‘Give me your oath not to harm me or the lady.’
‘How about you tell me right now, or I cut out your tongue, nail it to my mast and see if it wags any truths in the wind?’
‘You know I’m speaking the truth. You know they are coming. Look at the thing in the courtyard. How many men did it take to kill it? Do you want Helgi to thank the Raven and his sister in gold for returning this girl? They will just scatter it to the wind and return to some filthy nest in the woods. Cut out my tongue and my ghost will watch as the Raven does the same to you.’
‘I’m not afraid to die,’ said Giuki.
‘But don’t you want to go back to your people with gold and glory? Would you return empty-handed rather than face down your enemies?’
Giuki stood tall. ‘You speak some sense,’ he said. ‘Tell me what we can do against this Raven.’
‘Do you swear not to harm us?’
‘I swear it,’ he said, touching the picture, ‘in front of Odin, who hung on the tree for lore.’
‘He will not travel by water if he can help it,’ said Leshii. ‘Set sail. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Good,’ said Giuki. ‘It will be dawn very shortly. We’ll leave then.’
There was a knock at the door of the chapel. It was Kylfa. He carried a candle, his face long in its light. ‘I lost another brother,’ he said. ‘Hrodingr just died from the wounds he suffered at the wolfman’s hand. I want to know what this boy is saying. He will not deny me my holmgang.’
Giuki’s mouth was halfway between a grin and a grimace. ‘Let your brothers lie in peace, Kylfa,’ he said.
‘No man has the right to deny me under the law.’
‘No,’ said Giuki. ‘But know this: no man killed him.’
‘That is a man of fifteen summers at least.’
‘No,’ said Giuki, ‘it is a woman.’
Kylfa’s eyes widened.
‘So,’ said Giuki, ‘you are welcome to your holmgang, but when she dies it will become apparent that she is no man. And it will be known your brother died at the hands of a woman. This is a princess, of a sort. She is bound for Helgi in Aldeigjuborg. Better to let her claim her marriage bed and take weregild from the king than seek humiliation for your family in combat.’
Kylfa seemed to tremble. ‘A woman could not have killed my brother. That is no woman.’
‘Kylfa, I’ve had my hand up her tunic and felt the proof,’ said Giuki, ‘and she is protected by great forces. A woman did not kill your brother. The gods, working through her, did. How else could a Frankish virgin kill a warrior like Brodir?’
‘We should rape her and kill her,’ he said.
‘Which would also reveal that Brodir died at the hands of a woman. As I said, weregild restores your honour and preserves your pride.’
Kylfa nodded. ‘It will have to be a good reward.’
‘It will be,’ said Giuki. ‘Do not mention to the others that we have a woman on the ship. There’s less chance of trouble that way.’
Kylfa grunted and walked out of the chapel.
Giuki turned to Aelis. ‘Well, lady, you have your passage.’
‘You will be rewarded for it,’ said Aelis.
It was a cold dawn with a good offshore breeze.
The longships were stacked with plunder — several horses, some reasonable chairs and weaving, and many large sacks of wool. Leshii sat on the wool at the stern and smiled to himself. The lady was beside him. The longship was narrow and didn’t have much room for cargo. The mule was browsing in the scrub at the top of the beach. He hated to lose the animal — not for any sentimental reason but because it had been his only possession other than Aelis, who was proving not at all easy to hold on to. He’d tried to bring the wolfman’s pelt, but the Vikings had declared it nithing — a word in their language that meant something close to ‘cursed’. Still, the ships would stop at Birka to trade and take on provisions. He knew merchants there and felt sure he could spirit the lady onto a ship and away before the Vikings knew she was gone. There were pilots who would start the crossing to the lands of the Rus at night, given the right moon. The promise of reward from Helgi would be enough to entice them.
Vikings were ready at the oars and in the water, pushing the boats off the beach. The boiled rabbit the lady had bought from the Norsemen was in Leshii’s stomach, a cloak she’d purchased about his shoulders, and he was set for home, two good drakkar alongside the ship he sat in. They’d make any pirate think twice. He pulled his cloak about him and fell into a daydream of drinking wine in the sun of Ladoga, the temple girls and the spiced meats of the market stalls.
There was shouting and clattering. The Norsemen on the beach had shoved the boat free and were climbing on board. It was then that Leshii saw the warriors making their way towards him — two of them, big ones.
‘Off,’ said Kylfa.
‘What?’ said Leshii.
‘Off. Now.’
Giuki was behind them, looking at Leshii with a smile on his face.
‘You promised not to hurt me,’ said Leshii. ‘On oath you promised.’
‘And I’ll keep my oath. The water here’s no more than a man’s height deep. You can swim, can’t you?’
‘Yes, but-’
‘That’s all I needed to hear!’ said Giuki. ‘Get this eastern louse off my ship.’
Leshii struggled but it was useless. The two men picked him up and hurled him over the side, just beyond the last oar, which he was lucky not to hit.
The water was shallow and did little to break his fall. He smacked into the sand and all the breath went from him.
‘Here, merchant!’ Aelis threw something onto the beach. It was his silk-cutting knife. ‘For your protection,’ she called.
The merchant picked up the blade and stood up, soaked. ‘You’ll never get to Helgi without me!’ he shouted after Giuki.
The Viking chief laughed. ‘I fought with Helgi at Miklagard. He’s like a brother and will welcome me well enough!’
Leshii fell forward onto his hands and knees and beat at the water. ‘This is not fair,’ he shouted. ‘I have struggled. I have endured. What must I go through, Perun, to get your favour?’
No one heard. The sleek ships had already put twenty lengths between themselves and the beach.
Leshii collapsed sobbing in the water, wanting it to drown him, to carry him away to somewhere where the living was easy and profit fell from the trees. He rolled onto his back. ‘I have nothing. I am the heir of nothing. I am the father of nothing. I have no friend, no ally and no country. I am nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’ He splashed and thrashed like a grounded fish, and then he remembered. The mule. ‘Cut the self-pity, boy,’ he told himself, and got up and ran as fast as he could back towards the monastery.
Aelis watched him go, a silly little figure still doubtless chasing after his profit on an alien shore. She felt sorry for him but curiously relieved. She had depended on others to help her so far, but now she was on her own. She turned away from the shore. The light swam around her, grey on grey, the line between sea and air invisible, as if the ship cut through clouds not water. The sensation came to her again. She had travelled that way before. She saw herself on another boat, at another time, the same grey glow all about her.
Once, she thought, she had given up on life, slipped from the side of such a ship and prayed to die. She remembered the rush of the cold, her disobedient limbs fighting to swim, defying her will to drown. Now it was as if she was playing out a story, like a mummer at a fair, her actions echoes of other actions she had performed before. The immediate threats had been so great — the Raven, the wolfman, the Vikings and even the local people — that she hadn’t had time to think of what was happening to her. She could now speak Norse. She had never understood more than a few words before. If she tried to think in it, almost nothing came, just fragments: I shall live again, Vali. A bright magic entered me when the god died.
She thought of the confessor. What had happened to him? She
felt sure he was dead and she felt she had caused it. As you caused it before. The voice was not her own, more like that of a girl.
Days went by and the ship moved on in a sea mist. When the mist blew away it left a bright sky streaked with clouds like longships themselves on an ocean of deep blue. Then dusk came, the sun turning the ocean to cloth of gold. When night fell the wind was good and the moon rose full and bright, the water glittering beneath it like the ridged back of a dragon. The ships didn’t stop; just kept on as if flying on a moonbeam over a void of darkness.
There was a hushed call from one of the other ships.
‘What?’ said Giuki.
‘Longboats. Against the headland. There’s a monastery.’
Giuki shook his head. ‘That carcass was picked clean years ago. Let them waste their time there. We’ll sail on.’
‘We could take their boats.’
‘Or hit a sandbank and get beached ourselves. We’ve got our plunder and our guest, and we can’t carry much else. Let’s head for Birka and forget these pirates.’
‘That’s Grettir’s ship. I’d know it anywhere.’
‘Aaaah, now I am tempted. I hate that bastard,’ said Giuki.
There was a noise from the beach, a terrible piercing howl. Another answered it, coming from further back, up towards the monastery.
Aelis looked over the water. A light seemed to emanate from one of the boats on the beach. She had a sensation of cold, of sharp prickles on her skin. She recognised the feeling. Hail. The symbols inside her, the ones that spoke to her and whispered their names — horse, torch, reindeer — stirred, fretted, guttered and brayed. Aelis spoke a single word in Norse: ‘ Kin.’ Whatever was awakening within her had recognised its counterpart across the water.
She glanced at the Vikings. They peered towards the shore but no one mentioned the shining, shifting thing above the black line of the beached longships. Was she the only one who could see it, that silver cloud, that thing that moved and shone in the hollow light like a fall of petals from the flower of the moon? She said its name: ‘Hagaz.’ It was a rune, she knew, manifesting on the beach. She was not the only one who carried those symbols inside her.
The howl fractured the darkness again. Aelis looked at the faces of the Norsemen. They registered nothing — no one else on the ship seemed to hear it.
Giuki pondered for a second. ‘If we get in close,’ he said, ‘we can snatch their boats while they’re ashore and run them out to sea before they can stop us. And even if we don’t we’ll get a good scrap out of it. A drakkar and a fat couple of knarr, boys!’ He turned to Aelis. ‘You’ve brought us luck. Let’s hope that continues at Ladoga. Come on. Crack open the sea barrels and let’s have our weapons.’
50
An Encounter with Death
Leshii was relieved to find the mule still grazing where he’d left it. He quickly caught it and headed back to the monastery. He felt vulnerable, alone and very cold. He was soaked to the skin; there was a fresh sea breeze, and the clouds were a low and rolling grey that kept away any hope of the sun.
He would go east. He had an animal to carry him, which the mule would do once it got used to him. That was good. But it was the only positive. Against it he had huge forests full of brigands between him and home, no food, only a small knife and a very uncertain welcome once he got back. In fact, even if he did return his fate might be to be flogged or to starve.
Still, he had no choice. He couldn’t sit in the monastery; he had to move. He was tempted to smash up some of the wood out of the little the Vikings had left and make a fire. Then he reminded himself that he had no way of making one. The flint had gone east with the lady. He’d seen people make fire with a firebow, of course, but he had never learned the knack. It was considered rather primitive in Ladoga. A man of standing, even a merchant of standing, used a flint.
There had to be something, he thought, in the monastery that would make his journey more comfortable. There was only the wolf pelt, which still lay encrusted with dirt where it had been stamped into the earth beside Chakhlyk’s body. The Vikings had not buried the wolfman, just left him where they’d killed him.
Leshii examined the body. It was mutilated, the face swollen and blackened where it had been kicked and kicked again by the Vikings. The hands, though, were intact. He took one in both his and held it. The nails seemed unnaturally thick and sharp, the fingers stained with a kind of dark ink. He wondered if that was what caused the nails to grow like that. He turned the hand over in his. He looked at the scars on the fingers, the creases at the joints, the lines on the palm. He wondered if the fortune-tellers were right. Was this death, here on a strange shore, written in the wolfman’s hand? But the hand had no future, just a past, revealed in the blood beneath the nails, the stain of the strange substance, the darkness of the skin showing a life outdoors.
Leshii looked at his own hand. The lines were supposed to tell him his wealth, the length of his life, the loves he would have. On two out of three counts Leshii was surprised he had any lines at all.
He studied the little whorls on the wolfman’s fingers, some rubbed away or calloused into insignificance. He had not been so intimate with anyone for years. He had an impression of his long-dead mother, no more than a pink face and a shock of black hair. Beyond that, there had been whores, many as a young man, fewer in recent years.
But he had never sat and looked at the lines on someone’s skin, the scars and marks, the wrinkles and veins that only they bore. His great family, his great love, the caravans that travelled south and east to Miklagard and Serkland admitted no such tenderness. He couldn’t say that he felt it as a want in him, even then. He was just curious what it might have been like. Closeness to family or friends had always come second to his business. It was a door he had never opened. He wondered what might have happened if he’d walked through it.
Would he have been sitting in the monastery, holding a dead man’s hand?
He would go to Helgi, he thought, though not because he expected reward. He knew princes too well to expect that. He would be flogged, probably, if he was lucky. Leshii’s view of Helgi’s likely greeting had darkened with his fortunes. But he would go anyway because he needed a place to fit in, however low that might be, not to be as an animal wandering the wilderness.
Leshii put down the wolfman’s hand. Now he felt guilty for taking the man’s charm. He took it from where he had stuffed it into the cloth wound at his waist and examined it. It was a curious thing, roughly triangular but with rounded edges. On it, conforming to the shape of the triangle, was scratched a rough wolf’s head in the Varangian style.
‘Would you like it back, Chakhlyk?’ he said.
No, he thought, he would not give it back; he would wear it in the man’s honour. He unwound his silk neckerchief and tied the thong about his own neck, replacing the scarf over it. Even though he wanted the memento, he was superstitious and didn’t want the Norse god looking down at him and bestowing the same sort of luck as he had on the wolfman. The stone felt like a bond to Chakhlyk, something that made Leshii feel slightly less lonely, even though it was a connection to a man he had hardly known. He picked up the pelt and shook it.
‘Goodbye, Chakhlyk,’ he said. ‘I am sorry for what has happened to you. Your story may earn me a cup of wine at a fireside and I thank you for that.’
He managed to mount the mule and set off, heading east into the woods that lay like an ocean between him and his home. The animal took to being ridden well, and Leshii fell to talking to it, reassuring it when he was really reassuring himself. There were wild men in those woods who respected only a large caravan and plenty of guards. ‘There will be no bandits here, my mule, it is not the season, The grass is thick, is it not? Another short while and I’ll let you eat.’ Leshii shivered as he made his way through the forest. It was less cold in the trees than it had been on the coast but it still wasn’t warm. He put the wolf pelt on, pulling the animal’s head up over his own for warmth.
It was a miracle he had come so far with the wolfman. On their journey from Ladoga they had travelled mainly by boat, and when they had been forced into the woods the wolfman’s ears and tracking skills had kept them out of most trouble. Twice he had faced attack, green men of the woods, filthy and bedraggled, barring his path. They hadn’t even bothered to ambush him by stealth, a lone merchant travelling the woods. They’d just come up to his animals and started unloading the packs. That was when Chakhlyk had struck. The first time three were laid motionless on the ground in the first breath of his assault, two more screaming for the trees holding broken arms in the next instant. Within ten breaths the wild men had disappeared. They were tree dwellers, outlaws hiding from normal men, and their traditions and ideas were strange. Chakhlyk’s attacks seemed to them like visitations from a myth, and they had run from him as the Christian men who had come against them had run, as if he was the devil.
But there was no Chakhlyk now; only fear of the trees, the many darks of the forest, the mottled and uneven light bringing a terror of imagined things, things half glimpsed that were almost worse than the terrors of the night and of things unseen. It was spring and the woods were blooming, but Leshii couldn’t enjoy their loveliness.
At least the mule ate well.
Leshii had rescued a waterskin from the monastery and could refill it in the streams, but as rain cast the wood in a slick green shine he felt miserable, old and vulnerable. He had no way to start a fire so just went on as far as he could into the evenings, found what shelter he could, which was not much, and hoped his exhaustion would overcome the cold and take him down to sleep. Most nights the cold won. He began to hallucinate with hunger and tiredness, became no more than cargo on his mule, allowing it to make its own way down the track. The animal seemed to know where to go, keeping straight on when paths split off, making good time in the wet woods. It was happy. The leaves were fresh from the bud and sweet, the pace easy and the old man its only burden.
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