The Whale Road o-1

by Robert Low

  I was in Dengizik's tomb again, alone, in a blue dark, like a night with a shrouded moon. The lines of soldiers, dead but still with eyes that followed me, were sitting patiently and Hild sat at the foot of the throne, chained to it by the neck.

  I took a step to her and the soldiers shifted. I took another and they rose, with a hissing rustle like insect wings.

  Then I ran and they surged on me, a blinding mass like bats, like a blizzard of dust and fury with no more substance than memory.

  And, suddenly, I was there, looking into the great white-rimmed pools of Hild's eyes, while she smiled up at me. My arm rose and fell, the sword in it chopping the withered hand from Dengizik, which held Hild's neck chain.

  It fell, slowly, slowly, tumbling, shredding scraps of flayed skin, dusty bone.

  Then I was awake, by the fire, staring into the limpid eyes of Hild, who sat astride me, her face inches from mine. Her mouth worked, twisting this way and that; sounds tore from her in a rippling, wheezing hiss:

  `Don't . . . go . . . with us. Live . .

  Limpid eyes, dewed with . . . tears? I watched them expand, to where the black ate all the white, saw the hands which cupped my face claw like talons, felt her quiver and then, with a sickening liquid surge, rise up over me and step away, into the darkness.

  I breathed. I know I did, because I heard it, ragged and thundering in my ears. There was no other sound for a moment, then all the noise of the world crashed back and I blinked at the camp murmur, the hiss of dung-chips on the fire, my father's groan and stir, Skarti's fluttering fart.

  I sat up, looked wildly around, but everything was as it should be—and yet nothing was. Had it happened? Had I dozed and woken in my dream? Did I dream still?

  All the rest of that night I wondered, staring into the glowing embers until my eyeballs seared.

  There were horns and drums sounding, like ships lost in a golden fog. Under our feet the steppe had crumbled, crusted over and was kicked to dust again, hanging in the air, gritting our eyeballs, scorching tongue and nose and throat.

  The acrid stink of horses hung in that dust as they sluiced nervous piss and moved to our flanks, ghosts in the murk, to make sure the assault wasn't smacked by a counter-foray from the once-white city.

  This time there were just sixty-two of us, half with their teeth clamped tight because otherwise they'd chip or crack them with the fever's jaw-quaking chatter. Twenty more lay under awnings back at a new camp, amid the hundreds of other sick gathered in one place so that what aid there was could be more easily given. Not that there was much . . . they lay and shook and died in pools of their own loosened bowels.

  But we stood and waited, while fire and death occupied the space between us and the ravaged city. In the yellow shroud of dust, five dark towers moved, like the fingers of a hand, while archers rushed forward in pairs, one holding a pavise of reeds, the other shooting, then ducking under to reload.

  There were hoots and screeches and shrieks and, through it all, the high, thin scream of horses dying, a sound which, to me, seemed worst of all.

  I leaned on my shield, on one knee, watching, almost detached from it. Skarti, shivering, was glass-eyed and shit dribbled down one leg, but he didn't seem to notice. The smell of that and dust and oil on steel—

  that was battle and any component part of it reaching my nostrils later in my life would bring my head sharply up, like a chariot horse of the Blues when it hears the roar of the crowd.

  A block of sweating men heaved and strained, some in front and some behind, moving the tower foot by slow foot towards the walls, from which rained death, unseen in the murk.

  Unseen but felt. Like some giant snail, the block of men round the tower left a slick, viscous trail of blood and sprawled bodies behind, felled by arrows, fist-sized stones fired from small engines and large spears fired from bigger engines.

  There was a bird, amazingly. It flitted out of the dust and perched briefly on the shaft of one of the hedgehog maze of arrows sticking from the assault tower, then whirred off again, gone in an eyeblink.

  Then a flock of small boys appeared, darting out of the saffron haze with bunches of arrows: they got silver for every twenty they recovered. A dog was with them, limp-running on three legs, then four, then three again. The boys plunged on, laughing, panting, sneezing, carefree dancers on the edge of the abyss.

  I laughed, too, at the sheer incongruity of it. Skarti heard it and his lumpy head came up, tight-mouthed.

  He shook it, saw what made me chuckle and managed a savage grin. He was holding himself to prevent the shakes—even his hair looked clenched yet he leaned forward and spoke.

  `S-s-see many s-s-strange things in b-bbattle,' he managed. 'B-b-birds, b-b-beasts, w-w-women, d-dogs.

  S-s-saw a s-s-stag once, r-run between two armies.' Then he shut one eye, which fluttered as he did so, and placed a quivering finger alongside his nose in a grotesque parody of the knowing look. `B-but you n-n-never see a c-c-cat on a battlefield,' he finished portentously and, drained, sank back to lean on his shield.

  Mounted couriers galloped to and fro. A man on foot spilled out of the shimmer, looked wildly around and spotted the Raven Banner.

  He stumbled towards Einar, his tunic streaked with dark sweat patches and worse, spoke quickly, pointed, waved his hands furiously and then, done, slumped down, his legs buckling. Einar began to pace, slowly, up and down.

  I realised, eventually, that he was counting. On five hundred of my count, he stopped, signalled to Valknut and the Raven Banner went up, then bobbed three times.

  The Oathsworn lurched upright and moved at a walk, then broke into a jog. Skarti weaved and staggered with me and I slowed to let him keep up as he clattered into me and almost fell, caught my shoulder, muttered an apology.

  In a loose bunch, shields up, we headed into that sulphurous maw, shrinking ourselves as small as possible and wishing we were anywhere else. I caught sight of others, equally thick with dust, trotting forward in small groups, their own banners up. My father appeared from the crowd, raised his sword briefly in salute, then was gone again. I loped on and the arrows arrived.

  The sagas will tell you of arrows like rain, like sleet. Not so. They come in flurries, in flocks, like birds.

  You see a brief flicker in the air and then they hit with a drum-roll smack.

  I had three in my shield almost at the same time, the shushu-shunk of them making me stagger. Another whicked past my head; Skarti went down, gurgling, drowning in his own blood. Another hit his thigh as he rolled.

  I half stopped, wanting to turn to help him, but dared not expose my back. Another bird-flicker through the dust and a man to my right yelled, hirpled a few steps, then started hopping, his injured leg held up, the shaft through the calf from one side to the other.

  Àh, fuck,' he yelled, then fell over. `Fuckfuckfuck.'

  A dark shape loomed: our assault tower, now hard against the scabbed wall. Close up, that white wall was a yellowed fang, rough and pitted, the base littered with ragbag corpses in dust-tanned white, stained ominously black and clumped on the shards of picture tiles torn from the walls.

  Fireflies sparkled in the dust and I stared at them until they whunked into the earth and the tower. One sizzled past me; someone behind screamed and Eindridi staggered out of the pack of men squeezing up the lower entrance, waving his arms wildly, a shaft sticking from his neck and his hair on fire.

  `Help me. Tyr help me . . .' But he reeled off into the dust before anyone, man or god, could lay a hand on him.

  Fire-arrows smacked the tower. It smouldered already and the haulers were trying to keep the cowhides wet with frantic licks of water from wooden buckets, but the heat was drying them out almost as fast. Inside, men struggled up ladders in a dripping rain of mud, sliding and cursing and sweating.

  I waited, shuffling forward with the rest, breathing ragged and still hunched, though the tower offered shelter from the arrows. Almost. The man in front of me—not one of the Oaths
worn—half turned to say something to the man next to him and his head jerked with a sudden high clang. He dropped, twitching and I saw there was a huge dent in his helmet and the blood was pouring from his nose.

  I pushed past him. Something slammed into the timber nearest me and, unable to go further in the queue, I ended up staring at the round, pebble-sized lead shot embedded there. I swallowed and looked back at the felled man, who was thrashing now, his back arched off the ground and blood coming out of his ears and nose and even streaking down his cheeks from his eyes, like tears.

  There was a flurry of movement ahead. I was almost on the ladder when the whole tower shook and, just as I was putting my foot on the first rung, a body plunged to the ground with a clatter of iron and breaking bones.

  The tower lurched again, then embers and chunks of burning timber rained down through the muddy drips. Another body crashed down, then several more and people above me were scrambling back down the ladder. I took the full weight of a man on me, scrambling, kicking.

  He stepped on me and another one would have done the same if I hadn't lashed out and sent him spinning, which let me scramble back out, away from the tower, which had suddenly gone crazy. The ladder had tilted.

  No, not the ladder. The whole tower. As I scrambled away on all fours, losing my shield in the process, the assault tower toppled like a falling tree. The top half was on fire; it had then been hooked with grapples from the wall and hauled over sideways.

  It fell with a great bell of a crash and a blast of choking air, thick with dust and smoke. Flaming debris spun and whirled in it, like the end of the world.

  I found my shield, got up and stumbled backwards over half-seen figures on the ground, caught my boot and fell over one on to another and lay on it, panting for breath. I levered up, felt stickiness under my hand and heard the clang of steel.

  It made no sense—had they sallied? I got up on one knee, looked at the body and blinked. Steinkel. My cousin, last seen being dragged out of Martin's company, scowling and sullen.

  Now he lay on his back with dust in his glazed eyes and entrails oozing from between the shattered rings of his fine mail. And something dark and gibbering rose in me. Gudleif s sons.

  Fresh clangs, a grunt, a series of triumphant shrieks and, for the first time, I saw the figures nearby, hazed silhouettes in the gold. One crumpled as I watched, the other hacking with frantic blows, each one heralded by a grunt.

  I rose and moved, half blurred in my head, and saw the horror of it; saw the fear that had been rising in me, shapeless and screaming, given truth.

  Bjorn turned from hacking my father to bloody ruin, his mouth slack, his eyes wild. He saw me and snarled, but his voice came out too high-pitched. 'You. Now it is complete.'

  My father. I wanted to brush him aside, not to be bothered by his idiot raving and his quarrel, to get to the side of that bloody, leaking thing that had been my father.

  But Bjorn was there and his sword was up, thick, fat blood runnels sliding down the blade. My father's blood.

  His face was still young, round with puppy fat, but the mouth was twisted in fear and hatred.

  I stepped back in my mind and saw, for a flashing second, through his eyes, what faced him: his age, but leaner, axe-faced and wiry with new muscle, bulked unnaturally at the shoulder by oar and sword, blasted brown by sun and wind.

  He was too young and soft, this boy, for trying to exact bloodprice—but he and his brother had hacked my father down.

  I went for him then and I don't remember much of it, save that, for the first time, I had no fear. Perhaps that was what Pinleg had found, that disregard for death or harm in the pursuit of something desperate. Maybe berserk was different, but I tasted something of it then, in the dancing golden dust in front of the White Castle.

  How did the fight go? A good skald would have made much of it, but all I know is that when I blinked back into the Now of it, Bjorn was laid out on his back with his head all bloody and one ankle almost severed.

  I saw that blood was dripping from a cut on my forearm, that my shield was slashed and tattered and that I had lost the last two fingers of my left hand.

  My father was still alive when I knelt by him, but only just, and I had nothing to offer, not even water and certainly not help. I knelt there, my hands waving uselessly because I couldn't even work out where to start in the slick gore of what he had been. All I did was drip blood and snot-tears on him and I have always remembered, with shame, how useless I was then.

  He grinned at me, his teeth stained red. `Dead, are they?'

  I nodded, trapped in silence, hands fluttering.

  `Good. Fucks—should have known they'd never leave it alone. Got one—that silly little arse, Steinkel. Had no sword-sense at all. Should both have stayed away. That fucking Christ priest . . .'

  He would have spat, but had no fire left to do it. Blood worked into froth at the corners of his mouth and he was gargling when he spoke. He looked at me, still grinning. 'Bad business. That fu-fucking bear. You look like your mother.'

  Again I couldn't say anything and the tears were splashing muddily on his shoulder.

  `Good woman. Loved her after a fashion and she me, I am thinking. Never had a chance to grow.'

  He coughed up more blood and I patted aimlessly, helplessly.

  `Lies,' he said. 'For good reasons. We each had our true loves. Mine rode the whale road, swift and sure.

  With a good sail on it I could cut a day . . . off any . . . journey anywhere. Find my way by the stars to the end of the world.'

  He spasmed; the grin froze. 'You are my pride, though.' His eyes went glassy and he hissed, one hand grasping me by the wrist: `But not my son. Her true love was Gunnar . . .'

  And he went across the rainbow bridge, while the world spun and crashed and roared like the sea and all my thoughts were dust.

  I would have stayed there, but some others passing dragged me away and dropped me safely out of arrow range, beside the huge engines with their Lebanese cedar throwing arms and sweating Greek engineers.

  They loaded and fired, loaded and fired, for the assault had failed dismally and the only way into the city now was to pound the walls to rubble. Some of them, seeing the state I was in, gave me water and bound my wounds up with only slightly dirty rags, while I sat and let them, solid as a stump on the outside. Inside, I was . . . disconnected, like sea-rotted mail, falling link by link.

  Not my father. Gunnar her true love. Stammkel hated Gunnar. The new links locked and riveted themselves into place and, though it was patchy, the shape of it was there.

  My mother, already carrying me and knowing it, brings herself to my father . . . no, to Rurik, I realised. To Rurik, who marries her and gets a farm for his old age, he thinks, taking someone else's son with it.

  Someone thought dead until he turns up, like a ghost at the feast.

  Gunnar. No wonder he had stayed at Bjornshafen and no one dared say anything of it. No wonder, too, that Gudleif had to be sleekit about trying to do away with me, for he must have known.

  And Gunnar had stayed with Einar because I was there—had died for being a father and kept it all to himself to the grave. I wept for that, splashing muddy tears down my face, for all the things we would not now say to each other, for all the remembered things that now made sense.

  Gunnar Raudi. Swaggering, bracken-haired hard man, a sea-raider who had more in him for fathering than Rurik, who had wanted a farm and peace. Somehow, in a Loki joke, they had swapped lives.

  Eventually, the dullness lifted and the tears stopped. I thought of him lying out there, dead in the dust and unclaimed. I couldn't let that happen, so I went to find the Oathsworn.

  I found a man I knew, Flosi, who had been my oarmate on the old Elk and he greeted me with a weary wave.

  'Thought you were gone,' he said, jerking a grimy thumb behind him. 'The rest are over yonder—Illugi is taking a tally. I've been sent to fetch food and water for us.'

  He stood there, grinn
ing madly, his hair a wild tangle and his beard stiff with matted blood and all the same tawny yellow from the dust. His eyes showed white and red-rimmed from the crusted scab of his face but he had no colour in anything he wore, just a coating of that dust. It came to me, then, that I looked no different—save for the tear-tracks, which he did his best to ignore.

  Nor did any of the others, slumped in slack-mouthed exhaustion round the remains of what had been our camp, trampled by horsemen at some point, our flimsy shelters scattered. Illugi and Einar were finding out who lived, and who did not.

  I was greeted with a raise of the hand, or a nod. Einar, blood streaked in his hair, turned and grinned a lopsided smirk, then jerked his head at Illugi. 'Better mark him off the dead roll,' he said.

  `Leave the mark,' I replied, heaving up a slack skin of tepid water. I sluiced it over my head, then drank some. It was foul.

  `Fair enough,' said Wryneck. 'You look more dead than alive—and you just used all the water we had left, so some of us might kill you anyway.'

  `Leave the mark,' I repeated, 'but tally it to my father.'

  Àah,' groaned Wryneck. 'Old Rurik? Gone?'

  À loss we will feel sorely,' Einar added sorrowfully, 'when we have the wind at our back and a fair sea.

  How will we find a course now?'

  Àny course will do,' I snarled, 'on the whale road.'

  Einar nodded and tried to pat my shoulder as if I was merely overwrought; I glared at him through the streaked crust of my face. Illugi stepped forward, just one pace into that space heating up between us.

  Ànyone else you saw go down?' he asked.

  I blinked away from Einar, into the ravaged creases of Illugi's worn face, made deeper by the dust caked in them. `Skarti,' I said. 'Took an arrow.'

  Ìn the throat,' agreed Valknut, cross-legged. He was trying to comb the matted tangle of his hair and beard.

  He looked up, eyes blank, his voice full of wonder. 'He drowned. I heard him drown in the middle of all the dust.'

  Ì saw Eindridi,' muttered Ketil Crow. 'At least I think it was him, for I could not see his face. His head was on fire.'