Odin’s Child (35 page)

“It's kind of you,” the wolf-gray head bobbed up and down. “Between Jesus and Odin I shall be well watched over, I'm sure.” Leaving Kalf bemused, he shambled away to the ship.

I kissed Bergthora and Thyri, shook old Ketil's hand and looked round for Stig.

“Devil skin him, he was just here,” Bergthora scowled. “I swear he sneaks around like a cat.”

“Which is why he always knows so much,” I replied. “I'm sorry to miss him at my leave-taking, but he doesn't like goodbyes, does he?”

“We're all ready, Captain,” sang out Stuf from the fo'c'sle, “let's be off.”

“Good-bye Kalf, Bergthora!”

Heaving altogether, we pushed the Sea-Viper out into the shallow water and swarmed up her sides. Mounting to the stern and taking the tiller in my hand, I gave the order to take down the oars from their racks and put them through the oar ports.

“Ready, boys.”

I looked down the double line of rowers—thirty-two men, each on his sea chest with his oar poised to strike the water. And thirty-two pairs of eyes gazed back, in every eye the same question: would I steer them to riches or to doom?

Just short of a year had gone by since the trial at the Althing, the house-burning, my near death, and my bout of madness. A year is a long time in the life of a boy—long enough to become a man. I was ready to be their captain.

“Now, you big-bellied boys,” I cried. “I'll row the winter's fat off you.
At the double beat—pull for warmer waters!”

A roar went up as oars churned the water white—again and again—the men's shoulders cracking, the veins standing out in their necks and the blood coming up in their faces. The Sea-Viper shot forward, skating on the sunlit surface of the sea.

“Not so fast!” came a cry from shore.

“Stig!”

“Red-faced and puffing, his sword and bedroll on his back, the steersman raced along the wharf. He passed Bergthora with a wave of his arm.

“Stig, you whore's son'!” she wailed. “You troll! You black-hearted, lying bastard!”

“Back in the autumn, old girl—”

“You said that the last time!”

“Back water!” I shouted.

As she made a grab for him, he dove and came up sputtering. Tossing the water from his bristly head, he struck out for us.

“Starkad, throw him a line,” I laughed, “before he drowns.”

Eager hands reached down to help him.

“Mother Bergthora,” I called, “I'll send him back to you, I promise.”

She buried her face in her apron and shook her head.

Stig stood dripping on the deck and grinning.

“Old girl,” he yelled, “I've left you half my silver—you've earned it.”

A corner of the apron came down.

“Steersman,” said I, “I've never been so glad to see anyone. Will you take the helm?”

“Thank you, Captain. I will.”

Again, the water churned and the Viper shot forward. I wanted to see, and wanted
them
to see, what a quick and lively snake she was. I kept them at it for a good long time before I let them slow down.

By that time Nidaros was far away
.

We hadn't been long at sea when the men began to complain because Glum was refusing to take his turn at the oar. They took it hard—especially the Christmen—that he thought it beneath his station to row like any other man. I did try reasoning with him, but he was immovable, literally. He would settle himself on the deck with his broad back up against the mast, tug his sheepskin around his shoulders, and fall asleep at once. Shape-shifters, as I had already had occasion to learn, were great sleepers. As I didn't care much for the idea of pushing Glum around, I turned on the grumblers instead, and told them to leave off. Soon enough, I promised, they would have reason to think better of the “great lazy heathen.”

Thirty-five men, mostly strangers to one another, on a new ship with a new captain, are a mob—not a crew. It needs days and nights of gossiping and tale-telling, bragging, complaining, and more than anything else, of rowing—hour after long hour of it, when the wind is down—before they grow together into a single body with one heart, one head, and many arms. Even then something more is needed: they must face death together.

†

Day followed day, while the wooded coast of Norway slid past, running like a ribbon along the foot of the giant mountains, broken now
and then by a grassy river mouth or sandy bay, or by a great fjord, its cavernous walls hung with rags of mist and sometimes, clinging high up on its shoulder, an impossible sloping farm, with a sloping house and a sloping cow, tethered lest she drop into the sea.

Our second week out we rounded the southern tip of Norway and sailed out into a wide gulf which they call the Skaggerak. Here, where the sea pours into Oslofjord, we came upon the bustling harbor town of Skiringsaal, the home of Ogmund Pot-Belly, as I recalled, and lay to for a few days while we took on provisions.

From Oslofjord, we turned east and then south again into a gulf called the Kattegat, keeping the coast of Sweden on our left, while to starboard we had only the open sea for three whole days before the flat coast of Jutland came into view.

We were drawing near now, said some of my crew, to that eastern sea of Stig's, whose entrance is barred by a string of islands that stretch between the long tongue of Jutland and Sweden's southern coast. The narrow sounds between these islands, they warned, were a favorite haunt of pirates.

“Tight as a virgin's furrow,” Stig observed, as we lay off shore and surveyed the mouth of the sound that divides the island of Sjaelland from Scania. “Catch you fore and aft between two ships and cut you to pieces. Best run her at night, Captain, unless you care to fight on unequal terms.”

I took his advice, though it meant a seven-hour row in the dark, battling a headwind all the way.

The sun was an hour high when, stiff-backed and weary, we passed the point of Trelleborg and saw spread out before us, the bright expanse of a brand new sea. We lowered a bucket and tasted the water: as promised, it was nearly fresh. All the ocean's salt is left, for some reason, on the farther side of the Sounds.

A freshening breeze sprang up behind us, ruffling the water and filling our sail. I whispered a prayer of thanks to Njord, god of the sea, and giving Stig the helm and telling the others to rest while they could, stretched out on the deck and was instantly asleep.

It seemed only a moment later—though the position of the sun told me it was hours, really—that Stig woke me to report that we'd come in sight of an island. Looking where he pointed, I saw a chalk cliff, dazzling in the sun, off our starboard quarter.

“Bring us in closer, Steersman, and spy out a snug cove. We'll lay up for a bit and rest.”

I started to turn away, but a warning word brought me back. A black sliver had darted out from behind the curve of the cliff less than a mile away, crossing athwart of us and standing out to sea. We squinted at her in the sun's glare.

“Hawk or pigeon, Captain?” said Stig.

A shiver of excitement ran through me. “Rouse the lads, Steersman.”

They woke grumbling, until I showed them our prize. Then how they jumped to—scrambling to fetch the oars down from the rack, slinging their shields on their backs, and spitting into their hands. And Glum, with a feral growl, took his place in the prow, where a berserker always stands in battle.

Meanwhile our quarry was drawing farther away. In my mind's eye I saw some flabby merchant, bearing a strong resemblance to Ogmund Pot-Belly, with his bags of silver piled all around him and his sweating face pale with fright, running for the open as fast as he could go.

This pleasant notion vanished almost at once.

“He's changing course,” said Stig. “He's doubling back.”

He was indeed, and as he came about, he dropped his sail and put out his oars—twenty-five, maybe thirty pair!

“Stig, he's foxed us. He has us up against the cliff and nowhere to go.”

Gone was that quaking merchant: in his place a wily viking in a damned big ship.

“Strike sail!” I ordered.

The yard came rattling down the mast, landing heavily across the gunwales.

“Heads up! Bengt, watch your head! Get her up onto the crutches. Kraki, lash your end.”

Fighting a ship is a steersman's art. He needs a sure hand on the tiller, and he can't be encumbered with a sail that may catch a breeze and throw him off his aim. But more than all else, he needs the trust of his rowers. Thirty men race backward towards death; he alone can see the enemy. They see only him, and from him they must take their courage—from his eyes, his voice, the way he stands.

I took the tiller from Stig. This must be
my
victory—or my death.

“Easy lads,” I coaxed, “easy strokes—let them do the hard rowing.”

I held our course steady as he closed on us—near enough now to see the fighters crowding his deck, and to see that his ship was both longer and higher in the water than ours. Size would give him the advantage when it came to boarding, but would also, I reckoned, make him sluggish at turning.

“Odd!” Starkad dashed back from the fo'c'sle with my helmet, clapped it on my head and tossed my shield at my feet, then stood with his own shield over me. Once within bowshot, their archers would be marking me.

“Stig, if I'm hit the tiller's yours.”

He nodded without looking.

All the night's weariness was gone. The blood sang in my ears and a great happiness, just salted with fear, filled me up.

The wound-bees began to buzz about our heads. Bui rolled from his seat with an arrow in the angle of his neck and shoulder, and Helgi screamed a curse seeing his hand pinned by a shaft to the handle of his oar. Soon Starkad's shield bristled like a boar's back with arrows. One shaft flew past him and struck me between the eyes, rebounding with a
whang
from the nosepiece of my helmet.

Our enemy bore down on us, his warriors leaning out from the prow, screaming and shaking their weapons.

“Boys,” I shouted, “listen sharp now, and we'll play this sea-ox a trick.”

Perhaps it was Odin who whispered it in my ear. Or was it my father, for I sensed him close? I take no credit for myself.

“Steady … steady now … watch me.”

It was plain from their course that they meant to grapple to us on the port side, so their port rowers would be alert for the command to ship oars at the last instant before they struck us, while the men on the starboard side would be at ease.

“Steady—steady—
pull
!”

The water churned as the Viper leapt forward—three ship's lengths … two … Now! I threw myself against the tiller, and the Viper slewed around, darting across their bow. “Pull again!” I hauled the tiller hard over and she danced on the water like a dolphin, turning on her tail and springing ahead again. “Oars in!”

Before our enemy could help himself, we were on his starboard side, running up on his oars and snapping them like twigs, and knocking his rowers, tip over ass, all over the deck. Out snaked our grappling hooks
and, with a groan of wood on wood, the two hulls slid together.

Glum hopped from foot to foot in a fine madness, howling and biting the rim of his shield, his breast laid bare. As the ships touched, he flung the shield away, took their gunnel at a bound, and landed in the their midst, whirling his long-hafted axe around his head.

Seeing him, the battle joy rose in all our throats and shouting the name of Odin—for not one of us was a Christman now!—we went screaming over the side.

It was a wild brawl of a battle. I remember they had a big fellow on their side who wielded a halberd with both hands. His style of fighting was to ram a man in the belly hard enough to burst his ring-mail and then, just as if he were pitching hay, swing him up and hurl him overboard.

He had done this to two or three when Glum, who had already cleared off one side of their deck, cut a path to him. One look at that face was enough: the haymaker threw himself into the sea.

As for me, I shoved and was shoved all over the rolling deck, chopping away at legs and necks and “bathing my blade in the red wound-dew” (as we poets say), when at last I came within reach of their captain. He was a big, shaggy man with a broad face as pink as a ham and a red beard braided into pigtails.

Finding me before him, he struck his thigh and roared out that Red Kol would yield his ship to no ugly young pup such as I or, by God's guts, they could take and feed him to the eels! And, so saying, he charged me with his sword.

He had the advantage of size, but I was quicker. I kept him in play, dodging his lunges and swipes and leading him round in circles, 'til before long he was blowing like a whale, and his color had darkened from ham to roast beef. Desperate to end our duel while he could still stand, he aimed an especially hard blow at me and bent his blade double on Wound-Snake's tempered Frankish edge.

“Hold,” he puffed, “while I straighten her.” And leaning against the bulwark, he put his knee up to his sword to bend it back.

When a man's luck is out, nothing is to be gained by helping him put off his doom. When he dropped his eyes to his sword, I swung up with a backhanded stroke that caught him in the mouth, slicing off his lip and chin and spilling his teeth on the deck. He went down, choking on his blood.

“Red Kol won't kiss his wife again,” said one of his crew, tossing his own sword at my feet.

As the word passed that their chieftain was done for, the rest of his crew broke off and asked for quarter.

My victory was so sudden I couldn't for a moment take it in—until Stig's crooked grin showed itself to me, and the flushed faces of Stuf and Otkel, laughing because they had had their first blooding and were still alive; and Glum, filthy with gore and his howl reduced to a hoarse croak—until, in short, I saw them all around me and heard them cry: “Tangle-Hair! Tangle-Hair! Tangle-Hair!”