Anything can happen on the whale road.
After Starkad’s visit to the Dolphin, we moved to Radoslav’s knarr, the Volchok, partly to keep out of the way of the Watch, partly to be ready when Short Eldgrim warned us that Starkad was away.
There was a deal to be done with the Volchok to make it seaworthy. Radoslav was a half-Slav on his mother’s side, but his father was a Gotland trader, which should have given him some wit about handling a trading knarr the length of ten men. Instead, it was snugged up in the Julian harbour with no crew and costing him more than he could afford in berthing fees – until he had heard that a famous band of varjazi were shipless and, as he put it when we handseled the deal, we were wyrded for each other.
But he was no deep-water sailor and every time he made some lofty observation about boats, Sighvat would grin and say: ‘Tell us again how you came to have such a sweet sail as the Volchok and no crew.’
Radoslav, no doubt wishing he had never told the tale in the first place, would then recount how he had fallen foul of his Christ-worshipping crew, by drinking blood-tainted water in the heat of a hard fight and refusing, as a good Perun man, to be suitably cleansed by monks.
‘The Volchok means “little wolf”, or “wolf cub” in the Slav tongue,’ he would add. ‘It is rightly named, for it can bite when needs be. My name, schchuka, means “pike” for I am like that fish and once my teeth are in, you have to cut my head off to get me to let go.’
Then he would sigh and shake his head sorrowfully, adding: ‘But those Christ-loving Greeks loosened my teeth and left me stranded.’
That would set the Oathsworn roaring and slapping their legs, sweetening the back-breaking work of shifting ballast stones to adjust the trim on his little wolf of a boat.
Trim. The knarr depends on it to sail directly, for it is no sleek fjord-slider, easily rowed when the wind drops. Trim is the key to a knarr as any sailing-master of one will tell you. They are as gripped by it as any dwarf is with gold and the secret of trim is held as a magical thing that every sailing-master swears he alone possesses. They paw the round, smooth ballast stones as if they were gems.
Knowing how to sail is easy, but reading hen-scratch Greek is easier than trying to fathom the language of shipmasters and I was glad when Brother John tore me from a scowling Gizur, while we waited for Short Eldgrim.
The little Irisher monk was also the one man I seemed able to talk to about the wyrd-doom of the whole thing, who understood why I almost wished we had no ship. Because a Thor-man had drunk blood and offended Christ-men, I had a gift, almost as if the Thunderer himself had reached down and made it happen. And Thor was Odin’s son.
Brother John nodded, though he had a different idea on it. ‘Strange, the ways of the Lord, right enough,’ he declared thoughtfully, nodding at Radoslav as that man moved back and forth with ballast stones. ‘A man commits a sin and another is granted a miracle by it.’
I smiled at him. I liked the little priest, so I said what was on my mind. ‘You took no oath with us, Brother John. You need not make this journey.’
He cocked his head to one side and grinned. ‘And how would you be after making things work without me?’ he demanded. ‘Am I not known as a traveller, a Jorsalafari? I have pilgrimed in Serkland before and still want to get to the Holy City, to stand where Christ was crucified. You will need my knowledge.’
I was pleased, it has to be said, for he would be useful in more ways, this little Irski-mann and I was almost happy, even if he would not celebrate jul with us, but went off in search of a Christ ceremony, the one they call Mass.
Still – blood in the water. Not the best wyrd to carry on to the whale road chasing a serpent of runes. Nor were the three ravens Sighvat brought on board, with the best of intent – to check for land when none was in sight – and the sight of them perched all over him was unnerving.
We tried to celebrate jul in our own way, but it was a poor echo of ones we had known and, into the middle of it, like a mouse tumbling from rafter into ale horn, came Short Eldgrim, sloping out of the shadows to say that two Greek knarr were quitting the Julian, heading south, filled with Starkad’s war-dogs and the man himself in the biggest and fastest of them.
We hauled Brother John off his worshipping knees, scrambled for ropes and canvas and, as we hauled out of the harbour, I was thinking bitterly that Odin could not have picked a better night for this chase – it was the night he whipped up the Wild Hunt hounds and started out with the restless dead for the remainder of the year.
Yet nothing moved in the dark before dawn and a mist clung to the wharves and warehouses, drifting like smoke on the greasy water, like the remnants of a dream. The city slept in the still of what they called Christ’s Mass Day and no-one saw or heard us as the sail went up and we edged slowly out of the harbour, on to a grey chop of water.
Wolf sea, we called it, where the water was grizzled-grey and fanged with white, awkward, slapping waves that made rowing hard and even the strongest stomachs rebel. Only the desperate put out on such a sea.
But we were Norse and had Gizur, the sailing-master. While there were stars to be seen, he stood by the rail with a length of knotted string in his teeth attached to a small square of walrus ivory and set course by it.
He also had the way of reading water and winds and, when he strode to the bow, chin jutting like a scenting hound, turning his head this way and that to find the wind with wettened cheeks, everyone was eased and cheerful.
Him it was who had spotted the knarr ahead, not long after we had quit the Great City, on a morning when the frost had crackled in our beards. For two days we kept it in sight, just far enough behind to keep it in view. Only one, all the same – and, if we saw it, it could see us.
‘What do think, Orm Ruriksson?’ he asked me. ‘I say she knows we are tracking her wake, but then I am well known for being a man who looks over one shoulder going up a dark alley.’
Then a haar came down and we lost her – or so we thought. Finn was on watch while the rest of us hunkered down to keep warm. The sail was practically on the spar and yet we swirled along, for we were caught in the gout that spilled through the narrow way the Greeks call Hellespont and only us and fish dared run it in the dark. I had resigned myself to casting runes to find Starkad when Finn suddenly bawled out at the top of his voice, bringing us all leaping to our feet.
By the time I reached the side, there was only a grey shape sliding away into the fog. Finn, scowling, rubbed the crackling ice from his beard.
‘It was a knarr, right enough – we nearly ran up the steer-board of it, but when I hailed it, it sheered off and vanished south.’
‘As would I have done,’ Brother John chuckled, ‘if you had hailed me in your heathen tongue. Did you try Greek at all?’
Finn admitted he had not mainly because, as he said loudly and at length, he could not speak more than a few words as Brother John knew well and if he had forgotten he, Finn, would be glad to jog his memory with a good kick up the arse.
‘Next time, try your few words first,’ advised Brother John. ‘“Et tremulo metui pavidum junxere timorem” as the Old Roman skald has it. “And I feared to add dreadful alarm to a trembling man” – bear it in mind.’
Everyone chuckled at a shipload of Greeks being scared off by a single Norse voice, while Finn,