Scramasax (13 page)

‘Yes!' exclaimed Solveig, cupping her hands tightly as if they were guarding some truth. ‘Yes, that's how it was.

And how things are.'

The north wind hissed through a split in the square sail as long as a sword-blade.

‘I like your words,' Solveig said. ‘You play with them.'

The German met her eye for a moment, and gave her a nod, and then Solveig continued on her way between the banks of men slumped over their oars.

For the next three days, Harald Sigurdsson's crew sailed west without sighting a single one of their companions. To begin with, the stink of their own vomit and the stench from the horse-stalls knotted their throats, and their mouths were full of complaints that they'd left the Golden Horn in too much of a hurry, without making sacrifices or even saying charms. One guard pointed out that Empress Zoe's priests had wafted incense and sprinkled holy water over all of them in Hagia Sophia, but that was as nothing to most of the Varangians. As hollow-cheeked Priskin declared at some length, ‘The god of the sea is Ægir, even if Nico and the Greeks have another name for him. Ægir's the god of the sea, and he always has been, and his wife with her drowningnet is Ran, and the god of winds and squalls and storms is Njord. If we don't pray to them, we're fools.
Men can die even when they're not fated if they're neglectful.'

Is this true? wondered Solveig. Is my life as uncertain … as chancy as that?

‘You, Priskin,' said one guard, ‘you make all your opinions sound like facts.'

‘You should have been a temple priest.'

‘Yes, words, words, always words.'

‘Go on! Give half of them away to Grimizo!'

But as the wind went round to the south-east and ushered their boat towards Sicily, the mood aboard changed. The Varangians recovered their appetites, Solveig and two guards sat shoulder to shoulder stitching the rips in the square canvas sail, several Greek oarsmen searched out and stopped all the leaks, while a number of guards mucked out the horse-stalls and swabbed the deck. Often they shouted to each other, now and then they sang together, and Solveig saw how at midday, when the scorching sun rode high in the skull of the sky, they fell quiet, almost dazed by the brightness of the day. By the way the light seemed to fizz and the clouds seemed somehow to gather and rise – rise as if they were ascending to Asgard – and the sea was not one blue but every blue, not one green but every green, intense yet transparent.

‘Little hops,' observed Solveig. ‘Little skips and jumps.'

‘All the way to Sicily,' her father replied. ‘That's what Nico says. Already it's as if the squall were just a night-hag.'

‘
Swa swa hit ne waes
,' agreed Solveig.

‘What?'

‘Edwin used to say that.
Swa swa hit ne waes
: as if it had never been.'

For a while the two of them stared at the waves, almost
mesmerised, and then Solveig said, ‘I keep wondering about Edith and her baby. And her home in England.'

‘What about us?' asked Halfdan. ‘When will we see home again? It's more than halfway through Hay Month.'

Solveig filled her lungs with air, and closed her eyes, and very slowly let it all out again.

Oh! The sweetness and the ache. The sweep of the waves and the curving hill-brow above their farm, the sharpness of salt and the fragrance of hay, her two cows lowing and the croon-and-wash of the ocean, all her journeying and the womb of home: they were all part of each other.

‘Everything is different here,' she told her father. ‘Everything is strange. But it's less strange because we're here together.'

Halfdan put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Solva!' he said fondly.

On the next day, Solveig again had to stitch tears in the ripped sail, but this time she was working on her own, and by midday she was flushed and her fingertips were red and puffy. She made her way to the bows and sat there on her own, sweating. She yawned. She measured the width of her scramasax in its sheath – just a little more than the distance from the tip of her middle finger to her second knuckle. Then she slipped off her belt and stitched three loops to the back of it so that she could wear her scramasax at all times.

Tamas spied her. He walked up and stood right over her.

‘You're in my light,' Solveig complained.

So the young Viking sat down beside her, and for a while he watched her. ‘You know what they say?' he observed.

‘Who?'

‘Men. About women.'

Solveig groaned.

‘Wives and mothers, hearth-guardians, farm mistresses, feud-harbourers …'

Solveig groaned again. ‘I've heard it all before. “Flying into rages … beautiful, dangerous … fickle … witches.”'

Tamas pursed his mouth. ‘But I've never heard them called warriors, well-armed, bloodthirsty, battle-hungry—'

‘We're not!' exclaimed Solveig, and then she saw Tamas was making fun of her.

‘You're giving women a bad name, Solveig,' Tamas said, and he poked her in the ribs with his left forefinger.

‘Anyhow,' countered Solveig, ‘what about the Valkyries?'

‘They're not fighting women,' Tamas replied. ‘They bring back slain warriors to Valhalla. Now, shall I help you to put on your belt?'

Solveig swatted him with the back of her hand. ‘Go away!' she exclaimed.

‘You do know how to wear it, do you?'

‘My scramasax? Of course I do. Flat across the small of my back. The edge of the blade upward.'

The third day was no less peaceable, no less glassy than the first two, and Solveig at last completed her repairs to the sail. She flopped down on to the deck, just aft of the banks of oarsmen, and gnawed a rib of pork, most of it gristle, and swilled it down with sour milk. Then she delved into her bag of bones: one tine of a red deer's antler; an oval disc of walrus bone; lumps of whalebone and soapstone, both a bit bigger than her clenched fist, and a piece of amber twice as large as her thumbnail; bits and pieces of oak and maple that she had already begun to work into combs, pins and beads. Last
of all, Solveig pulled out the shoulder blade that she'd found at Stiklestad.

I don't know why I've brought it all this way, she thought. Or rather, I do. I'm going to carve runes for the battle-ghosts I heard singing in Trondheim fjord, runes for every Viking who has died in battle. The waste! Oh, the grief of it! Some so young. As young as I am … as young as Tamas!

Solveig flinched.

No! I wish I hadn't thought of that.

She groaned and rocked from side to side.

Sometimes, sometimes I can scarcely bear my thoughts and memories.

Solveig stared at the bleached shoulder blade. I don't know what the right runes are, she thought. Not yet.

Almost absently-mindedly, she delved into the bone-bag again, and grasped the wad of bog cotton at the bottom of it. Then she teased out her father's brooch nestling inside it and she squeezed it. She squeezed it until her blood warmed the gold.

Solveig picked up her little hammer and began to tap it on the deck. Without realising it, she was tapping the very rhythm, the double-beat, of her own heart.

I could carve a bone for Tamas, or cut a charm for Nico – one to send the sea to sleep.

Solveig stared down at her lap and the deck without really seeing them.

Or else Grimizo. Something to cheer him up. But I think he quite likes being gloomy.

The longer Solveig sat there, the more people she thought of. Oleg, the master carver in Ladoga, she could give him something on her way home; a bone comb for her little stepbrother Blubba who told her at midwinter that he wanted her to be happy again. Or Maria? What
about Maria, surrounded but alone, her father dying, her mother locked away in a nunnery?

It's like this, she thought. Always. At first. I don't know what, don't know who for, don't know which piece of wood or stone or bone. Even if my skills were as great as those of Volund, the master smith, I still wouldn't know. I don't think I would. No, I have to wait …

Carving means warming your cold skills with all your thinking, your imagination, your feeling.

‘W
omanish! That's what you are!' exclaimed Skarp.

Snorri gave Skarp an affable smile and then slipped Solveig a wink.

‘Soft!' said Skarp loudly.

‘What a terrible insult, Skarp,' Snorri taunted him.

‘I asked you what you thought about having a young woman aboard, not to sick up all your feelings. Since when were soft feelings a match for hard thoughts?'

‘Poor Skarp!' observed Snorri. ‘He doesn't trust his feelings. Doesn't he know there's woman in every man and man in every woman?'

‘A young woman aboard,' Skarp repeated. ‘I'm warning you – no good will come of it.' Then he jabbed his right forefinger in front of Solveig's nose. ‘You're a bad omen.'

The afternoon air began to gather around them. It thickened into mist and blinded the glaring red eye of the sun. Its chill stopped the words in Snorri's and Skarp's throats.

‘On my way to Miklagard,' said Solveig thoughtfully, ‘the blacksmith told me about magicians who make death-spells.'

‘That's right,' said Snorri. ‘Sendings. In Iceland, they do.'

‘Vapours and mists like this one,' Solveig went on. ‘He said they can board boats and cross oceans.'

‘There you are!' exclaimed Skarp. ‘What did I tell you?'

The thick white sea mist closed around the
ousiai
. It clamped her in its grip, and the wind dropped, it fell away to nothing. The sip-and-suck of water around the bows sounded quick and keen, and so did the creak of the boom, but the shrieks of the seabirds following the boat and the sound of Nico's tolling stern bell were somehow muffled.

This mist has taken away my eyes, Solveig thought, and now it's taking my ears as well. The bell sounds so doleful. Even this sip-suck, slap-drip, it's like the sound of a hundred widows weeping.

Solveig shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. And then, without knowing quite why, she began to feel very restless. She made wings of her arms and pulled back her shoulders. She stood up again.

‘What's wrong?' asked Snorri.

Solveig sighed. ‘I don't know. I think I'll find my father.'

‘Poor man!' said Skarp half-heartedly.

As Solveig glided along the deck, she called out her father's name several times, but now her own voice sounded muffled, almost lifeless. Twice she tripped over the legs of Greek oarsmen who swore at her, twice she apologised. She groped her way to the mast and leaned against it, cheerless.

Where is he? she thought. I haven't seen him all morning. How long until this sea mist lifts?

Solveig closed her eyes and started to murmur words, as if she were singing-and-saying a charm, and then she twisted them round each other:

The sending or the swirl ing sea mist or lung of Sicilian fog, whatever it was, heard Solveig. It began to lift.

Solveig kept screwing up her eyes, then opening them as wide as she could, blinking, and wiping her salty cheeks. Whatever she looked at swayed and danced – men made of flesh and bone, wooden crates, coils of hempen rope, even the thick torsos of the boom and mast – as if they were uncertain of their shapes.

Then she heard the bell. No longer tolling, no longer doleful, but clamouring, warning, as the helmsman thwacked it again and again with a mallet.

At once Vikings and Greeks were leaping to their feet all around Solveig, grabbing their weapons, their oars, getting in each other's way, yelling.

‘There!' bawled the guard Gissur, pointing to starboard. ‘There!'

Solveig stared. Everyone stared.

‘Dhow!' shouted the helmsman. ‘Saracen!'

The dhow sliced through the silken water alongside them. One hundred paces. No! Less than that. No more than an arrow's shot.

Then Solveig made out the row of men standing on her deck, watching them.

How did they know we were here? In all that mist? Did they throw its cloak over us? Was it them? Father, where are you?

‘To your benches!' bellowed a voice right behind her. Harald Sigurdsson. ‘Every man to his oars! Row, men! Row!'

Then Harald rounded on Solveig. ‘Stay where you are, girl.'

‘My father!' Solveig gasped.