Robert Low - The Whale Road

Einar considered for a moment—a long year under that obsidian stare—then chuckled. 'Faults on both sides, then. The main thing is I now have someone who can read stuff before Martin the Christ priest does.'

Ì can read it if it is kept simple,' I warned him, wishing now I had spent more time with Caomh and his dirt-scratchings. But who knew then that such a thing would be of more use to me than the best way to get gull eggs from a high cliff?

Einar nodded, considering.

`What now?' my father asked. 'Down to Kiev and the Black Sea again?'

Èventually,' Einar said, 'but we call in at Birka and fulfil our hire. That way we get paid and I find out if Martin and Lambisson say true, since they will not know that I have all the saint's chest has to offer. Orm, not a word to anyone else that you can read the Latin. Mind that.'

I nodded and he grinned and clapped my shoulder. 'Truly, Rurik, you birthed a rare one and I am glad now that you bribed Thorkel to let him take his place.'

My father chuckled and I gawped and everyone laughed at the pair of us.

`Now go and fuck that Serkland woman before your head swivels off its stalk. Not that she'll thank you much—she has the coughs and fever all of those women get coming from the warm lands and I am thinking she will not last the winter.'

Still chuckling we moved into the main hov and, as we broke apart, my father caught my sleeve.

Ì did not know that he knew about Thorkel,' he said quietly. 'I forgot that Einar is a deep thinker and a cunning man. We'd both do well to remember that.'

Funnily enough, I remembered those words, even as my loins took over the thinking for me. Partly, I think, because Einar was right and the Serkland woman was already too sick to be a good bedmate, but mainly because of what Illugi had said about Atil's treasure.

`You sew your lips on that one, young Orm,' my father said when I mentioned it, looking right and left to make sure no one could hear us. 'That's something we are not supposed to know about.'

`We don't, I am thinking,' I answered.

He rubbed his head and acknowledged that with a rueful grin.

`But this is the same Atil as the tales?' I persisted. `Volsungs? All of that?'

Àll of that,' agreed my father and then shrugged and scowled when he saw my look. 'Learned men believe it,' he argued. Tambisson's tame Christ priest, we found out, seems to be seeking it to solve Birka's silver problems.'

I said nothing, but the thoughts whirled and sparked like embers in the wind. If even a tenth of what was said about the treasure hoard of Attila the Hun was true, then it was a mountain of silver you could mine for years.

Sigurd's treasure, culled from a dragon hoard and cursed, if I remembered the saga tale of it, then handed to the Huns by the Volsungs before they fell out.

`Just so,' Illugi Godi said, when I came to him with questions—though his eyes narrowed at the mention of it. 'You should put your tongue between your teeth over this matter, young Ruriksson,' he added.

`No secret here, it seems to me,' I replied and he hummed and shrugged.

`Well, so it would appear. No simple saga tale, either,' he went on. 'The Volsungs are lost to us, vanished like smoke, taking Sigurd Fafnirs-bane and Brynnhild and all the rest, so that the former is now a dragon-slaying hero and the latter is one of Odin's Valkyrie. Remembered for that only and not that once they were people, like you or me.'

I sat, hunched, hands wrapped round my knees as I had once done in Bjornshafen, listening to Caomh tell stories of his Christ saints. For a moment, listening to the steady, firm voice of Illugi, I was back in the red-gleam twilight of Gudleif's hall, full-bellied and warm and safe.

Àtil, too, was once real, a powerful jarlking of those tribes who live in the Grass Sea, far to the east. The Volsungs thought him great enough to be allies against the Old Romans, so they sent him a wife: Gudrun, who was once Sigurd's woman. With her came a marvellous sword as a dowry.'

`Sigurd's sword?' I asked and he shook his head.

`No. They gave him a sword forged by the same smith who made Sigurd's own. They called it the Scourge of God and while Atil had it, he could never lose a battle.'

`Which made it hard for the Volsungs when they found Atil was a false friend,' I offered and Illugi scowled.

`Who is telling this?'

He was, of course and he hummed, mollified, when I said it.

`Just so. The Volsungs knew they could not win; they were beaten time and again by Atil until they came upon another way. They sent him a new wife, Ildico, in peace. To tempt him to take her, she came with a great treasure of silver—Sigurd's dragon hoard.'

`Cursed,' I pointed out and he nodded.

Òn her wedding night, this brave Ildico slew Atil as he slept and waited for the morning beside him, knowing she could not escape.'

We were both silent, brooding on this cunning plot, cold and coiled as a snake, and the sacrifice it had entailed: the Volsungs losing their wealth and Ildico her life, for she was chained to Atil's death throne alive when he was howed up in a great mound of all the silver of the world, including the Volsungs' gift. A mound long hidden, with all those who knew of it killed.

Such revenge we in the north knew well, yet even so, the warp and weft of this sucked the breath from you.

The rest of the winter dragged into spring without much event. Many of us got sick, me included, with streaming eyes and nose and coughing. Eventually, we all recovered—save for the Serkland woman, as Einar had predicted. She caught a fever, which went quickly, Illugi Godi said, through all the stages: tertian, quartan, daily and, finally, hectic.

At that point, with her breath rasping in her chest, she simply gave up, turned her head to the wall and died. Einar gave her body to the Christ priests in the town, but they refused to perform suitable rites over her, since they said she was 'infidel'.

So Illugi Godi commended her to the true gods of the North and then tipped the body into the sea, from a rocky spit a little way out of town, as an offering to Ran, Aegir's sister-wife, to ensure good sea journeys.

That was because the good merchant council of the town wouldn't have a thrall howed up in their own yards—though they took Harald, whose cut foot had festered all through the winter, then turned black to the groin and stank, at which point he died.

Ulf-Agar, myself and a new Oathsworn, a fair-haired, bearded man called Hring, brought into the Oathsworn to replace Haarlaug, carried the Serkland woman out. I remember Hring because neither he nor I joined in Ulf-Agar's cursing about having to carry a thrall to be buried. That and the fact that, because of the lice, he was the first of many to have his head shaved. Perhaps that, the mark of a thrall forced on him by circumstance, made him more aware of her.

As for me, I thought myself the only one who cared, though we had all humped her at one time or another and never had a name for her other than Dark One. But, almost with the splash of her in the black, cold water, I had forgotten; I stopped wondering what she had been in her own hot lands. By the time I was back in the hov, I was already looking for the huskiest of the girls still on her feet and trying to get her off them.

Not long after that all the girls were gone, sold off almost overnight. The winter was done and the Fjord Elk was bound for the whale road again.

No one remembers Birka now. Sigtuna, a little way to the north, now sits in its high seat, though people still speak of Gotland as being the queen of the trade places of the Baltic. But Gotland was no more than a seasonal trade fair beside Birka when it flourished.

At the time, I thought Birka was a marvel. Skirringsaal was big, even winter-empty, but Birka, when I first saw it, seemed to me an impossible place. How could so many live so close together? Now, of course, I know better—Birka was a place of rough-hewn logs that could be placed in a few streets of Miklagard, the Great City of the Romans, and not be noticed.

We came beating up to it in driving rain and a wind that wanted to tear the clothes from us. It thrummed the ropes and heaved out the soaking sail.

Because it was so wet, my father shrugged at the idea of hauling it in and the Fjord Elk ran with it, cutting like a blade through the black water, throwing up ice-white spray, snaking down the great heave of the sea so that you could feel it flex, like the muscled beast it was named after, rutting in some red autumn wood.

It was here that we lost Kalf to the waves. My father, when Pinleg bellowed out that the great fortress rock of Birka, the Borg, was in sight, knew that the sail and spar had to come down on to the rests and be lashed. If not, we would slice past it and on into the Helgo and the tangle of islands where the ice still gripped and calved off into dirty, blue-white bergs that would smash the speeding Elk to splinters.

So we all sprang to the walrus-hide ropes and began to pull, while the Elk groaned and bent and the water hissed and creamed away underneath her.

The sail fought us—and one corner of it tore loose, flapping, deceptive. Kalf leaned out to grab it. A mistake. It was wet; he missed; it slapped him like a forge hammer in the face and I just caught the sight of him out of the side of one eye, flying arse over tit, up and out and into the black water with scarcely a splash.

And he was gone, just like that.

Those who had seen it and weren't hanging on to rope sprang to the side, but there was no sign. Even if he had surfaced, there was no hope; we were flying before the wind like a horse with the bit clenched. By the time we had got the sail stowed and the oars out and turned to row back, he'd have stiffened with the cold and sunk.

I saw my father mouth at Einar, the wind ripping the words away into the wet sail. Einar simply shook his head and pointed onward. Illugi Godi made a sign against the evil eye and Valgard roared incoherently at us, then moved in, banging shoulders and urging us to pull down the sail.

We smothered the great, wet, squelching mass of sail on to the spar and lashed the spar to the rests, panting and sweating with the effort. The rowing crew took their sea-chest benches and, slowly, the Fjord Elk, like a reined-in, snorting horse, stilled and was turned towards the great wet-black rock that marked Birka.

On it, I saw, was a fortress, a rampart of earth and stone that loomed over the settlement and, at a certain point, Einar had us take down the antlered prows, to show we came in peace and were not about to offend the gods of the land with our arrival.

We rowed on, practically level with the great rock, until the sound of a horn brayed out faintly on the water and Rurik, sharply, ordered oars to rest. We waited, the Elk rolling in the swell, water slapping spray over the side.

`What are we doing?' I demanded of Steinthor. 'Going fishing?'

He chuckled and slapped my shoulder, causing a fine spray of water from the soaked cloth. 'We wait for the tide,' he answered. 'The way into the harbours is dangerous with rocks and only Birka men know where they are. The only safe way in is to wait until the rocks show at low tide—or leave when the water runs really high, like in a storm, and trust to the gods.'

`Harbours?' I ventured.

`They have three,' he said, almost proudly. `The one to the west they actually made; the other two are natural.'

`Four harbours,' my father interrupted. `The fourth is the salvik, the Trade Place, further to the east.

That's for small ships and those with shallow draught, like us. We can berth there without having all those fat-bellied knarrer in our way, or paying fees for it.'

Steinthor grunted. 'It is a harbour if you count dragging the ship up the shingle on rollers a harbour. And it's a long walk to the town.'

The swell grew and the Fjord Elk moved with it, slow and ponderous, like some half-frozen water insect.

We slid into the salvik and, with the others, I leaped out, paired myself with Hring on an oar and, using it and the others as rollers, the Fjord Elk was ground up over the shingle and the cracking ice pools.

Valgard fretted and tried to inspect the keel, ducking under the oars as we took them from behind and dropped them in front. One cracked and splintered under the stress; Einar cursed, nodding to Valgard to add that to his tally stick of essential refurbishment.

There were other ships, none as big as the Elk, but many of them, it seemed to me, freshly arrived with the melting ice. But Geir and Steinthor grunted and shook their heads.

`Fewer than last time and there were few then,' muttered the former, rubbing his wobbling nose.

Steinthor shrugged. 'All the more ale for us then.'

Down on the strand, under the flapping tent of a patched sail, a trader had spread out a series of tattered furs, on which were bolts of dyed cloth, wool and linen. Next to him, another had set up a simple trestle bench, with amber beads, bronze cloak ring-pins, ornaments of jet and silver, eating knives in decorated sheaths and amulets, particularly Thor's hammer made to look like a cross, so the wearer got the best of both Other Worlds.

They looked hungrily at the men swaggering off the ship; a few Oathsworn wandered over, but wandered back swiftly enough, glum. Pinleg, rolling even more because he hadn't got his landlegs yet, scowled and shook his head as he came swaying up. 'Not buying, selling,' he growled. 'Piss-poor prices for anything we want to get rid of. That means we'll have to hang on to it until we get to Ladoga.'

Illugi Godi came up, carrying a live hare by the ears. It hung from his hands, trembling and quiet. He moved to a large, flat rock, which had clearly been used before, and set the hare flat, stroking it gently. It gathered itself into a huddle and shook.

He cut the throat expertly, holding it up so that it kicked and squealed and the blood poured over its front and flew everywhere with its flying, desperate attempts to leap in the air.

Illugi gave it to the sea god, Aegir, in the name of Kalf, who had died in the black Water without a sword in his hand, in the hope that the Aesir would consider that a worthy enough death, and to Harald One-eye and Haarlaug. Men stopped, added their own prayers, then moved on, humping sea-chests on their shoulders.

It came to me then that the Oathsworn had done one journey, from south Norway, round between Wessex and the lands of the Norse in France, north to Man and Strathclyde, then back and on eastwards to Birka. A journey without trouble and a soft raid, according to the salt-stained men of the Oathsworn. And yet three men had died.

Illugi gutted the hare while it kicked feebly, examined the entrails and nodded sagely. He left the red ruin of it aside, started a small fire from shavings, fed it to life and caught me watching. 'Get me dry wood, Orm Ruriksson.'

I did—with difficulty on that wet beach—and he built the fire up, then laid the remains of the hare on it.