Bjorn swam up to join them. ‘The troll,’ he said fearfully. ‘Did you not see him?’
‘I saw someone,’ Gest muttered, gripping firmly onto the sheer strake. He glanced up at the silent cliff. ‘Just before the rock broke free and fell.’
‘Do you mean the troll dropped it on us?’ Asgeir said. He looked up, dashing the water from his face. ‘I see no one above,’ he added, pointing, ‘but I can see where the rock came from.’
Part of the cliff had visibly fallen away, and a trail of broken scrub and smashed rock ripped down the side. The rock itself had sunk without trace into the fjord waters.
‘No sign of the troll, if such it was,’ he said. ‘Are we all here?’
There was a quick headcount, and Asgeir concluded that two men were missing. Gest gazed at the spreading waters that surrounded them. Had they drowned, or been struck directly by the rock? He had a bruise in his forehead, which he guessed marked had been where a fragment had stuck him. Most of the men had still been aboard the ship when the rock hit.
‘We must get the ship afloat again,’ he urged his companions.
After a few minutes’ strenuous effort, they hauled the vessel over until its keel was bottommost, then swarmed aboard. While several men baled out what water remained using their helmets, Gest took stock of their situation. Although men had lost weapons and armour in the fall, enough remained aboard for them to continue without returning to the hall for more equipment. They paddled the ship back into the cave and held a council of war.
‘It seems that the way is blocked to us,’ Gest commented wryly. ‘Whether that was a troll we glimpsed, or a common outlaw, we can’t be sure. But someone is defending that path up the cliff. We must find another road to take.’
‘But there is no other path,’ said Asgeir, shaking his head. ‘Only up the cliff. If the troll guards that way…’
‘It is the troll we have come to fight,’ said Bjorn loudly. ‘We need to draw him down here and slay him.
‘And how will we do that?’ Asgeir challenged him, his voice echoing in the dark gloom of the flooded cave. ‘And what if there is more than one troll up there? There are said to be many.’
‘This rock makes an ideal fortress,’ said Gest in a quieter tone. ‘But even the strongest of forts has its weak spots. What do we know about it? It is swathed by trees on two sides, another side hangs directly over the fjord. What about the fourth side?’
‘More cliffs,’ said Asgeir. ‘There is no way we could get to it from that side, no path we could take.’
‘Through the trees?’ asked Bjorn. ‘Can we find a path through the wood?’
Asgeir shook his head. ‘No one has ever found any way through the trees,’ he said. ‘It is said to be impenetrable.’
‘Then that leaves us with the cliff,’ said Gest. ‘We must find a way up. Or more than one?’
Bjorn looked at him strangely. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
Gest turned to him. ‘If there is only one troll,’ he said, ‘and we found more than one way up the rock, the troll could not guard all the paths. ‘
Asgeir rested his hands on the crosspiece of his sword. ‘A feint?’ he said. ‘You want some of us to throw our lives away while the rest climb the cliff another way?’
‘It would mean dividing our forces,’ Bjorn said.
‘You may value your whore highly,’ Asgeir said, ‘but you can’t ask more men to throw away their lives in a futile attack.’
‘It’s not just about Hild,’ Gest said. ‘As long as trolls remain up there, one or many, they can come and raid your lands with impunity. Why Earl Sigvaldi has not dealt with the problem before…’
‘I think we can see why he has not done anything about it.’ Bjorn said. ‘The trolls are too secure for men to shift him.’ He shook his head. ‘We know though that they leave the rock to hunt. We should wait for them to do so, then attack.’
‘Not while he holds Hild captive,’ Gest said. ‘We need to strike and strike fast before they kill her, or whatever it is they plan.’
Asgeir gave him a mocking look. ‘Afraid you have a rival?’ he said. ‘This expedition is proving a failure, much like your last.’
Gest wanted to seize Asgeir by the throat and throttle the life from him. He restrained his impulses and looked questioningly at the oarsmen who had been listening to this interchange in silence. ‘What do the rest of you think?’
‘Two men have been lost already,’ said Gorm, who sat by the gunwale. ‘What tale will you tell their kin? What will you tell our kin if we die here?’
‘We should return to the hall,’ said another man, Egil. ‘We’ve lost the food we brought with us. Even if we aren’t killed by the troll, we’ll starve here.’
Asgeir snorted. ‘We won’t starve, you coward,’ he said. He indicated the cave walls where they met the water. Shellfish festooned them. ‘If you’re hungry, help yourself to the mussels. Or fish from the fjord waters.’
Some men produced fishing rods and dangled lines over the side. Others waded ashore to prise mussels and oysters from the rocks. When they were busying themselves, Bjorn shifted closer to Gest.
‘These locals show no loyalty to you, a king’s man. What’s more, we can’t even depend on them to defend their own livelihoods. Would it be different if it was their own livestock or thralls?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Gest, ‘but these trolls are well defended. I say we should try our way through the wood.’
‘That would take too long,’ Bjorn told him. ‘Who knows what has happened to your leman already?’
Gest gritted his teeth. They had met with an impasse. He watched as hungry crewmen picked mussels from the rocks and ate them raw from the shattered shell. In the woods they would be able to light a fire. He was as hungry as the others.
Going to the hold he found firewood that had escaped the worst of the dipping in the fjord waters. ‘Light a cooking fire,’ he told one of the other men. ‘There is no reason why we must eat raw meat.’
He went back to Bjorn, who was now speaking with Asgeir. ‘…very well,’ the latter was saying as Gest squatted down beside them. ‘We shall make a two pronged attack. There is a place on the far side of the outcrop where some of us could climb. Other men can wait in the ship, and if a troll appears, throw spears to keep him pinned down.’
Down by the keelson the fire began to burn, producing more smoke than flame, and Asgeir coughed irritably.
‘What is that fool doing?’
‘Lighting a cooking fire,’ Gest told him. ‘You men,’ he called to the warriors fishing in the gloom, ‘You can cook your catch here.’
Men waded back ashore, hands filled with barnacle rough shells, which they set down by the fire to cook in the embers. The fire blazed more steadily, and it began to light up the cave. Crabs scuttled away into dark shadows. Gorm had caught a fish with his line, and he hauled it aboard. As he proudly carried it towards the cooking fire, he looked about him.
‘What’s that over there?’ he asked, as he squatted down to gut the fish.
There was a patch of greater darkness in the fire lit wall.
‘It looks like a cave,’ Bjorn said quietly. It looked like he was right. The base of this cave within a cave was flooded, but in the flickering firelight Gest could just see its floor rising from the waters and plunging deeper into the rock.
‘That’s not a cave,’ he said. ‘It’s a tunnel. A tunnel leading upwards.’
Asgeir turned to look at him incredulously.
‘Do you mean…?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ said Bjorn. ‘There has to be a way the trolls get up and down the rock. That cliff is almost unclimbable. It’s in the nature of trolls to lurk in caves and tunnels. This must lead to our foes’ dwelling place.’
‘It’s said the trolls live in a cave,’ Asgeir commented.
Gest grinned. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We’ll eat and recuperate our strength, and dry our drenched clothes by the fire. Then a group of us will
go up the tunnel, taking flaming brands with us. We will see if it leads to the troll’s dwelling place or not. Even if it does not, it may take us higher up the cliff.’
After a hasty meal of fish and shellfish, cooked on the embers of the smoking fire, eked out with what remained of their original provisions, Gest took Bjorn and several others over to the tunnel mouth. Asgeir remained aboard with the rest of the men.
‘I’ll await your return,’ he said. ‘If it leads somewhere to our advantage, send a man back and I will join you with the others.’
Gest raised a hand in farewell. He had replaced the hand axe he had lost with another from what remained of the stores aboard the ship, and this now hung from his belt. He didn’t anticipate any need to use it, but they had no idea of where the tunnel would lead. Perhaps into the very realm of the trolls itself…
They waded ashore. Gest lifted high the flaming brand he had taken from the cook fire. Crabs scuttled away across the ooze and weed. The tunnel led away into the darkness, becoming increasingly slippery, although the weed did not reach much further than the edge of the water. With Bjorn and the others behind him, he clambered up onto the wet rocks, clinging to slimy tussocks of weed, until he stood on a slippery shelf festooned with weed.
He looked back at the others. Bjorn and Gorm also held fiery brands. Behind them the still waters stretched towards the cave mouth. The ship bobbed at anchor, the cooking fire illuminating the faces of the men aboard so they resembled trolls themselves. It was a weird, eerie scene.
Bjorn scrambled up to join him. ‘Never look back,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The object of our quest lies ahead.’
Before climbing onto the rock he had handed his brand to another man, and now he turned to take it back before helping the man up beside them. Gest looked further up the tunnel. It grew narrow, but the ground was now wet sand. He moved forward to give the rest a chance to get up out of the water. His brand fizzed and smoked in the dank air.
He examined the walls. They were rugged and wet, clearly the work of nature. Other than the slither of booted feet on slippery rock, muffled curses from their owners, and the distant drip of water on rock, all he heard was an eerie silence.
He padded up the passage, feet squelching in the cold sand. As it grew narrower it also began to climb. He turned again and looked back at the others. All now stood bunched together, gazing about them in awed silence. Bjorn met Gest’s gaze, and Gest beckoned him over.
Bjorn ushered the others up the sandy ground. Gorm at the back held a brand, Bjorn came in the middle, while Gest forged forwards. The thud of their feet echoed through the increasingly cold air. The tunnel sloped upwards, turning first one way, then another. In places it grew so narrow that Gest had to scuttle through crabwise. In others it widened out into spaces where the light failed to illuminate more than a fraction of the blackness.
It grew bitterly cold. The air was no longer wet, although the ground underfoot was still slippery. But it was cold and lifeless. It felt to Gest as if he was leading his men into some icy kingdom of the dead. And somewhere in this darkness dwelt trolls. One at least, perhaps more.
Out in the light of the sun Gest had felt able to scoff at the notion of such beings. The mysterious attacker would turn out to be one of the outlaws of whom there were so many in Earl Sigvaldi’s poorly governed land. But here, in this deep place beneath the world, he felt less sanguine. He was more than half willing to believe in any amount of trolls.
The cold closed around him, and chilled him to the bone. A hand just as cold seemed to clench itself round his heart. A cold hand of fear.
Onwards they tramped, further and further up the winding tunnel. And yet what would await them at the other end?
—14—
They came out into a wider space, and here the tunnel ended. Scowling, Gest lifted his brand higher. It was almost burnt to a stump, but in its unsteady light, they all saw two cave mouths yawning in the rock face before them.
It fell to Bjorn to ask the obvious question. ‘Which way?’ he asked.
Gorm wetted a finger and held it up in the air, first before one cave mouth, then the other. A thoughtful expression flitted across his face. He turned to the others.
‘The right hand path is stale and airless,’ he said. ‘Also, if you see, it goes downwards after a short way. The path to the left leads to the surface, I’m sure of it.’
‘But which way will we find the trolls?’ asked Bjorn. ‘Such folk lurk underground, so I would say the right hand path.’
Gest indicated their brands, all of which were burnt down to smoking embers. ‘Our light will not last long,’ he said. ‘We should make for the surface and take stock.’
Gorm nodded. Bjorn shook his head. ‘We must seek that troll we saw,’ he insisted.
‘I’m as eager to find him as you are,’ Gest told him levelly. ‘But we have no notion of where he is. Except that when we last saw him, he was aboveground, on the cliff. So we should make our way to the surface, and perhaps we will meet him there.’
‘And what then?’ asked another of the oarsmen. But his question went unanswered.
They began their ascent of the left hand tunnel. This grew steadily steeper, until they were scrambling up, sometimes even scaling, walls of nigh vertical rock. Gest saw nothing but the next ledge, as he hauled himself towards it, heard nothing but the panting and slithering of men. He was slathered from head to foot with gritty mud; beneath his grubby clothes he was wet with sweat, and the brand he gripped, hampering his movements since it left one hand unusable for climbing, was little more than a cinder.
At last he reached a wider ledge. Here he leaned back against the rock wall and looking down the shaft at the men toiling after him. Two more brands danced like fireflies in the murk, and the shapes of men were indistinct as they progressed like snails up the rock face. He panted for breath and tried to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but succeeded only in smearing mud across his face.
One by one men joined him, each one sitting down on the ledge, wheezing gratefully for breath. Next Bjorn reached them. For a while even he said nothing, only peered over the edge down at the men still toiling below. At last he lifted his head.
‘It can’t be much further,’ he said. ‘Is there any sign of daylight?’
Gest cupped the flame of his brand with his palm and nodded at Bjorn to do the same. Now the only light came from Gorm, at the back of the group still climbing. Except… Bjorn’s face took on an expression of delight as he saw it in a weak shaft of light that filtered from aloft.
‘There’s light coming from somewhere above us,’ he murmured. ‘We’re almost there.’
Gest took his hand away from the brand with a wince. Although it was still hot, as he could testify, the flame was growing steadily dimmer. He glanced up in the direction of the sunlight, which had vanished in the light of his brand. Would his light last long enough? Or would they have to make the last leg of the climb with no light other than that falling from above?
Bjorn held his own brand high and looked down at the climbing men. Now only Gorm and two others were still making their way up, and Gest held out a hand to help them up beside him. Gorm settled down, handing his brand to another man, yawned and stretched, leaning back against the rock.
‘How much further do we have to go?’ Gorm whined. ‘The light won’t last much longer.’
‘We know,’ said Bjorn. ‘But daylight is visible up there.’
Gorm extinguished his brand and darkness increased.
‘What did you do that for?’ Gest snapped.
Gorm looked up, startled. ‘What need have we for light now that there’s sunlight?’ he asked.
‘We don’t know if we’ll be able to get any closer,’ Bjorn told him sternly. ‘It could just be a shaft of light, not a cave exit. Here, let me relight that brand.’ He leaned over with his own brand and touched it to Gorm’s, which lit again after a moment, but its light was still feeble.
‘Don’t do anything unless you�
��re ordered to,’ Gest told Gorm. Gorm sat back, muttering to himself. In the torch glow, his face looked dark and angry.
‘Is everyone rested?’ Gest said after a moment’s silence. A chorus of unenthusiastic grunts answered him. ‘Then get up,’ he snapped. ‘We’re carrying on now.’
With his brand in his left hand, he rose, clutched the rock with his right, then hauled himself up, feet skittering for a foothold on the ledge. He climbed over a boss of rock and scrambled up onto the next ledge, which led in a zigzag up the rock face. Here he crouched, and looked back down to see the others rising grudgingly to their feet. Bjorn was chivvying them along.
The halt had seemed like a good idea, but it soon proved to have been unwise. Having rested, the men were now unruly and rebellious. Gest himself was cold and wet and tired, while his joints were blazes of agony. But he kept going, his mind filled with visions of Hild’s possible fate spurring him onward.
The cold shaft echoed with the thud of booted feet and the angry curses of weary men. The brands shed so little light that they only made the dancing shadows darker. Anything could be looming there, watching the climbing men with hungry eyes. At that moment Gest fervently believed in the trolls, in monsters with sorcerous powers, waiting only for them to take a wrong turn and then to descend and slay them.
But as he reached another level ledge, he caught a breath of air on his face, and he was dazzled by a light from above. Briefly he peered upwards, holding his sputtering brand away from his face. There, high above him, like a single star in a night sky, was a light.
‘At last,’ came a voice from below, as Egil scrambled up to join him. ‘A way out.’
Gest’s lip curled. ‘We don’t know that yet,’ he said. ‘Keep climbing.’
As he drew closer to the shaft of daylight, his nostrils twitched as he recognised a familiar beast stench. It was the same reek he had met when he first encountered his opponent. He looked about himself fearfully. Was a troll lurking somewhere in the darkness? He could see nowhere where one might be hiding. The shaft was growing narrower and narrower… A cold wind sighed somewhere above.
Viking Revolt Page 10