The Littlest Viking

by Sandi Toksvig

  Katie was firm. ‘We can’t take her in the house. Mum will know straight away. She knows if you bring in some mud never mind about someone from history.’

  Amber was looking carefully at the play tent. ‘I believe this may be the very thing I shall need.’

  The children led Amber round to the back gate and into the garden. She still clutched her plastic leg as she munched crisps and wondered how potatoes could be made so flat and why they tasted so strange.

  In a clearing among some bushes, Katie set to work and, after making a fuss about which way the door should be facing, Gary lent a hand. Before long, they had put up their old play tent. It was bright red and shaped like a London double-decker bus. Amber peeked inside.

  ‘A house, you’ve made a house!’ she cried, delighted, and crawled inside.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Katie, laying out an old blanket for the floor. ‘I thought you could stay in here for the moment.’

  ‘It’s wonderful. It’s the very thing I . . .’ Amber lay down on the blanket, cuddled her shop dummy leg and instantly fell asleep.

  ‘I suppose she’s had a long journey,’ said Joshua.

  ‘Of course she has,’ said Gary. ‘Must be at least a thousand years.’

  The children went inside for tea, passing Mrs Marchmont, who was on her way out.

  ‘We’ve got a Viking in our garden,’ shouted Joshua, who had terrible trouble keeping a secret.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ barked Mrs Marchmont, sweeping past to post her weekly letter of complaint to the Pegwell Bay Chronicle.

  Down in the garden, in the clearing in the bushes, Amber the littlest Viking snuggled down in her tent. She was dreaming of sailing across the oceans by the stars and cutting off the heads of a nine-headed troll – who looked remarkably like Mrs Marchmont – just as easily as slicing through butter.

  Chapter Two

  From Bad to Verse

  IT HAD BEEN a very strange morning in the Lloyd household. Katie, Gary and Joshua had tried to act as if it were just another day – as if they hadn’t found a small Viking girl called Amber on the beach yesterday afternoon and as if she weren’t now living in the garden. They knew their mum wouldn’t believe it, and, to be absolutely honest, they weren’t completely sure that they hadn’t imagined it themselves.

  The three children ate their breakfasts without being told, cleared their plates away without discussion, and not one of them put up a decent fight over the free pencil rubber shaped like a vampire that had come with the cornflakes. This should have been enough to make Mum suspicious that they were up to something except that she was too busy thinking about the post. There had been a phone bill and a red reminder from the gas board. Even worse, she’d just read a letter from Gary’s teacher, Mrs Johnson, saying that if he didn’t stop reading comics in school and start doing his homework, then something very official would have to happen.

  ‘We might . . . pop out, Mum,’ said Katie, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Oh, I don’t care if we go or not,’ added Gary, shining the tops of his trainers with the carpet.

  Mum looked at Gary. ‘We need to have a talk about school, Gary. You’ve got to work on your reading.’

  ‘Not now, Mum,’ said Joshua. ‘Amber will be starving and . . .’ At this, the two older ones lost their cool and picked Joshua up between them and left.

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ shouted Gary over his shoulder. ‘Got to go.’

  Mum sighed the way only mums can. The frost was still crunchy under their feet as Katie and Joshua ran down the stone steps into the large garden behind the row of houses where they lived. Gary followed more slowly, sliding along on the especially icy bits of the path.

  ‘Stupid school,’ he muttered to himself. ‘What’s wrong with comics anyway? It’s reading. They’ve got words in them.’ Gary kicked a lump of ice. Of course he hadn’t done this week’s homework. Mrs Johnson wanted him to write a poem! How could anybody find that interesting?

  Still muttering to himself, Gary caught up with the other two. There, hidden away in the bushes stood the small red play tent shaped like a bus, in which Amber, the Viking they had found on the beach, had spent the night. Joshua ran up and lifted the flap to look inside.

  ‘She’s gone!’ he cried.

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Katie, disappointed. ‘We should have taken her inside yesterday.’

  ‘Perhaps she was never really here at all,’ wondered Gary.

  ‘No, her leg’s still here,’ said Joshua, giving his brother and sister a nasty turn until he pulled out the plastic limb from a shop dummy that Amber had picked up on the beach the day before.

  ‘Morning,’ came a voice booming through a mulberry bush. ‘Look what I found. The very thing I needed.’ Amber stood before them, holding a milk bottle. ‘The gods have left milk as an offering for my great journey.’ She examined the bottle carefully, for she had never seen a milk bottle before. ‘Must have been a strange cow that made this.’

  ‘Amer, where did you get that?’ asked Katie, half afraid of the answer.

  ‘From a great doorway with a terrible metal face that tried to frighten me but did not, for I am brave and sturdy. I am Amber, Hammer of the North.’ The miniature Viking smiled and began drinking the milk from the bottle.

  ‘Mrs Marchmont’s door knocker!’ Katie and Joshua whispered together.

  ‘Mrs Marchmont’s milk!’ said Gary. They all knew that Mrs Marchmont, their next-door neighbour, could be spectacularly bad tempered when she wanted to.

  ‘You mustn’t take that,’ said Joshua. ‘It’s naughty.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll stop a Viking by telling them that they’re naughty,’ explained Gary. Sometimes he wished that the others wouldn’t be quite so feeble, though he was also hoping that Mrs Marchmont didn’t actually know where they were.

  ‘We thought we’d imagined you,’ said Joshua.

  Amber pinched herself. ‘No, I’m definitely here,’ she beamed.

  Amber finished the milk with a great flourish and put down the bottle. ‘Come, we must get on.’

  She looked up at the sun. ‘It’s already late. Sleep is the great thief; he will always steal half the time. I have a mission I must complete.’ With that, she set off through the bushes and across the garden. There was nothing for it but to follow.

  ‘Where are you going, Amber?’ asked Joshua.

  ‘Amber, we need to talk to you,’ Katie panted, trying to keep up. Amber was really only the size of a large doll, but she walked as fast as Mr Patterson darting out from his hut on the Pitch and Putt course when he spied visitors cheating at the windmill on hole number nine.

  ‘We’ve got to decide what to do,’ Katie said.

  ‘We must hurry,’ replied Amber. ‘Skinfaxi is already riding fast across the sky and we must find Ratatosk.’

  ‘Skinfaxi? Ratatosk?’ The children were totally bewildered.

  ‘Skinfaxi, the Horse of the Day,’ said Amber. ‘Don’t you have teachers and learn about things?’

  Joshua was running behind Amber and even Gary was having trouble keeping up with her as she reached the top of the road to the beach, but Amber strolled on.

  ‘Everyone knows that there was once a giantess called Night who had a son called Day. The gods gave each of them a horse-drawn chariot and sent them up to drive round the heavens. Night goes first. Her horse is called Hrimfaxi, which means “frosty mane”. Asdarkness falls, Night tightens the reins on Hrimfaxi and each morning the face of the earth is wet with foam from the horse’s mouth.’

  Gary looked down at the dew on the grass, and trod a little more carefully in his new trainers at the thought of walking on foam from a horse’s mouth.

  Amber ploughed on. ‘Day’s horse is called Skinfaxi or “shining mane” and his horse brightens all the earth and sky with the shininess of his hair. We must find Ratatosk while Skinfaxi rides high above us.’

  By the time they reached the cave, the children were completely out of breath.

&n
bsp; ‘Who’s Ratata . . . Ratati . . . whatever you said?’ called Joshua, but Amber had already rushed inside.

  ‘Maybe it’s some pony who rides out in the afternoon,’ said Gary, slumping down on a rock, fed up with the whole business.

  Amber reappeared with a small squirrel sitting on her shoulder. ‘Ratatosk. He’s my friend. In all the excitement yesterday I forgot to bring him with me.’ The tiny grey creature looked at the three children and then jumped up onto Amber’s head and stood on his hands. He waved his feet in the air and chattered in a high-pitched nonsense voice. After a moment he slipped back down onto the little girl’s shoulder and clapped his hands.

  ‘He wants you to clap. He thinks he’s very clever,’ said Amber, rubbing Ratatosk’s head. Katie and Joshua began to clap and the squirrel immediately stood on his head again. Even Gary couldn’t help thinking that this was the best thing he’d seen since he’d watched a video on YouTube of a dog that could skateboard. He began to laugh. Katie, however, tried to contain herself and be sensible again.

  ‘Amber,’ she began in a voice she had learned from her mother, ‘do you really mean to tell us that you have sailed all the way across the North Sea on your own with nothing but a squirrel for company?’

  Amber nodded. ‘You know what they say – if you travel alone at least you get on with your companions.’

  ‘But how did you get here?’ asked Joshua. Amber sat down on the ground while Ratatosk began playing with a large shell.

  ‘I sailed by the stars and used my sunstone in the day. Here, look.’ From her pocket Amber pulled the yellow stone that the children had found on the beach the day before. ‘This is a sunstone. When you hold it like this, it’s yellow, but if I hold it at a certain angle to the sun it turns blue. By looking to see when the stone turns blue, I can always know my angle to the sun and journey in the same direction. At night I follow the Great North Star, Polaris.’

  Joshua had never heard of such a thing. ‘Don’t you have a map or sat nav?’

  Amber shook her head: ‘Vikings don’t need maps. All the glowing sparks and cinders in the sky point the way. Don’t you know these things? I mean, don’t you have any learning?’

  ‘I go to St Joseph’s Infants’ School,’ said Joshua proudly, ready to explain that he was rather a dab hand at the Plasticine table.

  ‘I hate school,’ said Gary, who was thinking about Mrs Johnson and her dreary old poetry.

  ‘But you must learn your runes,’ said Amber earnestly.

  ‘Runes?’ asked Joshua.

  ‘The ancient, magical letters of the gods.’

  ‘Huh.’ Gary was unimpressed.

  ‘They say that if you learn the runes you can find words that put the sea to sleep, put water on fire and calm an aching heart. When you know them you can write anything. They are the gift of Odin, the god of poetry.’

  ‘Poetry!’ Gary almost spat the word. ‘That’s soppy. It’s the pits!’

  ‘Don’t tell Odin that,’ replied Amber. ‘He’ll get cross and he’s very powerful. Odin is the god of warriors. He has only one eye. He is the fiercest of them all, but he is also the god of poetry. Do you know, he loves words so much that even when he was wounded, he still hung from the windswept branches of a tree for nine days and nights just to discover the secret of writing.’

  Gary thought about himself spending just five minutes in a warm classroom before giving up on the secret of writing.

  ‘Here, look,’ said Amber, picking up a stick and beginning to trace shapes in the sand. ‘Each one of these shapes is a letter. This one is for the sound F, this one is T.’

  ‘It’s an alphabet!’ cried Joshua.

  ‘I don’t know what that is’ – Amber continued drawing – ‘but I do know that with these you can either spell words or they can mean whole words on their own. This is “cattle”, this is “man”. Oh, and look, Ratatosk has done the one for “giant”!’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Gary, still trying to be unimpressed but annoyed that even the squirrel had the hang of it. ‘Just a bunch of drawings really.’ Nevertheless he watched carefully as Amber traced out the rest of the alphabet of the gods.

  For several minutes, there was complete silence. Then Joshua suddenly spoke. ‘I need to go home,’ he said urgently. Needing to wee always came as a complete surprise to him, and once again he had that desperate look in his eye.

  ‘And I’m hungry,’ announced Amber, getting to her feet.

  ‘I’ve got two pounds,’ said Katie. ‘We could get some chips from the pie shop.’

  ‘Is it many leagues from here?’ asked Amber as they headed back to the road.

  ‘No, just on the corner,’ replied Katie.

  The next morning the children were late going out as Mum had wanted their bedrooms tidied. When they finally got down to the tent, Amber was nowhere to be found, though her beloved leg from the plastic dummy was still there.

  ‘She’s probably getting Mrs Marchmont’s milk again,’ said Katie, and they ran up to look, but there was no sign of the little Viking.

  The children looked everywhere. They couldn’t understand it. After all, you wouldn’t expect to lose a Viking that easily, would you?

  ‘We’ve got to find her,’ said Katie. ‘She doesn’t know a thing about living around here. What it she gets run over?’

  ‘Or arrested?’ added Joshua, who had recently had a lecture at school from the local policeman. The children began searching.

  It’s tricky to know where to start looking for a Viking, especially if you’ve only known them for a couple of days. And would you really feel comfortable saying to people, ‘Excuse me, have you seen a very small Viking who’s a girl and probably about a thousand years old but doesn’t look her age?’?

  The children split up to continue the search.

  Katie went down to the Pitch and Putt course and looked in all the little buildings. She thought Amber might have fancied the castle and moat at hole number eight, but there was no sign of her. Gary checked under the bushes in the rest of the garden, but then had to stop and rescue Joshua who had climbed up the side of a rubbish skip and fallen in.

  ‘Amber likes bits and pieces of rubbish,’ Joshua said defensively as his older brother hauled him out and held him at arm’s length because he smelled of old cabbage. By the time they all met back in front of the play tent half an hour later, everyone was feeling rather grumpy.

  ‘Phew, Joshua, you stink!’ said Katie.

  ‘I was being thorough,’ replied Joshua, who was also wondering if he should pop inside to the loo quite soon.

  It was while they were all heading inside to get a thinking biscuit that Gary spotted some marks on the ground outside the Belchers’ house at number 3.

  ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Amber’s left us a message after all.’ The children gathered around a series of scratchings in the dirt.

  ‘What does it say?’ asked Joshua. ‘It’s not proper writing,’ he said confidently. Joshua was sure about writing. He could recognize all the letters except S, which he sometimes got back to front. ‘It doesn’t look like a message,’ he continued.

  ‘They’re runes,’ said Gary, ‘Viking letters. They’re telling us she’s gone on a journey,’ he declared. ‘Look – that’s the symbol for journey and that’s the one for sun. I think she’s gone on a journey and she’ll be back before dark. We don’t need to worry.’

  The children went and sat by the play tent and, sure enough, before long Amber popped up from behind the mulberry bush.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Katie.

  ‘I have been on a great adventure in a ship that went across land and journeyed to a place of wonder. Did you get my message?’

  ‘Gary read it,’ said Joshua with pride. Gary blushed.

  It took them some time to work out that Amber had in fact been to Sainsbury’s in the back of Mrs Belcher’s old Volvo. The Belcher family were keen on whole foods and usually only ate things that had been soaked overnight. Everyone knew though th
at Mrs Belcher had a sweet tooth and every now and then snuck off to the supermarket to buy cream cakes. Amber told them all about her thrilling adventure, though she did say that there had also been a strange smell in the car. Joshua explained that the Belchers ate a lot of beans.

  ‘What did Mrs Belcher say about you being in her car?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Amber. ‘It was very odd. I tapped her once or twice on the shoulder to tell her a bigger ship was coming right towards us, and I didn’t think she’d seen it, but she just pretended that she hadn’t heard me.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t see you,’ said Gary. ‘Maybe no one can except us.’

  ‘But,’ said Amber, ‘it was a very good adventure, for I have found the very thing I need.’ And she held up a large grey cloth with the words FOR SALE written across it.

  ‘It’s a sail for my boat.’

  ‘No,’ said Gary, ‘it’s a tarpaulin with writing. It’s a FOR SALE sign from that car on the front.’

  Amber eyed him with exaggerated patience. ‘It may have been for sale but now it’s for a sail for my boat.’

  That evening, when Night had already begun to ride her horse, Hrimfaxi, across the sky and darkness was settling around the house, Katie was finishing her turn at the washing-up. They had left Amber and Ratatosk marvelling over noodles that came in a plastic pot.

  ‘I like your land,’ Amber had said, looking at the large garden and poking at something that Gary said was supposed to be meat.

  ‘It’s not ours exactly,’ Katie explained. ‘It belongs to all seven of the houses in the terrace. In the old days it was very smart, and there were big picnics and tea parties in that garden. It’s all a bit dilapidated now, but I’ve seen pictures of when Mum grew up here as a girl, and Mrs Marchmont still had a Mr Marchmont. Our family has lived in this house for three generations.

  Amber nodded. ‘It must be a powerful land.’

  Katie looked out of the kitchen window at the old garden. Gary was sitting at the table with a library book about boats open in front of him. He imagined the words in runes, as pictures telling him how to calm the seas and find his way by the stars. As he sat there a thought occurred to him: ‘By the light of a star, there’s no telling how far, a ship could sail over the sea.’