by Paul Watkins
I straightened up. ‘Why not?’
‘He will get himself killed.’ Her voice was weak and hoarse.
‘There is that possibility.’ It was all I could do not to spit in her face.
She moaned. ‘You would risk the life of a friend just to spite me?’
‘There are several lives at risk.’
‘I love him. I know it does not always show –’
I cut her off. ‘No, it does not show.’
She jabbed her finger at me, sudden anger in place of her sadness. ‘If he goes, you will be responsible for him! I will hold you to it.’
I stepped forward, crowding her space. ‘But you are responsible for his asking to come with us, and I will hold you to that.’
She walked away sobbing.
I was not going to say anything else to her, but then I changed my mind and called her back. ‘If I tell him to stay,’ I began.
‘Please!’ She held her clawed and begging hands beside her face. ‘Please do not bring him with you.’
‘You will never mention it,’ I said.
Slowly, she lowered her hands. ‘Never,’ she said quietly.
‘Nor will you humiliate him again in front of the whole town,’ I said in a low voice. ‘Do you not see? He would rather die than go on living like that. Can you not understand how much he loves you and how much he hates you as well?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘Promise me, Tola.’
She nodded, then she sniffed and swallowed.
I began to coil the rope again.
She opened her mouth to speak.
‘Go now,’ I said, and turned away.
*
Later that morning, Olaf and I sailed out of the bay, then turned south, hugging the shore.
He did not say where we were going, but there was no need for me to ask. We soon sighted the cove in which he had watched the raiders land all those years ago. Then we lowered our sail, dropped anchor and rowed ashore.
Olaf was nervous as we walked up the shingle beach. At the high-tide line, dried seaweed, crumpled and black, lay tangled in amongst old sea shells, twisted driftwood and the empty armor of dead crabs. ‘This is where it happened,’ he said, almost whispering, as if afraid someone would overhear us.
I wondered how many nights the grey faces of the dead had lunged at him from the darkness of his sleep, stalking him across the years.
Under the canopy of pines, the bones of the raiders were still lying on the ground. Even though they were green with mould and cracked from age, I had not imagined they would be so well-preserved. There were even fragments of clothing and curled and brittle shreds of leather from their shoes. In silence, we walked among the slender ribs, the scattered dice of spine and hooped bones of pelvises.
I thought about the bears that had done this. I wondered if they still lived here. There were bears in these hills, but they were rarely seen these days. Sometimes, in the early summer, older males would chase the younger ones down from the high ground. I had seen them lumbering across the grazing fields, their fur dark brown or silvery or black, rarely the same colour twice. Sometimes they would rise up on their hind legs and sniff the wind. That was when you could see how big they really were.
In the gloomy green light which sifted down through the trees, Olaf found the place where he had stashed the weapons. We pulled aside the rocks and uncovered the swords and armour sheathed in spiders’ webs. We sorted out the things we could still use, smearing our hands with decades of grime.
The wooden shields had rotted, as had the leather-wrapped wood of the sword scabbards, but the sword blades inside them were in fair shape. The helmets and chain-mail vests seemed usable once we had shaken them out, showering our feet with flecks of rust.
As I lifted the swords and handed them to Olaf, I realised my hands were shaking. Amemory had returned, of myself on that other raider’s ship. I felt a sudden rage take hold of me. In the madness that it brought, I wanted to conjure these men back to life, to bind their rotten skeletons with ribbons of vein and slippery knots of muscle, to jam new eyes into their hollow heads and pour the blood back down their throats until their hearts gasped into motion. Then I would kill them all over again, for what they had done to Olaf’s childhood and to mine.
When we returned to Altvik, we handed over the gear to Guthrun, who made no comment about where we had found these things. Either he already knew, or he was wise enough not to ask. He resharpened each sword blade, scrubbed off the rust with a mixture of oil and sand, then removed the old leather and wire wrapping from around the handle, replacing it with simple leather cord.
Olaf chose a sword with a winding pattern of serpents and vines on the hilt.
I took one of simpler but more sturdy construction. Then I brought down my chain-mail vest from its hook by the door, as well as my old shield and spear. After tipping out a bat who had been living in the hollow of the boss, I wiped off the dust and painted over the white paint with red.
Cabal did the same with his.
We looked at the shields, the paint still shining wet, drops of it stretching from the rims, then breaking and splashing on the ground in tiny bloody sunbursts.
‘It is no good painting those things white,’ said Cabal. ‘They always end up red again.’
*
Later in the day, I headed down towards the beach, carrying Cabal’s gear as well as my own. We would leave on the outgoing tide. On the way, I stopped off at Kari’s house, knowing that Cabal would be there.
I found them standing on the doorstep, arms wrapped around each other.
‘It is time to go,’ I told Cabal.
Slowly, he released her and stepped back.
I handed Cabal his weapons and his shield.
‘Look at you now,’ she said to us. ‘I thought you had left your pasts behind you.’
‘We thought so, too,’ I said, ‘but they caught up with us again.’
‘None of this will have been worth it if a single life is lost,’ she pleaded.
‘And if we do not take the risk,’ replied Cabal, ‘how many lives will we lose later in the name of Jesus Christ?’
Kari saw that it was no use arguing. ‘Promise me you will look after each other. I have already lost you once,’ she told me. Then, turning to Cabal, she said, ‘And you I could not stand to lose at all.’
Despite what she said, there was a blankness in her her expression, a sadness beyond tears which told me that she did not expect to see either of us again. The happiness, which had only just begun to seem permanent, now took on the blur of an illusion. Even as she implored us to take care and to come home, we were already freezing in her mind into a thing which belonged in the past and only and forever in the past.
*
It was evening when we left town. We ran up the sail. Its belly filled with the breeze and ropes creaked as they drew taut. The walrus at our bow nudged out into the open ocean. Soon I felt the familiar yielding of the boards under my feet as the deepsea waves slid by beneath us.
Our shields hung along the outside, strapped to the oar ports. Sea spray cut across them, beading on the new paint.
I checked the bearing dial, while Olaf stood beside me at the tiller.
Cabal watched the land vanish slowly into the water, colour draining from his face as he lost sight of the Grimsvoss mountains. He turned to me and smiled weakly, lips pinched bloodlessly together. A few minutes later, with the motion of the water churning in his stomach, he roared his guts into the waves, hands white-knuckled on the rim of the boat.
Olaf and I shook our heads. The ocean had already set its rhythm in our bodies.
We sailed hard with a leading wind, south by south west as Cabal had told us. At night, we hauled the spare sail over the bow to make a canopy, then took turns sleeping beneath it.
For two days, Cabal lay curled up under sea-sprayed blankets, hungry but too sick to eat. Now and then, he lolled his head over the side and streaked the warshields with hi
s retching.
When it was time for a meal, I would join Olaf at the steerboard, handing him slabs of bread with dried meat and cheese on them. We drank rain that poured in rivulets from the steerboard arm, or scooped our wooden mugs into the casks we had brought on board.
Olaf could not hide his happiness at the reward which he thought was waiting for him once we reached Altvik again. ‘I only want to show you, and everyone else, that Tostig made a mistake. The opportunity was not given to me, so I was forced to take it. I will see to it that you are provided for. You will be welcome to work for me once things are settled.’ He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘You will not go hungry, I promise!’
I played along and smiled, but inside I felt so cold it was as if every vein in my body had turned into branches of red glass.
On the morning of the third day, Cabal announced that he was well again. He more than made up for the food he had missed with the huge portions he devoured now. Then he stood at the bow, riding the waves, as if to smell the English coast approaching.
‘We are coming to a stormy sea,’ he told us. He had many names for the wind which I had never heard before. The damp and gentle breeze which came in from the east he called the Cigfran. If it blew from the west, he called it Heligog. A southern wind was Morfran.
I found myself trying to memorise these new words, as if knowing their names might help me to control them.
The wind to fear, Cabal said, was from the north, the Arador, which ploughed the sea into a frenzy so relentless that you could not sail into it, nor reef your sail and ride it out. The only thing you could do was to slacken sail and run with it as far as it would take you, then hope you could find your way home when the wind let up. ‘The Arador is alive,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I mean it is alive, like you and me. It has a voice. I have heard it.’ Cabal looked around, as if he heard it still, like the beating of wings above our heads.
Olaf and I looked at each other and shuddered.
The clouds thinned out. A vault of palest blue enclosed us. The waves looked soupy green. Clouds gathered on the horizon, flattened on the bottom and rising to a great height in huge bubbling plumes, showing that land was near.
A nervousness spread through us. Even the Drakkar seemed to wake from its years of sleepy trading runs to the purpose for which it had been built.
In the distance to the west, we saw pale cliffs of chalk rising from the water. We rounded these cliffs, staying as far out to sea as we could while still keeping them in sight, and headed west along the southern flank of England.
For another three days, we cruised along the English coast, then headed north into the stormy seas about which Cabal had spoken. We were close now, passing long beaches with high grey cliffs, beyond which stretched fields of heather and bracken.
Cabal prepared his weapons. The grating sound of a blade over a sharpening stone cast me back into the Varangian compound during the long afternoons of preparing for the Emperor’s inspection.
At first light of the following morning, we came in sight of Cabal’s country, which he called Cymru. It seemed to hover on a plateau of haze, as if the land had come loose of its anchor to the world and was riding towards us faster than we were moving towards it.
Close to shore we jibed and dropped the sail. There were no houses on this stretch of coast. Broad beaches ended in waves of dunes and rock. The land beyond rose gently, dotted with yellow buds of gorse.
Cabal turned to me. ‘We will wait until dark,’ he said. ‘Then you and I can go in and look around.’
It took forever for the sun to run its course.
When the first stars pocked the sky, we lowered our rowboat over the side. I climbed in and took the oars, while Cabal sat in the stern. The shield slung across his back made him look like a giant turtle.
Olaf pushed us off with his heel. ‘Come back safely,’ he said. And then he added, ‘Both of you.’
I started towards land, digging the oarblades deep and watching the whirlpools of my strokes spin away into the grey-green sea. Ahead, the rumble of the surf was deafening.
On the Drakkar, Olaf’s face blurred in the mist. The walrus skull nodded with the rising, falling waves. It seemed to be laughing at us.
‘It is a shame,’ said Cabal.
‘What is?’ I asked.
‘That I have begun to see his better side.’
As we neared the breakers, I turned the boat broadside, so that I could watch how the waves were going in. When I stowed the oars, cold water ran down the wooden handles until it reached my hands. Through the spray I could make out the grey-white collar of surf along the shore and, beyond it, dunes patched with tall grass. Having studied the waves, I set the oars again and spun the boat around. I rowed hard, coasting in on a breaker which brought us up onto the beach.
We jumped out and hauled the heavy boat into the dunes. By the time we had the boat clear of the water, our feet were caked in sand and we were sweating hard.
We agreed that Cabal would go inland alone, and I would wait here with the boat. A Celt would not arouse suspicion, but news of a Norseman would spread quickly. There were plenty of Norsemen in Ireland, both Danes and Norwegians, and even a few settlements on this coast, said Cabal. The sight of them was rarely good news for Cabal’s people, who were known as the Cymry.
I handed him his sword.
‘Better off without it,’ he said, and scrambled up over the dunes, running across the open ground towards the woods. He reached the wall of trees, then ducked into the shadows and disappeared.
I wondered if I would ever see him again.
While waiting, I gathered driftwood and dune grass, laying it across the rowboat to hide the shape. The incoming tide swept away our footsteps and the keel line of our boat. It was a cloudy day, the air warm and damp. I took my spear from the boat, walked down the beach, and found myself a hollow in the dunes which was sheltered from the wind. I could stick my head up from time to time and see if anyone was coming.
I found it hard work just sitting there all day, wandering in and out of my past like a man lost in a house with too many rooms.
There was no sunset, only a faint but steady dimming of the light. The white slicks of breaking waves glowed strangely in the dusk. Mist rolled in from the sea. The colours bled away to grey and then to black. I wrapped my cloak around me and drew my knees up to my chest.
When night fell, I saw a figure moving without sound through the woods a short distance away, hunched over as if the darkness were a weight upon its back. Every few paces it stopped and raised its head, sniffing the wind like an animal hunting for a scent.
I could not tell if it was Cabal and it was too much of a risk to call out his name. I stared back into the darkness, to see if he was being followed, but could only make out the silhouettes of wind-blown trees shifting in the woods.
The figure was at the dunes now. He vanished over the humped sand and was gone.
I moved towards him, creeping through the grass. As I reached the crest of a dune, something suddenly rose up in front of me.
It was Cabal, leaping through the air, trailing sand from his heels as if his feet were burning. His fingers were spread like claws, ready to choke the life out of me. For a moment, it was as if he had forgotten who I was, but then he smiled and lowered his hands.
‘Did you find out anything?’ I slapped the damp sand off my shoulders.
‘St. David’s is just up the coast, less than a day’s sailing.’
There was nothing to do now but wait for Olaf to return. We huddled in our damp clothes, back to back in a pocket in the dunes. The wind picked up and blew a steady hiss of sand off the lip of the dune, until it powdered every wrinkle of our bodies.
‘There is a cross in that church,’ said Cabal. His face was a mask of sand, as if he were a stone which had been conjured into life. ‘A gold cross. I want it.’
‘To melt it down?’ I asked.
Cabal
shook his head, then closed his eyes. In that moment, he became a stone again.
I wanted to ask him what was so special about this cross, but it was too cold for talk. I pulled my cloak more tightly around me and clenched my jaw to stop my teeth from clattering together.
Our huddled forms reminded me of an old man we once found frozen in the mountains of Askhazi. He was kneeling beside a dead horse, one hand held against his forehead and the other still gripping the horse’s bridle. He must have lost his way in the mountains and ridden the horse too hard trying to find his way down. He wore a look of concentration on his ice-hard face, as if he were still trying to remember the way home. If someone had stumbled across us now, half-buried in the sand, they would have thought us just as lost as that old man, and just as dead.
At dawn, we spotted the Drakkar. It rolled in the swells beyond the breakers. Immediately, we dragged our boat down to the water and rowed out to join Olaf.
In the Drakkar, we tacked north along the coast, keeping close to shore. Through the spray and breaking waves, we saw sheep grazing in fields which had been cleared down to the water.
Blue sky appeared through the clouds, like the glimmer of old ice deep in the heart of a glacier.
It was close to midday when Cabal spotted the river mouth. Its course was well hidden, unfolding almost imperceptibly from trees and mudflats on the banks. The safest plan would have been to wait until dark, but Cabal told us it would not be possible to navigate from the ocean into the river at night, because we would never find the channel. The only way was to head in now and hide along the bank, waiting for darkness before we made our way into the town on foot. At dawn the following day, we would move out to sea again before the Cymry noticed anything was missing.
We hauled in the salt-crusted shields and laid our weapons on the deck.
Now, if we were spotted, we could pretend to be traders who had lost our way. Then we would leave for open water as quickly as we could.