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The Whale Road The Wolf Sea The White Raven Prow Beast Crowbone
ROBERT LOW
CONTENTS
The Whale Road
ROBERT LOW
To my darling wife Katie, who makes sure my keel is straight and all my oars are in the water.
CONTENTS
Runes are cut in ribbons, like the World Serpent eating his own tail. All sagas are snake-knots, for the story of a life does not always start with birth and end with death. My own truly begins with my return from the dead.
There was a beam, knotted and worn smooth where nets and sails hung, with a cold-killed spider hanging by the slenderest of threads, swaying in the breeze, swimming in my vision.
I knew that beam. It was the ridge beam of the naust, the boatshed at Bjornshafen, and I had swung on those hanging nets and sails. Swung and laughed and had no cares, a lifetime ago.
I lay on my back and looked up at it and could not understand why it was there, for I was surely dead. Yet my breath smoked in the chill of that place.
‘He’s awake.’
The voice was a growl and everything canted and swung when I tried to turn my head to it. I was not dead. I was on a pallet-bed and a face, jut-jawed and bearded like a hedge, floated in front of me. Others, too, peered round him, all strangers, all wavering, as if underwater.
‘Get back, you ugly bollocks. Give the boy room to breathe. Finn Horsehead, you would frighten Hel herself, so I am thinking you should bugger off out of it and fetch his father.’
The hedge-bearded face scowled and vanished. The owner of the voice had a face, too; this one neat-bearded and kind-eyed. ‘I am Illugi, godi of the Oathsworn,’ he said to me, then patted my shoulder. ‘Your father is coming, boy. You are safe.’
Safe. A priest says I am safe, so it must be true. A moment’s vision-flash, like something seen in the night when a storm flickers blue-white: the bear,