As sudden as a ram splintering through a gateway, they burst out from the fog and found the whole landscape waiting before them. Two hundred yards ahead, great cliffs the colour of bonemeal reared up into the air. An empty beach, open and flat, lay at their feet. And at the top, framed against the streaked dawn sky, stood a solitary building, the largest and grandest that Bjọrn Egilsson had ever seen. The treacherous beacon burned in a stand at one end of it, twinkling innocently, guiding the raiders to their prize.
Eiric came to join his brother at the prow, and Bjọrn roared his rowers to even greater speed. A hundred yards out, as their keel began to smash through the rollers, he noticed a single figure scrambling down a cut in the cliffs towards the shore. The man’s feet reached the sand, and he began to labour along the beach to intercept the ship. Bjọrn gave a grunt of admiration, and drew his sword.
The figure was stumbling the last few paces as the ship ploughed its belly into the ash-grey sand. Bjọrn stood high against the masthead and looked down at him. He was some kind of old and wretched man, clothed in only a coarse brown robe with an old length of rope about his waist. The top of his head was as bald as a skull, but so symmetrically so that Bjọrn was tempted to think he had shaved it that way deliberately. He went without boots on his skinny grey legs. He was not even armed.
The man peered up at them and opened a nervous mouth as if to speak, but then he seemed to see something that made his neck gulp and the words crumble on his lips. Too late, he realised he had made a grave mistake. He babbled something in a tongue that Bjọrn did not understand, a beseeching look upon his face, and then turned and stumbled into a run. Before he had made it two paces, Eiric jumped down into the shallows, caught him by the robe, and hacked him into the sand.
‘See?’ Eiric roared, turning back to the ship. ‘Easy!’
Bjọrn and the others leapt down into the surf behind him, and he led them towards the cliffs at a run.
On the eighth day following Olaf Gudrødsson’s arrival as a noose around Helvik’s throat, Gunnarr Folkvarrsson rose at first light. He dressed in hurried silence so as not to wake his wife and mother, before ducking out into the freshness of dawn to check his traps.
It was a routine that, by now, he could probably have conducted before waking. He let himself out through the bolted east side-gate and stalked through familiar parts of the lowland woods, carefully inspecting each snare. Unfortunately, the outcome of his forages had become all too repetitive as well. The land was parched of wildlife, and all his traps were empty. He wandered weary-eyed down to the shore, hoping to have had better luck with the sea.
By the time that the sun was fully risen, Gunnarr was stooped waist-deep in the ocean shallows. He wore an old pair of sealskin trousers to keep some of the water off, and stepped across the smooth ocean rocks barefooted. His hands moved in brisk, familiar patterns, working across the stiff twine of his nets. After a short while longer he sighed and straightened, smearing a dash of seawater across his furrowed forehead as he flicked a strand of hair away with the back of his palm.
His nets were empty, as usual. Once he would have undergone the laborious process of drawing them in to the shore first, and replanting them elsewhere if unsuccessful, but he had long since learnt that that was wasted effort. The disappointment had been too much to bear. He snatched a section of netting up to his chest and began trying to knot together an area where the salt had corroded through the joints. At another point further along he noticed a darker piece of material from where Kelda had repaired it previously, and he smiled sadly to himself. The poor girl had spent days trying to mend the nets at one time or another, using anything she could find that would tie, even lengths of her own hair when there was nothing else. With so few fish to be had it seemed there was little point to the exercise, but Gunnarr knew that it wouldn’t be long before she insisted on taking another look at them to see what could be done. He often wondered whether she had been born with that positivity, or if it had been beaten into her through Helvik’s hard schooling.
A movement inland caught his eye, and he raised a forearm across his brow to watch a rider climbing slowly up the hillside leading out of town. It could only be Hákon Egilsson. As the oldest son of the ruler of Helvik he had been riding the mountain path regularly to ‘negotiate’ with the invaders. Gunnarr felt that was a generous term for such one-sided bargaining, but this appeared to be one matter in which his opinion mattered little. So many days of ceaseless waiting had allowed the townsfolk time to scare themselves half to death. Many now saw Hákon as their only hope.
Pointing, he called across to the two friends who were also checking their catches at either side of him, prompting them to straighten their backs and wade over to his position. Ári and Hilario were their names. Like most of those in Gunnarr’s life, Ári had been with him for as long as he could remember. Hilario was one of the rare few who had come in from the outside, arriving as a boy with a sprawling family of travellers and finding as a man that he did not want to leave, even as the rest of his kin were disappearing over the hills.
‘Mine are empty,’ Hilario stated as he drew up beside Gunnarr. He was a short, curly-haired man with a face full of expressions. ‘Someone’s been at the nets,’ he concluded. He often chose being robbed over being unsuccessful.
Ári had caught something, albeit small, and he took a knife and skilfully emptied the fish’s innards into the water, using his thumb to hold back some of the dark waste flesh. The good meat would be saved for his wife and son, and the innards would make oil for his lamps. He would have whatever there was left.
‘How long do you reckon he’ll be up there this time?’ Ári asked, giving his blade a quick rinse in the water.
‘Not long,’ Gunnarr replied, still watching Hákon on his ascent. ‘I doubt they’re as welcoming when he comes empty-handed.’
Hilario ignored Hákon, instead running an inspecting eye along the lie of Gunnarr’s nets. ‘I suppose we’ll be some of the first to know whether he’s persuaded them to be patient,’ he said eventually. ‘He’ll be coming down that hill pretty quickly if not.’
Ári sheathed his knife with a click. ‘Or not at all.’
The others murmured in agreement. Together they started to wade back to shore, the splashing of water between their limbs steadily increasing in pitch as the depth shallowed off.
‘When will you next speak to Egil, Gunnarr?’ Hilario asked.
‘There’s to be a meeting when Eiric and Bjọrn return from their raid, to discuss a more permanent solution.’
Hilario smirked with light-hearted affront. ‘In the old days they’d hold great big gatherings for the whole town to attend. Is everyone invited to this one?’
‘I think Egil worries that might become unruly.’
‘Well,’ Hilario said, as they reached the stony beach, ‘if he does happen to ask for my considered opinion, tell him that if we’re going to end up fighting, I’d rather it was sooner than later. Anything is more fun than a famine.’
Gunnarr sat, and began to sweep the dirt from the soles of his feet. He could manage a smile at the words, but he wasn’t surprised when Ári did not do the same. His friend had been a stern adolescent when Gunnarr was a child, son to a proud old metal worker who had liked nothing better than to spend the day working himself into the ground whilst complaining about the damage that it did to him and the laziness of those that did not do the same. As a boy, Ári had had a man’s concerns. Now a man, he showed no sign of taking the opposite approach. Not that he had any choice.
‘You have only yourself to worry about,’ Ári said dismally, and his face appeared drawn with the strain of the last few days. ‘My Tyr is too young to fight, and before long he’ll have a little brother to protect as well as his mother.’
Hilario scoffed, striving, as always,