CHAPTER EIGHT

 

THE THING IN THE WATER

 

Bjólf reached in with one arm and hauled the skinny wretch to face height, then deposited him roughly on deck, still clutching the front of the boy's scruffy tunic in his fist, his knife at his throat. His eyes burned with anger.

"What do you think this?" He shook the boy violently. "Just hop aboard and it's a-viking we will go? Well?" With that he pushed him away.

The lad looked at him in pale-faced shock for a moment, then vomited violently over the gunwale.

Bjólf raised his hands in despair. "This is all we need." The stowaway, recovering himself - though still slightly green - wiped his mouth, and stood swaying awkwardly on the shifting deck, every eye of the crew upon him.

"I... I thought..."

"You thought!" roared Bjólf, pointing at his face with his knife. "This is not a child's game!"

Gunnar put a hand on Bjólf's arm. "Go easy. I seem to remember you starting out much the same way."

"That was different," spat Bjólf. But he could not hide the note of defensiveness in his voice. He had been twelve when he stowed away on his uncle Olaf's ship. It was the only time he saw Olaf get really angry with him. The storm blew over quickly - but the voyage that followed was tough on the boy, and Olaf spared him none of its hardships. Upon his return, Bjólf's father met him not with with the expected fury and platitudes, but merely silent disapproval. Secretly, he thought the experience would turn his son against the viking life, and back to more serious application on the land. It did exactly the opposite. He thought now of the wrecked village the boy had left behind - the crazed, snivelling man on his knees in the mud - and his anger began to subside.

"Well, this solves the food problem, at least," said Fjölvar. The farm boy looked at him in alarm. "What do you say? Throw him in the pot?"

Bjólf looked the boy up and down slowly and shook his head. "Too scrawny."

"I'll have a leg!" called a gruff voice from the dark. There was a chuckle beside him.

"Save me the liver," said Finn with a smile, tapping the blade of his knife against his knuckles.

"Nah," said Njáll Red-Hair, matter-of-factly, "if it's a young lad, the buttock's the best part." A few of the men snorted with a mixture of amusement and incredulity. Njáll threw his hands apart in mock innocence. "Don't blame me, lads. I heard that one from a Christian bishop." There was an uproar of laughter among the crew, during which Njáll threw a brotherly arm around Magnus and planted a kiss on the side of his head. "And if a Christian man said it, it must be true!" Magnus responded with a sardonic smile. For many of the men, those Christian jokes just never wore thin. Although Magnus was far from the only member of the crew who claimed to follow the White Christ, he was the only one to worship him exclusively, or with any real dedication. For most, he was simply another god to add to the extended family - an additional insurance policy against the perils of the world, and an uneasy bedfellow of Thor, Týr and Freyja. Even for Odo of Normandy - the only other crew member who could justifiably be termed 'Christian'- the faith had been born more out of the pragmatism of politics than of personal conviction.

Bjólf had by now regained his sense of humour, but when he turned to face the lad again, his face was sombre. He raised a hand, and the crew fell silent.

"I don't like people coming aboard my ship uninvited, large or small," he said, gravely. "But since you're here, little man, you now have a choice to make. On this ship, you're either crew, or you're cargo. If you're crew, you work, you follow my rules, and you live and die for this vessel and the men aboard it. If you're cargo... Well, let's just say that the only cargo we find ourselves interested in at the moment is the edible kind."

The stowaway looked nervously from face to face. From somewhere came the sound of a knife blade scraping slowly on a whetstone.

"C... crew..." he stammered.

"Good choice!" said Bjólf, clapping his hands and breaking into a broad smile. "Now we will throw you overboard." And with that, several of the men hoisted the boy like a sack by the hands and feet, manoeuvred him to the port side, swung him twice over the gunwale, and on the third, hurled him far out into the heaving sea.

 

 

The cold hit Atli like a stone. The world turned blue-black, the distant sounds of laughter deadened by the icy water that enveloped him. He thrashed helplessly as if in a dream, ears ringing, silver bubbles bursting from him as the pressure crushed against his aching chest. He felt a sickening panic at his sudden inability to breathe, then deeper, existential dread at futility of his situation, at the terrifying scale of the surroundings, as if momentarily aware of himself as a tiny, insignificant speck in the vast, black, implacable ocean. He tried desperately to swim, to reach air, but could no longer tell which way was up or down. The strength drained from his limbs. He flailed uselessly. Then, as shock and disbelief subsided, it was replaced by a kind of detached numbness. A strange calm descended. He seemed to withdraw from his body; it felt insubstantial - nonexistent. For the first time in his life, he knew, with absolute certainty, that he was going to die.

Then, in those last moments, at the point where life and death met, a weird vision came to him. Looking down at his own body, as if from outside it, he became aware of something in the dark water below him. A pale shape, coming closer. A face. At first - such was his disorientation - he had the strange idea that it might be his own. But as it loomed nearer, its features resolved into those of a corpse, its skin and eyes as pallid as a cave fish, its flesh drawn and bloodless, lips and gums shrunk back from its jagged, broken teeth, its long, tangled hair, flecked with the whorled shells of sea snails and silver with their slime, fanned out like lank, oily weed. All over its grotesquely bloated belly and sunken chest, strange eel-like creatures clung and writhed, while pale, lifeless fish-eaten organs lolled from a ragged black cavity in its side. Out of the black water - impossibly - its dead, skeletal arm, almost stripped of tattered flesh, reached towards him, the fingers of its ghastly hand - thin and sharp as bleached fishbones - clawing convulsively at his leg.

A tug on his wrist brought him back to life. He felt a sudden, rapid motion through the water. A rope burned him. Then the distant sounds of laughter and shouting gurgled back into his head, and, as the weight of the world returned, he was heaved back onto the deck, retching and coughing up salt water, and finally lay quivering and spluttering in a pool of his own making like a helpless newborn. With one swipe of his thin knife, Wide-Face - Finn - cut the line that had been lashed to his wrist as the crew had readied him for the plunge.

Atli looked up to see the beardless captain's hand extended towards him. "Welcome aboard the Hrafn."

As the cheers and laughter rang around him, muffled by fog, he stood unsteadily - ears popping, water dripping in a pool at his feet. His toes were so cold now he could no longer feel them. He shivered, shoulders hunched, teeth rattling noisily in his head - a sensation he felt rather than heard - staggering awkwardly with every heaving movement of the ship, movement to which the forbidding, sturdy figures before him seemed utterly oblivious. For a moment, in a kind of abstract trance, his ears ringing from the cold and the water, his head battered by the dull thunder of their disconnected voices, he marveled at it - at the way they moved with the ship, as if part of it. Somehow, in this strange state in which he now found himself, they appeared to inhabit a different universe altogether, one in which the laws he knew - those which weighed him down, chilled him to the bone, hauled him off balance - did not apply.

He struggled to process all that had happened to him, but could hardly summon the strength. Somehow, as they had actually been happening, he had taken the day's extraordinary events in his stride, even with all their horrors and hardships. He had held on, kept going. He'd felt proud of himself over that. Strong. But now, just when it seemed he had achieved his long-held dream, now that he was once again safe - or as safe as he was likely to ever be - they threatened to overwhelm him; images and sensations flooding into his brain as if the dam holding them in check had finally burst. His dream had turned to nightmare. He felt weak and alone. Tears stung his eyes, lost in the rivulets of seawater coursing down his face. All he wanted now was to go home, and to sleep.

Back at the village, his resolve had been clear. Leaving behind its bafflingly surreal confusion - so strange and unfathomable that it had seemed to barely touch him - he had made his way back through the trampled, fragrant forest to the longship. There was nothing left for him there, no reason now to stay. He was a victim in a village of victims. But he would be that no longer. If he was to die, let him go down fighting like these bold warriors.

Splashing into the shallows along the ship's port side, to which the beached vessel now gently listed, he'd hurled his bundle of wood over the battered, grey-brown gunwale, and hauled himself after it. It was the largest ship he had ever seen, yet once aboard he'd found himself marvelling at how so many men could be accommodated in so cramped a space. From the tall mast - a single trunk of pine - a complex system of ropes stretched all around, some, he could see, wound around wooden cleats at key points along the ship's elegantly curving hull. The central portion of the vessel was dominated by the lowered wooden yard and heavy, furled sail, resting the length of the ship on three supports. Almost as tall as Atli himself, the sturdy posts were topped with horizontal crosspieces shaped to carry the yard and sail - like perches for impossibly large hunting birds.

The main part of deck seemed a chaotic mess of obstacles. Scattered at regular intervals, forming two rows along each side of the ship, were at least thirty long, low chests of various designs, interspersed with numerous boxes, coiled rope, tools and weapons. In the very centre, some distance before and behind the mast, were thick bolts of heavy, folded, striped cloth, tied roughly together with carved planks and poles: tents, for the crew's accommodation when ashore. At either end, some brightly painted shields - several battered and badly split - stood stacked together, with space for many more. On top of it all lay the shipped oars, hastily hauled aboard through the oar holes and laid at an angle towards the stern, ready to be rapidly deployed upon the crew's return. At first, it seemed there was hardly any deck visible, let alone available to walk on. But as Atli picked his way through, it became clear that there was order to this chaos; everything had its place, every bit of space used to best advantage, and - although it was not immediately apparent beneath the abandoned oars - every chest carefully positioned to allow access to any part of the ship, leaving clear pathways down the centre of the vessel for any with a keen eye.

As he passed the length of the furled sail - a vast sausage of dirty, pale, heavy material, criss-crossed with strips of leather - he could just make out glimpses of what appeared to be a dark motif painted or dyed in black upon parts of its surface. An unpleasant, acrid smell of damp rose from it, like wet clothes, mingled with the rank odour of old animal fat. They joined the various other smells that seemed to emanate from the timbers as he negotiated his way aft - fish, rotting seaweed, wet animal skins and stale sweat.

He had to think quickly now. His plan, such as it was, had not extended beyond this point. It was clear that if he was to make good his escape, he would have to hide from his unwitting hosts at least until the ship was in open sea. But where? He stood at the stern, near to the steering board, looking back over the deck, mentally probing every nook or cranny he could find. It seemed hopeless. On this crammed deck there was barely space to hide a rat.

Panic was starting to rise in him. What if there was nowhere? What if the returning vikingr were to find him there, and, laughing, simply deposit him back on the shore, back in his everyday life, and leave, never to be seen again? He could not bear the thought. Then, as he stepped back, he felt a portion of the deck shift under his weight. Crouching to examine it, he noticed a small hole cut in the planking, just big enough for a forefinger. He poked one in, and pulled.

A section lifted like a hatch, opening into a dark confined space below, among the ship's ribs. It was damp and dark with tar and smelt like urine. But it would do. Partly filling the space was some sort of bulbous cage made from withies, broken and useless - a bird or animal trap of some kind, he supposed. Further over, a tiny carved effigy of a god, wrapped around with twisted straw, had been nailed to the inside of the keel. Atli abandoned his bundle of sticks, climbed in, and, shoving the trap further under the deck with his feet, nestled against the clammy timbers, pulling the hatch back over him.

He couldn't tell how long he had waited in darkness, listening to the lap of the water. He had been aware, at some point, of shouting in the distance, and the pounding of feet on shingle. Then, quite suddenly, the deck above him had burst into life with the hasty, heavy tread of the crew, and the rumble of oars being thrust into position. There had been urgent cries all around - some so close, he could hear them swear under their breath. The planking creaked and shifted. Further away, the shouting grew to a roar. There was the clash of metal against metal, and the space around him suddenly reverberated with the grinding of wood and gravel. The ship was moving. Then the vessel freed itself and began to heave to and fro, pitched forward with each pull of the oars. There had been laughter. For a time the motion had even seemed leisurely. Then another shout had gone out, and the ship had begun to lurch more violently, the rhythm of the oars building in speed until everything around him creaked and cracked as if the ship was about to break itself apart. Somewhere to the right of him, the heavy wood of the steer-board had clunked and groaned against the outside of the hull. Amongst it all, inexplicably (at first, he thought he had imagined it) a voice had begun to sing. Suddenly, up ahead, he had seen daylight. Someone further down the ship had raised a section of planking. Surely they could not know he was here? He had gripped the ship's ribs tightly, then, holding his breath against imminent discovery.

But no discovery came. And, as the rise and fall had grown greater, a more urgent fear began to grip him. In the darkness, with each inevitable plunge leaving his stomach behind, he had tried to brace himself against the relentless, increasingly violent motion, clinging to the slimy timbers until he felt his knuckles would burst, repeating over and over the prayer for protection that his father had so often used when they were fishing out in the estuary, and which Atli had never before believed.

It had got significantly worse after that.

The torment that followed had seemed endless; the heaving of the ship so extreme - the inexorable climb on the swell, the sudden drop like a stone, the shuddering and cracking and groaning of the timbers, like howls of agony - that he felt sure he could not survive it. He could not understand how men could go to sea in such conditions. Even in his terrified state, it had made him angry to think of it. Surely, he had thought, whatever was going on outside his wooden prison must be the most treacherous, the most violent of storms? It was only the onset of seasickness that had finally taken his mind off the danger. He had spent the rest of the journey not so much fearing for his life, as wishing for death.

Time had blurred, then. He only remembered becoming aware, somehow, that the swell had diminished - and then, without warning, the scowling face of the ship's captain had appeared, framed in the dim rectangle of the open hatch. Then he had been quivering on deck, facing the stares of the crew - and before he knew it, engulfed by the numbing cold of the sea.

And then there was the thing in the water.

The memory came back, chilling him to the core. He could no longer judge whether it had even been real. As he swallowed, his ears popped and crackled again. Water ran from them, and the sounds of the ship, the sea and the men - now busying themselves with the fishing lines - returned with a disconcerting clarity, sharp and bright in his aching head. He felt himself fully back in their world, stunned and helpless, and only dimly aware of a throbbing pain in his calf where four rows of parallel scratches stood out, angry red weals against the white flesh.