He thinks about this.
“A skeith and two knarr? With over a hundred warriors. I can’t part with these.”
I’m ready for his resistance. “So don’t part with them. Just place them under my command.”
“You already have a share, Ladda, for the boats you’re building.” He begins to walk, so we have some distance from the others on the beach. I take it to mean he’s considering it, so I walk with him.
“I know,” I say. “But I want boats in the water now.”
He sees the sense of it, sees, as well, my need for it. “You think they’ll follow you?”
“They’ll follow me if I pay them.”
“You’ll have to pay them from your share,” he agrees.
“I know how this works, Goat Pants,” I say, laughing.
“King Goat Pants,” he replies. “We almost have a deal.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll need a kiss,” he says.
I sigh dramatically, playfully, and tap my cheek. He pecks there and seems satisfied. A final laugh, and he returns to his circle in the sand.
For my part, I have a crew to provision for.
Night, and the rowers at rest just offshore. Some of the ships have been tied together, and there’s music that accompanies the slap of the water against the hull. A leather tent has been set up on the deck, but the rain has held off, even though the sky darkened with more than nightfall. Most sleep, but others drink, clatter knucklebones against the hull and cheer or swear. Some pray quietly, some snore.
There are things beneath us in the black water, awake or asleep, capable of erasing us from Midgard in a single swipe or swallow. Serpents beneath the world, always. Not tonight. Or not hungry for us, at least.
The sound of a rowboat rises over the sound of distant singing, and it’s Ragnar. It’s bright enough from torches that I can see the blonde of his scruffy beard. I can see, too, that he’s smiling.
“King Goat Pants comes to honour us with his rowing!” I call to him.
“Ladda! I hardly recognized you,” he teases. “I thought it was the ghost of the pirate queen, Alfhild.”
“And I thought she was your grandmother,” I answer cheekily.
“Grandmother? No, but something of a family legend.”
“Wife or daughter of Siward, I thought,” I tell him, taking the rope he tosses me. I secure the line to the gunwales and pretend I don’t notice him admiring the knot.
“So many Siwards in my family I can’t keep track,” he says, climbing aboard. “I’m surprised I’m not one.”
“But Ragnar, ‘the ruler,’” I say. “Your parents had plans for you.”
“Or Ragnarok, the end of the world,” he teases. “Dark plans, maybe.”
“Why have you come to see me, World-Ender?”
“Our bargain,” he says.
“What? I let you kiss me already,” I say, surprised. I expect he’s here for another. Or more.
“You kept my sword,” he says, grinning.
“That I did,” I admit. I had forgotten. I had removed it earlier, placed it in the center of a bundle with woolen cloak and my traveling things. Spoon and board and comb, the wolf skin which I haven’t needed since the wind died down.
I hand him the beautiful thing; its steel seems to glow dimly in the moonlight.
“This concludes our deal,” I say formally.
“We’ll drink, then,” he suggests.
“You’ll have to row back to your own boat.”
“Do I?”
“Yes, Ragnar, you do.” I don’t like where this is going, if he decides to be stubborn.
“One drink then,” he says. “I can row on one horn of wine.”
“Wine?” I mock him. “What Frankish galley is this, Ragnar? We have ale, or mead. And I’d have to steal the mead.”
“Ale then, thanks,” he says. Gods, the boy is beautiful. And the freedom of the day, the speed of the boats–my boats–south into the darkening sea, this has my blood up. But I suspect Ragnar could be difficult to get rid of.
I lie. I don’t suspect it, I know it.
A stoppered jar fills the horn he pulls from his belt, and he doesn’t look away as he downs the thing. A sadness crosses his face, just for an instant.
“What?” I ask.
“My father,” he says, perching on the gunwales, steading himself with a rope and taking care not to rattle the axe handles hanging there. “I barely knew him, hardly remember him as a child. But in the end, he brought me here. With you.”
“His death, you mean.”
“I was born here, you know. In the north. My father went to raid, and while away, a man—his friend—Ring, seized the throne, so there was a war. I was taken away to Birka, and raised there in hiding.”
“You’re no Swede,” I say to him.
“No, but my father had allies there. And with his lands in Jutland, he had supporters. So, we made a plan to conspire with Ring against my father, and I was supposed to be Ring’s puppet.”
“But it was a trap,” I say.
“It was a trap. We earned Ring’s trust, and I betrayed him, securing my father’s throne,” he says, like he’s reciting something. He swallows the mead, a little trickle in his beard he wipes away with the back of his hand.
“How?”
“How? I murdered him,” he says plainly.
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen.”
Suddenly I think of Kara, jarl for just a day but still only twelve years old. What have I done to her?
“Then what happened?” I ask, trying to distract myself.
“We returned to Jutland. To Heithabyr, and my father’s lands there. It was the only time I had with him. But he had business in the north, and was here when Fro invaded. My father was killed in battle. So,” he says, taking another drink, “I sail to avenge his death.”
“A Norwegian prince, raised by Swedes, with a Danish army, searching for a Swedish king.” I think I need a drawing in the sand to keep track of all this.
“A tangle,” he nods. “The gods choose these things for us.” He reaches out and touches my hair gently.
“All right, Goat Pants,” I take his hand from my head, press it into his own chest. “Back you go.”
“So soon?”
“My ship, my rules. I’ll have you thrown overboard.” I’m only half-kidding.
“I am the king, you know.”
“You are the king of the Nordvegr,” I say, pointing at the shore. “You’ll have to swim for it.”
“Not a bad night for a swim,” he says.
“Don’t tempt me,” I reply.
“That’s why I came here,” he laughs.
“You think I don’t know that?” I’m not upset with him, but he doesn’t understand. “The men, Ragnar. They can’t see me as your woman. They have to see me as their commander and in no other way.”
He shrugs. “You are right as always, Jarl Hladgertha.” He steps with one long stride over the side of the skeith and into his rowboat. “But it was worth trying.”
I untie the knot, toss the rope to him. He catches it without looking.
“Ragnar,” I say, as his boat begins to wobble away. “Garrison my village, and I’ll make you king. In reality, not just in name. That’s our only deal now.”
“Make me king,” he says, raising the sword slightly, “and I’ll make you rich.”
Dawn snaps the sails awake, and within minutes of stretching, groaning, stowing, and pissing overboard, my three ships have rows in the water. The sun is already warm, with the wind a chill behind us, though the horizon still lies under a leaden sky.
To war then, tomorrow if not today.
There is no plan. If we discover Fro’s fleet in the water, we attack them. If we see them beached, we take as many of their boats as we can. If no sign, we take to shore and find a high point to see what we can. This is a hunt. We’re steady, and look for tracks.
After an hour of rowing, we pull the oars
aboard and the crew breaks fast. There’s little talk among them. The grey seeps towards us, and even warmed by labour, we are chilled by sweat, so cloaks are unbundled, pinned, adjusted. Jars of fresh water passed along the line.
The fleet is spread out and ragged in such times, subject to the fickle nature of wind. It doesn’t matter much—south, south is all that counts. Across the sea to Jutland, as the Nordvegr falls away at our stern.
This, I can only guess, is the main thing of war. The waiting. The routine. To meet the demands of the ship after each creak or groan, after the slip of the tide, the shift of the wind. Serve the ship, which serves the sea, to serve the war.
On my signal the fleet takes to oar again, like a single animal. A cat stretching in the sun. In moments, the fleet again is a line, barely a ship’s width between each oar-tip. And then back to the relentless rhythm and the speed and spit of salt.
South to the sea. The sea and the darkening sky.
It’s the rumble, first. And each of us knows its meaning.
Thunder. The gods are coming.
When the lightning flashes in the distance, it’s almost an absurdity. Black outlines of masts, sail-less beneath the storm our own ships have yet to greet. The enemy, far sooner than any of us could have expected. The sea white-capped and choppy, no current we can make out. Backs groan into each pull of the oar. A woman, slight as myself, scrambles barefoot up the mast to slip the yard and drop our own sail.
“Hold!” I shout. She looks around at the faces of the men, for signs of support or defiance.
“I said hold!” I yell over the rising wind. “We keep our speed as long as we can. There’s the line. We sail for it. Now row!”
War is not new to me, I realize. I’ve seen it. Seen the faces of the slayer and the slain. My own face has worn defeat, and vengeance. I have slogged with my people through misery and grief, I have known blisters from spear and the spray of hot blood on my hands and face. I won’t be dismissed by men who row boats paid by my own silver, my own debts, my own oaths. And despite all I know of war, I know boats better.
Speed is force. And the wind is with us, at least until it tears us apart. I can work with that.
Another lightning strike, another forest of masts burned into and out of sight. Impossible to count but greater numbers than our own. Twice? Impossible, as I say, everything’s moving, tangling in vision.
I look to the boats in our line, and we’re more or less the right flank of it, seaward. The line holds. Ragnar means to sail right into them, a frontal assault, so long as the wind is with us, though ship after ship drops sail as the wind becomes increasingly dangerous.
But our sails are up, despite what the storm is throwing at us. As a result, my three ships are now in advance of the line, the wind giving us additional speed. If we are the first to slam into them, we’ll just be the first to die.
I have a plan.
I can’t shout over the wind. There are flags, but I don’t know what they mean and I’m embarrassed to ask how to use them. I can only trust my other two captains, whose names I can’t even remember, will follow.
Gods, let them follow.
I scramble to the stern, shins banging against each thwart, half-swinging from stays. I greet the steersman, wet from spray, and point. His arms are like roots of some great tree, and he throws their strength into the starboard. We wheel away from our own fleet, breaking seaward to flank the enemy line.
Gods, let them follow.
And they do. My three ships are with me, sails now straining now luffing against the storm, whipping as loud as the thunder.
Fro’s line holds. None peel off to meet us, as I had feared. Or would have feared, had I thought of it until now. It is only a few minutes until we are nearly alongside them, though well off from the left flank of their fleet.
Nothing but ocean behind us. Between us and the shore more ships and axes than I can count. Than I could have imagined this morning.
I haul myself up on the stays so that I can be seen by my other ships, pointing south-west, out to nothing. Pointing hard. We row, and keep a line of our own. Now past and west of the navy which closes fast upon our friends.
I’m waving my arms now, shouting. I point southeast, as though the fury of my pointing could shift the wind, shift the current, as if by my will alone I can bend three ships at once to a new fate.
The rain is soaking us as we are under the full fury of the storm. I point to the woman who has not moved from the mast, and she climbs, understanding, up to the halyard line, descending again on the rope as the yard begins to come down. Likewise, my two knarr drop sail, and we’re all rowing now. Rowing for our lives.
This is it, two thirds of a wheel, with only the hardest to do as we fight the sea to come ‘round the rear of Fro’s forces. We grind our oar blades into the salt, seemingly to go nowhere. Harder then, all of us, muscles burning, skin tearing from hands on oars and ropes, throats roaring just to turn, turn east, turn ‘round. And with each stroke, a small victory, though the storm itself resents us.
Painfully slowly and hard won, it is working, with a line kept and now we are directly behind the Swedish navy, seventy boats by quick counting, in a strict line. Arrows fly northward from the fleet into Ragnar’s line. We know some are already dying.
“I curse you,” I mutter at first. “Fro, wolf of Birka and Uppsala, I curse you.”
I make my way to the bow.
“Fro, hear me. I come for you. I, Hladgertha, daughter of the mother whose face you cut with an axe, daughter of the father you cut down in the night, I curse you. I am coming to kill you.”
My voice is rising. I nearly give in to the hypnotic rhythm of my own dark song, when an idea hits me like a blow to the back, the hair on my neck standing. I look around. Buckets. Barrels of pitch. Buckets of sand. Buckets for bailing.
“Water!” I yell. “Seawater in those buckets, now!”
Oarsmen drop what they are doing, throw the buckets overboard with the ropes attached and drag them back full.
I myself grab a small cask of pitch, used to seal planks, and begin painting the gunwales. It is madness, and no one understands. How could they?
“Soak the sails!” The men get to it, dousing the sails, now on deck yet still wadded to the yard, returning the buckets to the sea, and repeating. I’ve covered the front third of the boat with pitch and a rag.
“Get that sand ready, and for the sake of the gods, keep the water away when I say so, or we will all burn!”
They stare at me blankly, until I take the rag to the coal fire in the iron pot at the center of the boat, holding flame in my hand. I light the pitch and drop the rag overboard, though not before feeling the flame’s heat crack my skin like a whip.
The gunwales of my own ship are on fire.
I have set my own ship on fire.
“Row!” I scream, shrill and mad in what I’ve done, the crew terrified that I’ve killed them already, or resigned to the fact.
“Fro!” I shout. “I curse you. I Hladgertha, who have survived you, curse you. The gods curse you. The fates curse you. The spirits of my family look at you from Valhalla and deny you. You die this day and you will never enter the hall of your forefathers! You will wander the depths of the sea and the fish themselves will shun you!”
We are upon the enemy. I see the faces of Fro’s men, turning and horrified at every sailor’s worst nightmare. Fire at sea.
“Odinn sees you with one eye and looks away!” The flames rumble like the thunder, like the wind. “Thor sees you and strikes lightning upon you. Freya gazes upon your ugliness with disgust and vomits! Heimdallr sounds not the Gjallarhorn and closes the bifrost to you! The Valkyries fly over your slain and cooling corpse and do nothing! I curse you, Fro, leech-worm and frost-bitten toe! I curse you to Hel!”
The boats tack and scramble, spin sideways as one whole row of their oars stop to grab water or sand.
The rear of Fro’s line breaks, scattered, panicked. We have cut the ene
my in two.
“Oars up!” We’re close enough now. Any more and our oars would tangle with theirs. “Archers!” and short bows appear from under the thwarts. Some stand, others fire from where they are sitting but the backs of the rowers in front of us are easy targets, and our forty warriors fell a hundred, two, in an instant. The sky is full like the flight of starlings as our arrows find the enemy.
“Sand!” I scream. “Keep the water away from the pitch of or the fire will spread!”
Half the crew fights the fire I started, while the others pound relentlessly into the enemy, shot after shot after shot. The fire is soon out, with the help of some hides my crew have the sense to apply. I don’t know if I’ve damaged the ship or if I’ve merely scorched the wood.
I also don’t know how this axe appeared in my hand, just like that day on the beach.
There is a gigantic groan of hull on hull, as we grind alongside a knarr of the enemy. A dozen of my warriors already aboard, swinging axes into the foe.
The hull is too round, and I can’t make the jump from where I’m standing on the bow. There’s a kind of bridge between our smaller ship and the larger one of the enemy’s, but it’s a bridge we hold, we own, and we pour across it like blood through a wound.
And I’m aboard their ship, my axe gone, buried in the chest of a man who has vanished into the sea with it. I have my shield, left hand in the boss and right hand, still singing with pain, on the rim the bottom edge finding knee, back, throat, skull. Slamming warriors between my shield’s edge and their own hulls. Over and over.
My voice is an animal thing now. The caw of a raven. It is the scratch of a talon on the wind. My arm is glowing with pain, yet there is no thought to stopping, none to mercy, and even less to fatigue. I can’t see out of my left eye, as salt from blood spray has glued it shut.
“Ladda,” a voice says. “Ladda!”
And I wheel around to crush the throat that dares hold my name.
But Ragnar is quick. He’s unarmed and simply plucks the shield from me. I’m shaking and weak. How long have I been like this?
The rain continues, but the sounds of battle are over.
“Ragnar?” my voice is almost nothing. A ghost of salt and burnt skin.
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