Raven: Sons of Thunder (24 page)

‘I believe it, because it is the truth,’ I said, touching the Óðin amulet at my neck. ‘And Sigurd will live.’

And whether it was Asgot’s seidr, or Egfrith’s prayers, or the meddling of the All-Father himself, I could not say, but Sigurd did live. For three days he lay in his barrow of linen and skins, his life spirit fighting a dark and desperate battle against death, and on the fourth day at sunrise he emerged to a scatter of murmurs from his men. His hair was no longer greasy and matted, but golden like the sun and shining. His skin no longer held death’s pallor but was fresh and glowing, and his beard was woven into two thick plaits that looked strong enough to
moor a dragonship. He did not slouch but stood tall and strong as an oak as he took three great lungfuls of dawn air, his eyes closed in the savouring as though he were breathing for the first time.

‘Óðin’s hand is in this,’ Bram Bear rumbled, ‘up to the elbow, mark my words, lads.’ But none of us disagreed. I glanced at Black Floki who was grinning like a wolf.

‘It is not possible,’ said another man.

‘Bugger me with Thór’s hammer if he doesn’t look stronger than ever, the soul-ripping son of thunder!’ Olaf called. Then I caught Asgot sharing a fox look with Cynethryth and I knew that those two had been with Sigurd for much of the night. Had they rubbed the juice of raspberries or burnt clay powder into the jarl’s cheeks to hide that death pallor? Had they smeared chalk beneath his eyes to conceal the dark circles? Perhaps.

‘I’m so hungry I could eat a troll’s breeks,’ Sigurd announced, throwing his green cloak round his shoulders and pinning it with his silver wolf’s-head brooch. ‘What does a jarl have to do on this ship to get something to eat?’ Men laughed and slapped each other’s backs, throwing good-natured insults around, and I smiled. Our jarl was back. And we were going to be rich.

AFTER PARIS THE SICAUNA HAD SPLIT AND AT WINIGIS’S ADVICE WE
had taken the left-hand tributary towards the rising sun. For seven days we rowed up a river which the Frank told us was called the Marne, a great coil like a man’s guts that wound eastwards through a wide, empty valley. The days were shortening but the sun still had enough heat to warm our faces in the late afternoons when the ravenous wolf Sköll had chased it through the sky. ‘One day,’ Asgot had warned us, his face creased and bitter, ‘when the doom of the gods is upon us all, Sköll will catch the sun. He will seize her like a hare in his jaws and swallow her.’ Another wolf, Hati, he told us, would catch and swallow the moon and the world would be plunged into darkness. But none of this would matter, I thought. For at Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, those of us lucky enough to be chosen – the glorious dead – would be fighting alongside the gods in a desperate last battle against the frost giants, and from what I had learnt it was a battle we could not win and so what difference would it make if the world was dark?

Sometimes, one of the river’s twists would put us before the wind and for those short periods we could hoist the sail
and rest, stretching out our backs, arms and legs. But mostly we rowed against the river. It was hard going but it carved our bodies lean with taut muscle so that we were strong and dangerous as swords forged of iron and steel.

Cynethryth and Father Egfrith nearly always had lines in the water. They did not row, of course, and it seemed they wanted to do their part by keeping us rich in fresh fish, for which we were all grateful. The Marne teemed with salmon. They would gather in dark masses underwater and sometimes Cynethryth and Egfrith would abandon their lines in favour of nets which they cast from
Serpent
’s stern and hauled up full of flapping fish. Once they inadvertently caught an otter in the net. The creature had been hunting amongst a salmon shoal and when it came up, shiny chestnut brown and slick, tangled amongst the net and trying to bite through it, old Asgot laughed and danced around
Serpent
’s deck like a mad, drunken old fiend, the bones in his grey hair rattling.

‘We’re going to be richer than we ever dreamt,’ he cackled, sure that the otter’s misfortune was our good omen. ‘Richer than kings. We will never have imagined such a hoard but it will be ours.’ Cynethryth pitied the poor creature and wanted to set it free, but the godi simply sneered, snatching the net from her and beating the otter with a spear butt. Then when he bent to untangle it from the net it turned out that the fierce little creature was only half dead. It bit Asgot between his finger and thumb so that he yelped and blood dripped on to the deck and the rest of us laughed as he finished the hissing animal off with his knife.

‘You whoresons can laugh,’ Asgot spat, pointing an accusing finger at us, ‘but this means there will surely be more death before we get our hands on a king’s hoard. Some who laugh now will be beyond laughter soon enough.’ And that was enough to silence us.

The days passed slowly on the river, which eventually
straightened itself out so that we began to sail south. Because the wind often came from the north, our sails could often outmatch the Marne’s running and we could stow our oars. But sailing on a river is nothing like being at sea. It may be less dangerous than ploughing the unfettered ocean and Rán’s rolling white-haired daughters, but I have never much cared for it. On a river you are confined, trapped like wine in a flask. As Cynethryth would have said about our heathen beliefs, you are on a path along which you have no choice but to go. I suppose you can turn your ship round if a river is wide enough. You can go back the way you came, but that course in itself feels stale, for you merely re-live what has already been. And being on a river in your enemy’s land can be very dangerous indeed, as we would soon find out.

Sigurd was still not quite himself, though it was good to see him smiling with Olaf and standing at the tiller with Knut or at the bow with Winigis, learning from the guide which lord owned what land around us, and how we would have to pull
Serpent
and
Fjord-Elk
across three miles of dry ground before wetting their hulls in another river that would take us north. ‘It can’t be done,’ Black Floki said, looking suspiciously at Winigis. A quiet, fearful man, Winigis stared out from beneath the rim of his hat, his hands gripping
Serpent
’s sheer strake.

‘The Frank gives me his word that it can be done,’ Sigurd replied simply, gesturing at Winigis. ‘And since I told him I would rip his heart out of his arsehole if he was wrong, I am thinking we will soon be in Aix-la-Chapelle.’

Three days later, having passed several small vessels on their way to join the Sicauna, we came to the Marne’s upper course where turbulent currents made the rowing difficult. The air was still thick with stoneflies and grey wagtails streaked about like tiny yellow-fledged arrows. The day after that the river narrowed and grew shallow between moss-covered boulders and stands of silver birch whose leaves fluttered in the breeze.
Peregrine falcons perched in branches, still as the dead, watching and waiting. Black dippers careered with insects in their beaks or dived into the water at the stream’s edge to emerge with small fish. Here was where salmon and sea trout laid their eggs and we could go no further.

But Winigis made us go on, and we rowed gently, saying nothing, wincing whenever we felt
Serpent
’s keel scrape along the riverbed. ‘The boats that come here are rarely this size,’ Winigis had explained nervously to a frowning Sigurd as
Serpent
crunched against smooth river-worn pebbles. Then, round a bend, where the dangerously shallow water slowed to a trickle through which I could see sunlight glinting like gold ingots on the riverbed, we found the way to Aix-la-Chapelle.

‘Everybody off!’ Olaf called, nervous that our added weight was putting too much strain on the hull, which was now resting in the mud. We had nosed into a channel that had been dug into the bank and was only just wide enough to accommodate
Serpent
, and it was clearly the place where for years boats had been dragged from the water on to the land. This portage had been cut from the river’s edge into the woods where it lay spear-straight and sun-dappled and muddied by countless journeys. The air was dank and smelt mossy and men’s voices sounded small and intimate. Moss-furred tree stumps sat everywhere, the trunks long since taken, leaving only spindly birch, saplings, and misshapen ash and oak for the most part, though the forest thickened again a bow-shot in all directions.

We had only four hours of light left and so we would have to work fast.
Fjord-Elk
waited patiently a little further downstream in the deeper water, her oars stowed as Bragi the Egg and a group of his men took her mooring ropes round two jagged boulders. The rest of her crew came along the bank to help us with
Serpent
.

‘
Fjord-Elk
’s crew will unload the ballast,’ Sigurd said,
stirring a low groan from those men, ‘and
Serpent
’s men will cut trees.’ This received its own grumbles for we knew there was more to it than simply felling ash and oak. ‘I want one good, smooth stake per man, smooth enough to roll, or else I’ll use your damn legs.’

‘What about those?’ Ingolf asked hopefully, pointing to a great pile of slick stakes left by a crew who had brought their boat to this river and dumped the rollers for whoever might need them coming the other way. Sigurd drew his sword, walked over to the pile and hacked into one of the rollers. Just from the sound we knew the wood was rotten. Sigurd wiped the fragments of damp wood from his blade and sheathed it.

‘Get cutting,’ he said. And so we did.

We had to walk some distance to find good straight trees and I wondered what some crew making the same journey in ten years’ time would do for then there would be no decent trees for miles around, but that was not our problem. We took our long axes and we chopped and when we had chopped we hewed. And when we had done that we smoothed them with hand-axes and sometimes our long knives, until we each had a pale stake twice our own height and good enough to drive into the ground to build a palisade. But we were building no wall. Instead, we would lay our stakes in the mud and then we would roll our ships over them.

That night I dreamt of cutting alder and elm for Ealhstan who had been my foster-father in Abbotsend. It was a peaceful dream and I had the feeling I was leading that dream by the hand, unlike most dreams, which lead you even if you don’t wish to go. Then I was shaping the wood with the old man’s adze, following the grain to make smooth planks, one after the other. I stood back to appraise my work but did not know what I had made. Dreams are strange like that. So I went closer and my heart thumped once as though it had been kicked. I had made a coffin. Slowly and afraid I lifted the lid and then
in my dream I wept. For old Ealhstan lay in that coffin I had made, his fingers laced and his white hair long and his yellow eyes staring.
In somnis veritas
, I had heard Egfrith say once. In dreams there is truth. And in this at least the monk was right, for I had not saved my old friend and his death was my burden.

Next morning we hauled
Serpent
on to the land. Without her ballast she was surprisingly light, even with her cargo of silver and weapons, furs, amber, and other goods. When she was on dry land it was
Fjord-Elk
’s turn and Bragi and his steersman Kjar brought her to the portage where we unloaded her ballast, leaving two great piles of smooth stones which, no doubt, someone would find very useful afterwards. Since the day we had left Paris with Winigis aboard, Sigurd had made us put any guts from the fish we caught into a barrel. That barrel was now full of stinking gore and we were sick of the stench and the flies that buzzed around it even with its lid on. With a grim face Sigurd himself took fistfuls of the guts and smeared them on to the rollers we had spread out along the portage a little over twice the length of
Serpent
.

‘Slippery as Ealdred and stinks just as bad,’ Sigurd announced, smelling his bloody hand and holding it up for all to see, and even the Wessexmen laughed at that, apart from the ealdorman of course, who glowered at his former warriors. Those Wessexmen seemed little different from the rest of us now, though they prayed often and kept to themselves still. But they had given us not the least bit of trouble, perhaps hoping for a share in whatever hoard we would get our hands on when we sold the gospel book, which Father Egfrith guarded jealously in a small oiled sack over his shoulder despite none of us wanting anything to do with it, other than the silver it would bring.

We of
Serpent
lashed our ropes together to make two that, when their ends were held at the ship’s prow, were each long
enough to loop around the dragon ship, cradling the great curve of her stern.
Fjord-Elk
’s crew did the same and we took our places; some pushing from behind, some pulling on the ropes, others in pairs picking up the rollers after
Fjord-Elk
had run over them and hurrying to position them back on the track before
Serpent
. This last was the most exhausting work of all, I discovered, for we each took turns at every task and that one made my legs feel as though their insides were on fire. The best job was pushing from behind, as you could rest awhile, leaning against the hull whilst pretending to push. And in this way we set off north-east along the portage, our dragons – though their fierce heads were stowed and crosses sat at their prows – lumbering across the land in sad contrast to how lithely they swam the ocean and the rivers. Sure enough Sigurd’s stinking fish guts helped the ships slide, but the stakes we had cut did not often roll as I had expected them to. Yet the hulls slid over them, the fish livers greased the way, and we trudged on.