by Henry Treece
‘That is our goal,’ said Thorkell, as he leapt down the rocky slope. The others followed, now careless of life or limb. The cold dawn air chilled them but set their blood tingling. They were filled with a strange excitement. The smell of the sea, strong and heady, made them drunk. They shouted a war-cry as they leapt.
Then from above and behind them they heard another shout. Horic, who was last in the line, turned and stopped for an instant. He saw a tall dark shape on the rocky hilltop above the passageway. It was one of Leire’s guards. Horic saw him thrust out one arm and draw back the other. He ducked, expecting to hear the arrow whizz over his head. It struck him between the shoulder blades. He flung up his arms and with a high cry, pitched forward, to fall before the others. He rolled quickly down the slope, taking with him a runnel of pebbles. Thorkell stopped for a moment as Horic’s body struck the sharp rocks below. ‘He was dead before he reached the beach,’ he said. ‘Crouch low and run for your lives. We must not stop now.’
Once an arrow whirred above them. Once a shaft glanced on the very rock where Harald had leaned a second or two before and shattered itself to pieces, flying on through the brightening air with the vicious sound of a hornet.
Then, sobbing and gasping, they reached the beach, and staggered over its soft surface towards the tarred curraghs.
They lay unguarded, their paddle-oars stacked beside them. Thorkell and Wolf rocked one of them, the smallest, until it was clear of the clogging sand, and then all pushed the flimsy shell to where the breakers ran in on to the pebbles. John and Harald carried four oars. They clambered into the curragh while the others pushed on until they were waist deep. Wolf groaned with pain as the salt water bit into his raw back, but still he pushed.
Then Thorkell yelled, ‘Aboard, Wolf, the tide will take her now.’ First one, then the other, scrambled into the curragh. The light shell seemed to shudder with their weight. A flurry of waters struck her and for a moment she hung, turning back towards the shore. The four rowers worked like souls damned to bring her out to the current again.
At last she swung free of the shore and began to move out of the shallow channel where the Nameless lay, and so beyond the far ridge of rocks, into the open sea. Now their spirits lifted, despite the great sadness of their lost comrades. For a while they sang wordless songs, out of the bursting fullness of their tormented hearts.
And so singing and weeping and rowing they passed out of sight of the rocky coast on which lay Leire’s Dun. It was only when they met the great untamed rollers of the ocean that they came to their senses and realized that they had no water, no food, little clothing. Then they remembered their wounds, their weakness, their madness at leaving the land behind them with so little preparation for a voyage.
Wolf said, ‘We had little luck with the ship we named Nameless. What shall we name this one, shipmaster?’
Thorkell smiled grimly and said, ‘I have learned that a ship lives up to its name. Nothing comes of nothing. Very well, then; let this be Landfinder. And I pray to Odin that she finds us a good shore to land on before long.’
Wolf said nothing, but from his look as he lowered his head, Harald saw that he had little faith in that prayer. Harald turned to John. The monk’s eyes were closed, but his lips were moving in syllables which the boy did not understand. Yet the monk rowed as steadily and as strongly as did Thorkell himself.
Perhaps there is some hope, thought the boy, when he saw this.
A gannet flying low seemed to say, ‘Perhaps … Perhaps.’
22
The End of the Voyage
The three days since they had taken to the sea again had been days of steadily growing despair. Now the battered curragh lay, almost waterlogged, at the mercy of the sea. Three of the paddles had been swept from nerveless hands and had floated away beyond all chance of recovery. As Wolf’s had gone, he had said, ironical with exhaustion, ‘Goodbye, dear friend, and may we never meet again!’
Then he had burst into loud laughter which had weakened him so much that Thorkell had been forced to turn and strike him across the face to save his reason.
John still had an oar and he pushed this way and pulled that way, more to give himself something to do than with any hope that his puny efforts would change the course of the curragh.
Harald sat, over the knees in water, his hands on his thighs, staring at the bottom of the tarred craft. The sky was dark above them now, and the great grey-green waves rose mercilessly higher and higher about them. Sometimes they lay deep in a twilit trough; sometimes, with a sudden frightening swing, they climbed effortlessly to the summit, and the waters rushed past them as they rose, sickeningly powerful.
Harald tried to remember what his father looked like. But found that the image would not come to his mind now. He tried to recall the name of the old headman in the village on the fjord, but that eluded him too. There was nothing to think about. Even the man he had killed no longer seemed frightening. The boy tried to make up a song and was actually singing its first harsh note when between his feet, the floor of the curragh split, and a spar of splintered wood appeared as though from nowhere, ripping its way through the flimsy shell, and striking violently on the lad’s legs, numbing them with the great force of the blow.
Almost immediately the crazy vessel sank beneath them. They were sitting down upon the waves at one moment, then they were standing in the great waters without any warning.
No one spoke, but each grasped the wooden rim of the waterlogged craft. They stared through each other, seeing nothing but the surging mountains of water, their teeth already chattering with the shock of the sudden immersion.
Then Thorkell came out of his trance and said, ‘Ragnar.’ It was merely that one word, spoken so softly that Harald only just heard it. He did not look at Thorkell’s face. He only saw the red hands slowly unclench on the rocking shell and then disappear. It was some time before Harald understood that Thorkell had gone. He did not feel sorry. He did not feel anything. It was as though only his own hands existed now. There was no sensation in the rest of his body. He began to wonder with what part of him he could see, or think, or hear. He knew only his own hands, chafed raw and cramped. As he looked at them he saw that the ends of his fingers had gone white, very white, down to the first knuckle joint. He wondered why that was. Then he heard Wolf shout out, ‘Where has Thorkell gone?’ As though Thorkell had walked out of the feast hall without saying where he was going.
John looked towards the swaying breakers. Wolf understood what he meant. He gave a hoarse cry and loosed his grip on the curragh. He had disappeared as soon as his hands let go.
Harald looked at his fingers again. They were white now to the second joint. Then to the hand itself. He watched his fingers loosing the rim of the curragh. The waters swept in at his mouth and he gave up trying to breathe. He began to slip away from the curragh.
Then John clasped him and brought him back again, holding him between his own two weakening arms. A curious gull swept above them, almost alighting on the curragh to see what they were. But at that moment John raised his head and the timid bird swept on up again, into the salt-laden air.
The bird wakened Harald once more. He saw the white flash of its wings, that almost touched his face as it rose, screaming away from them. The bird’s cry stirred the boy’s memory to life again. He now saw Gudröd’s hall clearly again with the flames licking round it, reflected in the dark tarn; he saw the deep forests through which he had trudged with his father; he saw the village nestling by the fjord. Then he saw his father’s face. He remembered it now. It came closer and closer to him, bigger and bigger. Now it was very near his own. At first it towered over him, then it came down and down, until it almost touched him. He saw the hair, the eyes, the mouth, all separately, then all blurred.
He heard his father’s voice. It said, ‘Steady with him. He had almost gone. Lift him aboard. Gently, gently, Rurik! The lad isn’t made of iron.’
Then Harald saw that it was not his father a
fter all. Suddenly he felt unsafe. ‘John! John! Where is John?’ he shouted.
The Danes looked over the side of their longship. They saw only the swirling wastes of water. Their fat, dark-haired shipmaster rubbed his chin. Then he went to where the boy lay, wrapped round with woollen blankets. ‘Sleep now, lad,’ he said, ‘John is with you, John is well.’
Harald smiled and tried to put out his hand. ‘Good John,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’
His hand had moved but a few inches when the boy sank into an unconsciousness as deep as the sea he had been saved from.
The shipmaster said, ‘There will be time enough when he is well again to tell him that there was no John there when we found him.’
Indeed, of all the longship’s crew, Harald was now the only one left. John had held him afloat just long enough for the Danish ship to sight him and then, his work finished, had slipped beneath the waves.
23
The Village by the Fjord
It was high summer and the forests above the fjord were a full, deep green again. The sun glittered across the broad water as though there had never been winter in the world, and would never be winter again. The blue-grey woodsmoke rose straight up from the cottages that lay along the shore, and children ran after each other, brandishing sticks for swords.
Behind the huts, tethered cattle grazed on what they could find. The pigs, as ever, rooted cheekily wherever they wished and only lost their smug air of self-confidence when the headman’s dog, Brann, ran out from his master’s hut and chased them grunting away.
Outside the headman’s hut sat three men, on a bench in the morning sun. Old Thorn cupped his horny hand about his ear to hear what was being said. He paid great attention, like an aged but earnest scholar. Sigurd sat attentive too. One of his legs was still bound thickly with a flannel wrapping and he carried a stout blackthorn staff. These men listened to the one who sat between them. He was a raw-boned young man, his light hair cropped short, his lithe body dressed in a simple rough tunic of linen. He was talking gravely and with a quiet confidence. The old men nodded as he spoke. Sometimes he would make a wide gesture with his hand, as though explaining something, when the others would follow his every movement with their pale-blue eyes, as though they were hungry for information. Then they would nod and smile at each other, having understood his words.
At length a young girl came out of the hut, bearing a big clay pannikin of milk. She offered it to Thorn first, but he waved her aside. She stood irresolute for a moment, about to offer it to Sigurd. Then her father spoke, almost in reproof, ‘Give it to the Viking, girl,’ he said testily. ‘Give it to Harald Sigurdson. He has been where none of us will ever go. He has come back to us from the belly of the sea.’
The young man looked down. ‘We lost your longship, headman,’ he said.
Thorn looked across the fjord to where the woodsmoke rose from another settlement.
‘A ship can be built again,’ he said. ‘But a true man once lost is lost for ever.’
After a while Sigurd said, ‘They are building a longship over there. Will you go and take the knucklebones from her master?’
Harald looked down at his deeply scarred hands. He felt the itch of the wounds across his back as he leaned against the wall of the hut. His mind suddenly flung him the picture of his white fingers slipping from the curragh’s rim.
‘Maybe, maybe, father,’ he said. ‘Who knows? There is time. But come what may, one day I would wish to talk with John’s brothers again, to tell them about him.’
Thorn said, ‘You have sailed with men, Viking. The world will never see their like again.’
Harald smiled sadly, ‘Who can tell, headman?’ he said. ‘Perhaps there will be others as good. Perhaps one day their longships will sail the seas as thick as seeds on a lake.’
‘Hm, perhaps,’ said Thorn, taking the milk-bowl, ‘but I doubt it.’
Harald’s father said, ‘I have a hankering to go where you have been, son. Perhaps to make a home alongside Olaf on Orkney.’
The old headman said, ‘I have often told you, Sigurd, that there is always a home for you here, by the fjord. Will that not do for you?’
Just then a fresh breeze blew in from seawards, carrying on it the sharp tang of salt. Two white gulls swooped up from the blue waters and on over the pine woods above the village, and out of sight. Sigurd sniffed the air and followed the flight of the birds.
‘Ah, they are free creatures,’ he said, still looking up. ‘My leg is much better than it was, since seeing you, Harald. Perhaps if we waste no time we shall be there before they launch her.’
He put his hand on his son’s strong shoulder and stretched his leg, trying it.
Thorn looked bewildered. ‘Where are you going?’ he said. ‘Are you not happy here?’
Sigurd and Harald smiled back at him gently and then gazed over the fjord to where the longship was a-building.
Old Thorn shook his head sorrowfully, ‘Ah, Vikings! Vikings!’ he mumbled. ‘There’s no understanding them. They are tied to salt water as a prisoner is tied with chains! No, there’s no understanding them! They’re either madmen – or heroes!’
He called his daughter to lead him back into the warmth of the hut. He was still shaking his head.