Thunder God

by Paul Watkins

  ‘No. I am keeping a promise. That is all.’

  The muscles in his back seemed to give way and he slumped in his blanket-draped chair. ‘I cannot understand how anyone would choose a faith other than Christianity. What does your faith hold for you that Christianity does not offer in even greater measure?’

  The question had never been put to me in that way before. Why choose one faith over another? Simply because I had grown up with it? Because I was too lazy or too frightened to change?

  It was Cabal who gave him the answer. ‘You have found magic in your one god,’ he said.

  Godfred raised his eyebrows, pursing his lips as he considered this. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose that is true.’

  Cabal nodded. ‘But we find it in everything around us.’

  Godfred shook his head. ‘What a distance lies between us.’ Then his face brightened as a new thought bloomed in his head. ‘Will you both do me the honour of signing your names in my book!’

  ‘So you can tell your friends you baptised us?’ I asked.

  He seemed surprised, then glowered at Yarl, who sat at the far end of the table.

  Yarl lowered his face to his bowl and hurriedly began ladelling soup into his mouth.

  *

  When Godfred turned back to me, he was smiling again. ‘As my guest,’ he said. ‘Only that.’ He opened the book, turned it around and and slid it across the table towards us. Then he mixed some ink from a leather bag of powder and gave Cabal a goosequill with which to sign.

  When Cabal wrote his name in the Celtic form called Ogham, Godfred politely said that would not do and crossed it out and rewrote it in Latin.

  Then I wrote my name in runes, and Godfred did not want that either. He held out his hand for the pen, to write my name in his own script.

  Instead of handing back the pen, I wrote my name in Arabic, then Greek, then finally in Latin.

  ‘Where did you learn that?’ he asked suspiciously.

  I explained where we had come from. It was all news to him since he had never asked, preferring instead to invent our past for himself.

  ‘The Varangian Guard?’ he asked. ‘Both of you?’

  We nodded.

  ‘No wonder I am not getting anywhere!’ Now Godfred stood, gripping the edge of the table with his age-crooked hands. ‘All men are Christians in their hearts,’ he announced solemnly, ‘but there are some who do not know it yet.’

  Although Godfred made no more attempts to convert us, his questions had left their mark in my brain. How much could one person accomplish? Was this secret source enough to hold back these Christians, who seemed as stubborn in their faith as we were in our own? The further north I travelled, the more overwhelming it all seemed. Added to this was the thought of seeing my parents again, if they were still alive. And Kari and Olaf and Ingolf. Would they be there to meet me, or had they moved on long ago?

  We put ashore at Hedeby three days later. It was here, for the first time in as long as I could remember, that I saw the blonde hair and blue eyes of Norse people outnumbering any other race that walked the streets. I also saw the single-edged Scramasax swords and wide-bladed spears which were carried only by the western Norse – a sign that I was truly close to home.

  But much had changed since Halfdan brought me through here. The town had grown to three times its former size, yet many of the houses were empty now and falling in upon themselves from neglect. Grass grew in disused alleyways and tatters of old woolen sail-cloth, which once served as doors and roofs, fluttered threadbare and rotten in the breeze. Only in the centre of town did I find the same shouting voices and stork-walking people, carrying their shoes while the greasy mud squelched between their toes.

  The old market place had disappeared completely under houses. The new market was closer to the water and ringed with stalls selling swan-necked bottles made of glass and bloodless slabs of pork, which Yarl said were rumoured to be human flesh. One man with a leather blacksmith’s apron offered to extract bad teeth with iron pincers. Neatly laid out on his bench were all the rotten teeth that he had pulled.

  Christian preachers, standing on tables, drew crowds with their promises of unremitting pain for those who did not follow them.

  On the outskirts, where the pillars had once stood, I saw a single cross. Its huge cross-beam was hung with the ragged flesh of animal sacrifices. Those converts to the new religion had not completely put away the ancient tokens of respect.

  Cabal and I said our goodbyes to Godfred. He seemed preoccupied, as if his god had played a trick on him. He shook our hands and heaved out a sigh that popped against his fleshy lips. Then he turned to walk into the town. In that same instant, he seemed to forget us. Ahopeful smile returned to his face, as he began another search for new converts.

  Yarl followed his master. They disappeared among the crowds that tramped the busy streets.

  Later that day, we heard of a ship bound for the Trondelag region on the western coast of Norway. We found it moored at an old jetty. It was an old Drakkar with a shallow reach, giving it plenty of speed but little room for cargo. To remedy this, the owner had tied a sheet of sailcloth rope from one side of the bow to the other, forming a canopy under which goods could be stored. There were many repaired boards, which stood out along its clinkered hull. Orderly coils of rope lay on the deck. Rawhide bindings laced the steerboard arm and more strips of leather had been used for tying the skull of a huge animal to the bowhead. The skull had two great tusks and enormous, salt-crusted eye sockets.

  I went forward to speak to the owner, while Cabal slung his pack in the shade of a tree and lay down to rest.

  ‘Walrus,’ said the owner of the Trondelag boat, jerking his head toward the skull tied to the bow. He was a broad-shouldered man, with a beard the colour of straw. The hair that jutted from his head was like a shock of wheat. He sat on a bale of furs, a sheepskin wrapped around his shoulders, under which he wore a rough brown shirt and baggy trousers tucked into seal-fur boots. ‘That is what you were wondering, isn’t it?’

  I remembered my father’s long moustache and the jokes he had endured about looking like a walrus. I missed him suddenly, as sometimes happened when the returning memory of him caught me by surprise. The thought no longer brought me to tears, the way it used to do. These days, it was more a feeling of confusion, finding myself unable to make sense of how much time had passed.

  ‘Everybody asks me about the walrus,’ said the man.

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Off the Lapps. They say it is magic.’

  ‘And is it?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I am still here, so it must be doing something right.’

  That appeared to be all the explanation I was going to get. I turned my attention to the wooden chest, strapped with iron bands, which he had set out in front of him.

  On the chest he had placed a lemon. It was slightly shrivelled, the bright gleaming yellow gone from its dimpled skin. But it was still a lemon, and I imagined not many of them made it this far north.

  I thought about the basket-loads I saw every day down in Miklagard, the smell of them clean in my lungs as I walked by chanting vendors in the marketplace.

  The man stared at this lemon for a long time. He seemed to have no idea what to do with it. Eventually, he drew a short knife from his boot and cut the fruit in half. Then he took a big bite out of it.

  I winced.

  He gagged and roared and spat the piece from his mouth. Then he slammed the lemon down, as if it had just bitten him and not the other way around. He stared at it some more. After a while, he sliced it in half again and took another bite. He cut the lemon into smaller and smaller pieces until the whole fruit lay in fragments on the chest. He sat back and muttered under his breath, scruffing his fingertips through his beard.

  ‘It is better with honey,’ I said, trying not to smile.

  He glanced at me, one eyebrow cocked, fingers still wandering across his chin, the way I once saw a blind woman lear
ning the shape of a child’s face by touch. ‘This is a lemon. Leee-mooon.’ He dragged the word out of his mouth. ‘You have not seen one before because they do not grow around here. And because you are an ignorant Norseman, you do not know what it is better with. Now I would like to eat my lemon in peace.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ I turned to leave. Behind my back, I heard the man gagging on another sour bite.

  ‘You!’ croaked the man.

  I turned again and waited.

  ‘How did you know this would taste better with honey?’ he asked, screwing up his face.

  I shrugged.

  He frowned at the wreckage of the lemon. ‘I paid a lot of money for that. I bought it from a Moor. He said he had brought it all the way from Spain. He was keeping it in a box made from the wood of a lemon tree. It all looked,’ he sighed, ‘very impressive.’ Then he stood up, squaring his shoulders. ‘Now what is it you want from me?’

  ‘A ride to a place called Altvik, if you happen to be passing through there on your way north. It is my home.’

  The man raised his chin and squinted. He did not say anything. He just squinted.

  I took that as a no, and turned to leave. I had not walked two paces before something hit me in the back.

  Cabal was getting to his feet, a look of concern on his face as he tried to make out what had happened.

  I spun around, just as the piece of lemon he had thrown bounced onto the boards of the dock. Anger sparked inside me. Is it not enough, I thought, to refuse me a place on your boat without even so much as a word, but to send me on my way like this? I stepped towards the man, ready to knock him into the harbour, or worse.

  ‘Hakon!’ he shouted.

  That brought me to a halt. Suddenly I recognised him, his boy’s face transported through time into the body of a man. ‘Olaf?’

  He bared his teeth, and smiled with the same narrowed eyes that I remembered from our childhood.

  ‘Your aim is still good,’ I said, too shocked to say anything else.

  He was shaking his head in amazement. ‘They are going to choke on their cheese when they see you again.’

  For a long time, we just stood there, staring at each other across the crevasse of years. The worry I had felt about seeing him again, especially after the way we had left things, fell away to nothing.

  Cabal came to a stop behind me. ‘Do we have trouble here?’ he asked.

  ‘None at all,’ I said.

  Olaf spread his arms. ‘Well, are you coming home or not?’

  *

  The Drakkar seemed to have a life of its own when it moved through the open ocean. The long strakes of its hull became like the skin of a snake, rippling as if it were alive when it answered the pull of the waves. The walrus skull unnerved me; the way its tusks reared up as the bow climbed into each wave. But this gave the boat a suitable look of stubbornness, which matched its many repairs and sun-faded planks.

  Olaf seemed built for this work. His stocky legs kept him steady on the pitching deck, and his heavy calf muscles clenched in rhythm with the motion of the waves, as if an ocean current ran beneath his skin.

  At first, he and I did not speak, not knowing where to start.

  It was Cabal who made the conversation, asking about the markets and what goods Olaf was trading.

  Olaf stared at him, barely able to reply, as if entranced by the beads and coins which shuddered on Cabal’s chain mail vest.

  Eventually, Olaf and I found the words to talk. He explained that my parents were dead. My father had been lost at sea two years after the raid. My mother lasted another ten years by herself. She raised a stone in front of our house, a rock as big as a man, and on it a stonecutter had carved in runes the story of how I disappeared.

  It came as no surprise to hear that they had passed away. I had been gone so many years and they had not been young when I left, but hopeful doubt had always flickered in the corner of my mind, immune from all sensible thought. Now, with the acceptance of their deaths, that corner of my mind grew shadowy, folding into darkness like the closing of a butterfly’s wings.

  ‘And Kari?’ I asked, afraid to hear what he might say.

  ‘Alive and prospering,’ he announced, ‘despite the fact that she walked away from her job with the tailor only a few days after you left. Your parents tried everything to talk her out of it, but she is as stubborn as her mother and as much of a dreamer as your father ever was. It is a shame they never lived to see how she makes her living now.’

  ‘And how is that?’ I asked.

  ‘With plants,’ replied Olaf. ‘Little weeds and flowers which she gathers from the woods and upland meadows. She brews them up or grinds them into powder, and uses them to cure the aches and pains of every grumbling sniffler in our town. At least one of us found what we were looking for up in those fields.’

  ‘I would like to meet her,’ said Cabal.

  ‘I dare say you will meet everyone in town, whether you want to or not. It is a small place. We do not get many visitors, and none like yourself, I am sure.’

  ‘Is she married?’ I asked.

  Olaf rolled his eyes. ‘If she were not so set in her ways, she would be.’

  ‘Did she turn you down?’ asked Cabal.

  He glanced up, and it seemed for a moment as if he might take offence. But then he smiled. ‘I have not given her the opportunity.’

  ‘And Ingolf?’ I asked. ‘How is he?’

  Olaf held his hands out around his belly. ‘Like a naked bear.’

  The closer we came to Altvik, the more nervous I grew about seeing them again. I had been forced to imagine their lives in all the years I had been gone and did not know how far astray my mind had led me from the truth.

  Before I could ask more about them, Olaf began speaking of how Altvik had never recovered from the raid. The old trading ships were not rebuilt or replaced. Now Olaf’s was the only one. He also said that Guthrun, the blacksmith, had taken over from Tostig as priest.

  ‘Who did he choose for an apprentice?’ I asked, not doubting that the answer would be Olaf himself.

  ‘Nobody,’ he replied abruptly.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because Guthrun is an idiot!’ said Olaf, struggling to control his temper. ‘Guthrun will be glad to tell you all about it, although I expect you have no interest in that business now.’

  ‘In fact I do,’ I said.

  Olaf looked away. ‘Well, it is no way to make a living, I can tell you.’

  ‘It is not meant to make a living,’ I explained. ‘It is something I promised to do.’

  Olaf grunted. ‘Do you know what keeps its promise in this world?’ Without waiting for my answer, he hauled out a heavy leather bag from under his tunic and tossed it into my lap.

  I opened it and glimpsed inside old English sceattas and other coins from as far away as Samarkand and Damascus.

  Cabal looked over my shoulder and whistled quietly. ‘Even the Emperor would not turn up his nose at that pile.’

  Olaf watched me closely while I sifted through the coins. He seemed torn between needing me to see his wealth and fearing that I might help myself to it.

  When I handed it back, Olaf tucked the bag under his clothes again. He patted his belly where it rested. The coins clinked musically, as if he had swallowed a sack of broken glass. ‘I might not be against sharing some of this with you,’ he said. ‘Can either of you crew a boat?’

  We told him we could, having both spent time on the Emperor’s Black Sea ships.

  He immediately offered us a job, and went on to explain that his old crewman, whose name was Ivar, had just deserted him, having fallen in love with a woman who danced for a living back in Hedeby. It made Olaf so irritated to recall this, that he could not get the story out of his mouth without spitting, and he spat so much that by the time he had finished his story, the dockboards around him were spattered with saliva.

  ‘He has a shock coming, anyway,’ said Olaf. ‘That dancer is a man dressed
up as a woman. So do you want the job, or are you both planning to starve to death in Altvik?’

  Even though Cabal and I had saved some money by sharing the cost of our travels, we had spent most of our savings to get even this far. With no idea how long the rest would last, we accepted.

  As we neared the region of the Trondelag, Olaf made detours up the fjords to remote trading posts, where houses hugged thin strips of land beneath the cliffs.

  Cabal stood at the bow staring up in amazement at these vast walls of rock, and at waterfalls which painted white stripes down into the blue-green water.

  It had been so long since I had seen this land myself, that I felt as if I were seeing it for the first time as well.

  Olaf had no time for gawking at the fjords. At the trading posts, he did a brisk trade in belts woven from horse-hair, bone fish-hooks and glass beads, especially the red ones, glowering like plucked-out dragons’ eyes from the leather bag in which he carried them.

  He did some buying, too, especially of honey, which was sold in earthenware pots sealed with melted wax. The merchants who knew Olaf were dismayed to see him approaching. I watched some of them close up shop as soon as his ship came into view. It all had to do with the way he conducted his business. When buying goods, Olaf’s tactic was to linger, politely but idiotically refusing to acknowledge the prices he had been told. He would keep mentioning a lower price, as if he had not heard the other number. At the moment when it seemed to me a fight was inevitable, he would suggest a slightly higher amount, but one still much lower than the asking price. The exasperated merchants always gave in.

  It did not bother Olaf in the least to be thought of as a half-wit. His acting was always well thought-out and tailored to test the limits of whoever’s patience he was trying to wear down. The game was not to go too far, only to exhaust them. He even brought in Cabal and me as accomplices. Our job was to wait until Olaf turned his back and then have a loud conversation about how difficult Olaf could be but that he was an honest man at heart. I never saw Olaf walk away from those dealings without getting what he wanted.

  He seemed to be doing well for himself, and I was glad that his old bitterness towards me seemed forgotten. I hoped we could be friends again, as we had been in the old days.