Chapter 2

2: With Threshing Oar

Dawn found us half way across the Irish Sea. I stood with Inghen in the stern, like her keeping a wary eye out for pursuit. She was silent, and had been for most of the voyage out, except in the last few minutes when she told her men to ship oars and raise the sails to catch the billowing breeze. This was done, and now Thorir and Bjorn were heading up the deck towards us.

'Any sign of Hvirvil's fleet?' Thorir asked.

Inghen turned.

'No,' she said, looking bewildered. 'No sign at all.'

'And yet it seems they are on the same quest as us,' I said quietly. 'Still, there's no way they can have any idea of Innis Scathach's position.'

'Without the map,' Thorir said.

'That means they don't know where we're going, doesn't it?' Bjorn asked slowly.

'Don't think too hard,' Thorir replied caustically, and Bjorn's face darkened with anger. But Thorir ignored this and turned to me. 'Where are we going?'

I eased the parchment out of my jerkin, and squatted down on the deck with it. The other three sat down around me.

'Where are we now?' I inquired. Thorir squinted up at the sun, mumbled a few calculations, then looked down at the map. He pointed at a spot between Anglesey and the Isle of Man. 'About here.'

Inghen leaned over. 'And this island with the ring around it is Innis Scathach?' I nodded. She gazed at me with those cold blue eyes, and I had to look away quickly. My heart was beating rapidly. I shouldn't be feeling like this, I told myself. I was a hardened cynic, I had no feelings for anyone other than myself.

'So all we have to do is make our way through the Hebrides until we reach it,' said Bjorn happily. Thorir glanced at him again.

'Easier said than done,' he muttered.

It was true. In the summer, the Hebrides swarm with Vikings and sea-wolves. Still, we had a good crew with us.

And as we sailed northwards, I became better acquainted with them. Inghen remained something of an enigma, but Thorir, Bjorn and the others - especially the Sons of Fin - were more open, and I got to know them fairly well. I sat in the stern with Inghen much of the time, and she questioned me a great deal about my landlubberly life - sometimes she was rather more probing than I would have wanted, but I've always had a glib tongue, and I found it an easy matter to fill in the necessary blanks. At other times, however, especially if I questioned her, she would disappear into her own silent world. Sometimes it seemed as if the rest of the human race might as well not exist for all she cared. She was a magnificent woman, sublimely beautiful and supremely imposing, but she would make a terrible lover.

Not that I ever counted myself as being in the running, of course. Though she occasionally graced me with some curious looks.

Halfway to the Isle of Man there was a shout from ahead.

'Sail to starboard!'

Inghen rose, and investigated. I stood beside her, and looked warily at the tiny fleck of black sail on the horizon. Though far-off, I felt I had a pretty clear idea as to who it represented.

'We're being followed,' I said casually. Thorir and Bjorn appeared behind me.

'Is it him again?' Thorir hissed. I wondered what he meant. Did he think it was Hvirvil?

Inghen turned and gave him a catlike glance. She shrugged.

Bjorn peered forward.

'It is, you know,' he called. 'It's the black ship.'

'Is it one of Hvirvil's ships, then?' I asked.

'No,' said Inghen lightly. 'We don't know who it is. He appears every now and then and follows us along the horizon. But if we ever get any closer, he disappears out of view, and we can never find him again.'

'Perhaps it's a secret admirer,' I joked. She scowled at me, and I immediately went quiet. Then she turned her attention to the black sail, but it had vanished.

I was a little worried to discover that this ship had appeared before. Could it be that someone was being too unsubtle for their own good? It didn't seem wise to me for them to come so close. But I was in no position to criticise the ways of my employer.

I saw Thorir give me a dark look, and this worried me.

He was a curious character, I had quickly realised. I liked him, I think, though he never seemed to forget his initial suspicions about me. But he was - rather more than most Danes and Norsemen - a cunning and intelligent man. We Irish tend to scorn the foreigners' intellectual accomplishments; the baroque poetry they sing in croaking voices like yapping dogs; their obsession with technological achievement and their inability to understand the subtler points of priest-craft; their complicated boardgames - though I see the latter are taking off among some of our more disreputable youngsters - and of course, their outlandish ways of waging war, which break all the rules the monks laid down after Columba broke the power of the High Kings. But Thorir had the cunning of an abbot, and he wasn't easily fooled. I respected him, liked him even, but I found him hard to talk to, and he in his turn seemed to constantly suspect me of... something.

On the other hand, Bjorn was a complete contrast. As I think I've already indicated, he could be quite adequately described as big, burly and strong, and afraid of nothing. It seemed to me that he was devoted to his lady, hopelessly in love with her, I think. But he would never have had a chance of winning her favour, even if she was the kind of woman who dealt it out like some trulls I've known. He was an oaf essentially, though a good-natured one, and an excellent warrior, a dab hand with a battle-axe. I liked him enormously, and he was a trusting enough soul to accept me into his confidence. He loved a simple joke as much as a simple fight, and roared with laughter at all my shafts of wit, apart from the ones that went over his head. These were many, admittedly, but nevertheless, we struck up something of a friendship. I liked him enough to forget my rule of never get involved.

The other men I became friendly with were the Sons of Fin, who slept on deck next to the space hastily allocated to me. They were much the same as the lads you'd find in the warband of any Irish chieftain; on land, fond of drinking each other under the table and chasing whores; at sea, easily inveigled into games of chance and gambling. I won a fair bit from then the first night, as we sat under the awnings, anchored off the drizzling Galloway coast. But I gave it all back in the end - I needed none of it, though it pained me to do so - and they liked me all the more for this.

Brodir was the name of the eldest brother. He was a little solemn, having replaced Fin after their father's early death, but given the right opening he could show himself to be as fun-loving as the rest of the boys. Bild, Bugi and Fanning were simple, uncomplicated souls; Bugi was smaller than the rest, but wittier, and he and I hit it off from the start. Then there was Gunnholm who stood out from his brothers like a wolf in a dog-pack.

If Brodir was solemn, Gunnholm was stern. He was the only one of the sons to fully inherit his father's powers; he was a berserker, capable of going into the battle-trance that our ancestors called warp-spasm, but which these latter-day heathens name the berserk frenzy. He had a grim sense of humour, all of his own, and loved to shock newcomers, especially Irishmen and others he saw as foreigners, with his ability to thrust daggers into his flesh without any ill-effects. I can't for the life of me work out how he did it, but I've heard that the Norse kings have whole bodyguards of these madmen. His brothers told me that he could also walk through fire and swallow live coals. He wasn't very big, not like Bjorn, and he wasn't particularly muscular; oh, and as for when he started talking to you... well, he was the kind of bore you meet in taverns sometimes, and if you're at all sensible do your best to avoid. But he was a highly dangerous man, and I don't mind admitting that he terrified me.

The storm hit us the next morning - in fact, two of them. It had been drizzling since before I went to sleep, and apparently it continued all through the night, since we had a cheerless awakening under the canvas awnings. The wind caught up, stirring the sea into heaving troughs and waves, giving me, at least, a very queasy stomach. Raw fish, which the Vikings tend to live on at sea, does not appeal at the best of times, but that morning I had no breakfast.

At Inghen's orders, we struggled to make the ship safe as the winds howled and whistled around us and the deck heaved beneath our feet. I did my best to help out, but my knowledge of boats extended only to my father's trading galleys, and so I ended up hanging onto a convenient rope and letting the experts do their work. I do love seeing a job well done.