Blood Eye(16)

'Is he always so cheerful?' Olaf asked, nodding at the old man with a grin that revealed several dark teeth. 'Thór knows I have never met a happy Christian, apart from a man I met in Ireland once,' he said, his bushy eyebrows arched, 'and I doubt he was still laughing when he sobered up. Not with that headache. Drank like a fish, that one.'





Next day, Sigurd the Lucky put me to the oar. A Norseman had been killed at Abbotsend and I took his place. There might have been enough of a breeze to push us along, but I think Sigurd wanted to keep his men strong and hungry, the way a hunter starves his dog to make it more eager for the prey. Whatever the reason, it was relentless work pulling the blade through the water in time with the others and soon my arms and shoulders burned and my heart felt as though it would burst. Sweat coursed down my face and I could only brush at it with a shoulder. My eyes stung and my tunic was soaked. After a long time, the screaming pain dulled to an ache and the sweat dried up, and I found a strange peace in the monotonous rhythm. I lost myself in the motion of the stroke. Eventually I faltered and then they made old Ealhstan grip the stave too, and blisters swelled and burst on his skilled hands.





'A man does not need a tongue to row, hey, Englishman?' one of the Norsemen said in broken English, leaning back with the stroke. Ealhstan did not even grunt a riposte, his lungs having no breath to waste as we pulled on the oar, struggling to match the Norsemen's backbreaking rhythm.





Over the next few days we hugged the coast, gaining shelter at night and making slow progress by day. Serpent and Fjord- Elk followed the shore like predators on the prowl and though it seemed to me that their crews kept one eye on the look-out for an easy target, I also felt that they were simply happy to be on the move. The Norsemen still feared making landfall in case the English had gathered a great number of spearmen, and Sigurd was content to wait until there was no longer sign of those who tracked us from the cliff tops and the shore. There was little wind, but Sigurd was in no rush and he harnessed what breeze there was, letting it push us westward. Eventually, we stopped seeing spearmen against the skyline and riders on the shingle, and yet I would still devour the coastline with my eyes for any sign of an English levy, and I would imagine these proud heathens dying beneath English blades. Sometimes, I thought I saw men peering out to sea, but they turned out to be rocks or trees and once even a sheep. In those days I learned that your eyes will fashion form from hope, the way old Ealhstan made something beautiful from rough wood.





One grey morning, a steady drizzle fell unfelt on to my sweat-drenched clothes as I peered up at the grassy bluff, lost in the rhythm of the stroke. My palms had hardened like seasoned beech and the blisters had become knot-like calluses. I started when Ealhstan grabbed my ankle. He was exhausted and leaning against the chest on which I sat rowing with all my strength so that he might rest. He pointed landward, put two fingers to his eyes and shook his head.





'You think I'm a fool, don't you, old man? Looking for something that's not there,' I said. He nodded, then resumed picking his teeth after a small breakfast of hard bread and dried codfish. At least the Norsemen were feeding us. Without food we could not row. 'The women must have told Reeve Edgar we were taken,' I said weakly, 'when they saw we were not among the dead.'





He cupped a pair of imaginary breasts and made a wailing sound in his throat.





'You're right,' I said. 'They'll be mourning their dead men, not worrying about the two of us.'





He frowned then and pointed at my oar, gesticulating for me to keep up with the heathens. I leant back, pulling hard on the stave, suddenly aware that I had come close to snaring the oars. You didn't have to watch the others to know if you were losing time, for you would hear the solitary blade hit the water behind the rest. 'If you stopped distracting me, old man . . .' I huffed, gulping air as I leant forward to pull again.





He shrugged his slight shoulders and pointed to my bloodeye. Then he walked two fingers through the air and pretended to spit. Folk will happily walk in the mire to avoid me, was what he meant. Then he scratched his bristly chin and pulled a sour face as if to say, And as for me . . . He clenched his swollen fists, popping several knuckles, then made the sign for cups and platters. 'So what if folk know your hands are not what they once were?' I said. 'You're an old man. They won't expect you to work their wood for ever.' But this brought a bitter smile to Ealhstan's lips, for I had struck the nail clean. He was an old man and I was an outsider. Why would anyone come for us, even if they knew where to find us? He pointed to my blood-eye and nodded towards the heathen in front of us, and I knew what his words would have been if his mouth still held a tongue: Keep fixing these bastards with that unnatural eye of yours, lad. Put some fear in their heathen bellies.