Blood Eye(15)

'Are you from this Satan? Have you seen him?' Sigurd asked. A wave broke over the bow, drenching a Norseman to the amusement of the others. The man cursed. 'Asgot my godi says I should kill you. I doubt he knows why, but that one's knife is seldom far from his hand.' I glanced at the old grey-beard, the speaker for the gods, who sat cross-legged away from the others. The bones tied in his plaits rattled as he cast a handful of stones on to a wooden board. 'But we are not foxes, hey? We don't kill for the simple pleasure in it.'





'I am not from Satan, lord,' I said. 'I have never butchered a man. I have never opened his back and hacked at the bones whilst he lived. Even the fox is not so cruel.'





Sigurd smiled, twisting his yellow beard between finger and thumb.





'I don't think you are from Satan,' he said eventually. 'You are from Óðin All-Father. Even Asgot says this is possible. Your eye is made from blood.' He pointed to the empty eye socket on the small carving at his neck. 'See here. Óðin traded an eye for a drink from Mirmir's Well of Wisdom. Do you understand me, boy? Even the gods do not know everything. Some, like the Far-Wanderer, crave wisdom.' I nodded, my stomach churning now that I stood, and I hoped the bile would not rise as vomit again. 'But Óðin is the Lord of War, too,' Sigurd went on, 'he is Lord of the Slain.' I touched my blood-eye as I looked up at this warrior who seemed to believe I was something other than what I was. 'What is your name, English boy?' he asked.





'Osric, lord,' I said, noticing crimson spots on his brown, weather-beaten face. Griffin's blood.





'There is war in you, Osric,' the Norseman said, absently scratching his beard and bending a knee in time with the ship's roll. 'For this reason I have let you live.' Sigurd's free hand fell to rest on his sword's hilt. 'There is war in you,' he repeated. 'And death too.' Then he turned and jumped up to the raised stern to signal to the other ship, ordering his men to look out for a safe place to moor overnight, for the danger of striking rocks was greater now in the failing light. The men on the cliff tops might know we headed west, but it would take them longer to cover the difficult ground than for us to sail round peninsulas, so Sigurd could risk mooring. Besides, those levy men would have to be fools to pick a fight with these Norsemen. And they were not fools. They were mostly farmers, craftsmen and traders. They were husbands and fathers. I had seen the Norsemen's slaughter. The memory of it flashed in my mind like fish scales beneath the waves.





'Hey, Uncle, it seems Njörd is watching over us again!' Sigurd called, his teeth glinting like fangs in the weak yellow light cast by the cow's horn lantern he had lit so that his other ship would not lose us in the dark.





'That is why I would sail to Asgard itself with you, Sigurd the Lucky!' Olaf shouted from the sternpost, a great smile swelling his cheeks. He leant to pick up a coiled rope, one end of which he passed through a smooth rock before making a thick knot. 'I've sailed with many men, some fine, some fools, but you, Sigurd, you have the gods' favour.' They were happy because the wind that had filled the sail earlier had now died away, giving Olaf no problems in sinking the weight to test the depth of a small, rock-strewn cove. More important, there was little danger of being blown towards the rocks. Sigurd himself had spotted the bay and though it did not penetrate far inland, it would protect both vessels from the open sea.





'The Englishmen can bring their spears and their bows and we can be gone before they sink an arrow within a hundred strokes,' Sigurd announced happily to his men. He called to the captain of the other ship that we would be staying for the night, then slapped a bear of a man on the back, sharing some joke about the English with him.





'You hear that, lad?' Olaf asked me as he lowered the ship's iron anchor into the calm water, steadily feeding the rope through his hands. 'We can snatch this up and put out to sea in the time it takes to piss,' he said with a smile. Olaf was the oldest man aboard, except for the godi and Ealhstan, and he clearly loved being at sea. 'So you can tell the old man not to waste his time praying to that White Christ of yours.' He made the sign of the cross mockingly. 'You're on Sigurd's ship now, lad, and Sigurd is as lucky as a cock in a henhouse.'





'He's a cruel bastard to take an old man from his home,' I muttered in the Norseman's language, but Ealhstan gnashed his teeth and pointed to my mouth, suddenly snatching at something invisible, and I realized the gesture's meaning. He would rather rip out my tongue, making me mute like him, than listen to me using the heathens' words. To Ealhstan it was another betrayal and it burned my heart to see the disappointment in his eyes.