Wolfsangel

33

The journey north felt like a dream to Adisla. The midnight sun turned the sea to boiling blood as it dipped towards the horizon and when it rose again it cast crystal shards into a sky of fragile blue. Sea mists came and went, the coastal mountains looming and then fading away, massive but fleeting. The temperature dropped as they moved up the coast — not to freezing, though ice was visible on the mountaintops, but to a grey numbing cold.

There was no true darkness, no rest from the leering of the Danes. Only the strange foreigner with his filed teeth and his drum seemed to stand between her and them. She had no oar to row, no sail to work and, huddling terrified at the prow of the ship, she was frozen. The man with the drum tried to help, but his attempts to hold her were unpleasant. He was ugly, frightening and stank of fish, though there was no lust in what he did. He just put his arms around her and squeezed.

She shrugged him off.

‘It is normal,’ he said. ‘Be cold then.’

He brought her food — fish from the ship’s pot, boiled reindeer, hunted and cooked when they stopped to camp. He was a dead shot with his little bow — a curious squashed-looking thing. The reindeer he brought back to the boat had just one arrow in it, embedded behind its ear. There had been no stressful wounded chase for the creature and the meat was tender and lovely.

It was the foreigner who slept next to her in an improvised tent on the beaches, keeping her from sleep as he watched her with those strange blue eyes, but keeping her from harm too with the broad knife he kept at his belt.

Soon the midnight sun turned from the side of the ships to behind them. They moved among islands that seemed no more than mountains rising from the water, past immense bays and wide silver beaches where sea eagles wheeled against brilliant skies. Great pine forests stretched up huge slopes, and where the mountains parted there were glimpses of vast green plains.

The ends of the earth were supposed to be this way, and as the fogs swept over the boat she wondered if this was the road to Nifhelm, the misty hell she had learned about at her mother’s knee. The lands of men were called Middle Earth for good reason. There were other areas, realms of gods and giants beyond their own, and mortals had no place there. Was that where the longship was going?

Haarik came and sat next to her. He hadn’t spoken to her for the whole voyage but now he was bored. The ship was under sail in an easy wind, most of the crew were sleeping and he had nothing to do. He held her face by her chin and turned it towards his. Then he glanced towards his men. None was paying them any attention. He let her go.

‘I miss my wife,’ he said. Normally Adisla would have found his thick accent and mangled words funny. At Eikund they’d been visited by an entertainer who did a very good impression of Danes, and Haarik reminded her of him with his sing-song Norse. Now she just found him grotesque.

‘You should bring your bodyguard. You won’t take me without a fight and you are old and frail.’

The king laughed.

‘To talk to,’ he said. ‘I need to talk. The company of warriors is a glorious thing but men need softer speech too, don’t they? Well, I do. Do you know why you’re here?’

‘I took it that you meant to sell me.’

‘You’re already sold, in a manner of speaking,’ he said, ‘or rather exchanged, though it seems to me an uneven bargain.’

Adisla looked at him. Haarik wasn’t a coarse or unpleasant man; in fact, there was something quite fatherly about him — not her father but the father she wished she’d had. She hated him, though. He — or his men — had killed her brother, stolen her from her homeland and sentenced her mother to death. Still, she wanted to discover her fate so decided to be as civil as she could, which meant she said nothing.

‘You’re to be swapped for my son,’ he said, ‘although I wonder why I’m bothering. Perhaps I should have appointed you my heir. Are you any good as a sea captain? Can you wield a sword?’

‘Not among my talents,’ said Adisla.

‘You can’t be any worse than him. He was sent on a raid to the Islands at the World’s Edge. He ended up here. That really does take a special sort of stupidity. I say go west; he finishes up just about as far east as it’s possible to go.’

‘He was captured?’

‘Yes, and by people who couldn’t catch a cold. The Whale People have got him — can you believe that? Nothing more than a sharpened reindeer antler between the lot of them and they’ve taken him hostage. He was shipwrecked on his way up the coast north. Went too far up, got caught in the wrong current. One of two survivors apparently, one of whom — biggest berserker I’ve ever seen — shows up at my court with my boy’s sword and this whale wizard. I ask this berserker, Bodvar Bjarki, what a disciple of Odin of the white bear is doing getting captured by a bunch of icicle farmers and he murmurs something about sorcery. Says they heard a rumour of sorcerers’ gold and went chasing it, which in itself beggars belief.’

‘You look for him yourself?’ said Adisla. ‘Have you no champions to do it for you?’

Haarik laughed. ‘I’m an old-fashioned king, not one of this new breed more at home with the inky priests of new gods than a sword. My problem, my solution. And besides I’m afraid of what the boy might say to anybody who rescues him. He could disgrace himself further.’

‘Is he so big a fool?’

‘Why would he be here if he wasn’t? Sorcerer’s gold! If I had a piece of silver for every rumour of sorcerer’s gold I’ve heard then I wouldn’t need any sorcerer’s gold. These people haven’t got combs for their hair, let alone gold. Even if it does exist, couldn’t he hear the warning in the name? Sorcerer’s gold. That’s not little children’s gold or farmer’s gold, it’s sorcerer’s gold. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had just untied a wind knot and blown him onto the rocks for his cheek. Anyway, this berserk tells me they’ve dragged my boy halfway across the world and the blubber bashers want something in return. ’

‘What?’

‘You. If it weren’t for the shame, I’d let him freeze his nuts off for ten winters up here.’

‘How do they even know me?’

Haarik nodded towards the reclining Whale Man, who was watching them with half an eye. ‘Ask him. If he’ll tell you, he certainly won’t tell me. The deal is: I take him to Rogaland; he identifies you; I take you up here; I get my idiot son back. Everyone happy.’

He looked at her face. ‘Well, almost everyone.’

The Whale Man had closed his eyes and began to snore.

Haarik eyed him with contempt. ‘They’re idiots, his people. They pay tribute to three kingdoms that they move through after reindeer so no wonder they’re poorer than dirt. Do they do anything about it? Do they go raiding or fight to keep what they’ve got? No. I tell you this: any Finn or Swede who came knocking on my door asking for tribute’d be going home with more than a whalebone comb for his pains.’

‘And yet one Whale Man walks into your court, and you risk your men in war with the Rygir, leave your court in the hands of vassals and sail to the ends of the earth just because he asks you to.’

‘My son is my son,’ said Haarik, ‘for better or worse.’

Adisla looked out of the ship. The landscape was flatter here — a rusty shore of rocks above the grey sea; above that a strip of green.

Haarik continued: ‘Anyway, when we get my boy back we’ll give our blades a nice wetting, piss it up for a couple of days if they’ve got anything worth drinking and then head back. You seem like a nice girl. I’ll take you as a bed slave. I’ll try to avoid letting the crew have you if it’s possible.’

‘Very kind,’ said Adisla.

‘And practical. Giving you to them makes as much trouble as it stops — they’d be fighting like dogs over a bone.’

Haarik wasn’t being unpleasant. He thought he was genuinely doing her favour by offering to claim her for his own. Adisla swallowed and looked out to sea. The courage to take her own life had failed her so she had to accept whatever was coming. She thought of the ruin of Eikund and couldn’t help but taunt him.

‘Let’s hope the Whale People are not as fierce as the Rygir,’ she said. ‘You have only sixty men. With eighty you couldn’t take our farms.’

Haarik’s face darkened.

‘There was the hand of sorcery in that,’ he said, ‘as we were told there would be. That’s why we took you instead of the prince.’

‘The same sorcery the berserk muttered about?’

Haarik smiled. ‘Very like it.’ She could see he liked her wit, took it for good humour. She found it difficult to believe that he couldn’t see the hate that was in her heart.

They were approaching an island, a long black hill rising out of the flat sea. The sun seemed to reach out to it in a tongue of fire across the water, marking a path to lead them in.

Haarik went on: ‘There is something protecting Prince Vali.’ He nodded at the Whale Man. ‘He wanted the prince but seemed to know we wouldn’t get him. You were second best.’

A noise was coming across the water, a rhythm different to the creaking of the ship or, had anyone been rowing, the beat of oars. It was faint but insistent, and Adisla recognised it as the rhythm the Whale Man had used to pull her from the sea. It was pulsing towards them across the flat water now like the heartbeat of some gigantic beast.

‘How can I be important to him? I’m a farmer’s daughter.’

The Whale Man looked up, his pale eyes focusing on her, his little white teeth gleaming in a row as he smiled and jabbed a finger at her.

‘Wolf trap,’ he said.