Assignment - Black Viking (17 page)

“Listen, my father didn’t mean for you to kill me!” the boy snapped. “He just asked you to take care of me while he’s in the pen—”

“You will be a man,” Mario said tonelessly, “or I shall kill you myself. What is asked of us is most important. I obey orders. Life requires discipline. And so does death.”

Gino was sullen and defiant, then he shrugged his slim shoulders. He seemed built of steel, Durell noted, and might be useful, after all. And the old man would certainly obey any orders he gave.

Elgiva was a more subtle problem.

“Yes, I know the Walk,” she said. “I could take you there.” Her beauty was a quiet glow in the big Viking lodge, empty now except for themselves and the crackling fire on the huge hearth. “I have crossed the Skelleftsvik many times. You say Peter is there?”

“He must be. And his machine, too.”

“Very well. I have come this far. I shall go farther. But I think the old gods have wakened again, and they will only laugh at us.”

Eric got them hunting rifles, small arms and Arctic clothing. The wind seemed more violent as they prepared to go into the storm. Elgiva said it was half a mile to the shore where the Walk began. There was a distant look in her eyes as she spoke of it, as if she did not expect to return.

The wind had scoured the snow from a rocky ledge they followed. For a few steps, the lights of the house guided them. Then there was only a strange gray twilight on the southern horizon, over the raging sea. The snow was mixed with ice spicules that stung the cheek and blinded the eye. They all wore ski masks and goggles and used ski poles to test the ground before them, and they walked in single file, roped together as Elgiva had suggested. The woman was very sure-footed. She led the way, with Durell half a step behind her. The wind blew at their backs at first, and seemed to shove them forward with spiteful violence. The dark loom of the promontory by the mooring cove towered on their right as they descended toward the sea. The combers’ roar filled the air with maniacal rage. Black rocks stood up above the deepening snow. Durell tried to see across the cove in the eerie gloom, but snow intervened, and there were only the blowing curtains of white all around him. Elgiva pointed ahead and downward. The path twisted beside the cliff, down to the beach. Something lay there, shattered and splintered. It was Eric’s longship, torn loose from its moorings and spewed up from the sea.

Durell looked back. The house had been swallowed up by the darkness of the storm.

“How much farther?” he shouted above the noise.

“Not far. There. Ahead.”

He had thought it was an extension of the beach, that roughened tongue of ice that reached outward from the base of the cliff. “That’s the Walk?”

“It is quite shallow. Your boat was almost wrecked on it, getting here. In ordinary winters, it is solid ice.” Half of Elgiva’s words were torn from her lips by the wind. “We often walked across to Skelleftsvik this way. That is how the reef got its name.”

They paused in a niche of rock at the base of the cliff. Snow made a wavering ceiling overhead as it was blown out to sea. Durell tried to make out the island that must be there; but the black waters and the long, fragile tongue of ice reaching outward were all he could see. It was like walking into a dark infinity, with no end in sight. He turned back to Mario and Gino. The boy was all right. The older man was not. Mario looked tortured by the cold, but there was a grimness behind his pain, and if there was fear behind that, it did not show.

“Can you go on?” Durell shouted to him.

“It is not like Sicily,” Mario said.

Gino yelled: “We ought to go back. I ain’t going out on that! You’ll kill us all!”

His uncle spoke angrily. “Are you afraid to follow where a woman leads?”

“She’s a nut. So is Durell. Listen, Uncle Mario, we’re going back.”

The older man lifted one snow-caked arm and back-handed the boy with sudden violence. Gino fell against a rock and sat down. His black eyes were astonished, glittering behind his goggles that filled the slits of his ski cap. Snow made two strange lumps on his shoulders, as if he were deformed. They must all look strange, Durell thought, like creatures out of the prehistoric past, lost and floundering and helpless in the face of the elements.

“Are you ready?” Elgiva called.

“Let’s go.”

“You must follow in each step I take. If one of us goes into the sea, it is the end for that one, you understand? The water is too cold to survive in, for more than a few seconds. You must all be very careful.”

He was grateful for her calm tone. He had not known, two days ago, how remarkable a woman she truly was.

They left the shelter of the cliff with reluctance and crossed the snow-swept beach toward the jumbled ice that marked the Walk. The ice cakes had formed a kind of jetty, based on the shoal under the surface of the sea, and the breakers smashed and foamed over its sides with desperate fury, as if enraged that they should challenge the sea’s power. The first dozen paces were relatively easy. Elgiva led them down the center of the ice pack.

They used the rope to steady themselves. Now and then one of them slipped and stumbled to his knees. The air was filled with spray that froze on their coats as they went on. Fortunately, the wind at their backs pushed them onward as if anxious to help them to their end.

In moments, the dark cliff they had descended was wiped from sight. The world was neither land nor sea, but a confusion of tumbled ice and snow that shook and groaned and creaked against the power of the waves that broke against the windward edge. Durell felt a long slab of ice shift under his weight and slide to one side. He jumped away just in time, was checked by the rope that tied him to Elgiva ahead and Mario behind. His booted foot went out from under him and caught in a crack between the huge ice boulders. For a dreadful instant he felt a pressure as if he were caught in a giant nutcracker. Then the block of ice slid the other way and went down the slope onto the thinner, flatter ice that covered the sea to leeward. He got up, feeling a twinge of pain in his ankle. Elgiva’s gloved hands steadied him.

“Are you all right?”

“We’ll go on.”

“It is not much farther.”

“I do not see any end to it.”

She said: “It cannot be far. We must be halfway across now.”

But she didn’t sound too sure of herself.

The mainland was out of sight, and there seemed to be nothing ahead but the gray turbulence of the storm and the trembling bridge of ice along which they crawled. Young Gino now kept urging his uncle on; but Elgiva paid attention to nothing .but her carefully chosen footsteps.

At last she halted.

“There. There it is.”

There was a darker shadow ahead in the wind and snow. It was a small island at the end of the Walk, a craggy rock that loomed like the black prow of a ship plunging in the spume and spray that dashed against it. Astonishingly, a light burned high above, where Durell glimpsed a square house like a concrete bunker through a rift in the blowing curtains of snow. But when he started forward, anxious to get off the ice jetty, Elgiva put a snow-crusted glove on his arm and checked him.

“The gods laughed at us. We cannot get across.”

She pointed to the ice bridge just ahead, between them and the island shore of Skelleftsvik. The tides and the wind had eroded the jumbled ice that had supported them this far. The ice ahead was thin and flat, showing a darkness under it that betrayed a swift channel current that forced its way between the mainland and the island. Elgiva shook her hooded head and brushed snow from her goggles.

“It will not support us!” she shouted.

Durell shrugged. “We must get across. I’ll try it first.”

“If you go through the ice, you know what it means?”

He nodded. “It must be done.”

He waited for the struggling Gino and Mario to join them, then rearranged their safety lines so that he was in the lead. He felt an inner shiver as he contemplated the fragile ice ahead. He could almost see the black, freezing water beneath. But beyond, in the gloom, there was a rocky ledge bearded with ice, and then steps that went up out of sight toward that single light that beckoned as his goal. He had no love for the risk. He had been warned often enough by K Section’s analysts that his survival factor had long run out. But he could not turn back now. There was a wildness in this storm that no man had ever seen before. It had to be checked. He had come a hard, long way to this point. He had to go on.

He gave Mario and Gino quick instructions, then turned to where Elgiva studied the ice. It was a stretch of about sixty feet, shrouded now and then by mist and snow that blotted out the island. Only the light held steady.

Elgiva turned her back to the wind and took off her goggles. Her eyes were shining and mysterious, filled with an exaltation that reflected her sympathy with the elements. Something else was there—a kind of wonder as she considered Durell’s tall figure, a salute in the way she touched his arm.

“Keep to the right, where the current has piled the ice a bit together. It will be thicker there.”

“When I’m partly across,” Durell shouted in her ear, “Send Gino and Mario after me. You come last.”

She nodded. She had the serenity of a pagan priestess. “Be lucky,” she said.

He clambered down among the jagged ice boulders and stepped out upon the flat, snow-blown ice. The wind was stronger, pushing him toward the thin edge where the sea boiled against the ice. His footing was uncertain, trembling under him. He forged ahead quickly. He had to fight an impulse to run ahead in blind panic to reach the shore. That could only mean complete disaster. Each step had to be calculated. And yet the quaking ice underfoot mocked the care he took. Nothing would matter, if the delicate balance of pressures between ice and sea suddenly shifted. He gained twenty feet, then thirty. He heard a thin, cracking sound that filled him with sudden dread. He gave himself no time to think. He quickened his pace carefully. When he was past the halfway mark, he turned and waved to the three dim figures waiting behind him. Mario and Gino began to follow, stepping like blind men, with painful caution. It would not do, Durell thought. They had to be quicker. The trembling under his feet grew more insistent by the moment.

He cupped his gloved hands and shouted to them. “Come along now, Elgiva!”

The woman moved at once to obey. Durell turned and went on. He was not far from the shore now. The light in the house above showed him the way. The splintered remains of a wooden pier showed up ahead, the planks chewed up by the pressures of the ice. He reached for a timber, felt his glove slip on the ice that coated it, and with another effort hauled himself off the ice bridge to the solidity of Skelleftsvik’s rocky shore.

But when at last, gasping, he looked back, he saw only two figures left on the Walk.

Mario’s chunky form had vanished.

The wind was demoniacal, cutting at the knitted mask over his face, hurling ice spicules at his goggles and blinding him. Durell stepped back to the Walk. He saw the slender Gino waving both arms, and then snow intervened and there was nothing to be seen. He swore grimly and started back. He could not abandon them. Then the wind slackened and visibility improved. He saw Gino flat on his stomach, reaching into a black gap in the thin ice. If Mario had fallen into the sea, there was no chance . . .

Durell broke into a run, heedless of the quaking ice under him. Elgiva waved for him to go back. But he could not go back. Gino’s sullen resentment of discipline, his false bravado because of his father’s imprisonment, had not made the boy untrustworthy, after all. He could have left Mario through cowardice, instead of trying to save him. But before he could reach them, he saw Gino rise, hauling backward, and after him came a dark form, the chunky figure of his uncle. The boy had stepped out on a drifting ice floe to help the older man recover the main bridge. It had been a dreadful risk. Durell saw Mario stagger and fall to his knees and then he was with them again, helping the Sicilian up.

“I was careless,” Mario gasped. “It was stupid of me. You should not have come after me, boy.”

Gino looked surprised at himself. “I didn’t stop to think, Uncle Mario.”

“You were very brave. And foolish. But it is the kind of foolishness that may make a man out of you.”

“He’s a man now,” Durell said.

Gino sneered. “I don’t need nothin’ from you. The old guy was about to hit the water. Anybody’d have—” “All right, Gino. Your uncle is grateful. So am I. Get your rifle and let’s get off this jelly.”

There wasn’t much time left. The ice that had broken off under Mario’s weight was only a warning of things to come. There were other cracking sounds all around them as the pressure of the tide and the wind began to break up the thin bridge to Skelleftsvik. Durell took Elgiva’s hand and they ran for the shore.

As they jumped for the rocks beyond the broken pier, there came a sharper roar behind them, a scream as if from some monster animal, and there came a rush of

seas and a tumbling, twisting, breaking of ice. A small black tidal wave poured through the gap broken at last by the wind.

They were cut off from the mainland now.

THEY rested in the lee of a stone fence buried in the snow drifts. The island was not more than a mile across, Elgiva said, but it supported several small farms whose houses were dark and abandoned, their dark red shapes distorted by the long snowdrifts over them. There was road up to the concrete laboratory, defined by the lumpy drifts beside it. Durell thumped his arms against his sides to renew circulation. Mario and Gino talked in Italian, in low tones distorted by the screaming wind. The older man put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and hugged him, and Gino said something and started to draw away, then nodded and patted his uncle’s arm.

Elgiva touched Durell. “Look down there.”

The wind had died for the moment. The sudden silence left an iron ringing in his ears. Below the bunker on the other side of the hill they had climbed was a small cove, and something dark and whale-shaped lay there, canted a little as if the bow had grounded on the snow-covered beach.