“Lorcan! You bastard! You whore’s son!” Grimarr shouted. Ornolf’s men had broken like the rest, running with abandon down the beach toward Far Voyager. Grimarr’s men, the crew of Eagle’s Wing, were the last of the Norsemen still high up on the beach, and the Irishmen were closing in on them.
Harald grabbed Conandil by the arm. “Now! Go!” he shouted to her and she nodded and he let go and she darted toward a gap in Grimarr’s line while Harald whirled around and charged for the water’s edge and the safety of Far Voyager.
Neither made it far. Harald had a glimpse of a spear shaft swinging at his legs and he felt it hit his shins and he knew he was going down. He could hear Conandil screaming behind him and his hands went out and he hit the shingle hard. He felt knees on his back and the weight of several men on top of him, hands grabbing his arms and twisting them back. He struggled, but once his arms had been pulled behind him he did not have the leverage to resist. He felt a leather thong wrapped deftly around his wrists and pulled taut. He was bound and he was immobile.
The men who had been kneeling on him stood and Harald gasped for breath. Men grabbed his arms and pulled him up and propelled him forward. Grimarr was leading the way. The rest of the Eagle’s Wings were following him to the water’s edge at a pace just short of running, some turning to keep a wary eye on the Irish. The Irish, in turn, were still advancing slowly; more fighting would mean more Irish dead, and given that they had already driven their enemy off, the Irish apparently did not feel the need to hurl themselves into battle.
Harald stumbled down the beach, half pushed, half dragged by Grimarr’s men, the going awkward with his hands bound behind. A Dane warrior had Conandil over his shoulder, and he had no doubt carried logs for a hearth fire that weighed more than she did. They reached the edge of the surf, the cold ocean water seeping into Harald’s shoes as he splashed out alongside Eagle’s Wing. It was all happening so fast, and he had taken enough blows to the head that he was having trouble concentrating.
He looked out to sea, past Eagle’s Wing. Far Voyager was already under way, the oars moving with practiced rhythm, the ship clawing away from the shore. He felt emptiness and despair seeping in like the water in his shoes; Ornolf had left without him, had abandoned him to whatever horror Grimarr had in mind. His grandfather, his shipmates, were more worried about saving their own hides. He was not angry, which surprised him. He was alone.
The hands that had been pushing him along now grabbed his arms and more grabbed his legs and he was hefted aboard the ship. Fore and aft the crew were leaping up over the sheer strake, pulling out the long oars, while more stood waist deep in the sea and heaved at the ship’s side to break the bow out of the gravel so she might get underway.
Harald tumbled onto the deck. Alongside, thigh-deep in the sea, one of Grimarr’s men grabbed onto the edge of the ship, screamed, and pitched sideways, a spear jutting from his back. Another spear flew past and splashed into the surf. The Irish had followed them to the water’s edge and were trying to inflict as much damage as they could on the fleeing enemy.
The man carrying Conandil came alongside and dropped her over the rail onto the deck. She stood, her hands unbound, not enough of a threat, apparently, to warrant tying up. She reached down and took Harald’s arm and with a grunt helped him regain his feet, then the two of them stumbled forward, clear of the men desperately getting the ship underway. They pushed and twisted through the press, and Harald wondered why the ship was so crowded until he realized that most of Bersi’s men were aboard as well, their own ship now in Irish hands.
Harald slumped down on the deck again, just aft of the tall, curving stem, leaning against the ship’s side. He felt the motion of the vessel change as the bow slid off the gravel and the hull reacted to the small surf rolling in from off shore. The few men still in the water hurled themselves aboard. Irish spears thudded into the planking or sailed over the gunnel, forcing some of the men at the oars to duck and twist, but no one was struck.
Grimarr came last. He did not come over the side with the ease and grace of some of the younger, more lithe hands, but still he moved with an impressive fluidity for a man of his size. He gained the deck and strode aft. He gave no orders, as his men were already doing all they could do, backing the oars, driving Eagle’s Wing astern and away from the shore.
Harald was hardly aware of any of it, lost as he was in the agony of having been abandoned by his fellows, his grandfather, having been left in the hands of a man who would murder him without the honor of a fight.
Then Conandil was kneeling at his side. “Harald!” she whispered, and then looked aft at Grimarr and Harald followed her gazed. But Grimarr was paying no attention to them, he was looking beyond his own ship, toward the other vessels in his fleet, the stolen Water Stallion drawing quickly away. He bellowed out orders for the larboard rowers to pull ahead while the starboard continued to backwater, and Eagle’s Wing began to spin in her length.
“Can you swim?” Conandil asked.
“Yes,” Harald said.
“You must swim. Grimarr will kill you.”
“My grandfather, my shipmates, they left me,” Harald blurted out. The words were irrelevant, but he felt he would bust if he did not speak them.
“Left you?” Conandil asked.
“They did not try to free me from Grimarr. They left me here. Ornolf left me.” Harald was not generally given to self-pity, but this was too much.
Conandil shook her head and she looked confused. “Ornolf does not know Grimarr means to kill you or that he killed your father. You only know because I told you.”
Harald frowned, but he could feel the sun breaking through. Of course Ornolf did not know.
“Maybe he knows now,” Conandil added. “His boat is not doing what the other boats are doing.” She nodded over the gunnel and awkwardly Harald turned and looked in that direction. Just as Eagle’s Wing was settling on her new course, Far Voyager, two hundred yards away, was spinning in a tight circle, turning in a direction that would take her across Eagle’s Wing’s bow. She paused for a second as her turn was checked, and then the oars to larboard and starboard pulled together and the longship shot ahead, coming obliquely at Eagle’s Wing.
Grimarr seemed not to notice. From the bow, his eyes appeared locked on Water Stallion as that ship pulled hard for the north, opening the distance between her and the other longships. “Pull, you sons of whores, pull!” he shouted, unable to maintain his silence. “I want that Irish bastard, Lorcan! I want to eat his heart! Pull, and don’t let him get away!”
The men at the oars were pulling hard, and most of the oars were double-manned with the addition of Bersi’s men on the crew. Bersi himself was not there, either dead or aboard Fox, Harald did not know.
“You have to go, you have to swim away now!” Conandil whispered with a harsh urgency. She reached up the sleeve of her leine and pulled out a dagger. Harald recognized it; it had been on the belt of the man who carried Conandil to the ship. She glanced up at the nearby rowers and Grimarr, aft, but no one was paying them any attention.
Harald shifted his bound wrists to the side and with a deft and surreptitious motion she cut the leather thong free and slipped the handle of the knife into his fingers. Harald felt a great sense of relief surge through him - the cutting pain in his wrists gone, a weapon in his hand - and with that relief a new optimism and a readiness for action.
But he kept his hands where they were because he knew better than to let Grimarr or any of the men see he was free until he was ready to move. He craned his neck to look over the gunnel. Far Voyager was closing, Ornolf judging the place where she and Eagle’s Wing would meet on their respective courses and speed.
“Jump, now!” Conandil whispered again. “We are getting far from shore!”
Harald shook his head. “I don’t want to go to shore,” he said. He looked over the rail again. Another three or four minutes and it would be time. He did not think Ornolf planned to negotiate, and if it ca
me to a brawl, he and his men would be slaughtered given that they would be fighting both Grimarr’s men and Bersi’s. And the men of Fox as well, if they managed to get into the fight.
“Two minutes more,” Harald whispered, and then Grimarr noticed what Ornolf was doing, Far Voyager closing on his ship.
“What is this stupid bastard about?” Grimarr asked. No one answered, but Grimarr did not look as if he wanted an answer. He leapt off the low afterdeck and stamped forward along the ship’s centerline, between the rowers’ benches. He stopped near the bow and looked down at Harald. “Seems your people have not forgotten you, boy,” he said. “So we’ll wait until they are close enough, and then they will see you die.”
He leaned forward and reached out for the neck of Harald’s mail, and Harald whipped the dagger around and plunged it through Grimarr’s hand. Grimarr reared back, his eyes wide, his good hand cradling the ruined one. Harald had driven the dagger clean through, right to the hilt, the blade jutting out through Grimarr’s palm. Blood was already running bright down the tapered steel and between Grimarr’s thick fingers.
All that Harald saw in the instant it took him to move. He leapt to his feet and bent forward at the waist and the momentum shucked off his mail shirt which fell with a jangling sound onto the deck of the ship. Grimarr was roaring with pain and outrage, but most of the Eagle’s Wings were caught behind their oars and could not easily stand, and those who were not were too stunned to react.
“Go! Now! Jump!” Conandil shouted. There was a look of desperation on her face, one of terror. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, it changed to one of confusion and horror as Harald bent, grabbed her around the waist, and hefted her over his shoulder. He took three steps aft to the nearest rowing bench, stepped up on that with his left foot, put his right foot on the sheer strake, and with Conandil still on his shoulder he leapt clean over the side of the ship.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The squanderer of the sea’s fire
today offered me a broad untempered
blade and a whetstone with it that was
too little to take as compensation.
The Saga of Ref the Sly
When the sun came up that morning, turning the impenetrable blackness into a dull gray, and revealing with its indifferent illumination several miles of ocean, the coast of Ireland was still in sight. Thorgrim, sitting as he had been through the dark hours at the steering oar they rigged over the curach’s transom, was happy to see it.
Starri was hunkered down on the weather side, huddled and miserable. He was not pleased at all to be out at night on the big water in a small boat, vulnerable to those phantoms of the darkness and the sea swirling about him, dangers that could not be faced with an ax or a sword. He greeted the rising sun with visibly relief.
“Night Wolf!” he said brightly as the coast slowly resolved itself out of the mist, running north to south along the starboard side, a dark, low line in a dull gray world. “Here I thought sure you had sailed us right to Hel, but I see you have not!” He was wrapped in a blanket against the cold and he peaked out like some creature looking warily out of its burrow.
“I believe that’s Ireland,” Thorgrim said. “Might be Hel. They might be one and the same, for all I know.”
They had been underway since late afternoon of the previous day, two hours after Thorgrim’s eyes had lighted on the curach pulled ashore at Vík-ló. Most of the Northmen had dismissed the thing as silly, a child’s toy, not a sea-going vessel. But Thorgrim could see the potential of such a boat; light but well-built, with the sort of lines that could weather moderately large seas if handled correctly.
What’s more, they had no other choice. The only other vessel in sight was the longship Wind Dragon, which they could not have sailed by themselves even if it had not been half-burned by the Irish raiders.
They set right to work. From the various stacks of rigging and gear piled on shore they found two long oars, and with axes hacked them to the proper length for a mast and a short yard. They found line for a rudimentary halyard and stays and shrouds. It was not a lofty rig – Thorgrim did not think the light hull, ballasted by her two-man crew and what scant provisions they were able to assemble, would stand up to too much pressure aloft.
The sail was scavenged from the stack of Far Voyager’s cargo and material that had been left behind when she sailed. It was, in fact, the very cloth that had saved the ship weeks before when Starri had stretched it over the side to slow the water jetting in through the stove planks. They dug through the pile of empty casks that would be filled with water for the voyage home, dried beef and pork, spare bedding, tools, buckets of tar, coils of rope, spare oars, all the things they had not bothered loading for the short jaunt down the coast, looking for things that could be of use to them now.
And at the center of that pile, all but buried, lay much of the treasure that Thorgrim’s crew had amassed in their raids, in particular their bold feint at Tara the previous spring. Some of that plunder, consisting mostly of silver with a smattering of gold and jewels, had been divided out and was now stowed down in the men’s sea chests aboard the ship. But much of it was still here, secured in small chests and waiting disbursement.
They had left it behind because they had thought Vík-ló a safer place than a ship on the high seas, but Thorgrim was no longer sure that was the case. Vík-ló did not seem terribly safe anymore. But there was nothing for it now. They certainly could not take the plunder aboard the curach. Thorgrim could only hope for the chance to return and collect it up before they sailed for home, but he no longer knew if that chance would come. He had no idea what was happening beyond the southern horizon, and it was that uncertainty and anxiety that drove him on.
Thorgrim pulled the cloth free, cut it to size and rigged it to the yard. The workmanship was not something he would have been proud to show off, but with his growing fear for the fate of his son and his men it was enough that this lash-up would last through what he hoped would be a short trip south.
They loaded a sack of dried meat and bread and a small breaker of water aboard and pushed the boat out into the fast-moving river. The sun was dropping in the west as they took up the oars and pulled for open water. Once they were clear of the shore they set the small square sail, the yard swung nearly fore and aft, and then they settled on thwarts on the weather side to hold the boat more level as the northeast breeze drove it along.
The wind had not deserted them all night, blowing at strengths that ranged from moderate to threatening. While the sun was still above the horizon Starri suggested, in a most circumspect way, that they might consider beaching the frail wood and leather boat and sleeping ashore. But Thorgrim would not tolerate such a delay and Starri did not press the issue. Soon after that it was no longer an option, because once the light of day was gone entirely it was too dangerous to try to feel their way through the rock-strewn waters off shore and hope to find a beach that was not pounded by surf. So they sailed on.
The skies were overcast and no stars could be seen, leaving Thorgrim with no reliable way to judge their course. He knew only that the wind and seas had been taking the boat on the larboard quarter since they had cleared the River Leitrim, so he kept it that way and hoped those things would not change dramatically during the night. He angled the bow a bit more to the east so they would tend to sail away from shore, rather than toward it, to compensate for any leeway they might make. There was nothing more he could do beyond holding as steady a course as possible and waiting for the light of day or the sound of seas breaking on the deadly shore.
Now, with the coming of dawn, he saw that the gods had been pleased as they so often were with his making the bold choice.
“Here, Starri, let’s brace that yard around a bit,” Thorgrim said, nodding up toward the sail. During the night they had worked their way farther off shore than Thorgrim had intended, and now he meant to alter course to the west and close with the land.
“Yes, Thorgrim, certainly, but le
t me attend to this first,” Starri said. He shucked off the blanket and stepped nimbly to the leeward side, then up onto the boat’s rail. With one hand on the shroud for balance, he fumbled with his tunic and leggings and then with an audible sigh relieved himself into the sea. Thorgrim wondered how long Starri had been holding off, unwilling to lean out over the black water, or, worse yet, expose his manhood to whatever lurked below the surface.
Business finished, Starri dropped back into the bottom of the boat and adjusted the trim of the yard as Thorgrim swung the bow to the west. Then Starri relieved Thorgrim at the tiller so Thorgrim could take his turn at the leeward rail, and when that was done he served out a breakfast of dried meat, bread and water.
The day grew warmer with the rising sun and though the warmest days of the summer were long past it was not unpleasant, running nearly before the wind as they were. They approached the coast of Ireland at an oblique angle, their course a little west of south. Soon the details of the shoreline became more clear, the jagged rocks and the breaking surf, the long stretches of beach and the rolling hills further inland. The gray overcast thinned as the sun rose, and the day grew warmer still, the visibility greater.
“You know, Night Wolf, there’s much to be said for this small boat sailing,” Starri observed. He was standing on the weather rail, holding the shroud and leaning back, feeling the motion of the boat in his legs, letting the breeze whip his hair. Every once in a while the right combination of wind and wave would send a spray of salt water high into the air and shower him where he stood and he whooped with the exhilaration of it. Had it been anyone but Starri Deathless this behavior would have annoyed Thorgrim in the extreme, but Starri being who he was, Thorgrim knew it was pointless to be annoyed with him. Besides, his standing on the rail helped keep the boat on a more even keel and thus increased her speed.
The Lord of Vik-lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3) Page 24