was not here.

  I went back to the water’s edge, carrying the bucket.

  Arneson had not left the beach. Now and then, I saw him pacing back and forth, hood pulled over his head, hands tucked in the deep pockets of his cloak.

  By now, the guards had realised that there would not be any resistance, at least none that would prevent them from doing what now appeared inevitable. They took off their surly faces and stacked their swords with the hilts locked together and the scabbard tips dug into the sand. Then they sat down beside a driftwood fire. They looked disgruntled, as if humiliated by their matching tunics and their ornamental swords. To make a living by menacing peaceful villages with their war-scarred faces and long blades slung across their backs was beneath them and they knew it.

  I set the bucket on the table.

  ‘This will not do,’ said Arneson, his voice cold and clipped.

  ‘Perhaps we can offer you some things in trade,’ I began.

  But he cut me short. ‘I do not have room for all the goats and blunted swords I have been offered since I began this wretched task. Let me show you something,’ he said, and led me over to the boat which had been covered by the sailcloth. He swept back the cloth revealing dozens of torches, their heads wrapped in strips of tar-soaked wool. ‘If I give the order, my men will fire every house in this town. Do not think I am playing games. That is a mistake the people of Ytre Moa made three days ago.’

  I thought of their village in ruins, abandoned just as they had found it, and its people fading into the hills, to join the ghosts of those who had gone before them.

  On the scales, Arneson weighed out the silver. It came to 30 pounds. He wrote the number down in his book.

  ‘There was a time,’ I said, ‘when we might have been able to pay you.’

  ‘And how is that?’ he asked, without looking up from his writing.

  I told him about the raid, but he did not seem to be listening.

  Arneson spun the book around and held out the pen. ‘Make your mark there,’ he said, and pointed to the place where he had written Altvik, and the amount of money he had gathered.

  I wrote my name in the same Latin script he was using and slid the book back to him.

  He raised one eyebrow. ‘How is it that you read Latin?’

  I told him I had learned it down in Miklagard, during my time among the Varangian.

  When I said this last word, his eyes lit up. He actually smiled.

  I had never seen a face changed so completely by a smile.

  He told me that his younger brother had served with the Varangian. ‘Perhaps you knew him.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied.

  ‘His name was Halfdan.’

  I had been leaning slightly over the desk, but now I stood up straight. ‘Halfdan!’ I described him to Arneson, wondering if it was another man by the same nam
e, although I had known of no other.

  ‘But that is him!’ Arneson set his palms down hard on the table. His eyes opened wide and his lips trembled as questions massed in his brain, clamouring to be spoken. ‘I have had no news of him for many years.’

  I told him the whole story.

  Arneson sat at his table, refusing to move even as the tide came in and lapped against our feet.

  The guards watched all this with tolerant confusion, knowing it was none of their business to question Arneson, and if he wanted to sit there while the bay washed him and his table away, that was his right. They moved up to the high-tide line and rested on a cushion of dried weeds.

  When I told Arneson of Halfdan’s death and his funeral pyre out in the wastelands, he lowered his head and wept in silence.

  The guards stared at the strange sight of this man crying at his half-submerged table.

  Arneson wiped the cuff of his cloak across his face. His eyes were red and his lips were drawn tight over his teeth. ‘I feel I owe you an apology.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘That it was my own brother who took you away from here. I am grateful that you saw to his funeral in the way he would have thought correct.’ He stood and the ends of his cloak sagged in the shin-deep water. ‘I do not intend for such a gesture to go unnoticed.’ He paused for several moments in silence, then leaned forward across the table. ‘I will make you a gift of time.’

  ‘Time?’

  He nodded. ‘I am sailing up the coast to the city of Nidarnes. In one month, when I return south, you must have the remaining 120 pounds owed to the king. I suggest you also build yourself a Christian church and find a Christian priest to baptise you, so that you will only owe me 70.’

  ‘Even if I do as you say, I still do not know where we will find the money.’

  Arneson closed his book. ‘Then I hope when I return that I do not find you here.’ He summoned his guards with a sharp wave of his hand.

  Before the Dog Star winked from of the twilight sky their ship had vanished out to sea, leaving behind only the remains of a fire and some footprints in the sand.