“Here…that other one, Water Stallion, is tacking again,” Starri said. From his position aft it was easier for him to see both vessels at once.
Thorgrim twisted around and felt the pull of the wounds in his chest. Just as Starri had said, Water Stallion was coming about once more, turning from larboard tack to starboard, which would have her closing with the shore again.
“She’s in chase,” Thorgrim said, suddenly understanding what he was looking at. “Water Stallion stood off to gain sea room, and now she is tacking so she might head Far Voyager off. She’s chasing her.”
Thorgrim looked back at Starri and Starri nodded, slowly. “You’re right, Thorgrim,” he said. “The two of them would have kept company if they had been sailing together, would have both sailed off shore and then tacked around.”
Thorgrim looked back toward the two longships. Water Stallion was not Grimarr’s ship, but it might as well have been, since Bersi was Grimarr’s man. He shook his head. Whatever had motivated Grimarr to order him, Thorgrim, killed, was now driving him to see Far Voyager run to ground. Thorgrim still had no idea what that might be.
“We must reach Far Voyager,” Thorgrim said. “Quickly.”
“Quickly,” Starri agreed.
To Thorgrim’s great frustration, however, they were already moving as fast through the water as they could, and his minor adjustments of the sail and Starri’s fiddling with the course he steered had a negligible impact on their speed. But the curach and the longship were on converging courses, closing with one another, and that was good. Whoever had command of Far Voyager was holding her course close to shore. He was using the fact that the land tended away to the west, ever so slightly, to keep close to the treacherous rocks and make it more and more risky for Water Stallion to close with her. Thorgrim suspected that Agnarr, with his hard-won knowledge of the Irish coast, was at least playing a part in the navigation.
The curach plunged on. Thorgrim considered the four moving elements at play here. Water Stallion, Far Voyager, and the boat were all racing to meet on some spot of ocean where their courses would intercept, while the fourth element, the sun, was moving steadily toward the horizon. Who would reach what first he could not tell, but the outcome of that four-way race, which would be determined in the next hour or so, would change everything.
Three vessels, closing with one another over a gray-green sea, the shadows of their sails growing longer on the water. And somewhere, presumably south of the headland that blocked Thorgrim’s view of the rest of the coast, were two more ships, the rest of Grimarr’s fleet. If they suddenly appeared, then everything would once again be thrown into question.
“We will reach Far Voyager first,” Thorgrim said. He was not wishing it was so. He could see it was so. He could see the distance between him and his ship, the distance between Far Voyager and Water Stallion, their points of sail.
“I’m not so sure, Night Wolf,” Starri said. He was rubbing the split arrowhead he wore around his neck between his thumb and fingers.
“I am,” Thorgrim said.
He was right. Water Stallion was still a half a mile off and well to leeward when the curach came within hailing distance of Far Voyager. Their approach seemed to go unnoticed, or if it had been it did not generate enough excitement to warrant even a shout from the longship. Just two men approaching in an open boat. They were no more than fifty feet away, Far Voyager charging down on them as if intent on running them over, before Thorgrim could even be certain they had been seen.
Someone standing near Far Voyager’s bow pointed, but Thorgrim could not see who it was. He saw someone running aft. A shock of yellow hair near the stern. Harald…he thought. And beside him, the unmistakable bulk of Ornolf the Restless.
He stood in the boat and waved both hands above his head. He saw Harald point, saw him run to the side of the ship, pause, and then race for the bow. Thorgrim could hear him calling out to him, to the men of Far Voyager he could not tell. The words were lost in the wind and the rush of water.
“Come right up on the leeward side and I’ll toss a rope,” Thorgrim said to Starri, who was still at the steering oar, and Starri nodded. Twenty-five feet and Far Voyager was looming above them now, looking much larger than Thorgrim remembered her, the water rolling white along her side as she parted the seas with her fine oak stem.
He could see men scrambling along her deck, grabbing up the sheets and tacks of the straining sail, preparing to bring the ship to a standstill, but he would save them that effort. As the elegant, curving sweep of the bow came rushing past, Starri pushed the steering oar over. The boat spun up into the wind and Thorgrim, who was now standing on the curach’s starboard side, sent a rope arcing through the air. It landed across Far Voyager’s rail and eager hands grabbed it up.
The curach swung around and came up hard against the longship’s hull, tossing and bucking in the wake, dragged along like a child’s toy. Thorgrim heard his name called out, and Starri’s as well. The two of them grabbed hold of Far Voyager’s rail and powerful and welcoming hands took hold of their clothing and their belts and hauled them aboard, deposited them unceremoniously onto the deck, then helped them to their feet.
The first thing that Thorgrim saw was Harald’s wide, honest face smiling, his blue eyes bright. Thorgrim opened his arms and embraced his son, squeezed him hard as if he could squeeze all the agony of the past few days out of them both. Ornolf was there and he embraced Thorgrim and Starri as well and there were slaps on the back from the men who pressed around.
“I knew you were not dead, father, I knew those whore’s sons couldn’t kill you!” Harald shouted.
“Ha!” Ornolf roared. “Maybe you should be the one we call ‘Deathless’, you cheat death so often. Starri we will simply call ‘the Lunatic’!”
The men escorted Thorgrim and Starri aft, fetched them blankets, fetched them food and ale. Agnarr had the helm and he smiled and shook Thorgrim’s hand, and Starri’s. Thorgrim saw the Irish girl, Conandil, was there, too.
So many tales to tell, so much water under the keel.
But this was not the time for stories. There were greater considerations, more immediate worries.
“Ornolf…Thorgrim…” Agnarr said, not certain now who was in command. “We’re getting damned close to the land. I know little of the rocks or ledges here, but I know this is a dangerous coast.”
Thorgrim looked west. The beaches and cliffs were lost in deep shadow with the setting sun. He looked astern. Water Stallion was well to leeward and she would have to tack again, and soon, before she piled up on the Irish shore. That meant she would never overhaul Far Voyager, not in the hour or so of daylight they had remaining.
“We had better come about, then,” Thorgrim said, and with that the men ran to the lines and Agnarr at the helm pulled the tiller toward him and Far Voyager spun on her heel, coming about onto a larboard tack and standing away from the rock-strewn shore.
Thorgrim looked astern. Water Stallion was tacking as well, turning to head out to sea as Far Voyager was doing. But they were making a great hash of the maneuver, their sail flogging and coming aback, until they were forced to run a few oars out the larboard side to sweep the ship through the turn.
“Ha!” Ornolf shouted. “Damned Irish, they should stick to buggering sheep, they don’t know how to sail a longship!”
“Irish?” Thorgrim asked. “Irish, sailing Water Stallion?”
So many tales to tell.
As Far Voyager settled on her new course, Thorgrim looked down the length of the deck, making careful inspection for the first time since coming back aboard, and in doing so he realized two things. The first was that the crew was much diminished. There were not so many men as there had been when the ship first reached Vík-ló. The second was that many of the men who were there were wounded, and those who were not looked ready to drop from exhaustion.
“There was fighting today?” Thorgrim asked.
“This very morning,” Ornolf said. “An
d a bloody time it was.”
“We must beach the ship for the night,” Thorgrim said. “The men need rest. The wounded need looking after.”
He and Ornolf stepped aft and conferred with Agnarr, who had yielded the helm to Godi. “There’s a small beach north of here,” Agnarr said, “And if we stand out to sea another mile or so we should be able to fetch it on the next tack. I would not care to try and find it in the dark, but I will if I must.”
Thorgrim looked at the sun, at Water Stallion quickly disappearing from view in the fading light, at the coast beyond the larboard quarter. Three elements in motion now. It would be a close thing.
In the end they did not make it to the small beach before the light was gone. But they were close enough that Agnarr felt no great concern as he brought the ship in over the last half mile of water and they felt her bow scrape up on the shingle.
It was, in fact, the best possible outcome. By the time they turned toward shore it was too dark for their pursuers aboard Water Stallion to see the change of course. They would not know Far Voyager had beached for the night; as far as they knew, she was still at sea. Thorgrim hoped the men on Water Stallion would continue to sail north, thinking they were keeping up the chase.
With Far Voyager secured, some of those still fit to move about clambered over the side and onto the beach while others saw to the wounded, attending to their injuries in a manner more thorough than they had been able to accomplish at sea.
The men ashore built a small fire, shielded from sight from the sea by Far Voyager’s hull. They roasted meat and drank ale and mead and they told one another the stories of where they had been, what they had done: the fighting on the beach, Grimarr’s treachery, Harald’s escape, Thorgrim’s near murder, the voyage in the curach. The Northmen loved to tell tales, and here were tales for the telling.
Conandil was sitting close to Harald, and Thorgrim called for her to come and tell them once more of how Fasti had buried the treasure on the beach to the south. It was no secret now that Conandil spoke the Norse tongue, so she told them in their own language of how she was certain she had remembered correctly, and could not understand why the hoard had not been found. But she admitted as well that she had never seen the Irish coast from the sea before being taken at Fearna, and much of it looked the same to her.
Ornolf was well in his cups, but his mood was maudlin, not his usual raging enthusiasm. He slapped Thorgrim on the knee, not hard enough to cause pain, which was also unusual, and said, “I owe you an apology, son. I trusted Grimarr’s words. I thought you were dead. We all did. See here, this is what he brought us.”
He handed Thorgrim a long bundle of cloth. By the weight of it, Thorgrim knew the cloth was wrapped around a sword, but he dared not hope beyond that. He unwrapped the fabric. It was stiff in places with what Thorgrim guessed was dried blood. Then he recognized it as the cloak he had been wearing when he had faced Grimarr. He tossed off more of the folds to reveal the sword and belt around which the cloak was wrapped.
“Iron-tooth,” he said, the words like a prayer.
“How else, we thought, could Grimarr have that if you were not dead? We all thought as much. All, save for Starri Deathless. He was the only one who believed. The only one who stayed behind to look for you.”
Thorgrim, thoroughly embarrassed, waved the words away. “There was no reason for you not to believe,” he said. “Grimarr showed you proof. Or what looked like it. You owe me no apology.”
“And even when young Harald here came back to us,” Ornolf continued, “and told us what the Irish wench had said, still we were not sure of the truth.”
“Every man meets death one day,” Thorgrim said. “It was no dishonor to me for you to believe my day had come, as long as you thought my death was an honorable one.”
“Humph,” Ornolf said and took a deep drink of mead, letting the liquid run down the edges of his mouth, stream through his thick gray and red beard, make dark spots on his tunic. “In any event, I will never make that mistake again,” he said. “I will never think you dead until you and I are drinking together in Odin’s hall.”
“I only hope I reach that place before you do,” Thorgrim said.
“Why would you say such a thing?” Ornolf asked. “You may not be the young man you once were, but I am older than you by far, and should be expected to go first.”
“True,” Thorgrim said. “But once you have been there a week, I do not think there will be any drink left for those who come after.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
That is how the thread-goddess
woke me from my dream.
Gisli Sursson’s Saga
Harald Broadarm was no stranger to exhaustion, but the weariness he felt as the talk and fire died away was beyond anything he had known before. The fighting, the swimming, the fear, the knocks on the head had all taken their toll. And foolishly he had tried to make a decent show of drinking with the older men, had kept an eye on the amount Ornolf was consuming and tried to match it. He figured if he could keep pace with his grandfather then he would gain a reputation for holding his drink in the same way he was gaining a reputation for fighting.
But he soon fell behind and sensibly he gave up trying, but not before he could feel the effects of the liquor piled on top of the many other things that were dragging him down to sleep.
If I had not been hit so often on the head, or if I had not had to swim with Conandil scratching at me, then I would have kept up with old Ornolf, Harald told himself, knowing full well it was not true.
The fire had faded to little more than a desultory flame and glowing embers as one by one the men of Far Voyager drifted off. Some climbed back aboard and pulled out furs and bedding, some slept where they fell. Some, like Harald, mustered the energy to drag their bedding down to the beach, clear of the groaning wounded. Out in the dark, beyond the light of the fire, a ring of sentries stared out into the night, alert to any threats that might materialize from the wild Irish hinterlands.
Harald tossed a bearskin down on the gravel beach, lay down on top of it and pulled a wool blanket over him. He felt his whole body relax, the tension dissolve away like butter melting in a pan over a fire. His thoughts grew disjointed, his mind seemed to float off, disconnected, and he felt sleep wash warm and comforting over him.
And then something was shaking him and his first thought was that it was some small animal, poking around, a squirrel or a rabbit or something like that. He made some guttural noise which he hoped were words. But apparently they were not, or at least not words to frighten away whatever was poking at him because the poking did not stop. And eventually whatever it was managed to poke through the thick blanket of sleep, enough so that Harald half opened his eyes. Conandil was kneeling beside him.
He looked up at her, confused, and did not speak. Her hair was falling around her face, and her pale skin was lit softly by the dying light of the fire. For a moment they just looked at one another, then at last Conandil said, “Harald?” It was a question, like she was asking him if it was really him, or if he was really there in mind and body.
“Yes?” Harald said, slowly casting off the torpor of sleep.
She was quiet for a moment, as if unsure what to say. “I’m afraid,” she said at last, the words halting. “I’m afraid, sleeping with all these men so near me.”
Harald sat up on his elbow and looked around. Humps of sleeping men were scattered around the beach, just visible in the glow of the embers. “There’s nothing to fear,” Harald said. “These are my people, not the Danes or the Irish.”
“Please…” Conandil said. “Please…could I sleep near you?”
“Of course,” Harald said. He still had a foot in the world of dreams and was eager to get back to it. “Lie down here,” he suggested.
“No,” Conandil said. “Not here. Farther away. Away beyond the others.”
Harald sighed. She was suggesting he climb out of his warm bed, gather up the fur and the blanket and trudge som
ewhere out in the dark, and he felt like doing none of those things.
“Please…” Conandil said again, the light from the remains of the fire reflecting in her big, brown eyes. Her face and neck and shoulders were tiny, vulnerable looking. Harald sighed again.
“Very well,” he said. He stood, gathered up the bedding, and followed Conandil out into the dark, up the beach, toward the dark country beyond. They passed a sentry sitting on a piece of driftwood who startled at the sound of their approach and Harald wondered if he had been nodding off.
“Oh, Harald, it’s you,” the man said. He stood and leaned close to look at Harald’s face in the muted light, and Harald could see it was Vani Unnarrson, one of Ornolf’s men who had sailed with them from Vik. “What are you about?”
“Just looking for a spot to bed down,” Harald said, nodding out toward the dark.
“Oh,” Vani said. He glanced over at Conandil. “Oh,” he said again. He nodded and gave a half smile. “Very good, then. Very good.”
Harald and Conandil moved on and Harald could not help but think that Vani’s response was very odd, but he put it out of mind. He came to a place where the beach was all but lost in the dark and he spread the bear skin out and laid down on it and Conandil laid beside him and he pulled the blanket over them. He closed his eyes and tried to let the tension drain away once more, but Conandil was squirming around beside him, jabbing him with her elbows, doing what, he could not tell.
He tried to roll away from her, but then she had her arm across his chest and he could feel her face nuzzling into his neck, felt her lips brushing against his skin, and suddenly the sentry’s words and tone made more sense to him.
The Lord of Vik-lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3) Page 28
