The Lord of Vik-Lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3) (36 page)

  Thorgrim kept his course at a shallow angle heading away from the coast and kept note of the breeze on his face. It was rising a bit, and veering more easterly, and that was all good. Finally he broke the silence.

  “Let us set the sail. I think we can make a fair course for Vík-ló now.”

  The men not pulling oar unlashed the sail, swung the yard athwartships, rigged sheets and tacks and stretched the halyard along. Five minutes later the big red and white striped sail was spread to the wind and bellying out. The oars came in and
Far Voyager
heeled to leeward and Thorgrim swung her off north, bound for Vík-ló.

  “Starri!” Thorgrim called aloft.

  “Yes, Night Wolf?”

  “What do you see to the south? Anything?”

  Starri paused to make one more thorough sweep of the horizon. “Water. Cliffs. Fog,” he reported.

  “No ships?”

  “No ships.”

  Thorgrim nodded. “No ships to the north?” he called.

  “No ships to the north.”

 
Grimarr, you son of a bitch, where are you?
Thorgrim wondered. There were only two real possibilities. One was that he was still to the south, still lurking around the place where he had fought the Irish. Perhaps still looking for the Fearna hoard. Maybe he was still fighting a running battle with Lorcan, or whoever it was who had attacked them.

  If that was the case, then
Far Voyager
would have close to a day’s lead on him, plenty of time to land at Vík-ló, load their stores and their plunder and be gone. Such a possibility seemed too much to hope for, so Thorgrim did not hope for it. The gods had been generous in wrecking
Water Stallion
. He did not think they would be that generous again.

  So the other possibility, the likely one, was that Grimarr’s two remaining ships had passed them in the night or in the fog, that they were somewhere to the north, perhaps already at Vík-ló. Thorgrim guessed the visibility was something on the order of three or four miles now, and getting better as the day wore on and the fog seemed to blow away. Three or four miles, and Grimarr’s ships were nowhere in sight.

 
Ah, you son of a bitch, where are you?

  Agnarr stepped aft and offered to take the helm and Thorgrim was happy to let him. “How far are we from Vík-ló?” he asked.

  Agnarr looked west at the coast. “Twenty miles or so,” he said. “But we’ll want to give the headland south of there a wide berth.”

  Thorgrim nodded. He looked up at the sun, a pale disk behind the overcast, sinking toward the west. They would have reached Vík-ló that day if they had not had to play their games with
Water Stallion
.

  “Can you get us into Vík-ló in the dark?” Thorgrim asked.

  “Ah…” Agnarr said. He looked up at the sun, back toward the coast, then north toward the distant headland jutting out to sea. “I could…if there was moonlight enough.”

  “Which there will not be tonight,” Thorgrim supplied.

  “There will not,” Agnarr agreed.

  They found a sandy beach that seemed to run for miles north and south and ran
Far Voyager
’s bow up onto it. They were only ten miles or so short of their destination, but the wind had died with the coming of evening. By the time they grounded the men had been at the oars for two hours and no one grumbled about stopping. They built a fire on shore and Ornolf continued to drink in a most prodigious manner. “It’s good to have you back, Thorgrim,” he said, raising his goblet. “I am too old for all the considerations that go with command. It is better for younger fellows such as yourself to think on these things. Though it truth I think you’re falling apart faster than I am!”

  “I see,” Thorgrim said. Starri and some others had made a cauldron of stew out of dried meat and crumbled bread, and Thorgrim was scooping it from a wooden bowl with his knife. “It’s not that you’re happy to have me back so much as you’re happy to not suffer the burden of command. If a trained bear could command
Far Voyager
you would have been just as happy to have him aboard?”

  “You twist my words, Night Wolf,” Ornolf said. He looked annoyed but Thorgrim knew the old man well enough to know he was not. “I am happy to have you back.”

  “And I am happy to be back. And by this time tomorrow I hope we will be well on our way to England and home, and then I will be happier still.”

  “Ha!” Ornolf said and he took a long drink. “There is nothing the gods love more than to hear a man spout out about his plans for tomorrow. It makes them laugh ‘til their sides hurt. You are a fool, Thorgrim for speaking so.”

  And Thorgrim knew he was right.
But what difference could it make
? he thought.
The gods know what’s in my heart
. His speaking his thoughts aloud could not make any difference, he decided. The gods would do what the gods would do. He realized that he was once again rubbing his amulet of Mjölnir, the Hammer of Thor, and his silver cross between his fingers. He did not stop.

Make the tyrant flee his lands,

Frey and Njord, may Thor

the land-god be angered at this foe,

the defiler of his holy place.

                                                                       Egil’s Saga

Kevin mac Lugaed watched the longship beat itself to death on the rocks. He sat on horseback on the high cliffs that looked down on the shoreline below. Beyond the beach and the tumbling surf he could see the smattering of rocks strewn off shore, as if God had tossed them like a farmer’s wife scattering grain for chickens.

  The water was breaking white over them, but no water broke over whatever the ship had run up on. Again Kevin envisioned the hand of God, reaching down and snapping the
dubh gall
ship like a twig, smiting them in His vengeance.

 
And well He might, the heathen bastards
, he thought.

  Kevin mac Lugaed had been second in command of the Irish warriors who followed Senchan mac Ronan. When Senchan died on the beach fighting the Northmen, Kevin had assumed command, and he assumed it still. One of his first acts as leader had been to get his men off that God-forsaken stretch of gravel.

  The attack had gone mostly right. Lorcan had grabbed the ship and made off with it, while the two pronged assault had thrown the Norsemen into confusion. But as soon as Lorcan’s ship was underway and a respectable distance off, far enough that Lorcan could not see what was happening ashore, Kevin had pulled his men back from the beach. There was no good to be done there. They had killed their share of
dubh gall
and they would only lose more of their own men if the continued to press the fight. It was not worth the effort. Kevin did not believe there was any loot buried anywhere within miles of the place.

  His men had climbed back up the steep trail to the top of the cliffs and the
dubh gall
had not followed, and Kevin reckoned they had had a belly-full of fighting. There was still a considerable army of Irish warriors left, Lorcan’s men numbering well over a hundred, and at least half of them were mounted. They represented a force powerful enough to push the Northmen at Cill Mhantáin, what they called Vík-ló, back into the sea.

  When the Irish men-at-arms had been collected on the open ground above the beach and sorted out, Kevin was surprised to find that he was in command of Senchan mac Ronan’s men as well as all the others. Kevin was not of the
rí túaithe
, one of the minor kings, but he was of the
aire forgill
, the Lords of Superior Testimony who ranked just below the
rí túaithe
in Ireland’s complex hierarchy of power. And there was no one of superior status left alive who had not gone off on the ship with Lorcan. This good fortune Kevin credited to his ability to look as if he was fighting while still remaining largely out of harm’s way.

  His immediate concerns were twofold, and he kept them to himself. The first was to find a means to increase his own wealth and power. The second was to do nothing that would spark the wrath of Lorcan mac Fáeláin. To that end, he would have to see that the men under him acted in a way that at least appeared to further Lorcan’s aims.

  The warriors fell naturally into four different divisions based on which of Lorcan’s four chiefs they had served. Kevin kept those divisions intact and allowed each to pick their own men to replace their fallen leaders. One division he sent to Ráth Naoi to protect Lorcan’s home, a gesture he figured Lorcan would appreciate. Another he sent to keep an eye on the
dubh-gall
ship that was sailing off. The third was to keep an eye on those Northmen aboard the two ships that remained near the beach. And he, Kevin, would follow Lorcan’s ship, the better to be in the right place when Lorcan needed assistance.

  He had no idea if the others had followed his orders. He did not have much luck following them himself.

  At first it had been no great task to keep an eye on Lorcan’s ship as it headed north along the coast. The purloined vessel had sailed away from the land, and then back again, and then away once more, so in relation to the shore it made very little progress. Kevin and his men could have kept pace by casually strolling over the hills. It seemed to Kevin a very silly way to sail a ship, but he would have been the first to admit he knew nothing of such things.

  Then night fell. Kevin had assumed Lorcan would beach the ship, but instead he remained at sea, and Kevin realized he had no way of knowing where the ship might go. Understanding it was pointless to ride up and down the shore in the dark, he and his men plundered a wealthy farm which they happened upon and then bedded down there for the night.

  They rose before dawn and headed for the coast only to find, as the sun came up, that the fog hung like smoke over the water and they could not see more than a mile in any direction. Kevin sent riders up and down the shoreline, and an hour later, with the sun starting to burn the fog away, one of those riders returned to say he had seen a longship near shore and just to the north. Kevin gathered his men and lead them off, chasing their sea-borne ghost.

  They found the ship an hour later, heading south, but Kevin realized then that he had another problem; he could not tell the longships apart. This might have been Lorcan’s ship, or it might have been one of the others, in which case whoever had been sent to watch its progress had already failed in his task. Or it might have been a different ship entirely.

  They rode slowly along, tracking the ship on its way, and not long after, one of the men called that he had seen another ship, off in the distance. They pulled up short and watched and soon another vessel emerged from the fog, further out to sea but clearly trying to close with the first ship.

  “This might get interesting,” Kevin said and the men close enough to hear him agreed.

  It was like a slow, silent dance, the two ships moving below them, closing on a point where they would meet and, Kevin had to imagine, fight. If they were trying to join forces they could have done so already. But the one closer to shore seemed for all the world to be trying to escape. And then it turned a half circle and stopped.

  This caused a bit of confusion among the Irish warriors watching from the hill, but they felt a sense of anticipation as the second ship closed on the first, like waiting for the second dog in a dog fight to be let into the ring. Kevin and his men were several hundred yards above and to the west of the action, but still close enough that they would be provided with some fine entertainment when the two
dubh gall
crews went sword to sword and shield to shield along the decks.

  What happened next happened so fast that no one really knew what had taken place. The first ship darted out of the way. The second shot past it and then seemed to stop, then break in two. They could hear the screams as clear as church bells echoing up the cliffs, a very unsettling sound.

  “I think that one hit a rock, or some such,” one of the men offered, and that was met with murmured agreement. Whatever it was, it had ruined their fun.

  For long moments they watched in silence. Then half of the ship, the larger half, rolled over and that was the end of the men on board, and Kevin thought,
Enjoy your eternity of damnation, you heathen pigs
. The first ship, the one that had seemingly jumped clear, was underway, heading north, as if nothing had occurred, while the relentless, surging water pushed the wreckage of the second toward the beach below.

  “Sir,” one of the men broke the silence. “That other ship, it’s sailing off. Should we follow?”

  “No,” Kevin said. “The others who were told to watch that ship, they should follow it, not us.” In truth he had no idea which ship was which, and for all he knew that was Lorcan’s ship sailing off, the one he had tasked himself with watching.

  “We have more pressing matters,” Kevin continued. “We must get down to the beach below and see if there are any who lived through the wreck.” What he meant, of course, was,
We must get down to the beach below and see if there are bodies to loot or anything else of value
, but he did not say that. He did not have to. Every other man was thinking it as well.

  Getting down to the beach was not as easy as it first appeared. One of Kevin’s men, who lived in that area and knew the coast well, informed them they would have to ride half a mile north before they could find a path that would take them down the near-vertical cliffs. So they turned their mounts and rode off at a trot. Eager as Kevin was to get down to the beach, he knew that the longer it took the more valuable flotsam was likely to wash ashore.

  They came at last to the head of the trail, and the fellow with the local knowledge dismounted first. “There’s no riding down the path. We’ll have to go on foot,” he said.

  Kevin frowned, but he dismounted as well, as did the others. Kevin pointed to a dozen men and instructed them to stay with the horses, then he told their guide to lead them down to the beach. It was slow going and treacherous. The path was narrow, and on several occasions ran along the edge of straight drops of one hundred feet or more. They moved slowly, and with caution. Plunder was of no use to a man who lay broken at the foot of a cliff.

  At last they reached the shingle beach and marched off south, retracing the half mile they had ridden north. Even from a distance they could see a large section of the ship cast up on the shore, and the scattering of shattered planks and sundry debris from the smashed and overturned hull. Here and there were motionless dark clumps that might have been seaweed or might have been the corpses of the
dubh gall
crew.

  They slowed their pace as they came closer, and though no one felt the need to have weapons at the ready most hands were resting on sword hilts as they approached the wreckage. Some of the clumps they had seen were indeed seaweed, but most were men, and there was no sign that any of them were living.

  Kevin approached the nearest, lying face down on the gravel, the surf washing over his legs. He flipped the man over with his toe. Dead eyes stared up at the sky, his mouth hung open, long brown hair was plastered to white skin. Kevin felt a sick feeling in his gut. Judging by his clothes, his hair, his general look, the dead man was no
dubh gall
. He looked like an Irishman.

  “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Kevin said softly and made the sign of the cross. He continued on down the beach, walking slowly, running his eyes over the handful of bodies that had washed ashore. His men streamed along behind him. He could hear them rifling the corpses that he had already walked past.

  He moved toward the section of the ship that had come ashore.
This is the front end
, he thought. From his lookout on the cliff he had seen it break clean away from the rest, and apparently it had floated free until the waves had pushed it half onto the beach. It lay canted away from him, so he was looking at the bottom, dark with growth, and the tall, proud bow terminating in a carving of some creature or other. At the other end, which still rested in the surf, the planks hung shattered and ugly like a broken bone that had torn through the skin.

  Kevin approached the wreckage with caution, though he could not have said why. There was something mysterious and other-worldly about this great section of ship flung up on dry land. His eyes traced the curve of the stem and the almost delicate carved post that arched up above his head. He stepped around to where he could see the deck which had been hidden from view on his approach. He sucked in his breath, and once again made the sign of the cross.

  There was a figure lying on the deck, back turned to Kevin, more a great heap of cloth and hair than a man. But even with the face hidden, the clothes soaked through, the body lying motionless, Kevin had no doubt of who it was.

  He heard his men walking softly behind him, heard the notes of surprise as they, too, looked aboard the wreck. “Oh, by God, is that Lorcan?” he heard one man whisper, but no one answered him.