Varanger

by Cecelia Holland

They hauled out on the spit, and had another council. Volodymyr gave all the orders now, with Dobrynya sitting quietly beside him. They had brought bows, and Volodymyr told the men to go out onto the broad steppes and hunt, so that they would have enough meat in each ship for each man for six days.

  “I guess it’s good then the ships aren’t overfilled,” Leif said, the Icelander. “What happens if six days go by and we’re still way out on the salt?”

  “The sea is full of fish,” Volodymyr said. He held up the star measurer on its stick; the brass flashed in the sun. “We have the Mahmettan circle, and the chart. They say four days from here to Chersonese.”

  “What do we find when we get there?” Pavo said. He stood up among the Sclava, his hands on his hips. “Will they fight?”

  “Greeks would rather talk than fight,” Volodymyr said. “They will be so surprised to see us rowing up their cove, they’ll run like chickens.”

  Raef shifted from side to side; he was sitting on his heels beside Conn, his arms lying on his knees. He could see Conn was uninterested in this. Vagn as usual sat on Conn’s far side, and he was listening, a little frown on his face.

  Leif called, “Will they have the fire?”

  Behind Raef, Bjorn the Christian muttered, “God help us if they do.” All around the circle of men there was grumbling and whispers.

  Volodymyr held up his hands, calming them. He turned to Dobrynya. “What do you think, Uncle Dobrynya?”

  The posadnik stood up and walked forward. His voice spread soothingly over their jittery uncertainties. “It’s said the Greeks have forgotten how to make the fire. In any case they hold the way to make it as a close secret and would not give it away to a mere provincial city like Chersonese. They won’t have the fire there. They may have a city guard, no more.”

  “Can they chain the entrance to the harbor?” Conn said. He was paying more attention than Raef had thought.

  Dobrynya nodded. “And likely will, if they have warning. So we are going to surprise them. The astrolabe will take us straight across the sea. The first they see of us, we will be rowing up the bay. They will have no time to rig chains.”

  Raef said, “Why do you think this will be such a surprise to them?”

  Dobrynya swung toward him, golden, smiling as always. Behind him, Volodymyr was tipped forward a little, impatient. Dobrynya hardly heeded him. He said, “In the normal course of war we would march south by land through Taurica and they would have a long forewarning. But we will come straight to them, by sea, as I said.”

  He had not said it, but Raef let that pass. He said, “That may be true, and all.” He shifted his gaze from Dobrynya to Volodymyr, behind him. “But the Mahmettan Rashid was in Kiev when you first told us this plan. Now Rashid has gone south and he will tell them in Chersonese you are coming, and there will be no surprise.”

  At that a ripple of comment went around through the men listening, and Volodymyr straightened, ruffled. Dobrynya’s smile never wavered. He turned and exchanged a look with Volodymyr, as if to say, See how foolish these people are. Facing Raef again, he said, “Rashid is our friend.”

  Raef said, “Rashid is a spy for his Baghdadi king.”

  The listeners growled and muttered again, but Dobrynya laughed. “He is a spy for us. Where do you think I came by the star measurer and the chart?”

  Volodymyr said, “But if he did go to Chersonese, even by accident he might let something slip.”

  Dobrynya shrugged, looking from one to the other. “Rashid is a bit of a fool, isn’t he. He’s only interested in plants and stars. He’ll do us no harm, he’s not clever enough to dissemble.”

  Raef bit his lips together, saying nothing more. Rashid, he thought, was clever enough to get Dobrynya to trust him. He felt the other men staring at him and when he did not argue any more they snorted and nudged each other. The rest of the talk was of how they would put on supplies. Afterward he walked back to his fire with Conn. Ahead of them, at the fire, he saw Merike sitting on the ground, the wind off the sea blowing her hair back.

  Conn said, “Are you sure about Rashid?”

  Raef shrugged his shoulders, not wanting to get into any explanations. He said, “Yes.”

  “What about the chart and the star measurer?”

  “Maybe the chart is wrong. It looks like a bad coast, down where the city is, a lot of fjords, hilly, windward. A star stick like that, you have to really know the sky, the sea, the stick, everything:’

  “Can you find this place?”

  “I don’t know.” He remembered his basileus, in Rashid’s wallet, rubbed with his spit, which he had hoped would lead him there. He had long since lost any sense of where the basileus was. No better than the star measurer. “I can try. But this isn’t our sea.”

  He turned and walked out over the low sandy spit, toward the surging blue water that stretched out toward the edge of the sky. All across it like a herd of leaping white horses the spume sprang from the waves. He loved the sight of it, after the long muddy confines of the river; he longed to sail out onto it, the real world, infinite and unconquerable, the bits of land only places to stop. The wind rushed over his face; the little purling waves sang in his ears. “It doesn’t even taste the same. But it connects with our sea, even so, by some long crooked way.”

  “You can do it,” Conn said. “Don’t worry about anything else. Just get us to Chersonese.” He swung his arm over Raef’s shoulder. They went on to the fire, and the other men, and Merike hiding in the dragon.

  The Sclava were great hunters. They brought in a lot of meat, which they cut up and soaked in brine, and wrapped in hide. They filled hide bags with water from the lagoon. After three days they sailed out onto the salt. After they had gone south out of sight of land, Dobrynya made a big show with the star measurer, standing amidships of his dragon, and moving the disk back and forth. He went on smiling but Raef guessed he found it harder to use the instrument on the tossing waves than on the ground. They rowed due south, across a steady westerly wind.

  The crew thought they had learned how to row, but the sea was utterly unlike the river, and now they had to learn all over again. All the first morning Conn walked up and down the ship, trying to get them to row at one beat. Janka was hopeless at it and finally Conn took over his oar shuffling the men around so that he sat on the bench across from Raef, on the backboard side of the stern. By sundown at least they knew the commands, and could work together a little.

  That night a sudden squall blew up, and scattered the ships, but the next day Conn set up the mast and sent Janka up to the top. Raef told him where to row, and zigzagging back and forth they sighted the other ships one by one and gathered them all together. As soon as the first stray ship, Pavo’s, was within calling distance, one of the men dove straight into the water and swam over to Conn’s. It was the scrawny boy Vagn, and Corm took him in and put him on the oar he had been using.

  Seagulls in flocks hovered around them, as if they might throw food overboard. Far to the east, a faint shadow of a point of land appeared, and slipped away to the north.

  On the second day Bjorn the Christian contrived to go overboard from Pavo’s ship, and Conn picked him up, although it meant they lost the race they were having with the others. Volodymyr’s ship was winning the race, although they left behind a wake as ragged as the scar on Conn’s leg.

  They went racing on, each ship striving to pull ahead of the others. Conn’s ship had fallen far behind to pick up Bjorn and nobody waited for them, but by nightfall Conn had caught up again.

  When Conn said, “You can go back over there when you want,” Bjorn shook his head.

  “Something’s ugly in that ship,” he said. “I’ll stay here.”

  Raef sat in the stern, his hand on the steerboard, but they were going due south and so he had nothing to do. Conn watched him; on Raef’s face was the same soft, distant look as when they had gone down the rapids. Conn wondered how he knew about the sea. Maybe he watched the seagulls and stars, th
e clouds, the changing color of the water, felt the currents and the winds, just as other men did, only better.

  He knew this was not true. He knew he cast this net of reasonable explanations around Raef just to soothe himself. He remembered, once long before, thinking Raef was no use, and he would be better without him. This, he thought, was a reminder of how stupid he could be. He sat by his cousin in the stern, the mast crutch between them and the-great ocean of the stars overhead, and no word passed between them.

  The next day, they raced again, and this time, Leif and Harald fell overboard from Dobrynya’s ship, and had to be picked up.

  “This is a poor bunch of sailors, I think,” Oleg said, with a wide grin. “Do you think Helgi, Bos, and Ulf will lose their footing soon as well?”

  Conn grunted. “They’re winning all the races.” His ship had more men now than any of the others; that meant they could switch off rowing more often, but also that there was less food and much less water. And the meat was going rotten, even in the brine. But in fact that day all three of the remaining Varanger managed to get themselves onto his ship.

  Merike was sick all the first day and the next, moaning and limp over the gunwale; when she was not throwing up she was huddled into the hollow of the stem, behind Raef’s sea chest, crying. When he tried to comfort her she struck at him and snarled at him in her own language, tears all over her face. Once she knelt and clung to his knees and begged and pleaded with him incomprehensibly, pointing back toward the land, and he laughed at that, and she hit him and crawled back into the hollow of the dragon’s tail. He took his turn at the oar when it came, and then saw her begging and pleading even with Conn, who also laughed at her. Of course this meant she didn’t need much food, either.

  She was no use. He wished he hadn’t brought her; he couldn’t remember why he had ever thought it a good idea.

  The sea around him was sharp and harsh, shallow, and full of fish. It was blue as the bluest cornflower, darker, laced with spume. The wind worked it into an unpredictable chop that made rowing even harder. As they rowed they were drifting a little eastward, but still they were heading nearly full south. Then near noon of the fourth day he felt the bottom changing under them and stood up at the helm and said, “Conn. We should be going east now.”

  Conn gave him a swift look, and called to the oarsmen to change course a little, so they could come within hailing distance of Volodymyr’s ship. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called, “What’s the course?”

  Dobrynya’s ship was just beyond Volodymyr’s. The helmsman on the prince’s ship turned and relayed the question to Dobrynya, and the answer came back, “South—due south!”

  Raef said, “South, the sea’s much deeper. Colder. The wind’s bad. We’re over some kind of ridge here, and I think it runs all the way to the land over there.”

  Oleg was staring at him. “What land?”

  Raef waved vaguely eastward, and all along the two banks of oars, the men looked over their shoulders. The sky was broad and blue, the wind mild and from the west. Nothing marked the perfect circle of the horizon, not in any direction. But Raef felt the ridge under him, and the rise of the land east of him, as if they were carved into his feet.

  Volodymyr called to Dobrynya, “What if they’re right?”

  Dobrynya swung around to face him, and for a moment, between them, an open anger crackled that Raef had never seen before. He started, “We need to have—”

  And Volodymyr spoke over him, crushing his voice down. “Why did you bring them, if not to trust them on the sea?” He lifted his gaze to Conn, a ship’s width away. “Where should we go?”

  Raef said, “Due east. With the wind.”

  Between him and Volodymyr, Dobrynya wheeled around, not smiling, his face red with throttled rage. “If we get into the wind we’ll be blown all across the sea, We’ll die on the salt. You yourself mentioned this risk.”

  On the far ship, Pavo straightened, groaning. He had a greenish look about him; like Merike, he was not sailing well. But Conn was already wheeling around, his voice high and clear, “Up mast!”

  Vagn and Bjorn lifted the mast straight up off its crutch, stepped it down into the hole, a lance to the sky, and chucked it. All around on the other ships, howls of rage and panic went up. Pavo bellowed, “No water!” He was pointing off to the west, sometimes, the north some other times. “Go ashore—”

  “Up oars and stow!” Conn shouted.

  Volodymyr himself was bellowing. “Follow them. Uncle, obey me—I am the Knyaz!”

  Dobrynya clamped his mouth shut. Raef could see him clearly, from where he stood up by the steerboard, his hand on the tiller. He turned and looked east, and his forehead rumpled, but he turned, and called, “Up mast!” In his own ship, Volodymyr stood like an idol, pointing.

  The tiller in Raef’s hand was just a piece of wood, not carved yet, and he had no knack for such things and it would stay uncarved. Through it he felt down into the living sea beneath him. The rows of oarsmen lined their oars up along the inside of the hull, on the floor, and Bjorn had made the mast halyard fast; Vagn was hauling the sail up, and Bjorn went to snug the sheets fast on either side. Raef settled down to keeping the ship in the belly of the wind. From the hollow of the stem behind him, Merike crept forward, and looked out over the gunwale by his knee.

  She said something to him, and then, “Home? House?”

  “No,” he said. “Land. Solid land. One day away.” He held up his finger. “Not home. But land. Understand?”

  She glanced around for Janka, who was at the far end of the ship, and faced Raef again and held her hand flat and still. He nodded, with a laugh. “Yes. Land. Not—” He waved his own hand up and down, and then brought it hard against hers and held it still. “Solid land.”

  She said something that might have been a prayer in her own language, and gave him as dark a look as Dobrynya’s. He reached out to touch her, to comfort her, and she bit him. He whacked her across the head. She crawled deep into the hollow, glaring at him. He put his back to her, wishing there were room to do what he wanted to her.

  Conn helped Vagn and Bjorn trim the sail; the wind filled the red and white striped canvas sail with a snap. At once the feel of the ship changed, as if she rode higher and lighter, leaping forward, a great swan of the sea. The wind sang in the rigging, and the sound of the sea whispering against the hull was like music. Bjorn crossed himself, looking up at the sky.

  “The wind’s rising,” he said.

  “A wind like this lasts for days,” Conn said. “This is the way to sail.” He clapped his arm around Vagn’s shoulders in an exhuberant hug and went along from man to man, telling them what to do.

  From the other ships came volleys of shouting and curses. The Sclava were having trouble getting their masts up, their sails set. The loosed dragon sped away from them, coursing into the east, and Conn did not look back. When he had the crew settled he sat down finally on his sea chest next to Raef, his hand on the gunwale, and ordered another ration of the water for everybody.

  “Don’t forget her.” Raef said, jerking his head back over his shoulder. Conn looked into the hollow of the stem, where the hun woman crouched like an animal.

  “Maybe we should make her row,” Conn said.

  “I’m not letting her out of there,” Raef said. “Nobody would row.” He was watching the eastern horizon. The water skin came along, Conn drank first, and passed the skin over. The water was sour but Raef filled his stomach with it. After a moment’s hesitation, he handed the skin back to Merike, who yanked it away.

  “Sometimes I think we should just throw her overboard.”

  Conn laughed, and gave her another look, to see if she understood that. She looked just as sick of Raef as he was of her. “There’s still some meat on her, save her for when we get really hungry.”

  Raef laughed.

  By sundown, with the other ship’s hull down somewhere behind them, they had raised a low cape. Raef had been steering them slig
htly to the south, when the wind let him, not enough that they had to rig up the leech-beater, just dumping off some air now and then. Now with the point of land rising due east of them he turned the ship out of the wind, set his hands on his thighs, and cast a brief, derisive glance back to the west. Conn ordered the sail rolled up for the night, and sent Janka to the top of the mast with a lantern.

  Oleg said, “How can you be sure this is Chersonese? None of us has ever been here before. What if when they bring the chart everything’s wrong?”

  Conn grunted. “The chart is false.” He was watching the dark coastline ahead of them, fading into the night. “Look.” He pointed.

  Vagn had hung the lantern to the top of the mast, where it bobbed and swung as the ship moved. And now, suddenly, on that coastline, another light appeared, and moved from side to side.

  “See?” Conn said. “That’s a beacon. They’re calling us in.”

  The light on the coast flashed once, twice, and then three times quickly. Conn said, “Except there’s an answer, and we don’t know it.”

  Behind Conn, Raef laughed. Everybody on the dragon was watching, silent. The light shone on again, once, twice, three quick gleams, and then abruptly went dark.

  “No, not a friend,” Conn murmured. “Not somebody you want in there. Is there any water left?”

  “Not much,” said Oleg, in the dark.

  “Pass it around,” Conn said. “We may have a long wait for Volodymyr.”

  But in the morning the other three dragons came sailing up from the southwest. Oleg gave a bark of a laugh, and all up and down Conn’s ship, the Varanger and the guardsmen sent up hoots and jeers and long whistles. They brought all the ships together and threw out a sail for a sea anchor, so that they could hold another council. Conn and Raef went into the middle ship, which was Dobrynya’s, where they also had the last of the water.

  Dobrynya said, “You’re sure this is Chersonese.”