Scramasax (12 page)

Solveig and the five women tried to hold on to the counter and they could not. They threw down their meat-knives for fear of cutting themselves or stabbing each other. Trying to stay on their feet, they slipped and staggered on the spot. Then all six of them lost their footing at the same time, they whacked their ribs and knees against the galley's ribs and knees, they tore their fingernails on the galley's rough tree-nails, and they howled.

The three Greek women repeated the same word over and over again. ‘Aigaion! Aigaion! Aigaion!' they cried out.

Then Solveig thought she could hear her own name. She heard someone above her yelling, bawling her name.

‘Solveig! Solveig!'

Solveig tried to get to her feet and at once she was
thrown sideways again. She gasped, gulped and spat out a mouthful of the foul soup swirling around her feet.

‘Solveig!' the voice roared, and it wasn't a sea-god.

Solveig got to her bruised knees. She grabbed the edge of the counter.

‘Reach!' the voice insisted. ‘My hands! Reach!'

Solveig dared, she let go of the counter, she reached, and at once she was lifted, light as thistledown, out of the hellhole, out and into the squall. In the muzz and the murk, she stared up at Harald Sigurdsson, white-faced.

‘To the stalls!' he bellowed. ‘Now!'

Solveig choked and spat out more soup.

‘Now!' Harald insisted. ‘Lose our horses and we're lost ourselves!'

‘Yes,' gasped Solveig.

‘Lift them!'

‘Lift?'

‘Strap them!'

‘How?'

‘Over the beams! Understand?'

‘I don't know. Where is everyone?'

Harald growled and bared his teeth. ‘Some are down there. Go on, girl! I'll send more.'

Solveig's breath was jerky. Her whole body was shaking.

‘Go on!' Harald urged her hoarsely.

Sweat. Foam. Sopping leather. Sloppy dung.

Just for a moment Solveig flinched. Then she slapped her right haunch, as if she were a mare herself, got on to her knees and reached down with her feet for the ladder.

It wasn't there.

It's been uprooted, she thought. Everything has. My teeth are aching. It's a wonder we're still afloat.

Then Solveig lowered herself over the edge, took a deep breath and dropped into the horse-stalls.

At once she could hear what the roar-and-bluster had silenced for as long as she had been up on deck: neighing, whinnying, squealing, screaming and a strange pounding and grinding.

All the oil lamps hanging from the beams had swung themselves into darkness, but halfway across the stalls, in the middle of a storm of wild horses frothing and skidding, lashing with their back hooves, a single lamp bracketed to a beam-stanchion was still guttering.

Where is everyone? thought Solveig. Only those three men down at the far end … We need far more than that.

Solveig saw that while some horses were swinging from side to side as the galley rolled because they were half suspended by leather straps hanging from the stout beams, others weren't well secured at all. Their own slipping and sliding maddened them. They rammed against each other, they blew and bellowed, they thumped their proud heads against beam-stanchions – that was the hollow pounding Solveig had heard – and they groaned, they whinnied, they tried to jam their hooves into the deck – that was the grinding – and in terror, they screamed.

Not on my own, Solveig thought. I can't. Lift them! Strap them! Where is everyone?

As Solveig tried to pick her way towards the shuddering lamp without being kicked or crushed or trampled, she felt for a moment as if she were a little girl again. She was shuffling out into the waves, shin-deep, knee-deep, and the water was rushing at her from ahead, from her left, her right, and then it was swishing up behind her. She was completely at sea and yet safe; she was crying out not in terror but sheer exhilaration.

Solveig tossed her head, and her golden hair sparked in the lamplight. There was a man standing right in front of her. His back was turned and he was shoulder to shoulder with one of the horses, his brow pressed against the horse's brow, right between its wide eyes.

The man's fingers were linked under the horse's muzzle, and Solveig watched as he gently raised its heavy head until he could breathe right into its nostrils.

The warhorse snorted. It pulled away a little. But the man stepped forward and again pressed his forehead against the horse's brow.

Then he whispered something, Solveig couldn't hear what, and gently rubbed the horse's neck.

The Horseman's Word, thought Solveig. I'm sure it is, though I don't know what the words are. Who is he, anyhow?

Solveig couldn't help herself – the stench of the horse-stalls caught her by the throat, and she choked and then coughed.

Quite calmly and slowly, so as not to disturb his horse, the man turned round. His acorn hair all tangled, his face pink and open and eager.

‘Tamas!' exclaimed Solveig.

Tamas opened his eyes wide, and gave Solveig an incredulous smile. ‘Solveig!' he breathed.

‘Harald changed his mind. He said I could come.'

Tamas put a filthy finger to his lips, but he couldn't stop smiling.

‘Skarp told me you weren't even on this boat.'

‘The trickster!'

‘Horse-whispering. Is that what you were doing?'

‘You heard?'

‘Not the words.'

‘They're between me and him.'

Solveig nodded. ‘Like a charm.' She pointed to something sticking out of Tamas's sleeve. ‘What's that?'

‘Oh! A bone.'

‘What of?'

‘Not now, Solveig.'

Solveig spread her arms wide. ‘It's terrible,' she said.

Once more Tamas turned to his horse and laid his forehead against the horse's brow and rubbed his neck, and Solveig ran her fingers through his silky mane.

‘Is he … ?' she hesitated.

‘An Arab,' Tamas told her. ‘All our horses are Arabs.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Alnath.'

‘What?'

‘One of the stars.'

‘What does it mean?'

‘The butting one!'

‘It sounds like a mixture of Norwegian and Saracen.'

‘There!' said Tamas. ‘I've settled him now.'

‘Harald told me to hoist them. Lift them and strap them.'

‘On your own!'

‘He said he'd send more men down.'

‘That horse,' said Tamas, pointing to one whose ears were flat back and who was baring his teeth. ‘Mizer. He's terrified.'

Then Solveig and Tamas took hold of the broad strap under Mizer's girth and, pulling together, they were able to tighten it until he was swinging free, still showing the whites of his eyes but no longer pounding the deck with his hooves.

Solveig puffed out her cheeks and noisily blew out her breath.

‘Tough work,' agreed Tamas.

‘We need help.'

‘Much more.'

‘Harald said he'd send men down.'

‘I'm here to go and get them. There are twenty-four horses here. All this … rumpus! This havoc! Before long, the other horses will upset Alnath again.'

‘I'll come with you,' Solveig said.

Tamas led the way to the deck-hatch.

‘I had to jump down,' Solveig told him.

‘Me too. I don't know where the ladder's gone. Stand on my shoulders.'

Oh! Despite the stench and the squalor and the suffering horses, Solveig was feeling so light-hearted.

‘Skarp said you weren't even on this boat,' she told Tamas for a second time, ‘and my father said he hoped we hadn't left you behind.'

‘Left me!'

‘Searching.'

‘What for?'

Solveig drew back a little. Her eyes were dancing. ‘Don't you know?' she teased him, and with both hands she grasped the lapels of her cloak.

‘Ohh!' exclaimed Tamas.

‘My father and Snorri found it in the guardroom. They wrapped me in it, and put a helmet on my head so they could … spirit me out of the palace.'

‘We'll have to cut it in half,' Tamas told her.

At once Solveig started to unbuckle the cloak, but Tamas covered her fingers with his own warm hands.

Solveig's heart skipped, just as it had done in the guardroom in the palace.

‘I think I saw you,' she said.

Tamas opened his eyes enquiringly.

Acorn, she thought. The same as his hair.

‘In Hagia Sophia.'

Tamas smiled. ‘I saw you. I waved.'

Up on deck, day had almost darkened into night, but Solveig could see that most of the Greek oarsmen were slumped over their oars and many of the Varangian guards were grasping the gunwales, spewing into the water.

‘No wonder they didn't come down,' said Tamas grimly.

‘They need strapping and lifting themselves,' Solveig agreed.

‘Come and gone!' a man shouted from the stern. ‘All over!'

‘That's Nico,' Solveig told Tamas. ‘He's the helmsman.'

It was true, the squall had already spent itself. The
ousiai
was battered, rigging was draped over the lateen sail like giant cobwebs, guards and oarsmen were moaning and retching, while below deck the cooks were clinging to each other and the warhorses were swinging, unable to win a firm footing; but the worst of the storm was already on its way elsewhere.

‘What about the others?' Solveig asked Nico. ‘The other boats, I mean.'

‘Tubs.'

‘Will they be all right?'

‘Only morning will tell,' Nico shrugged. ‘As long as our siege engines are safe.'

Through the gloom, Solveig made out two men leaning against the sternpost, involved in earnest conversation. Their backs were turned and she took a step towards them.

‘But you! What would you do?'

‘Me? It's your choice.'

‘I know it is, man!'

Although it was difficult to hear everything, Solveig still recognised their voices.

‘. . . could ask Nico.'

‘I'm asking you, not Nico! Head for port? Onward?'

‘That depends, you know it does … the damage … the other boats …'

The two voices belonged to Halfdan and Harald Sigurdsson, and Solveig swelled with pride that Harald was asking her father for his advice.

S
olveig drowsed and woke and drowsed, dreaming of Harald's fleet of twenty-three boats, manned by more than one thousand Vikings. In one of her dreams they were sailing along the seabed, and in another they had already reached Sicily and were scattered across a beach of bones, feasting and singing and grinding their axes.

In the dark, Solveig sat bolt upright.

‘The Vikings grind their axes, and they whet their scramasaxes,' she said out loud. ‘The sea grinds her spears.'

Then she lay down and went back to sleep again.

The five cooks slumbering around Solveig in the bows were so deeply asleep that they didn't twitch their little fingers, and neither did they stir when Solveig suddenly sat up again as day dawned. She stared at her broken fingernails, she stretched until her sore shoulders cracked. She groaned and she yawned, then she stood up and padded down the length of the boat.

It was just as Nico feared. The squall had bullied and scattered Harald's fleet, and there was no way of telling where the other boats were, or whether they were still afloat, even the two transporters.

Again and again Solveig scanned the skipping and skeltering waves as if her eyes must be tricking her.

‘What I think …' Solveig began. ‘What I hope …' She faltered into silence.

‘Hope,' repeated the helmsman. ‘Hanging on ropes of wind.'

Solveig looked at him fearfully.

Nico sniffed. ‘Better to hope than not to hope. Hope's your good friend.'

‘Your light friend,' said Solveig. ‘And gloom is your dark friend.'

The helmsman nodded. ‘Both will keep you company on your journey.'

As Solveig made her way back along the deck she heard someone singing, and it wasn't Vikings on a beach of bones or the wavering vowels of the wind.

Grimizo, thought Solveig. A voice fit for the gods; that's what Snorri says.

Solveig stopped to listen, but Grimizo was just ending his song: ‘And yet … And yet things turned out better than I thought.'

Solveig advanced on Grimizo. ‘What were you singing?' she asked.

‘A song.'

Solveig waited but Grimizo said nothing more.

‘A dawn-song?' asked Solveig, remembering Sineus and the song he had sung on the quay at Ladoga.

‘A disgruntled song,' Grimizo replied.

‘What does that mean?'

‘What does it sound like?'

Solveig snorted like a sow.

‘A grumpy song.'

‘Oh!' said Solveig, and she couldn't help smiling. ‘Will you sing it again?'

Grimizo didn't reply, but Solveig held her ground and after some while the German cleared his throat: