by MD. Lachlan
‘The boy’s not likely to make it, but the big one’ll fetch a bit at market.’
‘Let me look at the oar,’ said Ofaeti. ‘I have some skill as a shipwright and it won’t be too much bother to fix. I can borrow a bit from your deck and our little boat, if it’s still where we left it.’
‘I like you!’ said Skakki, slapping Ofaeti’s back. ‘I’m glad you’re aboard. Maybe now our luck has changed!’
65 The Ice
Jehan’s heart felt like a cooling rock, his once strong body was now a useless weight as Aelis had pushed his baggage of limbs up onto the horse. The world was fading. His sight had gone, and now the night sounds, once so sharp and clear, seemed muted, far off. Smell, a sense that had been stronger than vision to him, seemed stifled and blunt. The flavours he had known – the laden breezes of the forest, the teeming airs of the meadows, the tarry stink of far-off oceans, the million rots of bog and fen – were gone. In their place was the thin palette of human perceptions.
Aelis had called the horse – a big brindled mare. The animal had come trotting out of the woods to wait beside her while she helped him up.
The two travelled north to the coast and then turned east. Aelis easily found the way through the vast forest, guided by a rune that shone like a beacon. The other horses she had taken from the Raven and his companions followed them at the beginning of their journey. Then she raised her hand to dismiss them and they turned into the deep woods.
Jehan was finding the going very hard physically, almost impossible. His body chafed with the movement of the horse, his joints ached and his muscles trembled. His mind came back to him and he often wept with the memory of the things he had done, the people he had killed.
Aelis was beside him. ‘Do you want me to take off the stone for a moment?’
‘I cannot give in to murder.’
She nodded. The girl she had been was just like a movement of the light inside her, a rainbow that appeared in a fleeting alignment of sun and cloud and then was gone, as the runes took her mind once more.
When she did return to herself she longed for him – his voice, his touch but the confessor’s voice was weakening, his limbs no more use than dead branches to a tree.
Aelis knew they could not go on much further. She sensed people in the woods, watching from the darkness, and she reached out to them to send them away, to push them shuddering into madness or to blind their eyes to their presence. She sensed the Northmen on the coast before she saw them – a beaten and bedraggled band seeking shelter in an inlet, hiding from the Franks, who would kill them in a second. They had wounded with them and men who smelled of rot and decay. She watched their camp. They were too scared to even light a fire, their ship on its side providing scant shelter from the sheets of fine mizzle.
She told the horse to go. Then she took the confessor in her arms and walked down through the gorse to the little beach, calling a rune into her mind as she did so, the one that whispered of ocean depths, secrets and shadows. There on the sand she laid him down and ate with the northerners at their fire. None noticed her or the confessor because she did not choose to let them notice them.
When it came time to set sail, she climbed onto the boat with the confessor and sat at a vacant oar – there were many. The boat got under way in a good breeze and headed east. Aelis watched the land rolling by, the men around her. She asked one for some food. He gave it to her, his eyes blank, and she knew he did not know they were there.
She went to the man at the steering oar. He was a tall chieftain with a dirty yellow beard.
‘Where are we headed, brother?’
‘To Skania and home.’
‘Try your luck at Ladoga,’ she said. ‘There are riches there.’
‘Aldeigjuborg? You are a wise fellow, easterner,’ said the chieftain. ‘I’ll head there. Svan has been before and will tell us the way.’
Aelis looked down the ship. She saw the crew as themselves and as their magical selves, little candles in that wall in the garden. She went to each flame, warming her hands on it, sensing it, controlling it. The crew would go where she wanted.
It grew cold as she went east and ice began to appear on the shore and on the sea. The confessor shook and trembled at her feet, and she longed to remove that stone from around his neck, to see him stand again. But she would not. She just found a sea blanket for him and saw to it that he was clean and as warm as anyone could be on an open boat.
The sea narrowed to a channel and eventually to a river, where the men threw buckets over the side to draw in the fresh water. Here the way was tight, a ship’s width of water remaining in the ice, and the crew regularly climbed out to smash their way through with axes and clubs. They came to a broad big lake, where the men caught and cooked fish. From there they headed into another river, wide at first and then clogged with ice. A haze was on the water, then a mist that reduced visibility to a few boat lengths. After a time the murk was impenetrable. The ship’s prow was invisible from where Aelis sat at the stern. She could only see the crew nearest to her, gazing around her, their hands at the oars.
She kept them rowing, sending her will to them, keeping them working to speed her to Helgi, taking the rudder to guide the longship through the fog, lit by the rune of illumination, the one that glowed with the colour of the sharpest moons. They rowed on, the ice becoming thicker, but she always found a course.
Night came and she saw the confessor was freezing, so Aelis lay down beside him, hugging him to lend him her warmth. The crew stopped rowing. Lost in her concern for the confessor, she forgot the men at the oars. Enchanted, they just sat with the ice thick about them, their furs in the chests they sat on. No rower needs too much clothing, even in the coldest weather – a jerkin is enough – but in the frigid air of winter in the lands of the Rus, once the oars are still it is necessary to put on whatever insulation you have as quickly as you can. Aelis held the confessor to her. The runes would not warm him, but she kept him well covered and held him tight. The Vikings sat unmoving on the boat as the mist thickened and the frost formed on the sails and the rigging. The confessor’s breath mingled with hers, clouding the air about their faces. She shivered and adjusted her furs.
Aelis lost track of time in the cold, concentrating only on the human warmth of the confessor and the uncommon love she felt towards him. She looked at her fingers. They were blue and she couldn’t feel them. Her body was dying, but the symbols inside her were bright. Sometimes she was calm, accepting of her fate and certain that she would live on in the runes, but then a dread would take her, and a glimpse of her true self would come back to her – terrified to die, terrified not of oblivion but of loneliness. She had travelled so far to meet Jehan, she could not begin that journey again. She thought of the wolfman, of his promise: Helgi will help you. She sensed this was true. The king would help her, would keep her from her fate, from the runes reaching out to their sisters and annihilating her.
‘Helgi,’ she said to herself, ‘we are here. Come and help us.’
A light was approaching across the ice. She needed to find out where she was, to find her way to the magician king.
‘Row towards the light,’ she told the men at the oars.
But the boat didn’t move. It was locked in the ice. And the oarsmen couldn’t row anyway because they were dead of the cold.
66 A Merchant’s Tale
In Helgi’s great hall the fire burned low. A fog was tight about the building, and it was as if the warriors and women in the hall felt its constriction, huddling together almost as if bound. The prince sat near to the fire, half dozing
There was a movement at the corner of his eye. For a minute he thought it was her, Sváva, creeping to his side once again. But it was only a cat – Huldre, the big pregnant mouser hunting for scraps. How old would Sváva have been now? Old enough that one of the cat’s kittens might be given to her as a present for her new house, a traditional gift to set her on her way in her married life.
He h
as not yet come with the girl. He was thinking of the wolfman, entrusted to do a job that a band of druzhina could not. Had he ever got to Paris? Had he managed to find the girl? Helgi had no doubt a man who could slip past his guards into Aldeigjuborg could slip into Paris, so he must have had a chance. Had he lost her on the way? Worse, had she been killed? If she died then the runes would leave her and go to one of the others who nurtured their sisters in their minds. The god would be nearer to being on earth, Helgi’s lands a step closer to waste and ruin. The severed knot might be whole once more.
In nightmares Helgi was pursued by the terrible Odin, his spear stabbing towards him, the eight legs of his horse carving a wake through the snow, the god’s face contorted with anger and hate. Everything Helgi saw confirmed what the wolfman had told him – Odin was coming. But what of his bargain with that red-haired fellow? Who had he been? Loki, Helgi was now sure. The god’s names told him all he needed to know: lie smith, prince of the burning air, deceiver, enemy of the gods.
‘The god promised I should be a great king,’ said Helgi under his breath, ‘and yet we are beset.’
He thought back on the strange things that had happened to him since the birth of Aeringunnr, the worse things that had happened since her death. Kiev was rising as a mighty power under Ingvar, while Novgorod, the new capital he was building as a staging post to the east, had been wrecked by fire. His people were in a fret of apprehension and had been for ten years. The week after Sváva died they put Gillingr in his barrow, sealing him in with his spear and sword, his bed and his lyre surrounded by everything he would need for the afterlife – food, perfumes, clothes.
It had not been a good sign, he thought, that tunnels had been unearthed during the grave digging. They were deep and they were narrow, most likely Roman mines, according to those who had seen such things before. His people had no skill in mining and had covered the entrance to the tunnels when they sealed the barrow.
But the barrow collapsed shortly afterwards, falling in on itself, and when they dug it out to make it good they found the things missing from the tomb. The jewels were gone, though the lyre was all smashed and broken. The food was gone too and the blankets, the spear. No man had laid hands on any of these things because Gillingr’s family and a good number of Helgi’s druzhina had overseen the whole burial.
People said then that Gillingr’s ghost was living in the tunnels, so he was reburied elsewhere. In the years that followed the townsfolk left tributes to the ghost at the tunnel entrance in his old barrow. Foxes might have taken the bread or the meat left there, but no animal took the pots of honey, the beer, the blankets and the boots that the people laid at the cave mouth. Something did, though.
Helgi seemed called to the spot. He would sit on the mud of the collapse at the mouth of the tunnel watching the pupil-dark entrance. Of course, he had gone inside to look. The entrance was very small and he’d had to force his shoulders through into the tunnel beyond. He found nothing. The passages were too tight, too winding – his way was blocked by a collapse here, a flood there. Now the soil of the barrow excavation was overgrown with grass, but still sometimes he went to the tunnel mouth to sit and think.
Looking into the fire, his mind felt raw and vulnerable. He went outside. The fog that had engulfed the town for a week was still thick, only the guards’ fires glowing like little cocoons of light giving any idea of direction.
‘A ship! A ship!’ The voice was coming from the loading tower.
Impossible. The river had been solid for a week, totally impassable to boats. And even if it wasn’t, the fog made travel almost out of the question. You couldn’t set out from one side of Lake Ladoga confident you would ever see the other.
He went to the tower, thinking it was just a fog spectre and that he would tell the guard to stop being stupid. He climbed up the ladders inside and went to the loading bay.
‘What?’
‘A ship, khagan, I swear it. It was there a moment ago.’
Helgi peered into the fog but saw nothing at all. From his vantage point, though, the fog was thinner. His guards weren’t idiots, so he waited a while. And then, as the fog swirled away for a second, he saw it – a mast and the top of a sail, both heavy with ice, the ship listing to one side.
‘Well let’s see what the gods have served us up here.’ In front of his men he still played the carefree and fearless monarch, the man of action. It was all they understood, and to share his gnawing fears would have been to lose his authority. The guard went to follow him down the ladder but Helgi told him to stay where he was. ‘You’ll need to guide me towards it,’ he said.
‘I won’t see you, lord.’
‘You will see me.’
Helgi ran to the hall to his great chest and pulled out his skates, stout leather shoes bottomed with a folded copper blade. Then he ran for the town gates, took a wall torch and went out to the river, his warriors streaming behind him through the fog. At the river he passed the torch to a druzhina and strapped his skates on. Then he took it back and set off across the ice, the torch a glow-worm in the white darkness.
He could scarcely see four paces and called up to the man on the tower, ‘Can you see my light?’
‘I can, khagan.’ The voice was flat through the stillness of the fog.
‘Then guide me to it.’
He skated forward slowly and the guard shouted for him to turn left. Already he had lost his bearings. On he went, falling twice but regaining the torch.
‘Keep going, lord. Straight ahead.’
He went forward again until the fog seemed to lift slightly and he could see further. There on its side with its oars trapped in the ice like an insect stuck in pine gum lay the longship. The ship was entirely white, like an apparition thrown up by the cold, its sail torn by the weight of crystals, its rigging sagging with jagged icicles.
Helgi went round to the low side of the ship and started back. At each oar was a man, his hands still on the shaft, but frozen where he sat as if enchanted.
One of his druzhina had followed him, and Helgi steeled himself to play the bluff warrior, the jaunty, fearless king, although dread was bound fast to him like the ice was bound fast to the ship.
‘A curious one, lord.’
‘When the gods deliver us booty, let’s not bother ourselves asking how it got here,’ said Helgi. ‘When we drink the wine we don’t ask to see the feet of the man who pressed the grapes.’
The man laughed. ‘Shall I go aboard?’
‘Let us both.’
The man began to clamber up but stopped. On the longship something had moved. Both drew their swords.
‘Who is there?’ said Helgi. ‘This is a trading town, and honest men have nothing to fear from me. I am Helgi, lord of the Eastern Lake, and you are under my protection.’
From the back of the ship a strange figure moved towards them. It was dressed in bulky furs and carried a sword at its waist, but was clearly either injured or bitten by the wolf of the cold. It staggered down the length of the skewed longship, leaning on oars and dead men for support. Five paces from them it bent to catch its breath.
‘Say who you are, stranger,’ said the druzhina. More men came skating in. ‘Say who you are!’ The guard repeated his command.
The figure breathed in and stumbled against the side of the boat.
‘Who are you? I ask again,’ Helgi said.
The figure looked up, gasping and shivering, and stammered, ‘I am Lady Aelis, sister of Eudes of Paris. You are Helgi, prince of the Rus, and you are my salvation. I am travelling with an invalid monk who needs your help.’
Helgi could see that the cold had her in its grip. Panic rose up in him as he pointed the way back to the town and shouted, ‘Get her to my hall! Get her there! This lady must not die! She must not die!’
67 A Reckoning at Sea
The Danes were intent on going home, not east for the convenience of Leshii, Hugin and Ofaeti. Still, the idea of a port appealed to Leshii – a place where ther
e might be rest, good food, a bed, girls and, who knew, even a living. He had enough money now in the five looted swords he’d been able to take with him on the mule to set up wherever he liked, if he could buy permission from the lord of the town and other merchants. And if he could keep them from the prying eyes of the Vikings on the ship. He’d wrapped them in one of the Frankish cloaks he’d taken and tied cut staves into the bundle to make it look like a camping roll. He knew the disguise wouldn’t stand much scrutiny but, so far, the sailors had kept their manners.
Leshii had intended to jump ship at Kaupanangan, but the Danes were heading back to Haithabu. All well and good. A hundred years before, the king there had kidnapped merchants from the east. His successor was bound to welcome one offering his services to the throne.
The Raven and Ofaeti had made the best of it. Winter was coming and they’d have a better chance of getting a boat at Haithabu than waiting on a freezing shore, they told the merchant, even if it meant going the wrong way for a while. Hugin hadn’t liked it but he had no choice. He was no sailor and even going via Haithabu would get him to Ladoga quicker than walking.
They were five days into their journey, the going slow as they kept having to stop at coves or inlets to repair the steering oar. Ofaeti worked well with the little crafting axe Skakki had on his ship. Eventually he secured enough good wood – by dismantling a hut on a beach – to make the repair stick.
Ofaeti watched Skakki eyeing him and felt his sword hand flex. The slaver had taken no one he knew well but some he knew enough. Kinsmen. When he chopped at the wood with the axe, he imagined it was Skakki’s head. Skakki, however, was not a stupid man. He knew there were few Danes who matched his description and saw the iron in Ofaeti’s eyes, no matter how much he tried to hide it.
‘We are a day from Haithabu,’ said Skakki as he sat beside Leshii. Ofaeti was tending to the sail, cajoling the men to better effort, for a moment consumed by the task of sailing. The Raven was tending an injured man, cleaning his wounds of pus.
