Kings of the North

by Kings of the North (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  The sun sank. The coast of France slid over the horizon. The captain said, “If we’re stuck out here at night—”

  Raef said, “We’ll be there by moonrise.” If there was a moon. With the coming of the night the wind lightened, the knarr steadier, slower. On the water ahead of them patches of fog were appearing, sea smoke, salt cloud, breath of the ocean. The English coast, he knew, was still miles away.

  Then, from the bow, one of the crew shouted, “Captain, sail! Sail to the south—”

  The captain wrenched around, peering down to the south. “Damn you,” he said to Raef.

  Raef stood up on the gunwale to see. Far down there in the fading light a blotch of red showed. He stepped back down onto the stern deck. “Tell them to get the oars out and ready.”

  The captain snarled at him, his face dark. “You see the color of that sail? That’s a Jomsviking. They owned this sea all last year. We can’t outrun them.”

  “Right. Get the oars ready.”

  The captain swore at him awhile, but he shouted the orders. The wind was failing fast. The knarr rowed from the bow end because of her cargo piled in amidships and aft: four oars on either side. Raef glanced south again. The wind was still gusting, down there, and the red sail was flying toward them, the dragon ship beneath already hull up. Leif rose, leaving Laissa bundled in their cloaks on the half deck, and went forward, in among the crewmen.

  Raef lifted a hand to him. “Oars out,” he said to the captain.

  The man hesitated, glaring at him, and Raef reached for the knife. “I’ll kill you before the Jomsvikings do.”

  The captain turned stiffly forward. “Oars out!”

  The oars rattled out, and Leif got the men rowing together. He walked back and forth between them, his feet widespread on the ship’s tilting floor. Raef put the knife back into its sheath on his belt. The captain sat down suddenly, his head in his hands. Raef looked back over his shoulder. The Jomsviking was under oars now too, striding after them.

  His heart rose at the sight of the dragon. Not even the dromons of the Imperial fleet were as beautiful as these ships. But he had no inclination to meet the crew of this one. He slid the helm over slightly, heading for the nearest fog bank.

  Night was falling, the sea and the darkening air mingling together in feathers and sheets of mist. The crewmen bent to the oars. Leif went along between the rows of benches, keeping the stroke. The knarr lumbered along through patches of fog, stretches of open water, more fog, thicker, like cold fleece.

  “They’re still coming,” Laissa said. She had wakened; she stood up and leaned on the gunwale, looking behind them.

  The captain said, “Why shouldn’t they – we can’t go much farther.” He rocked his head in his hands. “He’ll wreck my ship and kill us all.”

  The ship creaked along, the oars rumbling in their tholes. Raef’s beard was wet from the fog. In the dark he could barely see the rowers; he left that work to Leif. They were still a long way from the shore. The tide was at its height, but the tides here were very strange. The mist made the dark impenetrable. He could barely see the knarr’s mast, and he touched Laissa’s shoulder.

  “Go up there and tell him I’m laying her over to steerboard, and then oars up.”

  The girl slid out of her cloak and went nimbly up the ship, leaping from cask to cask. In the thick fog, in the dark, Raef put the helm over. The oars stroked once to make the turn and rose, and the ship came neatly around and glided to a stop.

  The captain lifted his face out of his hands but said nothing. In the silence, Raef looked behind them. In the night soup of the fog he could feel the Jomsviking back there, the great dragon groping after them like a monster in a cave. Then even the captain could hear the splashing of oars.

  “They’re—”

  Raef kicked him to quiet him. He glanced quickly forward, where he could see nothing. The ship rolled slightly in the waves. The sound of the Jomsviking’s oars ground steadily closer. They were at half beat; he could hear someone calling the pace. The captain was looking up at Raef, his forehead wrinkled. He opened his mouth and Raef nudged him with his foot again, and the captain said nothing.

  The Jomsviking was almost on them. The rhythmic grinding of her oars came through the fog like dragging footsteps. Laissa appeared beside Raef, and he put his hand on her shoulder. Out there, in the dense clammy blackness, someone called, “No bottom.” The Jomsvikings were sounding as they went. He could see something moving, in the dark, not the form, only the movement, rising and falling, and hear the creak of the oars, less than a bowshot away.

  The sound drew closer, closer. Under his hand Laissa was taut as a harp string. The creak and rattle of the oars seemed almost upon them. Now he could hear the whisper of the sea past her hull. Then the rhythmic thunking grew fainter. The dragon was moving on by. The same voice called, but Raef could not make out the words. He squeezed Laissa’s shoulder.

  She needed no directions; she raced off down the ship. A moment later, the knarr’s oars went out with a rattle that seemed loud as thunder, and the ship began to move again, slow, clumsy, but heading dead away from the Jomsviking.

  Back there, in the dark, somebody yelled. Raef held the knarr on course. On the backboard side, the coast was still a way off, but a mile or so west of where they were, a flat cape curved out into the sea. The tide was starting to ebb, dragging them back toward France again. Then abruptly the fog gave way and the knarr rowed out into a patch of moonlight bright as a lantern.

  “Pull!” Leif roared up among the rowers, and a hundred feet behind them, in the dark, a long jubilant howl rose, like that of a hunting pack on its prey.

  “We’re dead,” the captain said. “We’re dead.” Laissa was bounding back up the knarr to the stern; she came in beside Raef and leaned on him.

  “Good girl,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder.

  The moonlight shone white on the fogbank, and for a moment he saw nothing. Then the great fierce head of the dragon burst into the moonlight, and her breast split the fog. The men crowded around her prow let out a scream of bloodlust. Raef thrust the tiller bar into Laissa’s hands.

  “Hold this! Leif! Make them pull!” He leapt down from the sterncastle, in among the casks and bales, and began heaving them overboard.

  Under him the knarr shuddered; the rowers were thrashing forward at their work, shouting one another on. The captain jumped down beside Raef and grabbed his arm.

  “That’s my—” He looked astern, saw the Jomsviking dragon bearing down on them, and seized the nearest cask and flung it into the sea. Raef raced back up to the helm.

  Laissa was clinging to the tiller bar, leaning hard against the drag of the ship, which wanted to keep on straight. He got the bar away from her and put it over. The ship curved into the turn, sliding into the fog again. The moonlight faded. Dark settled over them like a lid.

  He heard a thunk behind him as the Jomsviking hit one of the floating casks. He doubted it would hurt the ship, but he thought they might slow to pick it up. When he looked back he saw nothing but the dull black of the night curtain. The crew was still pulling frantically at the oars, Leif yelling them on. Laissa was clinging to his sleeve. The captain was huddled down among the last of his cargo.

  Ahead of them, he knew, was the flat stony cape. “Leif,” he called. “Steerboard. Steerboard—” He leaned hard on the bar, and Leif bellowed, and between them they bent the ship out to sea again. The tide was slacking, somehow; where before it had been ebbing now it seemed to rise again. He could hear the distant growl of surf. The captain came up beside him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going to England,” Raef said. “Go down there and row.” The rising tide was hauling them inshore. Now they were wearing the tip of the cape, and he felt the water under them smack and surge together, the sea floor only a few feet beneath the keel. Beyond the cape the stony bottom rose up, shelving to the beach.

  Then, behind him, he
heard the grating crash of the Jomsviking running aground.

  “Leif,” he shouted. “Leif, oars up.” He whirled toward Laissa. “Get your cloak.”

  Leif called out hoarsely, “What are we doing?”

  “Follow me!” He turned to the captain and thrust the purse into his hands. “Get back to the tiller. Keep going. They’ll be after you as soon as they rock off that bar.” He jumped down to the floor amidships, among the few remaining casks. Leif was already there, his cloak over his arm. Raef put one hand on the gunwale and vaulted over the side.

  He went up to his waist in the icy sea. A wave carried the ship up and flooded over him almost to his chin, lifted him a moment off the bottom, and rushed on by. He got his feet on the ground again, stretched his arms up, and shouted, “Laissa! Jump!”

  Without hesitation she leaped into his arms, her cloak bundled in her grip. Holding her up out of the water he staggered in toward the shore. Leif splashed in after him. Another wave struck Raef from behind and almost knocked him down. He held Laissa up over his shoulders, paddling desperately with his feet, and plowed on through the rushing water, slipping and stumbling on the tilted bottom. The next wave rose up only to his waist. The girl was safe and almost dry in his arms.

  The moon shone white on the surf ahead of them. He waded up out of the fog, out of the sea. The breaking wave almost knocked him down. Then he was staggering up onto the land. Leif panted up beside him. They stood on the beach and looked back and saw the stern of the knarr vanishing into the fog. He put Laissa down on her feet; she still clutched her cloak in her arms, and he took it and swung it around her. Her teeth rattled together. She gripped the cloak closed with both hands. Raef was soaked to the skin. Leif was already ahead of them, walking fast inland, and Raef took Laissa by the hand and followed.

  Chapter Four

  The beach was a stretch of shingles, clicking and turning in the rush of the surf. The wind swept in across the flat open ground. Raef was shivering, his feet squelching in his boots. They walked on inland, looking for some shelter, some place to rest and build a fire, but for a long way from the shore the land was all rock and marsh, without even a tree. They left the fog behind and walked in the cold moonlight. The night stretched away before them, barren and empty. The wind rose, knife edged.

  At sunrise they were still walking; Laissa was exhausted, and the two men half carried her between them. The sun came up behind them and cast their shadows across the barren land, and now at last they found a human place. It was two sides of a house, the rest burned to the ground.

  This was shelter enough. They got out of the wind and broke wood out of the ruin to build a fire. Raef’s and Leif’s cloaks were still soaked, and the men hung them to dry on the wall, and all bundled together under Laissa’s, between the wall and the fire, and slept.

  * * *

  Later in the morning they set off again, following the road across the barrens. Soon Laissa began to cry, the tears slick on her face. “We’re always going to be walking. We’ll walk until we die.”

  Raef said nothing. Leif said, “We’ll come to somewhere soon.” His voice sounded flat with disbelief.

  “No, we won’t,” Laissa said. “I came all this way, all across the world, to find my mother. I found her, and it made no difference. I’m still walking; I still have nobody.” She sobbed. Leif put his arm around her.

  “That’s all right. Don’t cry, Laissa.”

  She flung his arm off, tipped her head back, her cheeks glittering with her tears. “I have no home. No family. My mother is a drunken whore. My whole life is over.”

  “I will be your father,” Leif said. “Haven’t I been so, all these years? What matters, if not the doing?”

  Raef said, “Which matters, the name of the thing or the thing itself? You could marry me, and then you’d have a husband.”

  She lowered her head and barked an astonished, scornful laugh. Leif turned and glared at him. Raef said nothing more; he felt the idea strike her mind like a dart and for a moment regretted saying it. Rain was starting to fall. He thought, At least we’ll have something to drink.

  All the rest of the day, savagely hungry, they trudged inland through the driving rain. The country they walked over had once been farmland, but now the people were gone, the fields and pastures overgrown with weeds, trampled and burned out. Raef remembered the captain saying that the Jomsvikings had been raiding this coast for years. Clearly they had taken everything useful and destroyed the rest.

  A wolf trailed along after them awhile, its ribs like hoops under its hide. The road was a stream of mud. Raef could sense how the people had fled along it, their footprints still warm somewhere under the icy muck. Here and there they found some relic of those people, an old broken shoe, a piece of a basket. Laissa took the shoe and chewed on the leather. Then, around sundown, with the rain pouring down, they walked into the ruins of a farmstead.

  Where there had been a dozen buildings only a few walls stood in masses of dead weeds. The place had been abandoned awhile, over a year. In the center was a fire-scarred oak tree, bones hanging from the branches.

  Laissa said, “Who did this?” She drew back, her arms folded up over her chest. Raef went toward the tree, where bones lay scattered everywhere on the charred ground, blackened and split. Broken skulls and fingers.

  Leif said, “It’s Danish work. Sweyn Tjugas. Or the Jomsvikings.”

  Raef said, “There’s nobody left here. There’s nobody for miles.” He went up past Laissa, toward the ruined hall.

  The walls had been made of stones and mud; with the thatch burned off the rain had melted them down to waist high. Inside the door the spined burrs of teasels stood up over his head. Behind him, Laissa said, “They killed all these people?”

  Leif said, “Most of them probably just ran off.”

  “Afraid to come back,” Raef said. “They’ve been gone awhile. But look here.” Behind the hall was a walled garden. He pushed open a battered wooden gate and went inside.

  They pulled old onions and woody turnips out of the mud, gnawing into them before they washed the dirt off. A crooked apple tree grew in the corner, and the ground under it was covered with tiny red apples. In the angle of the wall and the remains of the roof, out of the wind and the worst of the rain, they built a fire and roasted turnips and onions, ate the apples, and threw the cores out to the garden. After dark the rain stopped at last, and the wind blew colder and stars glinted in the sky. They sat there in the shelter of the wall, stupid from gorging themselves, the fire warm on their faces.

  Presently Laissa said, “What you said before, you meant it?”

  Raef put another piece of wood into the fire. “About marrying you? Yes.”

  Leif said, harshly, “There’s danger in this, Laissa – he is not telling you everything.” He gave Raef a stinging look.

  She said, “Not in a church. Not you.”

  “No, no. Handfast. How we have done this forever. We need only the two witnesses, and then to agree.”

  She turned away and said nothing more. Leif said, “You are not fit for her, Raef.”

  “So all fathers have said since Adam.”

  Laissa said, “Adam had no daughters.” She was drawing her cloak around her, settling down, ready for sleep.

  “He must have had some,” Raef said. “How would we be here?” But he was tired, and they were nestling together, ignoring him, unwilling to argue. He stood up and shook his cloak out. Under the soaked fur the good wool lining was warm yet, and he wrapped himself in it and lay down.

  * * *

  Laissa thought, He would belong to me then. Whatever he was, she would have someone, at last, someone of her own. She knew Leif was furious, jealous, afraid, but Leif was old and fatherly. Her heart pounded when she thought of Raef, of touching him like that, but most of all of owning him.

  * * *

  Raef dreamed he dropped into a great well and went down and down, floating, not toward darkness but into light. The well was
made of bricks, and soon he was descending a staircase that spiraled down the circular brickwork, walking it seemed for hours, until he reached the round room at the bottom.

  There was a door, and he opened it and looked out at nothing – neither the sky nor stars nor even emptiness but nothing at all.

  “You came to me.” The voice sounded around him, as if it came from everywhere. “You see this. You are coming to me because you have always belonged to me. You are my slave. I owned your mother. You were born in my house! If your mother and her brother had been wiser she would have reigned with me into eternity and you would have been fed to the dogs. Instead the Twins betrayed me. You’ll pay for that.”

  He was stiff with fear, his tongue stuck between his teeth and his hands trembling. But he made himself think: Why is she trying to frighten me like this? Why not just kill me? Then suddenly, without willing it, he was awake, lying on the ground beside Laissa, his feet cold.

  He shuddered with relief. The dream clutched him hard still. He lay breathing deeply, trying to fathom what had happened.

  He remembered the door into nothing. He ran his mind over the idea that she did not belong here, but then he had to try to think where she had come from, and he had no way to imagine that. He wondered if she had even been in the dream— if he had not made her up, out of what he already knew about her.

  The dawn was breaking. Somewhere nearby a raven barked. He thought of Conn, his heart’s brother, asleep under the mountain in Kiev. Of Corban, who had hated kings. His memory skipped to the false prophetess in Chersonese who had said that he, Raef, would be a king and that his son would be a king. His true father, Eric Bloodaxe, had been King of Jorvik. Gunnhild had said that was why he had to go to Jorvik.

  Now he was remembering something else, which was that it was in Jorvik that the Lady had bought his mother from Eric Bloodaxe, with Raef himself only a seed in her belly. They had first crossed paths there, he and she.