Brotherband 3: The Hunters (3 page)

‘
I’m
Ulf,’ he said shortly. ‘He’s Wulf.’

‘Are you sure?’ Stefan asked, a ghost of a smile hovering at the corner of his mouth. ‘He looks like Ulf to me.’

‘You know,’ said Wulf thoughtfully, seeing a way to annoy his brother, ‘I
could
be Ulf. When I woke up this morning, I wasn’t completely sure who I was. I thought, maybe they’ve woken the wrong person.’

‘That’s what our mother said the day you were born,’ Ulf countered. ‘She looked at you and said,
Oh no! That’s the wrong one. That ugly baby couldn’t be mine!
’

Wulf drew himself up a little straighter and faced his brother, his body language confronting. ‘And you’d know that, would you?’

‘Yes. I would. Because I was born before you. I remember waiting around for ages for you to arrive. And what a big disappointment that was for everyone,’ he added triumphantly. He was on a roll. The fact that he was the firstborn gave him a certain moral ascendancy over his brother in these arguments.

Wulf’s face was beginning to redden. ‘Do you seriously expect us to believe that . . .?’ he began, but Lydia, a few metres away, interrupted in a low, warning tone.

‘Let it drop, boys. We are at sea, after all.’

They looked at her and she jerked her head towards the stern of the boat, and the small group clustered round the tiller. Wulf’s mouth twisted into an uncertain line. Hal had banned any bickering between the twins while the ship was at sea. Up until now they had managed to control their natural inclination, but the previous four days had been uneventful and they were becoming bored.

‘I don’t think he heard us,’ he said quietly, and was disconcerted when Thorn answered, without looking at them:

‘Oh, yes he did.’

Ulf and Wulf exchanged a startled look. In actual fact, Hal had been too busy instructing Edvin to pay any attention to them. But they weren’t to know that.

‘In any event, tell us all about knitting,’ Wulf said.

His brother glared at him. He’d assumed that they’d moved on from the discussion about knitting. But Wulf wasn’t letting him off the hook as easily as that. Ulf took a deep breath.

‘Well . . . you need needles – knitting needles,’ he added quickly. ‘And you need a ball of yar–’

‘How many?’ Jesper interrupted.

Ulf frowned. ‘Just one. One ball of yarn.’

But Jesper was shaking his head. ‘No. How many knitting needles?’

‘Two,’ Ulf said, a warning tone in his voice. ‘Two knitting needles, one ball of yarn.’

‘If you used four needles, couldn’t you knit twice as fast?’ Stefan asked, with an air of innocence that was all too obviously faked. Ulf turned a withering look on him, then resumed his discourse.

‘Then you wrap the yarn around the needles and sort of push them in and out and you . . . well, you knit.’ He made an expansive gesture in the air as if that explained it completely. The others eyed him sceptically.

A few metres away, Ingvar’s eyes flicked open as Lydia placed a damp cloth on his forehead.

‘What are they blathering on about?’ he said. His voice was weak, which worried her. He should have been recovering a lot more quickly. She smiled at him now. It wouldn’t do to show him that she was concerned.

‘They’re talking about knitting,’ she said. ‘They’re idiots.’

He tried to nod but it was a feeble movement. He muttered something she didn’t catch and she bent closer.

‘What was that?’

‘Knitwits,’ he said, more clearly. ‘They’re knitwits.’ He laughed at his own joke, but the movement seemed to cause him pain and he stopped. She took his hand and squeezed it gently, wishing there was more she could do for him.

Jesper was unsatisfied with Ulf’s explanation. Now that the subject of knitting had come up, his curiosity was piqued and he wanted to know more about it. Truth be told, he was bored, and any subject could have claimed his interest at the moment. He turned to Lydia, who had begun sponging Ingvar’s neck and face with a wet cloth once more.

‘Lydia, how difficult is knitting?’ he asked. She paused in what she was doing, then looked up at him.

‘How would I know?’ she said in a level tone.

He shrugged. ‘Well, you’re a girl, and it’s kind of a girly thing, so I thought . . .’

His voice trailed off as he realised that Lydia was holding his gaze very steadily. She let the silence between them drag on for some time, watching him grow more and more uncomfortable. Finally, she answered him.

‘I don’t know, Jesper. I don’t knit.’

‘Oh,’ he said, relieved that the awkward moment seemed to have passed. You never knew with Lydia, he thought. She wasn’t like most girls and that long dirk she wore was very sharp.

‘But I can sew,’ she said and he looked at her quickly. Something in her tone told him she had more to say on the matter. He swallowed nervously as her eyes bored into his, daring him to look away. Some response seemed to be indicated.

‘You can?’ he asked.

‘I can. And if you ever ask me a stupid male question like that again, I’ll sew your bottom lip to your ear.’

He nodded several times. ‘Right. Right. Lip to ear. Point taken. Understood. Let’s talk about something else, shall we?’ he suggested to the group in general.

‘What else do you want to talk about?’ Wulf asked. Jesper darted a nervous glance at Lydia, who seemed to have lost interest in him and had gone back to tending Ingvar.

‘Anything. Anything but knitting.’

On the steering platform, Edvin was beginning to get the hang of things. He glanced quickly astern at the ship’s wake. It was a respectable straight line – not arrow straight the way Hal could keep it, but not too bad at all.

‘We’ll make a helmsman of you yet, young Edvin,’ said Thorn and the boy’s face flushed with pleasure. He took the ship off course by a few degrees, then practised bringing her back on course, easing the tiller just before she got there.

‘That’s good,’ Hal told him. ‘Did you want me, Lydia?’

The slim girl had come aft to the steering platform and seemed to be waiting to catch his attention. She nodded at Edvin.

‘Edvin, actually, if you can spare him. Edvin, can you come and look at Ingvar? I don’t think he’s doing so well.’

‘I
thought he was getting better,’ Hal said as he followed Edvin and Lydia to where Ingvar was lying on his improvised bed in the waist of the ship. The huge boy had been wounded by an arrow during the attack on Limmat.

Edvin pursed his lips. He looked worried. ‘I thought so too. But he took a turn for the worse yesterday and he seemed to deteriorate during the night. I was hoping it was only temporary. But now . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

Ingvar was asleep – if you could call it sleep. It was more accurate to say that he was unconscious. His eyes were screwed tight shut and his head tossed back and forth on the pillow. His cheeks were sunken and his skin looked waxy and pale. There were dark circles under his eyes. Edvin knelt beside the huge form and gently placed his hand on Ingvar’s forehead. His worried expression deepened and he gestured for Hal to feel Ingvar’s forehead.

Hal did so. He turned an alarmed look to Edvin.

‘He’s burning!’ he said. Ingvar’s skin was fiercely hot and dry to the touch.

Edvin nodded unhappily. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I actually thought he’d be better off to be at sea. That infirmary in Limmat was a dark, stuffy place, full of fevers and sickness. Orlog knows what you could catch in an unhealthy atmosphere like that. I thought the fresh sea air would be better for him, and the surgeon agreed. As I say, he seemed to be recovering.’

‘What’s caused it?’ Hal asked.

‘He’s very weak and he hasn’t slept well. That means he can’t build up strength to fight the sickness. I think there’s an infection started up in the wound again. That’s what’s making him so feverish.’

‘What can you do?’ Hal asked Edvin. The quietly spoken boy had been trained during the brotherband period as the
Heron
’s medical orderly, but it had been a perfunctory training only.

He shrugged. ‘I honestly don’t know, Hal. All I can suggest is that I clean the wound again, then do what I can to keep him cool and hope the fever breaks. If we can get him through the fever, and let him rest properly, he should begin to recover again. At least, I think so.’

Hal considered Edvin’s words. He looked up to the nearby coastline.

‘Can you do all that while we’re at sea?’ he asked.

Edvin hesitated, then shook his head. ‘Not really. We’re pitching and rolling too much.’

Hal nodded. It was a reasonable assessment. He had a brief, horrified vision of what could happen if the ship lurched suddenly while Edvin was probing the wound.

‘But once you’ve done that, we can put to sea again?’ he asked. Edvin’s unhappy expression told him the answer before he spoke.

‘He can’t rest properly with the deck pitching and heaving like this. You know how it is, Hal. Your body tenses and prepares for the movement. You brace yourself against the roll when you sense it’s coming. Ingvar needs solid sleep. That’s the best healer for him. And he can’t get it while we’re at sea. In fact, that constant tensing and bracing might well have aggravated the wound in the first place.’

‘How long then?’ Hal asked.

Edvin shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe one night. Maybe two. If he can rest properly and I can keep him cooled down, he should improve. We’ll need to keep bathing him with damp cloths to bring his temperature down.’

‘And if we don’t?’ Hal asked.

‘If the fever doesn’t break, he could die,’ Edvin said. Lydia looked at him in alarm.

‘It’s that bad?’ she said and he nodded.

Hal looked away, cursing silently. Each time he got close to Zavac, something intervened. Outside Limmat, he had had to choose between going after the pirates and leaving Svengal and the crew of
Wolfwind
to drown. Now he was faced with another choice, with Ingvar’s life in the balance.

And there was another, practical consideration, in addition to his concern for his friend. Lydia voiced it.

‘You need Ingvar if you’re going to use the Mangler,’ she said quietly.

‘I know that.’

The huge crossbow would be their main weapon in the event of a fight with the
Raven
. Only Ingvar had the strength necessary to cock and load it. Ulf and Wulf could do it together, of course. But in a sea fight, they would be kept busy adjusting the trim of the sails as the ship manoeuvred. That was the problem. Everyone on the ship had an assigned role and everyone was needed in that role. Particularly Ingvar.

Once Hal had that thought, it was easier to come to a decision. He rose, and looked at the coastline running past them, shading his eyes with his hand.

‘We’d better find a place to go ashore,’ he said.

They ran on for several kilometres before he found a suitable landing place. The coastline was, for the most part, open beach. And it was swept by the north-east wind that was blowing. If the wind got up any further, they could find themselves in trouble in such an exposed position.

Eventually, he spotted what he was looking for. The land rose and the long, unbroken beach gave way to rocky, low cliffs. There was a narrow opening that led to a cove. He lowered the sail and proceeded further inshore under oars to inspect it. It turned out to be exactly what they needed. There was a sandy beach on the eastern side of the cove, and the headland would provide shelter from the wind.