5: The Coming of the Hogboy

'No!' shouted Gunnholm.

Inghen met his yell calmly, though she boiled inside with frustration at his obstinacy - and his absurd attempt to shout her down. The berserker was a fierce warrior, but he was no taller than herself, and she never let herself be intimidated even by giants like Bjorn, or her brother. She glared back at him.

'You must,' she said quietly. 'Or else we're lost.'

'How many more times?' he bawled. He was acting like a spoilt brat, thought Inghen savagely to herself. She grabbed him by the collar.

'You'll do as your skipper tells you,' she snarled roughly. 'Got that?'

She staggered backwards as Gunnholm shoved her away, stumbling into Bjorn, who was standing in the crowd of Vikings behind her. He caught her and steadied her, then turned to face Gunnholm.

'Touch her again,' he said mildly, 'and I'll beat you into the ground, berserker or no berserker.'

Inghen dusted herself down, and turned briefly to him.

'Thank you, I can fight my own battles,' she snapped ungratefully. She turned back to Gunnholm, noting absently that he seemed unusually frightened by Bjorn's threat. 'Now you listen to me,' she said, pointing straight at him. 'If you don't do what I want you to do, I'll banish you from the crew! Understand?'

At that, Brodir stepped forward. He had been watching this baiting of his brother with mounting unease, and now he'd clearly decided that enough was enough.

'If you do that,' he said warningly, 'I and my brothers will go with him.'

The other Sons of Fin, Bild, Bugi and Fanning, all nodded and growled their agreement.

Inghen groaned inwardly. Thorir's clever idea was causing a mutiny. She'd have to placate their feelings for the moment, before things got entirely out of hand. She glanced at the swiftly sinking sun.

'Look, men, we're probably all a little tired now,' she said quietly. 'If we call it a night and return to the problem tomorrow, I think we'll all cope far better.' She glanced at Gunnholm, almost pleadingly. 'Think about it tonight,' she told him. Then she smiled coldly, adding 'If you can't sleep.' She turned, and strode towards the ship.

That night, Inghen herself had difficulty sleeping. She lay awake beside the guttering embers of the fire that her men had lit in the lea of the cliffs, not far from the longship, exhausted, but unable to sleep. As she stared into the glowing gledes, she thought about her father.

Raudi had become a Viking leader after being exiled from Trondheim by the King of Norway, and he had taken his family with him. Inghen's earliest memories had been of the unsteady deck of his flagship as it ploughed through the cold Northern seas, and of the barren, windswept, wave-tossed islands where they would occasionally put ashore. She and her brother had grown up together aboard the ship, and since their mother died soon after, giving birth to a third, still-born child, Inghen's upbringing at the hands of her father and his friends had not been one that fostered conventional feminine values. On the few occasions in her life that she had worn a dress, she had felt horribly uncomfortable, though her men's garb alone was enough to have her dragged up before the Lawspeaker in most Norse settlements. But the laws of the land did not apply to the Viking who was strong enough to make his - or her - own laws. And anyway, her father had always indulged her whims.

Still, he had been a man of savage contrasts, Raudi of Trondheim. Inghen remembered how he had once executed three of his crew who had raped a Pictish girl in a village near Caithness, dragging them back to the village and disembowelling them in front of the insulted girl and her family; he had hated the reputation Vikings had among foreigners, and always did his utmost to adhere to their savage code of honour. But she also had gentler memories of playing and joking with him in the stern of his longship, the Trollwife, the only ship that still survived from his once-mighty fleet; in fact, the one now pulled up on the strand behind Inghen. He had had a rough sense of justice with his crew, but with his beloved daughter - and sometimes with his moody son - he had been a loving father who had lavished upon them all the gifts that plunder could buy. And Inghen was determined to avenge him...

She became aware that a silence had settled upon the darkness around her, breaking insidiously into her thoughts, and she looked up from her meditations. The recumbent figures of her crew surrounded her, and it appeared that she was the only one still awake. But even their snores seemed to have subsided. In fact, everything was silent; even the roar of the waves was muted by this mysterious hush. She stared at the breakers as they crashed on the strand, and frowned in puzzlement. The silence was eerie, weird.

She got to her feet. Quite what prompted her to do so she was never quite sure, but soon she found herself striding across the pebbles towards the cliff.

It towered above her.

She began to climb up the looming rocks, with silence and darkness surrounding her. Above her, the stars shone coldly. There was no moon. The only sound in that chill silence was the scuffling of her feet as she scrambled from foothold to foothold, and even this faint noise seemed distant. Once she looked back over the starlit ocean as it spread blackly for miles in all directions towards the dark, arching skies, and a sensation of utter loneliness assailed her, almost like a physical assault. It was as if she was the only person in a dark, empty world.

She continued her ascent. Soon she found herself near the top, and a few seconds more of scrambling took her over the lip of the cliff and up to the edge of the circle of luminescence that she somehow knew had been calling her all this time. She stood at the edge of it, silent and fearful in the utter silence that blanketed the nighted land around her. Then, at last, from the silent darkness came a sound.

Footsteps.

And then he was there, standing before her in the circle of light. Her father! She gazed upon his broad face with amazement; there was the red, jutting beard, the thick lips, the broken nose, the craggy brow and ferocious eyebrows, and long, auburn hair held back by an embroidered headband. He looked exactly as he had done the day he went to the island to duel with Varg the Black. But his eyes glimmered coldly with the green light of the walking dead. He was a drow, a hogboy; he was one of the undead.

'Father...?' she ventured eventually. He said nothing, but thrust his heavily muscled arm towards her. She looked down. In his hand he held a crude club. She reached out tentatively to touch its rough surface, and glanced at him. Silent, impassive, he nodded. She grasped it, and took it from his hand. He smiled.

Inghen awoke to the boom of the surf and the crash of breakers. Blearily, she looked around her. It was nearly dawn. The beach was empty apart from the longship and her slumbering crew. Beside her, the ashes of the fire were cold and dead. Her body was numb from the biting wind that swept in off the sea, but her hand ached vaguely. Had it all been a dream? There had been something unearthly, unreal, about the entire episode, and now she thought back on it, it seemed hazy, fading; as insubstantial as a half-forgotten vision.

Of course it had been a dream! Her father was dead. She could remember that much of her dream, that her father had been there, standing on the headland. Her father. Her father...

She looked down at her aching hand, and started with shock.

Her numb fingers were tightly clasped around a rough wooden club. The club from her dream! As the sun crept hesitantly over the far-off edge of the ocean and her slothful crew began to stir around her, she stared at it in a wild surmise.