The Lord of Vik-Lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3) (31 page)

  “We had better come about, then,” Thorgrim said, and with that the men ran to the lines and Agnarr at the helm pulled the tiller toward him and
Far Voyager
spun on her heel, coming about onto a larboard tack and standing away from the rock-strewn shore.

  Thorgrim looked astern.
Water Stallion
was tacking as well, turning to head out to sea as
Far Voyager
was doing. But they were making a great hash of the maneuver, their sail flogging and coming aback, until they were forced to run a few oars out the larboard side to sweep the ship through the turn.

  “Ha!” Ornolf shouted. “Damned Irish, they should stick to buggering sheep, they don’t know how to sail a longship!”

  “Irish?” Thorgrim asked. “Irish, sailing
Water Stallion
?”

 
So many tales to tell.

  As
Far Voyager
settled on her new course, Thorgrim looked down the length of the deck, making careful inspection for the first time since coming back aboard, and in doing so he realized two things. The first was that the crew was much diminished. There were not so many men as there had been when the ship first reached Vík-ló. The second was that many of the men who were there were wounded, and those who were not looked ready to drop from exhaustion.

  “There was fighting today?” Thorgrim asked.

  “This very morning,” Ornolf said. “And a bloody time it was.”

  “We must beach the ship for the night,” Thorgrim said. “The men need rest. The wounded need looking after.”

  He and Ornolf stepped aft and conferred with Agnarr, who had yielded the helm to Godi. “There’s a small beach north of here,” Agnarr said, “And if we stand out to sea another mile or so we should be able to fetch it on the next tack. I would not care to try and find it in the dark, but I will if I must.”

  Thorgrim looked at the sun, at
Water Stallion
quickly disappearing from view in the fading light, at the coast beyond the larboard quarter. Three elements in motion now. It would be a close thing.

  In the end they did not make it to the small beach before the light was gone. But they were close enough that Agnarr felt no great concern as he brought the ship in over the last half mile of water and they felt her bow scrape up on the shingle.

  It was, in fact, the best possible outcome. By the time they turned toward shore it was too dark for their pursuers aboard
Water Stallion
to see the change of course. They would not know
Far Voyager
had beached for the night; as far as they knew, she
was still at sea. Thorgrim hoped the men on
Water Stallion
would continue to sail north, thinking they were keeping up the chase.

  With
Far Voyager
secured, some of those still fit to move about clambered over the side and onto the beach while others saw to the wounded, attending to their injuries in a manner more thorough than they had been able to accomplish at sea.

  The men ashore built a small fire, shielded from sight from the sea by
Far Voyager
’s hull. They roasted meat and drank ale and mead and they told one another the stories of where they had been, what they had done: the fighting on the beach, Grimarr’s treachery, Harald’s escape, Thorgrim’s near murder, the voyage in the curach. The Northmen loved to tell tales, and here were tales for the telling.

  Conandil was sitting close to Harald, and Thorgrim called for her to come and tell them once more of how Fasti had buried the treasure on the beach to the south. It was no secret now that Conandil spoke the Norse tongue, so she told them in their own language of how she was certain she had remembered correctly, and could not understand why the hoard had not been found. But she admitted as well that she had never seen the Irish coast from the sea before being taken at Fearna, and much of it looked the same to her.

  Ornolf was well in his cups, but his mood was maudlin, not his usual raging enthusiasm. He slapped Thorgrim on the knee, not hard enough to cause pain, which was also unusual, and said, “I owe you an apology, son. I trusted Grimarr’s words. I thought you were dead. We all did. See here, this is what he brought us.”

  He handed Thorgrim a long bundle of cloth. By the weight of it, Thorgrim knew the cloth was wrapped around a sword, but he dared not hope beyond that. He unwrapped the fabric. It was stiff in places with what Thorgrim guessed was dried blood. Then he recognized it as the cloak he had been wearing when he had faced Grimarr. He tossed off more of the folds to reveal the sword and belt around which the cloak was wrapped.

  “Iron-tooth,” he said, the words like a prayer.

  “How else, we thought, could Grimarr have that if you were not dead? We all thought as much. All, save for Starri Deathless. He was the only one who believed. The only one who stayed behind to look for you.”

  Thorgrim, thoroughly embarrassed, waved the words away. “There was no reason for you not to believe,” he said. “Grimarr showed you proof. Or what looked like it. You owe me no apology.”

  “And even when young Harald here came back to us,” Ornolf continued, “and told us what the Irish wench had said, still we were not sure of the truth.”

  “Every man meets death one day,” Thorgrim said. “It was no dishonor to me for you to believe my day had come, as long as you thought my death was an honorable one.”

  “Humph,” Ornolf said and took a deep drink of mead, letting the liquid run down the edges of his mouth, stream through his thick gray and red beard, make dark spots on his tunic. “In any event, I will never make that mistake again,” he said. “I will never think you dead until you and I are drinking together in Odin’s hall.”

  “I only hope I reach that place before you do,” Thorgrim said.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Ornolf asked. “You may not be the young man you once were, but I am older than you by far, and should be expected to go first.”

  “True,” Thorgrim said. “But once you have been there a week, I do not think there will be any drink left for those who come after.”

That is how the thread-goddess

woke me from my dream.

                                                              Gisli Sursson’s Saga

Harald Broadarm was no stranger to exhaustion, but the weariness he felt as the talk and fire died away was beyond anything he had known before. The fighting, the swimming, the fear, the knocks on the head had all taken their toll. And foolishly he had tried to make a decent show of drinking with the older men, had kept an eye on the amount Ornolf was consuming and tried to match it. He figured if he could keep pace with his grandfather then he would gain a reputation for holding his drink in the same way he was gaining a reputation for fighting.

  But he soon fell behind and sensibly he gave up trying, but not before he could feel the effects of the liquor piled on top of the many other things that were dragging him down to sleep.

 
If I had not been hit so often on the head,
or if I had not had to swim with Conandil scratching at me, then I would have kept up with old Ornolf
, Harald told himself, knowing full well it was not true.

  The fire had faded to little more than a desultory flame and glowing embers as one by one the men of
Far Voyager
drifted off. Some climbed back aboard and pulled out furs and bedding, some slept where they fell. Some, like Harald, mustered the energy to drag their bedding down to the beach, clear of the groaning wounded. Out in the dark, beyond the light of the fire, a ring of sentries stared out into the night, alert to any threats that might materialize from the wild Irish hinterlands.

  Harald tossed a bearskin down on the gravel beach, lay down on top of it and pulled a wool blanket over him. He felt his whole body relax, the tension dissolve away like butter melting in a pan over a fire. His thoughts grew disjointed, his mind seemed to float off, disconnected, and he felt sleep wash warm and comforting over him.

  And then something was shaking him and his first thought was that it was some small animal, poking around, a squirrel or a rabbit or something like that. He made some guttural noise which he hoped were words. But apparently they were not, or at least not words to frighten away whatever was poking at him because the poking did not stop. And eventually whatever it was managed to poke through the thick blanket of sleep, enough so that Harald half opened his eyes. Conandil was kneeling beside him.

  He looked up at her, confused, and did not speak. Her hair was falling around her face, and her pale skin was lit softly by the dying light of the fire. For a moment they just looked at one another, then at last Conandil said, “Harald?” It was a question, like she was asking him if it was really him, or if he was really there in mind and body.

  “Yes?” Harald said, slowly casting off the torpor of sleep.

  She was quiet for a moment, as if unsure what to say. “I’m afraid,” she said at last, the words halting. “I’m afraid, sleeping with all these men so near me.”

  Harald sat up on his elbow and looked around. Humps of sleeping men were scattered around the beach, just visible in the glow of the embers. “There’s nothing to fear,” Harald said. “These are my people, not the Danes or the Irish.”

  “Please…” Conandil said. “Please…could I sleep near you?”

  “Of course,” Harald said. He still had a foot in the world of dreams and was eager to get back to it. “Lie down here,” he suggested.

  “No,” Conandil said. “Not here. Farther away. Away beyond the others.”

  Harald sighed. She was suggesting he climb out of his warm bed, gather up the fur and the blanket and trudge somewhere out in the dark, and he felt like doing none of those things.

  “Please…” Conandil said again, the light from the remains of the fire reflecting in her big, brown eyes. Her face and neck and shoulders were tiny, vulnerable looking. Harald sighed again.

  “Very well,” he said. He stood, gathered up the bedding, and followed Conandil out into the dark, up the beach, toward the dark country beyond. They passed a sentry sitting on a piece of driftwood who startled at the sound of their approach and Harald wondered if he had been nodding off.

  “Oh, Harald, it’s you,” the man said. He stood and leaned close to look at Harald’s face in the muted light, and Harald could see it was Vani Unnarrson, one of Ornolf’s men who had sailed with them from Vik. “What are you about?”

  “Just looking for a spot to bed down,” Harald said, nodding out toward the dark.

  “Oh,” Vani said. He glanced over at Conandil. “Oh,” he said again. He nodded and gave a half smile. “Very good, then. Very good.”

  Harald and Conandil moved on and Harald could not help but think that Vani’s response was very odd, but he put it out of mind. He came to a place where the beach was all but lost in the dark and he spread the bear skin out and laid down on it and Conandil laid beside him and he pulled the blanket over them. He closed his eyes and tried to let the tension drain away once more, but Conandil was squirming around beside him, jabbing him with her elbows, doing what, he could not tell.

  He tried to roll away from her, but then she had her arm across his chest and he could feel her face nuzzling into his neck, felt her lips brushing against his skin, and suddenly the sentry’s words and tone made more sense to him.

 
Maybe this was not just about sleeping…
he thought.

  He stopped rolling away from her and rolled toward her instead. He reached out ran his hand over her shoulder and back and was startled to realize that she was naked, that she had shed her brat and leine and now wore nothing at all. He felt sleep slipping away, and in its place another, more powerful desire.

  He shuffled his other hand under Conandil’s frame until he had his arms wrapped around her. He kissed the top of her head and she looked up and their lips met and they kissed, deep and hungry. They stayed that way for some minutes, just kissing, then Conandil reached down and tugged up on the hem of Harald’s tunic. Harald, often slow to comprehend, understood that gesture immediately, and with a pull and a twist he had the tunic off over his head and he tossed it aside.

  Conandil ducked under the thick wool blanket like some small animal retreating into its burrow. Harald felt her running her lips down his chest and down his stomach. He felt her small hands undoing the tie of his leggings, and when he felt the tie come free he squirmed and kicked and soon was shed of those as well.

  She did not emerge again, but stayed where she was, and Harald could feel her hands and her lips moving over him, stroking, caressing, encompassing him. He closed his eyes and arched his back and made a low, groaning sound deep in his throat. He let the pleasure carry him off, and just as he started to worry that she would carry him off too far, she began to work her way back up his stomach, his chest, emerging from under the blanket to one again press her lips against his.

  She lay half on top of him and Harald ran his big hands over her back and her bottom and through her hair. He had only been with one other woman in his life, and that was the princess Brigit who seemed a much more substantial creature than Conandil; taller, more filled out, more robust after a lifetime of eating far better than an Irish girl who was not the daughter of a king.

  In comparison, Conandil felt delicate and frail, like a bird. Harald took care as he ran his hands over her, gently stroking, barely touching her skin, and though he was just trying to avoid hurting her, it seemed by her reaction that whatever he was doing was most welcome indeed. She climbed further up on him and ran her fingers through his hair and kissed him vigorously, making a sound that was somewhere between a purr and a groan.

  Harald wanted to have her. He felt as if he might burst if he did not take her then, but he was unsure how he could get on top of her without crushing her under his substantial weight. And even as he tried to fight through the fog of raging desire and come up with an answer, Conandil threw her legs over him, straddled him, and the next thing he knew he was inside her and she was moving against him, her feet planted on the bear skin on either side of his body, her strong, sinewy legs pushing off.

  Her hands were on his chest and she was half-way between sitting up and laying across him. He could just see the wisps of hair falling across her face, the oval of her open mouth. Her breathing was coming in short gasps and she moved faster and faster.

  Harald grabbed her waist and he felt as if his hands could encircle her completely. He thrashed as if trying to throw her off and at the same time held her in place with his powerful grip. He gasped and cried out as if he had forgotten that the sentry was only a few dozen feet away, which he had.

  Then it was over and the two of them lay still, their breath subsiding. Conandil was splayed out on top of Harald, both of them damp with sweat despite the cool night. Conandil’s weight was nothing; laying on top of him she felt no heavier than a thick blanket. Once again, sleep began to overtake him and he let it come. He was aware of Conandil shuffling off his chest and nestling in beside him, and then he was gone to that world.

  The gray light of early dawn was just starting to illuminate the beach and the cliffs inland, and to the east
Far Voyager
, hauled up on the shingle, when Harald woke to the sensation of being gently kicked. He opened his eyes and looked up. Sutare Thorvaldsson was standing over him, a spear in his hand, nudging him with his foot.

  “Oh, Harald, it’s you,” Sutare said. Sutare, Harald realized, must have replaced Vani sometime in the night.

  “Yes,” Harald said. He looked to his right. Conandil was buried under the blanket, so small it seemed as if she was not there at all. He reached out but did not feel her. He tossed the blanket aside and saw nothing but the bear skin below. Because Conandil was gone.