Thunder God

by Paul Watkins

  I tied the sail line in place and grabbed my red shield. Snapping off the arrow which had struck it, I threw the feathered stick into the waves. My whole body was shaking. Energy for the fight thrashed inside me. Without thinking, I crashed the hilt of my sword against the boss of my shield. And then again. And again.

  Olaf lashed the tiller and came to stand beside me, shield in one hand and sword in the other. After a moment’s hesitation, he began to strike his shield as well.

  I had not grasped at first what was happening. But when Olaf took up the strange metallic chant and the sound began to multiply, I understood. Already I could feel the shadow taking shape beneath my skin, climbing to the surface like a face rising up through murky water, moulding its features to my own. It stretched into my fingers, stealing my senses, drawing my flesh around itself. A murmuring fury filled my head, changing my blood. All fear gone. The hammering thunder was everywhere. I felt my lips pull back around my teeth and a horrible, shrieking howl tore out of me. In that moment I no longer knew who I was.

  The bear-cloaked Dane roared his hate at us. Sea spray matted his hair and the shaggy ruff of his fur cloak.

  I raised my shield to my chest and steadied my legs for the collision of our boats.

  As their boat slid between us and the wind, it caused the waves to slacken. Our boat began to turn with the current. Now it seemed as if the two boats might not collide after all. The Danes on the port side struggled with their oars, but they could not make their boat move sideways. The steerman pushed the heavy tiller back and forth, trying to scull their Drakkar back on course.

  The bear-cloaked Dane cursed and hurled his axe at us. It flew end over end and thudded against our mast. Chips of wood spat into the air. Then the Dane hurled his shield, which spun flat and would have taken off Olaf’s head if he had not dropped to his knees and let the shield fly past above him. Now the Dane stepped up onto the prow of his boat. He balanced there uncertainly. One of his crew shouted and held out his hand, ready to help the man back into the safety of the boat. But the man was too crazed now to understand. His cloak billowed around him and the tendons in his arms were taut from his grip on the prow.

  As he perched there, ready to leap across onto our boat, a pale and ghostly thing rose from the murky water. The Dane narrowed his eyes, struggling to make out what it was. In the moment of his realisation, he gasped so loudly that I heard it even over the rumble of the churning water.

  It was Cabal, this bloodless thing. He floated face down, torn flesh shivering in the current. His body swung back and forth in the slack water between the Danes’ boat and our own. It seemed to hover there, arms outstretched and fingers twitching in the cold grey water, as if there was still life in them.

  All of us stared. A great silence descended upon us. We who were about to butcher one another had been bound together in horror.

  With movements as slow as in a dream, I took up my spear, which had been lying on the deck. I raised the shaft to the level of my shoulder, drew back my arm and sent the bronze point flying. The spear was only in the air for a moment. It crossed the space between us so quickly that its blade had cracked through the Dane’s chest before the expression could change on his face.

  He fell back among his crew, who caught him in their arms and held him while he thrashed out the last of his life.

  The silence which had fallen on us tore away and the sounds of wind and water roared back into my ears.

  Quickly, Olaf returned to the tiller, while I went back to the sail. We steered towards the breakers, gathering speed.

  The Danes struggled to bring their boat around. Some of the crew remained around the body of their fallen leader, while Cabal’s body, pitched by the waves, threw itself again and again at their hull.

  We ploughed through the surf, heaved up by the breakers and slammed back down again. The steerboard raked across the sand, sending a shudder down the spine of the Drakkar. I thought we might founder, but then we passed into the open water. The wind swept us out to sea.

  I looked back at that estuary, as it faded away in the mist, and it seemed to me that years from now, perhaps centuries into the future, people might come to this place and feel the savagery still hanging in the air. It would remain here like a shadow brought to life, howling in their dreams, the echo of our pounded shields calling through the silence of their sleep.

  Then I saw the Danes clear the mouth of the estuary, their sail bellied out with the wind and heading right towards us.

  I knew then that they would follow Olaf and me off the end of the earth rather than give up the chase. We had killed one of their own. Now they would make us pay.

  As long as the wind kept up, we stood a chance of outrunning them, but only if we went with the wind, wherever it took us.

  The land drowned in the sea. Deep swells moved against the hull. Our ship sailed on into gathering darkness. The Danes were still visible in the distance, now falling behind, now gaining, their curved prow riding up on the crests of the waves.

  There was no moon, only the black cloak of the night sky, flecked with countless silver droplets like the sea spray on our clothes.

  Olaf manned the steerboard, his gaze fixed beyond the bow. ‘If there is a fog,’ he said, ‘we can come about and tack to the east. Then we might lose them, if they do not decide to do the same thing.’

  ‘Your wound,’ I said. ‘Are you in pain?’

  He shook his head. ‘I have no feeling at all in my shoulder.’

  While he stood there at the tiller, I cut away his blood-soaked shirt and looked at where the arrow had gone into his shoulder blade. The flesh was mounded up around the splintered arrow shaft.

  ‘I am going to try and pull it out,’ I said. Setting my left hand on his shoulder, I gripped the shaft with my right hand and tugged at it hard.

  Olaf groaned and struggled to stay on his feet.

  The arrow would not come out, nor could it be pushed through, since it was lodged in bone. The point would have to be cut away, and such a thing could not be done on the deck of this pitching boat.

  ‘No luck?’ he gasped.

  I patted him on the head. ‘No, but I have seen much worse than this in men who lived to tell about it.’

  He tried to smile. His face was covered in sweat.

  ‘Rest,’ I said. ‘I can manage the tiller.’

  ‘I will tell you when I need to rest,’ he replied stubbornly.

  So I sat down beside him on my whale bone seat, put my face in my hands and felt the warmth of my fingertips against my closed eyelids. Exhaustion clouded my mind. When I thought back on the day, I could not recall when the pounding of the shields had ceased. I could still hear it and felt the black self still inside me, drifting in the river of my blood.

  I could not get into my head the fact that Cabal was gone. I kept thinking that I saw him from the corner of my eye. I seemed to hear fragments of his voice. Along with the rest of the Varangians who knew him, I had convinced myself that Cabal was only partly of this earth, and the sufferings of mortal men would not be his. I had not believed that he would ever die.

  It seemed to me as if the gods had abandoned us, not only ours but the Christian god as well. They had started this fight and then left us to slaughter each other, while they remained distant and beyond harm, unlike the once-untouchable Cabal.

  As the hours went by, the truth began to sink in, I flinched in sudden, uncontrollable shudders. I stared out at the black waves, which looked to me like an endless, glinting plain of thunderstone. Our movement on the water seemed to carve a path through time itself, away from my old friend and all the years we spent together.

  The wind blew hard that night, as the Danes pursued us out along the whale-road’s trackless path.

  PART IV

  Five days we ran south with the wind, sliding over the hunchbacked waves.

  The Danes did not give up. They seemed not to care about their own lives, governed only by the rage of vengeance. At times, they
came close enough that we could see their faces and the patterns on their shields. Other times, we were convinced we had outrun the Danes, only to climb the mast and see them out there still, trailing in our wake.

  Something besides the Danes was following me. It came in those moments of half-consciousness as my exhausted mind trailed away towards sleep, like a ball of yarn unravelling across the floor.

  I found myself again in that wave-churned estuary. But I was not on Olaf’s boat. I was among the Danes. I stood at their prow as the man in the bear cloak had done. I was him now, feeling the great weight of the spray-soaked fur cloak and the metal plates across my chest. And in this vision I could see the bronze spearhead glimmering pale and dusty green as it flew through the air towards me. For a moment, the spear seemed to pause in front of my body, hovering as if it were a hummingbird. I looked around me and saw everything frozen in place – the glassy waves and pregnant sail, men’s hair blown by the wind and even the tiny droplets of spray off our bow, suspended in space. Then I turned to face the spear again and felt the tearing jolt as it ripped through the cage of my chest. I felt myself falling, arms thrown out, eyes already growing dim. The force of these images jarred me so violently that I would sit up and find myself staring at the horizon, where the blue of the night met the black of the sea and stars shuddered in the great silence of the sky.

  As often as I could, I bathed Olaf’s wound with salt water and patted it dry. The skin around the arrow shaft was red and sore, but the swelling had gone down. He was in constant pain, however, as the feeling had returned to his shoulder, and for this I could do nothing. He refused to rest any more than I rested myself. Olaf knew as well as I did that if I cut out the arrow now, he would grow worse before he grew better. I could not sail this boat alone and keep up the speed we needed to stay ahead of the Danes.

  On the sixth day, thunderhead clouds filled the northern sky. The wind picked up out of the north-east and we heard a strange moaning sound around the ship, as if invisible creatures were crying out in pain. It was the breeze, slipping through the rigging lines.

  I checked the ropes around the tiller, fastened the waterbarrels shut and battened the spare sail cloth over the bags of food, which by now were nearly empty.

  ‘Look!’ said Olaf, and jerked his chin in the direction of the approaching storm. His left arm had stiffened so that it hung almost useless at his side.

  The Danes had turned about. They were tacking away to the east. They had seen the storm too, and the size of it crowding the sky, like some vast creature rising from the water.

  We felt no relief. If we came about as well, it would only put us within reach of the Danes again. The threat of the storm seemed almost as bad. Both were determined to send our lifeless bodies to the bottom of the sea, but we stood a better chance against the wind and waves.

  The moaning of the gale continued, surrounding our ship. I wondered if this could be the voice of the wind, which Cabal had spoken of. I found myself listening for words inside its droning chorus.

  The sun disappeared, smudged out by smoky blue-grey clouds. Hard gusts ploughed the water. The boat heaved up on swells and sail lines groaned with the strain.

  We heard the drums of thunder. Lightning clawed at the sky. This was no small storm. We shortened sail and tacked as the Drakkar rolled from one wave trough to another. The first rain drops darkened the sail cloth and sank into the scuffed deck planks. Soon, the rain fell harder, roaring out of the low-hanging clouds. Before long, it was pelting so viciously that I had to start bailing, while Olaf shortened sail even further. The wind cut straight from the north.

  It was the Arador.

  ‘We cannot tack through this,’ said Olaf. ‘It will tear us to pieces if we try. We will have to loosen the sail and run with the wind until it blows itself out.’

  A tremor of fear passed through us. We were already far out to sea, and this storm would only push us further from land.

  I staggered around the deck, making sure the cargo was lashed down. Then I made my way back to the steerboard. ‘Ready,’ I told him.

  We loosened the lines, and the storm wind surged into the sail, hurling us forward over the waves.

  The rest of that day and into the night, I sat with my arms on the steerboard, guiding the Drakkar down one foam-slicked valley of water, up the gasping wall of the next wave and down again. I could not tell where the waves ended and where the sky began except from the white line of foam of the next approaching wave. Clouds crackled with the fire in their bellies. Rain pounded the sail. We opened the rain barrels and they soon filled to overflowing. It was the darkest night I had ever seen.

  Olaf was stooped over, using one hand to bail with an old wooden bucket, when a wave jumped the deck and the force of it almost carried him overboard. Afterwards, we tied ropes around our waists and lashed them to the mast, in case the next wave washed us away. As the hours went by, we grew used to these strange umbilical cords.

  Olaf was growing weaker. He complained of feeling hot when the air was almost freezing. A fever had begun to burn inside him.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. ‘There is still a little food.’

  Olaf spat over the side. ‘I have no appetite,’ he said.

  Morning spread a dove grey light over the waves. The rain was still falling and the wind had not slackened. My joints felt stiff from the cold and wet.

  There had been no chance to think how far this storm had taken us, nor time to be afraid, nor to eat, nor sleep, nor to mull over past grievances, which seemed now to belong to another life.

  Whenever we tried to tack into the wind, a gust much harder than the rest would barge into the Drakkar and send us skidding down the bank of another wave. I had to use all my strength to hold the steerboard straight.

  Another day passed, and then another. The moaning wind carried us south and west.

  I grew so tired that sometimes I fell asleep at the steerboard. My mind grew blank, sluiced of dreams. Darkness crowded my skull.

  Olaf’s skin turned grey, with a haziness of green under the flesh.

  I fed him water from my wooden cup and pressed flakes of dried fish into his mouth. ‘I could try to cut away the arrow now,’ I said.

  He raised his bloodshot eyes to meet my own. ‘And how many days would it take for me to recover?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It depends on how things go. Maybe three or four if we are lucky.’

  ‘By then we would be drowned. You cannot sail alone across a sea like this. When the storm is over, then you can try out your swordsmanship on me. Until then, I am going to sail this ship.’

  Three days.

  Five.

  We fought an endless war against the storm, having no idea where we were headed since the bearing dial could not be read without the shadow of the sun.

  I woke to find Olaf sprawled on the deck beside the steerboard. He had fainted.

  I cradled his head in my hands.

  ‘There is someone else here,’ said Olaf, when he had opened his eyes. His nose was pinched and salt was crusted in his beard. ‘He is watching us. He is waiting for me to die.’

  ‘Let him wait,’ I said and pressed some dried fish into his mouth. ‘In the meantime, you can rest.’ I bundled him in his cape and placed a roll of spare sail cloth under his head for a pillow. He was too weak to protest.

  From then on, I was sailing the ship by myself, which proved difficult but not impossible, as I had thought it would be.

  Twice I tried to remove the arrow head from Olaf’s back, using the tip of my sword blade since I had no shorter knife. I felt like a butcher. Olaf cursed and beat his fists against the deck and finally, when his strength had given out, he wept.

  With the tips of my fingers, I could feel past the broken arrow shaft to the tip, but could not grip it strongly enough to remove the point. The pitching of the boat and Olaf’s cries for me to stop caused me to give up each attempt.

  Eight days now. Ten. Was it ten? I had lo
st count.

  My thoughts folded back upon themselves, plodding up and down the same worn paths like fever dreams. My sleep was not sleep but some other land I had begun to inhabit, which was as real as our drenched and pitching days out on this boat.

  That night, as I sat with my head resting on the rope bindings of the steerboard arm, my thoughts began to race across the ocean as if following the moonlight on the water. I wandered through the streets of Altvik, peering in windows like the ghost of Sasser Greycloak. All the while, the storm pushed us further and further out to sea. I understood now why Cabal had called this wind alive. It seemed to be toying with the ship, defying us to turn against it.

  On what I guessed to be the fourteenth day, I glimpsed sun like a waterfall in the distance, cascading out of the clouds. I could not help but steer towards it, even though I knew from the rippling light that it was just another world of tumbling waves. When at last we reached that raft of sunlight, it swam around us like a thousand tiny fish.

  Olaf’s eyes flickered open, as the warmth of the sun’s fire touched his face. Since my last effort to remove the arrowhead, he had been drifting in and out of consciousness.

  I checked the bearing dial, but we were so far south of where we had been the last time I’d checked it that it was useless to us now.

  Then the clouds rolled past and the sea blinked back into grey, and we sailed on across the tumbling waves.

  Panic closed around me. Every moment passed in a blindness of fear. I existed only in the shallow-breathing suddenness of waiting to die. In the past, the dangers I faced had never lasted long. When I was actually in danger, I had never been afraid. It was only afterwards that the terrors would come trampling through my skull and I would begin to shake. But this storm had dragged on for so long that that the fear caused by things that had happened in the past collided with dangers I was facing now. I could no longer keep them separate. They formed into one twitching mass inside me, crabbing its way through my veins and clogging my heart.