Raven: Sons of Thunder (16 page)

I looked skyward, watching black marks push and jostle through the thick grey, then my eyes sifted them into gulls and swallows, like little arrow heads, and above them all three crows whose cawing cut through the mist and cloud every now and then.

Sigurd kept Ealdred at the stern with him and Knut the steersman, but the other Wessexmen were put just behind the mast so they could learn about the ship from watching the Norsemen work the sail. It took three men to constantly tighten the mast stays and this was a simple enough job, which Olaf had the Wessexmen doing before long. They did it well enough, too, and I swear their backs were pride-stiff as they worked.

‘My father used to say that Englishmen sail as well as chickens fly,’ Sigurd said in English for Ealdred’s benefit, though I suspected these Wessexmen had it in them to prove Sigurd’s father wrong. Sigurd suspected it too, for he caught my eye and nodded at the English, one eyebrow cocked and his lips pursed on the edge of amusement.

We tracked the coast slowly but steadily and at one point we sailed right into a dirty cloud of biting gnats. They got into our mouths and down our tunic necks and even bit some of us on our eyeballs, which we all agreed was a very low thing to do. We roared at Olaf and Knut to tack us out of that Hel, but even when they tried the movement of the wind across the sail was pitiful and so we had to endure it, cowering under furs and skins like frightened women. Afterwards, we laughed about it, for when Svein huddled beneath a white reindeer skin it looked as if a mountain of snow had dropped on the deck! We laughed and we teased each other and we scratched and when we saw three broad knörrs ploughing their own sea roads west and south we knew we had come to the mouth of the Sicauna. Sure
enough we rounded a stubby peninsula upon which dozens of houses sat coughing black smoke into the grey sky. Once round that Olaf said we would see the river.

We were not close enough to land to see the people of that place, but they would certainly see
Serpent
’s and
Fjord-Elk
’s sails, even though the low line of their hulls would probably be obscured from view by waves.

‘Christ alone knows what the Franks will make of us,’ Penda said behind me.

‘When
Serpent
came to my village, not even Griffin, the most experienced warrior, had ever seen or heard of nearly sixty men in brynjas,’ I said, remembering the terror I had felt at the sight of so many armed men. ‘Let alone each with his own sword, spear and axe. Let us hope these Franks have not either. It will be better if they are wary of us.’

‘Oh, they’ll be wary, lad, when they clap eyes on this murderous lot. I’d wager my best teeth on that. What happened to Griffin?’

Those words tugged at my guts. ‘There was a fight. He killed one of them. Their shipwright,’ I said, a distant, warm pride blooming for a heartbeat somewhere inside my soul, ‘so they cut open his back, hacked the ribs to pieces, then pulled out his lungs.’ I felt the twist of my own grimace. ‘They call it the blood eagle.’

‘I know what they call it, lad,’ Penda said, ‘blood-loving heathen bastards.’

Before we had set off, Bjorn and his brother Bjarni had hewn four of the mooring posts and lashed them together to make two crosses, and now Sigurd gave the order to stow the dragon heads and mount these Christ symbols instead. Asgot countered this abhorrence by untying a sack that had been squirming by his feet and pulling out a seal cow, whose throat he cut, letting its blood spatter into the cream whipped by
Serpent
’s bow. That foam churned pink and the godi held up the twitching
animal for us all to see, then cast it over the side with a tangle of strange prayers.

It was certainly better than the mangy hare he had given to Njörd when we left the Wessex coast, and afterwards Bram joked that we should have eaten the seal meat first, then stuffed its skin with grass before chucking it overboard and hoping the gods were none the wiser.

‘I’d wager old Njörd’s belly never rumbles like mine,’ Bram proclaimed, slapping his stomach, which was barrel-shaped yet solid.

‘Thór’s chariot does not rumble like your belly,’ ashen-skinned Bothvar said, at which Bram Bear simply nodded and smiled proudly.

Now past the headland we were in the mouth of the great river and could see the green land closing in from either side beyond the wooden cross at
Serpent
’s prow – could feel it too. Hedin Long Face said the place looked like Fensfjord, where most of the Fellowship came from, but Olaf barked that that was hjem lengsel, homesickness, talking. Hedin considered this for a while during which you would have thought he had been asked to recall and recount the creation of the world in every detail. Finally, he admitted that Olaf had the right of it. The sea here was not as clear or deep, the land not as high and the air not as sweet as a Norwegian fjord. He even mumbled an apology to Frey the harvest god, who decides when the sun shall shine or the rain come down, for the insult.

We began to see boats of all sizes and shapes: broad merchant knörrs, poorly made pilgrim vessels with sails as tattered as the skeletons of old leaves, fishing skiffs, a levy vessel of twenty oars whose captain wisely pointed his prow away from us, and even a sleek dragon heading south, which must have been a raider, probably Danish according to Knut, for it was longer than
Serpent
and arrow thin. To me it did not look too seaworthy with that narrow hull. I could imagine a wave
slamming against its side and rolling it like a log, but when I said as much to Penda he scratched his long scar and pointed out that it had got this far and so its makers must have known something of sea-craft.

‘As a rule I’ll not climb aboard any ship that needs bailing more than three times in two days,’ Olaf said, ‘but I wouldn’t mind if these strakes leaked some more.’ He was standing on the mast step, scouring the channel with his experienced eyes. ‘I like to see you lambs back bent and bailing. In my father’s day . . . and in mine . . . we rowed! Churned the sea till it was as thick as porridge. None of this sitting around waiting for the wind to blow us here and there.’ This was met with a chorus of jeers from men who had heard Olaf hawk up the same bile a hundred times, but old Uncle took no notice. ‘Soft as hot horse shit, you lot. Like all young men these days. Óðin knows what the world’s coming to and I wager it makes his one eye weep.’ Above his head
Serpent
’s faded red sail rippled and flapped, whilst around him men were beginning to prickle with excitement and nerves because we were coming to an unknown land whose people and spirits were likely to prove hostile, especially if they found out we were heathens. I became aware of the creaking of
Serpent
’s timbers and ropes and those sounds, those squeaks and moans seemed somehow human, like questions from a frightened child.
Are you sure we should be here? Is it safe? What if they hurt us like last time?
It was strange, but without the dragon Jörmungand at our prow, the Christ cross being fixed there instead,
Serpent
felt different, even vulnerable, and I was not alone in feeling that strange seidr-weight of being watched. All along the Frankish shore eyes bored into
Serpent
like so many keen-edged spoon augers and even though we had not mounted our shields along the rack and were not wearing our mail and helmets, it would not be long before the powerful lords of this kingdom came to sniff us out, for surely ships like ours were rare in those waters.

The levy knörr, which I had thought long gone, was in fact entering the estuary along the far shore, stalking us from a safe distance, biding its time like a carrion bird around feeding wolves. This in itself was not enough to worry us, but it did tell us that the Franks were wary of outsiders and that even these seaward frontiers were patrolled, despite being far from the centres of power. As Sigurd explained, this Karolus was after all king of lands far and wide, a self-proclaimed emperor in the old Roman way, and he had not won such power without caution, organization and, perhaps most worryingly as far as we were concerned, many spears at his command. And now that we had left the safety of the open sea behind and were entering the gullet, let alone the mouth, of the river, I could not melt the lump of ice-cold fear that had grown in my belly.

I watched Father Egfrith carry a rolled skin to
Serpent
’s bow, where Cynethryth stood awkwardly. Dutifully, Egfrith unrolled the skin and held it up as a screen and Cynethryth half smiled before disappearing to relieve herself in a bucket. Egfrith turned his face away and I felt a grudging gratitude towards the man for looking to Cynethryth’s needs aboard this ship of rough men. Poor Cynethryth. It cannot have been an easy thing to live amongst us. She was after all the daughter of a lord of Wessex. Now she was in as much danger as the rest of us. Father Egfrith had enjoyed telling us that many of the Saxon people to the east, between the rivers Elbe and Ems, had been put to death under Karolus’s laws because they had observed heathen ways rather than embracing the White Christ. Simply refusing to be pushed under the water by a Christ priest was enough, it seemed, to see your head and neck parted never to meet again. When I translated all this for the others, Bram’s hairy eyebrows wove together.

‘This Karolus does not sound like a Christ follower to me,’ he said, biting a hunk of bread from the lump in his fist.

‘Perhaps these Saxons stank like a sheep’s arse,’ Bjorn
suggested, ‘and the king was tired of holding his nose, so he ordered his priests to wash them and when they refused . . .’ He drew the edge of his hand across his neck.

‘It’s called baptism,’ I said. ‘A Christ priest pushes you under the water a heathen and when you come up you’re a Christian.’ This idea was clearly absurd to the Norsemen and I was met with sceptical expressions. I shrugged. ‘Maybe there is more to it than that,’ I said. ‘But that much is true.’

‘They think they can wash Óðin and Thór out of us with a little water?’ Arnvid said, his face screwed up like a weasel’s arsehole.

‘I would like to see a Christ priest try to push my head under the water,’ Svein the Red announced, smiling at Father Egfrith, who was watching us, trying to pick apart the threads of our words, or so it seemed to me.

‘There isn’t a river deep enough, Svein,’ I said, meaning you could not wash the gods out of him any more than you could harpoon the moon and pull it out of the sky, and this simple statement seemed to settle it all.

I glanced at Ealdred, wondering if he would speak for us when the time came as I had hoped and told Sigurd he would. He did not have much choice of course, but then again he did not have much to lose either, other than his miserable life, and so we could not be sure. The other problem was that the Franks might not believe him anyway, which I thought likely looking at him hunched at
Serpent
’s stern like a ship’s dog that has been beaten for shitting in a man’s bed roll.

Olaf and Sigurd exchanged words, then Olaf turned to the rest of us, a grim smile cracking his bird’s-nest beard.

‘Put your combs away, you whoresons,’ he called, ‘it’s about time you earned your keep.’ Here, where salt water and fresh wove together, the estuary had narrowed, providing shelter against the sea winds so that there was no longer enough to make it worth keeping the sails up, especially with the river
flowing against us. With a clatter of oars from both ships we made ready to row as Olaf, Black Floki and Bram lowered
Serpent
’s sail and then took to their own benches. Wind-heaped dunes rose on either bank so that it felt as though we were passing through a gateway, and upon those hillocks marram grass stood stiff as an angry hound’s hackles. On either side, where the river’s banks met the water, the tides had carved steps into the sand and above these I could make out, even from a distance, hundreds of dragonflies streaking madly, making the air shimmer strangely. Fat gulls squawked and dived to
Serpent
’s sternpost, hungry for the fish guts men throw overboard when they come in from the sea. A flock of swifts shot across our bow like a flight of arrows, veering suddenly as one over the brow of a sandbank. Then, as I rowed, my muscles bunching and spreading – knots of heat radiating their warmth through my body – we saw the first of them. They were sprouting one after another from the dune’s summits, growing from the marram grass and standing stone still, like a great host of haugbui, the undead, risen from their howes. For luck I touched the amulet at my neck, the small carving of the All-Father’s face, which had once belonged to Sigurd.

The beautiful, rhythmic sound of oars – ours and
Fjord-Elk
’s
–
dipping into the water in unison was as much a statement to the Christian god as it was to those who now watched us from the banks, their thoughts known only to themselves – though I’d wager they were fear-soaked, for Sigurd’s wolves had come to Frankia.