motion into a violent reverse that whisked him off his feet and slammed the breath out of him. He sat up. Head awhirl, he saw two men pulling on the rope and then he saw them abandon it as the dog smashed into them.
Wayland’s crash had deadened his left side from thigh to shoulder. He regained his feet only to be dragged back to earth by another lasso. A second loop fell over his sword arm and almost wrenched the weapon from his grip. He was bayed and trammelled and if the dog hadn’t been with him he would have gone the same way as Raul. Trappings bristling with arrows, it charged each rope holder in turn, knocking them over, slashing with its jaws, panicking them into flight.
Wayland was still snared but he hadn’t lost his wits or his sword and when the last rope dropped away he hurtled forward as if he meant to throw himself from this world into the next. The shouts of his ambushers faded. Without breaking stride, he pulled off the ropes and threw them aside. He knew where he was. He was on the path he’d followed from the river. He aimed a smack at the dog. ‘We’re through!’
The dog threw itself down, arched itself into a bow and gnawed at its belly.
Wayland ran back. ‘What’s wrong?’ He took the dog’s head in both hands and pulled it away from its midriff. ‘Oh God!’
A broken arrow shaft jutted from the dog’s abdomen. He couldn’t tell how deep the head had penetrated. The dog lay on its side as though inviting him to deal with the wound. He reached for its head and the dog gave him a quick lick and stared away. He took hold of the shaft and gave a tentative pull. The dog uttered a low whine. ‘Ssh,’ he whispered. He pulled harder, feeling solid resistance, and the dog whimpered and clamped its jaws around his wrist. Gently he undid them. The arrow was barbed and had penetrated deep. The dog lay panting, its topaz eyes fixed on some faraway place. With swimming eyes Wayland looked about for some remedy or inspiration. There was none to be found — only the sight of Lapps running at him through the trees.
He pulled the dog to its feet. ‘Come on. I’ll deal with the arrow when we’re back at the boat.’
The dog matched him stride by stride for about a hundred yards. Then it stopped again and gave a piteous whine such as Wayland hadn’t heard it utter since it was a pup. It looked at him. The Lapps were getting closer. ‘Come!’ he ordered, clapping his hands. ‘We’re nearly at the river. Hero will have that arrow out in a trice. Come!’
The dog looked at him, its meaning so plain that Wayland groaned. There was no cure for the wound. The barbed arrow was buried so deep in its guts that no surgeon could have removed it.
The Lapps were only fifty yards away. Wayland stumbled back. ‘Come! Please!’
The dog looked at him for the last time. It turned towards the Lapps, shook itself and hurled itself towards them. He saw it bowl over one of the attackers and then it disappeared, swallowed up in a crowd of axemen and spearmen. The frenzy of hacking and stabbing stopped and the Lapps squatted in a busy cluster, doing things with ropes and branches. When they rose, they carried the dog’s carcass strung under a pole. It took four men to bear its weight. They shouldered their trophy and hurried away into the forest.
Wayland found the river and followed it upstream. The clouds shredded and the sun broke through. It was going down in a dim red ball when he caught up with the longship on the north shore of Lake Onega. His companions rose as he limped into camp. They opened their mouths to frame questions, then saw the answers plain on his face and held their tongues. Syth ran and threw her arms around him. He held her to his chest and stroked her hair.
Vallon limped over. ‘The dog, too?’
Wayland nodded.
‘I’m sorry. Are you hurt?’
‘A prick from an arrow and some bruises. Nothing serious.’
‘So you say. I want Hero to look you over. After that, food and sleep.’
Wayland shoved past. ‘I can’t sleep while the falcons starve.’
‘I fed them,’ Syth said. ‘Vallon had one of the horses killed. There’s enough meat to keep the falcons until we reach Rus.’
Vallon nodded in confirmation. ‘I told you I wouldn’t let them go hungry.’
*
Wayland woke in the longship, one shore a faint haze, the other invisible. It took four days to cross the lake, and the only thing he remembered of the passage was the geese passing overhead in ragged streamers, tens of thousands of voices raised in lamentation.
XXXVII
A broad river called the Svir flowed from Onega to Lake Ladoga and the land of Rus. Empty huts began to appear in clearings slashed into the forest. The dwellings were the summer quarters of hunter-gatherers. After weeks of sleeping rough, the travellers were grateful for the shelter offered by the simple lodgings. It was now early October and winter was treading at their heels. Each day the numbers of wildfowl passing overhead grew fewer. Each night the cold gripped tighter. Two more Icelanders had died, starved beyond recovery despite Vallon ordering the slaughter of the remaining horses.
His wound had knitted cleanly. He kissed Hero and told him that without the Sicilian’s physicking he would have died a slow and suppurating death. Hero was trying to take satisfaction from that as he and Richard plodded one morning along the riverbank ahead of the longship. It was the only comfort he could dredge from their situation. Still days from Novgorod, the food almost gone, many of the travellers sick. Wayland was restored and spent most of the daylight hours hunting, but without the dog’s help he couldn’t kill enough to satisfy the falcons’ appetites. All of them had lost so much muscle that their keels stuck out like knives, and one of them screamed for food from dawn to dark.
The Vikings and Icelanders couldn’t understand why the falcons should receive any meat while they themselves were forced to boil moss for soup and chew on horse hide to dull their hunger pangs. The previous day, when Wayland and Syth returned from a hunting trip with a hare to show for their efforts, the Vikings and Icelanders had crowded round demanding that the carcass be handed over. Vallon had forced them to back off, but it had been close. If they didn’t find food in the next day or two, a violent breakdown was inevitable. After that, barbarism and worse. The weak left behind to die, cannibalism …
Richard seemed to read his thoughts. ‘Drogo takes care to stand back, but have no doubt, he’s waiting for the moment when he can move against Vallon.’
Hero sighed and shook his head. The sky, heavy with clouds the colour of ploughshares, mirrored his mood.
They trudged on. Grey spots floated past Hero’s eyes. He rubbed them and saw that snow was falling — big downy flakes already beginning to settle.
Richard stopped. ‘We’d better go back.’
‘There’s a path,’ said Hero, pointing to a winding depression highlighted by the snow. ‘It probably leads to a cabin. We might not spot it from the ship.’
Soon the snow obliterated all trace of the path and only the sound of the river gave them their direction. Hero was about to step around a stunted bush when it jumped up and shouted. More shouts and vague figures darting through the snow. An arrow whizzed past his head.
‘Peace!
The commotion stilled. Through the feathery whiteness he made out figures crouched behind dark bales. Three men with arrows trained on him stalked forward. They were dressed in pelts, their eyes narrowed in hostile squints. One of them jabbered in Russian.
‘We’re merchants. Travelling to Novgorod.’
The Russians understood ‘Novgorod’. Their spokesman jabbed behind Hero, asking how many were with him.
He counted thirty on his fingers and the Russians yammered at each other.
The drakkar’s dragon stem slid out of the snow with Vallon at the prow looking like death warmed up and Drogo beside him in his mail coat and iron helmet.
