The Whale Road o-1

by Robert Low

  I slapped his hands away.

  `Lambisson does not esteem me. He will be back soon, having realised that the woman I had brought here is more valuable than anything else he seeks.'

  `Valuable?' demanded Einar.

  `She knows the way to a great treasure,' Martin responded, tugging, then rounded angrily on me. 'Let it go, you idiot boy.'

  At which point, angered beyond anything I had experienced in my life, I swung my sword in a half-arc. It was wild—a bad swing entirely, as Skapti said later. It hit the monk high on the head, but with the flat, not the edge. He went down like a sacrificed horse, gone from a twisted-faced little weasel of a man to a heap of rags on the floor.

  Einar bent, studied him for a moment, then stroked his beard again and nodded admiringly at me. 'Good stroke. Hring, bring the little rat round. Let's find this woman . . .'

  We moved to the door, opened it as cautiously as possible and Ketil Crow moved in, followed by Gunnar Raudi, then me. Einar and Skapti stayed outside.

  It was dark, lit only by a horn lantern, guttering low, and fetid, a strange, high smell which I came to recognise later as fear and shit in equal measure. Ketil Crow knew it well, for it put him into a half-crouch, blade held low in his left hand, hackles up. Behind, Gunnar Raudi moved to the left. Naively, I bumbled on, past Ketil and on to the middle of the room, to the only furniture in it: a low bed with a pile of rags.

  It was only when the rags moved that I realised it was human . . . or had been once, at least. There was a droning sound, a long muttering, then a sobbing—such a sound as to crack your heart. I backed away, my own hackles up. Perhaps this was the fetch of a woman who had died . . .

  Gunnar poked the rags with the blunt tip of his sword and they moved rapidly, scuttling like an animal, reached the end of a length of chain and stopped. A head came up, framed with tangled, greasy hair, face pale as the moon and with two wild, bright orbs staring back at us. The woman—if woman it was—gabbled something which sounded vaguely familiar. Ketil Crow advanced slowly and, from the door, Einar's impatient voice growled for us to get the bloody woman and be done with it.

  Ìt's chained up,' Ketil Crow said.

  Ìt stinks,' added Gunnar. 'And it's chained by the foot.'

  `Then cut the flicking thing,' hissed Einar, Behind him came slapping sounds and a low moan as Martin was brought back to life.

  `The foot?' I gasped, aghast at such an idea, but knowing either of them was capable of it. Gunnar shot me a scornful scowl.

  `The chain, you horse's arse.' And he nodded to Ketil Crow to get on with it, but got only a scowl.

  Ùse your own blade. I like the edge on mine.'

  `By Loki's hairy arse!' roared Skapti, barrelling in and knocking everyone aside, the huge Shieldbreaker sword soaring up. The pile of rags that was a woman saw it, screamed once and flopped. The blade whirled down; the chain shattered at the point where it joined an iron fetter.

  Skapti swung round, his eyes boar-like and red. Instinctively, Ketil Crow and Gunnar backed away.

  `Now you pair of turds can carry her,' he growled. For a moment, Ketil Crow's eyes narrowed dangerously and I watched him, for I knew if he struck Skapti it would be from behind. No sane man would face an armed Skapti in a confined space.

  Instead, he grinned like a wolf on a kill and moved to the woman. I followed Skapti outside, where Martin was sitting up and shaking his head, dripping from the contents of a ewer Hring had thrown on him.

  Hring, smirking, was trying to force the pewter pot inside his tunic, flattening it into uselessness as he did so.

  Einar hauled the monk up on to unsteady legs and clapped him playfully on the shoulder. 'Sore head, eh?

  Now you be quiet and nice, or I will let the Bear Slayer loose on you again.'

  Everyone chuckled—save me and Martin.

  Ì will want to know more of this, monk,' Einar went on. 'But, for now, we will follow your plan. Orm, give him your cloak and helm, for I don't think Brondolf Lambisson will want him gone from here and may have left instructions to that effect. Lower the woman on to the corpse bed and cover her up. Then we can leave.'

  They had completed their task, were hefting the bed and moving from the wreck of the room, when the door opened and Brondolf Lambisson strode in, holding a small chest close to his own.

  There had been no warning for him. One minute he was coming into the neat, warm hov of his fortress, slippers on his feet, a nice warm hat on his head; the next he had stepped into a nightmare wreck of a room, reeking of shit and blood, littered with corpses and come face to face with the last six armed men in the world he wanted to meet.

  He had time to give a strangled yelp and whirl back out of the door, though, hurling the chest straight at the nearest, which happened to be Skapti and Einar. It hit Skapti on the shoulder, smacked Einar on the forehead and dazed him. With a cry, Skapti dropped his end of the corpse bed, blocking the doorway.

  Àh, Odin's bollocks . . .'

  Einar was clutching his head, cursing so hard I made a sign against angering the very gods he maligned.

  Blood stained his fingers when he removed them.

  Skapti started to lumber after the fleeing Lambisson, but Einar grabbed him. 'No. Time to row hard for it,'

  he said through pain-gritted teeth.

  Hring picked up the chest and shook it. It rattled with coin and he beamed at Einar.

  `You have a head for business right enough, Einar.'

  The answer was a dangerous growl and a shake that sprayed everyone with warm droplets, like a dog climbing out of a stream.

  Martin stumbled forward, my hand on the nape of his neck. He tried once to shake me off and I tightened my grip, at which he gave up struggling and trembled, part with anger, but mainly with fear.

  `The chest,' he managed and Einar took it from Hring, opened it, shot a look full of questions at the monk.

  Òn the thong . . .' muttered Martin. Einar started raking about in the chest.

  `Time to go, Einar,' warned Skapti. 'Lambisson will raise the whole Borg in another blink.'

  Einar fished out a leather loop, dangling from which was a heavy coin, punched with a hole to take the thong. It swung, gleaming in the flickering lights.

  `The woman had it round her neck,' Martin said, thick-voiced with the pain in his head.

  We all craned to see it, but it was just a medallion to me.

  `See it,' Martin urged. 'On one side and the other . . .'

  Einar turned it over and over in his fingers, while Skapti hovered by the door. 'Einar . . . in the name of Thor, move your arse.'

  ‘On one side, Sigurd . . .’ Martin wheezed.

  And I saw it, as it turned and flashed. On one side, the head of Sigurd, slayer of Fafnir. On the other, the dragon head. `Volsung-minted; he went on. 'From the hoard Sigurd took. There is no other coin like it out in the world.'

  Skapti slammed the doorpost with his forehead and roared his anxious frustration at us all.

  Àll the others, its brothers and sisters,' Martin breathed, 'are buried with Attila the Hun.'

  Then we were out into the little room, composing ourselves and stepping as quietly as we could, controlling our ragged breathing with effort, to face the guard on the steps.

  `Wouldn't that weasel-faced little fuck help then?' asked the guard sympathetically. Beside me, I felt Martin stiffen and poked him meaningfully.

  `No. We will do it with our own rites,' answered Einar and moved on, keeping his head turned as far from the man as possible, so the blood wouldn't show.

  We were halfway down the stairs when Einar stopped. A red flower bloomed in the dark, beyond the Borg walls. Shouts followed it. Another flower bloomed. The guard above us peered disbelievingly.

  `Fire . . . ?'

  Èyvind,' said Einar bitterly, as if the very same was a curse. Which, of course, it turned out to be.

  Just then, the fortress alarm bell clanged out. Lambisson. The guard on the steps whirled, confused.

&n
bsp; Helpfully, I said, 'Must be a fire in the town. That will be bad in this gale.'

  The guard nodded, now unsure of whether to rush to the gate and find out, or stick to his post. Instead he said, 'Get on now. Hurry.' Then he turned into the fortress.

  `Move!' hissed Einar, but that was a whip we didn't need. We almost scampered across the main gate, where the guards were staring. Only two now—it seemed Sten had taken the others to help against the fire, which was luck, since he seemed to know my face.

  The ones on the gate couldn't give a rat's arse whether we had found a monk or given our comrade suitable burial, being too busy craning to see what was happening.

  They waved us through and we headed off along the walkway, moving towards the town wall. The reek of smoke, shouts, a whirl of sparks and flame showed that Eyvind's handiwork was excellent. I remembered the raven, the doomed voice of Eyvind saying: I was looking at the town and thinking how easily it would burn.

  A group of men and women with buckets charged past us, pushing along the walkway. Shouts whirled away with the wind, but some were louder up ahead, where a fresh red flower bloomed.

  `There he goes!'

  Eyvind stumbled from the cover of darkness, vaulted a fence, fell on the walkway and got up again. He was wildeyed and seemed to be laughing. He saw us and sprinted. Behind him, a crowd of pursuers made ugly noises.

  `Fuck his mother,' hissed Ketil Crow. `He'll have them all down on us . . .'

  There was confusion. All the weapons were hidden with the woman on the corpse bed. Eyvind, half stumbling, laughing with relief, charged up the walkway to us, to safety and his oathsworn oarmates.

  Einar stepped forward, whirled, wrenched my breeks to the knee and whipped out the hidden seax, all in one movement that left me frozen in place—which was just as well, since I felt the wind of that edge trail past my naked balls.

  Eyvind was trying to speak, gasping for air. Einar stepped forward, for all the world as if to embrace him, and drove the seax up under the ribs and straight to the heart. Eyvind simply collapsed like a bag into Einar's arms and he promptly threw the luckless dead man back towards the pursuing crowd, sprawling him bloodily on the walkway.

  He turned to me and said, 'Pull up your breeks, boy. This is no place or time to have a shit.'

  Then he swiftly—piously—laid the bloody blade on the chest of the swathed figure on the corpse bed, switched a covering edge over it and signalled us to move on.

  Some of the baying pack had seen what had happened, others further behind had not, saw only that their quarry was down and a boy was trying to take a shit in the walkway. There was laughter, confusion.

  The crowd milled up to the dead Eyvind like some giant, slavering cat whose prey had suddenly dropped dead before it could be played with. They pawed it with kicks for a while, then started to string up the corpse as we passed.

  The owner of the house they wanted to use was arguing furiously about having it hang from his eaves.

  More sparks whirled on the wind from the last fire Eyvind had started. Not one of them queried how he had died or that we had done it with a weapon we shouldn't have had. It was, I noted numbly, pulling up my breeks, as if we were invisible.

  We went through the town gate, out past the garrison, now stumbling into life in response to the clanging bells, the shouts, the fires.

  In the confusion, we melded into the darkness beyond. When I looked back, it seemed the whole of Birka was burning

  5 As my father said at the time, we should have hauled the Elk higher up the shingle, for this was no time to be out in a boat.

  It was bad enough scrambling up the straked sides of it in the dark, with the freezing water sucking and slapping you, but once aboard, the rowers bent to it and took her out to where the black waves were white-tipped with fury in a howling night.

  Then we fought the storm and the fear of splintering on Birka's hidden rocks; three men leaned on the steering oar and the rest of us huddled in a sort of dulled stubbornness. I was charged with looking after the woman, who moaned and rolled eyes made even whiter by the night and gabbled incessantly in some tongue that almost approached the familiar.

  In the blue-white flashes of lightning Which seared through even closed eyes, I Could see the pale face of her, like a skull, hair plastered slick to it, eyes sunk in deep, dark pools, mouth opening and closing on her meaningless sounds. I wrapped her and myself as tight as I could in a sodden cloak and her arms went round me.

  We leached warmth from each other as the Elk staggered forward recklessly into the night and, at one point, I saw Illugi Godi, standing alone at the prow, an axe in either hand, chanting prayers. Then he threw them overboard, an offering to Thor, master of the wind and rain.

  Dawn came up like thin milk in a bowl. We were alone under the great, white pearl that is the inside of the ancient frost giant Ymir's skull, which is the vault of the sky. The wind no longer roared at us, but hissed a steady, cold breath, driving us north and east, up the great, grey-black, glassy swells, spilling white spray from their frayed ends—my father had instinctively headed for Aldeigjuborg, which the Slavs call Starya Ladoga.

  The Fjord Elk slid up them, water foaming aft, staggering now and then as the bow knifed and water swirled down the deck into the nooks and crannies of her.

  She was a good boat, the Elk. Not a long-ship in the sense everyone thinks they know: those are the drakkar, expensive warships built to carry warriors and not much cargo, with barely four or five paces in the beam. You can't travel far in a longship before all those men need water and food you haven't got and you have to call in somewhere to replenish it.

  Nor was the Elk the fat-bellied little trading knarr that ploughs stubbornly through the blackest seas with tons of cargo in her well.

  Which was why Einar did what he did next. Later, I worked out why. Vigfus in his little knarr would wait out the storm before heading north in search of the god stone he thought we were after. He had too many men for such a little ship and such overcrowding would be deadly in a storm, for such a ship depended on its trim to stay afloat.

  Starkad, also, would wait, since he dare not risk his expensive ships. However, he would then race hard as those dragons can sail, aiming to make it to the same place faster than any of us and before his stores ran so low his men starved and thirsted. He would know where to go, because Lambisson would tell him, having no choices left.

  So Einar spoke with Valgard and Rurik, huddled together, with much shaking of heads on their part and much curled lip from him. In the end, they broke apart and Einar announced: 'Shields and oars.'

  There was a general shifting around at that. Those who knew what was about to happen seemed as uneasy as those who hadn't a clue. Gunnar Raudi scrambled up to me, forking a lump of bread out of a leather pouch and handing it to me and the woman. In the light of day, she looked no better, seemed no more sensible—but she chewed the bread avidly, which was a good sign, even if her dark eyes were strange and pewter-dull.

  I caught Gunnar's sleeve as he turned to go, asked him what was happening.

  `We run,' he said and flashed a gapped grin full of half-chewed bread. 'Hold on tight.'

  Shields were fetched out, the bosses knocked from their centres and carefully stored in pouches, along with the rivets. The oars were run out, which was a puzzle, since I already knew it was madness to try rowing in that swell. Perhaps they were going to try to turn the ship for some mysterious hidden land my father had found in his seidr way.

  Then the bossless shields were slickdown on to the oars, which were turned blades flat to the sea. The shields were locked in place on the side and the oars couldn't even be moved. I had never seen or heard of this before; quite a few others were similarly puzzled. But those who knew looked grim about it.

  The oars, uniformly fixed in place, stuck out pointlessly, blades flat to the swell, like the ridiculous legs of an insect.

  Ùp sail!' roared Rurik.

  No—a mistake, surely? In this w
ind and swell? We would run so fast we'd go arse over tip, plunge the bow into the waves and swamp her. I had heard such things—we had no keel for such travel . . .

  But the crew sprang to it, the spar lifted off the rests, the great sail, soaked despite the sheep grease and seal oil, flapped, strained, bellied out like some grass-fed mare and the Elk leaped like a goosed good-wife.

  The ignorant gasped and some yelled out with fear, but the Elk shook itself and sped ahead, the oars acting like the deep keel it didn't have.

  My father came across to me, squinting up at the sail, then back to the steering oar, Where Skapti stood braced with it under his armpit and three others waited close by, in case he had to try to turn.

  `Not that he could,' my father chuckled. 'We run hard, fast and true—faster than anything. The drakkar will fall over themselves under full sail in this sea and are too big to try this trick—we have near half as much again on them and are rigged so that the inside of every wave adds more speed.'

  It was true and men hung on as if about to be swept away. The Elk . . . flew. It planed up one side of the swell, surfed down the other, kissing the water with the oars, I sweeter and faster than anything, while the wind thrummed the walrus ropes and, if you leaned out, you could see parts of the crusted strakes not normally exposed except during careening.

  `Get your arse inboard,' roared Valgard, catching me by the belt and hauling me in with a cuff. I did not care. I was exhilarated, drunk on the sheer beauty of it.

  Once, as a boy, I had dared to ride Gudleif's best and fiercest, Austri, named after one of the dwarves who sit at the four corners of the sky. With no saddle or bridle or reins I sprang on him and he had taken off.

  His mane whipped my face, the wind ripped tears from my eyes, but I felt the surge of him under my thighs and calves, the sheer power and grace as we flew in a thunder over the meadow.

  Of course, the red weals of that mane had given me away. Gudleif had beaten me for it but, through the snot and tears afterwards, I was still mazed in the feeling. The Elk did the same for me that day, too.

  Gradually, as they grew used to the wonder of it, men relaxed—until Valgard had them watch the oars, lest one catch the water too hard and shatter.