it was.’
‘What do they fight for?’
‘To fight. Look at them. Each man here has been on many raids but are they rich? No. Do they have many slaves? No. They aren’t concerned by such things.’
‘They want no plunder?’
‘Yes, a little, but this is why they’re useful to Forkbeard. Their reward is the scrap itself. He gets some good fighters and they don’t bother too much about the booty.’
‘They sound insane,’ said Vali.
‘Maybe they are, but you can learn from them nevertheless. You’ll see how a man conducts himself in war.’
Vali said nothing. To him it was as important how a man conducted himself in peace. To sit muttering curses while bleary-eyed through who knew what concoctions of mushrooms and herbs was the act of an idiot, not a hero. They were three days from the fight, according to Bragi. The berserks were simmering before they had set off. What would they be like in sight of the enemy spears? Still, he was interested to see if they lived up to their reputation as invulnerable and fearless. Could it really be true that weapons didn’t injure them? Looking around the ship, he was glad he was fighting with them rather than against them.
The wind was up, which was why they were sailing. The longship’s sail billowed and snapped as it was unfurled, as if impatient to get going. Its design had been chosen in his honour — black with a snarling wolf’s head picked out in white. Vali looked up at his father’s symbol — the symbol, of everything he was supposed to become, in fact everything he was supposed already to be. It made him shiver to think of the weight of responsibility he carried.
His musings were interrupted by a boot in the back.
‘Move your arse. I need to stretch my legs.’
He turned around to see a huge man in a thick tunic, a white bear skin over his arm. A deep groove ran from the top of his head, over his eye socket and down into his cheek. Clearly he had been on the wrong end of an axe at some time in his life. Every inch of his body seemed covered in thickly drawn tattoos: scenes of destruction and battle, the coiling world serpent around his right arm, the wolf fighting Odin on his left, the three interlocking triangles that made up that god’s symbol below his left eye, and many other illustrations of animal figures, gallows and weapons all over his face and upper body.
Vali’s knife and sword were at the bottom of his travelling chest and he knew the berserk would attack him if he saw him go to take them out. He had to act, though. This was a slight to his honour in front of everyone and he couldn’t let it go unpunished, even if he was sure he’d receive more in return than he was capable of handing out.
He had only one course of action, one possible response. He swung a fist at the man’s head. The man enveloped the blow under his arm and came up to join his hands at Vali’s throat. The boy’s arm was locked and he was forced down, feet skidding for purchase on the ballast stones but finding none. The berserk snarled into Vali’s face and tightened his grip on his windpipe. Confrontation has a way of peeling back illusions and self-deceptions. Vali was no longer a man on his first raid, a prince of the sword-Horda, son of Authun the Pitiless, who could trace his ancestry back to Odin himself, and the hope of a nation. He was a frightened boy, caught by a much bigger and stronger man.
All he could focus on was the man’s face, which seemed contorted with hate. He was choking Vali and the boy’s whole consciousness seemed to condense into trying to remove the hands from his neck, but he couldn’t budge them. His vision seemed to contract to a tunnel, his head seemed ready to burst. Then a broad-bladed knife came into Vali’s line of sight, but it was at such an angle that the berserk could not have been holding it. Something else came into view — a large pole with three iron rings fixed loosely about it by pegs. Both were interposed between him and the berserk.
‘Save it for the enemy, Bodvar Bjarki,’ said a voice.
The berserk released his grip and Vali lay back gasping, his vision blurred. When he recovered his sight he saw Bragi staring down the scarred man, the old warrior’s knife pointing at the berserk’s throat. There was the rattle of metal on metal and a huge berserk in a brown bear pelt shoved that odd pole between the men. Bodvar Bjarki and Bragi said nothing, as hard men often don’t in such circumstances. They just continued looking into each other’s eyes. The brown bear berserk gently pushed Bjarki back down into his seat with the pole. The big man put his hands onto his oar. Bragi gave a short, amused snort and slid his knife back into its sheath. Then he sat back at his oar. Vali stood and climbed in across from him.
Bragi turned to Vali, making no effort to keep his voice down so the berserk wouldn’t hear.
‘I told you the value of keeping your weapons close. If you’d had your knife you could have gutted him.’
Vali nodded. Embarrassment mingled with relief, but still, he thought, hadn’t the situation resolved itself without anyone being gutted — for the moment anyway? If he’d had his knife then the result might have been one dead berserk and a blood feud. Or, worse, the berserk might have got the knife off him. Vali was aware that his strength in no way compared to that of the giant behind him. He glanced at the shore. Adisla was looking anxiously towards him. He inclined his head towards the big berserk and shrugged. Adisla mouthed, ‘Be careful,’ and he nodded in acknowledgement.
After that, the men said nothing at all, just began to row out to sea, more for show than for effect, as the lines on the great sail were tightened and it pulled them out of the bay at an exhilarating pace. Vali raised his hand in goodbye to the people on the shore, saw the figures becoming smaller and smaller and lost himself in the rhythm of the oars.
The ship, which the skalds called the stallion of the waves, really did feel like that, a living force straining to get forward. For a moment Vali almost forgot the brooding presence at his back. Then, against himself, he gave half a glance behind him. The disfigured man was staring directly at him. Or was he being silly? There wasn’t really anywhere else for him to look.
Bragi saw Vali’s glance and turned to wink at the boy.
‘Don’t show me the man with the scars; show me the man who put them there,’ he said. Vali smiled. Bragi was a good man, he thought, who had his interests at heart. He was honest, big-hearted, straightforward and courageous. Vali just wished he found him less boring.
The journey was to take three days — three days of dull stories, homely advice and excruciating jokes from the old boy. In rescuing him from the berserk, Bragi had achieved a small victory. Vali should have had a knife on him, granted. But it was that, a small victory. It didn’t imply, as Bragi seemed to with his told-you-so smile, that everything the old man said and believed was correct, and that he now had the right to patronise him for the foreseeable future.
Vali thought of a trader he’d met two years before, Veles Libor from Reric in the east, who was travelling up to see the Whale People. Now he would have made a better mentor, had he stayed. He knew so much, had travelled the world in peace not slaughter and survived off his wits. With him, Vali felt inspired and eager to learn. He had spread out his scrolls, and Vali had been amazed to see the beautiful colourful pictures and intriguing squiggly writing. He had longed to find out how to read it, how to put down his thoughts in long waves of ink that rose, fell and broke like the surf. Bragi, though, had nothing to teach him that he wanted to learn.
The journey had been scouted the summer before. They skirted the coast north up nearly as far as the Whale People and then across west to the Islands at the World’s Edge — which were no longer at the world’s edge but simply a staging post to the richer lands to the west. From there they sailed south and picked up the coast of the West Men’s land. Vali slept on the bottom of the boat, wedged in among the other men, listening to the mutterings and cursings of the berserks, looking up at the stars and thinking of Adisla.
The berserks never bothered to speak to him, and he was glad of that, as it allowed him to remain in his own thoughts. His people saw no beauty in the sea. He thought of the names they gave it: roarer, empty place, devourer, rager. To them it was an obstacle, a place of production and a killer. They turned the backs of their houses to the water, not wishing to look at it when they opened their doors. But Vali was enchanted by it, the sparkling greens and blues, the movement of the clouds on the horizon, the delight when a wave broke over the side of the ship and a mackerel landed in his lap.
Then: ‘The island! This is where it happens, boys!’
Vali glanced over his shoulder but could see nothing, no land, no enemy. Bragi put a hand on his arm. ‘Stick to the oar, lord; don’t worry about what’s waiting for us when we get off the boat.’
