Troll Mill (27 page)

“Now come. There is no time to lose.”

“How will we get there?” Hilde scrambled out of bed.

“I will lead you. Hurry! You are needed, needed, out among the skerries … skerries …” How long that last word was, a lingering sibilance like a wave washing over the sand. The figure was fading, too, holding out two arms from which the sea-fire splashed and spilled and vanished. Hilde blinked, rubbed her eyes, looked again. Not a glimmer remained; not so much as a wet spot on the floor.

But the warning had been true. It ran in her blood like a fever. She pulled her dress over her shift and jumped across the hearth to wake Peer. As she dragged back the panel of his bunk, Loki lifted his muzzle from Peer’s legs and thumped his tail.
So that’s why the Nis came to me. It doesn’t like Loki.

“Peer, wake up. Wake up, now!” He groaned, flung an arm over his face, tried to
roll over. She shook him ruthlessly. “Wake up!”

“Wha’sa’marrer? ‘S’not morning yet …,” he mumbled.

Hilde looked around, dipped a cupful from the water jar, and threw it into his face. He sat up, shocked and gasping. “What’s that for? Now I’m soaked!”

“Ssh! Don’t wake Mother. We’ve got to get up, Peer. I’ve just seen Kersten. She says Pa and the others are in danger out by the skerries!”

Peer shook his head.
“Kersten?
Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”

“I—no, not
sure.
But if it was a dream, it was a true dream. Ask the Nis! It’s hiding at the bottom of my bed.”

She peeled the blankets back to a muffled shriek. The Nis scuffled away from her, further and further down, pressing its face into the straw mattress. It took several moments to persuade the Nis that it was safe. “Has she gone? Has she gone?” it kept asking piteously. Finally it hopped out, cross as a cat that has made a fool of itself, hair and beard straggling everywhere, and leaped straight into the rafters, tutting and muttering.

“Did you think it was a ghost?” Peer asked. But the Nis refused to answer.

“It doesn’t matter,” Hilde whispered impatiently. “It was a warning. We’ve got to go—now!”

“Out to the skerries?” Peer looked at her.

“Yes!
If you don’t come with me, I’ll go alone.”

“You know I’ll come.”

They opened the door together, lifting the bar down as quietly as they could. A blast of wind whirled into the house. “On guard, Loki! Stay!” Peer ordered, as Loki tried to follow. Alf was still asleep, flat out by the fire.

Perched high on the cross beam, the Nis watched them go, its little eyes glowing steadily.

The sky was busy. Clouds tore across the face of the moon, and wild shadows flew. Hilde had half crossed the yard, her cloak billowing in the wind. As Peer caught up with her, she pointed. “Look, there she goes, slipping between the trees.”

The darkness was full of movement, leaves tossing, branches glimmering. Peer couldn’t see what Hilde saw.

“Come on,” Hilde grasped his arm. “She’ll guide us.”

The wood roared about their heads, and the path was no more than a dim trace in the darkness, but Hilde seemed able to see her way. “She’s ahead of us!” she shouted over the noise of the wind. “She’s beckoning.”

They came out of the wood to smell ash and burning. The mill was a patch of glowing red and black that creaked and ticked, and flurries of golden sparks chased about in circles as the wind woke the embers. The handrail of the bridge was still hot to touch. Not even the great wheel had survived. Falling debris had jammed it solid, and the top half was burned away.

Clouds blew away from the moon as Peer and Hilde hurried past the entrance to the yard, and the fleeting light seemed to astonish the barn and outbuildings—which had escaped burning—as they gaped at the destruction with their black mouths open.

As if in a dream, Hilde and Peer ran downhill to the village, past the sleeping, shaggy-roofed houses where the smoke blew to and fro, and up over the soft sand dunes and down
to the shore. Here the wind was even stronger, gusting hard off the land so the fjord tossed and snored like an uneasy sleeper. The waves crashed stiffly on the shingle. It would be very rough beyond the point. But Hilde seemed not to care. “She’s going into the sea!” she cried, and for a second, the memory of Kersten plunging into the waves was so strong that Peer almost saw her himself.

Hilde seized the prow of Harald’s boat. “We’ll take this one!” The wind whipped her hair across her face. “Can we sail out, Peer?”

“We can try,” Peer answered grimly. He jumped into the boat as it lay tilted on the shingle. It was a six-oarer, Harald’s pride and joy: bigger than Bjorn’s faering. Catching the mast, he grabbed the yard, which was lying fore-and-aft with the sail bunched around it. He loosened the braces, swung the yard around, and hauled it up to the masthead. Hilde sprang to help him untie the tags that held the sail reefed. It unfurled, flying loose and flapping. “Catch the corners!” Peer shouted, snatching for the lines that tethered the bottom of the sail to the gunwales. Now
the sail bellied out with a crack, slewing around to catch the wind.

“Right! Jump out and push!” He kicked off his shoes and leaned against the boat, driving it down over the stones. The first cold wave caught him around the knees, and he felt the boat lift. Hilde sprang in. He followed, grinding an oar into the shingle to send them surging out, bucking over the wave troughs. Instantly they were yards from land.

“Sit down!” he yelled to Hilde, and sat down hard himself, leaning to grab the steering oar. The moon dashed out from between the clouds; the water rushed past the sides of the boat in long silky stripes. With a snort and a splash, something broke from a wave on the starboard side. Hilde cried out, but Peer had already seen the sleek head, pointed muzzle, and dark eyes. The seal plunged past, leading them onward, dancing ahead of them toward the fjord mouth.

The boat slipped over the water, supple as a snake. The prow cut the waves. Spray flew inboard, rattling into Peer’s face. He blinked his eyes and shook his head, and suddenly wild excitement swept him away. The whole
broad fjord was their racecourse, and they sped along with hurtling clouds and streaming moon, while the dark mountains pressed in on either side as if eager to see the winner.

Beyond the mouth of the fjord they sped, into rough black water that snapped and chopped at the boat with white snarls of foam. Clouds poured across the moon once more, smothering its light. Darkness rushed down from the north with stinging rain. The world vanished, leaving them tossing from wave to wave.

The moment of exhilaration faded. It was crazy madness to come out here, for nothing but a dream or a ghost…. How would they find Bjorn’s boat? Where was their guide? The seal had gone. Maybe it was a trap, maybe they had been lured out here to their doom. Peer clung to the steering oar, as the boat kicked over the waves.

In the bows, Hilde screamed, “Rocks, Peer! The skerries!” The sea sucked and tilted; they slid dizzily upward. Spray burst around them. Then they were pitched away and hurled on, missing the black jawbone of rock by barely an oar’s length.

Peer clutched the steering oar with freezing fingers. He stared into the murk. This was the seals’ kingdom: their fortress and refuge. Here they would lie on the rocks and skerries or dart through the dangerous waters. He imagined them, plunging into whirlpools that would suck down a ship, weaving through the tangled ribbons of the kelp forests, snatching fish from the darting shoals. Some of them had human faces, gleaming pale in the water. And one black shape came thrusting through the weeds, trailing a broken harpoon from its shoulder, eyes glaring angrily through the gloom….

The moon floated out past a cloud edge. Hilde screamed again. “A boat! That’s the faering!
Pa!”

Screwing up his eyes against the constant spray, Peer saw it too: a long, low hull wallowing between the wave crests; the mast bare; the three men wrenching at the oars, dragging her through the water, turning blanched faces at Hilde’s call. The faering was riding low. There was a sort of dark clot clinging to her prow, a great knot of seaweed perhaps, or a tangled net. No. It was alive. It
threw black arms upward and wrapped them around the bows, clambering out of the sea and into the boat. Man or seal? It sat there, heavy shouldered, riding the faering down into the water.

With a shout, the nearest man let go of his oars. The moonlight lit his blond hair and stocky frame: It must be Bjorn. Twisting, he grappled with the creature. A blink of an eye later, the faering turned over, flinging them all into the sea.

Hilde struggled with the sail. It came down higgledy-piggledy. The boat drifted, pitching. With nightmare urgency, Peer ran out the oars, fighting to keep the stern to the waves. Hilde was leaning forward, stretching a spare oar to someone in the water. Peer threw his weight sideways. With a shuddering lurch, a man toppled over the side and fell onto the bottom boards, coughing up water. It was Ralf.

His weight lent ballast to the boat. It became easier to handle. In the bows, Hilde raked out with her oar. The prow sliced through a wave, and Peer was suddenly wet to the waist. He cried out with the cold and
shock, but somehow the wave ran on past and the boat rode up again.

Ralf pulled himself up. He reached out and helped Hilde drag her oar back in, with someone clinging to the blade. It was Arnë, his mouth open, gasping for air. Between them, Hilde and Ralf managed to pull him onboard. Two saved from the sea! Peer heaved again on the oars, feeling his back and arms ache with the strain.
But where’s Bjorn? Where’s Bjorn?

How far away the others seemed: Ralf, Hilde, Arnë, shouting, coughing, choking, trying to tidy away the yard and the loose sail, leaning over the side to search for Bjorn. Wrapped in his lonely task—
lift, reach, pull!
—Peer glanced up past the crooked yard to the masthead. The sky was lighter. Dawn was coming. The sea gleamed a cold gray, broken by dark skerries and white breakers.

That was when he saw another boat keeping pace with them across the dim water. A black sail reeled against the sky, and the crew—how could the crew sit so still? Stiff as a row of ninepins, their faces turned away.

The draug boat?

He saw it for only a moment. Then a fresh rainstorm, trailing drizzling gray skirts across the water, blew between them and blinded him.

Something knocked against the hull and went whirling past. A face glimmered through the water.

Fingers gripped at the boat’s side and then, as Peer watched in horror, unclenched and slid stiffly under. Everyone was shouting at once. And Ralf, roaring, cast himself halfoverboard, Hilde clinging to his legs. The boat canted horribly. Peer dropped the oars and leaned out the other way. Arnë was doing the same. They almost went over themselves as the vessel righted … and Ralf was hauling Bjorn out of the sea: Bjorn, his face white and blue, his hair streaming with water, his arms lolling. Ralf laid him gently in the bottom of the boat, facedown. A broken-off harpoon was embedded in his right shoulder.

NEW BEGINNINGS

I
DON’T WANT TO
say much about it,” Bjorn told them next day. Sitting in Ralf’s chair, his shoulder bandaged, he looked pale and tired, but peaceful. “The faering lurched, and I thought we’d struck. I turned, and there was the black seal grinning at me from the end of the boat. It all goes misty then. I tried to grab him, and the boat went over. We went down together, him and me, into the cold—throttling, strangling each other. I felt the harpoon thud into me, but it barely hurt—I was numb. It hurts now!” He eased his shoulder, grimacing. “He left me. I was done for. I thought my time was up. I could see things, glimmering green—drifting wreckage, it looked like, and twisting sea-worms questing about for drowned sailors, and the long weeds swaying
from the rocks. Then, something brushed past me in the gloom, another seal. It circled, nuzzling around me, pushing me up to the surface. I saw the boat go past and I reached for the side. That’s all I remember.”

“That seal was Kersten,” said Hilde certainly. “Oh, Bjorn—you see, she
did
care for you!”

“She did,” said Bjorn sadly. Arnë leaned forward and gripped his brother’s hand. “Hilde’s dream saved us all,” he said.

From the other side of the hearth, Peer gave him a dark look. His own shoulders and back creaked like an old man’s. He felt like screaming every time he moved, and he especially didn’t like the warm, admiring glance Arnë cast on Hilde.
I was there, too!
he thought.
We did it together.

“Peer and Hilde saved us,” said Bjorn, almost as though he knew what Peer was thinking. “Oh—and Harald, of course!” His face cracked into a broad grin. “It’ll be a long time before Harald forgives you for stealing his precious boat!”

“That Harald.” Gudrun sniffed. “Sour as last week’s milk. Oh,
hush
, Eirik, do!” She joggled Eirik, who appeared to be getting
another tooth. Flushed and dribbling, he sniveled on her shoulder, wailing, “Man! Man!” in between sobs.

“What’s
wrong
with this child?” cried Gudrun in desperation. “Whoever heard of wanting a lubber for a nursemaid?”