struggled. I have endured. What must I go through, Perun, to get your favour?’
No one heard. The sleek ships had already put twenty lengths between themselves and the beach.
Leshii collapsed sobbing in the water, wanting it to drown him, to carry him away to somewhere where the living was easy and profit fell from the trees. He rolled onto his back. ‘I have nothing. I am the heir of nothing. I am the father of nothing. I have no friend, no ally and no country. I am nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’ He splashed and thrashed like a grounded fish, and then he remembered. The mule. ‘Cut the self-pity, boy,’ he told himself, and got up and ran as fast as he could back towards the monastery.
Aelis watched him go, a silly little figure still doubtless chasing after his profit on an alien shore. She felt sorry for him but curiously relieved. She had depended on others to help her so far, but now she was on her own. She turned away from the shore. The light swam around her, grey on grey, the line between sea and air invisible, as if the ship cut through clouds not water. The sensation came to her again. She had travelled that way before. She saw herself on another boat, at another time, the same grey glow all about her.
Once, she thought, she had given up on life, slipped from the side of such a ship and prayed to die. She remembered the rush of the cold, her disobedient limbs fighting to swim, defying her will to drown. Now it was as if she was playing out a story, like a mummer at a fair, her actions echoes of other actions she had performed before. The immediate threats had been so great — the Raven, the wolfman, the Vikings and even the local people — that she hadn’t had time to think of what was happening to her. She could now speak Norse. She had never understood more than a few words before. If she tried to think in it, almost nothing came, just fragments: I shall live again, Vali. A bright magic entered me when the god died.
She thought of the confessor. What had happened to him? She felt sure he was dead and she felt she had caused it. As you caused it before. The voice was not her own, more like that of a girl.
Days went by and the ship moved on in a sea mist. When the mist blew away it left a bright sky streaked with clouds like longships themselves on an ocean of deep blue. Then dusk came, the sun turning the ocean to cloth of gold. When night fell the wind was good and the moon rose full and bright, the water glittering beneath it like the ridged back of a dragon. The ships didn’t stop; just kept on as if flying on a moonbeam over a void of darkness.
There was a hushed call from one of the other ships.
‘What?’ said Giuki.
‘Longboats. Against the headland. There’s a monastery.’
Giuki shook his head. ‘That carcass was picked clean years ago. Let them waste their time there. We’ll sail on.’
‘We could take their boats.’
‘Or hit a sandbank and get beached ourselves. We’ve got our plunder and our guest, and we can’t carry much else. Let’s head for Birka and forget these pirates.’
‘That’s Grettir’s ship. I’d know it anywhere.’
‘Aaaah, now I am tempted. I hate that bastard,’ said Giuki.
There was a noise from the beach, a terrible piercing howl. Another answered it, coming from further back, up towards the monastery.
Aelis looked over the water. A light seemed to emanate from one of the boats on the beach. She had a sensation of cold, of sharp prickles on her skin. She recognised the feeling. Hail. The symbols inside her, the ones that spoke to her and whispered their names — horse, torch, reindeer — stirred, fretted, guttered and brayed. Aelis spoke a single word in Norse: ‘ Kin.’ Whatever was awakening within her had recognised its counterpart across the water.
She glanced at the Vikings. They peered towards the shore but no one mentioned the shining, shifting thing above the black line of the beached longships. Was she the only one who could see it, that silver cloud, that thing that moved and shone in the hollow light like a fall of petals from the flower of the moon? She said its name: ‘Hagaz.’ It was a rune, she knew, manifesting on the beach. She was not the only one who carried those symbols inside her.
The howl fractured the darkness again. Aelis looked at the faces of the Norsemen. They registered nothing — no one else on the ship seemed to hear it.
Giuki pondered for a second. ‘If we get in close,’ he said, ‘we can snatch their boats while they’re ashore and run them out to sea before they can stop us. And even if we don’t we’ll get a good scrap out of it. A drakkar and a fat couple of knarr, boys!’ He turned to Aelis. ‘You’ve brought us luck. Let’s hope that continues at Ladoga. Come on. Crack open the sea barrels and let’s have our weapons.’
50
Leshii was relieved to find the mule still grazing where he’d left it. He quickly caught it and headed back to the monastery. He felt vulnerable, alone and very cold. He was soaked to the skin; there was a fresh sea breeze, and the clouds were a low and rolling grey that kept away any hope of the sun.
He would go east. He had an animal to carry him, which the mule would do once it got used to him. That was good. But it was the only positive. Against it he had huge forests full of brigands between him and home, no food, only a small knife and a very uncertain welcome once he got back. In fact, even if he did return his fate might be to be flogged or to starve.
Still, he had no choice. He couldn’t sit in the monastery; he had to move. He was tempted to smash up some of the wood out of the little the Vikings had left and make a fire. Then he reminded himself that he had no way of making one. The flint had gone east with the lady. He’d seen people make fire with a firebow, of course, but he had never learned the knack. It was considered rather primitive in Ladoga. A man of standing, even a merchant of standing, used a flint.
There had to be something, he thought, in the monastery that would make his journey more comfortable. There was only the wolf pelt, which still lay encrusted with dirt where it had been stamped into the earth beside Chakhlyk’s body. The Vikings had not buried the wolfman, just left him where they’d killed him.
Leshii examined the body. It was mutilated, the face swollen and blackened where it had been kicked and kicked again by the Vikings. The hands, though, were intact. He took one in both his and held it. The nails seemed unnaturally thick and sharp, the fingers stained with a kind of dark ink. He wondered if that was what caused the nails to grow like that. He turned the hand over in his. He looked at the scars on the fingers, the creases at the joints, the lines on the palm. He wondered if the fortune-tellers were right. Was this death, here on a strange shore, written in the wolfman’s hand? But the hand had no future, just a past, revealed in the blood beneath the nails, the stain of the strange substance, the darkness of the skin showing a life outdoors.
Leshii looked at his own hand. The lines were supposed to tell him his wealth, the length of his life, the loves he would have. On two out of three counts Leshii was surprised he had any lines at all.
He studied the little whorls on the wolfman’s fingers, some rubbed away or calloused into insignificance. He had not been so intimate with anyone for years. He had an impression of his long-dead mother, no more than a pink face and a shock of black hair. Beyond that, there had been whores, many as a young man, fewer in recent years.
But he had never sat and looked at the lines on someone’s skin, the scars and marks, the wrinkles and veins that only they bore. His great family, his great love, the caravans that travelled south and east to Miklagard and Serkland admitted no such tenderness. He couldn’t say that he felt it as a want in him, even then. He was just curious what it might have been like. Closeness to family or friends had always come second to his business. It was a door he had never opened. He wondered what might have happened if he’d walked through it.
Would he have been sitting in the monastery, holding a dead man’s hand?
He would go to Helgi, he thought, though not because he expected reward. He knew princes too well to expect that. He would be flogged, probably, if he was lucky. Leshii’s view of Helgi’s likely greeting had darkened with his fortunes. But he would go anyway because he needed a place to fit in, however low that might be, not to be as an animal wandering the wilderness.
Leshii put down the wolfman’s hand. Now he felt guilty for taking the man’s charm. He took it from where he
