‘Be careful with Madi,’ I said. ‘Abram poked him in the face with a firebrand to make him let go of his victim last night.’ I could see a burn mark and a black streak of soot on the bear’s muzzle.
‘That’s Modi,’ Walo corrected me.
I looked again. ‘But I thought that Madi was the angry one.’
‘That’s Modi,’ Walo insisted. Ignoring me, he pulled out the peg that locked the heavy iron hasp that secured the door to the cage. I took a deep breath and told myself not to interfere. When it came to understanding and handling animals, I had to trust Walo’s instincts.
I looked on as he swung open the door, climbed into the cage, shut the door behind him and went across to the bear and bent over to check the burn. Modi opened his eyes, raised his head and allowed Walo to rub away the soot.
I turned away, marvelling. On my way back to camp, it occurred to me that the events of the previous evening should be a warning to me that I was prone to making unfounded assumptions. Because Madi’s name meant ‘angry’, I had presumed Madi had mauled the drunkard. But I had been wrong. Modi had been responsible for the attack. With Redwald I had made the same mistake, thinking that he was behind the attempt to kill me in Kaupang. In future, if anyone tried to do me harm or wreck the embassy to the caliph, I would be more deliberate. Instead of making a quick judgement as to who was responsible, I would wait for the clues to make some sort of pattern. Of one thing I was certain: my difficulties were far from over.
By mid-morning we had shifted all our remaining stores and equipment, the gyrfalcons in their cages and the white dogs onto two more river craft. Then our newly recruited boatmen pushed our ungainly craft away from the bank, using long wooden oars, and we floated out on the slow-moving surface of the river. The ferrymen – two men in the bow and two in the stern – settled the oars into short Y-shaped crutches. Standing facing forward, they began to take slow, leisurely strokes. Our vessels drifted, barely moving. I was with Abram on the lead boat, carrying stores, and looked back towards our little convoy. A short distance behind us came Walo with the ice bears, then Osric on the vessel with the aurochs. The other stores boat brought up the rear. All three craft were low in the water and the double ferry, weighed down by the aurochs in its enclosure was scarcely visible. The huge animal appeared to be standing on the river’s surface, the water level with its hooves.
An unseen eddy caught our boat and it began to rotate slowly. Our boatmen corrected the movement, holding us straight and in mid-river. The bank on both sides was steep, covered with thick brushwood. There was nowhere to land in an emergency. It was evident that it was now impossible to get off the river. We were committed to wherever it would carry us. Abram had left to me the final decision whether to continue by road or take to the river. If I had made the mistake, I had no one else but myself to blame for our situation.
A heron standing in the shallows watched us draw closer. We were moving so slowly that the bird did not consider us a threat. It turned its head, watching us along its spear of a beak, as we drifted past.
‘This is even less than walking pace,’ I complained to Abram.
‘We’ll move faster once we pick up the current,’ he assured me.
Ahead of us the river curved to the left and out of sight. We drifted round the bend and passed a gulley where a stream emptied into the main river. Almost imperceptibly our speed increased for a few yards, then slackened again. Had I not been so dismayed by our dawdling pace, I would have enjoyed the tranquillity of the scene ahead of us. A large flock of wild ducks was feeding on the surface. They had blue beaks and wing tips, beautifully speckled brown breasts, and a noticeable streak of white just in front of the eye. They scattered in leisurely fashion, paddling just far enough apart to keep a safe distance from the dipping oars as we drifted among them, then came together again once we had passed. There was a small, rippling swirl almost within touching distance, and I had a momentary glimpse of the fin and green-bronze back of a fish as long as my arm before the creature sank from view. High overhead four swans flew, dazzling white against the grey, overcast sky. They were following the line of the river and overtook us in moments, the sound of their wing beats fading so swiftly that it made me feel as if our boats were anchored in one spot. From somewhere in the distance came a long rumble of thunder.
The hours dragged by. All that afternoon our little flotilla crept along at the same languid pace. Unlike a straight roadway, the river meandered and twisted in casual loops. Where trees overhung the bends, our boatmen were obliged to take a course to avoid branches that extended far out over the water. This increased the distance we had to travel. We never knew what we would encounter around the next corner or whether we would find ourselves heading north, instead of south. After four hours of travel I doubted we had progressed the same number of miles.