Thunder God (24 page)

Five days we ran south with the wind, sliding over the hunchbacked waves.

The Danes did not give up. They seemed not to care about their own lives, governed only by the rage of vengeance. At times, they came close enough that we could see their faces and the patterns on their shields. Other times, we were convinced we had outrun the Danes, only to climb the mast and see them out there still, trailing in our wake.

Something besides the Danes was following me. It came in those moments of half-consciousness as my exhausted mind trailed away towards sleep, like a ball of yarn unravelling across the floor.

I found myself again in that wave-churned estuary. But I was not on Olaf’s boat. I was among the Danes. I stood at their prow as the man in the bear cloak had done. I was him now, feeling the great weight of the spray-soaked fur cloak and the metal plates across my chest. And in this vision I could see the bronze spearhead glimmering pale and dusty green as it flew through the air towards me. For a moment, the spear seemed to pause in front of my body, hovering as if it were a hummingbird. I looked around me and saw everything frozen in place – the glassy waves and pregnant sail, men’s hair blown by the
wind and even the tiny droplets of spray off our bow, suspended in space. Then I turned to face the spear again and felt the tearing jolt as it ripped through the cage of my chest. I felt myself falling, arms thrown out, eyes already growing dim. The force of these images jarred me so violently that I would sit up and find myself staring at the horizon, where the blue of the night met the black of the sea and stars shuddered in the great silence of the sky.

As often as I could, I bathed Olaf’s wound with salt water and patted it dry. The skin around the arrow shaft was red and sore, but the swelling had gone down. He was in constant pain, however, as the feeling had returned to his shoulder, and for this I could do nothing. He refused to rest any more than I rested myself. Olaf knew as well as I did that if I cut out the arrow now, he would grow worse before he grew better. I could not sail this boat alone and keep up the speed we needed to stay ahead of the Danes.

On the sixth day, thunderhead clouds filled the northern sky. The wind picked up out of the north-east and we heard a strange moaning sound around the ship, as if invisible creatures were crying out in pain. It was the breeze, slipping through the rigging lines.

I checked the ropes around the tiller, fastened the waterbarrels shut and battened the spare sail cloth over the bags of food, which by now were nearly empty.

‘Look!’ said Olaf, and jerked his chin in the direction of the approaching storm. His left arm had stiffened so that it hung almost useless at his side.

The Danes had turned about. They were tacking away to the east. They had seen the storm too, and the size of it crowding the sky, like some vast creature rising from the water.

We felt no relief. If we came about as well, it would only put us within reach of the Danes again. The threat of the storm
seemed almost as bad. Both were determined to send our lifeless bodies to the bottom of the sea, but we stood a better chance against the wind and waves.

The moaning of the gale continued, surrounding our ship. I wondered if this could be the voice of the wind, which Cabal had spoken of. I found myself listening for words inside its droning chorus.

The sun disappeared, smudged out by smoky blue-grey clouds. Hard gusts ploughed the water. The boat heaved up on swells and sail lines groaned with the strain.

We heard the drums of thunder. Lightning clawed at the sky. This was no small storm. We shortened sail and tacked as the Drakkar rolled from one wave trough to another. The first rain drops darkened the sail cloth and sank into the scuffed deck planks. Soon, the rain fell harder, roaring out of the
low-hanging
clouds. Before long, it was pelting so viciously that I had to start bailing, while Olaf shortened sail even further. The wind cut straight from the north.

It was the Arador.

‘We cannot tack through this,’ said Olaf. ‘It will tear us to pieces if we try. We will have to loosen the sail and run with the wind until it blows itself out.’

A tremor of fear passed through us. We were already far out to sea, and this storm would only push us further from land.

I staggered around the deck, making sure the cargo was lashed down. Then I made my way back to the steerboard. ‘Ready,’ I told him.

We loosened the lines, and the storm wind surged into the sail, hurling us forward over the waves.

The rest of that day and into the night, I sat with my arms on the steerboard, guiding the Drakkar down one foam-slicked valley of water, up the gasping wall of the next wave and down again. I could not tell where the waves ended and where the sky
began except from the white line of foam of the next approaching wave. Clouds crackled with the fire in their bellies. Rain pounded the sail. We opened the rain barrels and they soon filled to overflowing. It was the darkest night I had ever seen.

Olaf was stooped over, using one hand to bail with an old wooden bucket, when a wave jumped the deck and the force of it almost carried him overboard. Afterwards, we tied ropes around our waists and lashed them to the mast, in case the next wave washed us away. As the hours went by, we grew used to these strange umbilical cords.

Olaf was growing weaker. He complained of feeling hot when the air was almost freezing. A fever had begun to burn inside him.

‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. ‘There is still a little food.’

Olaf spat over the side. ‘I have no appetite,’ he said.

Morning spread a dove grey light over the waves. The rain was still falling and the wind had not slackened. My joints felt stiff from the cold and wet.

There had been no chance to think how far this storm had taken us, nor time to be afraid, nor to eat, nor sleep, nor to mull over past grievances, which seemed now to belong to another life.

Whenever we tried to tack into the wind, a gust much harder than the rest would barge into the Drakkar and send us skidding down the bank of another wave. I had to use all my strength to hold the steerboard straight.

Another day passed, and then another. The moaning wind carried us south and west.

I grew so tired that sometimes I fell asleep at the steerboard. My mind grew blank, sluiced of dreams. Darkness crowded my skull.

Olaf’s skin turned grey, with a haziness of green under the flesh.

I fed him water from my wooden cup and pressed flakes of dried fish into his mouth. ‘I could try to cut away the arrow now,’ I said.

He raised his bloodshot eyes to meet my own. ‘And how many days would it take for me to recover?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It depends on how things go. Maybe three or four if we are lucky.’

‘By then we would be drowned. You cannot sail alone across a sea like this. When the storm is over, then you can try out your swordsmanship on me. Until then, I am going to sail this ship.’

Three days.

Five.

We fought an endless war against the storm, having no idea where we were headed since the bearing dial could not be read without the shadow of the sun.

I woke to find Olaf sprawled on the deck beside the steerboard. He had fainted.

I cradled his head in my hands.

‘There is someone else here,’ said Olaf, when he had opened his eyes. His nose was pinched and salt was crusted in his beard. ‘He is watching us. He is waiting for me to die.’

‘Let him wait,’ I said and pressed some dried fish into his mouth. ‘In the meantime, you can rest.’ I bundled him in his cape and placed a roll of spare sail cloth under his head for a pillow. He was too weak to protest.

From then on, I was sailing the ship by myself, which proved difficult but not impossible, as I had thought it would be.

Twice I tried to remove the arrow head from Olaf’s back, using the tip of my sword blade since I had no shorter knife. I felt like a butcher. Olaf cursed and beat his fists against the deck and finally, when his strength had given out, he wept.

With the tips of my fingers, I could feel past the broken arrow shaft to the tip, but could not grip it strongly enough to
remove the point. The pitching of the boat and Olaf’s cries for me to stop caused me to give up each attempt.

Eight days now. Ten. Was it ten? I had lost count.

My thoughts folded back upon themselves, plodding up and down the same worn paths like fever dreams. My sleep was not sleep but some other land I had begun to inhabit, which was as real as our drenched and pitching days out on this boat.

That night, as I sat with my head resting on the rope bindings of the steerboard arm, my thoughts began to race across the ocean as if following the moonlight on the water. I wandered through the streets of Altvik, peering in windows like the ghost of Sasser Greycloak. All the while, the storm pushed us further and further out to sea. I understood now why Cabal had called this wind alive. It seemed to be toying with the ship, defying us to turn against it.

On what I guessed to be the fourteenth day, I glimpsed sun like a waterfall in the distance, cascading out of the clouds. I could not help but steer towards it, even though I knew from the rippling light that it was just another world of tumbling waves. When at last we reached that raft of sunlight, it swam around us like a thousand tiny fish.

Olaf’s eyes flickered open, as the warmth of the sun’s fire touched his face. Since my last effort to remove the arrowhead, he had been drifting in and out of consciousness.

I checked the bearing dial, but we were so far south of where we had been the last time I’d checked it that it was useless to us now.

Then the clouds rolled past and the sea blinked back into grey, and we sailed on across the tumbling waves.

Panic closed around me. Every moment passed in a blindness of fear. I existed only in the shallow-breathing suddenness of waiting to die. In the past, the dangers I faced had never lasted long. When I was actually in danger, I had never
been afraid. It was only afterwards that the terrors would come trampling through my skull and I would begin to shake. But this storm had dragged on for so long that that the fear caused by things that had happened in the past collided with dangers I was facing now. I could no longer keep them separate. They formed into one twitching mass inside me, crabbing its way through my veins and clogging my heart.

I prayed, while rain poured off my mumbling lips and dripped from my straggly hair. The only sound that came back to me was of wind moaning through the eye-sockets of the old walrus skull, and the sucking gasp of the bow as it ploughed through the storm.

I prayed all the time. I prayed until I was angry.

Why won’t you answer?

Why won’t you help us?

I begged for an answer, for thundering voices to set out on the wind towards me, like huge and unstoppable ships, carrying the message that we had not been forgotten.

‘Are they listening to you?’ Olaf blinked at me from the cocoon of his cape. The skin around his eyes was dark and his lips were white and creased with bloody cracks.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. As I said the words, a vast loneliness filled my head with shapeless, nameless horrors.

Slowly, Olaf crawled out from his cape. ‘I will help,’ he said.

On our knees, heads pressed together and hugging each other’s shoulders, we prayed, while all around us, the sea washed into the sky like dye from cloth and the northern sky still grumbled with distant thunder, flickering with the
struck-flint
sparks of lightning.

That night, I discovered that our waterbarrels had salt in them. The waves must have seeped through the lids. We could still drink it, but the water was brackish and made us gag if we drank more than a few sips at a time.

I decided that we should eat the few remaining pieces of dried fish. White speckles of mould had already spread across the crumpled amber surface. From the days when my mother and I had hung and smoked the fish my father caught, I knew that this mould ruined the taste of the meat but that the fish would still be edible. But if we waited any longer, it would be too far gone. I washed the fish and tried to dry it in the wind by hanging it from the masthead. Then I gnawed on the hard, leathery meat until my spit ran red with blood from bruised gums. Some of this, I gave to Olaf, since he was too weak to chew it himself. I used the rest of the rotten fish to bait hooks, keeping five lines in the water, but never had a bite.

Then the last of the food was gone.

My breath tasted sweet and my tongue swelled up in my throat. I grew so weak I had to crawl around the deck, too tired even to scratch the itching salt-water boils which festered on my grotesquely swollen knees and elbows.

In the middle of the night, I ate my shoes.

Olaf said he wanted to sit up, so I propped him beside the steerboard and sat next to him. Hour after hour, we stared at the unchanging sea.

The strain on the boat was beginning to tell. These last few days, I had been bailing more and more frequently. The sail was fraying and the walrus-leather lines had stretched beyond their usefulness. Stress cracks appeared in the mast, spiralling up from its base, and there was no telling how deep they went.

Olaf began talking to people who he said were standing in front of him.

‘Who are they?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘but they say that they know me.’

Throughout the day, he raged at every thought which twisted in his brain. ‘I was not the one who killed our friendship!’ he shouted at me. ‘I tried to preserve it. More than you know! All
I ever wanted was to see what you can see! Do you know what it is like to spend your life in doubt?’

I held up the black hammer, which still hung around my neck. ‘This is not the key you think it is. It will not take away your doubts.’

Olaf drew back the flap of his cloak and held out a hand, fingertips chapped with bloody cracks deep in the skin. ‘Then give it to me.’

I tossed it over over to him. I did not care anymore.