Daughter of the Wind

by Michael Cadnum

  Hego could see more clearly now. Two mammoth drift trees closed in on the vessel. Each was still cloaked in moss, and a bark beetle scurried along the side of one of them. The great forest trees groaned against Strider. The vessel had been constructed by Njold the village shipwright for voyages in the ice, where drifting floes sometimes locked around a craft. The sailboat shivered along its length under the press of this drift timber, but she remained strong.

  The Danish ships did not make the familiar sound of the ships Hego knew best. Something about the way the oarlocks were greased, and the sort of leather used in the rigging. And the songs the Danes sang as they worked, lilting tunes, bittersweet. A Dane spat, and the sound of it struck a log like a hand slap. Too close. They were drifting too close.

  Hego huddled beside his friend, praying to Thor that, by sword or by sea, their deaths might be painless.

  Forty-three

  All day, Strider took on water, the Danes rowing ahead, trying to avoid the tangled mat of floating logs. The Danish seamen shoved at the drift trees with oars, and rowed well away, searching the shore. Hego and Gauk took turns, bailing as silently as possible. Hego found that bark stripped from the trees, silently pressed into place, served to slow Strider’s leaks.

  Then as the cool wind of late afternoon sharpened, the drift trees parted.

  The Danes lifted sails and tacked seaward, each warship leaving long, foam-spinning wakes.

  Gauk and Hego made short work of lifting sail and approaching the land, the surf along this low-lying coast weak and harmless, the seabirds giving way to broad-winged cranes, spearing the shallow water for fish.

  They agreed that, while they were not lost, they did not know exactly where they were. The ancient way-poems told how to approach any port, by river marsh or open sea, including Gudmund’s settlement.

  Black sea, blue sea, past the stumps of trees,

  when the scent of marsh is strong,

  guide the steer-oar landward

  and the brackish tide is yours.

  Hego remembered the poem exactly that way, except for one detail. “Past the tall white stone,” was the version he recalled. He sang it that way, and was met with Gauk’s silence.

  “Everything else you sang is correct,” Hego added quickly, not wanting to hurt his friend’s feelings.

  “How can we see a ‘tall white stone’ from here?”

  Hego was not sure how to explain such matters. “How could you see tree stumps?” he queried.

  Night fell.

  They smelled marshland—it was impossible to mistake sulfuric odor. Mud and decay, and that odd scent of fresh and salt water when they flowed together. They were close to their destination, as sea lore indicated, close to Gudmund’s customary lands. But to be close to a destination was not enough, where sailing was involved. They needed to be certain.

  Gauk steered the boat toward this faint but profound smell. Hego dipped his finger in the water, tasted it, and announced, “It’s not as salty as the sea.”

  There were stories of a blind sailor who could navigate by tasting the water, reckoning by the saltiness whether a river flowed into the ocean, or a stream, or a sluggish marsh.

  A tall white stone, some ancient boundary marker, did indeed loom against the shoreline, accompanied by the age-bleached stumps of what once must have been deep forest, long ago cut down.

  The two young men ran the vessel into a bank of reeds, stiff rushes as tall as a man. A marsh bird complained and, in the starlight, started out across the wetland with its pulsing cry.

  Hego heard the boat out in the waterway during the night.

  A single paddle, in and out of the water, someone trying not to make a splash. The boater was good at it, but whoever it was could not keep the prow silent, the small boat parting the marsh.

  Gauk drowsed.

  Hego did not want to awaken him. He levered an oar into the water and stirred the mucky bottom enough to ease the vessel partway out into the dark. It was a mistake—the approaching sound stopped, the paddler alerted by the snapping of the reeds.

  Gauk stirred and gripped his arm. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  Hego was clumsy at hurried explanations and merely shrugged.

  The approaching craft was silent. The only sound was Hego’s steering oar, cutting the water.

  Gauk took up Whale-Biter.

  “Can you see how many men there are?” asked Hego. He would die soon, he was convinced. But there was only one paddle out there on the water, Hego knew. One paddle, the person wielding it sitting perfectly still.

  Even Hego could see what happened then—the sudden glow of a fire rising up over the marshland, distant rooflines reflected in the water. An alarm iron rang out, and distancemuted cries reached them.

  A town was burning.

  The solitary figure in midcurrent continued to say nothing, but there was a creak from the boat as the paddler turned, looking back toward the ascending blush of the fire. Confused, Hego ran the key passages of the way-poem through his mind, trying to determine once again their exact location. There could be no mistake.

  He said, “Freylief is burning.”

  “Gudmund’s town is on fire!” agreed Gauk in a hoarse, excited whisper.

  They peered across the fire-gilded marsh. How long could the lone paddler hold his breath? And who would be wending the marsh all alone in the dead of night?

  Hego shivered, filled with hope. He leaned forward and licked his chapped lips, ready to make an experimental signal, the customary greeting of Spjotfolk in darkness.

  Before Hego could make the signal, the message reached them through the damp night air, the same click-click-click the hawk owl makes to its young.

  Hego cut a broad sweep with the steering oar, digging deep into the muddy bottom, propelling the boat forward. In their haste they failed to make the answering signal in return, and a woman’s voice greeted them across the dark, an even-voiced, quiet fragment of the old song: Under sky, above the sea / You will not take me alive.

  Hego stood, putting one hand to the mast to steady himself. He kept his voice as low as possible.

  “Hallgerd?”

  Forty-four

  When she heard a voice she leaned forward in the darkness. She fervently wished she had a seal spear, or a skinning knife—or even a sheep mallet. Any sort of weapon would be better than this oar.

  Hallgerd had heard a human voice call her name in response to her signal. She was all but certain of this. The recent period of solitude, however, had made her mistrust her hearing. The mind could hear what it desperately wanted to—every child in Spjothof knew that. Now there was no sound in the marsh but the drip of muck from her oar, and a corresponding whisper somewhere ahead.

  Another oar, out there across the marsh.

  She recited a few phrases of a cherished courage-poem. The marsh was dimly illuminated by the shifting glow, Gudmund’s town burning. Cries reached her from far off, and the steady iron stroke of the alarm pulsed through the dark. She felt a stirring of satisfaction for the damage she had set into motion, and at the same time a throb of sympathy for the ordinary folk of Freylief.

  Let them learn, she thought, never to set foot in Spjothof.

  Reeds crackled ahead of her, and a vessel parted a wall of vegetation. Hallgerd discerned two figures and the slender shape of a mast in the muted glow. A voice called her name again.

  Her breath caught.

  But it wasn’t possible, surely. Could simple Hego have come all this way? A further consideration troubled her—how could he have survived his fight with the Danes? She dug her oar into the muddy bottom, and shoved the craft forward.

  Hallgerd blinked tears of gratitude.

  She had never felt more relief at the sight of two friends. The two young men were excited, too, and stammered a joyous, hurried tale. It was garbled but filled with praise for Strider and told of some great deed involving Gauk and a wheel of cheese.

  For the moment she remained in he
r stolen vessel, the sides of the two boats touching. There was a protocol to questioning someone who had been lost—the rescuers traditionally inquired which neighbor the newly found would visit first, which favorite landmark had been most missed, and other such questions. It was important to determine that a spirit had not taken on the guise of a missing person.

  But Hallgerd was the one with the questions. “Where are the others?” she asked.

  “I hope it will not displease you,” said Hego, remembering now to use formal speech in addressing the jarl’s daughter, “that the two of us have come alone.”

  “Entirely alone?”

  “Indeed,” he responded, with what sounded like a touch of wounded pride.

  Well, this was not perfect news, she had to admit. In truth, this was not what she had hoped at all, but she knew that the gods provided in surprising ways. She was reluctant to put her next question into words, but she forced herself. “Was my father still alive when you sailed?”

  Gauk assured her that he had been breathing, and with the best of charms, Thor’s hammer, pinned to his breast. “Our jarl is as strong as the tide,” said the young hunter.

  The question was painful, but she kept her voice steady as she asked, “Tell me, if you can—how badly hurt is he?”

  “Our brave jarl suffered a wound,” said Gauk, feeling in his voice, “to his head.”

  Anguish swept every thought from her mind. She boarded Strider and asked Hego to break up the craft she had stolen. Head-Splitter did its work quickly. It took three blows, and the simple Danish vessel gradually filled with water, firelight reflecting off the welling interior as the boat began to sink.

  Heat from the distant blaze shivered the stars.

  Hallgerd recounted her own story, briefly, already imagining how the story would sound when she had knit it into a poem.

  “Let the Danes seek a bride from us again!” said Gauk when she concluded.

  She ran her hands along the darkened vessel, making an inventory of their meager supplies. She ran her fingers over the thick pale fur. “Why is there a bear pelt in this boat?” she asked. And bear paws, she did not add, huge, black-clawed things, smelling faintly of death.

  “Odin,” said Hego, “has taken Gauk into his hand.”

  “Is this true, Gauk?”

  The younger hunter did not respond.

  Hallgerd’s father had been broad-minded about berserkers and their unpredictable violence. Hallgerd herself was sorry to learn that Gauk had been lost to a life of divine savagery. But among the Danes, it had seemed, a berserker could dwell in a neighborly fashion. Perhaps Gauk himself would be so fortunate.

  She began to express such reassurance, but Gauk lifted a hand, asking for her silence.

  “Don’t speak of it, please, Hallgerd,” said Gauk at last. He described briefly the death of his good friend Snorri, and added, simply, “Odin chose me—for a time.”

  “Strider is leaking,” Hallgerd offered, quite willing to turn her attention to another matter. As she spoke the stolen boat beside them vanished entirely with an odd, almost human gurgle, leaving only a few floating splinters.

  “She was leaking quite badly,” said Hego, equally pleased to turn from uncanny matters. “She leaked like the waterfall beyond Ard, until Gauk and I recaulked her with tree bark.”

  “She is taking on water again, perhaps,” suggested Hallgerd, as gently as possible.

  “A little, just now,” agreed Hego.

  She took Gauk’s hunting knife and cut tidy strips from her thrall-wool cloak. “You’ll find butter on the bread in my satchel,” she said. “Knead the stuff into this fabric.”

  The two young men seemed to recognize an echo of her father’s gently commanding tone, and responded immediately. They fervently nibbled at some of the butter before they put it to the practical use of waterproofing their vessel, Hego’s skilled hands making short work of it.

  She made a brief examination of the vessel’s mast and forestay. Strider’s sail had been woven by Gauk’s mother and her friends, and Hallgerd was not surprised to see that no needle and thread would be needed to repair the sturdy fabric.

  Hallgerd took the steering oar. It was gray dawn, with a caul of smoke between them and the rising sun. She was troubled at Gauk’s weakness. His wounds were deep and his voice feeble despite his relief at finding her. Hego was travelworn, too, his lips chapped and his hands blistered, but both young men were excited, exclaiming fragments of poems and battle chants.

  Her father had taught her that a jarl and his family had to be quicker in wisdom, and deeper in compassion, than any of their shipmates. She encouraged her two friends to rest.

  “Oh, Hallgerd, how could we sleep now?” exclaimed Hego.

  “I have rested in hiding,” she explained reassuringly. “I’ve slept enough for twenty voyagers.”

  It was an old principle that sleeping companions eat and drink less, and awaken ready to take their turn on watch. As the south wind strengthened—the immortal gods be thanked!—she saw the sails of Danish ships far at sea, combing the swells for any sign of their escaped captive. And she saw new craft, their sails filling with wind, coursing seaward to give the warships details of the night’s blaze.

  She breathed a hope into the following wind, praying that it might take news of her to her father, and give him strength.

  Forty-five

  Hallgerd recognized the exact moment that the five Danish ships caught sight of Strider, all of them at once. With a surge of spray at each prow, each ship deftly ran out her oars and turned toward shore.

  Strider’s sail in the daylight, bright against the expanse of marshland, had caught their eyes. As fast as the sleek sailboat was, Hallgerd knew that by midday one of the faster warships would capture her again, and that surely Gauk and Hego would lose their lives.

  But she had not anticipated Strider’s speed as she gained the open sea.

  It should not have surprised her—the shipwrights of her village were well regarded in ports up and down the northern coast. The boat chased down gulls, and plunged from wave to wave, the passing foam a blur. Hallgerd’s heart leaped at such rising momentum—surely they would sail into the sky!

  Occasionally Hego would stir, groping reflexively for Head-Splitter, and she would give him a reassuring smile. Sometimes Gauk would lift his head, his hand on Whale-Biter, and she would tell him that all was well. It stirred her to pity to see how gratefully they welcomed sleep.

  It was sweet sailing. All day Strider conquered the sea between the kingdom of Denmark and Norway, the booming south wind a blessing. The Danish ships persisted, however, falling into a long line in her wake.

  Hallgerd could make out the painted white eyes of Bison in the lead, the ship seeming to stare across the distance, quickening Hallgerd’s heartbeat. This sleek, proud vessel was swifter than the others, blessed with sleeker lines and a broader sail.

  As the sunset approached, a great fatigue stole over her, even as she kept a firm grip on the steering oar, and she had a dream.

  In her dream a ship swept up to Strider, crewed by silver-faced women.

  A snekkja, a sleek, elegant warship, the craft kept away from the rocks and shoals that Strider, a lighter vessel, could sail over unharmed. Hallgerd was cold, her spirit stone. She did not want to look at these seafarers, but she kept turning back nonetheless to watch them going about the business of tightening riggings and bailing, like any sailing folk.

  A man swung down, into the small boat, and the tiny batr crossed the empty water between them. The cloaked and hooded boatman spoke her name. And she recognized her father as he swept back the hood with one hand.

  Rognvald made his way aboard Strider, and leaned over the slumbering forms of her two companions. He smiled as he realized they were fully lost to sleep. The wound in his head was grievous—she had to look away for an instant.

  “Keep to the coast, Hallgerd,” he said. “Follow the waypoems, as close to shore as you can.” Her father smile
d, tugged at the boat’s rigging, and nodded when he found that the cordage was sound. He said, “Never let the surf catch you broadside.”

  He wore the silver amulet, Thor’s hammer, pinned to his cloak, and his customary silver arm-ring. When he turned to depart he could not leave—she held him.

  “No, Hallgerd,” he said with a gentle laugh, “I have to go.”

  “Let them come for you,” said Hallgerd.

  “They will,” he said simply.

  “Let the spirits of death come here,” she said, “and they’ll see how a jarl’s daughter can fight.”

  With that, she embraced him, and try as he might he was too weak from his wound, and perhaps too loving to wrestle free. And Strider, even released from her steering grip, was faster than the snekkja. The women lifted sail, following the boat, her father laughing, gently protesting that Hallgerd was foolish. No one could outsail maidens from the Slain Hall.

  Forty-six

  When she woke, the Danish ships were closer, and the open sea gold and silver in the morning light. She believed that the dream had been a gift from some divine power, and that it warned her that her father was already drinking among the fallen heroes.

  It was customary to share an important dream with one’s companions, but she could not mention this extraordinary vision. Indeed, she fought hard to put the dream out of her mind. When Gauk saw how close the ships were now he made no remark, but drew Whale-Biter to his side. Hego did not spare them a glance. Anything they said or did might disturb the careful stitchery of fate and cause bad luck.

  Hego offered her a last piece of Spjothof flatbread, and Gauk used an oilcloth on his spearhead, cleaning the blade, until Hego took over the task.

  Already the drinking water was nearly gone, and what remained tasted salty as the goatskins became weathered and stiff. They took turns at the steering oar now, as Hallgerd’s hands became blistered and cramped, but the well-balanced skip needed nothing more than their continuing prayers as it sliced the swells.