It saw us; smelled the ponies, didn’t know which to go for first. That was when I ran for it and so decided the skein of all our lives.
The white bear whirled at my movement – the speed of it, and it so huge! It saw me at the door, scrabbling for the bar. I heard it – felt it – roar with the fetid breath of a dragon; I frantically tore the bar off and dragged the door open.
I heard it crash, half-turned to look over my shoulder as I scrambled out. It had risen on hind legs and lumbered forward. Too tall for the roof, its great head had smacked a joist – cracked it – and tumbled it down into the fire.
I swear I saw it glare its one eye at me as it shrieked; I also saw Freydis calmly stand, pick up the old spear and ram it at the beast’s ravening mouth. Not good enough. Not nearly a good enough spell, after all. The spear smashed teeth on the already ruined side, snapped off and left the head and part of the haft inside.
The bear lashed out, one casual swipe that sent Freydis flying backwards in a spray of blood and bone. I saw her head part company from her body.
I ran stumbling through the snow. I ran like a nithing thrall. If there had been a baby in my way I would have tossed it over one shoulder, hoping to tempt the beast into a snack and giving me more time to get away …
I woke in Gudleif’s hall, to a sour-milk smear of a morning and the sick shame of remembering, but everyone was too busy to notice, for we were leaving Bjornshafen.
Leaving my only home and never returning, I realised. Leaving with a shipload of complete strangers, hard men for the sailing and raiding and, worse yet, a father I hardly knew. A father who had, at the very least, watched his brother’s head part company from the rest of him and not even shrugged over it.
I could not breathe for the terror of it. Bjornshafen was where I had learned what every child learns: the wind, the wave and war. I had run the meadows and the hayfields, stolen gulls’ eggs from the black cliffs, sailed the little faering and crewed the hafskip with Bjarni and Gunnar Raudi and others. I had even gone down to Skiringssal once, the year Bluetooth buried his father Old Gorm and became King of the Danes.
I knew the place, from the skerry offshore where the surf creamed on black rocks, to the screaming laughter of the terns. I fell asleep at night rocked in the creaking beams as the wind shuddered the turf of the roof, and felt warm and safe as the fire danced the shadows of the looms like huge spiders’ webs.
Here Caomh had taught me to read Latin because no one knew runes well enough – when I could be pinned down to follow his hen-scratching in the sand. Here was where I had learned of horses, since Gudleif made his name breeding fighting stallions.
And all that was changed in an eyeblink.
Einar took some barrels of meat and meal and ale, as part of the ‘bloodprice’ for the bear, then left instructions to bury Freydis and drag the bear corpse in and flay the pelt from it. Gudleif’s sons could keep that and the skull and teeth, all valuable trade items, worth more than the barrels taken.
Whether it was worth their father was another matter, I thought, gathering what little I had: a purse, an eating knife, an iron cloak brooch, my clothes and a linen cloak. And Bjarni’s sword. I had forgotten to ask about it, it had never been mentioned, so I just kept it.
The sea was grey slate, capped white. Picking through the knots of dulse and rippled, snow-scattered sand, the Oathsworn humped their sea-chests down to the Fjord Elk, plunging into the icy sea with whoops, boots round their necks. White clouds in a clear blue sky and a sun like a brass orb; even the weather tried to hold me to the place.
Behind me, Helga scraped sheepskins to soften them, watching, for life went on, it seemed, even though Gudleif was dead. Caomh, too, watched, waiting by Gudleif’s head – until we were safely over the horizon, I was thinking, and he could give it a White Christ burial.
I said as much to Gunnar Raudi as he passed me by and he grunted, ‘Gudleif won’t thank him for it. Gudleif belonged to Odin, pate to heel, all his life.’
He turned back to me then, 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