Raven: Sons of Thunder (15 page)

The Wolfpack had gathered. Rain soaked our hair and streamed from our beards and vanished into the sand, leaving a frothy scum on it. We gave the English skins too, for now that we had decided to take them with us they were worth more alive than dead from some fever or drowned by the pissing Frankish rain, as Bram put it. We stood in a half-circle around Asgot, Sigurd and Ealdred, because today was the day when the ealdorman would die. He looked a sorry figure. Gone was the arrogance that I had seen glint like steel shards in his eyes. Without grease, the long moustache he wore, a fashion then amongst the English, drooped limp and frayed like a length of soggy, ancient rope. His shoulders slumped pathetically, his hands were clenched and he had been stripped of any marks of rank including rings, a gold brooch and of course his fine sword, which Sigurd had given to Black Floki for his guarding of the jarl’s silver hoard on the Wessex beach. Though Floki said he would sell the thing.

‘A coward’s hand has tainted it,’ he said, spitting on the blade, ‘and such a weapon can only bring ill-luck.’

When he realized what was happening, Father Egfrith began sniffing round Sigurd, begging him to spare Ealdred, despite the death looks old Asgot shot him. But the jarl took as much notice of the monk as you do of a wittering bird and this exasperated Egfrith until at last he stamped his foot into the sand and pointed to the sky.

‘
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito!
’ he proclaimed, and this seemed to get Sigurd’s attention. ‘
Tu ne cede malis,
sed contra audentior ito!
’ the monk repeated in his thin reedy voice, which recalled to my mind the sound children make by blowing along a wide blade of grass.

Sigurd’s brow darkened and he turned to the monk, his hand falling to his sword’s hilt. ‘Are you spinning some Christ spell, little man?’ he asked, his head tilted to one side.

The monk shrank back defensively. ‘I was speaking in Latin, Sigurd, the tongue of the Romans and of all men of learning. I said you should not give in to evils but proceed ever more boldly against them.’ Egfrith crossed himself.

‘Ah,’ Bjarni joined in, flapping his arms like a man falling from a cliff top, ‘I thought you were having some seizure.’ We laughed as Egfrith’s weasel face burnt red with anger. Cynethryth stood between Penda and me, her hands clasped together, the fingers squirming like worms. I put an arm round her shoulder but she tensed and slipped loose of it, turning towards me and aiming those emerald eyes at mine.

‘Don’t let them kill my father, Raven,’ she said suddenly, the words hitting me like pebbles on the forehead as the rain swept down our faces and the thunder of Thór’s chariot rolled across the heavy grey sky. I glanced at Penda, who simply shrugged, showing his palms in a helpless gesture.

‘But what can I do?’ I said. Resolved now to the coming violence, Father Egfrith began commending the ealdorman’s soul to his Christ’s Heaven.

‘Sigurd listens to you,’ Cynethryth said, ‘you are his talisman.’ She stepped forward and took my hands in hers. Her skin felt cold and damp. ‘You can make him spare Ealdred. I know you can.’

‘But I thought you hated him,’ I said. ‘It is because of him that Weohstan is dead. Have you forgotten?’ She winced at her brother’s name and I bit my cheek because of course she had not forgotten.

‘He is my father,’ she said, daring me to counter that. And
how could I? ‘He is the only family I have left. Even after what he has done, I cannot watch him die, Raven. You must understand that.’

‘
Homo homini lupus
, my daughter,’ Egfrith said to Cynethryth, shaking his tonsured head in sad resignation. ‘Man is a wolf to man.’

‘Keep up that tongue twisting, monk, and you’ll join the Romans!’ Bram growled in Norse, slapping the head of his axe.

‘Courage, Lord Ealdred,’ Egfrith said, ignoring Bram’s threatening gesture and walking over to lay his wooden crucifix against Ealdred’s forehead. I had seen the monk with a silver, jewel-studded cross before, but I guessed that now sat in pieces in the musty dark of a Norseman’s journey chest. ‘May the Lord forgive your sins and the Kingdom open its gates to receive your soul.’ Ealdred’s face was a twisted grimace, like a man preparing for pain. For shame his own men, those who should have protected him with their lives, could not watch, instead keeping their beards on their chests, though occasionally a man’s eyes would flick up quick as an adder’s tongue to taste the manner of their lord’s death.

‘Raven!’ Cynethryth hissed. ‘Do something.’ My mind flapped like a caged bird. What could I do? And yet I must do something because Cynethryth was begging me, and for her I would have crossed Gjallarbrú, the bridge to the Underworld, and spat in the giant Módgud’s eye.

‘Sigurd, wait!’ Those two words stunned me, then terrified me because men’s eyes told me they had jumped from my own mouth like a pair of fleas from a fur. Old Asgot glared, riled by another interruption to his bloodletting, and Sigurd’s brows knitted in annoyance. He could not deny his godi every time and he knew that the men expected sacrifices, needed them even, especially in a Christian land.

‘What is it, Raven?’ he asked.

‘The gospel book, my lord,’ I said, my mind grasping like a hand breaking the water’s surface to clutch at a salmon. ‘What will you do with it?’ I felt the weight of the Fellowship’s eyes upon me, crushing my chest and turning the breath in my belly into molten iron.

Sigurd scratched his beard. ‘I don’t know. We will decide that when this turd is no longer breathing the air meant for better men.’ Sodden jeers fused with the low roof of grey cloud and Thór’s iron-wheeled chariot rolled across the sky.

‘Ealdred was going to sell it to the emperor of the Franks,’ I said, cutting through the abuse being hurled at Ealdred, ‘we know that much. Which means the book must be worth a fat hoard.’ I gestured at the ealdorman. ‘This one is sick with silver greed.’

‘So?’ Sigurd said, flicking out an impatient hand.

‘So we sail up the river and we sell the book to this emperor,’ I blurted, resisting the urge to glance at Cynethryth to weigh how well I was doing. There were rumbles amongst the Wolfpack, echoes of the thunder cracks in the west.

‘We would be dead before our feet were dry,’ Olaf scoffed, shaking his beard as though it was the worst idea since Týr put his hand in the mouth of the fettered wolf Fenrir. ‘The emperor has no love of heathens, lad, haven’t you heard?’

‘We’d sprout Christian arrows thick as Bram’s nose hairs,’ Black Floki added, spitting vainly into the rain.

‘Not if we had a Christian lord speaking for us. Negotiating for us,’ I said, nodding at Ealdred. ‘And a Christ monk, too. The fat hoard that would have been Ealdred’s will be ours. Frankish silver for all the good men lost.’

After a moment’s silence that was as heavy as a mountain, Svein the Red’s beard was parted by a roguish smile. ‘I’ve heard it said this king of the Franks is so rich that his balls are made of solid gold,’ he said.

‘And I have heard that he pisses holy water,’ Olaf said, a
thick finger raised in warning, ‘which will melt the skin right off a dirty heathen like you, Red.’

‘So, we’ll cut off his snake before we steal his balls,’ Bram Bear blurted, raising a laugh which flowed to an excited murmur that spread through the Fellowship as the idea took wing in each man’s mind.

‘We could put crosses at the prows as they did,’ Knut said, nodding at the Wessexmen.

‘And what would our gods make of that, Knut?’ Asgot spat, but no one heard him because their heads were filled with the rattle of coins and the clinking of treasure. I felt a smile creep on to my lips and silently thanked Loki, for surely it had been the Father of Cunning who had drawn his bow and shot the idea into my head. All around me the wolves were grinning, yellow fangs flashing amongst the gloom. And I knew that I had them.

SO, EALDRED WAS SAVED, AT LEAST FOR NOW. FAR FROM SEEMING
happy the ealdorman if anything looked disappointed, dispirited and ashamed. Later, he would begin to scheme again, to believe that there might be something to be gained through guile and greed, but for now he was a shadow man. He had lost his household warriors, his fortune and his son. His daughter might have woven a new strand into his life’s thread, which had seemed about to be cut, but now she wanted nothing more to do with him. Death, the only escape from shame, had been denied him, had run from Ealdred like the rain dripping from the blade that had promised deliverance, so that my hate for him turned to pity. It is hard to hate a broken man, no matter what he has done in the past.

I had expected Cynethryth to throw her arms around me, to kiss me and thank me for speaking up and stealing Ealdred’s life from the grave. Perhaps she would even lead me to some secluded place and those grateful lips would reward me in soul-shuddering ways. I was still young enough to weave such fancies.

But Cynethryth said nothing, did nothing, led me nowhere. I
supposed her mind still coiled over itself like two snakes fighting, one for Ealdred’s death and the other for his life, and that was one hólmgang in which I wanted no part. And so I did not encroach on the space she put between us, but kept to myself and listened to the men’s talk of Karolus, this emperor of the Franks.

Most captains would not have sailed in such weather, but Sigurd was not most captains and Knut and Olaf both agreed that the distant rumbles of thunder and flashes against the roof of the world were the last throes of a spent storm. Somewhere up there, Thór was slaying giants, but we would be safe enough so long as we stuck close to the shore.
Serpent
’s shallow hold was full to the brim with silver and amber and furs, deer antler and weapons, and so we took half of her cargo and placed it in
Fjord-Elk
’s belly, first putting a layer of skins over the smooth ballast stones we had taken from higher up the beach to replace the old ones which were covered with green slime and stank. Then we untethered the dragons from the mooring posts buried in the sand, put our shoulders against their rumps and shoved for all we were worth. We pushed and grunted and swore and the muscles in my thighs burnt as though my leg bones had been replaced with rods of red-hot iron, but the ships refused to move, which an ugly, long-faced Norseman named Hedin said stank to him like a bad omen. Bjorn, though, called Hedin a horse-faced bollock nose, grunting that it had less to do with omens and more to do with all the rain, which had soaked the beach so that the sand and grit now sucked the ships’ hulls down hungrily. The keel and lowest two strakes were completely buried and in the end we had to break up the sucking silt with our spears and then dig the ships free with our hands, by which time the tide had retreated fully, meaning we had even further to push them.

The Wessexmen were put aboard
Serpent
because although they had rowed
Fjord-Elk
and might be more familiar with
her, that ship’s seasoned timbers had soaked up much Wessex blood and Sigurd thought it unwise to antagonize the warriors or stir them to some foolish action.

‘There is nothing to be gained by reminding a man of his defeat and of the deaths of his friends,’ the jarl said, ‘not if you want him to row for you. Better to let them come to love
Serpent
as we do.’

‘Aye, and besides, this way I will be able to keep my eye on them,’ Olaf added crabbily as the Englishmen took to their new row benches, puffing from the labour of digging
Serpent
free and grimacing at their fingernails, which were bloody and broken. Luckily for all of us there was enough wind to enable us to hoist the sails and leave the oars stowed. It blew from the south-east and we were heading south, so we were prepared for slow progress, happy enough not to have to row. Those at the foreship handled the front of the sail, attaching the thick rope to the tacking boom to ensure that the edge of the sail was firmly held towards the bow and into the wind. This prevented
Serpent
’s great woollen wings being taken aback, leaving Olaf and Bram free to tack us with the bowline.

Everything aboard was soaked through and in just seven days had become covered with snot-like slime; our journey chests, the deck, the mast, the water barrels, the rigging and blocks, and the edges of the sail. All had to be scraped with blades, scrubbed with rough cloth and smeared with grease, for life aboard a ship is hard enough without sliding around in moss and filth. But it feels good to clean a longship, especially a dragon like
Serpent
or
Fjord-Elk
. You catch yourself murmuring, whispering to her tenderly.
There you go, let’s get that dirt off you, that’s better, isn’t it? Yes, now we are all clean and beautiful again.
Because when you love a ship she will love you back. Even when the waves are mast-high or fat and swollen so that there is only a fingernail’s length of free board above the water line, she will flex and
ride and work for you, keeping your lungs full of air instead of brine.