bowed under the weight of his own sea-chest and looked at me from under his red brows. ‘Watch Einar, boy. He believes you are touched by the gods. This white bear, he thinks, was sent by Odin.’
It was something that I had thought myself and said so.
Gunnar chuckled. ‘Not for you, boy. For Einar. He believes it was all done to bring him here, bring him to you, that you have something to do with his saga.’ He hefted the chest more comfortably on his shoulder. ‘Learn, but don’t trust him. Or any of them.’
‘Not even my father? Or you?’ I answered, half-mocking.
He looked at me with his summer-sea eyes. ‘You can always trust your father, boy.’
And he splashed on to the Fjord Elk, hailing those on board to help haul his sea-chest up, his hair flying, streaked grey-white and red like bracken in snow. As I stood under the great straked serpent side of the ship, it loomed, large as my life and just as glowering. I felt … everything.
Excited and afraid, cold and burning feverishly. Was this what it meant to be a man, this … uncertainty?
‘Move yerself, boy – or be left with the gulls.’
I caught my father’s face scowling over the side, then it was gone and Geir Bagnose leaned over, chuckling, to help me up with my rough pack, lashed with my only spare belt. ‘Welcome to the Fjord Elk,’ he laughed.
The voyages of the Northmen are legendary, I know. Even the sailors of the Great City, Constantinople, with their many-banked ships and engines that throw Greek Fire, stand in awe of them. Hardly surprising, since those Greeks never lose sight of land and those impressively huge vessels they have will go keel over mast in anything rougher than a mild chop.
We, on the other hand, travel the whale road, where the sea is black or glass-green and can rear over you like a fighting stallion, all roar and threat and creaming mane, to come crashing down like a cliff. No bird flies here. Land is a memory.
That’s what we boast of, at least. The truth is always different, like a Greek Christ ikon veiled on feast days. But if anyone boasts of spitting in Thor’s eye, standing in the prow, roaring defiance at the waves and laughing the while, you will know him for the liar he is.
A long journey is always being wet to the skin and the wind bites harder as a result and your clothes are heavy as mail and chafe you until you have sores where the cloth rubs on wrist and neck.
It’s huddled in the dark, bundled in a wet cloak, feeling the sodden squash every time you turn. It’s cold, wet mutton if you are lucky, salt stockfish if you are not and, on truly long voyages, drinking water that has to be strained through your linen cloak to get rid of the worst of the floating things and no food at all.
There wasn’t even a storm of any serious intent on this, my first true faring; just a mild pitch of wave and a good wind, so that the company had time to erect deck covers of spare sail, like small tents, to give some shelter, mainly to the animals.
Einar huddled under his own awning, aft. The oars were stacked inboard and the only one with serious work was my father.
And my task? A sheep was mine. I had to care for it, keep it warm, stop it panicking. At night I slept, my fingers entwined in the rough, wet wool while the mirr washed us. In the morning, I woke with spray and rain washing down the deck. If I moved, I squelched.
The first week we never saw land at all, heading south and west from Norway. My sad ewe bawled with hunger.
Then we hit the narrow stretch of water which had Wessex on one side and Valland, the Northmen lands of the Franks on the other. We made landfall a few times – but never on the Wessex side. Not since Alfred’s day.
Even then we kept to the solitary inlets and lit fires only when we were sure there was no one for miles. Nowhere was safe for a boatload of armed men from the Norway viks.
We sailed north then, up past Man, where there was much argument for putting in at Thingvollur and getting properly dry and fed. But Einar argued against it, saying that people would ask too many questions and someone would talk and the news would get to Strathclyde before we did.
Grumbling, the men hauled the Elk further north, into the wind and the white-tressed sea.
Three more days passed, during which no one spoke much more than grunts and even the sheep had no strength left to bleat. For the most part, we huddled in solitary misery, enduring.
I dreamed of Freydis often, and always the same vision: her receiving me on the morning I arrived. She wore a blue linen dress with embroidery round the throat and hem, her brooches had strange animal heads and between them was a string of amber beads. She made no movement save for the rhythmic stroking of the growling cat.
‘From the pack, I take it you have come from Gudleif,’ she said to me. ‘Since he would only miss this journey if he were sick or injured, I presume that to be the case. Who are you?’
‘Orm,’ I replied. ‘Ruriksson. Gudleif fosters me.’
‘Which is it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sick or injured.’
‘He has sent for his sons.’
‘Ah.’ She was silent for a moment. Then: ‘So were you his favourite?’
My laugh was bitter enough for her to realise. ‘I doubt that, mistress. Why else would he send me through the snow to the hall of a—’ I stopped before the words were out, but she caught that, too, and chuckled.
‘A what? Witch? Old crone?’
‘I meant nothing by it, mistress. But I was sent away and I think he hoped I would die.’
‘I doubt that,’ she said crisply, rising so that the cat sprang off her lap and then arched in a great, shivering bow of ecstasy before stalking off. ‘Call me Freydis, not mistress,’ she went on, smoothing her front. ‘And ponder this, young man. Ask yourself why in … how old are you?’
I told her and she smiled gently. ‘In fifteen years, you and I have never met, though we are but a day apart and Gudleif came every year. Ask that, Orm Ruriksson. Take your time. The snow will not melt in a hurry.’
‘He sent me to die in the snow,’ I said bitterly and she shrugged.
‘But you did not. Perhaps your wyrd is different.’
Then the hall changed, to the one I had sat in under her bloodsoaked sealskin cloak, with the roof caved in. Yet still she sat on her bench, the cat somehow back on her lap.
‘I am sorry,’ I said and she nodded her head off her shoulders, so that it tumbled into her lap, sending the cat leaping up with a yowl …
I woke to the cold and wet, wondering if she was fetch-haunting me. Wondering, too, what had happened to the cat.
Then Pinleg yelled out from the prow, where he was coiling walrus-hide ropes. When he had our attention, he pointed and we all squinted into the pearl-light of the winter sky.
‘There,’ shouted Illugi Godi, pointing with his staff. A solitary gull wheeled, staggered in the wind, dipped, swooped and then was gone.
My father was already busy, with his tally stick and his peculiar devices. I never mastered them, even after he had explained them to me.
I knew that he had two stones, like grinding wheels, free-mounted. One pointed at the north star and the other was fixed to point at the sun. That way, my father knew the latitude, by seeing the angle of the sun stone. He could calculate longitude by using that and what he called his own time, marked on his tally stick.
I never understood any of it – but at the end of four days I knew why Einar valued Rurik the shipmaster, because we found the