The Whale Road

ROBERT LOW

The Whale Road

HARPER

To my darling wife Katie, who makes sure my keel is straight and all my oars are in the water.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

A Note on the History

Glossary of Names

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Runes are cut in ribbons, like the World Serpent eating his own tail. All sagas are snake-knots, for the story of a life does not always start with birth and end with death. My own truly begins with my return from the dead.

There was a beam, knotted and worn smooth where nets and sails hung, with a cold-killed spider hanging by the slenderest of threads, swaying in the breeze, swimming in my vision.

I knew that beam. It was the ridge beam of the naust, the boatshed at Bjornshafen, and I had swung on those hanging nets and sails. Swung and laughed and had no cares, a lifetime ago.

I lay on my back and looked up at it and could not understand why it was there, for I was surely dead. Yet my breath smoked in the chill of that place.

‘He’s awake.’

The voice was a growl and everything canted and swung when I tried to turn my head to it. I was not dead. I was on a pallet-bed and a face, jut-jawed and bearded like a hedge, floated in front of me. Others, too, peered round him, all strangers, all wavering, as if underwater.

‘Get back, you ugly bollocks. Give the boy room to breathe. Finn Horsehead, you would frighten Hel herself, so I am thinking you should bugger off out of it and fetch his father.’

The hedge-bearded face scowled and vanished. The owner of the voice had a face, too; this one neat-bearded and kind-eyed. ‘I am Illugi, godi of the Oathsworn,’ he said to me, then patted my shoulder. ‘Your father is coming, boy. You are safe.’

Safe. A priest says I am safe, so it must be true. A moment’s vision-flash, like something seen in the night when a storm flickers blue-white: the bear, crashing through the roof in a shower of snow and timbers, roaring and snake-necked, a great mountain of white …

‘My … father?’

The voice didn’t even sound like mine, but the kind-eyed stranger called Illugi nodded and smiled. Behind him, men moved like shadows, their voices ebbing and flowing in a tide of sound.

My father. So he had come for me after all. The thought of that stayed with me as Illugi’s face faded to a pale orb; the others, too, dwindled like trailing bubbles as I slid away, down into the dark water of sleep.

But the priest lied. I was not safe. I would never be safe again.

By the time I could sit up and take broth, the story was round Bjornshafen: the story of Orm the slayer of the white bear.

Alone, when the White Bear, Rurik’s Curse, came for revenge on the son – and then, presumably, the father – brave Orm, a mere boy becoming a man fought it over the headless body of Freydis the witch-woman. Fought it for a day and a night and had finally driven a spear into its head and a sword into its heart.

There was more of the same, of course, as my father told me when he came to me, hunkering by my bed and rubbing his grizzled chin and running his hand through his lank, once-gold hair.

My father, Rurik. The man who had fostered me on his brother Gudleif at Bjornshafen. He carried me there under his cloak when I was no more than fat knees and chubby fists, in the year Eirik Bloodaxe lost his throne in York and was cut down at Stainmore. I am not even sure if that was a true memory, or one patched back to the cloak of my life by Gudleif’s wife, Halldis, who liked me above the other fostris who came and went, because I was blood kin.

She it was who taught me about sheep and chickens and growing things, who filled in the rents in my memory while she sat by the fire, the great hangings which portioned the hall stirring and flapping in the winds which thundered Bjornshafen’s beams.

Patient and still, click-clicking her little bone squares as she wove strips of bright wool hemming, she would answer all my piped questions.

‘Rurik came back only once, with a white bear cub,’ she said. ‘Said for Gudleif to keep it for him and that it was worth a fortune – and it was, too. But Rurik, of course, couldn’t stop long enough to make it into one. Always off on the next tide, that one. Not the same man after your mother died.’

Now here he was, sprung like a breaching whale from the empty sea.

I saw a nut-brown face and, since folk said we looked alike, tried to see more handsome in it than, perhaps, there was. He was middling height, more silvered than fair now, his face roughened by wind and weather and his beard cropped short. His blue eyes laughed, though, from under hairy eyebrows like spiders’ legs, even when he was being concerned.

And what did he see? A boy, tall for his age, with good shoulders and the scrawn of youth almost gone, with red-brown hair that fell in his eyes unless someone rough-cut it with shears. Halldis had done it while she lived but no one much bothered after the coughing sickness took her.

I looked at him with the same blue eyes, staring at his snub-nosed face. It came to me, with a sudden shock, that I would look like this when I was old.

‘You are come after all, then,’ I said, feeling foolish even as I spoke, for it was self-evident he had come – and not alone, either. Behind him, in Bjornshafen’s boatshed, their temporary quarters, were the hard-faced crew of the ship he mastered. Gunnar Raudi had warned of these.

‘Why would I not?’ he answered with a grin.

We both knew the answer to that one, but I would have preferred it said aloud.

‘When word comes that a man’s son is in danger from his own kin … well, a father must act,’ he went on, serious as stone.

‘Just so,’ I replied, thinking that he had taken his time about acting and that ten years was more than a pause for breath in the journey to his son. But I said nothing when I saw in his eyes how he was genuinely puzzled that I would think he wouldn’t rush to my aid.

It only came to me later, when I had aged into life a little, that Rurik had done his task of raising me as well as any father and better than most – but looking at this new man, this rawboned hard man from a boatload of hard men and realising he was the one who had left me in the first place, with no word since and no prospect of one, I grew so angry and twisted with it that I could not speak at all.

He took that for something else – the moment of our meeting, the horror of what had gone before with the white bear and the snow journey – and nodded, smiling.

‘Who’d have thought that bloody little bear cub would have caused such trouble,’ he mused, rasping his chin with horned fingers. ‘I bought it from a Gotland trader, who had it from a Finn, he told me. I thought to sell it in Ireland, to make a jarl’s cloak, or even a pet, but that nithing Gudleif let it go. Arse. Just look at what happened – I nearly lost my son.’

Gudleif had cursed his brother, that bear and, in the end, the one he suspected of letting it go. It had grown too big for its original cage, so had to be tethered loose and fed mountains of good herring; the thrall had grown too afraid to go near it.

There had been about an eyeblink of cheering when everyone saw it had gone, then blind panic that such a monster was loose. Gudleif and Bjarni and Gunnar Raudi had hunted it all that year, but found nothing and lost a good dog besides.

The words were queued up in me, fighting like drunks trying to get out of a burning hall. My father was breathtaking … not one word about where he had been, or why I had been left so long, or what had been my life in the five years before he brought me here. Or even that the bloody bear had been his fault all along.

It was infuriating. My mouth gaped and shut like a fresh-caught cod and he saw it, put it down to the emotion of the moment, of seeing his long-lost father, and made manly of it. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, gruffly, ‘Can you walk? Einar is in the hall and wants to see you.’

Fuck Einar, was what I wanted to say. Fuck you, too. Freydis is dead because of your bloody bear and the fact that you weren’t around to decide what to do with it before someone got tired of it and let it escape. Where were you? And tell me of me, my mother, where I am from. I know nothing.

Instead, I nodded and weaved upright, while he helped me into breeks and shoes and kirtle and tunic, me leaning on him, feeling his wiry strength.

He smelled of old sweat and leather and wet wool and the hair grew up under the neck of his own tunic, all around, curling wads of it, grizzled and darker than that on his head and chin.

And all the while the thoughts in me wheeling and screaming like terns round a fresh catch. The years between us and the wyrd of that white bear. How long was it free? Six years? Eight, maybe?

Yet this winter it had sought me out somehow, tracked me down and brought my father back to me with its death, like an Odin sacrifice.

The wyrd of it made me shiver – those three Norn sisters, who weave the lives of every creature, had started on a strange tapestry for me.

Finally, as I fastened and looped a belt round my waist, my father straightened from doing up my leg-bindings and held out Bjarni’s sword to me. It had been cleaned of all blood; cleaned better than it had been before, for there were fewer rot spots on it than when I had stolen it.

‘It isn’t mine,’ I said, half-ashamed, half-defiant, and he cocked his head like a bird and I laid out the tale of it.

It was Bjarni’s sword, he who had been Gudleif’s oarmate of long standing. He and Gudleif had taught me the strokes of it, and then Gunnar Raudi, unable to watch any longer, had picked it up, spat between his feet and shown me how to use it in a real fight.

‘When you stand in a shieldwall, boy,’ he said, ‘forget all the fancy strokes. Hit their fucking feet. Cut the ankles from them. Stab them up and under the shield and the hem of their mail, right into their balls. It’s the only bits you can see or reach anyway.’

And then he showed me how to use the hilt, my shield, my knees and elbows and teeth, while Gudleif and Bjarni stayed quiet and still.

It was then I saw they were afraid of Gunnar Raudi and learned later – from Halldis, of course – that Gunnar stayed at Bjornshafen because he had got both Bjarni and Gudleif back from a raid to Dyfflin that went badly wrong. Everyone thought them dead and then, two seasons later, in they sailed with a stolen ship, captured thralls and tales of Gunnar’s daring. They owed him their lives and a berth for as long as he breathed.

‘I stole it from Gudleif,’ I told my father, ‘when it was clear he wanted me to die in the snow on the way to Freydis’s hov.’

He rubbed his beard and frowned, nodding. ‘Aye, so Gunnar said when he sent word.’

That had been the day Gunnar had cracked my world, a day that began with Gudleif sitting in his gifthrone with his ship prows on either side and himself swathed in furs, trying to be a great jarl and managing only to look like a bad-tempered cat.

Bjarni had died the previous year and Halldis the year before that. Now Gudleif complained of the cold and avoided going out much. He sat, hunched and glowering, with only old Caomh close to his elbow, the thrall who had come back as a slave from a Christ temple in Dyfflin.

Nearby, the equally old Helga shuttled a loom back and forth and grinned her two last teeth at me, while Gunnar Raudi, just visible in the smoking gloom, worked on a leather strap.

‘I am not up to the journey to the high pasture this year,’ Gudleif said to me. ‘The herd needs to be brought down and some essentials taken to Freydis.’

It was an early winter, the snow curling off Snaefel, the colour leached from the land by cold, so that there were only black tree skeletons on grey under a grey sky. Even the sea was slate.

‘It has already snowed,’ I reminded him. ‘It may be too deep to drive horses down now.’ I refrained from reminding him that I had spoken of this weeks before, when it might have been easier to do.

There was no sound save for the clack-shuff of the loom and the sputter of a fire whose wood was too damp. Halldis would not have made it so.

Gudleif stirred and said to me, ‘Perhaps. If so, you will over-winter there and bring them in spring. Freydis will have prepared.’

It was not an attractive proposition. Freydis was a strange one and, truth to tell, most people thought her a volva, a witch. I had never seen her, in all my fifteen years, though her hov was no more than a good day’s walk up the lowest slopes. She tended Gudleif’s best stallions and mares on the high pasture and was clever at it.

I thought of all this and the fact that, even if she had prepared well, there would not be enough fodder to keep the herd fed through the hard winter it promised to be. Or, perhaps, even the pair of us.

I said as much and Gudleif shrugged. I thought Gunnar Raudi was probably best to go and said that, too. Gudleif shrugged again and, when I looked at him, Gunnar Raudi was busy beside the hearthfire, too concerned with his strap of leather even to look up, it seemed to me.

So I prepared a pack and took the sturdiest of the ponies. I was considering what best to take Freydis when Gunnar Raudi came to the stable and there, in the warm, rustling twilight of it, tore everything apart with a simple phrase.

‘He has sent for his sons.’

And there it was. Gudleif was dying. His sons, Bjorn and Steinkel, were coming back from their own fostering to claim their inheritance and I was… expendable. Perhaps he hoped I would die and solve all his problems.

Gunnar Raudi saw all that chase itself like cat and dog across my face. He said nothing for a while, still as a block of grindstone in the fetid dark. A horse whuffed and stamped; straw rustled and all I could think to say was: ‘So that’s where the faering went. I wondered.’

And Gunnar Raudi smiled a grim smile. ‘No. He sent word by the next valley up. The faering is missing because I sent Krel and Big Nose to row it to Laugarsfel, there to send word to Rurik.’

I glanced at him anxiously. ‘Does Gudleif know?’

He shook his head and shrugged. ‘He knows nothing much these days. Even if he finds out what can he do? Perhaps he might even have done it himself if it had been mentioned to him.’ In the dim, his face was all shadowed planes, unreadable. But he went on: ‘A trip through the snow isn’t so bad. Better than here when Rurik arrives.’

‘If you think so, you take the trip through the snow and I will stay here,’ I answered bitterly and expected his wry chuckle and a growl of a reply. Instead, to my surprise – of both of us, it seemed to me after – he laid a hand on my shoulder.

‘Best not, lad. What Rurik brings with him will be worse than a frozen nose.’

That was chilling and I had to ask. His eyes gleamed in the dark.

‘Einar the Black and his crew,’ he replied and the way he said it told me all I needed to know.

I laughed, but even to my own ears it was forced. ‘If he comes.’

I looked him in the face and he looked right back and both of us knew the truth of it. I was like the white bear: someone else’s property, unclaimed and in the way. My father might not get the news. Even if he did, he might not be bothered.

My father grunted at that part of the tale, as if he had been dug sharply in the ribs. But his glare made me ashamed I had said it.

I told him then that I felt no pang about taking Bjarni’s sword. Or the large amount of salt, or any of the other supplies I thought necessary. Fuck Bjornshafen. Fuck Gudleif and fuck both his sons.

My father grinned at that.

Taking Bjarni’s sword was the worst thing, for a sword then was a thing not to be taken lightly. It was expensive and, more than that, it was the mark of a warrior and a man of substance.

The Greeks in Constantinople – who call themselves Romans, but speak no Latin – think all Northmen are Danes and that all Danes fight in mail and with swords. The truth is that most of us have only the seax, a kitchen knife the length of your forearm. With it, you can chop a chicken or gut a fish – or kill a man.

You get to be good with it, since mail is too expensive for most. Any good blow will kill you unless you avoid it and only if you must do you block it, so that the edge of your precious seax isn’t notched away.

A sword, though, was a magical thing, a rich thing and the mark of a warrior, so not to be trifled with – but I took dead Bjarni’s sword out of spite, right off the hook in the hall, while Gudleif grunted and farted and slept. In the morning I was gone early, before he noticed it was missing.

Bjarni would notice but I made my peace with him on my own and prayed to big, bluff Thor to intercede. Then I added a prayer to Odin, made wise by communing with the new-dead, who had hung nine nights on the World Tree for wisdom. And one to Jesus, the White Christ, who hung on a tree like Odin.

‘That was deep thinking, right enough,’ my father said when I told him this. ‘You can never have too much holy help, even if this Christ-following lot are a strange breed, who say they will not fight yet still seem able to field warriors and sharp steel. As for the sword – well, Bjarni won’t need it and Gudleif won’t mind. Ask Einar for it. He will let you keep it after what you did.’

I stayed silent. How could I tell them what I had done? Pissed myself and run, leaving Freydis to die?

The first sight of those great bear pugs in the snow, maybe two weeks after I had struggled through to her hov, had set Freydis to barring doors and hunkering down. The night it came we had eaten broth and bread by the glimmer of the pitfire embers, listening to the creak of the beams and the rustle of straw from the stalls.

I lay down clutching Bjarni’s sword. That, an old ash spear of her dead man’s, the wood axe and Freydis’s kitchen knives made the only weapons we had. I stared at the glowing embers, trying not to think of the bear, prowling, sniffing, circling.

I knew whose bear it was and, it seemed to me, it had come seeking revenge after all these years.

I woke to soft singing. Freydis sat, cross-legged and naked, the hearthfire glowing on her body, her face hidden by the long, unbound straggles of her streaked hair, one hand holding upright the ash spear. In front of her were … objects.

I saw a small animal skull, the teeth blood-red in the light, the eye-sockets blacker than night. There were carved things and a pouch and, over them all, Freydis hummed, a long, almost continuous drone that raised the hair on my arms.

I hung on to the sharkskin hilt of Bjarni’s old sword while the dead crowded round, their eyes glittering in the dark holes of their heads, pale faces like mist.

Whether she called them for help, or called the bear, or tried to weave a shield against it, I don’t know. All I know is that when the bear struck the wall, the hall boomed like a bell and I jumped up, half-naked, sword in hand.

I shook my head, scattering memories like water drops. A last, brief flash of the curving swipe of paw and her head, spinning, flailing blood to the rafters. Had there been a smile on it? An accusing look?

My father rightly guessed the memories, wrongly assumed I was mourning for the lost Freydis and clapped my shoulder again, giving it a slight squeeze and a half-smile. Then he walked me slowly to the hall across the sun-sparkled snow. The eaves were dripping with melting spires of ice.

Everything seemed the same, but the thralls avoided my eye, keeping their heads down. I saw Caomh down by the shore, standing by a pole with a ball on it – one of his strange White Christ totems, probably. Once a monk, always a monk, he used to say. Just because he had been ripped from his cloister didn’t make him less of a holy man for the Christ. I raised a hand in greeting but he never moved, though I knew he saw me.

Gudleif’s hall was dim inside, misted with cold light from the smoke hole. The hearthfire crackled, breath coiled in wisps and the figures hunched on benches at the foot of the high seat turned to us as we came in.

I waited until my eyes had accustomed and then saw that someone else sat in Gudleif’s high seat, someone with hair to his shoulders, dark as crow wings.

Black-eyed, black-moustached, he wore blue-checked breeks like the Irish and a kirtle of finest blue silk, hemmed in red. One hand leaned on the fat-pommelled hilt of a sheathed sword, point at his feet. It was a fine sword, with a three-lobed heavy silver end to the hilt and lots of workings round the cross guard.

The other hand clasped a furred cloak around his throat. Gudleif’s furred cloak, I noticed. And Gudleif’s high seat – but not his ship prows. I saw them stacked to one side and the ones that flanked the high seat now were the proud heads of an antlered beast with flaring nostrils.

Hard men, my father’s oarmates, who thought highly of him because he was their shipmaster and could read waves like other men did runes. Sixty of them had come to Bjornshafen because he had wished it, even though he did not lead this varjazi, this oathsworn band and their slim snakeship, the Fjord Elk.

Einar the Black led them, who now sat on Gudleif’s high seat as if it were his own.

At his feet sat others, one of them Gunnar Raudi, hands on his knees, cloaked and very still, his faded red tangles fastened back from his face by a leather thong. He looked at me and said nothing, his eyes grey-blue and glassed as a summer sea.

The others I did not know, though I half recognised Geir, the great sack of purple-veined nose that gave him his nickname wobbling in his face as he told the tale of finding me half-frozen and slathered in blood, the headless woman nearby. Steinthor, who had been with him, nodded his shaggy head in agreement.

They were cheerful about it now but, at the time, had been afraid when they found the great white bear dead, a spear in its brain and Bjarni’s sword rammed in its heart. As Steinthor happily admitted, to the grunts and chuckles of the others, he had shat himself.

There were two other strangers, one of them the biggest man I had ever seen: fat-bearded, fat-bellied, fat-voiced – fat everything. He wore a blue coat of heavy wool and the biggest seaboots I had ever seen, into which were tucked the baggiest breeks, striped blue and silver, that I had ever seen. There were ells of silk in those breeks.

He had a fur hat with a silver end, which chimed like a bell when he accidentally brushed it against the blade of the huge Dane axe that he held, rapping the haft on the hard-packed hall floor now and then and going ‘hoom’ deep in his throat when Geir managed a better-than-usual kenning in his story.

The other was languid and slim, leaning back against one of the roof poles, stroking his snake moustaches, which were all the fashion then. He looked at me as Gudleif looked at a new horse, weighing it up, seeing how it moved.

But no Gudleif, just this crow-dark stranger in his chair.