Winter was no time for sea travel. Rain hissed down from the perpetually grey sky into an equally grey sea. Huge swells continually lifted and lowered the ship, sending the men onboard to the side, spewing their guts into the water. With his wrists bound, this was a risky process for Einar and twice he slipped on the wet boards of the deck and almost toppled into the water and the cold, wet arms of death.
There was a canvas shelter raised over the deck and everyone onboard was given a sealskin cloak. Despite that they were still cold and wet all the time. Einar suffered more as the salt water stung the raw flesh where his bonds rubbed his skin. They sailed along the coast which gave some respite. At night they landed and got a chance to dry out beside a warm fire and their emptied bellies were refilled with bread, meat and beer.
The days drew into weeks, each day’s sailing taking them further around Britain. The further they progressed, Einar noticed the skipper got more tetchy. He shouted a lot more at Ricbehrt’s bodyguards who acted as his crew. He learned from overhearing their talk that they had reached the most south-west part of Britain and were approaching a point where they had to round a dangerous headland in order to start sailing north again.
If the ship was wrecked he stood no chance of surviving with his wrists bound. Much as it galled him to do it, Einar swallowed his pride and pleaded with Osric to untie him. Osric just laughed and told him that if the ship did go down he wanted to be damn sure that Einar went with it.
In the end the trip around the headland was a non-event. A bleak winter sun crept from behind the clouds for a change and a mild wind and calm sea made it almost pleasant.
Then they began the voyage north. The skipper still hugged the coast, staying close to Britain rather than cross towards Ireland. This was because, he said, Waterford, Dublin and the Isle of Man were all infested by Vikings.
Einar looked for any chance to escape but Ricbehrt’s men were too good. Over the time on the ship he was able to pick up information about them from their conversations. Some were Franks, like Ricbehrt, the rest were Saxons, or Aenglishmen as they also called themselves. These included Osric and another blond-haired hulk of a man called Oswald. They were all a lot older than Einar, having spent their younger years fighting in the warbands and armies of kings and lords from all over the Christian lands. Then they had fought for honour and glory. Now they sold their hard-won skills to the highest bidder, so as to make enough money to ensure their old age was comfortable. They paid enough attention to Einar that he was never able to escape, but otherwise he was treated with a practised indifference.
Osric and Oswald were different. While the others seemed indifferent, these Aenglishmen never failed to kick him or spit on him every time they walked past. Osric often left the others to come and sit beside Einar and tell him how he hated Danes. How they had come to his country in the time of his great-grandfather and taken their land and their women.
‘The way you wash every week,’ Osric said. ‘And comb your hair every day. It’s so unmanly. It’s time we sent you all home. Back where you came from.’
Einar’s repeated protestations that he was an Icelander were to no avail. Icelanders, Norwegians, Orkneymen, Norsemen from Ireland and those from Denmark were all just Danes to Osric. Einar was reminded of how Affreca had told him the Irish name for the Norse there was ‘foreigners’, even though they had lived there for perhaps two hundred years. Osric talked often about how he could not wait until they got their hands on the swords, because then he could cut Einar’s throat. Oswald did not talk much, but his glare and the blows he aimed at Einar showed he shared Osric’s feelings about Danes.
The skipper was a Frisian, the only other heathen aboard apart from Einar. When the crew went ashore on Sunnudagr, the Sun’s Day, to visit a Christian temple, they left the skipper behind. Osric and Oswald hauled Einar along with them and made him kneel on the hard-stone floor through the whole boring ritual.
As they sailed on northward, the shoreline became more deserted and rugged and the relative comfort of nights spent on the shore got less and less.
The further north they sailed, the more tense the atmosphere on board became. Men scanned the horizon constantly, watching for sails that could herald an attack. Then the weather closed in, the rain pelted down and the ship surged and fell on the heavy swell. The skipper actually seemed happier.
‘No Vikings,’ he shouted over the buffeting wind and the booming of the waves against the prow. ‘Only fools would be out in weather like this. Fools like us!’
The weather improved, the rain stopped and eventually a point came in the journey where the skipper turned the prow towards the open sea. The water was dark green, tipped with white and it rolled and fell like fields covered with endless burial mounds that spread in all directions. They crossed the point where the coast of Britain disappeared behind them and Ireland still lurked beyond the horizon ahead. There was nothing all around but heaving water. Even the sea birds whose constant mourning cries had accompanied their voyage ever since leaving Grims Boe, deserted the ship and they were left alone in the wide, empty ocean.
The skipper was as implacable as ever but Einar noted that the hard-bitten warriors around him became very quiet. Oswald chewed his nails until he was biting the flesh on the end of his fingers. Most of them sat around the deck, muttering prayers to the Christ God. Einar heard them mutter the names of other gods too, one called Brendan and one called Nicholas.
At one point an excited shout from one of the Franks at the prow sent everyone running in that direction. As Einar arrived, several of the men were pointing at something a little way off from the ship. He just had time to see the sleek, grey-black skin of something as it slid in an arc through the surface of the water. Then it disappeared again. It was not a seal. It was too big and they were too far from land.
‘What is it?’ Osric said.
The skipper shrugged. ‘A fish? Who knows? We see things like that all the time out here.’
‘A fish?!’ The Frank who first saw the thing stood, mouth ajar. ‘Did you see the size of it?’
‘There are big fish out here,’ the skipper said. ‘Perhaps it was a whale. Or maybe a water dragon. A Nicor maybe.’
Einar caught the playful glint in the old sailor’s eye but most of Ricbehrt’s men missed it. The sea thing, whatever it was, did not resurface, but all the same several of the bodyguards kept close watch on the water, spears gripped in their white-knuckled fists.
Returning to his solitary position near the back of the boat, Einar gazed at the green, opaque waters of the sea and wondered just what was down there. When he was a child his nurse had told him that an old giant called Aegir lived in a hall at the bottom of the sea. Aegir would get lonely, and when he did, he prepared his hall for a feast. He brewed ale, and the froth from the ale is the froth you see on the surface of the sea. His wife Rán then went up from the sea bottom with a net, and snared sailors on their ships above, dragging them down into the depths so they could share in the feast. Of course, once down there in the deep, that was the end of them. Einar looked at the flecks of white that tipped the choppy waves and wondered if there was a joyless feast waiting for them all in those unseen depths.
The day wore on and late in the afternoon two dark mounds appeared in the far distance where the sea met the horizon. As the ship rose on the swell those on board saw they were the tops of some mountains. It was their first sight of Ireland.
‘It’s too far away.’ Oswald looked at the skipper, his eyes wide. ‘What if we don’t make it there before dark?’
‘Then we keep on sailing until we do,’ the skipper said. ‘Otherwise, we’ll get hopelessly lost. Don’t worry. I’ve crossed this sea many times.’
His words did little to reassure anyone onboard. As the cloud-obscured sun dropped, unseen, into the sea, Einar could not help the thrill of panic that squirmed around his guts like a bucket of eels.
The night that came was not as dark as they all anticipated. A full moon flitted behind clouds, showing its face every now and again to cast bright silver light on the sea. Stars glittered around it and even when the clouds rolled over, there was enough ambient light for them to tell sea from sky. What they could not tell, as the mountains rose ever higher and the blackness of the land beneath them began to blot out the horizon ahead, was whether or not the dark lumps in the sea ahead were waves or rocks that waited to tear open the hull and send them all to their death.
There were sighs all round when the skipper finally judged they were close enough to land to drop the anchor stone. Even he feared going any shallower in the darkness.
They set a watch then crawled under their blankets for the rest of the night.
At dawn the rain returned and the voyage began again. In the daylight Einar recognised the shoreline and mountains from his previous trip to Ireland. They were south of the Strangrfjordr, the inlet with the village of Norse people Grim the former Wolf Coat had been a Christian priest for. Part of Einar held a vague hope that a longship from there might come sailing out to attack them. Ricbehrt’s men would be killed but they would welcome him as one of their own. Then he remembered the pathetic collection of huts that made up the village and the sorry collection of farmers and fishermen with their rusty old ancestral weapons who had met them that last time they had landed there. They were no Vikings who could take on a shipful of men like Ricbehrt’s crew who made their living from fighting. For all he knew the Irish had swept the Norse inhabitants of Strangrfjordr into the sea by now anyhow.
That was another unpleasant possibility. The Irish clan who had held him hostage lived around here too. They might be his mother’s clan but they would still behead him without a second thought and put his head on a spike above the door of the chieftain’s house.
In the end they passed the ravenous narrow mouth of the lough without incident. The skipper gave it a wide birth due to its fearsome reputation for violent currents.
North of Strangrfjordr they crossed another very wide inlet firth, passing some small islands that had huts of the Irish on them. Once across the mouth of the firth the coast became rugged and wild, covered with small gnarled trees, stunted and twisted by the harsh elements. The perpetually rocky shore rose from the green sea to jagged cliffs, sometimes sandstone, sometimes black. The cliffs were topped by green grass and trees and here and there deep wooded valleys swept up from the sea inland. Signs of human habitation were few.
‘We’ll find somewhere to anchor then rest up for the night,’ the skipper announced. ‘In the morning we should reach our destination.’
Einar now knew that if he did not come up with a plan to get out of this, he was about to spend his last night alive.