The Prow Beast (34 page)

‘So, Randr Sterki has met with some trouble,’ he growled. ‘Which can only be a good weaving for us, thank the Norns.’

I did not answer; I was too busy searching the water for signs of a small corpse, my belly sick with the thought of Koll, turning in a slow, stately dance like the sheep dead in the mucky water.

The oak finally behind us, days melted, one into the other and went unnoticed. No-one saw much else other than the red-brown water and the sucking mud as they stumbled, heads down and rope over one shoulder, through the shallowest parts they could find. The boat, that great shackle they were fastened to, fretted this way and that, the prow beast snarling and jerking.

The land changed, started to roll into short hills rising out of the flood, some of them flat-topped, others already undercut by the merciless waters. Half-drowned trees shouted out all their green buds even as they died; others huddled like herded cattle on the hills above the water.

The rain sighed itself out and the sun broke through, so that the ground steamed up a crawling mist and the insects came, bloated and fat on carrion, yet still wanting more from the living.

Gudmund died, raving and bursting sweat off him, despite Bjaelfi’s best prayer-runes binding the black-rotted holes where the hayfork had gone in, so we rolled him into the water and consigned him to Ran and Aegir, which was as much as we could do in that place.

Freed from that, Bjaelfi now went to treat the ones shivering and sweating and leaking their insides down their legs from some sickness or other – probably in the water, Bjaelfi thought, or perhaps poison from the insects.

‘Not good, Orm,’ he told me, as if I needed him to inform me of that. He slapped angrily and cursed the stinging insects.

‘Perhaps it will rain again,’ Crowbone offered cheerfully, ‘and drive the insects away.’

‘Not as if you suffer,’ Yan Alf countered gloomily. ‘I want that charm you have.’

Those on board – bailing, poling, or too weak and sick to pull – laughed, but uneasily, for the way the biting hordes avoided Crowbone was too close to magic for comfort and most remembered the reputation of the odd-eyed boy.

‘They do not bite him,’ Finn declared, bellowing from where he leaned on the sweep, fighting to keep the prow beast snarling into the current, ‘because he has no man-juice in him.’

‘They do not bite you, either,’ observed Dark Eye suddenly, her clear voice made stranger by the silence that had gone before from her. Finn squinted calculatingly, then grinned.

‘They do, but if you look closely, you will see them falling dead at my feet,’ he growled, ‘since there is too much man-juice in me for those little bodies to handle. One taste is all it takes.’ And he winked lewdly at her, so that I found myself bristling like an old hound and had to turn away with the shock of it, hoping no-one could see.

The next day, hungry and wet and tired as always, men looked sideways at Crowbone and at me, him for bringing the rain back, or so it seemed and me for…everything else. They were muttering more openly now, about forging on after this boy when there was little else in it for anyone. Yet they were fairly trapped, for they could not go downriver now, into the clutches of the waiting Kasperick. Ahead was not any more attractive.

Ahead, growling and spitting white lances and ferns, another storm fretted; the river, fresh fed, surged again the next day and the men started to stumble and fall and it was all I could do to keep them moving. We were close to the Vrankeforde now and I knew Randr Sterki would be there, what men he had as worn out as ourselves; if we were fast enough, he would not have time to find others, for when he thought he had enough, we would not have to chase him – he would come for us.

Then, so close I could almost taste the woodsmoke fires of Vrankeforde, there was a day that began under a vaulted sky of milk-silver, where the air clung to the skin and the men hauling and falling up the river, mouths open and panting, had almost lost the strength to put one soaked foot in front of another.

I saw Gunnliefr, best spearman we had, sink to his knees and weep, all his strength gone. I watched Osnikin, from Sodermannland, fall with a great splash and have to be hauled up by Murrough, or else he would have lain there and drowned.

‘Orm,’ Trollaskegg began and I did not need him to tell me what was best, so that my look was harsher than a slap and made him click his teeth on his next words.

‘Pull, fuck your mothers,’ roared Finn, seeing my face. ‘Haul away, you dirty swords.’

She moved beside me and I felt a hand on my forearm, but when I turned, she was that little wooden carving, staring out over the river, saying nothing, looking at the distant rolling black of cloud, dragging all our eyes to it. As if, some said later, she had magicked it up.

The air tightened, twisting like the iron rods of a smith starting on a new sword. The wind rose, knotting with force, hissed stipples on the river and the dark swooped like a cloak of crows.

The storm broke on us, a great laughter of Thor howling out of the sudden new dark, his Hammer sparking blue-white with a banging that seemed to split the air and fist our ears. The men leaned and the linden bast threw up skeins of water and trembled, while the mast bowed and sang like a harp string.

‘It will break,’ shrieked Trollaskegg, but the wind grabbed his words and whirled them away down the river, which was a mercy for Yan Alf, since he was clinging to the top of that whipping pole, searching the river ahead while the rain drowned his eyes.

It was the end and it came swift as a secret knife. Through the sheeting veils of rain, I watched a tree blaze and heard the sky crack, looked up and half-expected to see the wheelrim of Redbeard’s goat chariot breaking through the dome of the world.

Instead, there was Yan Alf, clinging to the
rakki
as the mast swung and sawed, his face a pale blob in the dark, shouting something the wind snatched away. He pointed out beyond the prow beast where, looming up like some snake-head goddess, the great tree crashed down on us, a huge ram with horns of clotted roots.

The prow beast rose up, dragging the men on the bank backwards, tearing the rope and the skin from their hands. I had time to turn, to think that all our struggle, all the days of effort to this place, hung on a thin, stretching line and the skidding crew who held it – when the linden bast spurted water, snapped and whipped back. Ospak yelped with the lash of it, spun half-round and went over the side.

The
drakkar
, locked in what seemed a raging battle, spun round; timber shrieked, planks splintered and men were mouthing bellows no-one could hear. The ship seemed to rear up like a stallion in a horse fight, right up until the stern went under and it tilted. I saw oars and chests slide away – saw Dark Eye slide away and milled my arms to try and grab her.

Water slapped me, snagged me, dragged me down and round and round, so that the silver trail of bubbles from my mouth circled me like a flock of birds.

I saw them, like pearls, like the last thought trailing from my mind – Odin would have to fight Aegir for his sacrifice offering.

Then there was only darkness.

The moon was a bright eye and an owl shrieked, a thrown chip of a cry. From the rolling charcoal of hills came the scream of some animal, high and thin and trembling with loneliness and then there was Vuokko, sitting beside me on a flat, black rock, cradling his drum.

‘I can only do this because it is Valpurgis,’ he said, ‘when the veil between the worlds is thinnest.’

May Eve, when the Wild Hunt staggered to a halt. Einmanuthur, the lonely month. I felt the crush of it, wanted to be home…

‘There is a loss coming,’ Vuokko said. ‘Keener than winter. Odin will take his sacrifice soon.’

I wanted to be home more than ever, wanted to tell the Sea-Finn, who I knew was soaring in the Other watching me die, to take messages with him, of love and friendship and last words. But when I started to speak, he hit his drum and kept on hitting it, a thundering sound that jarred me, pounding on and on and on…

The blood thundered in my ears and my chest ached with each huge, retching breath; my throat burned and my nose throbbed. There was the iron taste of blood in the back of my throat. Ospak peered at me long enough to make sure I had come to my senses, then stopped pounding my chest and rose up, his knees cracking.

‘It is a bad habit to get into,’ he declared, ‘this having to be hauled out of water just before you drown.’

Dark Eye, cat-wet and scowling, glared at him and then turned a soulful look on me.

‘I shall try and break it,’ I managed to hoarse back at him and he chuckled at that and the slap from Dark Eye as he reached out a grimy hand towards my nose.

‘That neb of yours is cursed, I am thinking,’ he said and then tilted his head slightly. ‘It is only straight on your face if I stand like this. And it looks flatter than it did.’

If the pain was anything to go by, I did not doubt it, but I was more concerned with what had happened. I had thought him dead, for sure, a thought I shared with him while Dark Eye fussed.

‘I thought the same when I went over,’ he told me grimly and showed me the blue-black welt on his upper arm. ‘That rope seemed set with a life of its own and it took me a while to get clear of it.’

‘Double thanks, then,’ I rasped, ‘for hauling me out.’

He chuckled. ‘Not me. The Mazur girl did that.’

I looked at her and she smiled.

‘I was supposed to save you,’ I said to her and she fixed me with her seal eyes; it came to me then that we were alone, the three of us, soaked to the skin on a patch of wet barely raised above a black swamp where the mud and water oozed and new, sodden reeds stood straight up like hairs on a boar snout.

‘Where are the others?’ I said, sick with the possibilities and scrambling to my feet. I was weary to my bones, my head pounded, my chest burned and the whole front of my face felt seared, but I forced it off; I was ashore and the ground might squelch, but it was solid enough for me to feel safe after that muscling river. There was freshness in the air, too, as if the storm had finally gasped itself out, tangled and shredded in the branches and brush by the tiny sprigs of green. A bird sang somewhere unseen.

‘Back upriver,’ answered Ospak with a shrug, ‘if they are still in the world at all. You and me and that girl were all tangled in the one rope, which is a strange thing. Perhaps the Norns wove it that way for a purpose.’

‘Well,’ I said, pushing the crushing weight of it grimly, like a bad plough, ‘it seems we have a walk back to camp, then, if camp there is.’

I rose, weaving. Dark Eye straightened, wiped the palms of her hands down her sodden skirts and bent to pick up something beside me. My sword, still sheathed, the baldric loop missing a few silver ornaments.

‘I hauled you ashore with it,’ she said in her thin little voice. ‘I had to take it off, for it was round your neck and strangling you.’

I felt the burning welt of that now, too, and fingered it, wondering at the strength in her to have managed that. I smiled and took the sword – Jarl Brand’s sword. At least we still had that and I turned to Ospak and told him so, for the cheer in it.

‘Aye, sure and that’s a good thing, for I have an eating knife only,’ he answered and then tilted his beard off to one side. ‘And they were a worry.’

I followed his gaze and saw the six horsemen sitting at the limit of bow range, watching, resting easy on hipshot horses, bows out and arrows ready.

I looked back at Ospak and then at Dark Eye, whose face was a carving block.

‘Magyar,’ she said.

Which was hardly a comfort.

Two things happened then and it is sometimes strange how such weight as your life can hang on the thinnest thread – a voice understood and a scratch behind the ear.

Dark Eye moved two paces forward and hailed them, in her own Mazur tongue, which it was clear they understood. At the same time, a dog trotted out from the horsemen, a smooth, long-legged loper the colour of old bracken; it headed straight for me. Though smooth-coated, it reminded me of the big grey, wiry wolfhounds that had been with me not long before; we had eaten them out on the Great White and left nothing much more than the paws and I had been sorry for that later.

This one came close and sat while I moved to it, a few paces, no more. It let me scratch behind one ear.

The horsemen shifted then. The leader came forward, his hands out to either side and empty; when he got close, he halted and waited for me to walk to him. The dog followed me.

He was sallow, black moustached, with a clean chin and dark eyes over high cheeks. His hair hung under a fur-trimmed cone and was knotted in hundreds of small braids, like ropes and he wore an embroidered coat over loose breeks tucked into high boots which had what looked like silver coins down each side.

We fished for understanding for a while and found Greek. He grinned whitely at me and placed one hand on his chest.

‘
Bökény fia Jutos
,’ he declared, which I took to be a name. Later, I learned that he was Jutos, son of this Bökény.

‘Orm,’ I answered, slapping my own chest. ‘Ruriksson.’

‘You are
Ascomanni
, from Wolin,’ he said and I put him right on that. He frowned.

‘Sipos says you are to be trusted,’ he answered and sounded as if that was strange to him. It took me a moment to realise he was speaking of the dog.

‘Sipos,’ said Dark Eye, coming up beside me; the dog licked her hand and grinned, pink tongue lolling wetly. ‘It means Piper. The Magyar call these dogs
viszla
, which means “deerhound” and they are much prized for hunting.’

‘Mazur,’ said Jutos, looking at her and it was a statement, not a question. Then he nodded and turned the horse.

‘Come,’ he said. Ospak looked at me and I shrugged. It was not as if we had much say in the matter, for the horsemen closed round us, like herders on cattle. We went a little east, away from the river which fretted me, for I thought it was further from the others and said so.