The Prow Beast (33 page)

Finn turned from the one on the walkway, took two steps, swung The Godi up as if for a great downward cut and then kicked the Saxlander spearman in the face as he followed the arc of it, his mouth slightly open. The man hurled backwards with a strangled choking sound; one boot was left stuck in the mud.

During this, I scrambled up and took on the other man, who crabbed and stabbed and huddled behind his shield, so that the best I could do was fend him off. Then he saw Finn was coming for him and backed off into the frustrated bellows of Kasperick, urging his men on.

They were wary, but circling, dropping off one walkway, slogging through the mud and on to another; the flash of white light showed them, dark as hunting wolves and almost behind us.

That same flash showed them stop, almost in mid-step. The darkness that followed was blacker still, but Finn had seen them and stood up straight, throwing out his arms, scattering water droplets like bright pearls.

‘I am Finn Bardisson, known as Horsehead, from Skane,’ he roared. ‘You want me? Here I come, you nithing, chicken-fucking, Saxlander whoresons.’

He hurled himself forward roaring, nail in one hand, The Godi in the other and I tried to snag him before he went, but failed. I half-stumbled on that cursed ankle, feeling the fireache of it and the sick, belly-dropping certainty that this was the moment Odin took his sacrifice and that I had doomed Finn with me.

The white light split the darkness again – and they fled.

The Saxlanders turned and ran, stumbling, away from the mad, wild-haired Finn and Kasperick stopped bellowing at them to get us and ran with them. I knelt, panting, bewildered, heard a noise and staggered up on one good foot, whirling round to face the dark shapes behind.

They loomed up, silent and grey-grim against the black. Then the lightning flashed again and I saw them, as the Saxlanders must have seen them, ring-coated and helmed, sharp with edges and grins, their faces streaked black with charcoal and sheep-fat.

Familiar faces – Alyosha, Finnlaith, Abjorn and the others.

‘That was a good trick of Finn’s,’ Styrbjorn said, pushing through to the front, ‘waiting until he saw us come up and then charging them. That set them running, for sure.’

Finn strolled back, The Godi over one shoulder, his nail in his teeth. He took it out and shoved it down one boot, then shouldered into the stone-grey ranks of men as we all backed off, heading for the river. I stood, trembling with reprieve.

‘You are a fool,’ I said to the grinning Styrbjorn, as Abjorn and Ospak helped me hirple away, ‘if you think Finn noticed any of you were there at all before he ran at them.’

SIXTEEN

The Odra roared and spat like a boiling cauldron, brimmed over into the woods and growled among the trees. It slashed the higher bank, so that sections of it slithered and sighed in slow splashes and turned the water black-brown. Trees came down, too, teetering slowly with a noise like ripping linen, clawed roots tangling so that they chained to the broken shore and made dams against which other drifts piled.

We watched it all warily, for the current in the river slithered like a coil of mating snakes, first one way, then the other, breaking round
Short Serpent
and fattening out into the floodplain so that we had no idea now where the old shore had been.

The rain fell, too. It had caused all this on the slopes of the distant mountains, now unseen through the fine, misted water that lisped on us and filled the very air so that every breath came as if we held linen cloths over our mouths and noses.

‘This is no time to be sitting on this river, I am thinking,’ Onund observed mournfully, ‘for we can neither use oars nor sail in this and if we sit here, a floater will get us, for sure.’

It was no time to be moving, either, for though we all feared the current and the clutch of water, we feared the floaters most and had seen three or four already, looming out of the boil like whales with great thrashing root-limbs. Hovering for a moment in the current, they would sink from sight again and, like the bergs of the north, most of the dangerous part was unseen. One of those great earth-clogged claws would swipe in the planks of
Short Serpent.

There was no possibility of stopping, all the same; we had to put distance between us and Kasperick, keeping to the east bank and trusting that the spate prevented him crossing. I was sure, all the same, that I had seen horsemen, faded as fetches through the rain-mist, splashing a miserable way up the west bank, appearing and disappearing as the swollen river widened and narrowed.

‘Time to haul away,’ Trollaskegg said cheerfully and the men groaned, for this was almost too much when added to the lack of food and ale and the soaked cloaks and blankets on a boat filmed with water.

Little Yan went up the mast with the rope and fastened it, then it was paid out and men leaped overboard, to the places where the water was shallow, or had not yet reached. Then they pulled, so that
Short Serpent
, balking like a stubborn goat on a tether, slowly moved forward; the linden-bast rope hummed and water spurted out of it, while the mast curved.

Everyone lent a hand, the strong ones pulling and staggering through the shallows or over the brush of the bank, the weaker ones using the oars as poles to fend off the drift. Even Dark Eye bailed and I did not care for that, though I told myself, and everyone else who saw my unease, that it was because it would not do for her to get sick or injured, for we might need her yet. I had already provided my good sealskin cloak for her as a makeshift shelter.

Finn, squeezing the water from his beard so that it squirted through his knuckles, had squinted from under the drooped, sodden brim of his weather-hat and smiled, a quizzical, knowing smile I tried to ignore, all the while feeling it nag me as badly as the ache in my ankle.

She had clasped me tight when we lumbered, sodden and uneasy, spilling hurriedly onto
Short Serpent
and sliding off into the dark, rain-hissing river. In the storm’s searing white light, her face was raised to mine, eyes bright, streaming with rain so that she looked as if she wept. I almost kissed her then, but the corner of my eye caught Finn’s scowl in that eyeblink of light and I patted her like a wet dog instead.

In the dark, we had hauled a little way upriver, all that could be managed, before settling on the east bank to wait for daylight and the storm to growl out. By then the river was mud-coloured, frothing like a mad dog in the sullen light of morning and it stayed that way for the next few days, with no sign of stopping, so there was nothing to be done but pull.

‘Bank is not made for towing,’ Onund growled at me, coming up with an oar to fend off something that rolled and turned, shapeless in the water.

‘Nor the current for rowing, nor the wind for sails,’ I answered, more sharp than I had intended, for the truth of it nagged me like a broken tooth.

‘Trees down to the water,’ Onund added, which was true. Once they had been the edge of a considerable wood, set back from the river, but it had spilled over and swamped them; hipdeep in it, the men looped rope over one shoulder, padded a tunic, or a cloak or a spare serk under it and hauled, stumbling and sliding. To their left, Alyosha and a handful of men, weighed with shields, weapons and ring-coats, splashed to keep up, as a flank guard.

‘The mast might go,’ added Trollaskegg, watching the bowing curve of it.

‘Or the line,’ added Yan Alf, almost cheerfully.

I wondered if anyone had something good to say and asked it aloud. No-one answered – then Kuritsa appeared, sloshing calf-deep through the water and calling out, so that men stopped pulling and braced instead, holding
Short Serpent
against the current.

He came up to where the water deepened to the river proper, stopping when it got to his waist. He had his unstrung bow in his hand and a young doe draped round his shoulders like a fur cloak, the hooves cinched on his chest; men yelled at him and grinned, for this meant good hot eating at the end of a wet misery of hauling.

It took some time, but we got
Short Serpent
closer to him, while he came out until the current threatened to sweep him off his feet. Crowbone threw him a line, he tied the deer to it and it was hauled aboard; another line drew him in like a fish, until he stood on the deck, streaming water and grinning. The rain had stopped.

‘Good hunt,’ I told him and he nodded, blowing snot from his nose. He pulled off his leather cap and checked that the bowstring was dry, then coiled it up again and stuck the hat back on.

‘Up ahead is trouble,’ he said. ‘A barrier of drift.’

Trollaskegg grunted; that was a bad thing to have happen now, but you could have foreseen it without throwing rune-bones, on a river like this and weather like we had.

It was a fallen tree, undercut and ruined, a fine big oak – a keel tree, as Onund pointed out. If we had been wanting one that would be cause for grinning, as I told him; those nearest laughed, though it was a sound as grim as tumbling skulls.

Drift had piled against it, sodden birch and gnarled pine from far upriver, willow branches swollen with new buds, all forming a great dam the length of twenty men out from the east bank and solid enough that men could walk on it.

Around the end swept the water, rippling like muscle, then breaking into dirty-white foam and growling up spits of spray. The air stank with the cloy of death, for there were bloated bodies here, sheep and cattle that had drowned, bobbing and sinking and rising again as they spun in a stately dance down to the sea.

Onund and Trollaskegg and others walked, cat-careful, out onto the barrier and peered and prodded here and there, while the men stood like patient oxen, hock-deep in the water and braced to stop
Short Serpent
spiralling backwards with the flowing current.

A tree came down, with an animal on it and men yelled and shouted cheerfully; it was a water-slicked wildcat, yowling and snarling, running this way and that as the tree caught the water’s flow and half-turned beneath it.

‘Shoot it,’ Crowbone yelled to Kuritsa, who merely shook his head.

‘Not me,’ he declared. ‘I almost died from shooting one once and I will not do it again.’

‘How could you die from shooting a cat?’ demanded Yan Alf, watching the tree in case it came too close. Kuritsa, his face serious, said it was the speed of the beast that had been his undoing and Crowbone made the mistake of asking how that was so.

‘I came upon one while hunting deer,’ Kuritsa said. ‘Suddenly, without warning. I do not know who was the more surprised – but I had an arrow nocked and shot it, straight down the open mouth.’

He paused and shook his head.

‘This was my undoing, for that cat, like all of its breed, was faster than Perun’s thrown axe. It spun round to run away and my own arrow shot out of its arse. I felt the wind of it on my cheek; an eyelash closer and I would be dead.’

People laughed aloud and watched the tree and the yowling misery of its passenger spin away downriver.

Then Onund hauled himself aboard, dripping like a walrus, with Trollaskegg not far behind. Their faces were gloomier than Hel’s bedspace.

‘It will not be chopped up this side of summer,’ Onund declared.

‘Nor will it be hauled apart,’ added Trollaskegg.

There was a pause and I waited, trying to be patient. Onund grunted and shrugged, the hump of his shoulder rising like a mountain.

‘We will have to pull round it,’ he said and all our hearts sank at that. It meant tethering
Short Serpent
and bringing everyone on board to take an oar – then loosing the lines and bending to rowing to the west bank. We would lose way, of course, probably back to where we had started pulling that day, before we could tether on the opposite bank. Then we would have to pull all the way back again, this time with the threat of Saxlander horsemen.

It would be a long, hard pull, too, for we would have to put some distance between us and the barrier; no-one wanted to spend a night on the west side of the river, so we would have to repeat the process to take the ship to the east bank again, on the far side of the barrier – with enough room to allow for losing way that would not carry us smack into that gods-cursed drift of trees and sodden corpses in the fading light.

The black, wet misery of it settled on us as we grunted and cursed and slithered the ship to where it could be tethered. The panting, exhausted crew slackened off, the linden-bast rope was hauled in and loosed from the masthead and folk spilled wetly over the side, sloshing towards rowing ports, sorting out their sea-chest seats.

I nodded to Finn and he went round with two green-glass flasks and men grinned wearily and brightened as the fiery green-wine spirit was passed down the line. Dark Eye and a couple of others offered soggy bread and hard cheese, pungent with its own sweat; men chewed and grunted and, slowly, began to chaffer and argue, so that I knew they were recovered.

Then Yan Alf called out that there was a boat snagged in the barrier.

This time, I went with Finn and Onund and others, stepping cautiously out onto the slick, wet tree, treacherous with stubs and broken ends, draped with crushed willow. The boat was half-swamped, cracked like an egg and ragged with splintered wood, but clearly a
strug
, the solid riverboats Slavs made. It would not have been important at all – there were lots of them and it was hardly a surprise to find one as part of the wreck of this swollen river – save for the crew it still held.

He was snagged by his own belt, hair drifting like weed, pale face fat with water and curdled as old cheese. For all that, it was a face I knew and I remembered him, stumbling back from where he had dug up my silver, showing handfuls of it to the rest of his oarmates, that bloated face bright with the wonder of it. Hallgeir, I remembered suddenly. His name was Hallgeir.

Finn nodded and growled when I told him this, peering up the river; he pinched one side of his nose and blew snot down into the wreck.