Serpent’s Tail

By Mharie West

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Thorgest Ketilson woke badly since he had entered his forty-fourth year. Each day, he felt like there was wool between his ears. This time was no different.

“Up, Ref.” Makarios’ voice had that particular snap which meant weapons were out, and so Thorgest was scrabbling for his sword, even as he got out of his blanket and to his feet as best he could. His long plaited hair swung behind him as he steadied himself. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he saw with dismay that the rowing had stopped and every man was on his feet. Ulf had his sword out and something hot and out of control shone in his eyes.

“You jump when your harlot asks, hey, Ref?”

Thorgest’s mind raced. He thought that the inn door had creaked too loudly the night before they left port. He kept his sword low, but poised and ready nonetheless.

“I jump for no one.”

Ulf sneered. “Then does he jump for you, your foreign boy?” He pointed his sword straight at Makarios, which was a threat and an insult combined. Thorgest ransacked his mouth and spat hard on the deck at Ulf’s feet.

“We’re in the middle of the fucking sea, Ulf. What do you think you can do here?” He brought his sword up and ready. Makarios moved to his flank, sword out too.

“Do you do it because you’re too old to have kids anymore, she-fox?” Ulf taunted Thorgest with the feminine version of his nickname, Ref.

Thorgest gave an exaggerated sigh. “Really? How are such serious insults coming from a puppy-boy straight off his mother’s tit?”

He saw the killing rage flare in Ulf’s eyes then, which confirmed it hadn’t been there before. Still, the young man hesitated.

Thorgest could understand why. No one else was making a move to help either of them, so all of a sudden Ulf was facing two seasoned, experienced fighters alone, on a trading ship in the middle of the ocean.

Ah, the boy was too young for trading. Barely older than Thorgest’s oldest son. He needed a few more raids under his belt to get that fire out.

“I should kill you for what you’ve said,” Thorgest said clearly. They all knew it was true. The right to kill after that sort of insult was enshrined in law. “I could kill you. But it would be dangerous for everyone else involved, so I’ll see you when we’ve both got feet on dry land again.”

“Coward!” Ulf snarled, looking a little like his lupine namesake. More quickly than Thorgest had expected, Ulf took the three short steps separating them and lunged.

It was a clumsy, showy blow, and for someone like Thorgest who’d been paid to kill in the great city Miklagard, it was child’s play. He swept the point aside with the pommel of his sword then put all of his weight into shoving Ulf, chest to chest.

Ulf staggered backwards and fell. He kept the sword in his hand as he went down, and accidentally nicked his bench partner. The other man swore and punched Ulf in the side of the head.

Thorgest extended his sword and took half a step forwards, just to prove that he could finish it if he wanted, then stepped back. He looked at his crew…the crew he had thought was his. Several of them wouldn’t meet his eye. It was a painful thing to see.

He wondered whether any of them were truly offended by the public unveiling that he and Makarios were lovers (a secret most of them had known at least something of previously), and which of them were simply excited by the idea of getting his ship if he was killed or outlawed. Or just at seeing him taken down a peg or two.

“I’ll see you’re all paid your share when we get in,” he said at last, before sitting down on his bench and picking up his oar.

The result, once they pulled into home, was worse than Thorgest had feared. He had expected Ulf and maybe one other youngster to jump off the ship and try to stab him from the shallows. What he hadn’t expected was an almost equal split of the crew of ten, eyeing each other warily as they stood in the foam.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. He pointed at Ulf, who was in the middle of his little group and looking much more confidant now. “He wants to kill me. I have every right to kill him. The rest of you shouldn’t be involved, unless you really want to start blood-feuds for your children and their children.” Without taking his eyes off Ulf’s “crew,” he pointed to the men who had gathered behind him and said, “You too. Don’t you think I could handle this sapling with one hand tied behind my back? Go.”

There was some mumbling. A familiar bulk settled at his side and Makarios whispered, “Never.”

As everyone knew it would, that act of intimacy made the others charge.

It was four on two, but within the first frantic few strokes, two of them fell away. One had a slashed arm spouting blood, and Thorgest had simply clubbed the other one on the head and kicked him away. Now it was only Ulf and his benchmate. You bonded to your benchmate, it was a hard thing to turn away from, but Thorgest could see the doubt forming in the man’s eyes.

Still, in they came again. He and Makarios were trying to not do real damage, and that was always a problem in a fight. Ulf feinted for Thorgest and let the deflection carry his blade straight into Makarios’ face. His instant of satisfaction faded when Makarios stabbed him in his sword arm. Thorgest took the opportunity and made the split-second decision. The law was on his side. His sword pierced into Ulf’s stomach, and he angled it as high as he could to try and find the heart and cause a quick death.

“Nithing!” came a shout from where the rest of Ulf’s supporters had run to the crowds on shore. Thorgest stared at them in disbelief and pointed at Ulf, who was gurgling and turning the wet sand brown.

“He’s dead because he called me that.”

“You can’t kill us all!” Under the hostile eyes of his former friends and neighbours, who crowded close to let him know he wasn’t allowed any of the cargo, Thorgest did the only thing he could. He and Makarios emptied their ship chests into their sacks and prepared to leave. “Look at me, Maka,” Thorgest muttered as they lifted their spare clothes and a few days of uneaten rations.

“I’ll live, Ref.” Makarios’ olive skin was slick and red from cheek to collar.

“I can see your cheekbone.” It glinted like moonlight in the gaping red flesh.

“And you’ve seen it before.”

They trudged away from the ship. The hostility from the crowd was now palpable. They might have killed their accuser but they hadn’t denied anything, which was basically the same as admitting everything, and it was probably only a matter of moments before someone started spinning the tale that Ulf hadn’t deserved to die.

But after an hour or two, they felt fairly certain no one was following them. Thorgest turned to Makarios and scraped some dried blood from his lip away with his fingernail. “I’ll get to Kupsi if I can and we’ll round up some of the old crew and meet you at the cove where I’ve kept the Serpent.” He hadn’t rowed in the Serpent for years. It was a light, fast ship, which had been perfect, back in the day, for raiding round coastlines.

“But—”

Good, he was glad that Makarios was uncomfortable about going back to activities best suited to hot-headed youths like Ulf. “Get home, Maka.” It was a journey of several hours and doubtless some hotheads would now have a head start. “Sewenna knows what to do if anything happens,” he said, more to convince himself than anything else.

“More than both of us put together,” Makarios agreed, then leaned in and gave Thorgest the bloodiest kiss they’d shared since Thorgest has lost most of his nose in a battle fifteen years ago. “Meet you at the Serpent.”

Sewenna the Blind, they called her in the village, along with a number of unflattering things: nag, leech, English. That last one was true, though she hadn’t set foot on her homeland since Ref had snatched her away twenty years ago. The other two might be true, too. People could think what they liked. But ‘blind’ wasn’t true. At least, not how everybody thought.

True, she couldn’t see facial expressions and couldn’t see when the ground rose or fell, and certainly couldn’t see her neighbour’s fine stitch-work. But none of that was really necessary. She could see shapes, colours and movement, she could hear well, and her children joked that she had magic fingers due to their sensitivity.

That night, she was grateful they thought her black-bound and helpless.

She woke with a start. There was nothing unusual in this; it was the price she paid for paying more attention to sounds than most. Still, there was something about the silence this time that scared her. She concentrated into the quiet, letting it fill her while she waited for it to be disturbed again.

A clink.

A weapon.

There was absolutely no good reason for someone to be trying to silently move a weapon right outside their house.

As quietly as she possibly could, she rose from the bench she slept on and walked slowly and carefully around the fire to where her sons slept on benches on the other side.

“Ssh,” she whispered into their ears even as she shook them back and forth to rouse them. When they were younger, she had taught them to write runes by tracing them on sand, mud, and their skin. She did this now, urgently, aware that every second she was spending was a waste: úr for iron, madr for man.

Her younger son, Godgest went straight for his belt knife and was half upright by the time she pinched him, hard. For once in her life, she was glad for the elder boy, Thorkell, who thought and moved more slowly. Silence was ringing in her ears like a bell. She whispered to each boy, her words soft and gastlike on the air. They had an escape route, though it had been created when the children were too young to remember, and if they took that path rather than make a stupid heroic stand in the house, then they might all survive.

Boys informed, she went back round to Thora. Her daughter was already sitting up, jaw set and clutching her own belt knife. The noises were getting louder and Thora had always had better hearing than her brothers anyway.

“There’s more than one, Mama.”

Sewenna nodded slowly. Understandable. One man might consider himself able to kill two women in their sleep, but her sons posed a more significant problem.

This was definitely a murder attempt. A humiliation or a threat would have been delivered in daylight, or with great noise. But this was a cowardly, dishonourable murder attempt: killing a family in their sleep in the dead of night with no chance for them to fight back. It should ruin all who took part in it. So why was it happening? What had prompted it?

She thought that she knew. When your household was built like theirs, you knew it was just a matter of time before your society couldn’t tolerate you any longer.

Minutes later, they smelled smoke. In the darkness, the flickers of fire at the door were so stark in contrast that even Sewenna could make them out. There was more noise coming from outside now: low, angry male voices. Sewenna cast a nervous look at the other end of the house, where she knew a stout wooden bar blocked the door and wondered if someone out there was gaining a conscience before it was too late.

Luckily they had nearly finished moving all of the massive pile of old furs that lay in one area of the floor. They would have been at least thirty seconds faster, but Godgest and Thorkell had kept scuttling up and down and returning with sacks that clinked. If she had to guess, Thorkell had grabbed a half-finished axe-head he’d discarded two days ago and Godgest had grabbed a fire-poker. She tried not to snap at them about it. Neither of them were little boys anymore and she was lucky they had listened to her at all and not stormed straight out of the house, waving their puny bits of iron.

Also, if she was fair, she’d admit that she’d stopped and tied a full purse to her belt while she was pulling on her outer dress. Job done, she lifted the final fur away for the first time in fifteen years and the children all made noises of surprise as the wooden trapdoor was revealed. She tugged at the handle. It stuck. One, two, three hands joined hers and heaved, and the trapdoor opened. Even to her eyes, its square black maw looked uninviting.

“Where did you say this goes again, Mama?” Godgest whispered.

“Helvegr,” Thora said with typically bitter humour. The Road to Hel.

Sewenna rolled her eyes at their melodrama. They hadn’t even thought of the really terrifying bit: that the tunnel could cave in when they were inside it, and that they could end up suffocating underground as their home burned.

Ha. Lovely.

The front door was starting to catch light properly now. The shadows it cast made her children look much older than they were.

“Thorkell, you first.” She shuffled aside to let him peer into it. Now she elaborated on what she’d told them earlier, “It was measured for your father so you should have enough space to move forwards with your knees and elbows. Eventually, you’ll hit another wooden trapdoor. You’ll end up in the old outhouse—yes, the one we used to tell you was rotting and full of ants. There should be a big wooden peg in the back wall; if you pull it out, the whole wall will fall away. Try to do that quietly. It backs straight onto the copse. Hide in there and wait for me.”

“No, I’ll go last, Mama.” Godgest. Always Godgest. He stood in front of her with that silly patchy beard he was so proud of, stubbornly folding his arms. She could see the stupid poker dangling from his belt.

“No.” She was calm but firm. He scowled so hard that she could see it distort the blur of his face.

“Yes!”

“I should really go last. I can stand heat better than the rest of you,” Thorkell, an apprentice blacksmith, pointed out.

“I’d rather crisp and know you were all in there, getting away,” Sewenna said bluntly.

Thora sighed loudly at them all and plunged into the hole like a diver. Sewenna’s stomach dropped to her feet as she imagined the potential for slow suffocation.

“Wait a bit before following,” she advised Thorkell. “You don’t want her to accidentally kick you in the face.” Just three years ago, she’d had a swollen, bruised face for days when they’d crawled into it to test it and Makarios had panicked in front of her.

Smoke was starting to fill the room beyond what they could usually tolerate. She hoped that the stout, hardened outer shell could withstand the fire for just a bit longer.

“Mama, I’m staying until you go!” Godgest hissed.

“Then we’ll both die and that would be a pity.” She stared at his face as the seconds ticked away in frantic heartbeats. People tended to react better when she stared at them like this, even though they were just blurs to her. “I’ll be behind you. I promise.”

She didn’t need to see his eyes to know when he gave in.

True to her promise, she wriggled into the hole only thirty or so heartbeats behind him. She closed her eyes in the darkness and started to edge forwards on her knees and elbows, being careful with her feet. If they got tangled in her skirt, she might accidentally kick the wall. She knew how fragile the tunnel could be. And who knew how much air there was left? With three panting, wriggling bodies before her, and a fire behind them, perhaps it would run out soon. There had been no point in scaring the children, but that just meant that all the fear sat on her chest like a great toad.

The earth was freezing cold and damp around her, and small clods kept dropping onto her face. She imagined ghostly dwarven touches and shuddered. She thought that she could hear Godgest moving up ahead of her—and just for a terrible second, her mind told her that it wasn’t her son and it wasn’t moving away from her.

After what seemed like an eternity, when she was certain that she couldn’t breathe another breath in this underground snake belly, she felt a sharp upwards tilt. Silently she thanked the Lord of her childhood and every god of her husband’s, just in case any of them were listening. The next second, a white blur was waving in front of her face and she could hear Thorkell telling her to grab on.

She sat on the edge of the hole and spent a few precious moments trying to control her breathing so that they couldn’t tell how badly she’d reacted down there. She noticed her filthy hands, felt the mud in her ears and up her calves. The others appeared equally as filthy, at least if the unusual darkness of their faces was anything to go by. At least one of them had badly chattering teeth. Probably Thora—she always did forget her cloak. Well, at least they might not be immediately recognisable.

“Have you got the wall open?” She coughed to try and cover up the alarming deep pitch of her voice.

“Of course!” Godgest’s voice was strained. “I’m holding it ajar for us. We were just waiting for you.”

She wriggled her toes to check how her leg muscles were doing. Minimal shaking. She’d be fine. “Let’s go, then.”

Thorkell took the other side of the loose wall and they lowered it slowly and carefully. One side snagged on a sapling, which was reassuring. If the trees had started to regrow around the gap they’d cut a few years ago, their escape should be less obvious. She put both hands out to navigate around the snagged door. Gadgets made an abortive “helpful” gesture towards her and she hissed at him like a cat.

“Peer over the edge of the outhouse and tell me what you see,” she demanded. It was her way of reminding him that he could be helpful in better ways. “Is anyone looking in this direction?”

“The-there’s a lot of people, Mama.” His voice trembled just a little. Thora crawled out of the opening on her hands and knees and took a look through the screening branches of a bush too. Even Thorkell had twisted round and was trying to see over his shoulder.

“No one’s looking, Mama,” Thora confirmed. “They’re all crowded round the front, just…waiting.” Now her voice wobbled.

Waiting for the screaming to start, Sewenna thought bitterly.

Never one to be outdone, Godgest interrupted when Thora drew breath, “There’s probably half the village out there.” He named a few of them.

The detached wall scraped against the rest of the outhouse. It sounded deafening. She’d just caught her movement in the edge of her vision—Thorkell had flinched, hard, and who could blame him when Godgest had just said Thorkell’s future father in-law’s name?

Enough. She shepherded them outside and then told them to try and prop the wall back up again. It was probably futile but the tiny attempt at covering their tracks made her feel better.

They pushed onwards through the trees—doubled over at first for cover under stunted thorn bushes and eventually standing taller as the trees around them matured and multiplied. From long habit, Thora went first. Not only was she the closest to Sewenna’s height and so the best judge of obstacles, but her leading stopped the boys from arguing and fighting.

Sewenna’s eyes were starting to hurt from pointless straining into the dark, so she closed them instead and trudged forwards. That meant she was the first to hear the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. She opened her mouth and eyes.

And Thora screamed. Sewenna’s heart tried to appear in her mouth and her feet simultaneously, and she charged forwards like a bear in the pit.

“Easy, my darling!” came a familiar voice. A familiar outline too, with a familiar way of standing.

Sewenna stopped dead. “Fuck you, Maka,” she said instead of the hysterical giggle that wanted to come out.

“Mama!” Thorkell sounded so shocked that Sewenna had to remind herself of the language she’d caught him using when he’d got distracted at the forge yesterday. She put her hand on Thora’s shoulder and separated Makarios and Thora from their hug. He obligingly hugged her instead, which hadn’t been her intention, but she’d be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that it was good to lean into his warm embrace for a second or two.

“What’s going on?” The pommel of his sword was digging hard into her hip. It was unsheathed, which meant it was bloodied. She could smell blood too, standing this close to him.

He clasped her hand and squeezed it three times, an old sign for ‘We’ll discuss this later, not in front of the children.’

She frowned and went for a different question instead. “Where’s Ref?” She ran her free hand over his face, and he flinched away as her fingers brushed something wet and ridged.

“He’s heading for the Serpent.”

“Ah.” Sewenna let her eyes slide even more out of focus for a second as she tried to figure out which emotion was causing the sudden weight on her chest. She wasn’t fond of that ship. She’d been brought here on that ship. But, more importantly right now, it was the fastest ship and the one that the fewest people knew about.

Makarios’ hand on her elbow broke into her unpleasant thoughts.

“Let’s go, yes?” He had already started walking before she said anything. Thora ceded head of their line to him and they shuffled on as fast as they could. The ship Makarios had mentioned was ten miles away, and they all knew that they needed to be out of sight when the sun came up.

Sewenna knew she was the big obstacle to that. They had to travel at her speed. Most of her slowness was due to the unfamiliar ground and a lifelong fear and avoidance of tripping and falling over obstacles she couldn’t see: loose stones, a dip in the path, a rise in the path…anything, really. At this speed, it would take them maybe four hours. If she just straightened up and accepted that her family would catch her or pick her up if anything happened, they could maybe make it in three hours.

Come on. Speed up.

She walked on quickly, with her heart beating her throat. Every step felt like a disaster waiting to happen. Every sound could be an attacker bursting out of the trees. The moon was bright enough that people with normal eyesight would be content—that wasn’t what you wanted when you were trying to escape.

“Who’s joining us?” she asked after what felt like hours of tense trudging, when she couldn’t quite bear keeping herself company anymore.

People had to be joining them, or they might as well have lain down in the house and drunk the smoke. Although they all knew how to row, the ship needed twenty people to row it most effectively, so six wouldn’t be of any use at all.

“Not the usual crew.” Makarios’ voice was flat. “Ref’s sent Kupsi as a messenger to round up some old favours.”

Kupsi was a grizzled veteran of fifty who had known Ref since they went raiding together as young men. It made Sewenna feel a little better that he was still dependably around.

“Why not the usual crew?” That was Godgest. Sewenna guessed from the angry tone of his voice what he would be saying next, her most predictable child. “You can stop trying to keep secrets from us now. Someone’s tried to kill us! In our beds! We deserve to know why!”

“He’s got a good point,” Thora said. “Father clearly did something. Did he kill someone?”

“Not unprovoked,” Makarios muttered, half under his breath. He stopped so abruptly that Sewenna banged her nose on his shoulder, and turned to face them all. “You’re right, you’ve got a point. Or rather, you’ve all got a choice and you’ve got to make it now.”

Silence. In her mind Sewenna could see the shape of what Makarios was about to say, but, as if the situation was deliberately mirroring her eyesight, she couldn’t make out the exact details.

“Ref and I are both outlaws now. For…well…” His head moved towards Sewenna, as if silently asking for help.

“For fucking.”

Godgest. Why was it always Godgest? But no, Thora was nodding hard too. Makarios’ face was still pointed towards Sewenna. She could see from the shadow pattern that his mouth was slightly open. Her mind, too, was blank. She’d always thought that she, Ref and Maka had kept their secret, but that instant, shared reaction surely meant that at the very least, the children had had suspicions.

“Ref can tell you more details if he wants when he gets to us,” Makarios said eventually. “But the point is still the same. We’re both outlaws—or I’m sure we will be once they get to the þing assembly. If you help us, you will be seen in a very bad light.”

“What, like the light from the fire they used to burn us in our beds?” Thorkell hadn’t spoken in at least an hour and his voice was gravelly. Sewenna raised her eyebrows at his dramatic pronouncement.

Godgest jeered, “What are you, a skald now?”

They were all starting to stumble by the time that they reached the cove where the ship was stored. The distance wasn’t necessarily the problem, but combined with sleep deprivation, worn-off adrenalin and the fact that in Thorkell’s case, he had put on his old ruined shoes in his hurry to flee, it all added up to a grumpy, wobbly group. Makarios was the only one seemingly unaffected. At several points in the last mile or so, Sewenna had to outright lean on him, rather than just using his shoulder for guidance, and he had walked on despite his wound and her extra weight. Now he shepherded them under a cliff, up a pebbly slope and into a small cave. There was just enough room to fit everybody in.

He looked down at them with one hand on his sword and nodded unsmilingly. Sewenna thought, with a slightly hysterical laugh, that smiling was probably not an option for him right now.

The sun was rising now, casting pink and cream shadows over them all. Sewenna could have wept for relief at the resurgence of colour. She dealt so much better with the world when she could identify bits of it properly. She was tempted to look up at Makarios, get close enough to feel his breath on her face while she checked his gaping cut and she pretended not to want to kiss him for the children’s sake. Instead of being that self-indulgent, she examined Thorkell’s feet, made Thora sit down, and just…tried not to antagonise Godgest.

The image of her burning house kept creeping back into her mind. Money she hadn’t been able to bring. Rugs and blankets, and the first horseshoe Thorkell had ever forged, which he’d given to her. Every single item of clothing other than what they stood in. All gone.

Shut up, Sewenna. She took a deep breath in and shut her eyes. Her eyelids let a single tear go free. Just shut up. That won’t help.

They were tightly snuggled up against each other and feeling warm for the first time in hours. Thorkell was definitely asleep. It was always obvious when he was asleep. With his snoring deadening her hearing, Sewenna knew Thorgest had reached them, not because she’d heard or seen him, but because Makarios had, and the loosening of tension from his shoulders was obvious.

“He took his time,” she whispered into the warm skin of his neck. Makarios laughed and staggered on sleepy legs out of the cave so that the rest of them could follow him.

Thorgest stood at the bottom of the slope looking, Sewenna thought, much like an engraving of Thor himself. He just needed a hammer instead of his sword. It was the ridiculously dramatic way that his waist-length curly red hair streamed out behind him. She couldn’t wait for the wind direction to change and for that mane to thwack him firmly in the face.

Thora was the first to fling herself at her father and he picked her up and swung her around even though she was a young woman of fifteen. Fierce hugs followed for Thorkell and Godgest.

“I knew you’d get them out,” he said to Sewenna, standing close enough to her that she could see most of his facial expression. Their foreheads rested together.

“You hoped,” she replied even as her heart melted anew, because she’d been brutally honest by default for too many years to change now.

“I prayed.” He touched his hammer amulet briefly. Then he pursed his lips and whistled a passable imitation of a cuckoo.

Suddenly, men materialised from the trees a few hundred feet away. Sewenna flinched backwards, then felt a lot better for it when she saw Makarios take his hand off his sword.

“Crew?” she asked Thorgest. He nodded. Over the thud of relief in her ears she asked the question that she knew from past experience was at the forefront of every rower’s mind, “How on earth are we paying them, Ref?” She ran distracted fingers over his muddy and torn tunic sleeve. “Did you keep something from trading?” She could see he had a sack with him, but she very much doubted he’d been able to get away with much of value if people had been trying to kill them.

“Now, that’s a question.” Thorgest grinned. He put an arm round her waist and cupped her chin on his other hand. “When I found you, Sewenna—”

She opened her mouth to yelp “Found?!” but the sparkle in his eyes was too sweet.

“We weren’t sure we would all make it back home, and we’d gotten a lot of stuff from those monks. So we hid it, and hoped that we could come back later for it.”

“Ah.” That was Makarios. He shuffled into the hug and they naturally let him in. He said sarcastically, “So, we’re going in a raiding boat to find buried treasure. I can’t wait.”

Sewenna rolled her eyes but pecked him on his non-injured cheek anyway. She pulled away from the comfort of the hug, turned her face towards the grey blur of the sea, and took the first step towards the waiting Serpent.