Raven: Sons of Thunder

by Giles Kristian

  Svein shrugged, smacking his lips together contentedly as though he did not have a care, but Floki’s words gave the rest of us something to chew on. Of course, he could have been wrong. Maybe the swineherd had fallen ill and could not tend the animals this day. Or perhaps the creatures we found had escaped from a nearby thorp. But somehow we smelled the truth in what Floki said. He was a brooding son of a she-wolf, but his nose had a talent for sniffing out a situation before others even knew which way the wind was blowing. Added to this, the shore guard ships that had swept upon us, and the towers we had seen along the coastal cliffs, all pointed to this Karolus being a man who knew how to bridle a horse and ride it too.

  That night half of us slept aboard the ships and half slept onshore, and all slept with one eye open. The next day we set off again with full bellies and holds packed with delicious joints of smoked pork which would feed our muscles and keep our oars churning the coils of the Sicauna. Occasionally smaller craft heading downriver clung dangerously close to the muddy banks to stay out of our reach. One knörr, a new and unweathered vessel by its look and laden with three fat cows, a clutter of barrels and six crew, even ran aground trying to keep away from us. Her keel dug into the submerged bank, stopping the boat dead and flinging her crew forward. The Franks yelled at the frightened beasts which were stamping in terror, and the beasts lowed back at the Franks, and we slid past the chaos, leaving nothing behind but a wake of Norse and English laughter.

  Others we passed without incident. We would wave and smile at whoever we saw and Father Egfrith would greet the boats’ crews and yell his god’s blessings as freely as if he were tossing them apples, and sometimes folk would wave back cautiously, but most frowned or shrugged because they feared us and could not understand the monk.

  ‘My beautiful Latin,’ Egfrith mourned through tight lips late that afternoon. Three old fishermen in a faering stared at us wide-eyed and slack-mouthed, none the wiser for the monk’s swift sermon. ‘The tongue of Pope Leo himself no less, God preserve His Holiness. Wasted on these clods,’ Egfrith went on under his breath as we passed, still smiling and waving and blessing. ‘Wasted like good wine on a Norseman. Dominus illuminatio mea! Dominus vobiscum!’ he called after them. Then he shook his bald head. ‘It may as well be the honking of a goose for all they know. Ignorant swine.’ He looked at me for support but then rolled his eyes because he knew he would get none from me.

  ‘You can’t blame them for looking baffled, monk,’ I called from my row bench, dragging the river past with my oar blade. ‘They have never seen a talking weasel before.’ Penda laughed and Egfrith glowered which made me laugh, but Cynethryth scourged me with a look so I tried my best to look chastened then, though my best was not very good.

  By dusk the cloud had rolled away to the south and the blue sky began to darken, revealing stars which flashed and pulsed like embers from an ancient fire – some old god’s death pyre. The moon hung impossibly bright. It poured cold silvery shadows across the river and fields on either side as we moored in some shallows amongst rushes where marsh hens and mallards guarded their nests with flapping wings and angry curruks, quorks and quacks. Gone was the brackish, tidal water of the estuarine reaches where freshwater and seawater fish live. Gone were the mudflats where geese and wading birds peck at water plants and shadflies, and gone were the rasping sand martins whom we had watched in the last few days leave their burrows to fly south for the coming winter. Here in the Sicauna’s middle course the river flowed more gently, making the rowing easier, though we still hoped for a change in the wind that would enable us to stow the oars and hoist the sails. We would see tomorrow. For now we secured Serpent and Fjord-Elk, tying their bows to ancient gnarly root tangles laid bare in the bank by eternal coursing water, and sinking their anchors from the stern.

  Those who had gone ashore the previous night remained on board this time. Sigurd had learnt a hard lesson on the English shore when Ealdred had attacked from land and sea with the use of fishing skiffs packed with men brandishing firebrands. From now on there would always be enough men aboard the ships to row them out of harm’s way at a moment’s notice. Those on shore could always run along the bank and meet the dragons further on, away from whatever threatened them. It was cunning craft and even though it meant half of us spending the night amongst hard oak ribs and sea chests, we did not mind. The fire scars that still pock-marked Serpent served as a painful reminder of how close we had come to losing her. We owed it to her now to keep her safe.

  There was a faint orange glow in the sky to the south-east, which we took to mean there was a town there, or at least a village, beyond the bumpy silhouette of the woods further inland. Perhaps its people knew we were there and had lit fires to prevent our coming unseen amongst them. Or perhaps their fires were part of some celebration or rite, a marriage or a death. Either way we would not bother them if they did not bother us.

  Ealdred and the Wessexmen were ashore, though the ealdorman was kept apart from the others as Sigurd wanted as much as possible, short of killing Ealdred, to break the bonds between his men and him. Penda and I nestled amongst skins at Serpent’s stern, playing tafl and drinking mead. Others aboard were sleeping already, making the most of rare space, or talking in low voices or doing tasks that the rowing had kept them from. Behind us, Cynethryth and Father Egfrith sat on the fighting platform and I had been thinking how quiet they were being when I realized they were fishing. The stone weights took their nettle-hemp lines spear-straight to the riverbed, yet for all their quiet patience the girl and the monk had caught not so much as a sprat.

  ‘She thanked you properly yet for saving that bastard father of hers?’ Penda asked, gesturing over my shoulder. With his spiked hair, scarred face and wild eyes Penda could not help but look savage, even on a clear, calm night like that and playing tafl. ‘A little reward for young Raven, eh lad?’ he said, eyebrows dancing. ‘A dip in the honey pot?’

  I shot him a sour look, appalled that Cynethryth might have overheard, but he just grinned his best imitation of a mischievous young boy.

  ‘Keep your mind on the game and leave the fishing to them,’ I muttered, sliding a scallop shell across to capture one of Penda’s blue-black mussel shells. ‘I’d wager even Svein could beat you, Penda.’

  He scowled. ‘You take so long to make every move I’m almost asleep when it comes to my turn. Playing you is about as much fun as watching trees grow,’ he said sulkily.

  ‘That’s it, Cynethryth! Steady. Careful.’ I turned to see Cynethryth hauling her line up swiftly and smoothly. ‘Good girl, don’t let him jump off the hook,’ Father Egfrith said, hopping excitedly from foot to foot. Cynethryth’s face was pure concentration, her eyes wide, teeth biting into her bottom lip.

  ‘Whatever it is it’s heavy,’ Penda said, and I nodded, though neither of us thought to help. ‘Probably a Frank’s boot,’ the Englishman added.

  Then with a delighted yip Cynethryth turned, swinging the fish into Serpent, where it flapped and hammered against the deck. ‘A pike!’ Egfrith yelped, kneeling to grasp the grey-green mottled fish and disengage the hook. ‘You must be careful of the teeth. Sharp as the Devil they are.’ And he was right, the pike’s teeth were wicked-looking things as it gulped in vain and spurted blood and shit over Egfrith.

  ‘Gaddr,’ Yrsa Pig-nose called with an approving nod from his journey chest.

  ‘The English call it pike, Yrsa,’ I said in Norse. Several other Norsemen had come over to share in the excitement and they were now arguing about how the sharp-headed gaddr compared in taste with the other river fish: roach, rudd, bream and perch.

  ‘It’s as long as my arm,’ I said, impressed.

  ‘It’s almost as long as my prick,’ Ingolf said, his smile more gaps than teeth.

  ‘But much prettier,’ Hastein barked, slapping Ingolf’s back.

  ‘Well done, girl, he’ll make good eating,’ Penda said, scratching his chin.

  ‘I was beginning to think all the fish must b
e asleep down there, Cynethryth,’ I teased as Egfrith hefted the fish by its gills as proudly as if he had caught it himself.

  ‘Do you think I haven’t caught a fish before, Raven?’ Cynethryth said, her eyebrows arched in challenge.

  ‘Of course not,’ I replied, ‘I just meant . . .’

  ‘Go back to your game, little boys, and leave the work to us.’ Egfrith grinned like a stoat and I could have smashed those teeth through the back of his head but instead Penda and I moped back to our game and as I considered my next move, Cynethryth called, ‘And Penda, you can squash those fleas jumping around in your breeks. Raven has had no reward from me.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I WAS WOKEN BY CURSING. CYNETHRYTH STIRRED BESIDE ME and we both sat up in our furs to see what the commotion was about. I knuckled my eyes, relieved to hear that Ingolf’s profanities were woven with other men’s laughter. The gaptoothed Norseman was amidships, brushing his breeks with the backs of his hands, nodding his head furiously and using words that would make Thór blush. He had pissed all over his breeks. Well, he had pissed over Serpent’s sheer strake, but the wind had had its own ideas and now Ingolf was in fouled breeks and an even fouler mood.

  ‘Thank Njörd for that,’ Yrsa announced, stretching his arms and ripping a great morning fart.

  ‘Thank Njörd that I pissed myself?’ Ingolf asked incredulously, showing Yrsa the dark stain on his left thigh.

  ‘No, you bonehead.’ Yrsa cocked one eyebrow and tipped his head. ‘Well, yes actually,’ he offered. ‘The wind has changed, you dirty swine. It’s coming up from the south-west now.’ He reached up and wrapped his knuckles on an oar stave amongst those lying across the oar trees. ‘Which means these fuckers can stay where they are today.’ He smiled through a wide yawn which made his eyes water. ‘If I were you, Raven, I’d stay in my sack all day,’ he said with a mischievous smile and one eye on Cynethryth.

  ‘And if I were you, Yrsa, I’d tie myself to a rock and throw myself overboard,’ I said, realizing it was no easy thing having a woman aboard a longship, especially a woman you are in love with. But Yrsa was right about the wind and the thought of not having to row put the men in a good mood as we prepared the morning meal. Cynethryth and Egfrith had between them caught two large pike and three perch and all these went into a broth with some horseradish leaves and the leftover bread that was now too hard to chew. With his bow Bjarni had taken two ducks amongst the reeds and these made another broth with some garlic and the bones of a hare, which Yrsa had saved from a previous meal. I did not know what those aboard Fjord-Elk were eating, but I did know that it smelt appalling and I was thankful for Cynethryth’s fishing luck and Bjarni’s skill with a bow. Mind you, I would have wagered those aboard Fjord-Elk were as glad as we were to be cooking aboard the ships for once, whatever was in their pot, for it was a rare day when Sigurd allowed a fire on the ballast.

  ‘This water’s mild as milk and you know why that is, lad?’ Olaf had asked me the previous night as he dropped the anchor into the river and fed the slime-coated rope through his gnarled hands.

  ‘Because it is shallow, Uncle?’ I had guessed.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s deep enough to drown a great lump of stone like you, lad,’ he said, testing the knot on the mooring post on Serpent’s sheer strake. ‘No. It’s slow-running because its upper course is only eight spear-lengths above sea level, meaning it has not far to fall and so doesn’t pick up much speed. Not like the rivers back home. They’ll carry you down faster than Sleipnir and spit you into the sea and before you know where you are you’re wiping seagull shit out of your eye.’

  Because the river was calm, Sigurd had allowed those of us waking aboard the ships that morning to suspend our cooking pots above small fires lit on the slippery ballast stones, so long as we kept buckets of water nearby and sloshed the whole lot down afterwards. After breakfast we raised the sails and slipped our moorings, harnessing the breeze that had ruined the start of Ingolf’s day. We pushed slowly up the Sicauna as the sun rose in the east, gilding the river and warming our faces, for we were not rowing and so sat towards the bows and the simple Christ crosses mounted there. We scrubbed our war gear, our brynjas, helmets and swords, removing the small rust spots that had begun to appear after days spent in the salt air. Men talked of their kinfolk back home and I listened mostly, for I had no kinfolk to talk of. Or if I did, I did not know who or where they were. Everything I knew or cared about now was sailing up that Frankish river into the heartland of an emperor. For my memory was like a dark, empty barrel because two years past some blow had cracked my mind and every experience and memory had leaked away. I had woken in old Ealhstan’s house and he had fed me and worked me, but now he was gone and every day that I spent aboard Serpent the roots of my soul dug a little deeper into her hull. Though I could never explain it, I knew that my ancestors’ saga stories were written in the intricate weave of her carved stem and stern posts and up Jörmungand’s slender, reaching neck. I imagined that my father, if he still lived, was a lord of the sea like Sigurd. Had I been washed overboard in a storm along the Wessex coast to bash my head against the sea-worn rocks? Had I been part of another fellowship of raiders when an English cudgel had knocked me unconscious, to be left for dead? Perhaps I had woken long enough to wander senselessly before falling again near the village of Abbotsend. It was likely that I would never know and so I did not argue with my heart when it beat in time with Norse oars.

  By noon we were rowing again, the wind on the sails being too feeble to overcome the Sicauna’s inexorable wend to the sea. For the next three days we ploughed the river southwards, passing gaps in riverside copses of alder and willow through which fields of wheat and barley rolled like a golden ocean in the breeze. We never moored near any of the villages whose people eyeballed us from the banks and low hills as though we were green-skinned interlopers risen from their Hell.

  ‘They must be muddled as Svein the Red counting his fingers and toes,’ Knut had called from the tiller. ‘Two heathen-built dragons with Christ crosses at their prows. Poor fuckers don’t know whether to run or pray.’ And we never stayed anywhere long enough for them to find out, instead rowing a great coil of slow water until the crosses at our prows faced the north-east. Two days later we came to Paris. I do not know what I had expected, but it was not what I found. We came into a great bowl where the Sicauna fattened and divided before passing either side of a low-lying island that was once, according to Egfrith, the home of a tribe of Gauls who fought Rome’s greatest general, Julius Caesar.

  ‘Your jarl would have liked Julius Caesar,’ Egfrith had said with a barely disguised grimace. ‘He worshipped pagan gods and slaughtered countless thousands.’

  ‘I’d wager he didn’t die a straw death,’ Olaf had put in with an admiring smile.

  ‘He did not have the time to die, Uncle,’ I said, ‘too busy killing Christians.’

  Now Egfrith grinned, his little eyes glinting impishly. ‘Julius Caesar’s own friends stabbed him to death whilst he was discussing Roman laws,’ he said.

  Uncle had spat over Serpent’s sheer strake at that. ‘No one likes laws,’ he said.

  On Sigurd’s word Knut pushed the tiller forward so that we took the river’s left-hand branch. It was wider than the right-hand channel, meaning we would have more water to manoeuvre in should we need to, and we all took in the sight of the place as we rowed with the beautiful, flawless rhythm we always kept when there were other sea-folk watching. The island’s muddy banks sloped gently up from the river until they met a grassy manmade rampart upon which stood a spear-height palisade of smooth, pointed trunks. This defensive wall was broken at regular intervals by walkways of planks ascending the rampart from the water’s edge right into the city. There were so many of them that I thought these Franks must be idle or foolish for choosing convenience over the integrity of their bulwark. It was a busy place. Dozens of skiffs, faerings and big-bellied knörrs were pulled up on to the mud and moored to sun
ken posts, their bows looking up expectantly at the city where their crews plied their trade. The day had been fair and bright before we had come within a bow-shot of Paris. Now the sky was a swirl of black, grey and yellow hearth smoke that lumbered slowly eastwards, almost too heavy for the breeze to shift.

  Every now and then a section of white stone wall rose behind the palisade and there were even some crumbling bastions along its length, but there were not enough of these stone defences to be much use. Egfrith said it was the remains of the Roman wall that once protected Paris from Rome’s enemies. It would be hard pressed to protect the city from a mangy dog now. Or us, I thought grimly, remembering the Wolfpack’s burning of Abbotsend.

  ‘Look at them. Like rats in a cesspit,’ Bram said of the Franks who, having seen us, were now scrambling up the muddy walkways in panic.

  ‘Looks like they are afraid of the Christ cross, monk,’ I said to Egfrith, who was standing by Sigurd at the mast step.

  ‘The crosses cannot disperse the fog of sin that cloaks these ships,’ he replied flatly. ‘You swine could put Christ’s sandals on your feet and His robe on your backs but you would be no less savage underneath them. No less lost to the Almighty.’ I hoped Sigurd might pick the monk up then and cast him overboard like a pail of piss, but the jarl seemed deaf to the weasel’s mewing. In truth Sigurd was still weak, some of his wounds still staining the linen with foul-smelling yellow slime. He stooped slightly and was thinner than I had ever seen him.

  ‘We’ll moor there, Uncle,’ he said, pointing to a spot free of boats where the bank was narrowest, only two spear-lengths wide before the manmade rampart rose. There were no mooring posts and I looked up to the palisade to see that there were no gates for three hundred paces in either direction. Sigurd had chosen the place because from that mooring we would see men coming along the bank from a long way off and have time to prepare.

  ‘Cunning bastard,’ I heard Penda mutter under his breath and we pulled hard for the last few strokes before slewing up on to the mud. Lightning quick we stowed our oars, grabbed our shields, helmets and spears and jumped from Serpent’s prow into the sucking mud. We did not bother with mail, for though we wanted to be ready should a fight come our way, brynjas would have announced, clearer than a war horn, that we had come to steal and kill. So we stood there in a loose cluster, eyes searching the ramparts and the banks. I cursed myself for having spent sailing time cleaning my worn old shoes, for now they were already misshapen clumps of leather and mud and my feet were wet as Rán’s cunny.