Viking Gold (29 page)

“It’s just a fish,” Redknee
said. But his words lost their conviction as another terrible blow crashed
against the side, propelling him backwards into his uncle. Silver started
barking from the perceived safety of the deck tent.

“
Shh
,” Redknee said,
holding his finger to his lips, but Silver ignored him.

“It means to sink us,” Sven
said, his face white with fear. He turned to the dazed crew. “To the oars,” he
shouted.
“Now!”

They rowed hard. But the
creature sped after them, weaving its dark shadow through the water at
terrifying speed, thrashing its tail, making a fast clicking noise as if
exhilarated by the chase. When it drew level with the tiller, it blew a flume
of water into the air then tipped its big square head beneath the waves, diving
down until they could no longer see it.

“Has it gone?” Sinead asked,
looking round.

Sven motioned for everyone to
stop rowing. Redknee listened to the telltale clicking as it receded into the
depths. By Odin’s eye, they’d out-run it! A smile leached across his face. Then
the sound changed, growing louder until it became almost deafening – click,
Click, CLICK! Redknee braced himself for the inevitable:
Wavedancer
shuddered as the monster surfaced beneath her, then tilted towards port.

Redknee plunged, head first,
across the deck. Barrels crashed into his ribs. Feet struck his chest. Buttocks
crushed his face. Just as things began to settle,
Wavedancer
tipped the
other way. Sinead flew past, her skirts about her head. He fought to grab hold
of something, but the deck had become a whirling mass of debris. An armoury
chest burst open, sending a lethal spray of swords skittering across the
boards. He gritted his teeth as a blade carved his thigh.

Through it all, he saw Olaf’s
stone-like grip circle the mast, holding Harold safe; the eye in the centre of
the storm. Eventually, the rolling stopped and he landed softly against Brother
Alfred’s belly. He examined his thigh. It was only a flesh wound.  

The ship was in chaos.

Sven stood first. Blood
dripped from a gash on his forehead, the bandages around his shoulder had
unravelled, but he still gripped his Dane-axe in his hand. “We must attack
now,” he shouted, waving his axe in the air. “Every man find a weapon and
follow me.”

Redknee grabbed a spare sword
and followed. He froze when he reached the rail. The monster resembled a huge
gungiger
,
with its tiny, beady eyes and slippery skin caked in barnacles. Sven leant over
the gunwale, hacking into it, spraying blubber and blood into Redknee’s face,
exposing crater after fleshy crater. The others joined Sven in attacking the
monster and its back soon became a slimy mash of gore.

“
Come on
, lad.” Sven
said between strokes. “Get stuck in.”

Redknee nodded mutely and
jabbed at a section of knobbly skin with his sword. His head still spun from
the revelation about his father. He wanted to ask Sven more—

The monster reared out of the
water; the sudden movement caught Redknee off-guard and he toppled overboard
into the pulpy red swill. Foam rushed his nostrils. He pushed up, broke the
surface. The monster’s huge head loomed over him. Coughing and spluttering, he
grabbed at an oar port and dragged himself above the waves.

The
monster had one of Astrid’s men in its half-open jaw, between teeth as long as
a man’s leg and sharp as ice-daggers. Redknee recognised him as Ragi, her second-in-command.
He must have been knocked overboard too. Ragi leant forwards and Redknee
stretched to grab him, but his belt was caught on its teeth.

“Undo your belt,” Redknee
called.

Ragi nodded and fumbled with
the clasp, but his fingers were too slow; the monster tossed its great head and
he disappeared forever.

The man-eater turned and
stared at Redknee. He flattened himself against the hull. Its eyes were small
and black, like sheep droppings. Its breath stank of rotten flesh. Then,
without warning, it dived beneath the waves, resurfacing three boat lengths
off. Redknee breathed a sigh of relief

“Get out the way!”

He looked up to see Sinead
calling him from the deck, her hand pointing out to sea. He followed the
direction of her gaze and froze. The monster’s bulbous form powered towards
him, intent on smashing him to pieces. He tried to uncurl his fingers, to slide
effortlessly beneath the waves where the worst of the impact would pass over
his head. He heard someone shout
“Move!”
from above, but the beast was
coming fast – he was trapped.

Sven threw a harpoon over
Redknee’s head, it plunged deep between the monster’s eyes. A high-pitched
squeal echoed across the water, but the monster charged on, preceded by a
terrifying surge that distorted its face, amplifying it to grotesque
proportions, exaggerating the glare of its beady eyes. A second harpoon joined
the first. But to no avail; the monster had Redknee in its sight and would not
be stopped. Sven leapt from the deck into the sea, pushing Redknee aside with
such force he smashed into the water face first.

Redknee turned round to see
his uncle slip beneath the waves just as the monster rammed its ugly great head
square into
Wavedancer’s
hull. The monster sank from view as suddenly as
it had appeared.

There
was no body to bury. They’d waited for hours, Redknee plunging, again and
again, beneath the waves in a vain attempt to find something, anything of his
uncle. But in the end he had to accept the truth – Sven had died saving him.

The monster had knocked two
large dents in
Wavedancer’s
hull. Water seeped in, slowly at first, then
in huge, noisy slugs.
Wavedancer
limped along, her desperate crew
bailing as fast as they could with their meagre collection of buckets, chests
and bowls. Even cupped hands were used when the light started to fade and fear
really took grip. Then a miracle occurred. At least, Brother Alfred proclaimed
it such. Great white cliffs jutted, saw-like, from the horizon. Land.

Sinead
came to Redknee as they neared the cliffs, which he now saw were made of ice.
They rose straight from the water with no beach to mediate between their naked
glow and the sea. The cliffs groaned as huge chunks of ice crumbled away,
landing with a mighty splash.

“If this is
Greenland
, it
doesn’t look very green,” she said, scooping the water at her feet with a bowl.

Redknee watched as lumps of
ice, fluffed into fantastical peaked shapes, like whipped cream, floated past.
The sea was calm; the floes moved slowly, but a brush with one of their jagged
edges would surely sink them.

“It looks like the end of the
world,” he said, using an oar to fend off a nasty looking edge.

They
eventually found a thin, grey beach strewn with sharp rocks. Exhausted, and too
low in the water to go further, they docked and hauled their injured ship as
far up the beach as they could.
Wavedancer’s
timbers seemed to slump
into the rough sand. Redknee knew how she felt. Fatigue gnawed his bones. His
legs felt like lead, his arms worse. Cold and wet, he collapsed to the ground
and closed his eyes.

At first, he was too tired to
think. Then, slowly, his thoughts began to order themselves. His uncle had
banished the man he’d known as his father from the village. This first
revelation had enraged Redknee, so that, in the moments before his uncle’s
death, Redknee hated him more than he’d ever hated anyone. And then, just when
he thought he finally knew the truth, Sven had spoken those six simple words:

Erik Kodranson is not your
father.

Redknee’s hate for his uncle
had faltered, smashed on the rocks of confusion. But now … now Sven was dead,
had died saving him, and all chance of answering the questions swarming in
Redknee’s head had died with him. In the end, only one question remained
important:

 If not Erik
Kodranson, then who? Who is my father? And who, then, am I?

For, in truth, they were the
same dilemma.

Something warm, wet and
spongy smothered his face. He opened his eyes and drew Silver close, feeling
the outline of the pup’s ribs beneath his soft coat. He would need to find his
friend more food. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Sinead
looking down. Her fiery hair seemed wrong, somehow, against the glaring
backdrop of ice. Her eyes were too green, her lips too pink for this bleached
land.

“They’re arguing,” she said,
pointing to the group standing beside the wreck. “Olaf wants to camp here, but
I fear a storm is coming.”

Redknee looked at the sky.
Purple clouds tussled on the horizon. She was right. The storm would reach them
by nightfall. Redknee sighed. “What can
I
do about it?”

“Tell them we must find
shelter. There’s none on the beach.”

“They won’t listen to me.”

“You must try.”

Drawing on his last remnant
of strength, he stood and walked over, squeezing past Olaf to the centre of the
bedraggled group.

Olaf grinned in amusement.
“Sven’s whelp here to lead us?” he asked, voice dripping with sarcasm. 

Redknee cleared his throat.
“My uncle … my uncle is dead. We’ve no leader now, but we must make a quick
decision about where to spend the night. A storm is coming. We should head
inland to find shelter. We can return tomorrow to mend
Wavedancer
.”

“But we don’t know where we
are,” Olaf said. “We’re tired. Soaked through. Some are injured. And the locals
could be hostile.”

Several nodded at this, among
them Magnus and a couple of Astrid’s men-at-arms. She cast them an angry look.
Clearly,
she
wanted to go exploring.

“You’re right,” Redknee
replied. “But we can’t wait out the storm here. I’m going to see if there’s a
pass through the ice cliffs.”

“I won’t leave Harold,” Olaf
said, folding his arms across his chest. “He’s too ill to go wandering.”

Redknee glanced to where
Harold sat, apart from the group, on a slab of grey slate, his face as white as
the ice-cliffs behind him. Redknee nodded to Olaf.

“We’ll send you word as soon
as we’ve found shelter.”

In
the end, everyone left with Redknee save Olaf and Harold. He led them west
along the beach towards what looked from a distance to be a break in the wall
of ice.

Sinead caught up with him,
the
Codex
tucked under her arm. “I brought you this,” she said. “The
chest it was in burst open; but it’s still dry—”

“That thing has caused enough
death. I’m having nothing more to do with books.”

Sinead stared at him in
disbelief. “But we
must
find the Promised Land. We’ve come so—”

“Look,” Redknee said, turning
to face her. I was only interested in finding the Promised Land because I
thought it was where my father had gone. Before my uncle died, he finally
confessed Ragnar didn’t kill his brother. In fact, his brother survived the
fight. And what’s more, he confirmed Erik
was
obsessed with the
Codex
,
and wanted to find the Promised Land for himself.

Sinead’s eyes widened. “Your
father is alive – that’s wonderful!”

Redknee shook his head. “You
jump ahead. Sven also confessed he banished his brother because his obsession
had grown so monstrous, he murdered a man over it.”

“Oh—”
She paused, then added, “But even so, you’ll still
need the
Codex
to find him.”

“There
is
a group of
men looking for the Promised Land, the ones Astrid’s husband set sail with two
years ago, but my father isn’t among them.”

“How can you be sure? Just
because he was banished—”

“
Because
,” Redknee
said, his voice hollow, “the last thing Sven said before the sea monster
attacked, was that Erik Kodranson, his brother, isn’t my father.”

“What?”

“That’s right. For me,
anyway, this whole stupid search has been for nothing. Worse even, because that
book was the reason our village was destroyed. It caused my mother to be
killed, caused Karl, Thora and the Bjornsson twins to be murdered. Now Sven is
dead too. Face it, Sinead, the bloody thing’s cursed. Do yourself a favour and
throw it away.”

Sinead placed her hand
lightly on Redknee’s sleeve, “If Erik Kodranson isn’t your father, Sven isn’t
your uncle either.”

“
And that
,” Redknee
said, kicking a loose sliver of flint across the beach, “is about the best
thing that’s come of this. Now, keep that book away from me before I throw it
into the sea, where it belongs.”

Sinead blanched. But she hung
on to the book, wordlessly gripping it tight as she fell into step beside him.

The
break in the wall of ice led nowhere. The beach was longer than Redknee had
realised, snaking for miles around small inlets and sweeping bays. But two things
remained constant; the high ramparts of ice blocking access to the interior and
the gathering cloudbanks. So it came as a relief when, as they entered a broad
bay with soft, black sand not long before sundown, Olvir stood on tiptoe and
shouted, “Look!”