Bracelet of Bones (16 page)

After eating and drinking, most of the crew went off into the woods to do their business, and then it was back to work again. Half a dozen portagers went around to the stern of the boat and tied restraining ropes there while the other six continued to carry rollers from the stern and place them under the slowly advancing, creaking prow. Each of the crew, meanwhile, stood alongside their own oar holes and put their shoulders to the hull to steady her on her journey downhill.

To begin with, Bard and Brita hopped around and joined in the chanting, but then Red Ottar told them they were quite old enough to lend a hand. Several times they helped carry a heavy pine roller from stern to prow, staggering under the weight of it.

“Watch your step!” Odindisa called out to Brita. “You’ll drop it on your toes.”

“I’m getting used to it,” Brita called back.

“You too, Bard!” warned Slothi. “It’s muddy here.”

But just a moment later, as Brita tried to position their roller beneath the hull, her right foot slipped forward. Then her left foot slipped backward, and she fell right in front of the advancing keel.

Brita screamed.

The ground was so mushy, she couldn’t even lever herself onto her knees.

She screamed again, and standing at the oar hole nearest to the prow, Vigot immediately saw what had happened. While the portagers pulled on their ropes, he leaped forward, yelling, and threw himself on top of Brita. He drove her face and little body down into the marshy mud, and his body protected hers as the boat rolled right over them.

Odindisa howled, and Truvor yelled a string of orders to his portagers. First they stayed the boat, then those who had been pulling began to push, and those who’d been pushing began to pull, and slowly, very slowly, they rolled the boat back . . .

Vigot lay motionless, his shoulders bloody, his white ribs exposed.

Truvor and Solveig carefully lifted him, and Solveig’s eyes were blurred with hot tears.

Then Slothi and Odindisa fell to their knees and lifted their daughter from the mud. They raised her, black-faced and choking, and Odindisa sobbed and embraced her.

“She’s all right?” Red Ottar asked.

Slothi nodded. “I think so.”

“Come and help Vigot,” Red Ottar instructed Odindisa. “Put a dressing on his bones.”

Then Solveig and Truvor gently laid Vigot down, and Truvor grimaced.

“If he lives,” Bruni growled in a dark voice, “he’ll be a half man.”

“A better man than I thought,” Red Ottar replied.

“The gods punished him before you could,” Bruni observed.

“They’ve punished us all,” the skipper replied. “We were nine—and now we’re eight.”

16

M
ihran was right. As soon as the crew set off down the Dnieper, they felt as if they were going downhill. The water was willing them on.

But before this, they had been obliged to wait for another whole day while the boat rode at anchor and her timbers drank and swelled again.

“Taking up,” Torsten told Solveig. “So she won’t leak.”

“We do the same with my father’s boat,” Solveig replied.

All day, Vigot lay in the hold facedown, arms outstretched. To begin with, Odindisa smeared the same ointment into his ghastly wounds that she had applied to Solveig’s bites, but then she changed her mind, and when they next disembarked she started to jab and stab with her spatula at the soft riverbank. Before long, she dug out a pair of worms, knotted together, then another pair, and triumphantly waved them in the air.

Solveig followed her back up the gangplank and watched her lay the worms on a thin iron tray and hold them over
Bergdis’s fire. Before long, the worms stopped wiggling. They became crispy. Then they fell apart and turned to ash.

“Poor Vigot,” said Solveig.

“This will help him,” Odindisa said.

“Yes, Asta does the same.”

“Who?”

“My stepmother.”

“The worms have to be knotted,” Odindisa told her, “otherwise the medicine won’t work. The sinews won’t knit together.”

“I know,” Solveig replied. “But Vigot’s ribs cracked as well. I heard them. And he’s all crushed.”

Odindisa gave a deep sigh.

“Will he ever mend, do you think? Ohh!”

“He saved Brita,” said Odindisa, “so I’ll do all I can to save him. This worm powder, and I’ll sing the healing runes and . . .”

“So brave!” whispered Solveig, and she stroked Vigot’s right hand. “If only I hadn’t accused you.”

Odindisa took the tray away from the heat and tipped the worm ash into the palm of her right hand. Then she rubbed it into Vigot’s gouged back and began to sing over him.

Vigot didn’t stir. He didn’t make a sound. Now and then he jerked his hands and arms, but he didn’t move his legs at all.

“Will you teach me?” Solveig asked Odindisa. “I know the runes but not how to heal people with them.”

“Runes for an adder’s bite or a filthy stomach or for swollen knees, runes for nosebleed and blotches and boils: there are healing runes for each malady.”

“I want to learn them,” said Solveig.

“You want to do this and want to do that. You’re so restless. Bergdis says you’re like a horsefly, buzzing around and feeding off the blood of one beast after another.”

“That’s not true,” said Solveig indignantly, and roses flared in her cheeks. “Is it?”

“You know Bergdis,” Odindisa replied. “Yes . . . I’ll teach you healing runes if you’ll teach me how to cut them. How’s that?”

Solveig smiled, but she felt upset. Bergdis is always making trouble, she thought. She’s the one with the sting. But I won’t let her see she’s gotten under my skin.

First the boat swallowed the fresh spring water of the Dnieper, then she swallowed its miles. Mihran required only one pair to sit at their oars—Bruni and Slothi, to begin with—while the remainder of the crew attended to small duties.

Torsten filed the oarlocks that had become splintered, and then he worked on two of the knees that had come loose from their thwarts. Mihran said he thought the boat might be off balance, and so Red Ottar got Bard and Brita to crawl behind all the packages in the hold to check that the stone ballast had not shifted. Odindisa hovered around Vigot. As usual, Bergdis busied herself with preparing the next meal, and Edith helped her until Red Ottar summoned her.

And Solveig, she carved. She scratched and scraped and gouged and whittled and shaped and fashioned and sanded as if her life depended on it. Pins and combs, dice, bone beads. Now I’ll really show Red Ottar what I can do, she thought.

Once Solveig glanced toward the bows, and there she saw Edith and Red Ottar. He was holding her face between his hands and kissing her on the mouth until Edith broke away from him, gasping and laughing.

Then Red Ottar attached something to the top of Edith’s woolen tunic . . .

“Your brooch!” exclaimed Solveig as soon as she and Edith were alone together.

“He gave it to me,” Edith told her wonderingly, as if she could scarcely believe it.

“It looks like two hammers laid end to end,” Solveig told her. “And here, these studs at each end, they’re like pairs of eyes.”

“He won’t tell me where he bought it,” Edith said.

“Maybe he didn’t,” Solveig replied.

“What do you mean? He did, and he says charms have been sung over it. To protect us.” Edith quietly joined her hands together over her stomach.

“You must show Odindisa,” Solveig told her, and then she smiled a little smile, surprised at herself for being so sly.

Later that day, Solveig got to work on a pair of elk shin bones. I’ll make them into skates, she thought. I can do that quite quickly and Red Ottar will be really pleased.

As she began to work, Solveig daydreamed. She was a thousand miles away, skating with her father and Blubba across the fjord where it narrowed and froze each winter. The light was so dazzling that Solveig had to keep her eyes screwed up, and they kept watering. Then her father unwrapped his auger and pointed it at the ice . . .

A shadow passed between Solveig and the sun, and she looked up. It was Mihran.

“Skates,” she told him. “A pair of skates.”

“Ahhh!” exclaimed the pilot, and he lifted his right foot and showed it to Solveig as if he were a horse waiting to be shod.

“That girl who told the story at the wrong time,” Solveig said. “Do you remember?”

Mihran nodded.

“It was about Skadi, the goddess who always wears skates or skis. This girl lived on our fjord, and she told a story about how the winter was so bitter that even the gods were famished and Skadi herself had to go ice fishing and hunting. But she told it on the eve of the spring solstice. Her words stopped the sun from warming the earth!”

“Was she punished?”

“My father said all the farmers called her a witch and stoned her.”

“There’s a right time for a story,” observed Mihran, “and a right place for skates.”

“What do you mean?”

The river pilot gestured to the pair of shin bones. “Skates are for north,” he said, “not much for south.”

Solveig stared at the bones.

“Not good price in Kiev,” Mihran told her.

Solveig picked them up and banged them against each other, feeling cross with herself.

Mihran gave her a sympathetic smile. “Making,” he said. “Never easy.”

“Kiev’s south,” said Solveig. “And the Black Sea and Miklagard are south from Kiev. But if you sail south from south, what then?”

“What then!” Mihran echoed her. He gave Solveig a flashing smile and sat down on the deck beside her. “Then, Solveig, the land of the Saracens.”

Solveig looked at him, wide-eyed.

“Some Saracens have eighty wives.”

“Eighty!”

“And they sleep with each of them each night! Their magicians can turn themselves into angels. And that’s where Jesus was born.”

“In the land of the Saracens?”

“Yes, and his mother Mary, she was afraid her baby wasn’t the son of God at all but the son of a magician.”

“And south from that?” asked Solveig, agog.

“Amazonia!” exclaimed the pilot. “The Land of Women. No man can stay there for more than seven days and seven nights.” Mihran gave Solveig a knowing smile. “Boy babies
are sent away to their fathers in other countries. And the girls . . .” The pilot opened his eyes very wide.

“What?”

“When they’re full-grown, one of their breasts is burned off.”

“Burned off!” cried Solveig.

“With a red-hot iron.”

“Why?”

“So they can fight and hunt. Women who carry shields—no left breast! Women with bows and arrows—no right breast!”

Solveig stared at Mihran, uncertain whether to believe him.

“Miklagard is the end of your journey,” Mihran told her. “But that’s where south of south begins.”

“I wish we were all going,” Solveig said. “Can’t you change Red Ottar’s mind?”

“I try again,” Mihran promised her.

Solveig was spellbound by Mihran’s stories, and each day he told her more. As the sun rose in the June sky, Solveig carved and heard about the country of Libya, where people’s shadows fall on the wrong side and there are no fish because the sea is so hot that it boils, and the country of Ethiopia, where the children are yellow but adults are black, and many of them have only one foot.

“That’s like unipeds!” exclaimed Solveig.

Mihran frowned.

Solveig told him how Vikings sailed west from icy Greenland until they came to a country where one-legged people hopped along the rocky strand and yelled and shot arrows at them.

Mihran grimaced. “Unipeds,” he said darkly. “Ruffians, Pechenegs, wherever we are now, we must keep watch.”

For her part, Odindisa kept watch over Vigot, each day rubbing new powders into his wounds. And while Solveig and Brita redressed them with linen strips soaked in fish oil, Odindisa sang quietly over him.

Lying on his side now, Vigot opened his eyes from time to time, but he didn’t seem to recognize anyone or anything, and he didn’t move his legs or his feet.

“If he doesn’t eat soon . . .” Odindisa told Bergdis.

“There’s no fat on him,” Bergdis replied. “That roller saved him. Otherwise the keel would have cut him in half.”

Odindisa screwed up her eyes. “His spine is injured.”

“With his mouth open,” said Bergdis unfeelingly, “and his eyes glazed, he looks like the trout he’s so fond of catching.”

One evening, while everyone was sitting around a fire on the riverbank, Solveig asked Bruni whether he knew about the unipeds.

“Not really,” said Bruni. “One of them shot an arrow right into Thorvald’s groin.”

“Ooh!”

“Erik the Red’s son. He died of the wound. I know about the Skrælings, though.”

Maybe Torsten thought Bruni was being too boastful or disliked the attention Solveig was giving him, or maybe he had drunk too much. In any case, the helmsman cleared the grog from his throat and spit into the fire.

“What’s wrong with you, Torsten?” Bruni asked.

“You!” Torsten retorted. “You’re what’s wrong with me.”

“Oh?” said Bruni loudly.

“A Skræling! That’s exactly what you are. Small and evil-looking. Coarse hair.”

“Torsten!” Red Ottar warned him.

But the helmsman got to his feet and walked around the fire, and Solveig looked up at him, wide-eyed. “You know what a Skræling is, Solveig?” he asked. “Brave men have sailed east to Miklagard,” he told her. “Your father, he’s one of them. Brave men have sailed west to Vinland. But one Norwegian, one miserable coward—”

Red Ottar leaped to his feet. “Torsten!” he shouted.

Everyone held their breath. But nothing happened. The fire crackled and spit. The helmsman slouched back to his place. Bruni Blacktooth turned to smile at Solveig, but Solveig was gazing into the hot-eyed fire.

It’s getting worse, she thought. Their feud’s festering. How long will it be before they fight? Not before Kiev. Please not before then.

As Solveig trudged back across the gangplank, she kept thinking of another of her father’s sayings:
“The truth will out. Truth’s a clear bubble that always rises to the surface.”

Then Solveig lay down between Bergdis and Odindisa. As soon as she closed her eyes, she began to drift. She sighed and drowned in sleep.

Perhaps because the crew’s duties were nothing like as demanding as before the portage, almost everyone was becoming more fractious.

We’ve all been cooped up on this boat for too long, thought Solveig. That’s what it is. That, and Vigot, and Torsten and Bruni.

Brita sensed the crew’s discontent. She kept picking arguments with her brother, and then she refused to help her mother change Vigot’s dressing.

“There’s no point,” she said. “He’s not getting better.”

“You ungrateful whelp!” exclaimed Odindisa. “Vigot saved your life, and you refuse to change his dressing.”

And with that she slapped her daughter so hard that both of Brita’s ears burned for the remainder of the day.

Bard, meanwhile, became more and more excitable. He gabbled, he got in everyone’s way, he laughed too long and too loud. He insulted his father.

“Go away!” said Slothi wearily. “Just go away!”

So Bard did go away. He walked into the forest while everyone was eating around the fire, and although Slothi and Odindisa kept calling for him, he didn’t come back.

“He will,” said Red Ottar grimly. “And he’ll go to bed hungry.”

That was exactly what happened. And as soon as Bard woke with a hole in his stomach, a devil crept into his
head. While everyone else was still asleep and a raft of mist hung over the river, he began to scale the mast. To begin with, it was quite easy because there were wooden pegs, and then Bard found a footing on some lashing, and above that on a paddle-shaped piece of wood secured to the mast to reinforce it. But higher up it was more difficult. Bard had to use all his strength to pull himself up on the lanyard, because his legs kept slipping when he wrapped them around the mast. Up near the top, though, there were several eyeholes, and Bard used them as finger holds. With a yell, he grabbed the very top of the mast and snapped off the wind pennant.