CHAPTER FIVE
Erlan’s eyes opened.
He felt a wet slobber in his ear and sat up with a start. Aska shied away from him.
‘Ugh! You filthy mutt.’ He palmed away saliva from the side of his face, then seeing the dog looked like a drowned stoat he relented and pulled his shaggy head towards him. ‘Good boy,’ he whispered, burying his nose in the dog’s muzzle. He shifted his weight. Mud squelched under his backside. At least he was on solid ground. His skull was throbbing like a war drum, his mouth tasted foul with river water, and his hand was clamped around something hard. He lifted it. Wrathling appeared out of the silty murk, still in its leather sheath.
A dog and a sword, he thought. That was something.
He suddenly felt around his neck, then breathed easier when he found his golden torc still there. It had been a gift from King Sviggar. A mark of honour. It was about the only thing of value he possessed, apart from his sword, and he was loath to lose it.
He got to his feet and at once his shin snarled in protest. He looked down. Blood was streaming from a tear in his leggings to mingle with the river water lapping at his ankles. He bent down to inspect the wound. That was when he heard the screaming.
‘Oh, Hel,’ he said. The twins.
It took him a while to reach them, hobbling along the bank as the river flooded past. By then, the screaming had subsided into a mournful, sobbing lament. One of the twins was slumped in the water cradling the head of the other in his lap.
‘Adalrik?’
The tousled head turned and he saw it was Leikr.
‘He’s dead,’ the boy wailed. ‘Dead!’
Erlan splashed down beside him and took him by the shoulders. ‘Easy,’ he said softly, ‘easy.’ He repeated it over and over, clasping the boy to his chest. But for a long time Leikr was inconsolable.
At last he grew calmer. Together, they dragged Adalrik’s body up onto dry ground. He weighed far more than he could have done alive. Probably his lungs were full of water. The boy’s face was a horrible distortion of what it used to be: the skin slick, almost blue, the jaw twisted, the eyes staring. When they laid him out on the grass, his head flopped over and there was an ugly black crater where his skull was stove in.
Snot and tears streamed unchecked from Leikr’s nose. ‘What do we do now, Erlan? Hey? What do we do?’
Aye, thought Erlan. What indeed?
Instinctively his hand reached for the silver amulet hanging at his chest. For luck. But his fingers found nothing but skin. He’d given his luck away. He scowled, looking around, and began noticing evidence of their boat’s fate. Strakes smashed to kindling, shivers of wood lapping forlornly against the bank. Most everything else was gone.
His gaze drifted back upriver. In the distance he saw an awesome sight, a white thunder of tumbling water, its roar a constant behind every other sound.
The little knarr never stood a chance.
‘Erlan.’ Leikr wiped his long fringe out of his face. ‘I said, what are we going to do?’
‘We bury your brother. And then. . . we go on.’
It took them a day to follow the river beyond the last of the rapids. Leikr hardly said a word. As for Erlan, he tried not to think how every friend he ever made seemed to die. Except for this dog, and this boy. It was his fault. The twins should have stayed behind to sit out the last of the winter in Osvald’s rotten hall. Then again, he hadn’t forced them to come. They wanted adventure, to win a name and if they were lucky, a fortune. But all Adalrik had won himself was an unmarked grave in a sodden piece of turf, far from his home and hearth.
It was another day before they spied the first sign of any human habitation: a few smears of smoke in the sky.
‘You think it’s safe?’ asked Leikr, nodding ahead to a sizeable village spread along the Dnipar’s eastern bank.
Erlan cast a look over their sorry crew. ‘Safe from us, certainly.’
‘We could go round it.’
‘No. We’re going to have to face the folk in this land sooner or later. Might as well be now.’
Still it was a risk, and with only a sword and a couple of knives between them, Erlan felt severely under-armed.
The riverbank was a bustle of small craft coming and going from a shallow landing beach on the inside of a curve in the river. By the time the pair reached the outlying dwellings, the bustle had turned into a commotion.
Suddenly they saw why. A large boat loomed around the bend downriver. A stout, cumbersome vessel, making heavy way upstream with a bright orange sail that bulged with the wind.
‘A raiding ship?’ asked Leikr.
‘No. Trade, is my guess,’ Erlan replied. ‘Though what they hope to trade in this place, I’ve no idea.’ There was no way a boat that size could progress much further, not with those rapids less than a day’s voyage upriver. That meant, whatever its business here, it had to be returning whence it came. That meant south. That meant the sea. ‘We need to get on that boat.’
Cautiously, they walked down towards the landing beach where already a considerable crowd had gathered. The handful of women left behind who noticed them prudently backed away into shadowy doorways, pulling their little ones after them. But no one challenged them. Most were short, fair of complexion, with a rusty tinge to their hair.
By the time the two companions and their dog had reached the shoreline the ship had dropped
