Raven: Sons of Thunder (25 page)

It was slow going. A man can easily walk fifteen miles in a day. On a horse he’ll make thirty. But hauling a dragon ship across mud, even if the ground is relatively flat, is arduous, backbreaking work and you will need hard men just to make five miles. A fine drizzle had begun that afternoon, turning into a relentless downpour by early evening that soaked us through leathers and cloaks and skin and muscle so that we were drenched to our bones and miserable with it. The portage track became a bog and our feet churned it worse still, making it even harder for
Fjord-Elk
’s crew, who moaned at us for our clumsy big feet when they were not gasping for breath or slipping and falling in the mud.

‘Poor bastards,’ Penda said as we leant into
Serpent
’s hull, our faces close enough to smell the tarred rope caulking and the pitch-soaked strakes.

‘If you feel so sorry for them, why are you smiling?’ I asked,
grimacing and putting my shoulder into it as Olaf walked down the line to inspect
Fjord-Elk
’s progress.

‘That’s the way, Raven!’ Olaf called. ‘Put some spirit into it, lad! Or even better ask one of your friends up there . . .’ he looked at a gap in the sodden trees through which the heavy, iron-grey sky could be seen, ‘to get off their arse and help us along.’

‘They’d be lighter without the Christ crosses, Uncle,’ Bram rumbled, his face red with exertion as he hauled on a rope.

‘Aye, and they’d be lighter without your secret mead hoard, Bram,’ Olaf said, making us laugh despite the rain and the filth, though Bram looked horrified that Olaf should have revealed his greatest secret.

‘Actually, Uncle, Bram’s hoard is not so heavy these days,’ I said, grinning.

‘You greedy, red-eyed son of a goat-sucking whore!’ Bram blurted, almost stumbling with the shock of discovering that we had all been at his stash.

It was early evening by the time we knew we had come to the end of the portage. The rain was lashing wildly and the wind was whipping through the forest, sending sodden leaves swirling and old branches crashing to the litter here and there. The eerie creak of boughs rubbing against each other in the wind was so loud that it seemed the forest itself was groaning, unsettled by our presence. We were close to the river but had not heard its gush above the hiss of the rain and when at last we did, we slapped each other’s wet backs and shook the water from sodden hair and beards, for we knew we had earned a rest and some hot food. A camp was prepared and the cauldrons were fetched from the ships, and we took the spare sails to make a shelter amongst the lurching trees big enough for us all to sleep under cover. Some of us went to the river, where we found tree stumps, some new, some moss-covered, and great piles of rocks left there by previous crews, which we would use
to replace the ballast we had left behind. Then after scouting the area we settled in for the night. Cynethryth and I shared two dry furs to keep warm and hoped that no boughs would crash down on us as we slept.

‘This river joins another far to the north and that one will take us to Aix-la-Chapelle,’ Winigis told Sigurd and Olaf next morning as we loaded up the ballast before sliding
Serpent
into the upper course of the river, which would be easy enough as the river here was wide and sufficiently deep. The rain had stopped in the small hours but the wind had yet to blow itself out and came in angry gusts every now and then.

‘Will your emperor be waiting on the shore with an ale horn and a roasted boar?’ Olaf asked, smacking his lips within his bird’s nest of a beard which rippled in the wind.

‘I expect he will be waiting,’ Winigis said glumly, ‘but with swords and spears and a thousand men. He’ll be waiting to kill us.’

‘But we are Christians,’ Sigurd offered, gesturing at the cross on
Serpent
’s prow. The wind moaned through the trees and somewhere a branch, weakened in the night, creaked and crumped to the forest litter.

Winigis shook his head, taking off his hat to wring it out, still sodden from the previous day. ‘They say the emperor is a clever man. He will know what you are. Now that I have shown you the way, perhaps I can go home,’ he said, though there was no conviction in his voice, nor hope in his eyes.

Sigurd put an arm across the Frank’s shoulder. ‘We have come far together, Winigis,’ he said, his teeth white and his eyes shining. ‘I would not deny you the chance to see the emperor’s great city one more time. Only accompany us to Aix-la-Chapelle, and you will be free to go your way whenever you wish.’ Winigis looked to Father Egfrith but found no comfort in those weasel eyes.

‘
Fiat voluntas Dei
,’ Egfrith said with a shrug of his little
shoulders. ‘May God’s will be done.’ But I hoped Egfrith’s god was attending to some far-away matter so that he had no will one way or another when it came to us, for they said that Emperor Karolus was the Christ god’s sword, and that made us his enemy.

THE RIVER, WHICH WINIGIS TOLD US WAS CALLED THE MASS, WAS
with us this time, meaning that our oars could stay up in their trees. That was just as well with us, as we had spent much of the morning sweating our beards off loading both ships with ballast. Our sails were up, drying and slapping in the wind, wetting the men on their leeward sides with a fine spray, though they took no notice of it. We were all too busy looking up. Once we had left the relatively flat wooded country of the Mass’s headwaters, the landscape had changed. Steep, sharp hills rose on both sides of us, following the river’s course like the jagged spines of two enormous dragons. On those hills stands of dark green pine were scattered amongst beech, oak and ash whose leaves had begun to turn orange and brown, creating the overall impression of a patchwork of markings on those dragons’ hides. Other than the odd wisp of smoke rising from the forest there was no sign of human life. The land was wild and huge and rich and ripe for the picking.

‘Now this is like the fjords, hey!’ Bram shouted from his journey chest where he was taking the opportunity to drink
some of his mead before he woke up one day to find it gone. He wiped the foam from his beard with the back of his hand.

‘But I want a nice cod,’ Halfdan said, stirring murmurs of agreement. ‘I’m sick of salmon. I’ve got salmon coming out of my ears.’

‘You hear that, Cynethryth?’ I said in English, ‘Halfdan is sick of salmon and would like you to catch him a sea fish from this river.’ Smiling, Olaf translated for Halfdan who suddenly looked embarrassed, his cheeks flushing red as he began to gabble in his defence.

‘You can tell Halfdan that he is welcome to fish for himself but he’ll need a very long line if he wants a cod,’ Cynethryth said, eyeballing the Norseman like a hawk. ‘And whilst he’s at it perhaps he can catch me some new clothes too.’ I translated this as the men laughed and Aslak reached over, cuffing Halfdan round the head for being a fool. Halfdan sulked then and I felt sorry for teasing him, but not too sorry, for we each got our turn at both ends of the tongue-whip. That is what it is like in a fellowship of warriors.

Each night half of us would go ashore and half would stay with the ships and those on dry land would hunt for hare, fox, deer or boar. They would train with their weapons, too, for we had not been in a fight for some time and we feared losing the edge that battle gives you and peace takes away. After five days on the Mass we passed a warship going upriver. It was a fine ship – not sleek and deathly quick like
Serpent
or
Fjord-Elk
, but broad and long enough to carry one hundred men to a fight, though there were no more than seventy aboard that day. Its oar banks were dipping fast and well, even though its sail was up and that sail was huge. It was of new white wool with an enormous red cross emblazoned on it. Egfrith, who had hurried to
Serpent
’s prow to bolster our ruse when Olaf had first spotted the Frank ship, now made the sign of the cross to her captain as she passed. The Franks aboard were tough,
grizzled-looking men who glared at us despite Egfrith’s bow sermon.

‘One day I shall have a wolf’s head on my sail,’ Sigurd said jealously. ‘On all the sails on all my ships. And I’ll pay for it with this Christian king’s silver.’ The Frank ship had passed now, but the red cross was still visible from the sail’s windward side as a huge pink stain. Then Sigurd said: ‘There is power in that symbol,’ scratching his throat and looking after the ship. ‘I felt it.’

‘Not enough power to see through our cunning, lord,’ I said, which Sigurd accepted with a half-hearted nod. ‘Your wolf’s head will freeze men’s blood and make them piss their breeks.’ He chewed his lip, deep in thought.

‘One day, Raven, you may have your own banner,’ he said after a while. ‘A black raven with great flapping wings.’ He grinned. ‘Such a thing would make me piss my breeks.’

I grinned at that too, perhaps because it was an impossible thought. For me to have my own banner I would have to be a jarl and there was more chance of Black Floki’s shaving his head, putting on a Christ monk’s skirt and spitting in Óðin’s one eye.

We saw shepherds with their flocks on high-up meadows, and clusters of smoke-wreathed houses by the river’s edge. We saw ruined dwellings of white stone like ancient skeletons bleached by the sun, and once we saw a church or monastery nestled on the western shore, which the Norsemen were tempted to visit. But all knew we were after a bigger fish than that and so Sigurd’s wolves contented themselves with eyeing the place hungrily and imagining the cool silver and treasures within. Downriver, the pine-covered peaks softened and were eventually replaced by a boundless landscape of low rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Three days later we joined a tributary flowing east, and two days after that we took the river north, where we came to a settlement that seemed to us to straddle the river and we
thought it must be Aix-la-Chapelle. But Winigis explained that we were between two towns, Tongeren on the west bank and Le Gi on the east. That stretch of river was bustling with ships of all shapes and sizes, so we lowered our sails and took to the oars to manoeuvre more easily amongst them. Merchants hollered greetings to one another and exchanged news of this place or that, their voices hard and flat above the seething river. Clouds of gulls shrieked and tumbled in the smoky air, excited by fishing skiffs coming and going. The thumping and chopping of wood carried across to us from the western bank where men were building a church. A group of solemn-looking monks were standing near the labourers and every now and then the mournful sound of their singing carried to us on the breeze, bringing a tear to Egfrith’s eye.

‘I don’t blame you, monk,’ I said. ‘It’s a sound to shrivel your balls and make your ears drop off.’ But he ignored me, too intent on straining to hear the psalms as we rowed past. Vessels hurried to get out of our way, perhaps thinking we were the emperor’s ships or perhaps simply because we looked dangerous, even with Christ crosses at our prows. But no one challenged us. We did not tempt the Norns by lingering and by midday we had passed another town, Maestricht, which Winigis told us had once boasted a great stone bridge built by the Romans to span the Mass in the time of Caesar Augustus. But that bridge was long gone, the last of its shaped stones now serving Christ as the foundations for his father’s house in the centre of the city.

‘This whole land stinks of the White Christ,’ Black Floki had moaned when I had translated Winigis’s explanation.

‘We should burn it,’ Svein the Red offered, pulling back in the stroke, his massive broad back expanding. The river was so wide here that the current had slowed to a crawl and the breeze had died to a whisper, so we rowed still. ‘The Christ filth can’t spread if we burn it from the place,’ he added.

‘There are not enough of us, Svein, you blood-loving oaf. And the trouble is you can’t burn a stone building like you can a man’s hall,’ Olaf said, standing before us with his hands on his hips. ‘But one day, lads, we’ll come back. We’ll come back and we’ll take our fill. Until then let them worship their bloodless, weakling god. Let them grow soft like a rotting apple. Easier for us to squash them beneath our heel, hey!’ The men cheered this and even Egfrith smiled, knowing no Norse and thinking we were just being high-spirited, and no one thought to enlighten him.

The next morning we entered a broad valley surrounded by wooded heights. The river here kinked and slowed. A wharf some five times the length of
Serpent
had been built into the eastern bank on great oak posts stained dark over a hundred years by the passing river.

‘The river here is called the Wurm,’ Winigis said to Sigurd, scratching at a pock scar on his cheek.