Raven: Sons of Thunder (41 page)

‘Óðin passed the mead horn round when you were whelped, Raven,’ he said, then pointed beyond the bishop’s ship. ‘Can that red eye of yours see that?’

Then I felt my own wolf smile crack my dry lips as the second Frank ship burst from the mist, its prow nosing towards the north bank where one of the treasure rafts lay fast, tangled amongst the roots of a half drowned willow. Another of the rafts was stuck in the muddy shallows further along, whilst the other two bounced along our wake.

Yells carried to us from both Frank ships as the silver-greed took hold on the trailing ship, sinking its needful teeth into men’s souls.

‘You see!’ Sigurd yelled. ‘These Christ slaves are not so different from other men after all. They would rather fish silver from the river than fight Óðin’s wolves.’ And then, perhaps because Bishop Borgon knew he could not fight us alone, or perhaps because the glint of treasure shone in his eye as brightly as it did in lower men’s, the lead ship’s oars slowed their beat, her steersman turning her bow towards another of the dawn-gilded
rafts. We rowed hard still, until the sun was out of the east and the Franks were somewhere far behind us, weighing their hoard, we wagered, and slapping each other’s backs for having chased the heathens from their lands. Then, as though the gods had run out of torments for us and were themselves in want of a rest, Njörd sent a decent breeze from the southeast, which combined with the westward snake of the river was enough to let us haul up the sail and stow the river-worn oars.

Serpent
’s sea-stained, faded red sail snapped and bellied, spraying clouds of dry salt over those forward of her as men struggled wearily out of brynjas and laid furs by their journey chests. Having dipped into his bag of herbs and gathered some clean linen, Asgot was trying to put Halldor’s face back together while the Norseman sat clutching a Thór’s hammer in each white fist and made a low thrum in the back of his throat, one knee bouncing incessantly. Olaf drew the arrow from Kalf’s shoulder and Kalf roared something about Hel’s huge reeking cunny before he passed out, blood streaming down his white-scarred chest and belly into his breeks. The Wessexman Cynric, whose throat had been ripped out by a Frank spear, was a stiff white corpse now, staring up at the circling gulls, his beard full of blood. His friends wrapped him in two cloaks and tied the ends, determined to bury him in the Christian way as soon as we made landfall, though Olaf warned them that Cynric would be thrown over for the fish the moment he began to stink. Other men saw to their own hurts and time would tell whether the wound rot would claim any of them. Sigurd himself took the tiller, sending Knut with his face as haggard as an old crone’s off to rest. Black Floki kept watch from the prow and but for a couple of others we all curled up and slept like dead men. I had never been so exhausted and I did not dream as such, but rather my spirit-self pulsed, weaving in the deep soul-darkness some monotonous, never-ending pattern as though it yet rowed.

Eventually I woke to the screech of gulls and the smell of food, a mouth-watering broth that bubbled in a great iron pot suspended above the ballast, sternside of the hold. Arnvid’s smiling face was wreathed in steam as he stirred, and I sat up, squinting through crusty eyes at those who sat drinking mead and talking in low voices, and those still asleep. Then I became aware of another sound above the creak of timbers, the spit of the cookfire and the cry of seabirds. That sound was the vast murmur of the open sea and I struggled up like an old man, gripping the sheer strake, and my stomach rolled over itself because we were no longer in that cursed river but had made it out to the unfettered ocean.

‘You looked dead, lad,’ Penda said, ‘and no one had a mind to rouse your mean-tempered shade for fear of being killed with a brooch pin.’ He grinned, scratching the short bristles on his neck, then he chuckled and I glowered groggily, a heartbeat later joining him.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

‘River spat us out there,’ he said, pointing to the mouth of the river where fresh water and salt water churned and hissed, sheltered by a rocky prominence whose summit was stained white with ancient bird shit. We were moored in the lee of an island and
Fjord-Elk
bobbed beside us, anchored and boulder-tied to stop our hulls bashing against the rocks. I was amazed that I had slept through the berthing and told Penda as much, but he shrugged, running a hand through his tufty hair, and suggested with no little sarcasm that perhaps great cunning exhausted a man as much if not more than fighting did.

I ignored that. ‘No sign of the blue cloaks then?’ I asked, imagining the Franks greedily grasping for that floating silver like old men at whores’ tits.

Penda shook his head. ‘But that lot made it out by some miracle,’ he said, thumbing over his shoulder. I looked round to see the two surviving Dane ships moored in a cove off
our port side, their crews little more than shrouded shapes as they slept still, perhaps dreaming of the freedom they had won.

‘Frigg’s tits,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I thought we had seen the last of them. They must have slipped past when the Franks were scratching their silver itch.’

‘I like to think that Bishop Borgon and his men killed each other over it,’ Penda said, pursing his lips. ‘That much silver would set brothers at each other’s throats.’ One eyebrow rolled like a caterpillar. ‘Or it could be that one of your gods fished the Danes up and dropped them gently in that cove. Who knows? But they’re here now and they have you to thank for it,’ he finished moodily.

‘Getting over that chain was Sigurd’s cunning, not mine,’ I said, wanting to get past the subject of losing our treasure as we had got past that chain until I knew how it sat with everyone. Penda half acknowledged this with a nod. ‘How’s Hall-dor?’ I pressed on.

He grimaced. ‘He’s going to make bairns cry wherever he goes,’ he said. ‘The poor swine’ll be even uglier than you, lad, but he’ll live, I think. Same goes for Kalf, so long as the wound fever doesn’t get him. Leaked enough blood to float a knörr, that one, and lived. The wound should have washed clean with any luck. Christ, I’m hungry.’

‘Me too,’ I said, my stomach grumbling in complaint, then I nodded to the smoke-shrouded cauldron above the ballast stones. ‘Sigurd’s open-handed tonight, allowing a fire aboard. And the mead skins are not putting up much of a fight by the look of it.’

‘Your jarl is trying to swill down the lump that’s sticking in everyone’s throat at losing a silver hoard like that,’ he said, and there it was, bobbing to the surface again like a dead fish full of air. ‘It’s enough to make any man belly-sick,’ he went on, shaking his head. Then he must have felt the cool shade of my
black look, for he shrugged casually. ‘But a hoard is no good to the dead.’

‘No, Penda, it’s not,’ I said, the words hot and sharp as hammer scale. ‘And I hope the others have the half-sense to see it that way too.’

‘Them?’ he said dubiously. ‘They’re Norsemen, lad,’ he crowed as though that was all the answer I needed.

We did not think it the wisest idea to linger at the mouth of the river where the emperor’s ships were likely to pass sooner or later, and so the next day we let the wind push us west to a cluster of low islands tufted with long grass and ringed with birch trees. Having studied the journey patterns of a pair of cormorants,
Fjord-Elk
’s captain, Bragi, had known we would find the skerries after a short sail, and he was right. So we moored up, us and the Danes, because Sigurd announced we were to hold a ting, a gathering, that dusk in which men could speak their minds openly. The mood was iron heavy and dark as Hel’s arsehole. I had not seen the Fellowship hold a ting before and Bjarni told me they never had for as long as he had been oath-tied to Sigurd.

‘Sigurd has always spoken for us all and that has been good enough for me,’ he said, sitting on a rock whittling a stick to a sharp point the way his brother Bjorn often did. Bjorn never had Bjarni’s skill for intricate work and could never have carved a rune stone like the one his brother had raised in his honour. But now Bjarni seemed to take comfort in the crude work his brother had enjoyed. ‘Sigurd has invited that skinny-arsed slash of piss to join the ting and speak for his own,’ he said, nodding towards Rolf, the man who seemed to lead the Danes now. ‘It’s bad enough they’ve got their beaks in our food. You should have seen them with their heads together. Looked like scheming to me.’

‘Next they’ll be sluicing their gills with our mead,’ Bram moaned from behind a tree where he was squatting. ‘Danish
goat fuckers,’ he said, finishing with a thunderous, rolling fart.

‘At least they won’t get their hands on our silver, seeing as it’s now either sitting with the catfish on the riverbed or lining the Franks’ journey chests,’ Kjar griped, shooting me a look from those close-set eyes of his that would pierce a fine brynja. And I thought to put it to
Fjord-Elk
’s steersman that he would almost certainly be reeking of the corpse-stink by now if we had not sacrificed the silver. But I knew there was no point and so I skulked off, muttering to myself that I had known hounds with more in their heads than some of these whoresons.

I cursed the island for being so small when I climbed up a yellow moss-mottled rock to get a view of the sun sinking in the west and came across Father Egfrith on his knees in the grass talking to his nailed god. He turned and arched his brows as though his prayers had been answered sooner than he had expected. ‘Ah, Raven my boy,’ he said with a sniff, ‘I’m glad to see you.’

‘No wonder your god loves thralls and whores, monk,’ I said spitefully, pushing my tongue against the inside of my cheek crudely. ‘They’re always on their knees too.’

He frowned and climbed to his feet, sweeping downy hawks-beard seeds from his habit. ‘Keep your filthy appetites of the flesh to yourself, young Raven, and we shall talk man to man.’ But I did not want to talk to him and so I turned to make my miserable way back down to the ships. ‘Wait, lad,’ Egfrith said. ‘I want to tell you something.’ Thinking I had nothing better to do I decided I might at least stay a while, if only to fling a few more insults the monk’s way. Then I wondered if he meant to talk of Cynethryth, whom I had still not spoken to since the night we had broken her out of the convent. And even then she had not seemed to know me. So I walked back over to Egfrith and looked out across the agitated slate-grey sea. Low evening light dappled the water with silver, taunting me for what we
had lost, and the salt-dried wind whipped my braids against my face. ‘Your idea saved us all,’ he said.

I hid my surprise behind a cold face. ‘You are the only one who thinks so,’ I said, ‘apart from maybe Sigurd, though I am thinking even he regrets it now.’

‘They are simple men, Raven, which is why they make easy prey for peddlers of superstition and iniquity. Why they close their eyes to the true path.’ He shook his weasel head. ‘Hounds have sharper wits than most of them.’ He smiled then. ‘But they know the truth of it, lad, I am sure of it.’

‘Careful, monk,’ I warned him, ‘I am one of those
simple men
.’

‘Ah, but you see, I don’t think you are, boy,’ he said, raising an accusing finger, ‘which is why you are a particularly interesting challenge to me. Your jarl too, come to that. If I can prise you and Sigurd from Asgot’s clutches then there is hope for the rest.’

‘Asgot?’ I spat. ‘I have no love for that flea-bitten old wolf.’ I thought I saw the lightning bolt of a smile flash behind his eyes at that.

‘Because he killed your friend the carpenter,’ Egfrith said with a thoughtful nod.

‘Because he’s a twisted hemlock root and has no honour,’ I said. The monk seemed to consider this, the greying tufts of his hair shivering like duck down in the breeze around the terrible livid scar left by Glum’s sword. The sword which now sat at my hip.
Fjord-Elk
’s last captain had carved a chunk of flesh from Egfrith’s head – bone too perhaps – but somehow the monk had lived to torment us all like a biting horsefly.

‘The ting is happening soon,’ I said, taking in a great lungful of the chill air and thinking that winter would soon be upon us. Then I turned and walked away.

‘I came up here to pray for her,’ the monk said. ‘She is lost, Raven. She is lost and Asgot will find her.’

I did not turn round, but kept walking across the rock, through bristling patches of grass and down through clumps of sea kale. And the monk’s words,
She is lost, Raven
, repeated in my head like waves against the shore, or spruce oars churning a Frankish river.

I FOUND CYNETHRYTH SITTING ALONE IN THE WIND-SHADOW OF A
large rock on the east side of the island. Beside her a small fire crackled and gave off an acrid filthy yellow smoke that caught in my throat. Burning hair. She had cut off her hair and thrown it into the flames where it blackened and withered and stank.