‘Shields!’ Sigurd yelled, staring up at the jagged heights, searching for this invisible enemy. I saw the next rock in flight, followed its descent until it struck the water with a mighty kasplosh.
‘One of those bastards will go right through the hull!’ Penda said wide-eyed.
Looking up was not a good idea – never is when arrows are flying – but look up we did, from behind our shields, and now I could see men up on the ridge. Lots of men.
‘They’re on this side, too!’ a man yelled from the port side. Arrows were clattering across all four ships and men were roaring in anger and pain. Fearing for Cynethryth, I pushed my way through to the stern and found her sheltering under Kalf’s shield. The Norseman nodded to me and stepped aside as I raised my own shield above her.
‘We need to find you a helmet, Cynethryth,’ I said, wincing because an arrow had thunked into the deck a finger’s length from my right foot. Cynethryth laughed, which was a strange thing to do under those circumstances. I took off my own helmet and put it on her head. It all but covered her eyes. ‘Do up the strap,’ I said. She laughed again and it was a cold sound. Most of my shield was above her, meaning that most of me was uncovered, and I was not wearing my brynja. Would she still laugh if an arrow went through my neck? ‘I’ll get you your own helmet,’ I said, ‘one that fits.’
‘I cannot be killed, Raven,’ she said lightly. Gods she was beautiful. In spite of the ice that sheathed her these days.
‘Even the gods can be killed,’ I muttered, watching the crews scramble for their war gear, many of them clambering from ship to ship.
‘Are those whoresons going to come and fight us?’ Bram bellowed. ‘Or are they just happy to drop things on us from the sky?’ I would rather the first one, I thought.
‘Asgot has taught me a charm,’ Cynethryth said conspiratorially, like a child sharing a secret. And those words made me feel sick. Cynethryth was unwell and the godi had sunk his claws into her. He had murdered my foster-father Ealhstan and now he was taking Cynethryth from me. ‘Why do you think he has survived so long?’ she said, seemingly unaware of the chaos around us. I knew then that if I walked away taking my shield with me, Cynethryth would just stand where she was, with that strange smile on her lips.
‘I thought you were a Christian,’ I gnarred. An arrow tonked off my shield’s boss and rolled across the wood, falling harmlessly to the deck.
Cynethryth spat then, her eyes filling with malice, and I was tempted to walk out into the arrow storm.
‘You were not born to think, Raven,’ she said. ‘You are a killer. So go and kill.’
A boulder crashed into the oars lying across Fjord-Elk’s oar trees, snapping several before shearing a splintered chunk off the mast step.
‘I think I’ll stay here if it’s all the same to you,’ I said.
‘Get the anchor up!’ Sigurd roared. ‘We can’t fight men who won’t face us.’ Black Floki and Aslak were keeping close to the jarl, protecting him with their shields as he strode the deck giving orders. The only thing to our advantage was the sea fog that slowly snaked in damp billows through that gorge and must have partly veiled us.
‘Come and fight us, cowards!’ Svein bawled, his voice booming up the rock walls. He stood looking up at the cliff top, his arms outstretched invitingly. ‘What kind of men are you? Come and fight us, goat turds!’ An arrow thudded into the bearskin on his shoulder. He grunted, pulled the shaft out, spat on its bloody head and tossed it overboard. ‘My sister has bigger balls than you!’ he rumbled like a rock fall.
‘Can you hold the shield?’ I asked Cynethryth. Men were taking to their benches and I was torn. Cynethryth was staring at Father Egfrith who stood by the mast, wearing nothing more proof against boulders and arrows than his woollen habit, raising his wooden cross to the cliff tops as though the sight of it would turn our enemy to dust.
‘He’s a brave little bastard, isn’t he?’ Penda said, gesturing towards the monk from behind his shield.
‘He’s a bloody fool,’ I spat. ‘Can you hold it?’ I asked Cynethryth and this time she nodded vaguely and slid down against a rib, the shield raised above her head. And so I left her there, took my oar from the trees and went to my bench, and Penda came with me because Sigurd had ordered that half should row and half should shield themselves and the oarsmen. Though Halldor did neither. He stood by Jörmungand wearing no helmet nor carrying a shield. He stood there looking up, his jaw clenched in his hideous swollen, pus-filled face, and his sword in a white-knuckle grip. Floki’s cousin was hoping for a violent death, to be crushed by a rock or pierced by an arrow. That way, with his sword in his hand, he would be taken into Valhöll as a stout warrior rather than slowly rotting from an old wound. But for all that he made a sorry sight standing there waiting for death. It would still be a bad end for such a man.
The other dragons bristled with men as crews made ready to get under way and all the time arrows and rocks and even pebbles rained down on us from the cliffs and we cursed the underhanded sons of trolls who would not fight like men.
I looked across at Wave-Steed and saw a Dane struck on the helmet by a rock. He stood staring for three heartbeats, then blood streamed down his face and he pitched forward.
‘This is not going into any skald’s song,’ Bjarni called from his bench as we pulled away, our anchor ropes coiled untidily and clothes, weapons and bowls of half-eaten food scattered around. ‘Remind me not to remember this day.’
I looked across at Svein, now at his bench. He was a scowling mountain of thunder. I could just imagine Black Floki’s face, too. But what could we do? If we stayed in that bay we would eventually see our dragons sunk, but neither was there anything to gain by clambering up those steep rocks, cumbered with shields and swords, into the unknown. Sigurd knew that there was no glory to be won in that ria and so we fled, just as we had fled from the Franks along that snaking river. But this time men must have felt knots of ice in their guts because we were rowing, where it was wide enough, back to the open sea which had mauled us and which might still be raging beyond the estuary.
For a while our craven enemies scrambled along the cliff tops, loosing arrows with fair skill as they moved. They even had the nerve to jeer us as though we were the cowards and not they, which was a hard thing to endure. Then after some hard pulling by too few oarsmen we were in deeper water beyond their reach and nearing the mouth. Which still seethed.
‘At least the tide is with us, hey!’ Bjarni called. I grimaced at my oar. The way things had gone for us I suspected the gods were playing with us, like a cat with a mouse, and we all know how that ends.
‘Thór’s balls, this is an ill thing,’ Bag-eyed Orm said, not sharing Bjarni’s optimism. He had been holding his shield over Arnvid at the oar but now he had moved to Serpent’s side and was looking beyond her bow.
‘From the pot to the fire,’ Halfdan agreed, laying his Thór’s hammer pendant on the outside of his tunic so that the Thunderer would see it and know to watch over him.
We led now, the other dragons following in our wake, and Olaf and Sigurd oversaw the reefing and raising of the sail, having been able to rob benches of oarsmen because the ebb tide was pulling us inexorably out to sea. Three reefs left only a small sail, which would make Serpent easier to handle in a storm, but there was still every chance that a mighty gust would lean into that sail and capsize us, or a wave wrench the steerboard from its block and leave us helpless, subject to Njörd’s will. I could hear those waves now – Rán’s white-haired daughters hurling themselves against the coast, smashing in spumy gouts. Then the estuary vomited us out into the maelstrom and Serpent’s bow rose into the breakers and waves buffeted her hull, flinging themselves over the sheer strake to soak us again and sting our eyes and freeze our hands on the staves. Some of those waves were three times the height of a man and Serpent moaned because we had returned her to that violence. Spent arrows, cups and bowls sloshed around our feet as we grimly pulled the oars, trusting in Olaf�
��s sail-craft and Knut’s skill as a helmsman. All that the rest of us could give was muscle against the storm and muttered pleas to our gods to spare us a bad end.
We rowed out into the open-water swells and when Sigurd was satisfied that we were far enough away from the coastal rocks he gave the order to stow oars. Now we were past the headland on our steerboard side, a fierce northerly hammered across the sail and Olaf caught that blast and harnessed it so that we rode the waves rather than ploughing through them. It was a dangerous game to play but it was also a thrilling one because Serpent flew and her rigging thrummed and her belly trembled with the madness of it.
Aboard Fjord-Elk Bragi followed his jarl’s lead; the Danes did likewise and in this way all four dragons ran south before the wind. We worked the sail in shifts, forever tightening the stays and reefing or lengthening the sail according to Olaf and Sigurd’s reckoning of the risks, and above us the grey cloud swirled in eerie likeness of the wind-tossed sea. We surfed past fog-shrouded green cliffs and inlets and lonely sharp rocks that seemed to burst up through the white breakwaters, and the rain lashed into us, so that men looked half drowned despite their best efforts with greased skins and hats. That northerly wind wanted to hurl us against the coast. It wailed and whined but Knut fought it, hauling on the tiller so that Serpent’s steerboard drove against the Dark Sea to hold our course. There was no sun to be seen, just the faintest blush in the east behind the black clouds and above the fog-veiled land.
‘I will miss this, Sigurd!’ Halldor yelled. He stood on the foreship, gripping the bowline, square on to the bow breakers and freezing spray, his dark yellow hair daubed against his head and face. ‘This is what we dream of, hey!’
‘Men will talk of Halldor who laughs at storms!’ Sigurd yelled back, smiling. ‘We will carve it on your runestone.’ A grin twisted Halldor’s grotesquely bloated face; the pain of it must have been terrible, but the warrior clearly felt warm pride swell in his heart at his jarl’s words, despite the icy spray, because not every man could expect a runestone to be raised in his honour. Halldor glanced at Bjarni, who nodded as though assuring him that he would make a good job of carving Halldor’s rune story. Then Halldor turned back into the spray, his head held high in challenge to the leaden sky.
Later that day we came to a wide, flat, wind-scoured beach. It was exposed to the storm, a forsaken strand above which gulls swirled like leaves in the wind, but there were no rock walls from whose summits men could drop boulders or rain arrows on us. Knowing it was low tide and fearing we might not come across another such place before nightfall, we turned our prows landward, hoping that that sandy beach extended beyond the breakers. The wind filling our reefed sails, we rode the dragons right in, their keels slicing through the soft seabed and up into the green-brown cloak of weed that lay beyond the water line. Then, the gusts howling in our ears and drowning our voices, we sank mooring posts deep into the sand and lashed the ships securely. We cowered onboard, for that stretch of coast was desolate and there was more shelter to be found in our ships than ashore, which was not saying a lot, and was probably why there were no folk there to attack us or from whom we might steal.
Serpent rocked in the wind as though she were still at sea, the gusts keening through her oar ports as men tried to sleep. I lay in furs and skins, watching the pale moon slip in and out of the swollen black clouds, when movement at the foreship drew me from a mire of thoughts of which Cynethryth was the centre. By the moon’s pallid light I saw Olaf and Halldor each gripping the other’s arm. Halldor’s cousin Black Floki was there too, as were Svein the Red and Bram Bear.
‘It’s time,’ a low voice said and a hand gripped my shoulder. Sigurd’s face was all shadow but for his eyes which glinted. ‘Find me something shiny, Raven. Something for a warrior.’ His teeth glinted but it was no smile. ‘Seeing as you are awake you may as well join us.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ I said gruff-voiced as he moved off. I climbed out of my nest and with a shiver picked my way past the shrouded bodies of men so still they could have been corpses, huffing into cold hands as I knelt by the hold. ‘Something for a warrior,’ I murmured to myself, lifting off the loose planks and skins that protected the cargo in Serpent’s belly, then I raised the lid of an oak chest to reveal its dully gleaming treasures to that ill night. There were brooches and silver cloak pins and coins and hack-silver. There were torcs, rings and silver chains and I tried to burrow quietly down to the bottom of that chest so that nothing would escape me in the darkness. Then my hand closed around something warm amongst those cold prizes, something smooth. Bringing it into the weak light I saw a figure of a warrior carved from cream-coloured bone, thumb-worn and of little worth compared with the other things in that chest. And yet it was a thing of power all the same, for it was a fine carving of Týr Lord of Battle, one hand gripping the sword hilt at his waist, the other arm ending handless, having been mauled by Fenrir Wolf. His helmet’s nose guard ended in a point between small eyes that were battle-wide because Týr is the god of victory. The figure was the size of my closed fist and would stand on a flat surface, on boots that the carver had given the appearance of being made of fur.
‘Throwing our hoard over the side one day and robbing us the next, hey,’ Osten growled, one eye gleaming from a swath of shadow between Serpent’s ribs.
‘Go back to your dreams of wanton sheep, Osten,’ I said, to which he grinned, and clutching the carving I made my way cautiously between snoring men to the foreship, then over the sheer strake and down the gangplank on to the wind-whipped sand. An arrow-shot downwind, just beyond the reach of the white-flecked waves, a flame quivered violently against the night. I headed towards it, feeling my own bones tremble with a sense of some dark seidr, and though I did not know why those men had left warm skins to gather on that wild shore, I was not surprised to see old Asgot there. I had not thought to see Cynethryth though, and for some reason the sight of her froze my guts.
They turned at my approach, some nodding at my joining that strange party, and Halldor watched me from the corner of his left eye which was just visible behind the grotesque, oozing swelling. You could not see his right eye at all. He looked like some troll horror from a child’s nightmare and yet he half grinned at me before turning back to Asgot, who was talking to him in a low voice. Halldor was dressed for battle, his brynja polished to a gleam and his blades sheathed and belted. He wore no helmet and I suspected that was because it would no longer fit on his misshapen head, but other than that he looked ready to take on the Midgard-Serpent. Then I noticed Black Floki cloaked in Halldor’s shadow, his sword drawn and his face clenched in a grim frown, and I suddenly understood what Sigurd had meant when he said it was time.
‘Raven, here, lad,’ Sigurd said, and so I stepped up, the wind whistling across the dark beach, lashing sand against my cheeks. I turned to spit out a wad of salty grit, then held out the bone Týr carving to my jarl. Sigurd took it and turned it over in his hand, ‘hooming’ in the back of his throat. ‘I have seen shinier turds, Raven,’ he said disapprovingly.
‘That the best you could find?’ Olaf gnarred behind his hand. I shrugged, suddenly wishing I had brought a torc or a silver arm ring or at the least some hack-silver.
‘It will have to do,’ Sigurd said, creasing his brow. Then he nodded to Floki, who took a step forward, his sword raised slightly as though that honed, hungry blade could scent blood.
‘No straw death for us, cousin,’ Halldor said, a nervous edge to his voice. His face twisted with a sour smile. Svein and Bram shared a bleak look, their loose, wild hair and beards tousling against the gusts, and Asgot stepped back from Halldor, nodding solemnly at Sigurd. It will happen now, I thought, glancing at Cynethryth. But she was staring at Halldor as though the man was already a haugbui buried in his death mound, and she was mumbling words which I could not hear.
‘Wait for me in Valhöll, cousin,’ Black Floki said, his eyes stony and his jaw clenched tight. ‘I will come soon enough.’ A blast of c
old breath whined up the beach from the foam-flecked sea. I resisted the urge to pull my cloak tight at my throat.
‘You had better not drink all the good mead before I get there, you greedy whoreson,’ Bram warned, pointing a finger at Halldor. ‘And I’ll want a swan-breasted wench or two to warm my bed, too,’ he added, ‘so you make sure old Bram is not left wanting when he crosses Bifröst and comes knocking.’
Halldor nodded in Bram’s direction but his eyes were on Black Floki, who gestured at him to draw his own sword, which he did, the blade rasping up the scabbard’s throat.
‘I have something for you, Halldor son of Oleg, something to take on your journey,’ Sigurd said, stepping forward with the Týr carving. ‘It is not silver,’ he added almost apologetically, ‘but maybe you can show it to the Aesir to test its likeness.’ He pursed his lips. ‘It is skilled work, I’m thinking.’ Sigurd held the figure up to the ashen moonlight for all to see, and far from seeming disappointed Halldor appeared moved. The significance of his jarl giving him a carving of Týr, the bravest of all the gods, was not lost on him there under the cold shadow of Black Floki’s sword.
Sigurd stepped forward and handed the thing to Halldor and it seemed the two warriors would embrace. But there was a flash of steel and a low grunt from Halldor as Sigurd pulled the man into him, so that Halldor’s one visible eye bulged horribly. Black Floki flew forward but Olaf stopped him with an arm and a glower as Sigurd closed his hand around Halldor’s so that the man could not drop his sword. Sigurd whispered something to Halldor then and I swear that a smile skimmed over the dying man’s lips like a flat stone across water. He gave a long gasping sigh and his head lolled on to Sigurd’s shoulder and his knees buckled though his jarl held him up until the last whisper of life had flown his corpse. And then it was over and the rest of us were left standing there and I do not mind admitting that there was a lump in my throat the size of a hen’s egg.
Raven Page 3