by Paul Watkins
I prayed, while rain poured off my mumbling lips and dripped from my straggly hair. The only sound that came back to me was of wind moaning through the eye-sockets of the old walrus skull, and the sucking gasp of the bow as it ploughed through the storm.
I prayed all the time. I prayed until I was angry.
Why won’t you answer?
Why won’t you help us?
I begged for an answer, for thundering voices to set out on the wind towards me, like huge and unstoppable ships, carrying the message that we had not been forgotten.
‘Are they listening to you?’ Olaf blinked at me from the cocoon of his cape. The skin around his eyes was dark and his lips were white and creased with bloody cracks.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. As I said the words, a vast loneliness filled my head with shapeless, nameless horrors.
Slowly, Olaf crawled out from his cape. ‘I will help,’ he said.
On our knees, heads pressed together and hugging each other’s shoulders, we prayed, while all around us, the sea washed into the sky like dye from cloth and the northern sky still grumbled with distant thunder, flickering with the struck-flint sparks of lightning.
That night, I discovered that our waterbarrels had salt in them. The waves must have seeped through the lids. We could still drink it, but the water was brackish and made us gag if we drank more than a few sips at a time.
I decided that we should eat the few remaining pieces of dried fish. White speckles of mould had already spread across the crumpled amber surface. From the days when my mother and I had hung and smoked the fish my father caught, I knew that this mould ruined the taste of the meat but that the fish would still be edible. But if we waited any longer, it would be too far gone. I washed the fish and tried to dry it in the wind by hanging it from the masthead. Then I gnawed on the hard, leathery meat until my spit ran red with blood from bruised gums. Some of this, I gave to Olaf, since he was too weak to chew it himself. I used the rest of the rotten fish to bait hooks, keeping five lines in the water, but never had a bite.
Then the last of the food was gone.
My breath tasted sweet and my tongue swelled up in my throat. I grew so weak I had to crawl around the deck, too tired even to scratch the itching salt-water boils which festered on my grotesquely swollen knees and elbows.
In the middle of the night, I ate my shoes.
Olaf said he wanted to sit up, so I propped him beside the steerboard and sat next to him. Hour after hour, we stared at the unchanging sea.
The strain on the boat was beginning to tell. These last few days, I had been bailing more and more frequently. The sail was fraying and the walrus-leather lines had stretched beyond their usefulness. Stress cracks appeared in the mast, spiralling up from its base, and there was no telling how deep they went.
Olaf began talking to people who he said were standing in front of him.
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘but they say that they know me.’
Throughout the day, he raged at every thought which twisted in his brain. ‘I was not the one who killed our friendship!’ he shouted at me. ‘I tried to preserve it. More than you know! All I ever wanted was to see what you can see! Do you know what it is like to spend your life in doubt?’
I held up the black hammer, which still hung around my neck. ‘This is not the key you think it is. It will not take away your doubts.’
Olaf drew back the flap of his cloak and held out a hand, fingertips chapped with bloody cracks deep in the skin. ‘Then give it to me.’
I tossed it over over to him. I did not care anymore.
Slowly, he put the cord round his neck and tucked the black hammer under his shirt. ‘This was always mine,’ he said. ‘It never did belong to you.’
We stared at each other, eyes filled with hate.
When Olaf fell asleep, I went and stood looking down at him. Watery blue light filled the air. For a long time, I watched him, steeling my mind for what I had to do. Then I reached down, grabbed Olaf by his shirt and shoved him over the side. His body seemed to weigh nothing at all. Olaf hit the water with a splash and disappeared, then bobbed up again, spluttering salt water from his lungs. He waved and called out my name.
It was only when I heard the fear in Olaf’s voice that I realised the blindness of my anger, and the terrible mistake I had just made. ‘Olaf!’ I called. ‘I will turn the boat around! Olaf! I am coming back for you!’ I tugged at the steerboard, but it was roped in place. The knots which held the ropes had swollen tight, and while I pulled them loose I kept calling to Olaf. Meanwhile, the boat sailed on and he disappeared behind the waves. ‘Olaf!’ I screamed. ‘Olaf, I am sorry!’
Then someone else was shouting. I blinked and saw Olaf, right in front of my face. I was lying down and he was shaking me ‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘What are you sorry about?’
I struggled to my feet and looked in the wake of our boat, where I had seen him fall. Then I looked down at Olaf, who had crawled across the deck to wake me from my sleep.
‘Why did you call out my name?’ he asked.
‘It was a dream,’ I said.
‘What was it about?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Nothing. It was nothing.’
Olaf returned to his place beside the tiller and pulled the dirty cloak around his shoulders.
I knew then that I could not kill him. What we had lived through since we set sail on this journey had changed everything between us, and I would have died of loneliness if he had not been there.
At night a huge creature, outlined with flickering green sparks, slid under the boat. We watched it trailing away into the dark, like a path of fire falling from the sky.
‘It is one of the monsters,’ said Olaf, ‘who live at the end of the world.’ As the boat ploughed onwards, pitching over the white crests of the waves, we were seized by a fear that we had sailed past the limits of the ocean and were falling now through the abyss. Then we felt the surge of the Drakkar riding up the next wave, and the terror left us for a while.
Again the grey dawn showed us no horizon.
Time came unbuckled. Everything was slowing down. My thoughts. My body. Even the movement of the waves.
In the moment that the sun rose above the waves, Olaf cried out in a wordless, high-pitched shriek which drilled into my ears and sent me crawling to his side. But he was asleep, his grey face composed and calm. Nor could I wake him. Olaf seemed to be caught in some place between the living and the dead.
I woke that night to find Halfdan on the boat. It did not surprise me to see him. Not in this place. Not now. He was watching me, smiling a pitying smile as he stood on the prow, just as the bearcloaked Dane had done. But he was not holding onto anything. He just perched there, defying all possibilities of balance in the pitching of the waves.
‘You should have killed Olaf while you had the chance,’ he said.
I closed my eyes, but when I opened them again he was still there. ‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘I have come here to tell you to stop struggling,’ said Halfdan. The words echoed around us, as if each one had come to life and fluttered around him like insects.
‘Why?’ I grunted.
‘Because you are already dead.’
I shook my head. ‘You do not frighten me with your lies.’
‘It is no lie. You are already gone. You and your friend. Only the dead can travel to this place. Our gods cannot protect you here.’ The longer he stood there, the less he seemed to be constructed from the gauzy fabric of my thoughts. The boat charged on through the waves, smashing over one foam-crested hill and down into the valley of the next.
For a long time, we only stared at each other, until at last he spoke again. ‘You must leave behind the ones you love,’ he said, ‘just as they are leaving you.’
I stood up, the pain of any sudden movement sharp in the joints of my knees and my hips and in the boils which bubbled on
my skin. ‘Look at me!’ I howled at him. ‘I am still alive!’
‘I am looking at you,’ he replied calmly, ‘and what I see is a dead man, clinging only to the memory of his life.’
I lunged forward to grab him but had forgotten to tie up the tiller, which turned in the water, jibing the boat. The sail swung back and the sideways motion knocked me off balance. I saw the grey-white sheet of the sail, filling my vision as it rushed towards me.
The next thing I remember is feeling water all around me and being surprised that it was not as cold as I would have expected. At first, I thought I had been washed overboard. Then I sat up, just as a wave tipped onto the deck. The boat was nearly swamped. With a shout, I clambered to my feet.
Olaf was lying between the rowing benches. His eyes were closed. Water washed over him.
I realise that the boom must have hit me in the head and knocked me out. Pain thumped across my temples and down the back of my neck, but at least I knew for certain I was still alive. I lashed the steerboard in place, hauled Olaf up onto one of the benches, then grabbed one of the buckets and began to bail. I kept bailing, long after my muscles had ceased to shriek. My elbows locked and I could no longer feel my grip on the sides of the bucket. The endless stooping and straightening of my back traced lines of agony around each segment of my spine. Once, as I raised my head, an arc of water sliding from the bucket past my face and back into the waves, I looked towards the bow, expecting to see Halfdan there, but he was gone. I kept bailing until the bucket scraped against the wooden deck. At last the boat rode higher in the waves.
Now that the danger had passed, I was overwhelmed with anger. I raged at the living storm, barking obscenities until my throat was raw, while the storm mocked me with its serpent’s hiss. Then suddenly I was myself again, afraid and so weak I could barely stand.
Olaf still lay unconscious on the rowing bench.
I pressed my ear against his naked chest and heard the wheezy rattle of his breathing.
With tears in my eyes, I begged him to wake and talk to me, but he just lay there in my arms.
All the while, Halfdan’s voice chanted in my skull: ‘You will never see your home again. No one can hear your prayers. You are already dead.’
The air was not as cold as it had been before. For several days now, I had only worn my cloak at night.
In the night, after a brief lull, the storm seemed to grow worse. I sat up bleary-eyed from where I had been sleeping with my head against the steerboard arm.
Thunder pounded all around and lightning flickered silvery in the air. In my mind, I counted off the things we had to do – shorten sail, lash the water barrels shut, check the steerboard. But then I noticed that the water was calm. I could see the stars. That was not thunder. It was a kind of drumming. Something flashed in front of my eyes. Some kind of bird. It flew straight into the sail. There were birds all over the deck. They were thin and had long wings. As I stood, I vaguely saw a ruffle in the water and then something struck me so hard in the chest that I fell over, gasping the air back into my lungs. As I rolled on my side to get up, I realised that the birds were not birds at all but fish with such long fins that they appeared to have wings. I stared at them for a moment, then without thinking, I grabbed one of the fish, picked it up and bit into it, flooding my mouth with the taste of salt and blood.
I ate the whole fish, sucking the fluid from the spine and swallowing the eyes. I ate the fins and spat out the flimsy bones. In the stomach, I found some minnows, which I rinsed and ate as well.
Again I tried to wake Olaf, but he remained asleep, breathing only faintly.
It began to rain, so I took the lids off the rain barrels to let them fill.
With fish blood dripping from the tips of my fingers, I held my wooden mug under the end of the sail’s boom, where the water trickled off in a steady stream.
I drank until I thought my stomach would burst.
My strength was returning. I felt it as a prickling sensation spreading from a bowl of warmth inside my stomach. My sluggish thoughts began to race. I found myself laughing for no reason, suddenly falling silent at the eerie cackle of my voice, then laughing again a moment later.
At first light, I gathered up the rest of the fish, cut the meat from their bodies and threaded the pieces on a line between the bow and the sail to dry.
By late morning, the wind had slackened for the first time in as long as I could remember. Now that the boat was riding more smoothly in the water, I brought out my sword and rinsed it in the waves, watching the blade flash as it cut through the green water. Then I took the clothes from around Olaf’s back and this time cut away enough of the skin around the arrow head that I could grip the piece of flint with my thumb and first two fingers and at last pull it free from the bone. Through all of this, Olaf remained asleep, but the sweat beaded up on his face and his breathing grew shallow and hoarse. There was a lot of blood, which I staunched with a bundled-up piece of my cloak. Then I fashioned a bandage from strips torn off my shirt. There was nothing to do now but keep the wound clean and hope that he recovered.
That night, the sky was so riddled with stars that I could barely make out familiar patterns.
At dawn of the next day, I noticed a few strands of seaweed drifting past. I knew this must mean we were close to land, but as hard as I looked, shading my eyes with salt-chapped hands, I saw no trace of mountains or the flattened clouds that gather above ground.
After a long time of staring, I began to see a brown haze above the water. At first, I was convinced that it had to be an island, but when I looked again a few moments later, the haze was gone and all I could see was water. And yet, something was out there. I felt it, even if I could not see it. I gave up looking for the shore and used the blade of my axe to hook up some of the weeds. As I brought them up, tiny flea-shaped shrimp jumped on the deck. I pinched their wriggling bodies and popped them in my mouth like tiny berries. I tried to feed some to Olaf, but still he would not wake.
The following morning, I went forward to the bow. The morning mist had just began to clear. Everywhere, clusters of weed dimpled the water. It was not long before the progress of the boat was slowed by this tangled forest.
Cormorants and seagulls scudded amongst the brown sinews. There were fish the same nut-brown colour as the weeds, with uneven growths jutting from their sides, looking so much like the weeds themselves that in this place the boundaries between plant and animal seemed to have come undone.
I set out lines baited with the scraps of meat, which sent tiny rainbows of oil to the surface as they sank. The dappled shadows of the weeds stretched down into the bottomless green below. It was not long before I had fish on the lines. They had the same shape as mackerel and put up the same kind of fight, and even had the same strong-tasting flesh, but instead of green and black stripes on their backs, they were the colour of new iron.
When I had caught enough to last us for a while, I slipped over the side and swam around the boat, picking off and eating the long-necked barnacles which were growing on the hull. I was shocked to see that the pine-tar used to plate the overlapping boards had almost worn away, which explained why I had been bailing so often.
Afterwards, I rested on the deck. At first, it was good to feel the sun on my bare back, but by afternoon, I had badly burned my face and hands and the tops of my feet. For shelter, I rigged a canopy of spare sail cloth which I stretched across the bow. Then I dragged Olaf in beside me. I kept up a one-sided conversation while I tried to make him comfortable in the cramped space, afraid that he would never wake from his death-like sleep.
At last, just as I was beginning to give up hope, Olaf spoke to me in a croaking, barely human voice. ‘Why are we not moving?’
I smiled and patted his grey cheek. ‘I thought you were not coming back,’ I said.
‘Have we reached land?’ he asked.
‘Not exactly,’ I replied. Hooking my hands under his arms, I moved him gently out from under the canopy. His
eyes were crusted shut and I had to moisten them with sea water before they would open. When I showed Olaf the weeds, which stretched as far as we could see towards the west, he seemed to wake completely from the blur in which he had spent these past few days. All he wanted to do then was look at the weeds, so I built him a chair out of our empty food boxes. He sat like the king of this watery world, while I brought him fish to eat and cups of rain water to drink.
Olaf was surprised when I told him I had removed the arrow head. He asked to see it, and for a long time just stared at the sharp little point, as it lay in the palm of his hand. ‘You would not think something this small could cause such suffering,’ he said. Then he flicked it over the side and slapped his hands together.
I had to help him move around the deck, but slowly Olaf was becoming his old self again. The scar, at first an angry poppy red, turned gradually to purple as it healed. Painfully, Olaf regained the use of his arm, clenching and unclenching his crab-clawed fist, until his fingers moved freely again. By now, in the sun, his blonde hair had turned almost white. His blue eyes glowed in his sunburnt face.
My own skin was darker now than it had ever been in Miklagard. Under the canopy, with my shirt removed, I was startled at how sinewy my arms had become. The bones of my elbows stuck out sharply under the skin.
Days passed. I could not say how long. We lived in an absence of time, speaking neither of the past or of where we might go on from here.
By the heat of the afternoon, we lived in the milky light under the canopy. Sun shone like the yolk of an egg through the sailcloth. The boat’s gentle rocking and the smell of the weeds, thick and earthy in our lungs, lulled us into peaceful waking dreams. At night, when it grew cooler, we fished by the light of the stars.
‘We could stay here forever,’ said Olaf, ‘and I would not regret it.’
Once I woke to find that he had moved himself out onto his food box throne. He sat there with a calm expression on his face, hands resting in his lap, and there was a seagull sitting on his head. It was a big old gull, with watery eyes and scaly legs.
