Chapter Twenty-one
As Cuthred rowed the two-oared boat down the fjord, Shef saw a young man bounding down the rocky slope from one of the outlying farmsteads, waving desperately to be picked up. Shef signed to Cuthred to pull over.
“Maybe he can tell us what's going on.”
The young man stepped out from one sharp-pointed rock to another, gauged the rise and fall of the boat on the waves, and dropped into the prow like a seal sliding on to a rock. He was smiling broadly.
“Thanks, mates,” he said. “The grind comes every five years maybe. I don't want to miss it this time.”
“What is the grind?” said Shef, waving down Cuthred's furious scowl.
“The grind?” The young man sounded as if he was unable to believe his ears. “The grind? Why—it's when the whales come, in a flock, a school. Come inside the skerries. Then, if we can get outside them, we drive them inshore, beach them. Kill them. Blubber. Oil. Whale-meat for the whole winter.” His teeth showed in an ecstatic grin.
“Kill a school of whales?” Shef repeated. “How many will there be?”
“Maybe fifty, maybe sixty.”
“Kill sixty whales,” snarled Cuthred. “If you could do it, you lying Norse walrus-get, you could never eat them if you sat and ate till Doomsday.”
“They're only the pilot whales,” said the young man, sounding hurt. “Not the sperm whales or the big baleen whales. They're only ten, twelve ells long.”
Fifteen to eighteen feet, thought Shef. Maybe it could be true.
“What do you kill them with?” he asked.
The young man grinned again. “Long lances,” he said. “Or else this.” He pulled a knife from his belt, long, broad, single-edged. Instead of a plain point it had a long sharpened hook, sharpened, Shef could see, on both its outside and inside edges.
“A grind-knife,” the young man said. In his thick accent, the “f” became a “v”, the long “i” an “oi.” “Grindar-knoivur. Jump out of the boat in shallow water, straddle the whale, feel for its backbone, stab in to the side of it. Pull back. Cut the spine. Ha! Ha! Much meat, fat for the winter.”
As the boat emerged from the mouth of the fjord, the young man looked round, saw the trail of dories all pulling rapidly away from them to the north, and without further words sat down on the thwart next to Cuthred, took an oar and began to row alongside him. Shef was surprised to see a sour grin on Cuthred's face, perhaps at the young Norseman's obvious assumption that Cuthred the mighty berserk needed assistance.
Ahead of them Shef saw the boats eventually ease to a halt, form a loose circle on the waves. And then, perhaps a half-mile beyond, Shef saw for the first time the school of whales they were pursuing: first a slow white spout against the gray sea, then another, then more of them all together. And beneath them, just a glimpse of black backs rolling easily in turn.
The men in the boats saw the rise as well, Shef could see them standing up, shaking their long-headed lances, and hear faint cries of excitement. Even from a distance, though, he could hear Brand's bull roar shouting them down, giving what sounded like a long string of explicit orders, boat by boat.
“You have to have a grind-captain,” the young man explained between strokes. “If the boats do not work together, the whales will slip out. Everybody works together, and then we all share equally. One share for each man, one share for each boat, captain gets a double share.”
Shef's boat came up with the main cluster just as they began to separate and move off. At the last moment the young man stood up, hailed a relative, and stepped from boat to boat with the same ease that he had joined them, pausing only to wave a cheerful farewell. Then all the Norse whaleboats, mostly four- or six-oared, moved off in a long unraveling string. Brand, positioned at the center of the line, turned to Shef as his boat moved off and shouted across the waves: “You two! Stay at the back, and don't do anything. Keep out of it!”
For a long time, Cuthred swung determinedly at the oars, maintaining station on the last boat in the long line. He seemed, Shef thought looking at his sweating frame, to have grown even stronger in the last few weeks, as solid food put a layer of fat over his tight-drawn mill-slave muscles. Yet it was hard work for one man to keep up even with the four-oared boats, all manned by skilled seamen. Cuthred stuck to it grimly. But in any case the whaleboats were not rowing at their maximum speed all the time. As the chase progressed, Shef realized there was a skill in it, a form of tactics.
Brand's first aim had been to get a line of boats outside the whale-pod, to the west, between them and the skerries that marked off the coastal channel from the open Atlantic. Once he had done that, he tried to move them inshore. Boats would swerve in close to the pod, and then stop, the crew leaning over and slapping the water with their oars. What this sounded like to whale-ears, who could tell? But the whales plainly did not like it, swerving away, trying to escape. Sometimes they tried to accelerate, to get round the far end of the line of boats. Then the lead dories would swing across, beat the water, force them to slow or turn back. Once it seemed as if the whale-leader had decided to turn round and swim back to the south, towards Shef and Cuthred bringing up the rear. For minutes the water was churned by black backs swarming close together, some swimming forward, some already turning back. Then all the boats moved in together, shouting and splashing, herding the whales towards the rocky shoals they feared.
Brand was relying also on panic, Shef realized as he got them moving again. And he had a particular place in mind. It was not enough to drive the whales on to the rock-bound coast. If it came to that they might turn and break through the line by sheer force. They had to be driven on to a killing-ground: a beach, for choice, but anyway an inlet or cove that they would be prepared to swim into but whose mouth could be firmly blocked. Best, too, if it could be done at high tide so that the ebb would leave the beasts stranded.
Slowly Brand jockeyed boats and whales till he had them where he wanted. The whales in a frothing mass just outside the entrance to the bay he had marked, the boats in a semi-circle from point to point of the bay. Then Brand waved his lance in one wide sweep and the boats moved in.
Brand himself made the first kill, his boat coming up alongside a slow-swimming cow-whale, while he leaned out, one foot on the gunwale, and drove home the long lance with its barbed head just forward of the low dorsal fin. From their position fifty yards behind Shef and Cuthred could see the instant flow of dark blood into the water—water whipped up instantly into a frenzy by lashing flukes.
The dying whale must have emitted some underwater bellow of agony, for the rest of the pod seemed to panic immediately, leaping forward away from the terror in their rear. Instantly they found themselves in the shallows, bellies grinding on gravel, tails rising out of the water as they fought for room. The other boats came in as one for the kill, a headsman in each prow looking for a place to plant his barb, the men shouting each other on.
As he watched Shef saw the first man leave his boat. It might have been the young man they had ferried, clutching his grind-knife, but he was followed by a dozen others, plunging recklessly into the turmoil of heaving bodies, seizing fins and trying to straddle their prey. Knives raised, plunged, plunged again as the men tried to find the vulnerable spot between vertebrae, where the hooked knife, hauled upwards, could sever the spinal cord and cause instant death. The whales twisted and thrashed, unable to fight back, unable to swim out, trying only to keep their tormentors from the kill.
“Looks risky,” muttered Shef.
“But it isn't.” Cuthred's voice had a note of disgust in it. “No more than killing sheep. Those things don't fight back, I don't think they have any teeth even. You could get squashed between two of them, but they're not even trying to hurt each other.”
A group of men had hold of one whale and were running it up the beach as far as they could, seizing it by its fins and by the spears and blades protruding from it. They left it squirming weakly and ran down into the water for another.
Already the whole surface of the bay had turned red from the streams of arterial blood pumping into it from the whales' punctured hearts. From the melee Shef saw a calf whale struggling free, having abandoned its dying mother. Barely six feet long, it floundered out of the shallows and made towards them for the open sea. A boat steered in front of it, a man leapt on to its back, grind-knife flailing. The spurt of blood that rose leapt into the boat, splashing his oar-mates. Shef heard them roar with laughter, saw another group on the shore already starting to flense the blubber from a dying whale, cramming handfuls into their mouths, and shouting with manic glee.
“I think we've seen enough of this,” said Cuthred. “Nobody ever called me squeamish, but if I hurt people it's because I don't like them. I've got nothing against whales. I don't even like whalemeat.”
He began to pull away from the cove of butchery, with Shef's silent agreement. The Norsemen, intent on their work, ignored them. By the time Brand thought to look up, they had gone.
Outside the cove, Shef was surprised to see how fat the sun had gone down. At this time of year in a latitude as high as theirs, there could hardly be said to be a nighttime. The sky remained pale continuously. Yet the sun did drop below the horizon for a short while every day. It was now close to it, the low red disc beneath the clouds sending long shadows across a placid sea. Cuthred bent to the oars and urged the boat along what would be a long trip back to a bed and fire. Shef became aware that it was hours since he had eaten or drunk; and he had begun the long boat-ride dehydrated from the steam-bath.
“Have you anything to eat in the boat?” he asked.
Cuthred grunted, “I always keep something in the cuddy there in the stern. Butter and cheese, a crock of milk, fresh water. Let me get us going and we can take turns to row and eat.”
Shef found Cuthred's provision box in its compartment and hauled it out. It was well stocked, but for the moment Shef was content to drink water, chew on a wrinkled apple stored from the autumn before.
“You know,” he remarked between bites. “This is the place Brand warned you away from. Inside the skerries, north of the island. I guess none of them come here much, from what he said. But with the grind out they wouldn't take any notice of where they were. And if there was anything dangerous it probably wouldn't want to mess with the grind boats. Not all of them together, all worked up.”
“But it might just fancy two men on their own with the sun dropping,” concluded Cuthred. His teeth showed in a snarl. “Well, just let it try.”
Shef threw his apple-core overboard, squinted into the long shadows, reached forward and put a hand on Cuthred's brawny arm. He pointed silently.
Perhaps a quarter of a mile away, a giant fin showed above the water. It seemed almost man high, stuck straight up at right angles to the water. A black back showed beneath it, and then more of them, fins coming up out of the water, backs swirling and then dipping down like the top of enormous wheels.
“Killers,” said Cuthred positively. They had seen several schools of them on the journey north in the Walrus, and each time Brand had gone to the side and regarded them speculatively. “Never heard of them attacking a ship,” he had said. “Never heard of them attacking a boat either. But then, you wouldn't. If one of them decided to attack a boat there wouldn't be anyone left to tell about it. Seals are their meat. People must look pretty much like seals to them. I never go in the water if there's any of them about.”
The lead fin suddenly changed course, angling sharply towards them. Without hesitation Cuthred swung the boat and headed for the rocky shore a hundred yards off. There was no chance of landing on it, it ran straight down into the water, but any kind of shoal or rock projection would keep the great beast off. It had certainly seen them, or sensed them. The fin was coming straight at them, a white wave cresting in front of it as it tore through the water.
The orcas had sensed the blood spilled in massive quantities into the water. They might have been following the pod of pilot whales themselves, intending to close in and make a kill. Could such a creature feel frustration at being forestalled? Resentment at the snatching of so many potential prey all at once? Anger against the land-apes, for so easily and ruthlessly destroying the whale-kind? It might just have been excitement from the blood, and a sportive urge to even the score against men moving so confidently out of their native element. The bull orca raced down on the small boat with menace in his very line. Shef felt instantly that he meant to toss the boat in the air, catch the men as they came down, and chop them to bits in the water with snaps of his great cone-toothed mouth.
“Head in,” he called to Cuthred. “Right against the rock.”
The boat glided along a sheer rock face, the two men reaching out for handholds to pull it closer in, uncomfortably aware of the deep water still only feet away. The fin lowered, rose up again till its tip was higher than Shef's head, sitting on the thwarts, and the whale surged alongside, almost rasping the boat's seaward gunwale. Shef saw the white markings under the black top, heard the sharp exhalation from the blowhole, saw its cold and careful eye on him. The tail slapped the water, the whale sounded, turning for another pass.
Shef seized an oar, thrust it against the rock, drove the boat a few yards along. Only feet away was the dark opening of a cove, a rocky inlet too small to call a fjord. Inside that the whale would be cramped, might turn away. The rest of the school were here now, sweeping past less closely than the bull-leader, filling the air with the spray from their blowholes.
Cuthred pushed too hard and the boat swerved away from shore. The bull was there instantly, boring in head first. Shef swung an oar, jerked the boat's bow back towards the inlet shore. As one man they thumped the oars into the rowlocks, heaved furiously, two strokes, three, rocketing into the quiet water of the inlet.
Something beneath them, lifting them irresistibly, the boat almost out of the water, starting to tip. If he fell in the water, Shef knew, the next thing he would feel would be great jaws about his middle. He hurled himself sideways, kicking with all his strength, and landed with one leg in the water and the other foot on a tiny rock ledge. A thrust, a heave and he was scrambling on to a tiny flat place, a hearthrug-sized patch of shingle on the rocky shore.
The boat turned over completely as the whale shook its body. Cuthred was launched out like a diver, turned in the air, a shower of objects coming down with him as the boat spilled its contents. His spiked shield, the one made of case-hardened steel, landed a foot from Shef's hand. He watched numbly as Cuthred splashed into the water and the whale turned.
Cuthred trod water for an instant, then seemed to find footing under him. He stepped backwards towards the land, only six feet from where Shef crouched, still thigh deep. Somehow, his sword was in his hand, he leveled it at the great black-and-white jaws boring in. The whale swerved and as it did so Cuthred thrust forward in a classic “long point,” arm and body rigid.
A thump of contact, a sudden flurry, a slap of water from the tail. Then the whale was gone, leaving a thin trail of blood in the sea, and shattered planks where the boat had been.
Cuthred slowly straightened, wiping his sword on his wet sleeve. The provision box floated a few feet from him. He stepped forward again, up to his middle, and without haste gathered it in, turned and waded over to the ledge where Shef still crouched motionless.
“How do we get off here, then?” he asked. “I don't fancy swimming.”
They crouched for a few minutes on the steep rock, looking across the little inlet. The whales were still there, cruising in and out. Once one of them rose to the stern of the boat, floating half-intact ten yards out from shore, took it without haste in its jaws, crunched down.
The two men turned awkwardly to look behind them at the rocky shore. The best that could be said was that it was not completely vertical, rather a stiff slope, steeper than the roof of a house, but made of a jumble of stone. There were handholds and footholds in plenty for a scramble. But the mountain-side seemed to go on and on,
up to the pale sky with never a break. It could take hours to reach the top, hours with never a place to rest. Yet there was no choice. Slowly and carefully, aware of the deadly water a few feet away, the men gathered their meager possessions together. Cuthred had his sword and spiked targe. Impossible to carry them while scrambling up the mountain. After a moment Shef took the sword, cut a length from one leather shoelace, tied sword and shield together and showed Cuthred how to sling both on his back. The rope handles on the provision box could be extended, retied so as to make carrying straps. Shef fixed that on to his own back, made certain his short eating-knife was still in its sheath, the fire-flint he always carried next to it. He carried nothing else except the gold bracelets on his arms, was unarmed save for the belt-knife.
They began, carefully and slowly, to make their way up the mountain-side. For what seemed an age they crept from rock to rock, on all fours all the way, trying to angle round vertical precipices, never quite coming on the impassable, never finding a place to stop, to sit or even stand in safety. Shef's thigh muscles began to ache, then to jump spasmodically. At any moment, he felt, the cramp might strike. Then he would lose his grip and fall, or roll, all the way to the water. Looking down, he saw nothing but unforgiving stone all the way down to the metal-gray sea, still patrolled by the orca fins. He forced himself to thrust himself up another few feet. Brace a foot, push again, haul with all the failing strength of his arms.
A voice was talking to him. Cuthred's, just a few feet above. “Lord,” it said. “Three more steps, two more steps. A place here to rest.”
As if in reaction to what Cuthred said, Shef felt the searing pain of cramp in his right thigh. He knew he had to override it, but there was no strength left. He felt the leg give way, tightened his fingers despairingly on their last hold.
Fingers seized his hair, yanked mercilessly with terrible strength. Shef felt himself lifted off his feet like a puppy, hauled up and over a ledge. He lay belly down, gasping. Cuthred seized him by his breeches and hauled him the last few feet, rolled him over and began to knead his thigh.
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