Robert Low - The Prow Beast

I roused myself, moving as if I was in the Other, walking in a mist and slowed. Twice, I know, I held his back, stopped the crash of a blade on him, but I only came into the Now of matters when he was pounding the head of the last man on the walkway, screaming at him.

‘What is it called?’ he shrieked. Slam. Slam. ‘This place? What is it called?’

The man, leaking blood from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth, spattered out a word, so that Finn was satisfied enough to haul him up under the armpits and heave him over the rampart.

We huddled in the lee of the black-stained points, sitting in the viscous stink and staring at each other, while the arrows wheeked and whirred and shunked into the wood. Eventually, Finn wiped one bloody hand across his bloody beard.

‘Needzee,’ he said slowly and my blank eyes were question enough.

‘Name of this place,’ he explained. ‘I was thinking we should know where we are dying.’

That night, he and Kaelbjorn Rog and Ospak flitted down the rampart on knotted ropes, but it was dark and they dared not show any lights, so they could not find Red Njal in the heap, some still groaning, at the foot of our stockade.

His death was a rune-mark on matters coming to an end.

The end came two days later, when eighteen of us were rolling with sweat and babbling and twenty more had died, three from the plague. Almost everyone else was wounded in some way.

Worst of all, Koll was sick. The red and white spots started under his armpit and down his thighs in the morning and then erupted on the pale circles of his cheeks. By nightfall he looked as if someone had thrown a handful of yellow corn that had stuck to his face, each one a pustule that festered and stank.

The monk sat with him, in between tending the others, while Bjaelfi, half-staggering with weariness, moved back and forth, Dark Eye with him like a shadow, answering a whimper here, a cry there.

In the fetid, blood-stinking dark, we gathered round the fire, streaked and stained and long since too weary to wash. My braids were gummed with old blood and other, even worse, spills from the dead and my clothing stained and ripped; no-one was any better.

We carried Koll to the fire; no-one minded, for there was no escape from the pest and if the Norns wove that red thread into your life, that was it. Only Styrbjorn scowled, thinking that distance meant more safety.

Behind us, torches burned at the raised wooden platform that marked the centre of the village — Needzee, Finn had called it, but Dark Eye had put him right on that. The luckless man had gasped out ‘ nigdzie ’ as Finn pounded his head to ruin, screaming to know what the name of this place was that we were all dying for, the place where Red Njal had gone to meet his granny.

Nowhere, the man had said in his own tongue and Finn had thrown back his head and bellowed with cracked laughter when Dark Eye told him that.

Now Dark Eye lit torches and knelt on the wooden platform, praying to her four-faced god, while the shadows flicked and men, too tired even to eat or talk, huddled in a sort of stupor, heads bowed, watching the smoke writhe. A pot steamed on an iron tripod and the men lay in a litter of helms and weapons, slumped with shields as backrests, crusted ringmail puddled like old snakeskins at their feet.

When Dark Eye wraithed herself back to the fire, a few heads lifted and dull eyes took her in. Styrbjorn, always ready with his mouth, curled his lip.

‘Praying for rescue?’ he asked.

‘Only the fearful pray for rescue,’ she replied, pooling herself into a comfortable squat. Styrbjorn stirred uncomfortably, for everyone could see that promised stake up the arse occupied most of his waking hours.

‘The man who says he is not afraid in this matter is a liar,’ he responded.

‘Tell Finn that,’ Uddolf chuckled harshly. ‘He is well-known for having no fear.’

‘Perhaps he can tell you the secret of it, Styrbjorn,’ Onund added with his usual bear grunt. ‘Then we will be quit of your whine.’

‘As to that,’ Finn said softly. ‘Since we are all about to look our gods in the face, it may be that you want to know the secret of having no fear.’

Now men were stirring with interest, me among them.

‘When I was young,’ he began, ‘I did matters which were not agreeable to certain men in Skane and, when they caught me, there was no Thing on it, no outlawing. Justice was rougher in those days and none rougher than Halfidi. He was as white-haired as any kindly uncle and as black-bowelled as a draugr. Slatur , men called him.’

There were chuckles at such a fine by-name — Slatur was a dish made by stitching pungently strong black-blood sausage into a lamb’s white stomach.

‘They kicked and beat me,’ Finn went on, ‘and starved me for a week, which was to be expected. Each day Halfidi, or one of his sons, would dish out the meat of a whipping and take delight in telling me when I would hang. At the end of that week, they took me to the top of the cliff they used, where a rope was fastened to an iron ring. They put the other end round my neck and tied a cloth round my eyes. Then they spun me and pushed me to walking, so that I did not know where the cliff edge was.’

Men grunted with the cruel power that vision brought.

‘Three days they did this,’ Finn said, soft, lost in the dream of it. ‘On the second day the shite was running down my leg and I was babbling promises not even a god could keep if they would let me go. On the third day I did the same, only for them to let me see.’

He stopped. Men waited; the fire flared a little in a wet night wind, throwing up a whirl of sparks.

‘On the fourth day, they were careless with the bindings and I worked one hand free, so that when they came to prodding and pushing, I tore the cloth from my eyes. There were eight of them, who all saw I had one hand free and so they came at me with spears.’

He paused, a long time this time, until Styrbjorn — that child would never learn when to put his tongue between his teeth — demanded to know what happened next.

‘I went over the edge,’ said Finn. All breathing stopped at the dizzying vision of that, of what it had taken to do it.

‘And died, of course,’ sneered Styrbjorn. ‘I heard this tale when I was toddling.’

‘I did not die. I went over the edge and, when I hit the end of that bast rope it snapped clean through. I should have had my neck cracked, but had my free hand taking a deal of the strain, so I was spared that. I hit the sea and got through that, too.’

Men were silent, for such a matter was a clear intervention of the hand of some god. Frey, suggested one. Odin himself, another thought and those who favoured Slav gods offered their own thoughts on the matter.

‘I have had no fear since,’ Finn said. ‘It was snapped from me by that bast rope. Nothing and no-one since has made me drip shite down my leg through terror.’

‘That is why you did not want that Vislan hanged,’ I said, suddenly seeing it and Finn admitted it.

‘And why you follow the prow beast,’ Kaelbjorn Rog added. ‘Since you cannot return to Skane while Halfidi and his sons are waiting.’

Finn said nothing.

‘They are not,’ I said softly, staring at him, rich with sudden knowing. ‘But you can still never go back, can you, Finn Horsehead?’

Finn stared back at me, black eyes dead as old coals. ‘I went to their hall in the night. That same night. I barred all the doors and fired it. No-one got out.’

It might have been the wind, or the trailing finger of that horror, but men shivered. The burning of a hall full of his own kind was the worst act a Northman could do and he was never forgiven for it.

It was cold, that burning revenge, for there were women and weans in it. It came to me then that humping a dead woman on the body of a dying ox was neither here nor there for a man such as Finn. I had been wrong, telling Brother John bitterly that I was leading the charge into his Abyss, for no matter how hard I ran down that dark, steep way, Finn would always be ahead of me.