Bracelet of Bones (9 page)

Solveig shook her head. She felt so sad for Edith, so angry at what she’d heard.

Edith smiled, though. She put two fingers to her lips and lightly touched the top of Solveig’s head.

Talking like this, thought Solveig, it’s like having a sister. I hope we’ll be able to talk again soon. I think I could tell her about my father and everything.

“Yes,” Edith told her, “I believe Ottar will be good to me.” She crossed herself. “And I believe I’ll have a better home in heaven.”

“You’re Christian!” exclaimed Solveig.

Edith and Solveig were able to sit down together the next afternoon while Red Ottar was sleeping off a tide of ale. But Solveig had only just begun to tell her about her father when the helmsman came right up to them.

“Torsten!” exclaimed Solveig. “I was telling Edith about my father.”

Torsten nodded. “Land,” he said. “Land. We’ll be in the estuary of the River Neva before dusk.”

Solveig and Edith stood up. With Torsten, they watched the fuzzy blur on the skyline begin to turn blue and green.

“I must wake Ottar,” said Edith.

But as if he were possessed of some sixth sense—some inner alertness—the skipper woke himself. He stretched and got to his feet.

“All hands to the oars!” he roared. “All hands! Bergdis with Odindisa! And you, Edith, you with cack-handed Solveig.”

Edith smiled at Solveig. “Whether you can or not,” she said.

9

“S
olveig,” Bruni called out between one stroke and the next, “some of us think you should be a man.” Then he looked across at his fellow oarsman. “You should too, Slothi!”

Red Ottar and Vigot guffawed. So did Bergdis, who was sitting in the hold, plucking a chicken.

“If a horse could laugh . . .” Red Ottar called out, pulling at his oar, “if a horse could laugh, Bergdis, it would laugh like you.”

For a while the crew kept their own counsel as they strained at their oars.

“All right!” said Solveig. “Cover my hair, then.”

“You’ll need more adjustments than that!” Vigot sang out.

Everyone guffawed again. Except Edith. She just sighed loudly. And then, less loudly, “The same old gibes, time and again.”

With the steering paddle lashed, Torsten was able to leave the helm for a few minutes. He stepped up to the oarsmen, flexing his forearms.

“Want a turn?” Bergdis asked him.

“Like you want to be plucked,” Torsten replied. “How’s the hand, Solveig?”

Solveig pulled her oar. “Women,” she said, “seldom complain.”

The five men jeered.

“Solveig’s right,” said Edith.

Bergdis looked up. “You men think women should be more like you. We know life would be better if you were more like us.”

Red Ottar twisted right around on his bench. “You gat-toothed, loudmouthed harridan!” he exclaimed. “Just how should we be more like you? I’ll remind you, I’m your skipper.”

“We’d all be lost without you,” Bergdis said in a mocking voice. And then she added, under her breath, “I’ll stuff you, Ottar, like a festival chicken!”

“You’re jealous, Bergdis, aren’t you?” Vigot chimed in. “Jealous of men. Jealous of youth.”

“I’m who I am,” Bergdis muttered.

Then, once more, the three pairs of oars pulled together—in unison if not in harmony.

Standing just in front of Solveig, Torsten loomed over Bruni.

“Got a wife, have you?” he asked.

Bruni didn’t reply.

“Got a wife? I said.”

“In every port,” Bruni replied.

“Back home in Iceland?”

“I have,” said Bruni in a measured voice.

“Norwegian, is she?”

Bruni threw down his oar and stood up. “Who told you that?” he asked, and he planted himself right in front of Torsten and glared at him.

The helmsman stared back at Bruni, unblinking. “I thought as much,” he said in a dark voice. Then he spun around, strode back to the stern, and unlashed the paddle.

Solveig felt confused. What is it between them? she wondered.

Before dusk, Red Ottar joined Torsten in the stern. “How about that strand over there?” he asked.

Torsten gazed at it. “Easy enough,” he replied. “Shallow. Sandy.”

Red Ottar slid his hand along the gunwale. “Run her up gently, then,” he said.

The skipper called over to Bard and Brita. “The hold’s awash!” he told them. “I want you to start bailing as soon as we beach her. Understand?”

“Yes,” said the children.

“Yes,” Red Ottar repeated. “You can sing for your supper.”

It was cold that night, the stars glittered, and the crew slept under their sail as well as their furs and skins.

At dawn, after breaking their fast with cold herring and a lump of bread, they were on their way again, but even so it took them all day to row and sail up the River Neva into a lake so wide they couldn’t see across it. That evening, they had to beach their boat for a second time.

Before she lay down, Solveig heard wolves howling.

“Garthar,” said Vigot.

Solveig looked puzzled.

“The wolves of Garthar.”

Solveig hugged herself.

Vigot eyed her. “If you want,” he said, “you can come and sleep under my skin.”

Solveig thrust out her chin. “I’d be safer with the wolves,” she said.

The next day Red Ottar and his companions hugged the shoreline of the great lake until they came to a wide waterway.

“Nearly there!” Torsten sang out. “Two hours up here.”

“Two hours!” exclaimed Vigot. He turned to Solveig. “Two hours and we’ll be tying up in Ladoga. I’ll show you everything. The Earth Town. The fortress. The best market on the whole eastern way.”

“Except for Kiev,” Torsten said.

“Kiev,” repeated Red Ottar, savoring the word.

“But we’ll need a river guide,” the helmsman told him. “I don’t know all the twists and turns and sandbanks and . . .”

The skipper held up his right hand and silenced him. “We wouldn’t have gotten this far,” he said, “without a good helmsman. You’ve done us proud, Torsten.”

“Thank Ægir and Ran,” Torsten replied. “Thank the spirits of all the drowned men.”

“I’m thanking you, man,” insisted Red Ottar. “Each of us has his own skills, but some matter a great deal more than others.”

In the blue hour, when everything’s chancy and uncertain—earth and water, thought and feeling—Red
Ottar and his crew paddled quietly up the wide waterway leading from the lake into the harbor of Ladoga. They ate and drank aboard, and while they did so, Red Ottar told them about the town’s Swedish ruler and the people who lived there.

The skipper was in such a good mood that he ruffled Solveig’s golden hair. “Ladoga,” he said. “Ladoga, where Garthar begins. So what’s the best part of a journey? The beginning or the middle or the end?”

Sobs of wind. Now and then a skuther. And a whistling as it tore at the rigging.

Solveig lay between sleeping Bergdis and Odindisa and looked up at the sail that the crew had stretched from gunwale to gunwale as a makeshift tent.

Then she reached up and trailed her finger pads across it. It’s well woven, she thought. It needs to be. Like a wife who endures blusters and bruises. But here and there the warp and weft are not so tight. And look, the salt wind has scoured this patch here and almost worn it away.

Solveig lifted her head and peered through one of the sail’s wind eyes. Fluffy ribbons of pink cloud. A flock of little scooting shorebirds, flying low.

This is the time of day I like best, she thought. A sort of no time when there’s all the time in the world.

Ladoga’s got a Swedish ruler . . . that’s what Red Ottar said. But he didn’t tell us why. All the names of people and places, they muddled me. Them and that ale . . . Solveig screwed up her eyes and felt her temples throbbing. I think he said Swedish earls have ruled here for
seven generations. That’s since my . . . great-grandmother’s great-great-great . . . no, I can’t work it out. I remember the name of the first earl. Rurik. That’s what Red Ottar said.

Solveig yawned. And then, in her sleep, Bergdis wrapped her left arm around Solveig’s waist, but for fear of waking her, Solveig didn’t push her away.

Time passed. Who knows how long? And then Solveig heard singing. Not the voice of the wind, not a gurl or a gushle, but a sweet, airy voice:

Who’s that? wondered Solveig. The voice of an ice maiden. Or one of the air spirits.

Christ, thought Solveig. Is that what she sang? Solveig screwed up her eyes again. That’s not right. Freyr and Freyja, they make our weather.

Then the song began again, and only later did Solveig realize that the singer must have been Edith.

“You sounded like a spirit,” Solveig told her.

“The voice God gave me,” Edith said, pursing her pretty lips.

“Was it a sort of charm?” asked Solveig. “For fair weather.”

Edith nodded. “A song of hope, anyhow.”

Solveig opened her eyes very wide. “Expect the worst, you said.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t hope.”

“I think hope’s like . . . opening a door,” Solveig said. “So good things can come in.”

Edith nodded. “Actually,” she went on, “this song’s not very hopeful.”

“About fair weather?”

“No, about women and men. It’s about a Frisian wife.”

“With frizzed hair?”

Edith laughed. “No, a wife from Friesland.”

“Where’s that?”

“South from Denmark,” Edith told her. “Down along the coast. The wife’s waiting for her husband to sail home, and the song says women are fickle and unfaithful.”

“They’re not!” objected Solveig. “Not like men.”

“So I’ve changed the words,” Edith said, smiling.

Edith looked at Solveig, and Solveig looked at Edith, and they both laughed.

Solveig could see at once how well the fortress of Earth Town was sited, overlooking the bend where the wide waterway leading north from the lake met the great river.

“Volkhov,” said Torsten. “That’s the river’s name. And we’ll ride her halfway to Kiev.”

“Ride?” said Solveig.

Torsten smiled. “On the back of our sea beast,” he told her.

The quay lay right beneath the walls and guardhouses of the fortress, and several boats were already tied up alongside it. Two of them looked very much like Red Ottar’s, but at the far end Solveig saw a strangely shaped vessel. It wasn’t clinker-built, and it was very broad in the beam. Like a barrel, almost. It had quite a short mast, and its pennant glittered in the early-morning sunlight. Then Solveig noticed that there were at least a dozen smaller craft tucked into the harbor walls—cobles and knarrs and skutes and little boats without masts, good only for rowing, as well as a couple of hulks lying up on the quay itself, thick with barnacles and weed.

“First things first,” Red Ottar announced. “You, Bruni, and Vigot, sort out the gangplank.”

Before long, the whole crew was carrying boxes and rolling barrels down the gangway onto the quay, no more than fifty paces from another Viking trading boat.

“Ulrik,” observed Bruni. “Your rival, Ottar. Your twin.”

“A twin I can do without,” Red Ottar replied.

“He always gets here first.”

“But always sells the least,” the skipper added. “And buys the least as well. If you don’t sell much, you can’t buy much.”

Once the crew had carried everything down onto the quay, Odindisa and Bergdis set up trestle tables and began to lay out their wares: hides and furs—sable and red squirrel, black bear, reindeer—hunks of wax, board games of checkers and chess, boxes of salt, two wooden platters glistening with honey scooped out of one of the barrels.

“What about the weapons?” Bruni asked.

“Tomorrow,” said Red Ottar. “Or the day after. We need something new each day.”

“And the carvings?”

“Three combs and a few oak beads,” said Red Ottar scathingly. He looked straight at Solveig, unblinking, and the roots of her hair tingled. “You’ll have to do better than this,” he warned her. “Much better, or you’ll end up as fish food.”

Bergdis stared at Solveig, silver-eyed. “I warned you, Red Ottar,” she said loudly.

Then Bergdis took Bruni’s arm, and the two of them walked several steps away along the quay.

They’re talking about me, thought Solveig. They’re both against me.

“Right!” Red Ottar told Solveig. “I want you and Slothi to watch over our goods. If you need to ease yourself, call Edith, and she’ll stand in for you. There’s a place at the end of the quay. Understand?”

“Yes,” Solveig said. “And I’ll carve as I keep watch.”

“No, I want two pairs of sharp eyes keeping watch at all times. If anyone looks like buying, give me a shout and I’ll come down with my weights and measures.”

So while the remainder of the crew busied themselves aboard and went on errands into Earth Town, Slothi and Solveig kept watch over the merchandise, and Bard and Brita, chasing up and down the quay, used them as a base for their games.

The very first men to approach them came not from Earth Town but from the strange-looking boat moored at the far end of the quay.

“Bulgars,” said Slothi knowledgeably. “That’s a Bulgar boat. They come up the Volga and around to Ladoga. They’ll be after our furs.”

“Do you know them, then?” asked Solveig.

Slothi shook his head. “Look at their beards. Each as long as the other. And their baggy trousers. Red as rowan leaves in October. Bulgars! I’d recognize them anywhere.”

“Have you often sailed here?” Solveig asked.

“Seven years,” Slothi said. “Several times each year.”

Each of the Bulgar men gave Slothi a handclasp and then bowed politely to Solveig.

Solveig wasn’t quite sure what to do. She put out both her hands, one uncovered, one bandaged, but the Bulgars ignored them. Then one of them said in rather thick Swedish, “Allah go with you!”

“Christ go with you,” Slothi replied at once. “And the gods go with you.”

“What’s Allah?” Solveig asked.

“Their god,” Slothi told her. “You’ll be meeting plenty of new gods!”