The Soul Thief

by Cecelia Holland

  One of the oarsmen wailed. The captain shouted orders, lashed the steeringboard down, and jumped toward the sail and the mast. The oarsmen were scrambling around in the hull of the boat for their oars. Corban lifted his oar up and swung it over the gunwale. With a glance over his shoulder he saw the two boats much closer, bounding through the white-crested waves.

  The captain shouted again, and Grod, crouched down behind Corban, said into his ear, “Pull. Pull. We have to get away. They’re pirates for sure.”

  Corban did not know the word pirate but he saw deadly purpose in the oncoming boats; he leaned his back into the oar. The men in the row ahead of him bent and drew, part of his rhythm. One of them was crying out, “God help us—God help us—” Corban’s heart was pounding. The captain swung the boat around to the north, away from the land. Corban twisted to look back again and saw the boats nearly on them.

  The captain screamed again; Grod did not have to translate this. Corban planted his feet on the bench before him and swung the oar and wrenched it through the water, and then from behind him came a whistling, a whining, like a flock of vicious birds, and a flight of arrows pelted into the boat. An arrow struck the naked back in front of Corban and went in up to the feathers, missing the long scar entirely. As that man slumped forward, his oar flopping, the boat wobbled off course. Corban looked around and saw the captain slumped against the gunwale, an arrow through his neck.

  The other men were shrieking and leaping up from their oars. One crouched down, his arms over his head, but the others rushed forward, scrambling over the cargo toward the bow of the ship. Corban swore under his breath. Stooped low, he wheeled around him, looking for a weapon. Grod, half-buried in the piles of hides, had his hand up over his mouth, his eyes bulging and slick with fear. The boatman was slumped down over a pile of hides, the arrow jutting up past his ear. Corban wheeled, looking around again.

  The two boats swept up toward them, one ahead of the other, full of men standing up now, waving spears and bows. From the first of these, which was swiftly approaching the merchant boat, a rope snaked through the air; the hook on the end landed inside the boat, and the pirate holding the other end began to haul the line in. The hook bounced on the hull and then caught fast on the gunwale.

  Corban grabbed for the bench, just as the rope tightened with a snap. The boat rocked under him. In the bow the oarsmen had gotten swords and clubs out of the forecastle and now, clambering around on the barrels and bales of hides, they were leaping to meet the attack; one lifted his sword and hacked through the line that hooked them to the pirate boat.

  Too late. The pirates were already leaping across the narrow strip of water between them and the cargo ship. Close behind them the second of the pirate boats was paddling furiously up toward the merchant, half a dozen men yelling and waving spears. Corban crouched down, burrowed deep down into the mass of the cargo, out of the way.

  The boat rocked violently again, as two of the oncoming pirates leapt over the shrinking space of water into the merchant boat and launched themselves at the fighting oarsmen. Flattened between the rowing benches Corban pretended to be dead, as a stream of men followed the others across the gunwale.

  The boat heaved and pitched under their feet. They rushed on past him. Corban popped up again. At the bow end of the boat men were scrambling over the heaps of cargo, stabbing with spears, but all he saw were their backs; no one was watching him. He stood up, panting, knowing he had to do something quickly, and then started and shrank at something moving just behind him.

  An empty pirate boat was bumping down alongside, its cut line trailing along. He reached down and grabbed the floating rope and reeled the boat in closer. It was light as a walnut shell; it bounced on the surface of the sea like a skipping rock. He twisted around, grabbed hold of Grod, down in the cargo, by the front of his shirt, and heaved him over the gunwale and into the little boat. Grod wailed. Corban dove overboard.

  The cold sea took him in. He swam strongly upward, seeing the hulls of the boats above him hanging down from the light-filled surface of the water. The cut line from the little boat trailed past him. His head broke the surface; he swam to the boat and shoved it away from the others. When he stretched up as far as he could he was able to see over the Goat’s leather-bound rim, to where Grod sat, clutching the round gunwale with both hands, his eyes white. Corban leaned his weight against the boat, got it moving, and drove it on with strong kicking of his legs.

  Salt water splashed into his mouth. He could see nothing, only the boat’s hull before him—a boat of hide, it was, leather and wax. He laid his hands on it and kicked hard with his feet, driving it through the water away from the merchant boat. He stayed down as low as he could in the water, so they would think back there that the boat was just drifting away. He shoved and muscled the little boat over a wave; on the far side it got away from him and slid down into the trough.

  Corban rode up on the crest of the wave, and looked back. The other men were still fighting on the merchant boat. He could hear the thin howling of their voices, and the sunlight glinted off a raised blade, and a body splashed into the sea. He turned back to the work of widening the stretch of water between the hide boat and the merchant.

  He began to feel the cold of the water. He stopped a moment, panting, took the gunwale of the boat with both hands, pushed it hard up and away from him so that the boat rocked, and then rocked it toward him and flung himself over the edge and in.

  The boat bounced and rolled wildly, and Grod, clutching the gunwale, let out a wail. “I can’t swim—Don’t throw me in—”

  Corban sat upright in the bottom of the boat. “Hang on, Grod. You’re all right.” He looked around for a paddle. He had used such boats as this since he was a boy, he understood them better than the merchant boat. In its bowl-shaped belly were wooden paddles, and he took one up, knelt down, and dug the blade into the water and sent them whirling away.

  The wave carried them up and he looked over his shoulder; from the peak of the wave he could see the merchant boat, the men chopping and hacking at each other. No one paid any heed to Grod and Corban. The wave carried them down again out of sight. With all his strength he paddled them off to the east and the last of the screaming and yelling died away behind them.

  Grod was watching him, pop-eyed. “You did it. You saved us.”

  “Maybe.” Corban slowed his pace, his strength fading. His cloak was gone, but he still wore his shirt, with the money tied into the corner of the sleeve. He felt at his belt; he had lost his sling. But his knife was still there. And Grod was there, sitting upright as a little priest, his eyes still huge with fear, clinging to the gunwales. Corban laughed to see him. He gave another quick look behind.

  For a moment he saw nothing, only the rolling sea, and then a wave lifted the boat and he saw the merchant boat, far behind. Nobody seemed to be fighting anymore. The wave carried it down again out of sight. He turned forward again, watching for the land he had seen; it was well to the south now, but he could see a dark line of hills behind it, curving deeply around in front of him. He paddled on eastward. His chest felt tight. He was soaked and shivering.

  But he laughed, quavery with relief. They had gotten away, they had escaped.

  Grod said, “They would have killed us. They killed everybody else.” His eyes were wide with shock and admiration. Corban laughed again, triumphant.

  He struggled to keep hold of the good feeling. He was so cold his teeth began to bang together. Among the gear in the belly of the hide boat was a blanket, soaked through, and he wrung it out and wrapped himself in it. Grod shook off his terror and went through the gear and found a jug of water but nothing to eat. Corban set himself to paddling. The boat moved well; by the look of the water around them he thought they had gotten into a current, and he tried to paddle the same way as the current ran, although it took them away from the head of land now rising to the south. Grod gave him water. Gulls floated by them, their white wings curled to the wind.

>   He thought again and again about how they had escaped. The first hot rush of triumph would not stay with him. He thought he had not actually done so great a deed. He remembered huddling down in the hold, while the others fought to defend themselves and their boat. Probably Grod was right and they had died for their bravery. He began to wish he could find some reason in it, that he should live and they should die—that they should fight and die so that he should live.

  He knew no reason. He was not a good enough man, that a dozen men should die for him. He felt uneasy, as if some charge now lay upon him.

  He paddled all day. He was so hungry by nightfall he could have eaten the blanket, or Grod. Now they were floating past a shore, with hills behind it, vague in the distance. He pointed.

  “We should go in. We have to find something to eat.”

  Grod shook his head. “Keep going.”

  “I’m starving!”

  “That’s where the pirates came from,” Grod said. “Do you want to give us back to them, now that we’re saved? Keep going east.”

  Corban groaned and set to work again with the paddle. When darkness fell he rolled himself into the blanket and lay down and slept, and Grod curled up next to him and the warmth of his body was like a little fire. Halfway through the night rain began to fall, and Corban woke, cold, huddled up against Grod. His belly was a knot of hunger.

  He thought about his sister, about his home, and the warm hearth and the people there, now gone, forever gone. A deep raw grief took him, as if all the world had died, and left him here floating in this leaf of a boat, freezing. His father’s curse swam up to the surface of his mind. He was Corban Loosestrife, who brought only trouble, who did nothing well or right.

  With the desperation of a drowning man he thought of Mav, and that gave him some heart. It came to him that he was sure that Mav was alive, somewhere; as he thought of this, the feeling grew stronger in him, as if she spoke to him from somewhere over the horizon. Surely she was alive. And he was not alone; against his chest Grod murmured in his sleep, and shivered. Corban pressed himself against him, to warm them both, and put his head down again. The rain had stopped, at least. He laid his cheek against Grod’s shoulder and tried to sleep.

  When the dawn came, they were floating along, much closer to the land; he saw a long pale beach, dark trees behind it, behind that the blue loom of mountains.

  “Let’s go in,” he said. “We have to find something to eat.”

  “Not here,” Grod said, and pointed to some rocks in the water.

  “I can steer between them,” Corban said, picking up the paddle.

  “How do you think they got there?” Grod said. “Giants live here. They throw rocks at any boat that comes ashore. When they sink one they wade out and pick up the bodies of the drowned people and eat them.”

  Corban stared at him, startled, and turned and gave a long look at the shore. All he saw was a long thin pale beach, with trees behind it, and then the lofting crags of the mountains. “How do you know this? Have you been here before?”

  “I’ve been everywhere,” Grod said.

  Corban bent to the paddle, keeping them out to sea, away from the rocks and the shore and the giants. “Where did you begin?”

  Grod said something he could not understand. “The danskers call it Gardarik. It’s way to the east of here, where the sea ends.”

  Corban bent steadily to the paddling. “The sea never ends. The sea is everywhere.”

  “Hah,” Grod said. “So little as you know. East of here the sea does end, and the land goes on forever. That’s where I came from.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  Grod shrugged. On his cheeks a glinting stubble of beard showed, strange beneath his shiny bald head. “I wanted to see what lay out here. I wanted to see how far I could go.” He scratched his cheek. “Young men have strange notions. If I had known there was nothing out here but rocks and water and savages I’d never have come.”

  Corban laughed. “Then where you were—what was it—”

  “Gardarik.”

  “Is a better place?”

  “Oh, certainly. There even ordinary people live in palaces, and everybody eats whenever he wants, eggs and cream and wonderful golden bread. Everybody wears fur robes and boots, even the beggars. At night in the summer the sun stays in the sky all day long, and we dance and sing for the wonder of it.”

  Corban’s belly was cramped and his back aching. He stroked steadily along with the paddle, the long shore off to his right. “The summer sun stays long above my home, too. You have a family there, to go back to?”

  Grod looked at him a moment, his wide mouth soft. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose they’re still there—my mother and my brothers. My father died when I was a little one.”

  Corban thought unwillingly of his family, of the burning farm, and the bodies. The piles of bloody bones by the shore. Abruptly his throat tightened, and his vision swam. He drew a long breath, forcing himself cold again.

  Grod reached out and touched his arm.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Corban shook his head. “I have to find my sister.”

  “Maybe she will be in Jorvik,” Grod said. “And you can take her and go back again to your home.”

  Corban felt a sudden rush of affection for the old man. He was glad not to be alone, maybe that was it. And he had saved Grod; now Grod belonged to him. He collected himself. The day was clear, the sky cloudless, and the sun beat on him. He felt this all in a new way, as if he had just awakened.

  Toward noon, he could see land ahead of them, too, and he straightened, resting his throbbing arms.

  “Now tell me why we can’t go in there,” he said, pointing.

  Grod peered over the gunwale, putting his hand up to shade his eyes. “Over there,” he said. “See where that river comes in? Go there.”

  Corban paddled. Ahead, the land bent around to the north, but he could see where a wide river mouth opened into it, and as they drew closer he saw other boats sprinkled across the broad reach of water, and men fishing from them with nets. He began to think of baked fish, and warm bread. His arms trembled with weariness but he bent his back and paddled them on.

  Grod said, “Keep going. What’s the matter with you? We’re almost there, don’t give up now.”

  Corban set his teeth together. He paddled them in past a fishing boat, and then another, until the land loomed all around them, the heights dark with trees; he saw the regular lines of buildings, on the ground above the shore.

  He was paddling now up the narrowing mouth of the river, the long waves of the sea fallen behind them. He had to pull hard against the outrush of the river and the boat kept trying to turn. On the shore along the northern edge of the river were other boats drawn up on the beach. Beyond them, on rising land, houses stood. “Look, there—we’re coming to some place important.”

  Grod twisted to look over the gunwale of the boat, holding on with both hands. “Yes,” he said. “Go in there.”

  “Is that Jorvik?” Corban asked. He plied the paddle strongly on one side, sending the little boat skimming across a stretch of placid water, toward the shore.

  Grod laughed. “No, no. Jorvik is far away still. But we can probably get something to eat here, and we can sell the boat and go on by land.”

  Corban nudged the boat into the shallows and stepped out. Grod bounded past him. “Wait here,” he said, and went running off.

  Corban stretched; it felt so good to be on solid land again that he bent down and put his hands on the sandy beach. He thought he should give a prayer of thanks, but he did not know to whom. He dragged the boat up high above the tidal wrack and sat down to wait for Grod.

  Almost at once several boys appeared, wandering around as if they didn’t even notice him, but watching through the corners of their eyes. He ignored them, turning his gaze out over the river. Although he was sitting on solid ground now, he still seemed to feel the rise and fall of the sea under him, and his hands ached. He
had come a long way, he realized, with a sudden, tardy amazement. A few days ago he would never have dreamt he could do this.

  He wondered if Christ were here, and if not, what gods watched over this country; he wished he knew some charms against them. The memory of the fighting clung to his mind, and he could not shake off the feeling that he owed something to those other men, who had died while he escaped.

  One of the boys said something. Corban did not understand him, and therefore he kept on staring at the river, thinking about gods and spirits, and wondering when Grod would come back with food.

  The boy came closer, moving in front of him, into his line of vision, speaking. Corban shook his head at him. Then Grod came up beside him.

  “Here.” He held out a round loaf, smelling strongly of rye.

  All Corban’s thoughts shrank down to this wheel of bread. He seized it with both hands and ripped it apart and stuffed the pieces into his mouth. The taste made him groan. It was still warm, strong and sour, delicious on his tongue. Grod stood beside him, and spoke to the boys.

  “What do they want?” Corban said. “Is there more bread? Where did you get it?”

  Grod produced another loaf. “They say this is a Cymryc boat and they’re wondering if we’re Cymryc. I told them no.”

  “Tell them to go away.” Corban ate the second loaf as fast as the first. “Give me some water.”

  Grod held out a jug of water. “We need to pay for this.”

  Corban nodded; he drained the jug. “What’s Cymryc?”

  “That boat,” Grod said. His eyebrows went up and down. “I need money, to pay for the bread, and then I will bring you more.”

  Corban unknotted the corner of his sleeve; the salt water had hardened the knot in the cloth and he had to tug it apart with his teeth. He gave Grod a silver bit, but the old man shook his head.