Thunder God

by Paul Watkins

  They were a very superstitious people with their own gods, about whom they spoke very little. To chase away the demons whom they believed were always among them, they used rings of different materials and sizes, squinting through them with one eye in whatever direction they thought the demons would appear. The rings were on the scabbards of their belts, around poles that held up their skin tents, and looped through the headboards of wooden-slat cribs in which they bundled their infants.

  The Lapps believed strongly in the power of their priests. Their shaman was an old man who wore a cap made from the top of a reindeer’s skull, complete with horns, and tied under his chin with a leather cord.

  They liked to hear Olaf tell stories, although I doubted if they understood more than one word in five. They sat in a circle about him, passing round a knot of smoked reindeer meat, from which each man would cut a red sliver and slide it from the blade onto his tongue. Now and then, they hawked blood-tinted spit into the fire.

  Olaf told the story of how he came by his boat in a betting match. Olaf’s success at gambling impressed the Lapps greatly. They believed in luck as a skill more than a matter of chance.

  Around the Lapp camp were many reindeer, which ate the crusty black blooms of rock-tripe lichen off stones that lay in the woods just back from the beach. The reindeer drifted like shadows in amongst the trees, hooves clicking together as they moved. The pelts of slaughtered animals were stretched on nearby racks to dry. Huge cuts of meat dangled over the smouldering fires, tended by women who otherwise stayed inside their tents.

  Olaf had brought the Lapps crude knife blades, combs made of bone, cheap silver pendants and small wood-working tools for which they traded antlers and whalebone. After the dealing and a meal of yellow-orange cloudberries, smoked salmon and reindeer meat, the Lapps shared with us some of the secrets of how they survived in their part of the world.

  In the course of one long night, they taught us many skills, allowing us to watch as they prepared three sleds for a journey across a glacier. Over a fire, they boiled a cauldron of blood gathered from the hanging carcasses of slaughtered reindeer. Then they flipped the sleds over and painted this blood on the undersides, using brushes made from bundled twigs.

  At the same time, they chipped out lumps of ice with an axe from the foot of the glacier, trimming it into sections as long as a hand and twice as thick. They laid the ice slats one by one along the bottom of the sled, pressing them down hard with the heels of their palms, until the blood stuck this ice to their sleds. With a knife blade heated in the fire, they shaped the slats to fit the curved belly of the hull.

  The Lapps said this had to be done once a day for as long as they stayed out on the snow fields, but there was no better way to make a sled run smoothly over ice and snow. They showed us the eye-coverings worn to shield against the blinding glare of sun off the snow. The coverings were made from two strips of antler bone with slits carved into them and joined in the middle with leather lacing. A second lace fastened the bones around our heads. Olaf and I tried them on, peering at each other through the slits while the Lapps made fun of our bewilderment.

  This knowledge was their treasure and made our gifts of beads and honeycomb seem worthless. They accepted what we offered with a dignified indifference that made our blood run cold.

  Having agreed to meet at the same place again next year, we left on the evening tide, heading south with our cargo. We would go all the way down past Altvik to Hedeby, where these Lapp goods would fetch much more than our original cargo of wool and sheepskins.

  As we moved out to sea, a dusty-orange moon rose from the tundra.

  It was cold out on the water. I buttoned my old vest, feeling the last of my coins from Miklagard pressing against my ribs. Then I huddled on a stool, knees drawn up to my chest. The stool was actually a block of a whale’s spine, two fins of bone stretching out on either side. I had traded it off the Lapp shaman for one red bead, which he tied onto a leather cord and wore in the hollow of his throat. He said it would protect him from bears.

  All around us was the hiss of water as our bow pushed through the waves, trailing blue-green sparkles in its wake.

  Olaf sat on a block of driftwood, his eyes narrowed against the wind. ‘My business is a success,’ he said, as much to himself as to me.

  ‘It certainly is,’ I replied.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, and then paused. ‘Perhaps you would like to be my partner. Make a living for yourself. You cannot do well earning the odd handful of coins from me, and how long will it be before the money you have saved runs out?’

  ‘I have nothing to bring to a partnership, Olaf.’ I raked my nails down my face and studied the black lines of campfire soot under my nails. ‘How can I be your partner if all I have to offer is my sweat?’

  He leaned forward and grasped at the air in front of him. ‘You have more than you know. You have the temple, after all.’

  ‘Olaf,’ I said, as calmly as I could, ‘what you want I cannot give you. What is done is done, and what more can be said about it?’

  ‘What can be said?’ he stamped his foot on the deck. ‘That the world has played a trick on us! Our fortunes were reversed. I know what people think of me in town. If I could be the one to wear that black stone hammer which hangs around your neck, I would prove them all wrong. It should have been me …’ and then he choked, as both of us recalled those words, hissed through the shutters of my house, the night before the raiders wrecked our town. ‘I was always the one who stayed behind, after you and Kari had gone home, and long after Ingolf had left. I was the one who never gave up.’

  ‘I don’t deny that, but it is over! Decisions were reached long ago, and they were not ours to make.’

  For a long time, he only stared at me, half hidden by the misty air.

  ‘Olaf,’ I said, ‘we were friends once and I hope we may be friends again.’

  ‘I hope it, too,’ he said.

  But we both knew that until this matter was resolved, it would always come between us.

  Silence settled on the boat. Sea spray clung to our clothes like tiny beads of glass.

  I pulled my cloak around me, smelling the smoke of a hundred campfires steeped into the wool. ‘That story you told to Boe and the Lapps,’ I said. ‘The one about your winning this boat in a gambling match.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Is it true?’

  He stared at me down the length of his nose. ‘You risk offending me,’ he said.

  ‘You risk taking me for a fool,’ I replied.

  Slowly a smile worked its way across his stubbled face. ‘In that case, you had better know the truth. You have seen this boat before, you know.’

  ‘Seen it before?’ I stared at his silhouette in the dark. ‘When?’

  ‘When the raiders came to Altvik.’ He bounced his heel off the deck. ‘This was one of their ships!’

  I remembered how we had lost the other Drakkar in the fog. I recalled the anxious faces of the raiders while they waited in the mist and the way they looked at Tostig and me, as if we had somehow brought it down upon them. ‘But how did you come by it? And what happened to the crew?’

  ‘When the raiders left, Guthrun sent me running along the coast after them. He said they were probably tired and might not go far before stopping to rest. If they were close enough, we might be able to hit back at them and rescue you and Tostig.

  ‘The fog forced them in close to shore. Sometimes I could see them. Other times I could only hear their voices carried on the water. After a while, the two ships split up. One of them stayed near land. The other disappeared.

  ‘I had been tracking that one ship for several hours already. I was thinking that maybe I ought to turn around. Then I came around a headland to a small inlet and saw the carcass of a whale that had washed ashore. And there were bears all around it. They had eaten a hole in the side of the whale and were walking into the hole and coming out of the whale’s mouth. Their skin was matted with blood. The
re were baby bears clambering up the side of the whale and then sliding down, raking their claws through the blubber and leaving deep white cuts. The whale could not have been dead long. It must have swum into the inlet and been grounded when the tide went out.

  ‘The raiders saw that dead whale too, and they must have wanted some for themselves. They set fire to a few arrows and shot at the bears to scare them away. I hid behind some rocks and watched as the raiders rowed their skiff ashore and began hacking out chunks of the whale’s meat. They were laughing and throwing chunks of blubber at each other and splashing around in the gore. Then they gathered up driftwood for a fire to cook the meat right there. I counted eight men in all.

  ‘That was when the bears came back out of the forest. The men yelled and threw rocks. It looked as if that might work, but then some of the baby bears came out onto the beach and the men chased them around.

  ‘Suddenly one huge bear raced out of the woods. It reared up on its hind legs and knocked a man dead with a swipe of its paw. Then more bears appeared, ten or twelve of them I counted. If there had not been so much to eat, you would never have seen so many bears gathered in one place. The bears chased men into the belly of the whale and killed them or drove them out into the water and mauled them in the shallows. One man reached the boat and was fending off a bear with an oar when a second bear climbed into the boat from the other side, knocked him down and tore him to pieces. It was a slaughter. Not a single man survived.

  ‘I waited until night, when the bears went back into the forest. It was summer then, you remember, and still light. I walked among the dead. I took whatever valuables I could find, their purses full of silver which they had stolen from our village, arm bands, armour, helmets and shields. I carried it all back into the woods and dumped it in a pile. Then I dragged the dead men back into the forest. As much as I could anyway. I used ropes from the ship to tie it up on the beach and make sure it wouldn’t drift away. Then I headed back towards the village, because I thought the bears might come for me if I spent the night out on my own.

  ‘I was running as fast as I could. The fog was still around me. I could feel it right down to my bones. I was getting ready to tell everyone about the whale and the bears and the men and their boat. But after a while, I had a different idea. That boat could be mine. Why did it have to belong to anyone else? There would never be another chance for me. That beautiful ship would be squabbled over and before long it would become some used-up hulk on the beach. I knew that was how it would go. So I decided that boat would belong to me, and I would run it as a trading ship.’

  ‘But you were only twelve years old!’ I said.

  ‘I knew I would have to be patient. The hard part was hiding the boat and keeping it safe until I was old enough that it wouldn’t just get taken away from me. So when I got back to Altvik, I told Guthrun the raiders had sailed out to sea. Tostig was gone, and in those first few days, nobody knew what to do with me. They were too busy trying to put things back together after the raid. I took advantage of the confusion and brought three of Tostig’s horses to the boat. I cut down some trees to make rollers, then had the horses drag the boat up off the beach and into the woods. Over the next few weeks, I sneaked back to the boat and built a shed around it with stones, a bank of earth and timber. I even built a roof. I rolled the sail up, stashed the oars and ropes. There was a wooden chest on board, a huge thing in which, to judge from the smell of it, they had kept dried fish and meat. It was covered with leather which had been draped wet across the wooden frame and then dried and hammered down with brass nails. I loaded it with as many of the swords and shields and as much of the silver as it would hold. Near the boat, I found a hollow made from the roots of a fallen tree. I shoved the trunk as far back in the hollow as it would go. Then I walled it in with stones and threw earth on the stones to hide it. Once in a while, I checked on things to make sure they were safe.’

  While Olaf spoke, my thoughts drifted back to that morning in Hedeby, when the raiders watched the harbour entrance for each boat that came through, certain every time it was the one, then sighed and swore under their breath when they knew it was not. By then, their friends lay in a reeking pile of bones, skin sagging from their skulls and flesh sliding off their hands like too-loose gloves.

  ‘And so you left the boat there,’ I said.

  Olaf nodded. ‘Until I was twenty. Yes. By that time, I was running a fishing smack around the bay, catching herring mostly, sometimes mackerel. I told people I was fed up with fishing, which was the truth, and that I wanted to start a trading route with Grim in the Lofoten islands. They told me I was crazy for trying it in such a small boat.

  ‘When I left, they were betting at the alehouse as to whether I would come back at all. I sailed out of the bay and even tacked to the north a way before I doubled back to the south and reached the raider’s boat. I dropped anchor in the little inlet and stayed there for three days. Even after all that time, you could still find the odd piece of whalebone washed up by a storm above the high tide line. I spent those days taking apart the shed I had built around the boat. Using logs from the shed and some pulley ropes, I rolled it down to the water’s edge, unfolded the sail and strung it up. When the tide came in, the ship floated free. I spent three days bailing it out while the boards swelled shut, then I sailed north, towing my old fishing smack behind me.

  ‘I do not know how many actually believed my story of what had happened. But what else were they to think? And what did I care anyway? I used the silver I had found on the boat to buy goods in Trondheim for my first trading run. Since then, I have been in business for myself.’ He gestured at my feet. ‘You can still see the marks where the bear killed that man on the deck. It is right where you are sitting.’

  I lifted my heel and saw the old gouges of the bear’s claws. I had noticed them before, but assumed it was just some heavy cargo that had scraped the wood. When I set my heel down again, I moved it to a different place.

  *

  Just after dawn, we spotted another ship heading down from the north. The comfort of seeing another boat, out here so far from land, was soon replaced by a tremor of worry as to who these people might be.

  It was a large vessel, whose rough sides showed no signs of the neatly clinkered planking of a Norseman’s ship. It glimmered dull grey and white and its crew took no notice of us, even though we seemed to be following the same course.

  Neither Olaf nor I had seen anything like it before.

  That evening, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the ship turned away to the west and vanished.

  This encounter troubled us deeply. Even though we did not say the name, both of us had been thinking the same thing. It was the Nagelfar, the ship of the dead, whose sides were hulled with the nail clippings taken from corpses. It was for this reason that the finger and toenails of the deceased were trimmed before their bodies were burned, so that the Nagelfar would not grow bigger, not grow stronger. So that it would stay away.

  Back on land, with the reassurance of the earth beneath our feet, we might have been able to persuade ourselves that we had only imagined it. But out here, the world made a different kind of sense. It reminded us that we were not welcome, not built for this place, kept alive only by chance.

  We did not linger there, but filled our sail with wind, gathering speed across the sunset sea of blood.

  *

  Two days later, we dropped anchor at the settlement of Ytre Moa which lay at the far end of the Sognefjord.

  Ytre Moa was a strange and melancholy village, set on a barren, windswept spit of land. Sheep wandered among the houses, which nested in a grove of stunted birch trees. These houses had been built with the old Norse technique of upending boats and gradually raising it by building walls underneath. The old, salt-cured boat planks were buckled and painted with mould. Empty drying racks for fish cast spindly shadows on the ground.

  I pitied the people of Ytre Moa, who tried to make a life out of this dreary place, especiall
y during the long winters, with the wind trying to knife through the walls. A kind of madness seemed to hang over the foggy ground and Olaf said most of the families had at least one child not right in the head.

  The sheep scattered as we walked ashore, dragging their dirt-stained wool behind them like the capes of beggars.

  A feeling of loneliness swept through me, chilling my bones. Out in the bay, half-hidden by the drizzle, our ship rested on the calm and dimpled water. The fjord swelled with lazy waves, grey air meeting grey water and the grey of the land, as if the world was fading away and everything it contained was only a compression of this greyness. I shivered and drew my cloak around me.

  Olaf did not like it here any more than I did. He wasted no time, but began the trading at once, giving them poor-quality linen in exchange for beautifully carved sword handles made of antler bone. These were engraved with interlocking snakes and dragons, then rubbed with verdigris to make the carvings stand out against the brownish-white of the bone.

  Although I gritted my teeth at the unfairness of Olaf’s dealings, it seemed that the people of Ytre Moa valued our visits more than our goods. Few traders ever put in to Ytre Moa, and the sight of Olaf’s ship appearing in the fjord was a sign that they had not been forgotten by the world.

  I knew we might sail in here one day and find the settlement deserted, just as it was when the people who lived there now had arrived. What they found was an empty farmstead, beside which four graves had been dug. One of the graves had not been filled, and in this they discovered the bones of a man. He must have buried his whole family and known that he was dying, too. Or else some other nightmare overtook them, whose story would never be told nor could be guessed.