Raven

by Giles Kristian

  I raised an invisible horn to my mouth and pretended to drink, following it with an ‘aaah’, then dragging my arm across my mouth. All three boys grinned at that and Curly Hair snapped an order at a blond-haired boy who nodded and ran off up the strand as lightly over the sand as a water snake across a pond. Then Sigurd produced an iron ring from his tunic of the kind that went round a slave’s ankle and stepped up to Egfrith and took his hand as though about to thrust it into the fetter. The two boys that were left frowned at one another, chattering all the while, then Curly Hair dared to step up to Sigurd and put a hand on his shoulder. He turned the jarl round until they were facing west, back out to sea, and then he pointed a thin arm up at the sun. He held up two fingers, which we took to mean in two days’ time, and then the boy thumped his chest with his palm and pointed to our ships at the wharf.

  ‘Clear as a pail of mud,’ Olaf said, shaking his head.

  Sigurd gave Curly Hair a small coin which the boy examined before nodding indifferently, though he must have worked far harder for much less many times before.

  ‘Uncle, tell the men we’ll be staying for a couple of days,’ Sigurd said, turning his face towards the sun and closing his eyes. The two boys ran off south-eastwards, which made me think there must be a larger settlement in that direction. ‘We’ll stay here and stretch our legs,’ the jarl added, breathing deeply of the warming air. Olaf nodded, pulling another fish from a pouch on his belt and biting into it as he turned on his heel. ‘And tell them to make the most of the blauvifs,’ Sigurd added, to which Olaf casually raised a hand as though he had already intended as much. ‘You too, Raven,’ Sigurd said. ‘The wolf that eats the farmer’s sheep loses its teeth before the wolf that must hunt in the forest.’

  I glanced at Svein who now wore the face of a boy who is told he cannot play with the other boys. Then I followed Olaf back to the ships. And Amina.

  That night the three boys returned, only this time they came leading an old tired ass. Across the creature’s back were slung almost its height again in bulging skins, but it plodded stolidly on, hooves flicking up flurries of sand as the boys beside it beamed with pride. They had barely got amongst the shelters we had built on the strand before Norsemen, Danes and Wessexmen fell on their hoard like men who were thirsting to death. It turned out to be not mead or ale but wine, as red as blood and at once sweet and sour and delicious. In some of the skins was fresh water and, after watching Bram swill enough wine to drown a horse, the boys took great pleasure in showing us the proper way, which was to cut the wine with water. Though many of us ignored that advice. When Sigurd had paid them they seemed more than happy to stay and spent the rest of the night flitting amongst us, filling our horns and cups over and over again. Fires crackled and popped and the moon-dappled waves spilled up on to the sand in languid sighs, each breath fresh with the scent of the sea. Having decided we meant them no harm, local folk came to sell us hot pottage made with barley, fish, olive oil and wine. They brought fresh bread and cheese and spiced vegetables and mice stuffed with pork and herbs. But my favourite dish was crusts of bread that had been soaked in milk, fried in fat and then covered with honey, and I ate until I could eat no more.

  Men and women screwed in the sand, some even swived in the sea, and all sluiced their insides with wine. Yngvar and Völund were part of our crew now, had even agreed to take Sigurd’s oath, but no one saw why the other men we had freed should still be sharing our food and drink and so Sigurd paid them what he had promised and sent them off to whatever lay in store for them in the land of the Romans. We cared nothing, so long as the wine flowed and the food kept coming, and I half watched them stalk nervously off towards the town. Bram challenged men to wrestling bouts and he won five in a row until he was eventually beaten by the wine, which put him face down in the sand, something no man had been able to do. One of the local men came with four dark-haired girls who he implied were his daughters. Three of them were beautiful and the fourth I wouldn’t have touched with a long oar, but the man happily sold their services to men who wanted a change from the blauvifs and some of those men might afterwards have wished they’d left the new girls alone judging by the scowls on the faces of those they usually shared their beds with.

  Penda lay back on his elbows, bare-chested and sweating, the sand stuck to his skin making him look white as a new corpse. In one hand he gripped a drinking horn and in the other a fleshy joint of meat. He was almost as drunk as me.

  ‘You would have thought they had been told that tomorrow the sky is going to fall on their heads,’ he said, squinting drunkenly at the seething camp. He was right. King Hrothgar’s Geats could not have celebrated more boisterously when Beowulf returned from Heorot brandishing the corpse-maker Grendel’s severed arm. I tried to reply but the words slewed out in a wine-soaked mess. Amina lay in the crook of my arm whispering her strange words into my ear. I shuddered as her hand snaked into my breeks.

  ‘Tomorrow, Baldred!’ Penda called over to the Wessexman, who was grunting like a boar, busy with one of the local girls. ‘Tomorrow the sky is going to fall on our heads! Make the most of that sweet honey pot. Tomorrow the sky’s going to fall.’

  Which it did. Because the next day we lost our women.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I WOKE FEELING AS THOUGH MY BRAIN HAD SHRIVELLED AND DIED inside my skull. My mouth was so dry I could not speak, my guts rolled over themselves like eels in a trap and the bile had risen, so that I thought I would vomit but didn’t know when. Amina was still sleeping after a vigorous night, her glossy black hair spread across the furs and her breathing a soft imitation of the nearby surf. I crawled out, but halted, waiting on my hands and knees while my eyes yielded to the harsh morning light. Then I climbed to my feet and stood swaying as I looked around the camp. Piles of white ash still smouldered and drinking horns lay abandoned, half-buried in the sand. Bones and scraps of food were everywhere and further up the beach I could see Cynethryth’s wolf content as a hound as it chewed plundered scraps. Here and there lay a Norseman or a Dane who had slept where he had fallen, and there were even two or three local men who had been too drunk to make it back to their homes.

  ‘Raven! Here, lad!’ I turned and there was Sigurd in the sea, waving at me to join him.

  ‘I swim like a rock, lord!’ I called back, holding the back of my head because I feared it was about to split open.

  ‘That’s good! Rocks cannot drown! You will feel better afterwards. Svein!’ Svein had just emerged from his shelter like a troll from its cave and beneath that flaming hair he looked as ashen as the spent fires. He was muttering to himself. ‘Svein!’ Sigurd called again. ‘Pick Raven up and throw him this way!’ I looked at Svein who shrugged and started towards me, but I raised my palms and he shrugged again and walked off to piss. So I took off my breeks and waded into the surf.

  ‘Makes you feel alive again, hey,’ Sigurd said. I could not reply because I was retching.

  ‘Swallowed … some …’ I muttered, watching the vomit float off and trying to find my feet. Sigurd was grinning.

  ‘That was some night,’ he said, sweeping his sodden golden hair back from his scarred head. There were scars on his shoulders too, like the runes of battle.

  ‘I would rather not think about it,’ I said, spitting bitter-tasting strings of saliva. Along the strand men were pushing their skiffs into the sea. Some were already far out, nutshells bobbing on the horizon, blurs of movement as crews cast their nets. The smell of onions cooking in fat wafted down from the beach.

  ‘Don’t fight it, Raven,’ Sigurd said. Beneath me my legs were kicking even more frantically than my arms were flapping. ‘Watch me.’ He lay back, so that even his ears were under water, and then he let each new wave gently lift him and lower him back down and somehow his nose and eyes remained above water. ‘You just have to take a deep breath and hold it so that you float,’ he said, staring up at the sky. Then he came back upright and blew snot from his nose. ‘Try.’ A gull dived and snatched
a morsel from the waves but another gull wanted the prize too and because the loot was too big the first bird dropped it and the second swooped in to snatch it up again. ‘Don’t be afraid, Raven, your wyrd is not to drown, I’d wager my sea chest on that.’ And so, gritting my teeth, I lay back in the water and just as I did a wave broke over my upturned face and I choked as the water hit my throat. I came up retching again. Sigurd’s laughter was flat as an oar blade across the water. ‘That’s the thing about wyrd,’ he said, beginning to wade back to shore, ‘you just never know.’

  Curly Hair and his urchins came back that afternoon and they brought with them a rich-looking man whose clothes were similar to those the amir had worn, though he was no blauman. He came with four bodyguards, big men with big spears who looked as if what they lacked in wits they made up for in muscle. They were nervous now though, surrounded by shambling, wine-addled warriors, and I suspected they were hoping their master did nothing that would get them killed.

  The merchant’s name was Azriel and he was a slave-trader. He had come because Sigurd had shown the fetter to Curly Hair and the boy had done enough business on that strand to know when men stepped ashore looking for slaves. Only, Sigurd did not want to buy slaves. He wanted to sell them. We had been told to say our goodbyes to our blauvifs and that had been a hard thing to do. Many of the men had grown fond enough of their women to shed a tear at the prospect of losing them and I admit to having a lump in my throat as I kissed Amina for the last time. The women had been lined up along the shore and Azriel had examined each one, often shaking his head disappointedly and clicking his tongue in annoyance. But his dismay was as thin as watered wine judging by how quick he was to make Sigurd an offer and not just for some of the blauvifs but all of them. Which was only to be expected because as the amir’s women they had lived lives of comfort and this showed in their skin and their teeth and in every delicious part of them. They may have looked rougher at the edges after living with us these last months, but the merchant knew his trade well enough to recognize good flesh when he saw it.

  ‘I will miss her,’ Svein said glumly as Azriel opened his blauvif’s mouth and peered inside. ‘She was the best bed partner I have ever had.’ I nodded, too upset to speak. I knew what he meant though. Amina had done things to me that I would never forget. ‘Hey hey, never mind! There will be another one,’ Svein added with a smile, slapping my back then turning to walk back to the camp. From that sorrowful line of blauvifs Amina stared at me with her brown-gold eyes, tears rolling down her dark cheeks. Nearby, Sigurd and Olaf were arguing with Azriel over the price.

  ‘No more tit pillows for a while then,’ Bram Bear said, brows arched. ‘I’ll wager you’ll miss that dark little treasure, hey Raven?’

  I gazed at Amina, wondering what might have been had the two of us been somewhere else. She was a spear’s throw away and yet I thirsted for her, as though another kiss might wash away the bitter taste of parting. Leaving her there was harder than I cared to admit. It felt wrong, like a plane stuttering across the grain, and those eyes staring at me did not help one bit.

  ‘There will be another one,’ I said, turning my back on the girl and walking away.

  Two days later we set sail. A north-westerly pushed us south-east along the Roman coast past countless small harbours and villages of white stone houses. We passed white beaches, jagged rocks and cliffs and swaths of dark green pinewoods whose sweet scent wafted out across the sea to us every now and then. The wind tended to be stronger in the morning and we revelled in it, harnessing it to drive past tree-shrouded promontories and blazing white dunes, and none of us had ever seen such shimmering blue waters.

  ‘The roof of the world is higher above these lands than our own, I think,’ Olaf said one day, scratching his coarse beard and watching a hawk drift high above the pine forest on our port side. Far above the bird, in the vast expanse of blue, a few vaporous white clouds hung seeming not to move at all.

  ‘It keeps the rain off better, too, Uncle,’ Sigurd said with a smile. They both stood by the mast step, overseeing the men whose job it was to tighten the stays and work the sail. The rest of us were on our sea chests making the most of the oars being up in their trees. The air still had a bite to it but we had stowed our bad-weather gear and only used our furs at night now.

  No one talked about our blauvifs. It had been a hard thing watching them sold, though Sigurd had shared out the silver equally and there had been enough for every man to get four silver coins to put in his sea chest. But even that was a bitter draught to swallow because every one of those coins had been stamped with the likeness of King Karolus, the emperor of the Franks who was our enemy.

  ‘It could be any whoreson,’ Bram had said, unimpressed, holding one of his coins up and inspecting it closely. ‘This man has no beard.’

  ‘The monk says it has the king’s name on it,’ Bjarni had said, ‘just there, look.’ He was pointing to his own coin and the writing that ran round the edge of it. We were all looking at our own coins, not for the first time overawed by the Frank king’s power. But Bram wasn’t having it.

  ‘It does not look like Karolus,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if you don’t want yours you can give it to me,’ Olaf said, at which Bram mumbled something and tucked the coin into the leather scrip on his belt.

  ‘I’m just saying it could be anyone, that’s all,’ he said.

  ‘Not you, Bram,’ I said. ‘They’d never be able to get your face on something this small. A cauldron maybe but not this.’

  He winked at Svein. ‘I’m just surprised you haven’t thrown yours overboard yet, Raven,’ he said, rousing moans and mutterings and several insults that were flung my way, so that I wished I had kept my mouth shut. I called Bram a troll-humping goat turd, then stood and made my way to the stern, thinking I would talk with Knut at the tiller where I hoped there would be no mention of the hoard I had set adrift in Frankia. But my eye caught on Father Egfrith huddled in the port stern. He was staring landward, the wind ruffling the beard he wore now and the messy wisps of greying hair above his ears. Something made me go to the monk instead of to the steersman and I cursed under my breath because I would have rather talked to Knut.

  ‘It looks like good land, hey monk?’ I said, watching Serpent’s shadow crawl along a stretch of rugged, sun-dappled rock. The black shape expanded and shrank and looked like a living thing, some seeking spirit.

  ‘You cannot imagine the things that have happened here in these waters, on this coast,’ he said without looking at me. ‘Great civilizations were born here. Men whose ambitions shook the world have looked upon the same rocks we see now. Men who valued enlightenment and learning and wisdom, not just the sword and the axe.’

  ‘I thought you said that the Romans’ greatest king was a warrior who killed thousands of men from a hundred lands,’ I countered, ‘just because they would not obey his laws.’

  He nodded. ‘Caesar. His name was Julius Caesar and yes he certainly shared your heathen blood-lust. But he was a great man, too. Unfortunately for him he lived and died before Christ’s light illuminated the world.’

  ‘The Romans believed in many gods, didn’t they? Like us.’ He nodded. ‘And some of them were warrior gods like Óðin and Thór and Týr?’ I asked.

  ‘Like all men they had faults. We are all sinners.’ Now he turned and stared into my eyes. ‘Though some sins cannot be forgiven.’ I thought that was aimed at me, but then I saw that those tired eyes, though they were fixed on mine, in truth looked inward. I knew the shadow that lay across his face for what it was. Shame. He stared again at the shore.

  ‘You could not have saved the nuns,’ I said, and the twist of his thin lips told me I had struck true.

  ‘No, I could not,’ he said. ‘But had I saved the men first then the nuns would still be alive.’ I knew by ‘saved’ he meant turned them into Christians, and now I tried to keep my own grimace hidden in my beard.

  ‘You have not had so long with the Danes,’ I
said, ‘and as for Asgot, surely you don’t think you can make a Christian of him?’ If he did, Egfrith was more of a fool than I thought.

  He hoisted his brows. ‘I have failed, Raven.’ The sail thumped and I felt a gust from the east on my right cheek.

  ‘You helped get your precious Jesus book to King Karolus,’ I said.

  He almost smiled at that. ‘That is true. A small triumph but not enough.’

  ‘Sigurd must value you,’ I said. ‘Loki knows why but he does. Otherwise you’d have been thrown overboard with the fish guts by now. You don’t row and I have not seen you in the shieldwall.’

  ‘Sigurd could teach a fox slyness,’ he said, this time letting a smile creep into his beard. ‘He feeds me crumbs of hope that I might one day win his soul for God and in return …? In return I go along with whatever iniquitous schemes you vile creatures fall into. I am a wicked whore, Raven. I have sold my soul and for what?’ I had no answer to that for truly I believed that there was more chance of the ocean freezing over than there was of the Wolfpack bending their knees to the White Christ. ‘And the worst of it,’ Egfrith went on, ‘is that I am a thrall to my own pride.’ He cocked one eyebrow at me. ‘Do not think you warriors are the only ones ruled by pride. Knowing that I have failed, that the Lord is disappointed in me, ought to compel me to abandon this damned ship and return to the fold, to my brothers, and there pray for forgiveness. I ought to quietly seek some lesser task to which I might, God willing, be equal.’

  ‘Sigurd would let you leave, I think,’ I said. ‘You are no good to him sulking like this anyway. You’ve been as sullen as a sober Norseman for weeks now.’