The Wolf Sea
Robert Low
To Lewis and Harris, two islands in a sea of troubles. I hope, one day, they enjoy what their grandfather has made for them.
Only the hunting hungry
Set sail on the wolf sea
Old Norse proverb
Table of Contents
MIKLAGARD, the Great City, AD 965
His eyes flicked to the bundle in my hand, then settled on my gape-mouthed face like flies on blood. They were clouded to the colour of flint, those eyes, and his snake moustaches writhed as he sneered at me, the blow I had given him having done nothing except annoy him.
‘Big mistake,’ he snarled in bad Greek and moved up the alley towards me, hauling a seax the length of my forearm out from under his cloak.
I hefted the wrapped sabre, swung it and revealed how clumsy the weapon was in that single moment. He grinned; I backed up, slithering through black-rotted rubbish, wishing I had just gone my way and ignored him.
He was quick, too, darting in fast and low, but I had been watching his feet not his eyes and swung the bundle so that it smacked him sideways into the wall. I followed it with a big overarm hack, but missed. The bundled sword cut through the wrappings and struck sparks from the wall.
Showered with brick and plaster chips, he was alarmed, both at the near miss and the fact that there was now a sharp edge involved. I saw it in his eyes.
‘Didn’t expect this, did you?’ I taunted as we shifted and eyed each other. ‘Tell you what – you tell me why you are following me all over Miklagard and I will let you go.’
He blinked astonishment, then chuckled like a wolf who has found a crippled chicken. ‘You’ll let me go? I don’t think you realise who you are facing, swina fretr. I am a Falstermann and not one to take such insults from a boy.’
So I had been clever about him being a Dane, I thought. It was a pity I had not been so clever about taking him on. His feet shifted and I had been watching for that, so that when he swung I caught the seax on the shredded bundle, wincing at the blow. I turned my wrist to try and tangle his blade in cloth and almost managed to twist the seax free of his grasp. He was too old a hand for that, though, and I was too clumsy with the sword wrapped as it was.
Worse than that – even now I sweat with the shame of it – his oarmate came up behind me, elbowed the breath out of me and slammed me to the clotted filth of the alley. Then he plucked the wool-coddled sword from my fluttering hands, easy as lifting an egg from a nest and, dimly, I realised that’s what they had wanted all along. I was gasping and boking too much to do anything about it.
‘Time to row hard for it,’ this unseen one growled and I heard his steps squelching through the alley filth.
I was sure death had not been in the plan of this, but the man from Falster had blood in his eye and I had rain in mine, blurring the world. The cliff walls of the alley stretched up to frame a patch of indifferent grey sky and it came to me then that this would be the last sight I would see.
I did not want to die in a filthy alley of the Great City with the rain in my eyes. Not that last, especially, for the vision of the first man – the boy – I had killed came back to me, lying on a heath with his bloodless face and his eyes open and startled under little pools of rainwater.
The Falstermann loomed over me, breathing hard, the seax reversed for a downward thrust straight at my belt loop, rain pearling mistily on the pitted steel, sliding carelessly along the edge…
The rain, says Sighvat, will tell you all about a place if you know how to read it. The rain in a Norway pine wood is good