After their victory Harald and his warriors made blood sacrifice to honour the Æsir. They brought with them bowls from the sacred places, some of copper, some of stone, and with them the holy arm-rings on which oaths were sworn, so that all the array of the temple was with them.
Then they slew captives and captured their blood in the bowls. With some they sprinkled their ships, and the rest they gave their dragonheads to drink, that the dragonheads might taste victory and know that they honoured the gods.
When he had given thanks thus, Harald feasted with his warriors.
I: GEORGE
George liked Charlotte coming over on weekdays for sailing lessons. ‘Working from home,’ Charl called it. It was good to have company, especially girl company, and there wasn’t much of that round the yard. Some people like sailing on their own. George liked someone to talk to, and Charl was fun to be with. George would take her down the pub any time. Friendly, too. Most women with posh accents tended to get all superior with George, like Charl’s mum, but Charl looked her in the eye and laughed a lot, like they were two naughty kids having a dare.
She reminded George of someone she knew at school just before her mum died. This girl was about a year older so she seemed all grown up, and like Charl she was tall and classy and beautiful, the sort of girl who’s so popular she has friends dancing round her. George had known girls like that in other schools, but this one was different because she was kind and let George join her group. Those few months were George’s happiest days at school. Any school. She may even have had a bit of a teenage crush on her. It went wrong, of course. George got too confident. Let her get close.
George’s mum always said George had a healing touch, and George believed it because she’d massage her mum’s shoulders and the sides of her head when she was sick, and it made her feel masses better. Sometimes George could make her sleep just by stroking her head. Her mum taught her some words to help her concentrate, like a little song, and showed her how to use her fingers, but the power, she said, was inside. The trick is to empty yourself, a bit like a trance. Healing can be unlocked but it can’t be taught.
George never tried it at school. She didn’t want to stand out. Not until there was snow that January and her friend took her toboggan out onto the hillside, but too many girls tried to sit on it. The friend came off with her hand wrapped in the tow rope but the toboggan kept going with the other girls, and next thing they knew there was a lot of screaming and her friend was holding up her hand with her fingers sticking out in all the wrong directions.
What George did was just instinct, and this girl was the best friend she’d ever had, so she stroked that mangled hand and muttered the words and let her mind find that special nothingness. As she pulled the fingers back into place she felt the heat flow through her hands into her friend and knew she’d be OK.
It must have looked more spectacular than it was. The fingers were probably only dislocated, although George didn’t know that, so they just slipped back into place with a sound like rolling dice and George stroked her hand some more, just to make sure, feeling all warm and happy. Her friend stared at her hand and closed the fingers, ever so gently, and they worked. George smiled at her, pleased, but her friend pushed herself away with her good hand, sliding on the snow on her bum, staring at George, frightened. The next day no one wanted to be with her. They said she was a freak, a witch like in the films, but real. After that George didn’t try healing any more, even when her mum fell really sick.
So when someone like Charl wanted to be friends, George was a bit wary. People like Charl lived at the centre of the crowd, while George lived on the edge, knowing that friendships can hurt. One step at a time. George thought about her a lot, wondering what she saw in her. But George’s memory of Charl seemed to fit with yellow, and yellow is a happy, friendly colour. There were pinks in that mental image as well. Pinks go with love and friendship, but George wasn’t sure if that was real or if it crept in because she really wanted the friendship to work. The mind can fool you like that, if you aren’t careful.
But by the third lesson, George was starting to relax. It was a day of leaden cloud, low enough to brush the hilltops. Showery, summer rain made little plastic ‘puk’ noises against their foul-weather gear, but there was a good sailing wind so they went anyway. They were coming up to the harbour entrance, close-hauled into a south-westerly, when Charl interrupted a monologue about navigation buoys and rules of the road.
‘Have you always sailed, George?’
‘Nah.’ George paused. Maybe it was time to release a little truth. It was no use pretending to have had a fairy-tale childhood. ‘Me mum died when I was fourteen. Then I had three foster homes in two years, between that and leaving school, and the last one was here, on the coast. I got a job in a boatyard, weekends and holidays, and learned. It was the first time I’d found something I was good at.’
‘What about your father?’
‘Never knew him. I think he’d moved on before I was born.’ Enough. George looked around her, and waved an arm at the harbour behind them. ‘Did you know this is one of the largest natural harbours in Europe?’
Charl frowned as if she’d recognised the blocker. One day, George would tell her a bit more, but not yet. It’d be too embarrassing. George had met Charl’s parents. She had two of them, and they looked rich. Charl hadn’t been dragged around the markets in a camper van, selling hand-made charms and bracelets, astrology charts and magical pixies. All cash in hand, nothing to spoil the benefits. Charl’s parents would have driven her to school in a flash car. George’s mum waited at the school gates in baggy, Turkish trousers like an escapee from a harem. And there’d been lots of schools. Always moving on, always leaving debts behind them. When George was really young, she thought all families did this, but as she got older, kids noticed her mum was different, and kids are cruel.
After a pause, Charl reached over and squeezed George’s hand where it rested on the tiller.
‘George, you’re awesome.’ She sounded all soft and tender so George didn’t know what to say.
‘Here, you take her. Just keep her heading out to sea.’ George handed over the tiller and settled back against the cockpit, just as a wave burst against the bow, spraying over Charl before she could duck.
‘You beast! You did that deliberately.’ Charl shook her head like a dog, with water running down her face and her hair turned to rats’ tails. She blew a wet strand away from her mouth and began laughing, and George had an urge to give her a hug. They ended up huddled together in the corner of the cockpit where the cabin gave them some shelter from the spray, with Charl steering one-handed. Behind them stretched a meandering, novice’s wake.
‘How’s Jack getting on, George?’
‘With Draca? Much faster than I expected. He’s there all hours.’ He’d be at the yard before George, though she was an early starter, and still be there late into the evening. ‘Chippy Alan will finish the structural stuff on the hull next week. Then we can step the new mast and rig her.’
‘What’s he like, around the yard?’
‘He’s a bit quiet. Withdrawn, like. Him and Chippy Alan get on all right.’ Jack was friendly enough when they did speak, but they didn’t talk much. She was a bit hurt by that.
‘He wasn’t always quiet. When we married, he was…’ Charl lifted one hand and flapped it, like she was struggling for words. ‘He was a god, a hero, and we were the golden couple.’
‘What, a real hero?’
‘They gave him a medal. Then he went off a second time, when he was wounded, and he came back changed. He’d have these brooding silences when I couldn’t reach him. He’d start shouting if I tried too hard. Such rages. You saw one after the funeral.’
‘It must be a bit harder than getting over man flu, having your foot blown off.’
‘I stayed in the cottage, last night. It’s getting worse. Like something’s taking him over.’
George reached out and corrected the cour
se herself rather than interrupt.
‘We’ve had our ups and downs, Jack and me, but we’re still good friends. More friends than anything else, these days.’
Charl’s honesty surprised George. Her thigh pushed against George’s, even through their foul-weather gear, but then it was a small cockpit.
‘If you and Chippy could lift him out of himself from time to time, I think it would help.’
‘Sure. I’ll try.’ George was well flattered.
Charl gave her an awkward hug through the bulk of their foul-weather gear.
‘Thanks, George.’
‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll make a play for your lovely husband?’ George returned the pressure on Charl’s leg, just so that she’d know that George was teasing.
‘He is gorgeous, isn’t he? When he’s in a mood though, you could have him, with pleasure.’ Charl didn’t sound as if she was joking. ‘But when we first married, before he was wounded, he was like a Great Dane, all bounce and bark. Sometimes I had this urge to throw him a stick.’
Laughing together was fun. Bonding.
‘And you know what they say about men with big hands?’ Charl nudged with her leg and opened one hand in her lap, suggestively. Her smiling eyes stayed on George’s, as if she was testing her reaction.
George stood, uncomfortable, and scanned the horizon. Ahead of them a line of whitecaps, clear and sharp as a weather front on a forecast map, showed where the tidal flow sweeping round the bay clashed with the main stream flowing down the channel.
‘Let me show you how to change tack.’
‘What’s happening over there?’ Charl had seen it too.
‘It’s called The Race. Two streams merging. It comes and goes with the tides. The wind is pushing against the tide at the moment, so it would be a bit lumpy. It gets a lot worse under Anfel Head.’ George pointed at the line of cliffs that swept away to the south.
‘I don’t mind living dangerously.’ And that from a woman who’d squealed and grabbed George for support on her first outing.
‘Nah. Maybe when you’ve a bit more experience.’ George took the tiller and altered course. Charl had the confidence of someone who’s never seen a bad sea up close and personal. Soon the wind was on the quarter, filling both sails in great, swelling curves.
‘So how did Jack win his medal?’ George asked as they settled on the new course.
‘I heard more about it around the barracks than from Jack. I gather he ran up a hillside under fire to bring a machine-gun back into action after it was knocked out by an RPG.’
‘RPG?’
‘Sorry. Rocket-propelled grenade. I was a barracks brat, you see? I grew up knowing the lingo.’
‘Watch your steering.’ Charlotte had let them turn away from the wind, and the boat heeled as it caught them square on the beam.
‘Sorry. Jack actually got knocked over when a bullet hit his body armour, but he just stood up and kept going. They say he shot two Taliban off the gun as they were turning it against his troop.’
‘Wow.’
‘Pretty awesome, huh? His men idolised him. His sergeant got quite emotional when he described that run. Imagine that, a hulking great marine sergeant going dewy-eyed. He said the hillside around Jack was boiling with bullet strikes.’
‘Were many killed?’
‘Marines? Amazingly, only one of the machine-gun team. Wolfe. I hardly knew him. The other one in that post was only knocked out by the grenade. What was his name? Miller, that was it, the one they all called ‘Dusty’. He told me he came round, all groggy, just as the position was overrun. He saw them finish off Wolfe and turn on him, and then Jack came charging in and blew them away. One of the Taliban actually fell on top of Miller, they were that close. Miller made it sound like a spectacular goal at football.’ Charl wiped her fingers over her eyes. Her voice caught a little as she continued. ‘His Military Cross wasn’t announced for a few months. He’s very quiet about it, though. Never told his family.’
‘Why not? I’d be dead proud, me.’
Charl thought for a moment. ‘I’ll let him tell you that, if the subject ever comes up. Anyway, by the time the honours list came out, he’d volunteered for another assignment. “Training job,” he called it, though I think that may have been a cover story. Three men went with him: Dusty Miller, Chalky White, one other I can’t remember. Miller and White came back in body bags, and Jack came home without a foot. And he’s never forgiven himself.’
They were both silent, absorbed in their thoughts. The rain had stopped, lifting back into a sky of dirty cotton wool. Charl turned to George with the wind blowing her hair away from her face in raggedy streamers and emotion shining in her eyes.
‘It’s wonderful to be able to talk like this, George. It’s good to be friends.’ She put her arm around George’s shoulders again, and squeezed. Charl was a woman who touched a lot. She hugged her again when they came ashore, squeezing George’s body against hers as if that was the only way she could show how much fun she’d had.
‘Come to the cottage on Sunday, George. Let’s prise Jack away from the boat and have a barbecue.’
As George accepted, she wondered if Charl would have kissed her on the lips if she hadn’t turned her cheek.
II: JACK
Jack was seeing things.
Two days before, he’d grabbed breakfast at the outside table, toast in one hand and a pen in the other, while he made a ‘to do’ list for Draca. The early sun had been low and dazzling across the water of the harbour, making him squint at his notebook, and out of the corner of his eye, Grandpa’s legs had stretched out of the shell of the boat shelter. It had been such a natural, friendly sight that Jack didn’t even look up. They moved, uncrossing and recrossing at the ankle, before that pulse of wrongness had Jack’s skin prickling. The image had been so clear that he had walked down the lawn, swallowing in dry-mouthed disbelief, until he could see into the shelter as far as the seat. The dragon watched him back, alone, its mouth gaping in silent laughter. The shadow of a branch played across the bald patch of earth where Grandpa’s feet had scuffed the grass bare.
And, more tangibly, when the girls came back from their sail, he’d just found his grandfather’s flameproof Zippo lighter in one of the cockpit lockers. He was sure that locker had been empty. Jack picked it up, caressed the polished steel and flipped the lid. It needed refilling, but it still worked. It was such a personal, tangible relic that for a moment Eddie seemed supernaturally close. His hands had cut the timbers at Jack’s feet, and had shaped the carpentry of the chart-table.
Jack held the lighter pinched between his fingers and rolled it along the top of the hatch, like a square wheel, listening to the crying of seagulls and the slap of halyards against aluminium masts. Wafting out of the hatch came the smell of newly cut wood and, still, the faint scent of French cigarettes. And on a far jetty, beyond the rotating corner of the lighter, clunk, Charlotte and George were embracing. Clunk. Still hugging. Clunk. With a kiss that was not quite a lover’s kiss. They turned and walked down the jetty towards the office, looking at each other and laughing together like a pair of teenagers whose body language says ‘I wanna be like you’. They both carried a bag in their left hands with their life jackets hooked over their right shoulders in a way that pulled their open foul-weather jackets back from their curves. Synchronised allure. But who was displaying to whom?
Maybe it had been a mistake to bring it out into the open. In the past, Charlotte had been so discreet that he hadn’t even had to look the other way. Jack lost sight of them among the boats.
Clunk, clunk. What would Grandpa say to him now? Would he be engaged in the restoration project, or would he think Jack had let him down by not scuttling the ship with him inside it? Would he understand Jack’s horror of burning bodies? How he’d allowed a clinical cremation rather than risk the same stink that Chalky White and his own, roasting foot had made? Jack hadn’t even held his father to his promise to cremate the figurehead with him.
‘Draca ahoy!’
Jack lifted his head over the rail. George stood below, looking up at him from beneath a baseball cap with ‘Boss Bitch’ embroidered above its peak. She’d discarded her foul-weather jacket and he had an echo of that first day when she’d challenged him from the bottom of the ladder. It might even have been the same tight, hooped T-shirt.
‘We must stop meeting like this. People will talk.’ Jack hadn’t meant to flirt. It just came out.
George didn’t smile enough. It transformed her face. A broad, heart-shaped face, he realised, that tapered into a delicate chin. She had a way of standing with her tummy slightly out that made her look less lean than she was.
George lifted the cap and finger-combed a strand of orange hair out of her eyes. What was it that Charlotte had said? Nice body, shame about the hair.
‘Me and Charlotte are going to the pub. Do you want to come?’
And she was his wife’s girlfriend. Despite himself, he felt a stir of prurient interest. Just for a moment.
‘Thanks, but I’ll crack on here.’ He hefted a sander lying by his elbow.
George looked disappointed. He could bet Charlotte wouldn’t be.
*
That night in the cottage, he waited up for Charlotte.
And heard Grandpa.
He’d read somewhere that many people ‘see’ dead relatives after a bereavement. They say that the subconscious throws an image or a memory onto a place, so perhaps that was why he sometimes felt he had company.
The evening that he left Charlotte with George, it was a cough. Jack had pulled Grandpa’s last diary out of the desk to kill time while he waited.
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