Sigtrygg flung another pailful over the side, the water reflecting the starlight before splashing into the sea. He bent again. 'Somewhere some other mean bastard who thought it would be fine to sacrifice a half-dead bull is having a bad night,' he said, straightening. 'So long as it's not us, I couldn't give a fart.'
'We'll give Njörd your breeding bull next time, Sigtrygg,' Sigurd said, holding out his hand to me and nodding towards the Óðin amulet at my neck. I gave it to him and he put it over his head before helping Olaf inspect the sail for damage. The wind had stretched it, but it would retake its shape overnight. 'Better still, he can have you,' the jarl added, thumping Sigtrygg's soaking back. 'Get the oars out, lads!' he called. 'We've had our fun tonight.' And where they might have moaned at having to row again, the Norsemen seemed relieved to be taking a grip on Serpent once more; oars and steerboard rather than wind and waves controlling where she would go.
It never gets completely dark at sea, because any small light from stars or moon, even if they are veiled, reflects from the water. But it would have been too dangerous to sail and so Sigurd decided to row back towards land and anchor in the shallows. At the first sign of exposed rocks, we could back oars far more quickly than adjust the sail. By the time the heat from our bodies had warmed the water in our soaking clothes, we had found a bay sheltered from the west wind by a great peninsula, and Olaf had dropped the anchor to the sandy bottom. The crews of both longships settled down to sleep or played games by candlelight. Ealhstan and I sat together whilst white-haired Eric held Sigurd's lamp before his face and began to sing a song that Olaf told me was ancient when his grandfather was a boy.
'I can sing my own true story,
Tell of my travels, how I have suffered
Times of hardship in days of toil;
Bitter cares have I harboured,
And often learned how troubled a home
Is a ship in a storm, when I took my turn
At the gruelling night-watch
At the dragon's head as it beat past cliffs . . .'
The men were smiling and nodding in appreciation. They all knew the sea and knew that she would sometimes swallow even great men. But the sea was their domain too, and they loved her.
'Got a voice like honey, hasn't he?' a man named Oleg said without taking his eyes from Eric. 'Hard to believe, if you've ever heard his old man sing,' he added, nodding towards Olaf who glowed with pride.
'He sings well for a heathen,' I dared, but Oleg simply nodded. It was a fragile, beautiful sound and I thought Rán's daughters, those foam-headed waves, would take Eric if they could, to sing in their mother's hall for all eternity.
'Often were my feet
Fettered by frost in frozen bonds,
Tortured by cold, while searing anguish
Clutched at my heart, and longing rent
My sea-weary mind . . .'
Now Sigurd himself held up a hand and Eric smiled, inviting his jarl to take up the song, which he did in a voice neither sweet nor lovely, but gruff and full and true.
'Yet now once more
'My heart's blood stirs me to try again
The towering seas, the salt-waves' play;
My heart's desires always urge me
To go on the journey, to visit the lands
Of foreign men far over the sea . . .'
And then, with the sound of singing washing over me, I slept.
CHAPTER FOUR
WE BENT OUR BACKS TO THE OAR. I WAS GETTING USED TO THE rowing now and preferred to do it alone, but I knew it took Ealhstan's mind off the seasickness, so I let him sit beside me against the top strake, his arms moving with the oar though taking little of the strain. There was only the whisper of a breeze this morning, meaning that every pair of arms was needed to pull Serpent through the still seas. But there was some strange comfort in the smooth stave that had blistered my hands, in the rhythm of the stroke and the plunge of the blades into the grey sea. Before, I had felt like a prisoner, but now I understood Serpent's beauty, saw the magic in the way she flexed through the waves and carried us away from harm.
'I don't understand, Ealhstan,' I said, breathing heavily, 'how it is that I speak their tongue.' He stared straight ahead as though he had not heard me. 'The knife you found on me. How did I get it?'
He shook his lank white hair and panted, but I knew he was only feigning exhaustion. And so I kept the questions to myself. My mind reached back into the darkness, searching for an answer, but finding nothing. My earliest real memory was of waking up in Ealhstan's house. I remembered feeling hollow. Empty. Exhausted. Satan's dark angel. That was what Father Wulfweard had called me. After that, everyone avoided me the way they avoid cow dung in the fields. Everyone except Ealhstan. And though at first I could not speak his language, I fetched his wood and caught his fish and worked hard so that he would not think I was a useless, lazy foxtail, which was what Griffin called the other boys in the village. But Abbotsend was gone now, and maybe my answer with it.