by Severin, Tim
‘What’s the captain doing?’ I whispered to my oar comrade.
‘Soundings,’ he hissed back irritably, as if I was an imbecile to have asked.
The explanation meant nothing to me so I kept on heaving on the handle of the sweep until finally Redwald’s voice came floating back. We were to stop rowing and the crew were to go forward and drop anchor.
Gladly I helped pull aboard the heavy sweep and laid it on deck. From the bow I heard a heavier splash which must have been our anchor hitting the water, then the thrum of rope, and more activity as the crew made fast.
Redwald’s gangling shape loomed through the fog, an arm’s length away.
‘All set for the night,’ he announced. ‘You and your friends can get below and rest.’
‘When will we finally reach Kaupang?’ I asked him.
‘We’re there,’ he said flatly.
‘How can that be?’ I blurted in surprise, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
There was a throaty chuckle. ‘What did I tell you when we left Dorestad?’ he demanded.
I thought back to our departure as we sailed down the Rhine’s current in the fading light of evening.
‘You said something about listening,’ I replied.
‘Exactly,’ the shipmaster said. He brushed past me without another word.
I held my breath and listened intently. The ship was lying quietly to her anchor. There was no longer the creak of ropes and timber, not even the sound of water moving past her hull.
In a moment of absolute silence and through the pitch darkness, I heard the bark of a dog.
*
I awoke with a stiff neck and aching shoulders after an exhausted sleep. At first I blamed my hard pillow, the saddlebag packed with silver, but the moment I stretched and felt the soreness in my muscles, I recalled the hours spent hauling on a sweep. I could hear the muffled sounds of distant activity and sunlight was pouring into the hold through the open hatchway. I rose gingerly and made my way to the foot of the ladder to the deck. Fresh blisters on my palms made me wince as I hauled myself up the rungs and emerged into a fine, bright morning. There was not a breath of wind. The fog had gone completely.
Turning to look over the bow, I blinked in surprise.
We were anchored within a stone’s throw of a landing beach. In dense fog Redwald had managed to guide the cog into a broad, sheltered inlet. It was little wonder that his crew had such confidence in their captain.
A couple of dozen boats lay drawn up in an uneven line on the shingle. They ranged from two-man skiffs to middling-sized cargo vessels. Their crews must have been ashore, for these boats were empty and unattended. Three much larger ships were berthed alongside a rough stone jetty and here the day’s work was already well underway. Men were hoisting cargo from the holds, carrying sacks and packages ashore, rolling barrels down gangplanks. At the root of the jetty stood a stocky, shaggy pony. It was harnessed to a wooden sledge already heaped with boxes, and the animal’s master was tying down the ropes that held the load in place. As I watched, a mongrel wandered up, circled the pony cautiously, and made as if to cock its leg. Someone must have thrown a stone, for suddenly the mongrel yelped and ran, tail between its legs. I wondered if it was the same dog that had barked the previous evening.
‘Kaupang must be just over there,’ said Osric. My friend was already on deck, leaning on the ship’s rail. He pointed inland to where a rough track led past a couple of weather-beaten shacks and over a small ridge. ‘Seems as though our captain’s expected.’
A small open boat was coming to us, rowed by two men while a third stood in the stern. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out. ‘Redwald! The knorr leaves for Dunwich at noon. You can have her space alongside as soon as she’s gone.’
Redwald shouted back, ‘I’ve got passengers you can take ashore for me right away!’
I was surprised that Redwald was being so obliging. ‘There’s no hurry. Osric and I can wait till later,’ I said to him.
‘I want you off my ship,’ he grunted. He jerked a thumb towards the jetty. ‘See that big vessel? That’s the knorr. Her captain will want to come aboard and have a chat before he sets sail.’ When I made no move to step away from the ship’s rail, Redwald shot me a meaningful look from his pale blue eyes and added, ‘Dunwich is a port on the English coast. Part of King Offa’s domain. Gossip spreads fast.’
There was a slight bump as the rowing boat came alongside.
‘But Walo stays aboard,’ I said.
Redwald scowled. ‘Then tell him to keep out of sight.’
I was about to climb down into the waiting skiff when the shipmaster laid a hand on my shoulder. He slipped his sailor’s knife and its sheath from his belt and held it out to me. ‘Here, take this, and don’t loiter in Kaupang after dark. Come back to the ship before dusk. The knorr will be gone by then.’
I took his knife without a word and lowered myself into the skiff. Osric followed, and as we were rowed ashore I looked back at the cog, wondering what to make of Redwald. He had ordered me off his ship because he wanted to avoid trouble with King Offa. Yet he seemed genuinely concerned for my safety ashore. He also knew that we were carrying a fortune in silver. I fretted that Walo was not the right person to have left on guard. At the landing place a man was melting tar in a cauldron over a driftwood fire. The unmistakable smell of hot pitch hung in the still air and a flock of seagulls squabbled at the water’s edge, tearing at a shapeless piece of carrion with their orange and yellow beaks.
‘Redwald is worried that King Offa will get to know that I’m in Kaupang,’ I said to Osric as we walked up the beach and out of earshot of the skiff’s crew.
‘Then we must take care not to draw attention to ourselves,’ he answered. ‘If Kaupang’s a seasonal market, there’ll be plenty of strangers who arrive here just for a short visit. We should be able to blend in.’
We stood aside to allow the pony and loaded sledge to go past at a lunging trot, the driver slapping the reins and shouting encouragement. Then we followed them along the track as it led up the slope of the beach to where it skirted the grove of alder trees and then crested the low ridge. On the far side, we found an untidy straggle of humble single-storey dwellings, their walls and roofs made of weathered grey planks. Among them were several much larger buildings shaped like huge upturned boats and roofed with turf. It took a moment to realize that this was Kaupang and our footpath, where it broadened, was Kaupang’s one and only street, unpaved and chaotic.
‘So this is the great market place of the north!’ observed Osric dubiously.
Scores of makeshift sales booths were little more than crude hutches. Rocks and turf sods had been piled up to make their walls, and sheets of canvas rigged to keep out the rain. Other shops were open-sided sheds. Much of what was for sale was merely heaped up on the ground, jumbled together, and left for prospective buyers to browse. Despite the chaos and clutter, the place was swarming with customers.
We strolled forward, picking our way around untidy displays or squeezing between rickety stalls set up at random.
‘I don’t see many takers for Redwald’s shipment of household querns,’ I murmured. There were some women in the crowd, but not many. They wore loose linen dresses reaching to their ankles and most of them had tied up their hair in scarves. That was a shame because, from what I glimpsed, they had fine, lustrous hair and wore it long. By far the majority of Kaupang’s customers were men. In general, they were burly, heavily bearded and exuded a certain swaggering arrogance. One passerby stared into my face, and then gave me an odd look – he must have seen my different-coloured eyes – and I was glad that Redwald’s dagger was very obvious in my belt. A drunk came swaying out of a ramshackle building that did duty for a tavern. He pitched forward on his face in the dirt in front of us. Like everyone else, we skirted around him and carried on walking.
In the area where foodstuffs were for sale, the most common offering was fish: split, dried and h
ung up like laundry, dangling in long strings that gave off a pungent smell. I could see little sign of the sort of farm produce normally found in a country market. There were no vegetables or fruit or fresh meat, just a few eggs and some soft white cheese in tubs being sold by one of the very few women stall holders.
‘I wouldn’t risk my teeth on that lot,’ Osric commented, nodding towards a handful of knobbly oatmeal loaves displayed in a wheelbarrow.
We drifted on to where farm implements were for sale. Here the traders had laid out axes, saws, cauldrons, hammers, chisels, lengths of chain and barrels of massive iron nails. It was also possible to purchase rough slabs of raw iron, ready to be heated and moulded into tools. I thought sourly of Osric’s nickname of Weyland, and that made me look more closely at some of the men in the crowd. A big ox of a man standing near me was examining an axe. His shirt front was open. Hanging from a leather thong around his neck was a T-shaped amulet. I recognized Thor’s hammer.
‘Let’s see if we can track down a seller of hunting birds,’ I suggested.
‘Maybe over there.’ Osric pointed towards one of the larger open-sided sheds. Some sort of unidentifiable animal skin had been nailed to a cross-beam high enough to be seen above the heads of the crowd.
We pushed our way through the press of people and found ourselves in front of a display of anchors, rolls of sailcloth, fishing line and hooks, balls of twine, ropes and nets. The air reeked of pine tar. The proprietor was a scrawny, pockmarked fellow who was trying to sell a coil of rope to a customer. The local language was close enough to Saxon for me to understand most of his sales talk. The rope was dark, greasy and – if the man was to be believed – cut from the thick leathery skin of a large animal he called a hross-hvalr, and far superior to rope made from strands of flax. His client, a thick-necked man with half an ear missing, was fingering the rope doubtfully and saying that he preferred thin strips of good-quality stallion hide so that he could plait his own rope. ‘One horse’s skin is as good as another. You will save yourself the labour of all that plaiting,’ wheedled the shopkeeper.
His client was not persuaded and dropped the heavy rope’s end with a disdainful grunt, then wandered off. I waited until he was out of earshot, then asked the shopkeeper. ‘Excuse me, I heard you speaking of a “hross-hvalr” just now. Is that some sort of horse?’
The man looked me up and down. He must have seen by my clothes that I was not a seafarer and therefore an unlikely customer. He was about to turn away when perhaps he noticed the colour of my eyes because he hesitated. His expression, which had been dismissive, changed to one that was more wary.
‘Why would you want to know?’ he asked.
‘Just curiosity. I’m a stranger to these parts and “hross” sounds much like horse.’
‘You’re right in that,’ the man agreed.
‘I’m told that many of the animals native to this region are white. I’m wondering if this type of horse is also white.’
‘I’ve never seen a live hross-hvalr,’ said the merchant. ‘I get offered lengths of rope made up from their skin. It’s always the same colour as that one there.’ He nodded towards the coil of rope on the ground. It was a dull, grey-black.
A thought occurred to me. ‘So you don’t make the rope yourself?’
‘No, it comes ready made. The hross-hvalr lives far in the north where the winter nights are so long that there’s plenty of dark time for a man to fill in the hours sitting by his hearth, slicing up skin into rope.’
‘Perhaps I should ask someone from that area,’ I suggested.
The man paused before replying, cautious about giving information to a stranger.
‘If you can help me find what I’m looking for,’ I coaxed, ‘I would gladly pay a small reward.’
He cocked his head on one side and looked at me sharply. ‘What exactly is it that you are seeking?’
I hesitated, aware of my own doubts. ‘I’m looking for an unusual sort of horse, a white one. It’s called a unicorn.’
There was a startled pause, and then he threw back his head and hooted with laughter. ‘A unicorn! I don’t believe it!’
I stood there, feeling foolish and trying not to show it.
He laughed so hard, he almost choked. ‘In these parts you’ll find Sleipnir before you come across any unicorn. A hross-hvalr is a horse whale,’ he gasped finally.
I waited until he had regained his breath and, curbing my irritation, asked him again who had supplied him with horse whale rope.
‘His name is Ohthere,’ he told me. ‘He owns a large farm on the coast and so far north that it takes him almost a month to get here, sailing every day and anchoring each night. He shows up in Kaupang every year, probably the only time he meets anyone outside his own family.’
‘Where can I find this Ohthere?’
The shopkeeper was still chuckling. ‘At the end of the street, on the outskirts of town. He always sets up a big tent there, on the right.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, stepping back. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’
‘And tell him that Oleif sent you!’ he called after me as I trudged on, Osric limping beside me.
‘What did he mean about finding Sleipnir before we came across a unicorn?’ Osric asked.
‘It was his way of saying that there’s no such creature as a unicorn. Sleipnir is the horse Odinn rides. According to the old beliefs, Sleipnir travels on eight legs.’
We were passing one of the large boat-shaped houses with a turf roof. Three men stood in the open doorway, deep in conversation. Judging by the tints of grey in their neatly trimmed beards, two of them were in their mid-forties. Their companion was younger, perhaps in his twenties. All three were dressed in the same unobtrusive style – loose trousers of dark wool, a long shirt belted at the waist and soft knee-length boots. Two of them were bare headed; the third wore a round felt cap with an unusual trim of alternating patches of glossy dark and light fur.
Osric nudged me with his elbow. ‘Over there,’ he murmured, flicking a glance towards the strangers.
At first sight there was nothing noteworthy about them apart from the fact that their skins were a darker shade than most visitors to the market and they appeared to be more neatly groomed.
‘Look at their belts,’ Osric prompted under his breath.
I took a second glance. Their broad leather belts were stitched with complicated interlocking red and green patterns in loops and whorls. The buckles were ornate and of massive silver.
‘Slave dealers,’ muttered Osric. There was sadness in his voice and I remembered that once he too had been traded as a slave.
I felt the pressure on my arm as he steered me so we passed close enough to the three slave-dealers to overhear their conversation.
The three men ignored us as we sauntered past and when we were at a safe distance I asked, ‘What were they talking about?’
‘I picked up a few words. Enough to guess that they come from Khazaria, well beyond Constantinople.’
‘Redwald mentioned that Saracen traders come to Kaupang to buy slaves. I’m surprised that the emperor in Constantinople allows Saracens to cross his lands to get here. They could be spies,’ I added.
Osric grimaced. ‘Trade leaks through frontiers. Slaves bought in Kaupang can finish up serving in the palace at Constantinople.’
Presently we found ourselves in the rougher end of Kaupang’s market. Rubbish littered the ground and the buildings were even more seedy. Stray dogs, scabby and malnourished, nosed for scraps at the side of the roadway. A group of what looked like vagrants were squatting or lying in the shade of one of the flimsy sheds. There were tear streaks on the grimy faces of some of the women and girls, the men looked sullen and bored. They wore no chains but I knew at once that they were for sale. They could have been taken prisoner in local battles, kidnapped by slave catchers, or sold into slavery to pay debts. I tried not to think of my own people made captive when King Offa conquered us. Most would have been allowed to sta
y on and work the land, paying their taxes to their new lord, but others would have been sold. It was my good fortune to have been sent into exile.
At the far end of the roadway, at the point it turned back into a footpath, we finally found where hunting birds were sold. A dozen or so birds were fastened by cords around their legs to a line of wooden blocks on the ground. They watched our approach with their fierce, bright eyes. The ground around their perches was soiled with their droppings. Fresh bloodstains and shreds of mouse carcasses on the blocks showed that they had been fed recently. The smaller merlins and sparrowhawks were easy to identify, and Carolus’s mews master had taken me on a tour of the royal mews so I was able to distinguish the big gyrfalcons from their cousins the peregrines. Disappointingly, of three gyrfalcons only one was white. The plumage of the others was patterned in dark brown and black. They were not what I was seeking.
A whip-thin lad, scarcely ten years old, had been left in charge. Mindful that I had agreed with Redwald that he would be negotiating with the bird sellers, I contented myself with asking the boy if he knew where I might find a man called Ohthere. My question was drowned out by a sudden furious outburst of barking. A pack of mangy dogs rushed past, nearly knocking the lad off his feet. Their jostling and yapping disturbed the hunting birds. They fidgeted on their perches, fluffing up their feathers.
‘Where can I find Ohthere?’ I repeated. The lad had knelt down on the ground to calm the white gyrfalcon, gently stroking its plumage. When he looked up at me, I thought that he did not understand my Saxon. The dogs had bunched in front of a stout wooden pen a little further down the road and were snapping and snarling hysterically at its bars.
‘Ohthere?’ I asked again.
The lad continued to stroke the gyrfalcon. He raised his free hand and pointed. A heavily built man, roaring and cursing, had emerged from a leather tent close beside the wooden pen. He strode angrily towards the frenzied pack, and began laying about him with a stout stick.
Osric and I waited until the stranger had succeeded in beating back the dogs before we approached him.