They were underway the next morning as soon as there was light enough to make their way down stream. Thorgrim was eager to get back to the nascent longphort at Waesfiord, which Failend insisted on calling Loch Garman. There was much to do, arrangements to be made. Battle in the offing.
The sky, which the day before had been a brilliant blue, had now turned to a milky white, threatening rain and an end to the unusual streak of fine weather. The rowing, at least, required little effort. The four men at the oars took easy pulls, just enough to keep the boat moving a bit faster than the current, allowing the rudder that Thorgrim controlled to retain some bite in the water.
It was a little past midday, as best as Thorgrim could judge, when they left the confines of the River Slaney astern and emerged into the now familiar delta where the Slaney emptied into the sea. To the south the two longships and what was left of Brunhard’s slaver were hauled up on the sand. They could see fresh-turned earth where ramparts were begun. That was good. But they could also see that Harald had not yet returned, and that was not so good.
“Godi has not been idle,” Thorgrim said.
Bjorn, pulling an oar, glanced over his shoulder and smiled. “We’ve had it easy,” he said. “Godi’s been driving those poor bastards like oxen, I’ll warrant.”
Thorgrim had left Godi in charge as he went off to see about arrangements with Ferns, and Harald went to fetch Dragon and Fox. There were three tasks for Godi to begin on—repair of the longships, building of some sort of shelter for the men, and setting up defenses for the longphort—and he seemed to have made a good start on all.
The curach pulled across the open delta, and Thorgrim could see that men were working on the defenses, some lining the top of the earthen wall they had managed to toss up, others hidden from sight on the other side, no doubt wielding shovels or whatever they could find. Thorgrim wondered if anyone would notice their approach, but soon he could see Godi’s bulky form making his way to the edge of the water.
“Thorgrim!” Godi called, grabbing the bow of the curach and hauling it as far out of the water as he could, while the oarsmen jumped over the side and helped him in that effort. “I hope you met with luck!”
“Me, too,” Thorgrim said, climbing over the side, his feet sinking into the soft sand. “They told us what we wanted to hear, at least. Whether it works out as we hope, that we can only wait to see.”
They walked up the shore, away from the brackish water, and Godi showed Thorgrim what they had managed to accomplish in the nearly two days he and the others had been off to Ferns. “We’ve done little work on the ships,” Godi said. “I thought we were better off seeing to the defense.”
Thorgrim nodded. That made sense. There was no knowing what enemies might be lurking out in the hills. Irish lords and their armies, bandits, other Northmen—Ireland was a dangerous country.
In order to turn that bit of shoreline into a ship fort, a longphort, Godi had begun construction of a half-moon-shaped earthen wall encircling the landward side of the ground that would become their ad hoc shipyard. One end of the wall started at the water’s edge and formed a shallow arc inland, curving back to meet the shoreline again about a hundred yards from where it started. It stood about five feet high but was growing higher with each shovelful tossed up on top.
“It’s not a lot of space we’ve enclosed by the wall,” Godi said. “But it’s about all I reckoned we could do in a short time, and about all the wall we have men enough to defend.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Thorgrim said. In truth, Godi had made the wall longer than he himself had initially imagined. And he had done a good portion of the work in one day. Bjorn was right: Godi had been driving the men hard.
They stopped by the remains of Brunhard’s slave ship, the stout Frisian merchantman that had been driven ashore with the others. She was, or had been, a good ship, but she was of little use to them now. As it was, they barely had men enough to fill out the crews of the four ships they had, and the Frisian, fat and slow, built to carry as much cargo as she could, was not well suited for raiding.
So Thorgrim had decided she would be sacrificed for the good of the others. Her mast, yard and rigging could replace that of the longships damaged in the storm and their collision at sea. The strakes could be pried off and reshaped to replace others which had been stove in. The decking and rowers’ benches and other bits could be used to make a temporary shelter for the men.
Godi had already made a good start on that as well. Using the upper edge of the Frisian ship’s side for support he had created a sort of lean-to shelter out of salvaged boards, with bits of what was left of the ship’s sail over that to give a little extra shelter from the elements. They would need better than that if they were to remain long at that place—which they might, depending on how much work was needed on the ships and how long the monastery at Ferns would take to weave their new sail cloth—but for now Godi’s odd lash-up would do.
“Good, good,” Thorgrim said. “You’ve done good work, Godi.” He turned and looked out to sea, past the headland that marked the northern point of the bay at the river mouth. “No sign of Harald and the other ships?” he asked.
“No word of them,” Godi said. “But I wouldn’t think there would be, necessarily. We don’t know how far north they had to walk. If I know Harald he’ll walk all the way to Vík-ló before he gives up. And if they never find the ships, then they’ll have to walk all the way back.”
Thorgrim nodded. Godi was right, of course. There was no way at all to gauge how long Harald and the others might be gone. But that did not stop him from worrying.
One can command warriors, and one can be a father, Thorgrim thought, but it is a hard thing to do both at once.
Godi returned to his work on the wall and Thorgrim began to poke around Sea Hammer in earnest, figuring where he would start with the repair work, how extensive it would ultimately be. Despite himself he found his eyes drawn again and again to the headland to the north, hoping every time to see Fox and Dragon come crawling into sight, their banks of oars rising and falling as they pulled for the new longphort at Waesfiord. Loch Garman.
But they did not appear. The sun began to drop toward the western hills and the men were dismissed from their work on the walls, and still there was no sign of the ships. A fire was lit and a caldron hung over it and ale served out and happily the rain held off. Vestar, whom Godi had sent out to scout the countryside, came back from his travels. He reported that he had gone many miles before seeing anything at all of note, and what he saw was a just small ringfort with a single house inside and a sorry herd of half a dozen cows milling about outside the walls.
When the men had eaten and had a few cups of ale in their bellies Thorgrim called them all around the fire. “Now I must tell you all what happened when we went to Ferns,” he said. “I hoped that Harald and the others would be back, that I could tell everyone at once what’s going on, but that’s not to be.
“When we first arrived, I swear by the gods we scared them half to death. They seemed to think the five of us and Failend were going to tear the place to the ground by ourselves. But after they saw we weren’t, they treated us decently enough. Fairly, I would say. It’s a big place, Ferns. Probably wealthy. But that’s not our concern. The chief man there, they call him an…” Thorgrim tried to think of the word, but could not. He turned to Failend.
“An abbot,” Failend supplied. “He is Abbot Columb, a very holy man.”
That caused some murmuring among the gathered men, all of whom were suspicious as to what magic the Christ men were able to summon.
“Yes…what she said,” Thorgrim continued. “He said they weave cloth, and he said he could weave the cloth we need, and they will. For a price. But there’s another thing. You know these Irish are all plundering one another. It seems one of their petty kings is intent on sacking this monastery at Ferns. If he does, then there’s no sailcloth for us. So I agreed we would go to Ferns and protect the place against this
other fellow. Fight him if we must.”
This led to more murmuring. Then Godi said, “Whenever we get between the Irish fighting each other it’s always a bloody mess.” There was no criticism in the words, only an observation.
“How many does this petty king command?” Onund asked.
“A hundred men or more,” Thorgrim said. “Or so I was told. Not so many more than we have, once the others have returned. The Irish at Ferns will have their own men as well. Those we’ll be fighting will be a bunch of farmers, mostly. And of course there’s always a chance for plunder.” He did not actually know if that was true, but it never hurt to put the suggestion out there.
“This abbot thinks it will not be long before Ferns is attacked,” Thorgrim continued. “We’ll move out tomorrow. I’d hoped we could row Fox and Dragon up the river, at least as far as where the smaller river, the Bann, meets it. But we don’t know when they’ll be back, so we walk.”
More muttering, but it carried no tone of disagreement. While the men might not care for miles of walking with weapons and armor, the prospect of action would animate them, as would escaping from the hard labor Godi was doling out.
“So, we leave right after dagmál,” Thorgrim said. “We’ll cross the river and move up along the north bank. Where this big river, which they call the Slaney, meets the smaller one, there we’re to meet up with the warriors from Ferns. We’ll go with them to wherever it is we’re to fight.”
It was not long after Thorgrim told them all this that the rain began to fall. It came gently at first. But every man there had spent time enough in Ireland to know that within minutes it would be a deluge, so they scrambled for a spot under the crude shelter Godi had ordered built and soon they were sleeping the sleep of the innocent.
It was still raining when the sun came up the next morning, turning the impenetrable blanket of cloud a dark gray and revealing the sodden beach and earthworks, the water streaming down the sides of the beached ships and dancing off the surface of the river mouth. Dried fish and oat cakes and ale were served out under the shelter and each man ate and tried to delay the moment when they would have to step out into the downpour.
“It’ll take us some time to get to the far bank,” Thorgrim said to Godi, who was sitting next him. Thorgrim was already thinking about their first logistical problem, one that would need solving before they even left, and that was the fact that they were on the wrong side of the river. “Without the ships we’ll have to ferry the men over in the curach, and I don’t think we could get more than ten in at a time without swamping the thing.”
Godi frowned. “There’s no way to ford the river, farther up?” he asked.
“Not that I saw,” Thorgrim said, and then their discussion was interrupted by a shout from the beach. They were the words Thorgrim would have most wished to hear if he had allowed himself to hope for them, which he had not.
“The ships! Fox and Dragon! The ships!”
It was Bjorn who had gone out in the rain to relieve himself and now ducked under the roof of the shelter, as soaked as if he had plunged into the sea, but smiling wide. “Thorgrim! The ships! They’re coming around the point!”
There was no thought of staying dry now. The fifty or so men and one woman who were squeezed under the crude roof crawled out from under and stood in the wet sand and looked north. Despite the rain, the visibility was not too bad, and they could see, about three miles away, the two longships rounding the point and turning slightly as they moved in the direction of the longphort.
In truth, there was no telling at that distance if they were indeed Fox and Dragon. They were two ships, around the size of those vessels, but beyond that they were too far, and too obscured by rain, to be identified with any certainty.
The ships threaded their way through the various sandbanks littering the delta and as they closed with the beach it became clear that they were indeed the lost ships come home. The oars rose and fell with a steady, easy rhythm as the vessels made their steady approach to the longphort. One of the ships—Dragon, it seemed—came to a jarring halt as she ran her bow onto the hidden sand, but they had little difficulty in backing off and getting underway again.
The vessels were a hundred yards off when Thorgrim was finally able to see at least one man aboard each ship: the lookouts in the bows keeping watch as best as they could for the sand bars, like underwater ramparts, which would not be easy to see in the rain. He could see no one besides them. The rest would be at the oars, hidden from view by the high bows.
And then they were there, their stems scraping up in the sand at the water’s edge of the new ship fort. The enthusiastic men on shore splashed out into the shallow water and grabbed hold of the sheer strakes and hauled the ships farther ashore. They called greetings to their fellows who were running in the oars. They seemed very excited about seeing men who had only left them a few days before.
And then Thorgrim understood. It’s the ships, not the men, he thought. It made them nervous, these sailors, these sea raiders, to have no vessels capable of going to sea. Without ships they were just men stranded in a strange land, surrounded on all sides, outnumbered. The ships meant the ability to attack or retreat at will. They were the instruments that made the Northmen feared in every land within striking distance of the sea.
The ships also meant that they would not have to walk to Ferns.
Dragon and Fox were as high up on the beach as they could be dragged and the men who had been rowing them now stood and hopped over the sides, landing with a splash in the few inches of water near the bows. Thorgrim saw Starri come over the side, and Gudrid and Louis the Frank.
With a grin, Starri hurried up to Thorgrim and embraced him. “We’re back, Night Wolf!” he said. “And we have the ships, and best of all, we had to fight some Irish whores’ sons to get them!”
“I see,” Thorgrim said and he felt his stomach seize up. If there had been fighting, then that might answer the question he felt most pressed to ask.
He pushed the berserker away, gently, a foot or so, and said, “Starri, where’s Harald?”
Chapter Eleven
Best have a son though he be late born
and before him the father be dead:
seldom are stones on the wayside raised
save by kinsmen to kinsmen.
Hávamál
Of the dozen or so words that Starri Deathless said in reply, there was only one that struck Thorgrim with any force, and that one struck with considerable force indeed.
Hostage.
“Hold up, hold up,” Thorgrim said, raising his hands as if to shield himself from the onslaught of Starri’s words. “Hostage? To some Irishmen who found the ships?”
Starri started in again, and as he did Thorgrim realized it was pointless to try and get any sort of rational explanation from the man. He looked past Starri’s shoulder and could see Gudrid hurrying up from where he had left Fox, and behind him, less enthusiastically, Louis the Frank. And with Louis, someone Thorgrim did not know. A young man. An Irishman, by the clothing. The man exchanged for Harald.
“Gudrid, what by the gods happened?” Thorgrim asked, cutting Starri off midsentence, while Gudrid was still a dozen steps away.
Gudrid stopped, glanced at Starri, glanced at Thorgrim. He did not look terribly happy to be the messenger on this. “Starri told you about the oars?” Gudrid asked.
“Yes,” Thorgrim said. “Some.” He had not really followed Starri’s words, but he knew it was not entirely Starri’s fault. The word had stuck in his head and blotted out the others. Hostage.
“We found the ships, but there were Irish there, men-at-arms. We drove them off, but it turned out they had removed the oars earlier. And without oars or sails we had no way to get the ships here. Then their jarl, or whatever these Irish call their chief man, he came down to the beach and talked with Harald and worked out some deal with him. We exchanged hostages…” Gudrid turned around. Louis and the Irishman had come to a stop ten yards down the
beach and seemed to be waiting to be summoned. “We got that fellow, and Harald went with the Irishmen.”
“What was the deal?” Thorgrim asked.
“I don’t know,” Gudrid said. “They were speaking Irish. But as I understood it from Harald, in exchange for the oars we are to join these Irish men-at-arms in a raid. A monastery, I think. Not far from here. The Irish wish to raid it but they don’t have men enough.”
Thorgrim shook his head. The more words that came out of Gudrid’s and Starri’s mouths the less sense any of this made. But he was also aware of an ugly sensation spreading through him as he heard the words “Irish” and “raid” and “monastery.” Thorgrim was no great fan of irony, but he understood that if his growing suspicion proved correct, then this would be the ironic masterpiece of the gods.
“Starri, pray, go fetch Failend and ask her to come here,” he said and Starri nodded and was gone. Thorgrim waved to Louis, gesturing for him to come. Louis pointed to the Irishman beside him and Thorgrim nodded. Louis said something to the young man and the two of them continued up the beach toward where Thorgrim stood.
Unlike Gudrid, Louis spoke Irish, and Thorgrim guessed he might have a better idea of what had taken place. And, grudging as Thorgrim was to admit it, he knew that Louis was no fool.
The Frank and the Irishman reached Thorgrim at the same time that Failend did. Failend had shed her Irish clothing and was now wearing a tunic and leggings, the dress in which Thorgrim was more accustomed to seeing her.
“Failend, please ask Louis if he knows what happened on the beach, what Harald and the chief of the Irish men-at-arms agreed to,” he said. Failend nodded and turned to Louis. Their eyes met and Thorgrim saw the unspoken words pass between them. They had been together, Louis and Failend, when Thorgrim’s band had captured them. There was history there. And now Failend was with Thorgrim. They could not ignore all that.
Loch Garman: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 7) Page 10