The steerboard bucked like an unbroken stallion amid a confusion of breakers and wild gusts of wind. Skarfr had to use all his strength to steady the ship’s course while Rognvald hurled orders that were barely audible above the howling gale. Torrential rain, salted and stinging, blinded the men, reddened eyes already sore from lack of sleep.
‘May Aegir preserve us!’
The men prayed to their gods as they fought with ropes and bailed water that surged onto the deck as fast as they emptied buckets. The sail had been taken down long since and half the crew manned the oars but the sea-god mocked the ship’s vaunted speed, rendered oars useless in a stomach-churning swell of tide against wind. Without its sail, in heavy seas, the ship rocked like a child’s cradle possessed by demons.
Through the mists that ghosted across the water like the dead haunting their barrows, the men glimpsed the craggy entrance to a narrow bay and thought they were saved. First the Saviour, then the Arrow made it into the cove. There the swell of the open sea changed to a frenzy of breakers, waves whipped to white froth, crashing against the cliffs and surging in all directions as they rebounded.
Land was within reach but they would not make it.
Skarfr held tight, closed his eyes and blinked to clear them, opened them to men screaming like boys as knife-edged rocks emerged from the whirling water, just missing the steerboard side of the ship. They were close enough to see the black bird perching in a deep fissure, still as a Madonna in a chapel niche until it flapped its wings after a deluge. Then it hunched up again.
His cormorant. A last farewell.
‘I’m sorry.’ Skarfr would never be the man of the cormorant’s prophecy. Even his death would be an anticlimax, fitting end to a life not fully lived.
The cormorant stared intently at him, bashed its wings against its rocky shelter, then disappeared beneath another gigantic wave that crashed over the outcrop.
Smashed against rocks. Skarfr faced his fate and did his job, holding onto the steerboard as if he could fly the ship with it.
Then he understood the cormorant’s message. Smash them against the rocks. The ships.
He abandoned his precious steerboard and lunged for Rognvald, grabbed his arm to get attention, shouted over the Jarl’s angry instructions, made him understand.
‘It’s our only chance of saving the men and some of the cargo. Head for shore, hole the keels on the rocks then get as near the beach as we can so we get ashore. The ships will sink but the cargo will come ashore and some can be saved. If we’re carried out to sea, we die and lose everything. We need to sacrifice our queens.’
Rognvald’s face was grim beneath the rainwater rivulets coursing down grimy tracks, white-edged with salt. He nodded. ‘Desperate times.’
He glanced over at the Arrow, cresting a wave three times the height of the ship and plummeting in a keel-breaking descent. Months in the building, the best of Norse ship-building skill and materials. Rising again on the next wave, a bold little mare tossing her white mane, defying the combined rage of sea and sky. Doomed.
Rognvald jumped onto a thwart and Skarfr instinctively grabbed his leg as tight as he’d held the steerboard, wondering for a heartbeat whether the Jarl intended to throw himself overboard. But no. He waved his arms like a windmill, pointed and gesticulated, a madman in a storm hoping to communicate something to Harald, across the savage waves. He stumbled and Skarfr pulled him down to the deck as the Saviour dipped and shook. It felt worse after watching the Arrow, knowing how small the ships were and how vast the sea.
‘It’s up to Harald now. Whether he realises what we’re doing is deliberate and follows suit. Do what you can with the steerboard.’
Skarfr braced himself for the shock as he grabbed the paddle again, stopped it veering wildly and made it work against the forces of nature. He watched Rognvald giving instructions to the men nearest him. The words flew the length of the ship like crows on a battlefield, ill omens.
Jagged rocks loomed port-side, the beach was close enough for them to see the shingle, and every oarsman on the steerboard side rowed for dear life while those men port-side shipped oars. Skarfr pulled the steerboard sun-wise and the ship turned so that the next wave rebounding from the rocks rammed the port side against unyielding stone.
Water poured in as all the oarsmen rowed, away from the rocks, towards the shingle. Every yard counted, brought them nearer safety, and the men were waist deep in the sinking ship, struggling to pull an oar or even move at all, when Rognvald yelled, ‘Now!’
Into the thrashing waves, struggling against the undertow, the men threw themselves overboard and waded towards the beach. Skarfr held onto the steerboard, waited until last man left, to give the crew as steady a platform as he could, then he let go and jumped.
Suddenly released, the paddle veered wildly, caught Skarfr a clout on his back that unbalanced him. The undertow did the rest, dragging him against the stony seabed like a plough over a field.
Pelted with pebbles and debris as he curled up and righted himself, Skarfr kicked his legs, pushed down with his arms and aimed for the surface with a swimmer’s instinct. Thought had long since left him.
But the tide was too strong and the sea-god wanted a trophy. Skarfr broke water and breathed, long choking airfuls, but he was weakening and he could feel the pull of the wild sea.
‘Skarfr!’
Only one other man was a swimmer strong enough to make the attempt. The man who’d reached Doll’s Cave and who counted swimming among his nine skills.
Rognvald wrenched Skarfr’s shoulder when he reached him, turned him and won him back from Hel’s gate. The distance between life and death was barely a yard or two, just enough for Skarfr to be hauled on his back, then raised to his feet on the pebble shelf that sloped upwards to what was theoretically dry land. Where he collapsed to the ground and surveyed the disaster he’d survived.
The Arrow did follow the Saviour’s example and soon the drenched company was gathered on the shingle, men shaking with relief and shock, freezing and exhausted.
Their arrival had not gone unnoticed and a file of local residents descended to identify those shipwrecked, then shepherd them to warmth. The Arrow and the Saviour had indeed reached Hjaltland – and would never leave there.