by Tim Severin
When he finally spoke he was hesitant. ‘Yes, Knut’s most trusted earl is the same Thorkel who was a member of your fellowship. Thorkel has become a great war leader, won riches, earned the confidence of the king. I believe that you should be proud of what he has become, rather than remember what happened thirty years ago.’
His words made little impression. I could feel the scepticism of the crowd grow around me, their mood suddenly changed. Kjartan felt it too. He knew that his mission was on the verge of collapse. He scanned the faces of the crowd. I was standing close to the front, looking up at him and, like all the others, waiting for him to continue. Our eyes met, and suddenly Kjartan announced.
‘You don’t have to take my word for it. One of your own brotherhood has met Thorkel the Tall at King Knut’s court, and he can tell you about him now.’ He beckoned to me and, after a moment’s surprised hesitation, I stepped forward to stand beside him. He gripped my elbow and whispered in my ear, ‘Thorgils, for the memory of Edgar the huntsman, try to say something to make them accept my proposal.’
Turning to face my audience, my breath seemed to leave my lungs. A couple of hundred warriors were looking at me curiously and I could scarcely breathe. For the first time in my life I had been called upon to address a large gathering and my mind was in turmoil. I realised that I held the balance between two men to whom I owed great debts: Thrand, who had been my mentor over the years, and Kjartan, who had stood by me when I was in desperate need in England. I had to find a middle way without dishonouring either man.
Odinn came to my rescue.
I cleared my throat and, stammering over the first few syllables, said, ‘I am Thorgils, a follower of Odinn, and I have always let the High One be my guide – Kjartan is my friend and I know him to be an honest man, so I believe he is carrying an honest message. Thrand is also my friend and has told me of the cowardice of Thorkel and the others in the fight against Earl Haakon. Yet I have seen how high Thorkel the Tall then rose in the court of King Knut, and I know that he would never have achieved such fame and wealth if he had stayed to fight and die. So I say – let Odinn’s wisdom guide you, and accept this as his sign. Seventy survivors of our felag came before Earl Haakon for judgement, and this is the seventieth of the High One’s sayings.’
Here I paused to draw breath before reciting:
‘It is better to live than to lie a corpse,
I saw flames rise before a rich man’s pyre
and before his door he lay dead.’
Kjartan saw his chance. He quoted the next verse for me.
‘The lame rides a horse, the handless is herdsman
The deaf in battle is bold
No good can come of a corpse.’
A low mutter of approval came from the crowd, and a voice from the back shouted, ‘Forget about Thorkel. Odinn had other plans for him. I’m all for the accepting Knut’s silver.’
One by one, the members of the council spoke up and all were in favour of Kjartan’s proposition. Only Thrand failed to speak. He sat there silent, and on his face was the same distant expression that I had seen while he gazed into the ship’s wake and thought of the defeat at Hjorunga Bay.
As the assembly began to dissolve, Kjartan took me aside to thank me. ‘Your speech made all the difference,’ he said. ‘Without it, the men would not have committed themselves to fight for Knut.’ Then he smiled. ‘With my wooden leg, I liked the bit about the lame being able to ride a horse. But I’m not sure that when I get back to London I should tell Gisli One Hand that, according to you and Odinn, he should become a cowherd.’
‘It was All-Father Odinn who spoke through me and swayed the minds of the audience,’ I replied. What I did not tell Kjartan was that, after a month in Jomsburg, I knew that the new order of Jomsviking could never resemble the felag Thrand had known. The new Jomsvikings were driven by their thirst for silver, not glory, and in the end they would have accepted Knut’s bribe whatever Thrand had said. By citing the High One, I had given Thrand a reason to accept their decision with no loss to his own sense of honour or duty to his fallen comrades.
ELEVEN
WE WERE SUMMONED to earn our fifteen marks of silver early in September. Knut moved against the forces massing to oppose him, and sent a messenger to tell the Jomsvikings to join his fleet, now on its way from England. His messenger slipped into our citadel disguised as a Saxon trader because Knut’s enemies already lay between us and the man whose pay we had taken. To the west of Jomsburg a great Norwegian force was raiding Knut’s Danish territories, while their allies, the Swedes, were harrying the king’s lands in Skane across the Baltic Sea. This left the felag dangerously isolated and our council met to discuss how best we should respond. After much debate it was decided to send two shiploads of volunteers, the most experienced warriors, to run the gauntlet and join the king. The rest of the Jomsvikings, fewer than a hundred men, would remain to garrison the citadel against any enemy attack.
‘Stay and complete your training,’ Thrand advised me. He was packing his war gear into the greased leather bag which also served as his sleeping sack while on campaign. As one of the most experienced fighters in the felag, he had been appointed second in command of one of the two ships in our little expeditionary force. My speech in defence of Thorkel the Tall at the assembly seemed to have done no damage to our friendship, though Thrand was so taciturn that it was difficult to tell what he was thinking.
‘I’ve already volunteered to join the expedition,’ I told him. ‘If I’m to take Knut’s silver, then I feel I ought to earn it. Besides, our battle drills are becoming very repetitive.’
‘As you wish,’ said Thrand. He slid his sword halfway out of its scabbard to check the blade for rust, and then carefully eased it back into the sheath. The scabbard was lined with unwashed sheep wool, the natural oils in the fleece protecting the metal from decay. As an added precaution he began to wind a linen strip around the hilt to seal the gap where the blade entered the scabbard. He paused from the work and looked up.
‘Be warned: Knut wants the Jomsviking as warriors in his line of battle. That is what you have trained for. But if it comes to a sea action, all that training is next to useless. There’s no chance for the swine array or shield walls. Ship fights are close up and brutal. Most of the engagement is pitiless and chaotic, with a good deal of luck as to who emerges the victor.’
That afternoon I went to the armoury to withdraw my weaponry for the expedition. When I had been a new recruit, the crippled armourer had been casual, issuing me with a mail shirt in need of repair and the weapons that were closest to hand. This time, knowing that I was going into action, he took greater care, and I emerged from the armoury with a helmet that fitted me properly and a byrnie of a new design. Attached to the helmet was a small curtain of mail that hung across my lower face, protecting my throat. He also produced for me a good sword with an inlaid metal handle, two daggers, half a dozen javelins, an ash spear and a round limewood shield, as well as a short-handled battleaxe. When I stacked this assortment of weaponry on the ground beside Thrand, he commented, ‘if I were you, I would change the grip on that sword. Wrap that showy metalwork with tarred cord so that your hand does not slip when your palm gets sweaty. And you’ll need a second shield.’
‘A second shield?’
‘Every man brings a second shield. Nothing fancy, just a light wooden disc. They’ll be arranged along the side of the vessel – there’s a special slot along the upper strake to hold them – and they’ll make a fine display. In my experience much of warfare is decided by appearances. Strike fear into your enemy by how you look or act before the first blow and you’ve won half the battle.’
A spoked wheel with alternating fields of red, black and white was the pattern that the council chose for our insignia, and I had to admit it looked imposing when the shields were set in place. They gave our two ships a professional air, though a trained eye would have noted that the vessels, like the Jomsviking harbour, were antiquated and in
a poor repair. The two drakkar, longships of medium size, were all that now remained of a Jomsviking fleet of thirty vessels, the great majority of which had been sunk or captured in Earl Haakon’s time. These two survivors were leaky and their timbers were suspect. The felag’s shipwrights had struggled to make them seaworthy, caulking seams and applying a thick layer of black pitch to the outside of the hulls. But the deck planks were warped and cracked, and there were splits and shakes in the masts. Fortunately the Jomsburg lowlands grew flax so we were able to obtain new sails and rigging at short notice. But nothing could hide the fact, as we set out on a bright and crisp September day, that our two vessels were unhandy and slow, and their sixty-man crews were badly out of practice as sailors.
A fully manned drakkar offers little comfort to her crew. By the time we had loaded aboard all our weapons and equipment, the spaces between the sea chests which served as our oar benches were so crammed with gear that there was very little room to move about. Our only gangway was a walkway of planks, laid along the middle of the vessel to connect the small platform in the bows of the drakkar with the stern deck, where our captain stood. He was a squat thug of a man, a Jute who had lost one eye in a minor skirmish and the wound made him look like a bandit. Indeed, as I glanced round at my companions with their diversity of homelands and racial features, I thought they looked more like a pirate crew than a trained fighting unit. The truth was that we were hired mercenaries, setting out for money and the chance of loot – I wondered how long our discipline and our loyalty to the felag would last.
Our inexperience showed in the chaos of our embarkation. We found our places about the drakkars, unlashed the oars from their stowage and fitted them to the thole straps. Men took practice pulls with their oars to test their length and find their own best position. Unless they were careful, they knocked into their neighbours or struck the man sitting directly in front, hitting him in the back with the loom of the oar. There were oaths and angry grumbling in several languages and it was some time before our captain was able to order the lines to be cast off. Our drakkars pulled slowly out of the harbour, their oars moving to an uneven beat as though we were two crippled insects.
The current was in our favour once we emerged through the disused harbour gates, and as we rowed towards the river mouth it became obvious which of our oarsmen had learned to row on rivers and lakes and which were proper seamen. Those from calmer waters pulled their oars in a long flat sweep, while the experienced mariners used a shorter, chopping action, and of course the two styles did not match. So there were more oaths and arguments among the rowers, until our drakkars began to pitch and roll on the first waves from the sea, and one of the river rowers sprained his wrist. Luckily there was a brisk east wind to speed us on our way, so we hoisted our brand-new sail, hauled the oars inboard and relaxed, leaving the Jutish captain and his helmsman to steer.
‘Thank Svantevit for this wind,’ said the Wend beside me, reaching inside his shirt and producing a little wooden image of his God. He found a niche for the talisman beside his seat and put it there, then nodded towards the flat shoreline on our left. ‘Anyone know this coast?’
A man three places from us must have been a Sjaellander, for he answered, ‘Used to sail past it with my uncle when we were bringing his farm produce to Rugen. Not much to see, but easy enough once you know the channels. Have to watch out for sand and mudbanks, but there are plenty of creeks and bays handy for shelter if the wind blows up.’
‘Rich country?’ asked another voice hopefully.
‘No, just farmlands; nothing of note until you get to Ringsted and that’s Knut’s domain, so I guess we’ll be on our best behaviour if we stop there.’
‘We won’t be making any stops,’ said a heavily bearded Skanian, one of our Danish volunteers. ‘Rumour has it that Knut’s fleet has left Limfiord and is heading for the sound and we’re to rendezvous with him there.’
He spat over the side, and watched the spittle float away in our wake, judging the speed of our vessel. ‘She’s no racer,’ he commented. ‘In a wind like this she ought to be half as fast again.’
‘Ballast’s all wrong,’ said a voice from somewhere amidships. ‘She’s too heavy in the bow.’
‘Reckon the mast isn’t stepped quite right either,’ came a third opinion. ‘Should be shifted aft a hand’s breadth and the main halyard set up tighter.’ As the discussion gathered pace I realised that sailors could spend as much time discussing the rig of their vessels as warriors in barracks spent comparing the merits of weapons.
That evening we landed on a stretch of deserted shore to make a meal and rest. There is no cooking hearth aboard a drakkar, so the crew eat cold food if they do not land. We brought the vessels close inshore, turned stern on, and after setting anchors to haul them off next morning, we backed water with the oars until the sterns touched the sand. That way, if there was an emergency or we needed to depart in a hurry, we could scramble aboard and leave in double-quick time. Not that we expected trouble. Few villages could muster enough men or courage to dispute the landing of two shiploads of armed men. The only glimpse we had of the local inhabitants was the distant figure of a shepherd running away down sand dunes to take a warning to his people. He left his flock behind, so we butchered ten of his sheep and feasted.
Next morning the wind was fluky, changing in strength and direction as we resumed our coastal passage. But the sun shone in a sky flecked with high, fast-moving white clouds. It felt like a holiday as we headed onward under sail, keeping well offshore.
‘Wish all campaigning was like this,’ commented the Sjaelander, who was proving to be the ship’s chatterer.
By now most of the crew had learned how to make best use of the cramped space, stretching out on the lids of the storage chests that held their war gear. Folded sails and padded jerkins were their cushions. Thrand, I noticed, never joined us. As we sailed onward, he took up his position on the little foredeck, standing there watching the forward horizon or, more often, scanning the shoreline as we moved steadily northward.
Shortly before noon I became aware that Thrand’s gaze had not shifted for some time. He was looking towards the land, his attention fixed. Something about his posture alerted me to turn around and look back at our captain. He was glancing in the same direction too, and then looking astern at the waves and sky, as if to check the wind speed and direction, and watching the bronze weathervane on our stern post. Everything seemed to be in good order. Our two ships were moving steadily forward, nothing had changed.
The Sjaelander, who had been stretched out on his back enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face, lazily rolled over on his side and raised his head to peer over the side of the drakkar. ‘Soon be passing the entrance to the Stege Bight,’ he said, and then, ‘ah yes, there it is, I can see sails on the far side of that little island. They must be coming out from West Sjaelland.’ He rolled back on his side and settled himself comfortably. ‘Probably merchantmen on their way out to the sound.’
‘If so, they’ve come to trade with swords not purses. Those are warships,’ said the big Dane. He was standing on the oar bench, an arm shielding his eyes from the sun’s reflection on the water, as he looked towards the distant sails. There was a sudden stir among our crew. Men sat up and looked around, several got to their feet and squinted in the same direction.
‘How do you know they’re warships?’ asked one of the Wends. He had been one of the river rowers and this was clearly the first time he had been to sea.
‘Some of those sails have stripes. Sign of a fighting ship,’ answered the Dane.
I looked at our own new sail. It was unmarked. ‘Maybe they’ll mistake us for merchant ships as well.’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Dane. ‘Merchant ships don’t carry low, broad sails like ours. Their sails are taller and not so wide. As soon as they clear the island and get a good view of us, they’ll recognise the outline of a drakkar hull and know we’re not a pair of harmless trading ships. However, thi
s may be a piece of luck. West Sjaelland is ruled by Earl Ulf, one of Knut’s liegemen, and those ships could be on the way to reinforce Knut’s war fleet. We’ll be able to sail in company with them and if we run into the king’s enemies they’ll think twice about attacking such a large force.’
When the strange ships emerged from behind the dunes and into plain view, we saw that the big Dane had been correct, at least in part. Five ships came out from the sound. Three were drakkars like our own and two were trading knorrs, apparently under escort. Their position put them slightly upwind of us, and we watched them set their course to match our track, gradually closing the gap between us, as if to join us.
It is a commonplace to say that everything happens slowly at sea until the last moment, then all is haste and flurry, but it is true. For a while very little happened as all seven vessels carried steadily on their way – the five Danish ships sailing in company while our own helmsmen kept the two Jomsviking vessels close together, no more than fifty paces apart. As the gap between us and the approaching squadron dwindled, we gazed across at the strangers trying to learn more about them, until eventually our own Dane was able to confirm that they were indeed Earl Ulf’s men. He knew the earl’s livery and even thought he recognised some of the warriors aboard. Their two knorrs were clearly troopships carrying Danish levies, and their slower speed meant that the junction between our squadrons was leisurely.
Finally, in early afternoon, the leading Danish drakkar had pulled slightly ahead of her consorts, and was close enough for our Jutish captain to call out a greeting. ‘Well met,’ he bellowed, cupping his hands around his mouth so the sound carried over the waves washing along his vessel’s side. ‘Any news of Knut’s fleet? We go to join the king.’
