She had filled out and grown from girl to young woman. He gathered himself to speak, not knowing what he was going to say except that it would be irrevocable.
She noticed his attention and put her hands on her hips and gave a mock pout. ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, meaning ‘everything’. ‘I’m glad your hair’s grown. It makes you look … pretty.’ He winced at the lame compliment.
She looked down, suddenly as shy as he was. ‘The day we met you said I reminded you of someone. You never said who.’
Wayland didn’t stop to think. ‘My sister.’
Syth’s smile tightened. ‘Oh.’
‘Only at first sight.’
Orm released Wayland from his torment by thumping him between the shoulderblades. ‘Not far now.’
Syth turned eagerly, a girl again. ‘Will we see snow bears?’
Orm laughed. ‘I doubt it, lovely daughter. In all my trips I’ve only seen three. They live further north.’ His brows waggled. ‘So much the better. They’re bigger than bulls and so strong that they can flip a seal clean over their shoulders. You won’t even see them coming. Do you know why?’
Syth gave a quick shake of her head.
‘They spend all their lives on snow and they’re white all over — except for their black noses. So when they stalk prey, they cover their noses with their paws … ’ Orm suited action to word, ‘ … and creep up, closer and closer … ’ Orm lurched in a crude pantomime of bear strategy, ‘ … until they have you in their grasp and then — Grrr! No, be thankful you won’t see any bears.’
Syth giggled. ‘I don’t believe you. About bears covering their noses, I mean.’
‘Why do you think my eyebrows stand on end? It’s because of all the amazing things I’ve seen in the northland. Up here it’s like living in a daylight dream.’
A pleasant silence fell.
‘Where does Greenland end?’ Wayland asked.
‘In mist and ice, the evening of the world and its dawn, the abode of the dead and the realm of the first gods.’
Wayland nodded towards the west. ‘Do you know what lies over the sea?’
Orm stood shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘I do, for men have sailed there in my own lifetime. The West Land we call it, but it can’t be reached by chasing the sun. The sea’s too thick with ice. You have to follow the current north until you can’t go any further, then cross a strait to the west. First you reach Slabland and Flatland, where the snow never melts in summer. Travelling south you pass Markland and the Wonder Strands before reaching Wineland, where even the winters are snowless and the nights of the Yule festival are as long as the days. It’s so fertile that wheat ripens into loaves, and the dew is so sweet that cows only have to lick the grass to grow fat. In Wineland the trees reach halfway to heaven and the forests swarm with deer and sable and beavers. The seas are so thick with cod that a man can cross between islands by walking on the backs of them.’
Wayland smiled. ‘Greenland’s a harsh land. I’m surprised you don’t leave it to make new homes in such a paradise.’
‘They did. In my great-grandfather’s day more than a hundred of them settled in Wineland. As a boy, I met the last survivor of the colony. Bjarni Sigurdason was his name and he never stopped talking about the wonders of the West Land.’
‘Why did he come back?’
‘Why did Adam and Eve leave Eden? Jealousy over the women. Sickness. Above all, strife with the skraelings.’
‘Skraelings?’
‘Screechers. Uglies. God in his wisdom has given the West Land to savages who don’t even know his name. At first they were friendly and happy to trade. They were so unworldly that a settler could buy a bale of pelts with a scrap of woolcloth no broader than a finger. Soon, though, they became a menace. They stole the settlers’ livestock, not understanding that animals could be personal property, and they threatened hunters who went into the forests which they claimed as their own preserve. Blood was shed on both sides, but the skraelings were many and the settlers were few. After three winters the leader of the colonists decided that there would never be peace with the heathens and brought the survivors back.’
He lapsed into silence and Wayland assumed that he was thinking about the ill-fated colony. But when he spoke again, he pointed north.
‘I’ve seen a skraeling in Greenland — at the furthest end of the northern hunting grounds. I’d been hunting seals out on the pack ice. I returned in the evening and found footprints around my camp. I took my bow and followed them. I climbed over a snow ridge and there he was. At first I thought he was a blind bear because he was dressed head to toe in fur and had white discs where his eyes should be. He saw me at the same time and drew back his spear. I had my arrow aimed at his heart but I didn’t shoot. I don’t know why. He held up his hand and I raised mine and then he began to back away. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He jumped on a sledge and eight white wolves bore him away.’ Orm looked fiercely at Wayland. ‘God’s word. That was three years ago and ever since I’ve been wondering how he came to be in that place so far north, living with tame wolves where we Greenlanders can’t survive for more than three months of the year.’
‘Perhaps he came from the West Land.’
Orm stabbed his forefinger. ‘You’ve got it, boy! That’s what I tell my people, but they laugh and say how could skraelings who don’t have ships, who know nothing about iron, who live in houses made of twigs and leaves — how could such savages cross the icy sea to Greenland? You’ll see, I tell them. Where one has come, others will follow. Then where will we be?’
Glum gave an urgent cry on the other side of the ship. His father ran over and they both leaned over. ‘Come quick,’ Orm shouted.
The whole company gathered. Under the hull passed a school of fish or whales with pallid, mottled bodies and spiral lances sticking out of their heads.
‘Corpse whales,’ said Orm. ‘Some call them sea unicorns. Forget falcons. Catch one of those and you’ll be rich for life. I’ve heard that in Miklagard the value of a narwhal horn is measured by twice its weight in gold.’
‘How do you catch them?’
‘They swim into the fjords to calve and we harpoon them in their breeding bays.’ Orm leaned out along the course taken by the narwhals. ‘It’s a good omen, lad. They’re heading for the fjords where the falcons nest.’ He pointed towards the coast. ‘Red Cape. We’re nearly at the hunting grounds.’
Wayland looked along the golden path laid by the midnight sun and saw that it ended at a colossal escarpment separating two ice-carved valleys.
On a dying wind the crew rowed towards the immense red prow. Hundreds of seals bobbed in the waves, watching them with limpid curiosity. Acres of eider drakes parted around the ship, only shifting when the bow was almost upon them. Giant auks as tall as geese with wings no bigger than a child’s hands waddled to the edge of a skerry and flopped in. Underwater they flew as gracefully as swallows. ‘God forgot to grant them wits the day he made those boobies,’ Orm said. ‘A man can stand in a flock of them and club them all day long.’
From the same islet ungainly leviathans with down-turned tusks and coarse moustaches humped forward on flippers and slid into the swell. ‘Walruses,’ said Orm, and stroked his own whiskers to make Syth laugh. From the cliffs above came a steady roar. Every ledge and gallery was packed with auks and gulls and God knows what other kinds of fowl. The cliffs loomed so high that the birds flocking around the upper heights looked no bigger than gnats.
‘Falcons nest in both fjords,’ Orm said. He indicated the precipices plunging into the southern sea-arm. ‘One of the eyries is up there.’
Wayland’s gaze panned up from the ice-littered channel to the summit crags, then back down again. The cliffs fell sheer to the sea or dropped to talus slopes pitched at sickening inclines. There was no coastal shelf, nowhere to put ashore.
Raul had a finger pressed thoughtfully to his lips. ‘We ain’t going to climb that.’
‘Not from below,’ Orm said. ‘There’s a path to the top on the other side of the cape. Glum will lead you up it.
