Raven

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Norsemen!’ It was Filthy Beard, the man who had helped us board the blaumen ship. ‘Do not kill us. I am from Aggersborg.’

  ‘Not another Dane,’ Bram Bear muttered through a beard whose bristles held beads of blood.

  ‘We are slaves of these dogs,’ Filthy Beard said, spitting towards the surviving blaumen, who were fear-soaked and staring like wretched, beaten curs. There were perhaps thirty of them still armed and in a fit state to fight, but they could see their sister ship in the distance and see too that her bows were pointing the wrong way. ‘I have rowed for these dark dogs for two burning summers. But I knew a good crew of Týr-brave men would come from the north and slaughter the whoresons. I am Yngvar.’

  Sigurd stepped forward and from the look on Yngvar’s face he knew instantly that Sigurd was our jarl.

  ‘It was you who threw us the rope?’ Sigurd asked.

  ‘It was, lord,’ Yngvar said, dipping his head though you could see the pride in him.

  ‘That was well done, Yngvar,’ Sigurd said. The other slaves were all blaumen and they watched in desperation, not knowing what lay in store for them. ‘I am Jarl Sigurd and these are my oathmen. Do you speak the blaumen’s tongue?’ Sigurd asked Yngvar, pointing his gory sword at the enemy warriors, some of whom were muttering strange words under their breath.

  Yngvar shook his head. ‘Would a Norseman eat goat droppings?’ he asked. There were chuckles at that. ‘But my friend speaks their filthy words.’ He gestured at a blauman standing proudly amongst the slaves. He wore no clothes but for a cloth to cover his modesty. He was heavily muscled, his corpse-black skin glistened with sweat, and like Yngvar’s his body was covered in welts from his master’s whip. ‘We have shared these rusting fetters,’ Yngvar said, moving his leg, so that a short length of severed chain rattled along the deck, ‘and pulled the same oar for a long time. I have taught him our words but …’ he shrugged his scarred shoulders, ‘my dog back home can speak it better.’

  Sigurd nodded. ‘Tell the blaumen that I will spare them if they put down their weapons.’ Yngvar looked horrified, but I knew it was the right thing, for we did not want to risk our own lives if we did not need to.

  ‘But my lord, these dogs deserve only your blades,’ Yngvar said. ‘They lured you in with that trader and would have killed you all or made thralls of you. Even you, Jarl Sigurd, would have been beaten and treated worse than a beast of burden.’ His eyes hardened. ‘Kill them.’

  ‘Just give the word, Sigurd, and we’ll send these draugar back to their graves!’ Rolf called from the stern, his men bristling with violence.

  ‘Kill them all, Sigurd!’ Yngvar said.

  ‘Watch your tongue if you want to keep it, cur!’ Olaf warned, pointing a finger at Yngvar. ‘Do as you have been told before I have you standing in your own rancid guts.’

  Yngvar grimaced and gestured to his friend to step forward, then told him what Sigurd had said. The blauman nodded and turned to those who had kept him in chains for who knows how long. He all but spat the words at their feet. The blaumen did not move.

  ‘Well?’ Sigurd said. ‘Are they in such a rush to get to the afterlife?’ One of the blaumen spoke to Yngvar’s oar-mate, who locked his eyes with Sigurd’s.

  ‘They do not trust you to keep your word, because you are heathen devils.’ It was the strangest thing hearing Norse words from a man who looked like that.

  Sigurd laughed. ‘They sound like Christians, even if they don’t look like them,’ he said, then turned to Olaf. ‘Well, Uncle, these walking corpses do not trust us. Perhaps we should lay down our weapons to prove ourselves.’

  Olaf grinned. ‘Aye, and we could bend over and let them fuck us, too. Just to show that we mean what we say.’ The blauman spoke again.

  ‘They say Allah the almighty will protect them. They will fight,’ Yngvar’s oar-mate said.

  Sigurd frowned.

  ‘This Allah must be one of their gods,’ I said.

  ‘There is only one god,’ Yngvar’s blauman friend said.

  ‘They do sound like Christians,’ Sigurd said. Then he shrugged at Olaf and lifted his shield. ‘Are you ready, Rolf?’ he called.

  There was a thumping of shields from the Danes behind the blaumen.

  ‘Aye, Sigurd! Gleipnir couldn’t hold the lads back!’ Rolf replied.

  Sigurd nodded. ‘Leave no man alive,’ he said to us and I gritted my teeth and lifted my shield, eyeing the blaumen for the one I was going to kill. Penda loosened off his neck and Svein slapped the haft of his long axe.

  Then a sword clattered on to the deck. A grey-bearded blauman stepped from the press of warriors, his chin held high. He studied us down a beak of a nose, as though we were the shit bucket that needed emptying. Some of his men stepped in front of him protectively, raising their curved swords at us threateningly, but a few sharp words from their lord stung them into stepping back, heads bowed.

  ‘That’s the vicious son of a troll who likes to whip men who are chained to the deck,’ Yngvar said, the words dripping with putrid bile.

  The blaumen’s lord barked at Yngvar’s friend and you would have thought the man was still chained to an oar.

  ‘He’s got balls, this one,’ Bram said admiringly.

  Yngvar’s friend nodded at the blaumen’s lord and looked back to Sigurd.

  ‘He says you may kill him but only if you let his men go,’ Yngvar’s friend said. ‘Otherwise they will fight you and many of your men will die.’ I did not know how many men we had lost, but surely some were already crossing Bifröst.

  Sigurd dragged the knuckles of the hand holding his sword across his chin, then eyeballed the blauman who had offered his life for his men’s.

  ‘Aye, Bram, he is brave for a dead man,’ Sigurd said.

  Seeing a chance to appease the gods, Asgot stepped forward, the bones rattling in his braids. ‘Sigurd, the All-Father will look kindly on a blood offering.’

  Sigurd seemed to consider this, then shook his head.

  ‘No offering, godi. Óðin might think we had dug up a corpse and killed it again,’ he said and even Asgot admitted that perhaps it was not such a good idea. ‘You say that this man whipped you, Yngvar?’

  ‘Even when we were rowing well, my lord,’ Yngvar said.

  Sigurd nodded again. ‘Tell him I accept his offer.’

  Yngvar glared at us, clearly horrified at the thought of letting his captors live. But then he nodded, for it does not do to gainsay a jarl. Besides which, he did not know what we were going to do with him.

  When Yngvar’s oar-mate confirmed Sigurd’s acceptance, the blauman dipped his head and muttered something, to his god I think, but even then he had some nerve, demanding that Sigurd put his men ashore before the heathen brought his filthy blade anywhere near him.

  ‘Gut the draugar, Sigurd,’ Bram Bear said.

  ‘I will throw his guts to the fish.’ Svein the Red pointed with his axe, gripping the long haft’s throat in one massive hand.

  Sigurd shook his head. ‘Uncle, can a small crew sail this blauman ship?’

  Olaf pursed his lips. ‘In this weather ten men could handle her, I think. If they’ve any sea-craft.’ He looked up at the sky, eyeing the cloud, which had thickened into heaped layers of shorn wool drifting north-east. ‘But if it turns …’

  Sigurd nodded, turning to Yngvar. ‘Choose nine good men and tell them I will pay them three large silver coins each if they sail this ship until I can sell it.’

  Yngvar glanced at his oar-mate, whose eyes were yellow as butter against his dark skin. ‘Her sail alone needs ten men, Jarl Sigurd,’ Yngvar said. ‘Specially when the wind is up.’

  ‘Then fifteen men will each get two coins, or the same weight in silver,’ Sigurd said, to which it was impossible to guess Yngvar’s thoughts. ‘Uncle, take the rest of the blaumen aboard Fjord-Elk and put them ashore.’

  ‘You want me to give them food and water too?’ Olaf asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘They have their lives,’
Sigurd said, implying that that was enough.

  And so we watched as the blaumen, slaves and erstwhile masters together and none of them armed, were loaded aboard Fjord-Elk and rowed to the shallows. Bragi would not risk Fjord-Elk’s belly for the sake of those men and so made them jump overboard at the points of his men’s spears, about three boat-lengths from the surf that rolled up the dark gold sand. Of the two groups there were many more slaves and the rest of us watched, wondering if they would turn on the others in vengeance now that they were free. But, to the disappointed groans of many, the crowd split like an oak and the sorry-looking freed men shuffled off like a herd of sheep, leaving the others staring out to sea from above the water line. For those were loyal men and hated abandoning their lord to us.

  ‘If a man beats his slave he must be certain that the slave will never taste freedom,’ Sigurd said to the blaumen’s lord, ‘for that first breath of free air will bring to his mind every bite of the whip and every blow of the fist.’ But the blauman did not understand, or at least he showed no signs of understanding, and simply glared at Sigurd with eyes as cold as Hel. ‘Yngvar,’ the jarl went on, ‘it is not right that a man from the fjords should be in thrall to a walking corpse like this. Worse still that this burnt goat’s prick should beat the men who are pulling his oars.’ Sigurd glanced at Bag-eyed Orm who lay against the hull bleeding to death from a spear thrust that had split his mail and pierced his belly. Uncle had poured a gruel made with onions down Orm’s throat and now he was on his knees sniffing the wound as Orm bit into a comb against the pain. He looked up at Sigurd and shook his head, meaning he could smell onion in the wound and so Orm’s stomach was holed. There was no hope for Orm now.

  Sigurd half grimaced and looked back at the blauman. ‘Do what you want with him, Yngvar,’ he said.

  Now Yngvar grinned and his oar-mate stepped forward but Yngvar batted him away with a brawny arm. ‘I felt the whoreson’s lash more than you. You can have what’s left when I’m finished.’

  But in the end there was nothing left. The blauman had not raised a finger, which some of the Norsemen thought was a pale-livered and shameful way to behave. But I agreed with Floki, who cursed those men for their thick-headedness. For the blauman not to have at least tried to defend himself was not cowardice. It was one of the Týr-bravest things I have ever seen. He stood there on the deck of his own ship, taking blow after blow, until Yngvar’s fists were torn to bloody pulp. And even when his face bones were broken and he could no longer stand, he had clasped his own hands together over his stomach, shaking and pain-racked as the Dane stamped him to death. The man knew he would soon be feeding the crabs. Knew that any resistance would be useless and worse, would look wretchedly pitiful. And so with iron will he made his death one that others would remember. Perhaps his men on the shore saw the way he died, but most likely they did not. Either way they would not have recognized what was left of their lord when it was over. And yet, even as Yngvar’s dark-skinned oar-mate tipped the bloody meat of the blauman overboard, I admired the man’s bravery. And I thought that this Allah, who was the blaumen’s god, must be a powerful god indeed, to fill his people with that kind of courage.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WE NAMED YNGVAR’S BLAUMAN FRIEND VÖLUND. I SUPPOSE HE must have had a name already, but the chances were it was one our tongues couldn’t wriggle round. And so because he was muscle-bound, and for his skin which was as black as a smith’s covered with the soot of the forge, we named him after the smith god. After the fight Rolf had taken our dead aboard Sea-Arrow and beached a little further along the coast. The Danes buried Bag-eyed Orm and Kveldulf along with one of their own who had, incredibly, taken an arrow in each eye. Those men went to their graves with decent weapons, for having stripped the blaumen of theirs we now had so many blades that each of us would need four hands to wield them all. Sigurd said it was a strange thing to bury his men this far from their home, but he also said their kinfolk would be proud to know they had journeyed so far and won so many hard fights and we could not disagree with that.

  We had also found plenty of food aboard the blaumen’s ship: bread mostly but also some salted meat, grain and cheese. There was also a basket of strange yellow fruits that were so sour that when Svein bit into one, being the first brave enough to try one, his face almost turned inside out. We laughed as the juice ran through his beard and his mouth puckered and the cords in his neck looked about to break through the skin.

  ‘This is more sour than Borghild!’ he announced at last when he had straightened out his mouth.

  ‘You don’t know my wife very well then, Red,’ Bram said, wafting Svein away. ‘For nothing is as sour as Borghild.’ And we roared because Bram did not seem to be joking.

  We sailed in an arrow formation like a skein of geese. Serpent was the tip, with Wave-Steed and Sea-Arrow off our steerboard side and Fjord-Elk and Goliath, which was our name for the blaumen’s ship, on our port side. Despite her enormous white sail, Goliath was slow and lumbering and we could only think that the other ship, the one which had fled from the fight, was faster.

  ‘I’ll wager the other one would catch their prey and this one would come along to finish the kill,’ Bragi had suggested when we had taken a closer look at the vessel. We had named it Goliath after a story of a giant from ancient times which Father Egfrith had told us one night in Frankia. We had all liked the beginning of the story, how the giant Philistine warrior had stridden from his ranks, his beautiful armour glinting in the hot sun, his sword-brothers chanting his name. But few of the Norsemen had liked the ending. They were troubled that a mere boy had killed the Philistines’ greatest hero with nothing more than a smooth pebble, and they sulked when Egfrith told it.

  ‘I think young David finished Goliath off with the giant’s own sword,’ Egfrith had explained in an attempt to rescue his story, but by now men were grumbling and farting and rolling over into their furs to sleep, leaving the monk upset that his tale, which had begun so well, was trickling away like piss in a ditch.

  Even so, we had all remembered Egfrith’s story and Goliath seemed a good name for the ship because of its size, and so it was. But that ship was like a rock around our necks for we could only sail as fast as it could. And yet all agreed that it was too rich a prize to cut loose. We must have looked a force to be reckoned with, though, and from then on we saw many ships’ sterns as they changed course to avoid us the way dogs skulk away from their drunken masters to escape the boot.

  The jagged mountains and scrub-crowned peaks on our port side gave way to land that sloped gently into the sea, which was warm and so clear in places that you thought you could just reach down and pull in the fish with your bare hands. Even when we were far from the beach our fat-smeared fathom weights came back up crusty with sand, warning us to stay further from the shore than you would have thought necessary. It was because of this long slope that the waves gathered such force for their assault on the shore, and we watched them surge and roll from far out until they flung themselves up the strand in frothy white billows and vanished.

  Nevertheless, we did risk landfall on a few occasions, and so had the chance to learn more of Goliath’s crew. It turned out that Völund spoke better Norse than Yngvar gave him credit for, and he was happy to give answers where Yngvar could not. It seemed he had been a raider before Beak Nose’s blaumen captured his ship and made a slave of him. He was a fierce-looking man, Völund, and he had muscles on his muscles. But smiles came easily to him and I admit I liked him better than I liked Yngvar.

  It was from Völund we learnt that the strange building we had named Gerd’s Tit was rightly called a mosque, which is indeed a church for the blaumen’s god – it seems they are all built with those bulging roofs the likes of which none of us had ever seen before.

  On this latest landfall conversation turned to an island we had sighted to the north-east, which Völund said he recognized from his raider days. It seemed to burst up from the blue sea, craggy white rock studded with d
ark green bushes. By the water’s edge, on the narrow, pebble-strewn margin, giant boulders sat sentinel. Having long ago broken and crashed down from the heights, they would rest there, wave-licked, until the doom of the gods, as immovable as Yggdrasil. According to Völund, there was a mosque on the island’s north side, where many rich men stopped to pray. As far as I could make out from him, this island’s remoteness kept it clean of man’s sin and if you made the effort to go there to pray then Allah would surely reward you, though with what I had no idea. Egfrith said there were storm-bashed Christian churches and monasteries like that where the most devout and God-fearing men could dedicate their lives to Him without the distractions of others.

  ‘We know of such places, monk,’ Olaf said, winking at Sigurd, who nodded, grinning.

  ‘Gerd’s Tit had nothing in it worth stealing,’ Rolf said, which was true enough and I said so as the Dane sat combing his tangled beard and squashing the lice that were left on the comb’s teeth.

  ‘That was not our target; we were going to wait near that mosque until a rich amir came,’ Völund explained, shaking his head at the memory, ‘but sometimes there is a bigger fox hunting the—’ He frowned.

  ‘Chicken?’ Sigurd suggested helpfully, to which Völund nodded.

  It emerged that it was on this island that Völund’s lot had fallen prey to Beak Nose’s crew. Most had been killed, though the blaumen’s lord had spared the strongest to pull his oars. Some time after that Beak Nose had tangled with a crew of Danes. Yngvar had been one of the men using oars to heave the enemy ship off their hull, but it had been his ill luck to fall overboard. He was still dripping wet when the fetters went on and he was put on a bench next to Völund. Olaf glanced at me during that part of the story, for I had been put to one of Serpent’s oars even as the smoke from my burning village dirtied the sky. And yet that seemed so very long ago now and I returned Olaf’s gaze, trying to remember the fear I had once felt at the sight of him.