"Needs salt," he'd said.
Thorvald laughed and gestured to the surrounding sea. "Help yourself!"
Gunnar gazed out at the dark water that hid the rotting, drifting remains of their mysterious visitor, then back at his fish. He said nothing. Despite the welcome luxury of a hot meal, there were few among them who, while swallowing the white flesh, had not thought of the pallid corpse that, until recently, had shared the same domain as their dinner.
After that, the atmosphere remained subdued. The fog hung about them still, like a thick, blank shroud; a physical manifestation of the depressed mood. The ship heaved slowly on the swell as if rocked by an invisible hand. A fine rain fell for a while, and there was not a single one among them who did not yearn for dry land beneath his feet. Men exchanged short words now and then as necessity required, but otherwise kept their thoughts to themselves. No one spoke further of the thing in the sea.
Atli ran his fingers gently over the weals on his leg and thought over and over of the ghoulish nightmare that he now knew lay somewhere beneath them. Not far away, Bjólf sat hunched against the gunwale, a thick sheepskin around his shoulders, his head bowed in dark meditation. Atli wanted to go to his captain and tell him that he had seen it, that it had been real. But he did not have the nerve to penetrate the heavy silence that had descended. Instead, he concentrated on keeping his wood store dry, and feeding up the cheering, crackling flames.
His mind began to drift. Already drowsy from the meal and the glow of the fire, wrapped in a damp but warm woollen cape - another posthumous donation from Steinarr - he allowed his lids to droop and close. The minute he did so, exhaustion washed over him. He tried to fight it, forcing his eyes open, telling himself of his responsibility to ship and fire. But again his lids became heavy, sinking once, twice... The third time, he gave in to it. Just for a moment, he told himself. Just a few more seconds...
Immediately, fevered images began to swim through his tired brain - images of the thing in the water - lifeless but moving, suspended in icy darkness beneath the hull, grasping at him. In a world somewhere between nightmare and daydream, he imagined it clawing its way up the side of the ship, its sodden, ragged, wrecked form slithering and rattling over the gunwale and onto the deck, squirming in the wet like some ghastly newborn, then tottering unsteadily to its feet, staggering towards him while the crew slept on, oblivious.
Sounds came to him too. Somewhere between asleep and awake, beyond the lapping water and the creaking of the timbers, he thought he detected another sound. Like something scratching slowly, repeatedly against the hull. Like nails dragged against wood.
A sudden movement nearby shocked him awake. He looked around, dazed, unsure how long he had slept. The fog had thinned considerably. The fire was low, its light barely penetrating the gloom. He tucked some kindling into the embers and, as it began to catch, threw on a few more chunks of wood. As he did so, he heard a movement behind him. A strange kind of movement - the same, he now understood, as the one that had jolted him awake. It was a sort of shuffling, flapping sound, something at once utterly alien, and yet uncannily familiar. It sent chills through him. For a moment, he did not dare move. Then came a horrible exclamation, something between terror and disgust. He whirled around. A pale face hovered in the dark extremity of the prow. Near it, an unidentifiable black shape flopped and scratched. For a moment, Atli's eyes - fresh from the fire - struggled to adjust to the shadows.
Then he saw it.
Kjötvi, his face as white as a ghost, his eyes wide as shield-bosses, was staring in horror at a big, black shape that was pulling at his leg. His bandages lay unravelled and strewn about the deck, and a great bird - black as soot and big as a cat - was holding a red, wet length of... something... in its beak, something that was still attached to Kjötvi's calf. It was the flap of flesh that the axe had failed to remove, far too great a prize for a meat-hungry raven to leave behind. It yanked at it repeatedly, each time eliciting a stronger cry of pain and revulsion from its victim, while Kjötvi swiped at the creature weakly, as if trying to swat a gigantic fly.
By now, Bjólf and several of the crew were on their feet, the growing flames of the fire illuminating the bizarre scene, shadows flickering and dancing like ghosts against the timbers of the bow. Fjölvar had strung his bow and already had an arrow upon it, the bird in his sights.
"No!" said Bjólf, shoving Fjölvar's arm roughly aside. The arrow loosed, hissing over Atli's head and disappearing far out into the foggy ocean. Fjölvar glared at Bjólf with a mixture of anger and shock - then suddenly understood. No one moved.
The raven hopped and loped and flapped about, clinging doggedly to the precious bit of meat, the blue-black sheen of its feathers reflecting the flickering light of the fire. Kjötvi, wide awake now, kicked at it desperately with his good leg, looking to his shipmates for aid, not understanding why it would not come.
"To oars!" whispered Bjólf, not once taking his eyes off the black, ravenous creature. "Quickly."
The bird momentarily lost its hold, then flapped and jumped as Kjötvi's foot tried to connect with it again, its hunched form croaking angrily at him. He flailed again and missed - then, seeing another opportunity, it darted back in. It snapped and pulled. Kjötvi cried out. Then again. The creature suddenly tottered backwards and flapped off, up onto the figurehead where it perched victoriously, teetering against the swell, a glistening red strip of Kjötvi's leg in its bloody beak.
The crew, meanwhile, had snapped into action, swiftly deploying the stacked oars. The tips of the port set, Atli now saw, were painted red, the starboard oars tipped with yellow, and each one - slightly different in length from its neighbour to compensate for the curve of the ship - carved with one of sixteen runes to indicate its position. Within seconds, the oars were out over the water, the crew ready.
Bjólf, surveying the scene with growing satisfaction, and turning back to the prow, ran suddenly at it, clapping his hands noisily. "Hyah! Hyah! Hyah!" The raven took off and swooped ahead and to port, while Bjólf leapt past Kjötvi, up into the ship's prow and pointed triumphantly after the flapping black shape. "Follow him!"
The ship lurched forward as Gunnar called the strokes, Thorvald at the helm guiding the ship along the raven's path. Bjólf noted with satisfaction the faint glow of dawn on the horizon, off the starboard bow.
"I didn't feel it,"gibbered Kjötvi, looking up at Bjólf. "I didn't feel it. I just woke up and it was there..."
"We're just glad to see you alive again," laughed Bjólf.
Kjötvi shuddered as Magnus set about binding his wound again. "It's not right, to still be alive and to have part of you pass through a raven!" He looked at his leg. "I'll never get that back!"
"Your sacrifice was not in vain, my friend," said Magnus.
"You saved us," said Bjólf, beaming. "Trust Kjötvi to find the way!"
The raven, much faster than its sea-going namesake, soon disappeared from sight. But such birds would not stray far from land, and now they had a bearing from the distant glimmer of the sun too. Nevertheless, a tense silence fell as Bjólf stared intently into the eerily glowing fog, trying to read shapes within it. For the space of about sixty strokes, nothing appeared. Then, quite suddenly, a half imagined band of dark, ragged forms emerged dead ahead. Rocks. Grey cliffs. A coastline.
The cliffs were precipitous and inaccessible, but, to port, were broken by a wide, sheer-sided inlet.
"There!" called Bjólf. The oars pulled in steady rhythm. Thorvald heaved on the creaking rudder.
Leaping down from his vantage point, Bjólf bounded past Atli, then snatched up a pail and hurled its contents over the fire, extinguishing it immediately. A hiss of steam shot up as the water hit hot metal. Atli stared at the sodden ruins in utter disbelief, the wreck of the fire that he had nursed through the night.
"Wh-why did you...?" he stammered, wide-eyed.
"We don't want to announce ourselves until we're ready," said Bjólf, weaving his way back towards
the stern. "Don't look so downcast, little man," he called as he went. "The long night is over. And tonight we eat and sleep on land!"
As one, the men cheered, relieved that the worst of this ill-fated raiding trip - and the dark matter of the previous night - was at last safely behind them.
PART TWO
DRAUGR
FIRST INTERLUDE
The relentless sun beat upon Bjólf's back, making his tunic sticky with sweat. It was low in the evening sky now, but still ferocious. In the three weeks that had passed since embarking on their southward journey the heat had been steadily increasing, and the past few days had been the hottest he had ever known in his short life. Like standing over a forge night and day, his uncle Olaf said. Bjarki, Olaf's trusted skipari, claimed that further south the sun was fiercer still. He had seen lands where everywhere the soil had turned to dust, where there was no rain and not a single leaf of green. How people lived in such conditions, Bjólf could not imagine.
The voyage had been hard. By the end of the previous week the sun had burned Bjólf's skin raw, and the wind had rubbed the salt spray into the worst afflicted parts of his face, leaving his lips cracked and blistered. He was healing now - his skin unevenly brown and peeling - but for a while had been delirious with it, feeling as if his skin were on fire. One night, just as Bjólf's fever was hitting its peak, they had put ashore at a small, dusty port where the houses appeared to have grown out of the dry earth like anthills and the bustling throngs of merchants seemed to be perpetually shouting; words that were harsh and alien to his ears. He remembered the sights, sounds and smells like disconnected images from a dream: dark faces lit by the flicker of firelight; cries in a dozen unknown tongues; the smell of hot coals, raw fish, stale sweat, fresh garlic, spices and vinegar; drums and wailing pipes and voices raised in song. He remembered strange loping creatures that snorted and stamped and dropped their dung, or capered and flapped at the end of a chain: a dwarf-like creature covered in hair with arms and hands and a face like a shrivelled man; a squawking bird that spoke whole words, all colours of the rainbow; a black bat hanging from a perch, as big as a seagull. His uncle bought him wine, some skewered, charcoal-grilled meat, and black berries that looked to Bjólf like the small plums his mother used to gather, but which were hard and oily and bitter-tasting. The wine - his first taste of this great, southern luxury - was good, and he wolfed the food down, ravenously hungry, but nonetheless also strangely disconnected, and no longer entirely able to tell what was real, and what the creation of his fevered imagination. He had lain awake all night, sweating and shivering and drifting in and out of maddening, repetitive dreams, desperate for the clear, cool air of the open sea.
Now that the fever was past, the burning flesh calmed, he stood at the prow of the ship under full sail, feeling the cooling air and the fine salt spray on his skin, able at last to appreciate the beauty of this ocean that held such a fascination for his otherwise unsentimental uncle. In these waters, it seemed, one barely had to lower a net into the waves for it to be blessed with creatures that made good eating, and never had the sea and sky seemed so blue, nor the shore glowed with such colours as they did in these long, late evenings. At moments like this, even the crushing heat did not seem so bad.
But there was another, deeper kind of contentment. Although his frame had yet to fill out with muscle, Bjólf was tall and broad for his thirteen winters, at least on a par with the shorter members of the Hrafn's seasoned crew - none of that stopped jibes about his size, of course. But, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with Svein, on watch at the bow, he felt that he had grown in other, more important ways upon this journey. Ways that could not be mapped or measured.
Yet, despite everything that had happened to him, there was one more experience, one more milestone that this trip had to offer. It was something that he had long known would come, but he anticipated it with increasing dread.
"Sail!" called Svein, snapping Bjólf out of his reverie. Olaf stepped up to the prow and curled a hand around his right eye.
Bjólf looked. At first, he could not be sure what he was looking at - just a flash of brilliant white in the far distance off the port bow - but as his eyes found their range, the dark smudge beneath resolved into a distinct shape. As they cut through the waves in their steady advance he could make out a vessel; compact, with one - no, two - square, white sails. It bobbed in the water, apparently without direction, both sails flying in the wind.
He saw his uncle's face crease into a frown as he squinted at the horizon.
"What're they playing at?" muttered Bjarki behind his shoulder.
Even with his limited experience, Bjólf could tell something was wrong. He could see now that one of the sails was only partially secured, flapping limply at one of its corners in the steady breeze; the other had seemingly come completely adrift of its sheets and billowed uselessly from the yard, occasionally catching the sun as it did so.
"Who are they?" asked Bjólf.
"Arab traders," said Bjarki. "From the East." He nodded directly ahead.
Bjólf could now just make out figures on the deck - dark-skinned faces and arms, heads and bodies garbed in white - waving in their direction.
"Arab traders in trouble," snorted Svein, dismissively. "Either their fathers never taught them how to sail, or they have worse problems on board."
Distant raised voices now carried across the water as the westerly wind ebbed. Although Bjólf could make out none of the words, there was no doubting the tone. They were cries for help.
"What do you think?" said Svein.
"Attacked, maybe," ventured Bjarki.
Olaf narrowed his eyes, rubbed his thick beard and gave a grunt. "That's what they want us to believe."
Bjólf frowned at his uncle. Olaf seemed to sense his question without once taking his eyes off the horizon.
"They're no merchants," he muttered.
"Who then?"
"Pirates."
Svein nodded. "A trap." Without a word, he reached down beside his sea-chest and began to strap on his sword. Olaf gave a curt nod to Bjarki, who turned and gave a shrill whistle towards the helm. The tanned and weather-beaten faces of the crew looked up to see him make a concise gesture - a single slap of his clenched fist against a flattened palm. It was a signal Bjólf had seen only twice before, when arming for a raid. There was a creak deep in the timbers of the ship as it changed course directly for the Arab vessel. Olaf made a sudden turn and headed back along the length of the ship.
"But, how can you be sure?" said Bjólf, hurrying after.
"If they'd been attacked, they'd be dead. But since they have a good many able-bodied men on board, alive and well, one has to ask how they got this far if they can't even secure a line."
Bjólf, alarmed, gawped at his uncle and then towards the nearing vessel. "They intend to trap... us?"
Olaf gave a deep, rumbling laugh. "No! They don't intend that." He stopped and stared back at the other ship for a moment. "They don't yet realise what we are."
His uncle gave another hoarse grunt, then resumed his purposeful march.
"The sun is behind us," he continued, stopping at the place where his sea-chest stood. "They see only a silhouette of a square sail. They assume we are a trading ship returning to the East - exactly what they are pretending to be." He hauled out his coat of mail "Fully laden. Easy prey, especially when coming to the aid of another we believe to be in distress."
"So, what do we do?"
Olaf shrugged matter-of-factly. "We go to their aid." He flipped the mail coat over his head, shook it down over his huge body and began strapping his wide belt around it. "No reason to disappoint them." In a few swift moves he had slung his sword over his shoulder and tucked his axe into his belt. All around, without a word, men were doing the same, checking blades, passing out shields and tightening helmet straps. "Better arm yourself, little man," said Olaf. And with that, he took up his battered helm and headed back towards the prow.
Bjólf
hastily grabbed his weapons and scurried after, struggling with belts and straps as he went. He recalled the words of his uncle a few days before, when they had first entered these calm, blue waters: "Take care," he had said. "Our people inflicted great damage upon these regions in past years, and some hereabouts have long memories."
"But... What happens when they realise who we are?" Bjólf called nervously. Olaf stopped next to Svein at the prow.
"They just have..." said Svein.
Bjólf looked again towards the Arab ship. The urgent babble of voices was clear now, but the pattern of movement on board had entirely changed. Instead of waving in distress, their attention had now turned inward. One of the sails had already been secured, and the rest dashed about in a bustle of frantic activity, some shouting impatiently at each other. Just one man - their lookout - was completely motionless; a strange, still point amidst the mayhem, staring silently back at them. Bjólf could just begin to make out his features. It seemed to him the man wore an expression of barely concealed horror.
"Hoy!" called Olaf, standing high on the prow. Despite the Arabs' haste in securing the other sail, it was clear the longship would be upon them before they could get underway. Some turned and began more wild gesticulations. Voices called out urgently. Olaf's booming voice answered in what, to Bjólf, seemed disconcertingly friendly tones.
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