Robert Low - The Whale Road

I ran to the first room and frantically tore aside the hangings on the door openings: boxes, bales, dead rats, live rats. The next one was a room with another square opening blazing with light on the splintered debris of fresh wood; the one after that was a room with a straw bed and nothing . . .

A room with a smashed opening and shards of wood littering the floor. Where he had come in. And gone out again.

I sprang to the window, stuck the seax in my tunic and snaked out of it. I hauled myself upwards this time, on to the sloping wooden shingles, baking in the heat and so dry they cracked like ice. I slithered, cursing, on the ones that came loose.

I saw him then, his red tunic torn and fluttering, one purple leg-binding trailing and the fancy ribbons on one fork of his beard ripped loose. He glared wildly at me and scuttled down the tiles and over the far side.

Odin's arse, would he never stop running? I skated after him, saw the short drystone wall he had dropped on to—astride it, I noted savagely—and was clambering up on, limping painfully and clutching his cods.

People were yelling at us from the tannery yard and on the other side of the wall was the street. I dropped heavily on to the wall, managed not to slam it into my groin, swayed alarmingly for a moment, then caught my balance as Vigfus walked along the uneven, crumbling, narrow wall-top, hands out for balance.

Then I saw Einar and Gunnar Raudi and others, spilling into the tannery yard—but the wall was too high for them to reach him. He saw them at the same time as I did, reasoned at the same time as they did and avoided the weapons they were preparing to hurl at him by leaping down the other side of the wall, with a curse, to the street below.

`Go round, go round!' I shrieked and they all turned and headed the long way round the buildings, elbowing people out of the way.

They'd never make it in time before he vanished, so I leaped after him, trying to cushion my fall by landing in a trestle of stacked fruits. I came up scattering more people and sticky with juices. Angry shouts followed me as I got up, limping. It had been a bad landing anyway and I was flagging now.

Vigfus wasn't in much better shape, but he was starting into a run when I hurled forward in a flying dive and caught the last, trailing edge of his fancy purple bindings.

He gave a sharp yelp as he went over, clattering in to the dusty ruts full on his face. He scrambled away, kicking at me, his face a mask of fury and bloody mud.

Then I saw, with a sick horror, the bone-white head of Gunnbjorn, trotting through the yelling, milling people, hurling them aside to get to his jarl. Vigfus scrambled up and White Gunnbjorn grinned and made for me, a blade in his hand. His eyes, I saw were strange, colourless—even his lashes were white.

`Leave him,' Vigfus gasped. 'Help me—get out of here. Einar is coming.'

Gunnbjorn snarled at me, then hooked a shoulder under his master's armpit and hauled him up. They were four steps further on when, nearly sobbing with the sheer anger and frustration of watching them get away, I hurled the seax.

It whirled through the gap between us and smacked Gunnbjorn in the back. There was a crack and he shrieked and collapsed in a heap, knocking Vigfus over in front of him.

Gunnbjorn was flailing, trying to reach his back, gasping for help. Vigfus, cursing, saw his state, scrambled up and hopped off, vanishing into the milling throng. I tried to follow, but the pain in my ankle made me shriek as loud as Gunnbjorn, so I fell and Einar and the rest found me, sprawled in the street, pounding it with my fists, face streaked with blood and snot and sweat.

Gunnar Raudi rolled me over, had two men haul me up. Einar hunkered down by Gunnbjorn, who was moaning and still trying to reach his back.

`Take it out,' I heard him groan. 'I can't feel my legs. Take it out.'

There was nothing to take out. The seax was no throwing knife; the haft had hit him on the spine and broken something vital.

Einar rolled him over surprisingly gently and spoke quickly, for we didn't have much time left before someone hefty and armed came to find out what the trouble was.

`Gunnbjorn; he said, 'you are done for.'

Ìt would seem so,' the man answered painfully, through clenched teeth. His face was as white as the bone hair plastered limply to his skull, even through the patina of dust. His eyebrows and lashes were white; his eyes were not colourless, I saw, but a faint shade of violet.

Ì can let you die as a man,' said Einar, `with a good blade in your hand and a bench in Valholl.'

You could see the nod in Gunnbjorn's eyes, even if his neck could no longer make it.

Òr I can leave you here,' he said, 'in this street, where you will probably live long enough to be carried to a bed and cared for a little, until you die a nithing.' He paused and shrugged. 'Perhaps you may even live.

I have seen such. A man I saw once in Miklagard had a marvellous seat with an awning and was carried about by thralls after having his legs crushed under a ship he was careening.'

Having made the point, he leaned closer, dangling Gunnbjorn's own knife by the blade, haft tantalising inches from the man's Palm. 'Tell me where Vigfus is going with the girl,' he said.

Gunnbjorn moaned.

`He left you to die here,' Einar pointed out.

Gunnbjorn's voice was scarcely above a whisper now. 'I have a mother, Hrefna Ulfsdottir. In Solmundsteading in the Vestfold . . .'

Ì will send word that you died well. And the purse under your left armpit.'

He closed his eyes then, already seeing the ravens. 'The Sea Storm. The howe of the Sea Storm, looking for Atil's hoard. The girl knows. To the north-west, one, maybe two days, she says.'

Einar dropped the knife-haft into Gunnbjorn's palm at the same moment he slit his throat. Then we left, while the blood pooled into a scarlet mud-puddle beneath his head and the street emptied, for no one wanted to answer questions about a dead man.

It was like being on the sea in a swell. We crossed the seared steppe under a sun like a fist, kicking up puffs of black soil as we moved over the rolling yellow grass, heading for the next green line on the horizon.

Eventually, the line would thicken, grow larger, haze out of the heat into stands of pine and alder and birch. The slow, undulating steppe was studded with them, each huddled like a herd of living creatures round a gulley, where water trickled sluggishly to the Dnepr. Under the trees was heady with resin, thick with needles and mulch, and an even more oppressive heat. But it offered shelter from what we feared most: Pecheneg horsemen.

It was, as Valknut never seemed too tired to point out, a truly bad idea, heading out on to the steppe on foot, with no more than two days' hard flatbread, rank cheese and some of the dried meat strips the Rus horsemen used.

They stuck it under their saddles and cloths, where the horse sweat softened it and juiced it up—mare sweat tasted better, they swore—but we had no such luxury and, at the third forest of the day, I stopped trying to chew it and swore it would be better kept to repair my boot soles with.

`Give it here,' shouted one of the band, a pox-faced half-Slav called Skarti. 'I'll stick it down my breeks for you. Same idea, different sweat.'

They laughed, this dripping, evil-smelling bunch. They panted like dogs and filled leather bottles with river water, softened bread and meat in the stream before trying to eat it, gasped on their needle couches With the weight of the heat—and joked.

Einar had to turn eager men down when he told them of his plan and that he needed sixty good men from the company to get Hild back. He had sent word to Sviatoslav and his three sons that men of Prince Vladimir's druzhina had broken oath and run into the steppe, taking with them a slave from Einar, and that he had gone to bring all of them back. That, he hoped, would excuse his own absence.