Even then, standing there flanked by his nephews and with most of the ship’s company looking on, rain began splattering about them, heavy drops that left coin-sized circles on the hard ground. They boarded and pushed off, dropping oars into a river dull with the grayness of dawn.
They had lifted the new red-and-white sail a few times, admiring how its interwoven stripes caught both breeze and eye; but in the river channel and with growing crosswinds, Yrling ordered it stay furled against the spar. He stood in the stern, hands on the tiller of the steering oar, as all took up oars. This was their first time pulling together, and Yrling had those new to the skill take up the oar with the practiced men behind and before them. The rain had begun to pelt, and Yrling had not donned his new oiled-skin tunic and leggings, so soon all were wet. Une sat nearest him, so that he might be in ready earshot, and Toki opposite on the port side. All, save Yrling who stood, sat upon the chests that held their kit; the knee-braces of the hull serving as blocks against which to brace their feet. Sidroc took up a place at broad amidships, where his height was better served. Jari was across from him, on the port side.
They had been eager to cast off Ribe and its constraining river, but as they did so the weather turned its back on the newly-launched drekar, presenting it with rain so chill that all forgot it was the first month of Summer. They need sail up the river to its outlet into the North Sea, skirt the sandy barrier islands, then take a northerly tack to catch the prevailing currents to help spill them South and West across that vast sea to Angle-land.
Emerging from the river mouth they all saw what they had set off into. That sea now was a foaming expanse of chopping, curling white-caps, the wind whip-sawing back and forth, but with a steadier under-wind beating them back whence they came.
Oaring in such conditions exhausted both strength and patience. Yrling scanned the skies through the rain, searching for a glimmer of light that told of coming clearing. He saw none.
They beached on one of the barrier islands, and spent two days there in rain and wind consuming their stores, before the skies lightened and they could move on. They built a camp of sorts the first day on the sand in the lee of the ship, stretching oiled tarpaulins from the gunwale to stakes they drove into the sand with the blunt ends of the war-hammers three of them carried. Beneath was shelter enough to allow Bjarne to strike and light a fire from twists of sea-grass. Driftwood, scoured from the wave-beaten sand, seemed wet through but dried with little coaxing, allowing them a bit of warmth to toast loaves and melt the soft cheeses and butter they scooped from crocks.
Around such a fire the score of them talked and jested. Their progress had been arrested at first setting out, but turning back to Ribe to await favourable winds was never in their captain’s plan.
The first night was made easier by Toki’s prowess at the harp. He set himself up in a corner of their lean-to and pulled it from its bag, striking the strings so that they thrummed under his fingertips. He sang songs that all knew, of the giant race, the Jotuns, those devourers who the Gods had need to defeat before the world could come into being; and of that Trickster Loki, Jotun blood-brother of All-Father Odin, ever causing grief but also bringing laughter.
A number of bawdy songs fell from Toki’s lips that night, some of his own devising, speculations about which of the Goddesses would bring greatest pleasure. These gave rise to debate amongst a few of the men, some holding that sleeping with any Goddess was far too dangerous an endeavour to reward the risk. Toki’s songs thus proved diversion, and loosened their own tongues. That first night, hove to on the sand bar, driven by rain under the dripping tarpaulin, they then began to speak of themselves, trading stories of what past adventuring had cost them.
Yrling knew fewer than half these men; Sidroc and Toki, only Une and Jari. One, known solely as Gap – for his upper two front teeth were missing – had sailed with Yrling before. His absent teeth did not keep him from grinning, an effect that to Sidroc looked like the opened gates of a palisade wall. Of necessity Gap bit off food and chewed on the side of his mouth. And Bjarne lacked most of his right ear. All, even those who had been witness to it, heard how Gap’s teeth were knocked out by the butt end of a spear, and of the Saxon seax that cost Bjarne his ear.
Eyes then went around the circle of men, and several stopped on Sidroc.
“And you?” This was Gap, who whistled slightly as he spoke.
They were expecting Sidroc’s story; even Une and Jari were looking at him. He was silent.
His eyes shifted slowly to his left, to Toki, who had earlier put away his harp. Sidroc said nothing, wondering if his cousin would laughingly lay claim to the act, as the fruit of a friendly fight. But his cousin too was silent.
It was Yrling who spoke. “I was there, soon after the deed. The one who gave that cut was worse marked than Sidroc.”
Toki, eyes down, was now busy picking dirt out from the grooves of the grip of his knife. Sidroc too had dropped his eyes a moment, and when he raised them saw all looking on him. His uncle’s words seemed to do him honour, one Sidroc knew unearned, just as he knew the same words were meant to privately castigate Toki. Yet Yrling’s true meaning was shared only by the three of them.
Talk shifted from hurts suffered to contests, and warriors, which lived on in memory.
“Who has seen a berserkr?” Une posed, a question answered by laughter, or the shaking of heads.
“Seen one, and lived?” Yrling challenged. “If the bear enters a fighting man, those he faces are not likely to tell the tale after.”
Bear, wolf, boar – all these mighty beasts might take possession of a warrior who was so favoured by the spirits. In body he would look a man, but the beast’s hugr – essence – would suffuse his being, giving him powers beyond mortal fighting men, and animal cunning too. To be so possessed gave a warrior almost invincible ability, carrying him to a realm of expanded senses yet narrowed focus. The essence of the spirit beast was constricted into a channel, deep and clear, flowing into the warrior’s consciousness. It took possession of his human form – his hamr – spreading throughout his body, and thence to his limbs, to direct their action. Sometimes a man’s voice was taken over, sounds issuing from his throat never before heard. Other times he might fight in silence, the whirlwind sweep of his weapon and that of his breathing the only sound.
Pure rage alone could not take a man there; in fact, such wrath was often the key to recklessness and an early death. The awakening of the hugr was a deeper arousal, like that of the bear who each year went to its den under the ground, a seeming death lasting months, to arise in Spring to new life.
Most gathered under that dripping tarpaulin hoped they might be found worthy to attain such a state; such warriors won rare repute amongst their brothers. Yet there were dangers too in this possession, a kind of madness that could make a man fight with indiscriminate fury. Only let me fight like Tyr, Sidroc thought; with an arm that does not fail me, and discernment too.
Later, both Sidroc and Jari quit the slight shelter of the tarpaulin. One must sit beneath it, and their legs needed stretching. There was naught but scrub-growth, sea thorn and the like, springing from the sand where they had beached, and walking on the barren flatness both felt the taller for it. The rain fell only in scattered drops, but the wind was fierce upon them, and both clutched their woollen mantles closely to them. They walked leaning into the blow, side by side, not unaware that each was watching the other from the tail of their eye.
“I am taller than you,” Jari said, for no reason. Sidroc stopped and sized him up. He shook his head.
He turned on his heel and they stood back to back. With lifted hands they tried to determine the taller. It was indeed Sidroc, but Jari was close.
“I am still growing,” Sidroc claimed. He could not know this for certain, save that he recalled his own father telling him that he himself had had a late growth spurt.
Sidroc could not pin this telling to an exact moment. He felt p
rompted to say it nonetheless. Once out, he felt for a sudden moment the presence, in his breast, of his fylgja, nodding her head in assent at his words, Já, that is correct; that is true.
Jari took it with ease. He was certainly broader; a chest like a barrel, a neck well able to hold the large head and abundant fiery hair. “We will be tall enough to face any,” he said into the wind, as they turned back to the ship. “You, Une, and me. We can put Sif between us for protection.”
He laughed, and Sidroc did too. Sif was the name Une had once called Toki in jest; he had watched Sidroc’s cousin combing out his yellow hair, delaying him in some task about the ship, and teased him with the name of the yellow-haired wife of Thor. Toki had not taken well to it.
After two damp nights on the sandy spit of the barrier island the blast abated enough that they could once again push off. Hoisting sail made all glad, and the ship fairly lunged forward in seeming eagerness to be at last underway. They must travel northerly first, up past the tip of Jutland, and from there cast out, working with the currents, letting them carry them down across the North Sea to their target. They cleared the last of their native land, and staring on the dim green and brown line of it some on the deck looked forward to their return. Three at least did not, and though Yrling, hand on the steering oar, said nothing, he followed the gaze of his nephews’ eyes. He read in their faces the cool satisfaction of final farewell.
Yet winds remained contrary, and with it the work of keeping the ship on its southwesterly course. When it grew dark enough to spot the North Star they could check by its gleam they headed South and West; but the lengthening northern days made it hard to see. Yet the Sun refused them its bright beams, and the ceaselessly grey skies denied them a clear benchmark. When for a generous moment or two the Sun grew strong, it would cast a slender shadow from the pointed spindle of the wooden Sun-board Yrling held up, and from which he must determine their course. They had now seen no land, and no other craft, for three days. The ship was a brown sliver of wood, blown along by its red-and-white sail on a grey and ceaselessly rough white-flecked sea. Une and others had made this journey before, but Yrling now led these men. He must serve as his own kendtmand – that man who knows the secrets of open-water sailing.
Both gannets and fulmars ranged far out to sea by day, but returned to shore at dusk; they were truth-tellers of land ahead, and when they were sighted Yrling knew to turn his back on them, keep heading across the expanse before the prow.
The food was cold, parcelled out so none were ever full, and fogs and frequent rains assured that none felt dry or warm. And some were sick. Sidroc, used to going out in a small boat as a child, felt it not, and Toki too was blessed with a strong stomach. But a few of the men, including those who had before made the crossing, found their bellies lurching with the roll of the waves. These could barely keep down a bit of stale bread, so it freed up remaining stores for those who laughed at their brethren clinging to the gunwale. But the ale in the big cask was beginning to sour, and must be drunk up before it became unswallowable.
“Rat!” called Bjarne one dull morning. He had been placed in charge of the food supplies, and opening the chest that held the remaining loaves was startled by a brown rat that leapt out at him. He flung his knife at the lithe creature, startling one of his fellows, Asved by name, by whose shoulder the blade flew. But the rat vanished behind one of the casks of water. Asved, who had narrowly missed being punctured by the knife, stood cursing the thrower. But Bjarne was busy turning the food chest. Sure enough, there was now a hole gnawed clear through the wood of it, near one of the bottom corners. The rat had had its full, and many of the loaves were left in crumbled fragments.
Jari leapt up from where he sat near the mast. “I told you,” he challenged all, with not a little triumph in his declaration. “No cat – and we have a rat.”
A few of the apples, but lightly secured in a sack, had before been found to have been gnawed, but the men had laughingly accused each other of taking a bite and returning the rest of the fruit. Their bread was a more serious matter, for between the creature’s teeth and the scat it had left, it had despoiled much.
Une, looking on his brother, was forced to admit aloud he always had good sense, and regretted they had not scooped up a clawed hunter when they could.
There was no cornering the pillaging creature, though Jari, Bjarne and a few others shifted casks, chests, and packs where they were lashed, in an attempt to capture it. It darted about, a streak of sleek dark fur, until it vanished down a narrow slot in the decking, beneath which lay the ballast stones.
The rat, unwelcome as it was, served as momentary distraction, one which Yrling felt the need of, though no one regretted the loss of bread as much as he. Short rations ever led to short tempers. All were suffering from the first, and nearly all from the second. Their cheese was gone, but butter they still had, now with less bread on which to spread it. The dried cod was meant to have served them when they landed in Angle-land, and could fire a cauldron and boil it down. They had a few apples and some boiled eggs, and now must hack up the dried cod and chew small chips of it. It was of leather-like hardness and salty enough that it only increased thirst. One cask of water had been exhausted, and when Yrling warned the men to slow their drinking of the second, a few of them looked at him with glowering eyes. No one had a gaze as hard as Yrling; his heavy brow line gave his eyes the cowl of a raptor, but he saw how some of those he glared at clenched their fists in wordless protest.
In truth they had been too many days at sea, with little to eat, continual damp, and no land in sight. The winds meant that the sail was always up, and full. But once the mast was lifted and sail unfurled, any four men could tend to the actual sailing, with one as look-out, which left an idle group of wet and hungry men with time to grumble. Yrling was loath to yield the steering oar to any but Une, with short stints for Sidroc and Toki, that they might learn the feel of the tiller. That night as he wrapped himself in his blanket on the decking under the carved visage of Odin, Yrling bethought him that in the morning he might order the fishing net to be unrolled and dropped. He would not go so far as to allow fire on his new ship, but the moist flesh of raw fish would be better than barely chewable flakes of wind-dried cod.
That next morning, their seventh out, no net was cast. All who slept were jolted awake by a sudden swell, which caught the ship, carried her up, and dropped her into a trough. Une was at the steering oar as Yrling staggered up and out of sleep. The fog and cool mist of the night was gone; the sharpening wind had driven it off. The sky was overcast, unchanging, an unbroken leaden gray. The sea roiled beneath them, and another few swells found wave tips slapping over and inside the hull. Yrling yelled out orders as the sail was hastily dropped and furled.
The rain began, in confused flight. The wind sent it down upon their heads as if to batter their brains. It then thickened and froze, shifting so that particles of hail came at them from the side in sheets, smarting their faces and bare hands as hornets might. Indeed it felt the ship herself was under attack, and she betrayed this in her movement, bucking as a stung horse might, rising and falling, canting to port and then to starboard. The bow lifted, driving the painted dragon head seemingly straight above them, then plunged so that carved Odin in the stern grinned over them as they clung to anything that kept them from being flung overboard.
Une stood with Yrling at the steering oar, four hands and two strong backs on the tiller. The frenzy of the sea was such that there was no keeping her bow heading into the swells, for waves crested on all sides, pouring water within. The oaths of men scrambling for handholds as they were dashed against the hull were lost in the whistling of the wind. Tarpaulins were blown from where they had been stretched over the bow, ripping away the slight shelter they had provided. Yrling had not been able to afford a stout netting of hempen line, cunningly knotted to cage his cargo; all had been secured by simple lines lashing down their stores. These had been disturbed, and then imperf
ectly re-fastened, by the chase after the rat, and now fell loose. The wind mounted in its fury, shrieking about the scrambling men. Freed chests and casks rolled wildly. Sidroc, trying to reach a loose bucket which neared where he held the base of the mast, saw even the coiled fishing net be picked up in the wind and fly over the gunwale. But the bucket came within his grasp. He was able to scoop at the cold water soaking him, joining those men who had grabbed what vessels they could in their bailing.
One thought was in Sidroc’s mind as he struggled, on his knees, to hurl bucketsful of sea water back into the angry depths: I will not rest in Ran’s bed tonight. He was not alone in this determination, even if for some it was little more than mere hope. Ran was a Goddess of the Sea, one known for her greed in pulling men down to their deaths in her sea-net.
They crawled, shivering through the churning salt water that engulfed them. Any sudden roll of the ship might fling them out, and those who found lines near them hastily tried to secure themselves. Twice when Sidroc reached the gunwale he found the deck dropping away from beneath him, and the bucket he grasped dumped its sloshing contents back over him before he could toss it over.
More than one man howled out prayers. Sea-God Njord heard, and seemingly took pity. The gale released its grip on them. Stinging hail melted to hard rain, and the battering winds slackened. At length the ship slowed in her tossing. Buckets, cooking pots, even bowls were used to lift and fling the sea water out from whence it came. They all worked numbly, soaked and even trembling with cold, to rid the ship of the channel of sea water they stood in, water at first as high as the calves of their legs, and still up to their ankles. Other than a random oath they barely spoke. Nearly all the men were bruised from being thrown about the hull, or hit by wooden chests and barrels. One sat dazed, having struck his head against the spar.
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