Viking's Sunset Read online

  Then Thorfinn Thorfinnson began to beat with a hammer on the floorboard to set the rowing time, and all backs bent to the oars. And as they rowed, Thorfinn sang an old song which they all knew:

  ‘Makers of widows, wander we must;

  Killers ’tween seedtime and salting of kine;

  Walking the Whale’s Way, sailing the Swan’s Path,

  Daring the Sun’s Track, tricking dark death!

  In jaws of the storm, jesting we stand,

  Lashed with hail’s fury, hand frozen to line;

  Numb head rain-shaken, sharp spume in the nostril,

  Salt caking hair – and blood’s haven in sight!’

  All the men joined in, feeling once more the sharp splash of the water on their faces, breathing deep of the salt-laden air after the long winter ashore.

  And many that day blessed Haakon Redeye for giving them the excuse to sail again and to leave the barley field and the pigsty.

  Late that night, on a little skerry of stones that hardly poked above the sea’s level, they heard a man crying out to them. As they drew nearer the voice, they saw that big white seabirds circled over the rocks, as though to threaten the man who clung there so desperately.

  As they came alongside, they saw a man dressed in an old horse-hide clinging to the stones, too weak to draw himself up away from the sea’s hands.

  Harald called out, ‘What man are you?’

  And the man answered weakly, ‘I am Havlock Ingolfson, master. Haakon Redeye had me flung into the sea because I wanted my share of the plunder now and not when we reached Isafjord Deep. Save me, I beg you.’

  Harald said, ‘Were you with the men who burned Sigurdson’s Steading three days ago?’

  The man said, ‘Aye, master, and a fine burning we made of it. Take me aboard and I will tell you the story. It will make you smile, I warrant you.’

  Then Harald took his axe in his hand and for a while seemed about to leap into the water and put an end to this rogue. But at last he turned away and said to the rowers, ‘Why should I hurry his end? Let the Dark Ones who weave our web have their way with him. Set course to northwards again, my seacocks!’

  So Long Snake passed on, and soon the wretch began to yell out again as the seabirds came back and swirled over him in the dusk.

  And at last the men on Long Snake heard him crying out no more.

  That night they lay out in open sea, three leagues off land, with the top cover down over the roof-slats, and their sheepskins about them.

  And as Harald paced the deck, unable to sleep for the thought of his revenge, he thought the mists before the longship parted and a woman wearing a winged helmet and carrying a shield stood upon the prow looking down at him, smiling strangely.

  Harald said, ‘What have you come to tell me, Shield-maiden? Speak out in clear words for I am afraid of nothing now.’

  Then the Shield-maiden spoke and her voice was like the splintering of icicles and sometimes like the swishing that the gannet makes as he falls out of the cold sky.

  She said, ‘Harald Sigurdson, I have come to bring no message, but only to look on your face, so that I shall know you again.’

  Then Harald said, ‘Why should you need to know me, Shield-maiden? Are you to bring my doom upon me?’

  Then the grey misty shape seemed to laugh, with a sound like the grey seals mourning on some lonely skerry out beyond Iceland.

  And at last she said, ‘We do not answer the questions of men. We do the bidding of the gods only.’

  Harald Sigurdson said, ‘Many a time have I heard of you doomsters, yet never have I seen you before, though I have lain helpless in the deep sea off the Western Isles with my body numb and my mind gone from me.’

  The woman said, ‘We come but once, to be seen by men. And when we come the second time, they do not see us.’

  Then Harald said, ‘I understand, Shield-maiden. I see that I have done something wrong. I will not ask you what it was, for I think I know now. I should not have left that wretch on the skerry for the seas to drown and the birds to eat.’

  Then the Shield-maiden seemed to nod her head and whispered, ‘When the winds howl over the lonely nesses and the snow beats across the frozen inlets, you will remember him, remember Havlock Ingolfson, who lived wrong but died right.’

  Harald said, ‘I will turn the ship round to find him, Shield-maiden.’

  But she only laughed and whispered, ‘Too late. Too late …’

  And then, as Harald went forward to see her more clearly, she faded back from the tall prow and into the rocking sea.

  So Harald shrugged his shoulders and then went back to the stern shelter and wrapped his blanket about him and fell into a numbed sleep, which lasted him until the dawn.

  4

  Distant Waters

  The next morning broke clear and cold as crystal. A flurry of kittiwakes swept about the longship; then three stormy petrels came so low that their wings almost touched the mast. A dark cloud built up like a grey fortress on the port quarter, and then a grim wind started up, whipping the salt spume across men’s backs as they rowed, as sharp as a whiplash.

  Grummoch, who was half as big again as any Northman, got the full force of this, down to the waist, and so ruefully lay down under the lee of the shield-gunwale.

  It was as he lay thus that Harald went to him and said, ‘Shame would it be on me, not to tell my oath-brother and the foster-father of my children what I have seen in the night.’

  Grummoch said, ‘This day will test us all. There are berserks here who will weep for a cup of warm milk and a sizzling hunk of pork, before this day is out. What did you see, brother?’

  Harald told him of the Shield-maiden and of what she had said.

  Then Grummoch raised himself on his big red elbow and said, ‘All men must go when the Norns call. Yet I have it in my mind that your dream was more the result of too little food and too much excitement yesterday. I think you will live to be a hundred.’

  Harald almost struck his oath-brother then for so tempting the gods; but instead he held down his hand and said after a while, ‘The guest who stays longest at the feast sees the most juggling.’

  Then he went aft to tell the man at the steerboard to lash his helm to the ship-side, so that they might hold their course to the north.

  An hour later the full force of the Spring storm hit them, rocking Long Snake as though she were a ship of straw. Few men that day ate; and those that ate scantly kept down their meals. And so it was for three more days and nights, until the men of the longship began to swear that Haakon Redeye was in league with Loki the Wicked, or that Freya, the Goddess, who saw to the bringing forth of life, had turned her back on them and intended them to feed the fishes, and so help bring forth fish-life.

  But Harald laughed at them, and did not tell them of his vision of the Shield-maiden. Instead, he told them not to be thrallish-minded, and said that he had sailed through storms ten times worse than this one when he was a young man; though he knew that he lied.

  At last, when the long low shape of the land of ice raised itself up over the black sea, most men in Long Snake lay on the boards, groaning and asking their friends to slip a knife below their ribs so that they might not have to endure another day of this torment. Wet to the bone, raw at elbow and knee, their stomachs empty of food, these men had hardly the strength to lift sword or axe now.

  Harald said to Grummoch, ‘These men are in poor case. Not one, save thee and me, could swing a sword or flail an axe.’

  Grummoch said, ‘Count me out. If a kitten leapt at my throat, I could not save myself. I should be at its mercy!’

  Harald smiled to think of the kitten who could spring high enough to reach tall Grummoch’s throat, but he said nothing and went forward to where Gudbrod Gudbrodsson lay, making little marks on the planks with his wet finger.

  ‘Friend,’ said the shipmaster, ‘you know of the inlets and nesses of this place. Where are we to steer?’

  Gudbrod Gudbrodsso
n said without looking up, ‘I have heard of these places from my grandfather, who sailed here in a storm when he had not enough money to pay for the killing of Alkai Nobody. But when he told me, he was in his dotage and rambled. I cannot remember what the old sheep said, master. All I know is that he said the place was full of lawless men who had come here to avoid hanging or head-removing. That is all I know.’

  Then he went on scribbling over the decks, using his finger as pen, and salt-water as ink, daft with the storm and hunger.

  Harald went to the steerboard and unlashed it. Then he scanned the coastline that stretched out before him.

  As a cloud of birds came out to meet Long Snake, Harald put the helm hard over, towards a place under a hill, where a cloud of dark brown smoke rose.

  The longship lay in a sheltered waterway, full of shoals, that afternoon. The Vikings waded ashore, each trying to look fierce, but each cursing the day when Haakon Redeye fetched them out on this blood-quest.

  There was a half-rotting whale drawn up on the shore and many men about it, hacking for blubber with great adzes and flensing-knives. They had a huge fire of seaweed beside them, on which iron pots bubbled as they flung the blubber pieces into them. The stench was heavy. Even the birds avoided that place.

  Harald went foremost, with Grummoch close behind him.

  The men flensing the whale scantly looked up. They were red-eyed fellows, wearing old clothes and their feet bound with sheepskins. Their hair and beards flapped matted and uncombed in the shore wind. Not one carried a true weapon, but only staves tipped with iron.

  As the Vikings approached, a short bandy-legged man rose from his business of lifting out the whale’s heart and came, red-handed, a pace or two to meet them. His face was set and defiant.

  Harald said in Norse, ‘Greetings, friend. We seek Haakon Redeye. Can you tell us where he may be?’

  The man looked up at the sky. Then he looked to left and to right. Then he spat into the scummy water of the shore puddles.

  ‘He is not here,’ he said. ‘He is not at Isafjord Deep. Maybe at Ragnafjord, or at Sealflaying fjord. I do not know, and I care less. But not here.’

  He spoke in a strange dialect that Harald could hardly understand, as though he had always lived at this place and had learned from seals and walruses and the gulls rather than from men. Harald did not like the looks of him, for his eyes were dark and set close together. Besides, his eyebrows were so sandy-light that who could see them unless he came very close, too close?

  All the time he spoke, his score or so of men stood silent about the rotting whale, their adzes in their raw hands, their chapped lips closed, their matted hair blowing in the wind.

  Grummoch went forward and said slowly, ‘If I took you by the leg, I could fling you over that hill.’

  The man said, ‘What good would that do you or me? It would not tell you what you want to know, and it would stop me from flensing my whale. Don’t talk like a fool. Your body has outgrown your brain.’

  Harald said, ‘I would give good pieces of money to know where Haakon Redeye is at this moment.’

  The man said, ‘There are no markets here. No place to use money, friend. We have horses and pigs and sheep. We have fish and whale-blubber. What use is money to us?’

  Harald saw that they could neither frighten nor buy this man.

  He said, ‘Suppose we burn your village down, what then? What would your wives say to that?’

  The man said, ‘They know better than to raise their voices. They are all lawless women who have sailed with pirates years ago. They have burned villages themselves, and they have built villages. Besides, they never speak unless we give them leave. They are well-trained, unlike the women of Norway and Denmark. If you burn our village, you are welcome to do so. And while you do that, we shall stave in the sides of your longship with our flensing adzes. That is all.’

  Grummoch said, ‘Suppose we kill you all, here and now?’

  The man said, ‘If I blow this bone whistle on my belt, fifty more men will come running from behind that hill, and fifty more from the next one. Then they will do such things to you that I have not the words to speak of. Go away and waste no more of our time with your prattle.’

  The man then turned back to the whale, and his fellows bent again to their stinking task.

  Harald said to Grummoch, ‘This fellow is lying. He knows more than he will say – yet his reasoning is good. There is nothing we can do to make him tell us where Haakon Redeye might be.’

  Grummoch said, ‘It ill becomes warriors to turn back from such a creature. But there is little we can do. Let us go back to the ship.’

  As they went, the men about the whale scoffed at them in their hoarse voices, and flung pieces of bone and skin after them. But the Vikings did not turn back, though sometimes they were sorely tempted, especially when the rubbish struck them.

  Long Snake set forth again, and rounded the headland and so came into deeper waters, where the grey rock rose high on either side of them. And as they went, they saw fires start up here and there on the hillsides, as though signals were being sent from one part of the place to another.

  Thorfinn Thorfinnson said, ‘Seems it to me that who catches Redeye must have windows in the back of his head.’

  Gudbrod Gudbrodsson said, ‘And a sword in each of his eight hands.’

  Jamsgar Havvarson said, ‘If I had my way, I would wipe this island clear of men and of cattle. Then I would take a spade and dig out the foundations and let it all sink into the sea; for it is a breeding-ground of wickedness.’

  Thorfinn Thorfinnson said, ‘That comes well from you, who have never dug your own garden in twenty years, but always make your wife do it.’

  Jamsgar Havvarson said, ‘I do not dig because I have a weak heart and bending down does not suit me. If you had a weak heart, you would understand better. Then you would see what injustice you do me.’

  Gudbrod Gudbrodsson said, ‘How can a man with a weak heart wield an axe as you do?’

  Jamsgar Havvarson said, ‘That is a secret told to me in a dream by a witch. I am under oath not to tell anyone else, especially you.’

  Thorfinn Thorfinnson said, ‘It is as good a way to avoid digging that I have heard of. When I get back home, I shall have such a dream and then I need dig no more. I am no lover of gardening, either!’

  Jamsgar Havvarson said, ‘You make light of a serious matter. When I have a moment to spare, I shall challenge you to fight and shall cut off your head for those words.’

  Harald Sigurdson said, ‘If you fools don’t stop arguing, I shall fling you all overboard now, and let you swim home to Norway. Then you will see what a weak heart is like.’

  Gudbrod Gudbrodsson said, ‘It is all one to me. I can walk on the water, didn’t you hear? And so can Thorfinn Thorfinnson. We both learned to do it at the same time. We went to a school run by a Russian witch in a cave near the mouth of the Dnieper. We paid good money to learn the trick. I have often wondered when the chance to practise on real water would occur, for up to the present we have only been able to do it on dry land, though we know exactly what to do on water.’

  Harald went away then, for he knew that Norsemen would keep up this silly sort of talk for hours at a stretch, until they became so drunk with words that they would draw swords and hit each other, just to prove a point, or leap into the sea for a wager.

  5

  Haakon Redeye

  That night they slept again upon the ship, watching the fires burning high on the hilltops, afraid to go ashore lest such lawless men as they had already met surrounded them and killed them as they slept.

  They woke at early dawn-time to find Long Snake half full of brackish water, from a hole in her side which needed caulking.

  And as they lay, half-settled on a sandbank, filling that hole with rope strands and tarring it over, a longship swept out from behind them, down the inlet, and set course to the west.

  Seeing their plight, the ship came close to them, wi
thin an arrow-flight, and then Harald saw that Haakon Redeye was in the prow, smiling at them in mockery.

  ‘If I had more time,’ he said, ‘I would stay and help you, Sigurdson. But as it is I am behind time and must go on to visit my old grandmother who lives among the trolls. It is her birthday soon, and I have promised to take her a present. So you will forgive me, I am sure, if I do not stay to help!’

  His men lined the side of the longship, grinning above the shields, and waving in derision.

  Harald called out, ‘Stay and fight like a man. I will meet you on board your own ship, bringing only two men with me. But at least give me the chance of my revenge.’

  Haakon Redeye said, ‘No thank you, Sigurdson. I have no wish to be struck by such as you. I have just eaten my breakfast, and it would be a waste of good food to go and get killed now. Goodbye!’

  So Haakon’s longship passed away out of sight, while Harald and his men swore furiously, baling out the water and caulking the hole in Long Snake’s side.

  And when this was finished two hours later, a party went ashore and filled the empty beer barrels with fresh spring water, while others found a herd of sheep and took eight of them, having frightened away the shepherd boy by waving axes at him.

  So they struggled back to their ship with the casks and the carcasses, into which they rubbed salt immediately, so that the meat would stay reasonably fresh for the voyage they had to make now to the west.

  At last, when the sun was sinking and the tarred side seemed to keep out the water, Long Snake set forth again in the track of Haakon Redeye.

  And Harald said at sunset, ‘I don’t know where we are going, my comrades, but it would ill become such men as us to turn back now and become the laughing-stock of our women, when we are so close on the heels of the man who has done us such harm.’