The Lords of the North (20 page)

For two weeks we voyaged. This was the whale path, and the monsters of the sea rolled to
look at us or spouted water, and the air became colder and the sky was forever clouded,
and I knew Sverri's crewmen were nervous. They thought we were lost, and I thought the same,
and I believed my life would end at the sea's edge where great whirlpools drag ships down to
their deaths. Seabirds circled us, their cries forlorn in the white cold, and the great
whales plunged beneath us, and we rowed until our backs were sore. The seas were grey and
mountainous, unending and cold, scummed with white foam, and we had only one day of
friendly wind when we could travel under sail with the big grey seas hissing along our
hull.

And so we came to Horn in the land of fire that some men call Thule. Mountains smoked and
we heard tales of magical pools of hot water, though I saw none. And it was not just a land
of fire, but a haunt of ice. There were mountains of ice, rivers of ice and shelves of ice in
the sky. There were codfish longer than a man is tall and we ate well there and Sverri was
happy. Men feared to make the voyage we had just made, and he had achieved it, and in Thule
his cargo was worth three times what he would have received in Denmark or Frankia, though of
course he had to yield some of the precious cargo as tribute to the local lord. But he sold
the rest of the ingots and took on board whale bones and walrus tusks and walrus hides and
sealskin, and he knew he would make much money if he could take those things home. He was in
such a good mood that he even allowed us ashore and we drank sour birch wine in a long-house
that stank of whale flesh. We were all shackled, not just with our ordinary manacles, but
with neck chains too, and Sverri had hired local men to guard us. Three of those sentinels
were armed with the long heavy spears that the men of Thule use to kill whales while the other
four had flensing knives. Sverri was safe with them watching us, and he knew it, and for the
only time in all the months I was with him he deigned to speak with us. He boasted of the
voyage we had made and even praised our skill at the oars. 'But you two hate me.' he said,
looking at Finan and then at me.

I said nothing.

The birch wine is good,' Finan said, 'thank you for it.'

The birch wine is walrus piss.' Sverri said, then belched. He was drunk. 'You hate me,' he
said, amused by our hatred. 'I watch you two and you hate me. The others now, they're
whipped, but you two would kill me before I could sneeze. I should kill you both, shouldn't I?
I should sacrifice you to the sea.'

Neither of us spoke. A birch log cracked in the fire and spewed sparks. 'But you row well,'
Sverri said. 'I did free a slave once.' he went on, 'I released him because I liked him. I
trusted him. I even let him steer Trader, but he tried to kill me. You know what I did with
him? I nailed his filthy corpse to the prow and let him rot there. And I learned my lesson.
You're there to row. Nothing else. You row and you work and you die.' He fell asleep shortly
after, and so did we, and next morning we were back on board Trader and, under a spitting
rain, left that strange land of ice and flame. It took much less time to go back east because
we ran before a friendly wind and so wintered in Jutland again. We shivered in the slave
hut and listened to Sverri grunting in his woman's bed at night. The snow came, ice locked
the creek, and it became the year 880 and I had lived twenty-three years and I knew my
future was to die in shackles because Sverri was watchful, clever and ruthless.

And then the red ship came.

She was not truly red. Most ships are built of oak that darkens as the ship lives, but
this ship had been made from pine and when the morning or evening light lanced low across the
sea's edge she seemed to be the colour of darkening blood.

She looked a livid red when we first saw her. That was on the evening of the day we had
launched and the red ship was long and low and lean. She coursed from the eastern horizon,
coming towards us at an angle, and her sail was a dirty grey, criss-crossed by the ropes
that strengthen the cloth, and Sverri saw the beast-head at her prow and decided she was a
pirate and so we struck inshore to waters he knew well. They were shallow waters and the
red ship hesitated to follow. We rowed through narrow creeks, scattering wildfowl, and
the red ship stayed within sight, but out beyond the dunes, and then the night fell and we
reversed our course and let the ebb-tide take us out to sea and Sverri's men whipped us to
make us row hard to escape the coast. The dawn came cold and misty, but as the mist lifted we
saw that the red ship was gone. We were going to Haithabu to find the first cargo of the
season, but as we approached the port Sverri saw the red ship again and she turned towards
us and Sverri cursed her. We were upwind of her, which made escaping easy, but even so she
tried to catch us. She used her oars and, because she had at least twenty benches, she was
much faster than Trader, but she could not close the wind's gap and by the following
morning we were again alone on an empty sea. Sverri cursed her all the same. He cast his
runesticks and they persuaded him to abandon the idea of Haithabu and so we crossed to the
land of the Svear where we loaded beaver hides and dung-encrusted fleeces. We exchanged
that cargo for fine candles of rolled wax. We shipped iron-ore again and so the spring
passed and the summer came and we did not see the red ship. We had forgotten her. Sverri
reckoned it was safe to visit Haithabu so we took a cargo of reindeer skins to the port,
and there he learned that the red ship had not forgotten him. He came back aboard in a
hurry, not bothering to load a cargo, and I heard him talking to his crewmen. The red
ship, he said, was prowling the coasts in search of Trader. She was a Dane, he thought, and
she was crewed by warriors.

'Who?' Hakka asked.

'No one knows.'

'Why?'

'How would I know?' Sverri growled, but he was worried enough to throw his runesticks on
the deck and they instructed him to leave Haithabu at once. Sverri had made an enemy and he
did not know who, and so he took Trader to a place near his winter home and there he carried
gifts ashore. Sverri had a lord. Almost all men have a lord who offers protection, and
this lord was called Hyring and he owned much land, and Sverri would pay him silver each
winter and in return Hyring would offer protection to Sverri and his family. But there
was little Hyring could do to protect Sverri on the sea, though he must have promised to
discover who sailed the red ship and to learn why that man wanted Sverri. In the meantime
Sverri decided to go far away and so we went into the North Sea and down the coast and made
some money with salted herrings. We crossed to Britain for the first time since I had been a
slave. We landed in an East Anglian river, and I never did learn what river it was, and we
loaded thick fleeces that we took back to Frankia and there bought a cargo of iron ingots.
That was a rich cargo because Frankish iron is the best in the world, and we also
purchased a hundred of their prized sword-blades. Sverri, as ever, cursed the Franks for
their hard-headedness, but in truth Sverri's head was as hard as any Frank's and, though he
paid well for the iron and sword-blades, he knew that they would bring him a great profit in
the northern lands.

So we headed north and the summer was ending and the geese were flying south above us in
great skeins and, two days after we had loaded the cargo, we saw the red ship waiting for
us off the Frisian coast. It had been weeks since we had seen her and Sverri must have hoped
that Hyring had ended her threat, but she was lying just offshore and this time the red ship
had the wind's advantage and so we turned inshore and Sverri's men whipped us
desperately. I grunted with every stroke, making it look as though I hauled the oar-loom
with all my strength, but in truth I was trying to lessen the force of the blade in the water
so that the red ship could catch us. I could see her clearly. I could see her oar-wings
rising and falling and see the white bone of water snapping at her bows. She was much longer
than Trader, and much faster, but she also drew more water which is why Sverri had taken
us inshore to the coast of Frisia which all shipmasters fear.

It is not rockbound like so many northern coasts. There are no cliffs against which a good
ship can be broken in pieces. Instead it is a tangle of reeds, islands, creeks and
mudflats. For mile after mile there is nothing but dangerous shallows. Passages are
marked through those shallows with withies rammed into the mud, and those frail signals
offer a safe way through the tangle, but the Frisians are pirates too. They like to mark
false channels that lead only to a mudbank where a falling tide can strand a ship, and then
the folk, who live in mud huts on their mud islands, will swarm like water-rats to kill and
pillage.

But Sverri had traded here and, like all good shipmasters, he carried memories of good
and bad water. The red ship was catching us, but Sverri did not panic. I would watch him as
I rowed, and I could see his eyes darting left and right to decide which passage to take,
then he would make a swift push on the steering oar and we would turn into his chosen
channel. He sought the shallowest places, the most twisted creeks, and the gods were with
him for, though our oars sometimes struck a mudbank, Trader never grounded. The red ship,
being larger, and presumably because her master did not know the coast as Sverri did,
was travelling much more cautiously and we were leaving her behind.

She began to overhaul us again when we had to cross a wide stretch of open water, but
Sverri found another channel at the far side, and here, for the first time, he slowed our
oar-beats. He put Hakka in the bows and Hakka kept throwing a lead-weighted line into
the water and calling the depth. We were crawling into a maze of mud and water, working
our slow way north and east, and I looked across to the east and saw that Sverri had at last
made a mistake. A line of withies marked the channel we threaded, but beyond them and
beyond a low muddy island thick with birds, larger withies marked a deep water channel
that cut inshore of our course and would allow the red ship to head us off, and the red ship
saw the opportunity and took that larger channel. Her oar-blades beat at the water, she
ran at full speed, she was overtaking us fast, and then she ran aground in a tangle of
clashing oars. Sverri laughed. He had known the larger withies marked a false channel and
the red ship had fallen into the trap. I could see her clearly now, a ship laden with armed
men, men in mail, sword-Danes and spear-warriors, but she was stranded.

'Your mothers are goats!' Sverri shouted across the mud, though I doubt his voice
carried to the grounded ship, 'you are turds! Learn to master a ship, you useless
bastards!'

We took another channel, leaving the red ship behind, and Hakka was still in Trader's
bows where he constantly threw the line weighted with its lump of lead. He would shout back
how deep the water was. This channel was unmarked, and we had to go perilously slowly for
Sverri dared not run aground. Behind us, far behind now, I could see the crew of the red
ship labouring to free her. The warriors had discarded their mail and were in the water,
heaving at the long hull, and as night fell I saw her slip free and resume her pursuit, but
we were far ahead now and the darkness cloaked us. We spent that night in a reed-fringed bay.
Sverri would not go ashore. There were folk on the nearby island, and their fires

sparked in the night. We could see no other lights, which surely meant that the island
was the only settlement for miles, and I knew Sverri was worried because the fires would
attract the red ship and so he kicked us awake in the very first glimmerings of the dawn and
we pulled the anchor and Sverri took us north into a passage marked by withies. The
passage seemed to wriggle about the island's coast to the open sea where the waves broke
white, and it offered a way out of the tangled shore. Hakka again called the depths as we
eased our way past reeds and mudbanks. The creek was shallow, so shallow that our
oar-blades constantly struck bottom to kick up swirls of mud, yet pace by pace we followed
the frail channel marks, and then Hakka shouted that the red ship was behind us.

She was a long way behind us. As Sverri had feared she had been attracted by the
settlement's fires, but she had ended up south of the island, and between us and her was
the mystery of mudbanks and creeks. She could not go west into the open sea, for the waves
broke continuously on a long half-sunken beach there, so she could either pursue us or
else try to loop far around us to the east and discover another way to the ocean.

She decided to follow us and we watched as she groped her way along the island's
southern coast, looking for a channel into the harbour where we had anchored. We kept
creeping north, but then, suddenly, there was a soft grating sound beneath our keel and
Trader gave a gentle shudder and went ominously still. 'Back oars!' Sverri bellowed.

We backed oars, but she had grounded. The red ship was lost in the half-light and in the
tenuous mist that drifted across the islands. The tide was low. It was the slack water
between ebb and flood and Sverri stared hard at the creek, praying that he could see the
tide flowing inwards to float us off, but the water lay still and cold.

'Overboard!' he shouted. 'Push her!'

We tried. Or the others tried, while Finan and I merely pretended to push, but Trader
was stuck hard. She had gone aground so softly, so quietly, yet she would not move and
Sverri, still standing on the steering platform, could see the islanders coming towards
us across the reed-beds and, more worrying, he could see the red ship crossing the wide bay
where we had anchored. He could see death coming.

'Empty her,' he shouted.

That was a hard decision for Sverri to take, but it was better than death, and so we
threw all the ingots overboard.