“Kill him,” Gisur snarled. “He’s got us all dead. We’ll never get home—We’re all going to die here—” He lifted his hands like claws. “Kill him, at least.”
“Ah, you’re mad,” Corban said. He tucked the knife into his belt. “Ulf, you said we could rig a new mast. What about a sail?”
“The cargo cover,” Ulf said.
“Is there enough rope?”
“There’s rope.”
Corban swung around toward the other men. “Stop acting like sheep. We’re going home. All of us. All together. Understand?”
They stared at him, their faces sagging. Floki turned and glared at Ulf. Gisur said, “We’re going to die here. I don’t care what you say.”
Corban grunted, angry. “If you’re right you can tell me so in Hell.” He moved over beside Ulf, so that the cockeyed man was staring at him too. “Tomorrow we’re cutting the mast.” He put his hand on Ulf’s shoulder. “Can we do that in a day?”
Ulf nodded. Corban turned to the other two again. “We’ll carry water in these casks—”
“They all leak,” said Floki, with a groan.
“We’ll patch them. There’s moss, there’s pitch. I’ll go hunting again. There’s a lot of game here, we’ll take meat with us, and we can fish.” He looked each one in the face, nodding to him. “We’ll leave as soon as we can put away some food.”
This silenced them but did not stiffen them. They went back to the fire and sat around it without talking, without looking at each other. At least they had stopped fighting. Corban went away down the beach again, to get away from them, and steady himself.
Now that he was on solid ground again the idea of sailing out onto the sea, of crossing that open ocean, filled him with a sick sense of panic. He thought of Mav, and of Benna and her sisters. He wondered again why it was he, Corban, standing here, alive, trying to get home, and not those other men: like Floki’s brother, swept overboard in the storm and drowned in the sea. He wished he could think that meant he would not drown in this crossing, either. He wanted to believe that it meant something, anyway.
He settled himself. The other men had no heart as it stood; if they saw him afraid they would give up. Being afraid did no good anyhow. Sometimes thinking just got in the way. He wished he could see Benna, and he longed for his sister. He went back to the fire, to the poor cold company of the other men.
In the morning Ulf went to work with the axe, and Corban walked off into the forest again. He followed the same stream he had found and traced before, picking it up where it wound into the black mucky swamp at the foot of the rising ground. The day was bright and fresh; he plucked some stems of reeds and chewed them as he walked. They had no real taste, but he swallowed some and did not get sick. He watched the trees for more of the creature he had found the day before, but saw none. Twice he saw owls, high in the trees, too far away to shoot with his sling.
In a clearing he found strange droppings, like bird droppings, but saw no tracks. He overturned rocks in the stream, looking for lizards or frogs, and found nothing. The stream wound back up a narrow rocky ridge. He watched for birds with nests, for the prints of deer—remembering that huge forefoot print, that strange bellowing cry. He began to think that was a tremendous deer, whose meat would take them all the way to Hedeby. He wondered how to kill it, and began imagining trapping it, somehow; clubbing it down. He turned over a rotten log and found a swarm of white grubs, and ate them without even thinking much about it.
The day wore on. Around him the forest rang with a racket of birdsong. He came on a meadow, and circling through it came on the forked prints of deer—but smaller, like the deer he knew. He quartered over the meadow, looking for more tracks. A mouse bolted away almost under his feet and dove into the grass. He saw just the tail of a snake vanishing.
From somewhere downstream a flock of birds took flight, and rose up over where he stood, in such numbers their passage shadowed the whole grassy meadow.
He wandered on, circling back, he hoped, toward the stream. There were big red mushrooms in the heavy shade below a rock, but the color put him off. In a stand of great barreled oaks he came suddenly on an enormous bird, scratching and pecking at the ground like a giant chicken, but looking like no chicken he had ever seen.
It saw him at once, and took off running with a hair-raising warbling yell; he whirled the sling around and fired at it. Just as he loosed, the bird took flight, lumbering into the air, and the stone sailed wide. He ran after it a little way, trying to see where it went, but the bird disappeared at once into the forest.
He went away down toward the stream again, following a narrow game trail, and striding along around a twist in the way, he came on a full grown deer, a doe, hanging upside down in the air.
He jumped. His skin went cold. His gaze traveled up, up from the doe’s body, following the long length of rope, up to the top of the tree. It was a snare. His mind seemed to swell, taking in the implications of this. His nerves quivered, as if someone watched him.
He had to get out of here.
He could not leave so much meat. He grabbed for the doe, cut her down, and hacked her quickly into quarters. The feeling would not leave him that someone was watching him. The day before, today coming here, he had left tracks, all through these woods, he had left plenty of signs. It had never occurred to him, until now, there might be people here.
Certainly whoever had made this snare knew that Corban had come into his country. He got all the meat up on his shoulders, and ran toward the beach.
Ulf had cut down a good tree for a mast, and Floki and Gisur had dug mussels and cockles out of the beach. Corban did not tell them about the snare, but in the morning he drove them to work, moving faster than any of them so they would have to keep up. They heated pine logs in the fire, to drive out the pitch, and sealed the whiskey casks, and he sent Gisur to fill them at the stream. He cut up the deer into chunks and stuffed them into one cask, and filled the spaces with sea water and seaweed.
When Ulf had trimmed the tree trunk they stepped it into the ship. The cargo cover was in two pieces, which meant it had to be sewn together. While they did this Gisur made a hook of bone and fished in the bay, and caught two huge flatfish.
Corban kept looking toward the trees; he saw that Ulf noticed this, but Ulf said nothing. Corban knew that someone was there, watching them. They used an extra oar for the yard, and bent the sail on. By midafternoon, they had the water casks mended and filled, and they loaded the ship.
Ulf said, “Should we go tomorrow morning?”
Corban straightened; they were all watching him. His stomach tightened. They had looked to Ulf before, and Ulf’s mistakes had gotten them here. He turned and looked inland again, toward the dark forest. In the night, what might come silently out of those trees and fall on them? He faced the other men again.
“No,” he said. “We’ll leave now.”
Without a word they obeyed him. They drove the ship out through the waves and into the sea, climbed aboard, and rowed toward the open water. The wind was foul for the end of the bay, but the tide was ebbing, and they all rowed, even Ulf, with the steerboard lashed down. No one spoke. By sundown they had reached the open sea. The stretch of white beach was already out of sight behind them, only the forest showing, a prickly dark line against the sky. They raised the sail, and caught the wind to the north and the east.
The wind backed around out of the west and they were still well south of where Ulf believed they should be; they started rowing north. The food went bad, and then the food ran out entirely. Corban ate the seaweed, chewing patiently. Gisur fished but caught nothing. Ulf took a reading one night and decided they were far enough north, and they turned east and ran up the sail.
That was worse even than rowing, because there was nothing to do. Gisur dozed as he sat with the fishing line trailing out between his fingers, and Floki moaned and, occasionally, cried. Ulf sat in the stern, the steer bar in his hand, his gaze aimed eastward as if he could pul
l them back home on the force of his will. Corban thought of his sister; he remembered one day he had forgotten for years, maybe since it happened, when they were little children, a day spent hidden in the byre cracking nuts and telling each other secrets. He longed for Mav as if for food; an aching hopeless hunger. He remembered the smell of the byre, the new-mown hay and the cattle, and the sound of a cow stamping its hoof. Mav leaning toward him saying, “Promise me you won’t tell.”
He had laughed, startled that she needed such a promise, when he talked to nobody but her.
The memory was so sharp it was as if the whole scene lay before him, everything except the fact. Corban shut his eyes. He was exhausted, half-broken, a bad man who had failed. He had forgotten how many days they had been at sea. The wind blew steadily from the west, fair and true, and the ship drove along before it, muscling along over the long ocean swells; at night the stars blazed from the sky in a white splendor. Corban chewed on a corner of his cloak, watching Ulf take another reading of the stars with his stick.
The captain spoke suddenly, low-voiced. “You see these notches? You put this notch here on the North Star—” He held the stick out at arm’s length, toward the north; squinting one eye shut he moved his head a little, and put out the other hand and gripped the stick, and lowered it and showed it to Corban.
“See—this notch is what we want.” He nudged his thumb into the indentation on the stick. “Sail on this heading until we strike land, then follow the coast southeast. You see?”
Corban realized suddenly that Ulf thought he was going to die, that someone else would have to read the star. He looked at the captain sharply, whose face was haggard and drooping, blood crusted on his lips. Corban swallowed; he could taste blood in his own mouth. He nodded to Ulf.
“I see it. Thank you.”
The captain snorted at him. They said nothing, only sat there in the stern, watching the dark water rise up and then slide away past the ship. Ulf’s head sagged between his shoulders, his body slumped down a little, and he dozed off. The wind drove the ship on into the east. Finally Corban got the bucket and began to bail.
They sailed on for days, Corban had no idea how many, the men lying around in the ship, too spent to talk. Gisur’s fishing line trailed along behind them, but Gisur slept most of the time now. Then, one morning, he caught a fish.
He had wrapped the string around his wrist, and the jerk of the hook setting woke him. Floki had to help him pull the fish in. It was another cod, and they hacked it up with their knives and cut the scales away skin and all, and devoured the meat raw. Corban scraped tiny bits of flesh away from the skin with his knife, savoring each little stab of a taste. A while later a seagull slid by them, looking them over, and around midafternoon they saw land.
Ulf let out a yell, flinging his arm out to point, and croaked and whooped, and the others looked and laughed, and cried, and staggered up onto their feet. They were coming up on a low sandy island. As the ship headed in toward the beach, a boy standing there turned and raced away up the low grassy hill where some sheep grazed.
Floki and Gisur were still laughing and hugging each other. Ulf croaked out something to Corban; the ship’s keel crunched against the sandy shore, and the captain leapt over the side and splashed through the shallowing wave, stumbling to his hands and knees. He waddled up onto the beach, headed after the fleeing boy. Corban got out of the ship, and took hold of the gunwale. For a moment he was too tired and weak even to try. Gisur and Floki tumbled out to help him, their hands on the ship, and looked at him. A big wave came, and he said, “Now,” and the wave lifted the boat and carried it in and they walked up beside it, light as wind drift, until the wave laid it down sweetly on the land. Floki went up on the sloping sandy beach and dropped to his knees and bent over, his forehead to the sand, his hands behind his head.
Ulf came back, with the boy and a man, who lived over the hill at a farmstead. They went back to the farm and there ate cabbage soup and mutton until their bellies were like drums. In the morning Ulf had them drag what remained of the cargo out of the ship so that he could look it over. Most of the remaining cloth was soaked and matted and ruined, but a few lengths somehow had stayed dry, and the fleeces were good enough, if a little salty. Ulf traded the remaining good cloth to the farmer for two bales of fleeces and some cheeses. They packed up mutton and some bread and a great jug of the soup and sailed off to the south, keeping that island to their right hand, and the next, too, when it appeared, slightly south and east on the hazy edge of the sea.
Ulf knew where he was now. He sat happily in the stern steering them along and drinking cabbage soup from a wooden bowl. At night, he put them in to coves and inlets, and they slept the night on dry land, with fires and cooked food. One day Corban thought he recognized the coast; they were sailing down past Jorvik, he thought. He thought of Benna, and kept his mouth shut.
His eyes followed the familiar coastline as it slipped by, thinking of her, of Grod, of her sisters. The warm little family in that hut. Finally he turned his face forward again.
They rowed south, against the wind, and Ulf took another reading, and turned them due east. They went out of sight of land, and Floki began to curse and sob again, but before sundown they had raised a low coastline to the southeast. The next few days they sailed past white shelving beaches, slowly giving way to swamps and fens, until the land bent around abruptly northward.
Ulf stood up, looking toward the coast, his hand shading his eyes. Abruptly he pushed the steer bar over and headed them in toward land. The coast was flat, indistinct, reeds poking up out of the water, water lying in behind patches of sandy shoal. In all the flatness there was a single little hill, even and grassy, just to the south. They took down the sail and put out the oars; Ulf came down from the stern to row in the second pair.
“See there?” He bobbed his head forward. “That earthworks? Follow that to Hedeby.” He leaned into the oars, and Corban swung forward again, and they rowed down into the swamp of interlacing waterways. To the south the hill lengthened into a steep-sided grassy ridge, a great wall, that ran straight away to the east. Ulf called out directions through the swamp, following a thread of current inland. They were catching up to a flat coaster boat, and he swung their ship to follow into the mouth of a slow-moving river. Pulling against the current, they followed a train of ships and boats paddling slowly up the river.
Over the grassy banks Corban could see broad fields, cattle, and once, someone plowing, far away. In the evening, they came finally to a wharf, with a little wooden town behind it.
There were ships already along the wharf, and Ulf after some snorting and groaning steered them to still water off between the wharf and the ridge of the earthworks, visible to the south. Here he fished a floating mooring out of the water and tied them up. At once, a little boat took off from the shore and stroked quickly toward them.
Ulf said, “This is the end, Corban.”
Corban stood up, looking at the little wooden town. “This is Hedeby?” he said, surprised; it looked smaller than Dublin.
“No, no. This is only Hollandstadt.” Ulf plunged his hand casually back into the stern and pulled out a sack of leather, which jingled. The other two men drew closer. Gisur licked his lips. Ulf said, “Hedeby is at the far end of the road. Follow the earthworks. If anyone stops you, say ‘Hurrah for King Bluetooth.’” He dug his hand into the sack and took out money.
Floki pushed forward. “I should get Odd’s, too.”
“Ah, you scum,” Ulf said. “Here, I have the pay for all the crew, divide it evenly.” He began to count out English pennies to each of them. The little boat had arrived beside their ship; a fat old woman sat in the stern, watching them expectantly.
Gisur got forty pennies, and Floki forty, and Ulf counted forty into Corban’s hand. When he was done, he lifted his face, and said, “You got us through that, Corban. Maybe these two will go and brag in the alehouses about how brave and strong they were, but I won’t forget you.”
Floki grunted out something. Surprised, Corban saw all three watching him with cow-eyes, like women. He stammered something, not knowing what to say, uneasy under their looks. Gisur reached out and gripped his arm.
“I will sail with you anywhere.”
Corban felt his cheeks glow hot as sunburn. He shook Gisur’s hand, and then Floki’s, and finally Ulf’s, and the captain held onto him. He lowered his voice.
“They would have killed me. I mean it, Corban. I won’t forget.”
Corban laughed. “I think you’re too tough to die anyway, Ulf.”
“Are you coming, or not?” the fat woman barked, from her boat, and they got into the tippy round-bottomed craft and she rowed them in to the shore. Ulf and the other men went straight to the alehouse, but Corban slept that night in the high grass at the foot of the earthworks.
In the morning he set out along the road that led eastward out of the little town. It felt strange to walk. The road still rocked gently under his feet as he went along. All around him as he went on there were other people; after being so long with only Ulf and Floki and Gisur he could not take his gaze from the faces of strangers. He swung around a big wagon, laden down with casks and bales, behind a team of wide-rumped horses, also going east. Other wagons rumbled past him in the other direction, raising fogs of dust. He kept to the side of the broad road, where the air was better. The high, even ridge of the earthworks ran along parallel to the road; the wind rippled the tall grass growing on it.
Ahead, now, a smudge of brown hung in the air, a gathering of old smoke. The rattle and creak of the wagons banged in his ears. He walked along among a great milling of hoofs and wooden wheels, with other men calling out, and now and then the snap of a whip. The road was taking him straight beneath the brown smudge.
The Soul Thief Page 18