I awoke to find the ship unusually quiet and dripping with moisture. The storm and its wind had vanished and the sea had subsided to a soft oily swell. It was still dark, but dawn was approaching and without sitting up I could imagine the scene about the deck.
I threw off my woollen sleeping rugs and, yawning and stretching, stiffly stood up. The men around me frowned, their ears were straining for the vaguest sound that would show that we were not alone out here, in the vastness of this fog shrouded sea world.
Looking about, I started to ask what was going on.
A nearby warrior grabbed my shoulder and held a hand across my mouth he shook his head with its wild, shaggy main of red hair. Obviously we were to be silent. Through the curtain of his thick red moustache, his fetid whisper brought a simple message,
‘Say nothing No-man. Open your mouth again and, gods or no gods, I will slit your throat.’ he smiled grimly and added. ‘Just listen.’
Through the darkness I thought I heard a sound. One of those small, but detached sounds of the night that almost blended itself with the soft gurgling of water as it passed our storm damaged hull.
Without thinking, I reached out into the greying gloom and caught the shoulder of Ivar as he soundlessly passed among us. I cupped a hand around my ear and pointed forward, across the leeward side. Almost as though I had requested it, it came again, the soft tinkling sound of a stream of water as it reached the surface of the sea. Someone, and within twenty paces, was taking an early morning pee.
Ivar gripped my shoulder and beamed. He’d heard it too. He motioned his dozen or so, sailor crew to follow him aft to where Brent stood, his leg hanging over the steering board handle, peering into the opal swirl of the fog.
Silently, Ivar signalled and graphically mimed what we had heard. Brent thought for a moment or two and then nodded, whispering orders into Ivar’s ear.
Ivar, with two of his men, crept along the deck giving out Brent’s orders and a message that melted grins into grimness.
‘Make ready. Without a sound. We will come alongside and board her as the shell of night cracks into morning. Anybody who makes a noise, any noise, will be blinded and have both hands cut off before being tossed over the side.’
That was very explicit and unnecessarily savage I thought. We could all now hear other sounds from the still hidden ship’s crew as it stirred itself into life for another day. Pots rattled, a bailing bucket slopped and even the sound of a belch reached us. Just as though it were coming from behind a room curtain at home I thought, a memory from my younger years, of waking in my tented bedspace rushed through my mind.
Silently, like the very wraiths of the fog itself, Ivar’s men took up their various tools of violence. Some had sharp grappling hooks that were attached to stout plaited ropes, they waited along the ship’s side peering into the fading gloom. The warriors, with a brief caress, took their ever ready short axes, swords and knives from their wrappings and, shrugging into ring-mail tunics, they too were silently ready for the coming action. Bread and full strength, un-watered, wine was passed around. The discipline amongst these pirates was so sharp, that everything was successfully done without even the tiniest of sounds.
Ivar, grinning cheerfully, turned from his position by the mast to give Brent the thumbs up signal that all was ready.
The light of dawn, now high above the sea’s chill white cloak, was gathering pace and the fog began to retreat before our gently thrusting bow. Brent held our course steady for several long moments, his eyes trying to focus through the obscuring pearly shroud.
Suddenly, the deck heeled as the helm was put over and, just a stone’s throw from our snarling dragon figurehead, we saw the shadowy form of a large wallowing ship. The outlines of rigging and mast took on firm shapes quickly as we swooped smoothly onto their windward side. At the same time, a group of Ivar’s men doused our sail with water and swiftly furled it to its yard.
Brent brought us skilfully alongside and, on Ivar’s signal, the grapples arched across the short gap between us, trailing their ropes behind them like writhing, living serpents. Still no sound came from a single throat.
Brent abandoned his steering position and, drawing his sword, roared the name of his god Thor into the stillness of the morning air and leapt onto the top of the merchantman’s gunwale.
‘Away we go my lucky lads. She’s ours.’
Despite myself, my heart leapt with excitement as a battle yell, from fully three score throats went into the stubborn remains of the fog and the men leapt across our side onto the deck of the merchantman.
Screams of panic, rising quickly to the pitch of nightmare terror, came from the deck tents of the merchantman and several pale, sleep and alcohol-puffed faces peered toward us from around the piles of deck cargo. A number of their men struggled to drag what weapons they had from beneath clothing and sleeping rugs.
But they were lost. Their lack of vigilance and imagination had betrayed their failing courage. The Viking horde swept across them quickly, cutting down everything that could breathe in their wake with their terrible axes and finely honed blades.
The trader’s broad deck was quickly slick from the murderous killing, the stink of violent death hung around us in the calm. Within moments it was over. The only people left alive of the ship’s crew, was a sorry, terrified looking group on the after deck who were on their knees before Brent. Ivar hovered close by, a short axe in one hand, a slender knife in the other and sticky blood to his elbows.
I moved towards our own master’s deck to hear what was going on. One of the people looked to me like the ship-owner or the master. The other two I thought, were his wife and young son.
Although the proceedings were conducted in a language that was new to me, the unmistakable tone told me what was happening.
The merchant, in total desperation was pleading miserably, trying to bargain for their lives. The woman that I took to be the man’s wife was shuddering with fright and terror of the inevitable.
Brent, in an effort to communicate, tried the several languages at his disposal to get the wretched man to give him the whereabouts of his treasure.
Brent turned and nodded to Ivar. I wanted to look away. I could feel the gore rising in my throat.
Ivar grabbed the body of the small boy and wrenched him away from his mother’s protective grasp. He picked him up by the scruff of his finely made tunic and, holding him high, at arm’s length, paraded him before the leering onlookers. Ivar turned slowly, almost a graceful dancer’s pirouette. Suddenly, with a guttural shout he tossed the terror-rigid body, high into the air above the men. The baby’s scream of fright was cut short as his struggling, kicking body was caught by the blade of a Viking long sword. To complete his performance, Ivar bowed with the art of a thespian towards the horror stricken father. The lad’s mother, mercifully, had feinted and had crumpled to the deck. She didn’t feel the rough hands grab her, the violence of having her clothing ripped away. But soon an animal wailing of pain and terror rose from the centre of the group of men that eagerly gathered around her.
All the while, Brent’s eyes never left the merchant’s face, whose panicking glance at the deck by his feet gave him away. As the last screams from his wife’s tortured body bit into the morning air Brent shoved the merchant aside and, grabbing a short spear, prised up a deck plank from the spot where the small family had stood.
Reaching into the rough hole, he hauled out an iron-bound box and tipped out a glittering, rainbow cascade of jewels, some mounted, but many loose. A dozen scrabbling, bloody paws pushed and shoved to take some of the riches.
‘There’s more than enough here for all of us.’ called Brent. ‘There’s another six cases down there.’ he pointed to the yawning hole that he’d made.
In the triumphant moments of discovering the horde, nobody, except for me, noticed the old merchant.
Pale, his face streamed in tears, he crept away from the melee of greed, and headed towards the mutilated remains of his wife. Silently he gathered her into his arms and, picking up the limp, doll-like, body of what had been his son he slipped over the side of the ship into the sea and disappeared.
Brent looked up as the last trace swirled into the green opacity of the smooth swell. He rushed to the side of the ship and peered into the depths.
‘The bastard.’ he swore. ‘I’d planned a glorious end for him. After his eyes had shown me the hiding place, I was going to have his face fed with his own, severed manhood.’
The crowding warriors cheered. Brent held up his hand to quiet them.
‘Then I was going to put out his eyes.’ louder cheers. ‘Then we’d tie ‘im to the mast while we set alight to the filth of this rotting pile.’
His crew and warriors cheered him with the enthusiasm of victors. Many, with a show of childish contempt spat into the water where the brave man had taken his family to peace.
It had all happened very quickly, I was numbed by the deliberate, wanton violence. I had seen battles, but surely there can have been no honour in this carnage. But they had won. The piratical mob had taken their prize and it looked as though the benefit to their purses would be enormous. A King’s ransom.
I scanned across at the deck of the trading ship, here and there were the remains of a celebration, maybe they were nearing their journey’s end. Or it may have been, that the merchant and his crew had been celebrating a near miss with a pirate’s longship the evening before. Amidst the empty flagons and upturned cups, the Norse warriors rummaged for anything of novelty or value. Corpses were stripped, a few sickeningly violated before they were all dropped overboard like so much galley waste.
Ivar formed the men into a chain and they began to bring their bounty onto the longship. Many brightly coloured rolls of filmy cloth, lace-work and the boxes of jewels went below decks to the cargo space, barrels of wine, boxes of spice and dyestuffs were stowed on deck along with the meagre collection of old weapons and a mound of rescued clothing.
When they had finished, the men returned to our deck, each carrying a bundle of looted personal belongings, rings, necklets and the like as well as yet more ale and wine. I stood, rooted to the spot by my horror of witnessing such a display of cruelty. I smoothed my feelings of anguish and guilt with realistic thoughts of how futile any attempt at defending the poor people would have been. I had more reason than ever now, to live through this mess, return and tell the world about the behaviour I had witnessed.
And I still had to fulfil my oath to the Watchett children. And now there was another small life to add to the burden of my promise. How many more would there be, before I could find the opportunity of satisfying my pledge.
Smoke billowed from the stricken ship’s gaping cargo space as she was pushed clear of our side. Two of the grapples had to be cut free in their haste to leave the wreckage of their dawn work. The wandering fingers of flame discovered what must have been a store of lamp oil because a sheet of flame shot upwards, into the brightness of the greying dawn sky.
Laughing and stinking of the slaughter that they had wrought, the men came past me to barter, swop and argue. There would be brawling later, unless Brent moved in to stop it soon. Ivar saw to the securing of the sail and setting the lookouts, then he came towards me, on his way to Brent who was already on the master’s deck pondering his magician’s table to determine the direction for our heading.
‘A present for you No-man.’ said Ivar and, as he passed, he held a small gold coin in his still blood-sticky fingers. ‘You were the first to alert us to the thieving merchant’s nearness.’ he grinned.
I pushed his hand away. ‘I want none of it.’
Some of the crewmen near me looked on with anger and distrust. I thought I saw a fleeting look of incomprehension pass across Ivar’s eyes, but he just shrugged and carried on his way.
It took several large doses from Ivar’s cane to get the men started at the long, heavy oars. Many had been awake most of the previous night and some of them had already started to gamble away their shares in the blood soaked mound of plunder piled on the ship’s deck at the waist. Eventually, the oars were put out, I was shoved onto one in the bow of the ship, the most awkward to use as the angle down to the water was steeper than the rest and it was the wettest when the waves broke against the bow. The great sail was still furled and, making way under oar, we turned to face the way we had come, straight into the teeth of the freshening breeze that had risen with the climbing orange ball of the new day’s sun.
We would I thought, have many watery leagues to travel before we reached our original line to the south seas, we had been sailing before a westerly breeze for most of the night. It would take some careful judgement to bring a landfall in the right place.
Away over the opposite gunwale I could see the brightly burning hull of the merchantman, a stream of thick black smoke stretched away to the east like an accusing finger pointing at the bright new day. As the waves stretched their backs I could see naked bodies floating among the debris of their shortened lives. A group of gulls were already investigating the remains, their mournful cries mewing across the widening gap of cold ocean. As I watched, the blazing ship settled slowly into the water and, in a cloud of smoke and steam, she slid beneath the waves. An event probably not noticed by anyone else, judging by the guffaws of laughter, excitedly recounted stories of personal prowess and the mocking derision of the few who had only wet their blades on the corpses of those already defeated.
Numbly, I let the rhythm of the oar-stroke take over my tired mind. Soon the vain side of Brent’s character would call for me and my writing skills. As neither he, nor any other on board could read, I would write the truth of the murderous deeds that had been performed. Provided I could tell him the story he wanted to hear he’d never know any different. I determined that the records would provide the truth, a damning indictment of the actions of these murdering brigands. And not the vainglorious tribute that my slave-master intended. Amongst its final pages would be a description of the destruction and wrathful vengeance of justice that must surely fall on this rabble.
‘No-man!’ Brent’s voice made me start. ‘Come, we have words of glorious courage and victory to set out in our Saga.’
A grumbling warrior, clutching a wine skin in his filthy fist was sent forward to take my position at the oar.
With a cheerful smile I stood and gave him my place, muttering in English,
‘Here you murderous, ugly hog, take it.’
He smiled his gratitude, thinking I offered praise or congratulation. It was a childish thing I suppose, but it gave me pleasure. A pleasure which turned to some element of satisfaction as I sat to compose my words of truth for Brent’s wretched journal.