Godspeed.
Hlif’s last word and the manner of it was sweeter to remember than the last time Skarfr had parted from her. But his activity was the same. Lean forward, dip, splash, pull on the oars as you lean backwards, lift the oars, lean forward, dip… All that Thorbjorn had taught him. The stronger your mid-section, the faster the boat. Fergus lacked technique but he was strong and pulled evenly so the boat set off at a fine pace, aided by the current and lack of wind.
As on the dragon ship, the oars were firmly attached to the boat by rope bands but instead of the modern oar-holes, there were traditional wooden kjeips. Nailed to the gunwales, each block had a small tree fork, from which a shield could be hung and to which the oars were tied for security. The kjeips also offered a brace against which to row. They felt and sounded different, less of a clunk-clunk knocking noise, than the oar-holes had.
Skarfr adapted quickly to the rowboat and as he found the oars’ rhythm, the shore moved ever further away. Sitting on the bow thwart, he rowed backwards into the future, relying for direction on the coast of Orkney visible on his right and on the woman who faced him, sitting upright and proud on the middle bench. Like Skarfr, she was watching the coast with which they ran parallel but she also looked behind him, out to sea.
Sometimes her eyes flicked to his, then away again. Or was he the one who looked away first, leaning into his stroke and straightening again? Arn had never instructed him in the niceties of such a situation and the magical blue half-light added to the strange intimacy. If Inge had stretched out her legs, she’d have bumped into Skarfr’s.
Behind Inge, using the second pair of kjeips, was Fergus, his arms moving in great sun-wise wheels. Like Skarfr, he was rowing backwards, facing the receding shore, his two companions invisible to him. His back moved to and fro with his oars and Skarfr adjusted his own stroke to work efficiently with the other man. Dip, splash, pull…
Work warmed the men but Inge shivered and pulled her cloak close against the chill of the sea. Three blankets had been stuffed hastily beneath her bench, alongside the pack of food and bottle of ale provided by Brigid. They would need them all at landfall. If they succeeded in making landfall.
When words came, they were like night-birds flying wild and free, then roosting in silence.
‘Never again,’ stated Inge. A vow or a realisation?
Ripple, splash. A tease of wind blew long strands of gold hair across her mouth and she tucked them back in place. One hand clutched her bag of worldly possessions. Skarfr thought of his own, stowed in Rognvald’s Bu, his pipe, the bone and the comb Hlif had given him. He hoped Inge’s were worth rather more in coin than his, for her sake.
‘I owe you my life,’ she said. ‘What manbot would have been paid for my killing? You should have that amount.’
The insult stung. Not all men sought coin like her pirate brother. Skarfr held his tongue, counted ten oar-strokes before replying. That a woman held to the same code of honour as a man, in debt and repayment, had never crossed his mind before.
He realised that if he had hoped for reward, he couldn’t answer her question. He knew of no manbot for any crime against a woman. Maybe such crimes were rarer than feuds between men. Had manbot been offered for Frakork? No, because Thorbjorn had not reached the Thing with his charge but had been pacified by Rognvald. The manbot price depended on a man’s rank so his best guess for Inge would be the same as the price of a karl of good lineage.
Although he knew the system of manbot had ended many feuds over hundreds of years, Skarfr suddenly found it distasteful, looking at this lady worthy of sagas and wondering what coin would replace her.
Fergus’ broad back showed no awareness of the conversation behind him as he swung into his stroke. What about Fergus? What was he worth? The night hid Skarfr’s flush of shame as he remembered that a thrall was property. If Thorbjorn killed Fergus, a small payment to his master would be due. To Skarfr. His thoughts circled back to Inge again.
How could he release this lady from feeling beholden?
‘A man sometimes behaves badly,’ he began. ‘And cannot put right his errors. But when he sees a chance to help another, he can hope that a good deed will weigh against the bad at Ragnarök.’
‘Might you be such a man?’ asked Inge, her voice like a murmur heard in a seashell.
Skarfr nodded. ‘You owe me nothing.’ He hesitated. ‘But should you wish to thank the gods by an act of charity, there is a man deserves reward though he asks none.’ Skarfr flicked his head towards Fergus.
A small smile and the bargain was concluded. ‘It shall be done,’ she said but she didn’t let him off the hook. ‘And manbot for my murder would be…?’
‘Two thousand pennies,’ invented Skarfr.
Even in the dim light, he saw the shadow flit across her face. ‘So little,’ she said.
He hoped she would never find out what price would truly be set.
Even in such a light wind, white-caps played around them in the swirls of oil-dark sea. The last sight of the Orkneyjar coast left a void in the horizon and Skarfr’s stomach. Their lives depended on their navigator’s skills.
‘We keep a straight course.’ Inge’s voice was steady, confident. ‘Feel the current and keep it with us. By the time the tide turns, we’ll be out of the Pentlandsfjord and around the headland. The only landmark we care about is Muckle Skerry. Keep it in sight to port and you’ll stay clear of Stroma, where the Swelchie is, to starboard.’
Skarfr’s insides threatened to return his last meal. ‘The faering won’t survive the Swelchie.’
‘No.’ Her tone had not changed. ‘And neither would a dragon ship. Which is why we keep close enough to the skerry not to be drawn anywhere near the Swelchie. I’ll tell you when we reach it and how close to pass it by. There’s no mist so we should be fine.’
Should be would have to do.
‘That’s Muckle Skerry,’ she told him. ‘Hold steady.’
The rocks loomed white in the distance. Not mist but masses of white that shifted, made short flights and settled again. Terns night-roosting. Skarfr envied their downy warmth, their freedom in flight, and kept pulling the oar. A slower route to freedom. He pulled again and again, through the deep blues of sea and sky, until finally Inge gave them the news, a note of triumph in her voice.
‘We’ve reached Skotland! South-east now and follow the coast. We go with the current and will make landing at Vik well within half a day.’
Relief lent extra vigour to the two men’s strokes and the reassurance of the sombre coastline on their left settled Skarfr’s nerves. In emergency, they could land in one of the coves that indented the cliffs. But Inge had brought them this far, safely, and he trusted her. Not long to go now.
‘Now!’ Inge’s face glowed. ‘Pull in here.’
‘Fergus, use your right oar only. We’ll turn her!’
Skarfr used his left oar and the faering spun in a circle, till the land had disappeared and Inge said, ‘Stop! Forward now.’
And then they were moving towards the land they couldn’t see, with Inge describing how far to go, then slowing them, then – gods be thanked – the drag of sand on the keel. The men jumped out into the shallows and ran the boat up the beach with Inge still in it, as if they were showing St Magnus’ holy bones in his saint’s-day procession.
Amid laughter and tears, Skarfr helped Inge out of the boat. She still clung to her bag and stumbled as she adjusted to the movement the land was making in her imagination.
‘Bannocks, smoked herrings and ale, or Brigid will flay me when I go back,’ said Fergus, his face bright.
‘Fire first,’ said Skarfr. ‘We’ll sleep here. I can’t go one step further.’
Foraging offered enough driftwood to make a fire and Inge once more proved her practical worth and her Ness origins. She emptied slivers of glowing touchwood from a waxed pouch onto the laid sticks, then she blew sparks until the wood caught. The touchwood fungus didn’t grow on Orkneyjar but Skarfr knew that slivers were imported from Ness, treated in urine on the island and carried smouldering, by men skilled in their use. And by a woman, it seemed.
She smiled at him. ‘My father taught me and my brothers.’ The smile faded and Skarfr remembered their fates. Her father burned in their house by Frakork over a land dispute. Her eldest brother drowned with his men mere days later, on his way to Jarl Paul’s Yuletide celebration. No wonder Inge and Sweyn wore their tough exteriors like armour.
Never had sea-salty stale bannocks with herrings tasted so good. Washed down with ale, they made the perfect end to their journey. Although the sky was now pale with the coming dawn, they rolled up in their blankets and dropped into sweet oblivion.
Skarfr was roused by a movement from sleep so deep he wasn’t sure if he was still dreaming.
‘Steady now, it’s only me. I was cold,’ a woman’s voice told him, as he gripped the potential assailant who’d joined him under the blanket.
Inge.
He dropped his hands, ashamed, but unable to move politely away from her in the roll of the blanket.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, taking his hands and putting them back where they’d been. ‘I want to wipe his face out of my memory, to be with someone kind, just once.’
She made clear what she meant and if Skarfr’s sleepy conscience warned him that no good would come of this, his body was already telling him the opposite. He shut his eyes and as gently as he knew how, he obeyed Inge’s wishes.
She flinched once and when he looked at her, he saw sky-blue eyes luminous with tears. Confused, he asked, ‘Am I hurting you? Should I marry you to make things right?’ Something prickly in his heart rebelled at the prospect but he would do it. He remembered his boyhood wish when he’d first seen her and wondered whether this was his fate, to have what he knew was not right for him and never had been.
‘No,’ she declared. ‘I will not wear the yoke again. And no, it’s not you that hurts me still. Nobody could be less like him than you.’ She stared at him boldly, nothing modest about her look or touch. And so, in the arms of Thorbjorn’s wife, Skarfr learned that the lord had been wrong about that as in everything else when he’d seen his younger self in his protégé.
Skarfr was his own man and whatever took place on that Skottish beach laid some of his ghosts as well as Inge’s. It was thank you and pleasure and farewell all rolled up in a blanket, while Fergus’ back was as discreet as it had been on the faering.
When second sleep was over and Skarfr woke fully, the other two were toasting the last bannocks and mocking him as a lazybones. As if nothing had happened.
The men escorted Inge to the nearby village, where she was recognised as Thorbjorn’s wife and she didn’t disabuse the folk who greeted her warmly. With a promise of a wagon and company to her family home later that day, Inge was safe and the flight was over.
Skarfr signed to Fergus and tried to slip away but Inge caught him.
‘We owe each other nothing,’ she said, ‘but know that you have a powerful friend in Ness, if ever you should need one.’
Where once he would have laughed at the very idea, Skarfr had learned much about women and felt honoured. He wished there was some way he could show this, some gallantry, but neither Botolf nor Rognvald had taught him any gesture of courtesy that fitted. His mind shied away from those other men who’d influenced him.
Instead, he hoped his eyes conveyed what his words didn’t.
‘Ness gains the treasure Orkney lost.’
‘Take care on the way home. It will be harder work against the current in the Pentlandsfjord but if you go now, you’ll catch the tide home to Orphir. And remember—’
‘Keep close to the Muckle Skerry and if you can’t see it, you’re too close to Stroma,’ Skarfr grinned.
Her mouth smiled back but her eyes didn’t. They told of a new life ahead, divorced, disgraced.