Raven (22 page)

‘I will miss her,’ Svein said glumly as Azriel opened his blauvif’s mouth and peered inside. ‘She was the best bed partner
I have ever had.’ I nodded, too upset to speak. I knew what he meant though. Amina had done things to me that I would never forget. ‘Hey hey, never mind! There will be another one,’ Svein added with a smile, slapping my back then turning to walk back to the camp. From that sorrowful line of blauvifs Amina stared at me with her brown-gold eyes, tears rolling down her dark cheeks. Nearby, Sigurd and Olaf were arguing with Azriel over the price.

‘No more tit pillows for a while then,’ Bram Bear said, brows arched. ‘I’ll wager you’ll miss that dark little treasure, hey Raven?’

I gazed at Amina, wondering what might have been had the two of us been somewhere else. She was a spear’s throw away and yet I thirsted for her, as though another kiss might wash away the bitter taste of parting. Leaving her there was harder than I cared to admit. It felt wrong, like a plane stuttering across the grain, and those eyes staring at me did not help one bit.

‘There will be another one,’ I said, turning my back on the girl and walking away.

Two days later we set sail. A north-westerly pushed us south-east along the Roman coast past countless small harbours and villages of white stone houses. We passed white beaches, jagged rocks and cliffs and swaths of dark green pinewoods whose sweet scent wafted out across the sea to us every now and then. The wind tended to be stronger in the morning and we revelled in it, harnessing it to drive past tree-shrouded promontories and blazing white dunes, and none of us had ever seen such shimmering blue waters.

‘The roof of the world is higher above these lands than our own, I think,’ Olaf said one day, scratching his coarse beard and watching a hawk drift high above the pine forest on our port side. Far above the bird, in the vast expanse of blue, a few vaporous white clouds hung seeming not to move at all.

‘It keeps the rain off better, too, Uncle,’ Sigurd said with a
smile. They both stood by the mast step, overseeing the men whose job it was to tighten the stays and work the sail. The rest of us were on our sea chests making the most of the oars being up in their trees. The air still had a bite to it but we had stowed our bad-weather gear and only used our furs at night now.

No one talked about our blauvifs. It had been a hard thing watching them sold, though Sigurd had shared out the silver equally and there had been enough for every man to get four silver coins to put in his sea chest. But even that was a bitter draught to swallow because every one of those coins had been stamped with the likeness of King Karolus, the emperor of the Franks who was our enemy.

‘It could be any whoreson,’ Bram had said, unimpressed, holding one of his coins up and inspecting it closely. ‘This man has no beard.’

‘The monk says it has the king’s name on it,’ Bjarni had said, ‘just there, look.’ He was pointing to his own coin and the writing that ran round the edge of it. We were all looking at our own coins, not for the first time overawed by the Frank king’s power. But Bram wasn’t having it.

‘It does not look like Karolus,’ he said.

‘Well, if you don’t want yours you can give it to me,’ Olaf said, at which Bram mumbled something and tucked the coin into the leather scrip on his belt.

‘I’m just saying it could be anyone, that’s all,’ he said.

‘Not you, Bram,’ I said. ‘They’d never be able to get your face on something this small. A cauldron maybe but not this.’

He winked at Svein. ‘I’m just surprised you haven’t thrown yours overboard yet, Raven,’ he said, rousing moans and mutterings and several insults that were flung my way, so that I wished I had kept my mouth shut. I called Bram a troll-humping goat turd, then stood and made my way to the stern, thinking I would talk with Knut at the tiller where I hoped there would be no mention of the hoard I had set adrift in Frankia. But my eye caught on Father Egfrith huddled in the port stern. He was
staring landward, the wind ruffling the beard he wore now and the messy wisps of greying hair above his ears. Something made me go to the monk instead of to the steersman and I cursed under my breath because I would have rather talked to Knut.

‘It looks like good land, hey monk?’ I said, watching
Serpent
’s shadow crawl along a stretch of rugged, sun-dappled rock. The black shape expanded and shrank and looked like a living thing, some seeking spirit.

‘You cannot imagine the things that have happened here in these waters, on this coast,’ he said without looking at me. ‘Great civilizations were born here. Men whose ambitions shook the world have looked upon the same rocks we see now. Men who valued enlightenment and learning and wisdom, not just the sword and the axe.’

‘I thought you said that the Romans’ greatest king was a warrior who killed thousands of men from a hundred lands,’ I countered, ‘just because they would not obey his laws.’

He nodded. ‘Caesar. His name was Julius Caesar and yes he certainly shared your heathen blood-lust. But he was a great man, too. Unfortunately for him he lived and died before Christ’s light illuminated the world.’

‘The Romans believed in many gods, didn’t they? Like us.’ He nodded. ‘And some of them were warrior gods like Óðin and Thór and Týr?’ I asked.

‘Like all men they had faults. We are all sinners.’ Now he turned and stared into my eyes. ‘Though some sins cannot be forgiven.’ I thought that was aimed at me, but then I saw that those tired eyes, though they were fixed on mine, in truth looked inward. I knew the shadow that lay across his face for what it was. Shame. He stared again at the shore.

‘You could not have saved the nuns,’ I said, and the twist of his thin lips told me I had struck true.

‘No, I could not,’ he said. ‘But had I saved the men first then the nuns would still be alive.’ I knew by ‘saved’ he meant
turned them into Christians, and now I tried to keep my own grimace hidden in my beard.

‘You have not had so long with the Danes,’ I said, ‘and as for Asgot, surely you don’t think you can make a Christian of him?’ If he did, Egfrith was more of a fool than I thought.

He hoisted his brows. ‘I have failed, Raven.’ The sail thumped and I felt a gust from the east on my right cheek.

‘You helped get your precious Jesus book to King Karolus,’ I said.

He almost smiled at that. ‘That is true. A small triumph but not enough.’

‘Sigurd must value you,’ I said. ‘Loki knows why but he does. Otherwise you’d have been thrown overboard with the fish guts by now. You don’t row and I have not seen you in the shieldwall.’

‘Sigurd could teach a fox slyness,’ he said, this time letting a smile creep into his beard. ‘He feeds me crumbs of hope that I might one day win his soul for God and in return …? In return I go along with whatever iniquitous schemes you vile creatures fall into. I am a wicked whore, Raven. I have sold my soul and for what?’ I had no answer to that for truly I believed that there was more chance of the ocean freezing over than there was of the Wolfpack bending their knees to the White Christ. ‘And the worst of it,’ Egfrith went on, ‘is that I am a thrall to my own pride.’ He cocked one eyebrow at me. ‘Do not think you warriors are the only ones ruled by pride. Knowing that I have failed, that the Lord is disappointed in me, ought to compel me to abandon this damned ship and return to the fold, to my brothers, and there pray for forgiveness. I ought to quietly seek some lesser task to which I might, God willing, be equal.’

‘Sigurd would let you leave, I think,’ I said. ‘You are no good to him sulking like this anyway. You’ve been as sullen as a sober Norseman for weeks now.’

‘That’s just it, Raven,’ he said, clutching at
Serpent
’s sheer
strake, ‘I cannot leave. My damned pride will not let me. I have met Alcuin of York, the greatest scholar of our times. I have spoken with Karolus Magnus, the Emperor of Christendom. I may yet live to see the glorious domed churches of Constantinople.’ I frowned. ‘Miklagard, Raven, the heartbeat of the eastern Roman Empire.’ He shook his head. ‘A curious mind can be a burden. Did you know that we must soon pass the mouth of the Tiberis river?’ I shook my head. I had never even heard of it. ‘That river leads to Rome itself. Sigurd knows it because I told him.’ I glanced at Sigurd, who was now in the foreship working the bowline while Olaf wound the tacking rope around the boom, lashing it to the clamp. The two men were enjoying themselves, each seeming to anticipate the other’s next movement. ‘Even now your jarl is weighing in his mind the risks against what might be won. Rome’s glory has faded, her eminence overshadowed by her sister empire in the east, and yet she must surely make Aix-la-Chapelle look like the humblest village.’

‘You think we should sail up this Tiberis?’ I asked, scanning the shoreline for the turbid, angry water that would betray a river’s mouth. I saw no river. A ravenous flock of screaming gulls wheeled above something dark that the sea had coughed on to the sand.

After a while Egfrith said, ‘I think my reasons for wanting to go to Rome would be very different from Sigurd’s.’ His eyes flashed hungrily for a heartbeat. ‘But, yes, I would see the city with my own eyes after reading of it in vellum leaves.’ He closed his eyes, then nodded slowly as though in answer to a voice I could not hear. When those eyes opened again they were dulled by a layer of ice. ‘Greed is greed, lad. Whether it is a heathen’s silver-greed, or a failed monk’s hunger to visit the places he has only ever imagined in his feeble mind. At least I now see why I have failed. I failed because I was too ensnared in my own ambitions to give myself fully to the Lord’s work.’

‘Well you did not kill those nuns,’ I said, not knowing what
else to say. ‘That much I
do
know. And if your god is as mild and forgiving as you say, he’ll overlook a little wanderlust.’ I stood and made my way over to Knut, hoping to draw from the steersman some inkling as to whether or not Sigurd was going to take us up the river Egfrith had spoken of. ‘As for making Christ slaves of us all,’ I added over my shoulder, ‘there is still time.’ And even the gloomy monk chuckled at that.

Eight days later, after a night of heavy rain and dark dreams, we left behind the clear blue coastal waters and the boundless vault of the sky and entered the mouth of the Tiberis. We stowed Jörmungand, and the other ships did the same with their own prow beasts, because we did not want to risk offending the local spirits who we suspected must be ancient and perhaps still powerful. In the end Sigurd had held a ting, a meeting where all were allowed their say, and the word from each ship was that almost every man had voted to sail up the river come what may.

‘How could we go back to Wessex and tell our kinfolk that we had sailed past Rome because we were too pale-livered to clap eyes on it for ourselves,’ Wiglaf had said, which was the way the rest of us felt about it too. So now we were rowing. Hard. Because somewhere far to the east, spring meltwater was engorging the river and now our arms were having to overcome the force of the current. And as I rowed, I tried to summon again the pictures that had filled my mind as I slept, for though the form of the dreams had dissipated like smoke, a grim, dread feeling had clung to me from the moment of waking. Even now, as I pulled at the oar, my heart hammering, the dream’s claws were still in me, but I could not see the rest of the beast.

Where river and sea entwined, we had passed whole villages of crumbling stone, long ago abandoned. Perhaps, too often attacked by sea-raiders, the folk had been moved inland, leaving their homes to the slower but no less certain onslaught of creeping vegetation. Now, beyond the silt-stirred mouth, the
river’s banks were thick with evergreens and gorse that billowed down to the water’s edge as though the whole verdant valley sought to drink the fresh water. The sun, rising somewhere beyond the river’s source, infused thick blankets of morning mist with red dye, and above that, swaths of cloud, thin as the blauvifs’ shrouds, curled out of the east, hung to dry below a grey and golden sky.

The low roar of the sea became a murmur and then faded away completely, taking with it the shrieks of gulls and the languid whisper of waves on the shore. All sound was subdued, so that even as we bent our backs to the oars we were aware of some ancient and weighty seidr clotting the air. Our oar blades plunged in their ceaseless way, stitching
Serpent
’s course through the dark water, the staves
clump
ing in their ports, and men’s laboured breath further fogged the air about us.

‘At least this damn spate means we shouldn’t run into any shoals,’ Bjarni said through a grimace.

‘Still, it’s not much of a river,’ Gap-toothed Ingolf put in. ‘I’ve pissed more ale the morning after a good feast.’

I knew what Ingolf meant. Every tale I had ever heard of the Romans told of the enormous buildings against which, it was said, men looked like insects. I had not believed most of it, thinking that like all tales those had grown legs in the telling. That was until Frankia. In Frankia I had seen things I would not have thought possible: churches and halls of stone that you would have believed could only have been built by giants. And according to Egfrith, those places were as nothing compared with the ancient constructions of Rome. Which was why I expected more of a river than the one we now navigated, for it did not feel like the ‘artery to the heart of the world’ as Egfrith had put it.

The river snaked northwards. We passed a fighting galley crammed with blaumen coming downriver, its oar banks beating quickly on the back of the current, and although Völund
might have been able to learn something from them, he did not get the chance, because we were yelling curses at them and they were yelling back. It was harmless enough, though some of the Danes neglected their rowing long enough to loose a few arrows at the blaumen for the sake of appearances. We passed three heavily laden barges being pulled against the current by oxen, and their drivers were struck with terror when they saw us, but we did them no harm nor even stopped to discover what cargo the barges held. Because the wind had changed. In the morning the wind had been against us and this, coupled with the current, had meant we had to row. But now the wind was coming from the west and Sigurd decided there was enough of it to make it worth hoisting the sails. You could have walked along the bank and beaten us to Rome, but we did not mind for it gave us time to put on brynjas and swords and string bows. We did not know what we would meet up this river and it is always better to prepare for a fight that does not come than to fight unprepared.