Hawk Quest (19 page)
It was well past noon when he reached the mouth of a deep, sluggish creek. He wiped sweat from his eyes. Upriver, reed beds stretched across the horizon. In their shade stood a squalid dwelling thrown together from driftwood and hides. He slaked his thirst with rainwater from a barrel next to the hovel and then looked about. The rustling of the reeds sounded like scandalised whispering.
He walked out on to a sand bar and faced the salty breeze. Sunlight on the water dazzled like broken glass. Something hissed overhead and he looked up to see a flock of waders flare round and bunch together like smoke sucked back to its source. A falcon threw up from its stoop, glanced over its shoulder and flicked over in another dive. Again the flock jinked and closed up with a soft whoosh of wings. The falcon jabbed and probed for an opening, the waders twisting and turning, one moment black against the sky, the next almost invisible in the sea glare.
The falcon spread its wings and sailed down to a bleached horn of driftwood where it preened and roused before flying away low across the sea.
When Wayland turned there was a girl standing on the grass, her long blonde hair backlit by the sun. His insides cartwheeled. He shielded his eyes and saw the dog galloping towards her.
‘No!’
The dog stopped, astonished. It looked back, tail wagging uncertainly. Wayland ran up and caught hold of it. His heart pounded. The girl watched him with eyes as pale as water.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she said.
Wayland passed a hand over his eyes. ‘Nothing. I thought you were … It doesn’t matter.’
‘That’s the biggest dog I’ve ever seen. Can I stroke him?’
‘I wouldn’t if I were you. He isn’t safe with strangers.’
The dog broke free and reared up, planting its front paws on her shoulders, knocking her backwards. She laughed and pushed it off. It flopped on its side and wriggled like a puppy. She knelt and tickled its
chest. She looked up, brushing a strand of hair from her face. Some -thing broke inside Wayland.
‘He likes me.’
‘You remind him of somebody.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘He doesn’t have a name. I never got round to choosing one.’
‘That’s silly. All dogs have names. Like people. Mine’s Syth. What’s yours?’
‘Wayland.’
‘You talk funny. Where do you live?’
‘Nowhere. I came from Northumbria.’
‘Is that a long way?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lynn’s as far as I know. Except for heaven. Are you looking for Snorri?’
‘That depends. Does he have a ship?’
‘No, only a little punt.’
Apart from her colouring and wide, luminous eyes, the girl didn’t really resemble his sister. She was so thin that he’d taken her for a starveling child, but she couldn’t have been much younger than him. Her threadbare tunic hung torn at the collar, exposing most of one pale and grubby breast.
She crossed her arms and gripped her bony white shoulders. ‘You keep staring at me. It’s rude.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I forgive you.’
‘What?’
‘I forgive you.’
Sadness overwhelmed him. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘What’s the shortest way back to Lynn?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Never mind. I’ll find my own path.’ He scuffed the ground with his toe. ‘Well, then.’
‘I’ve never seen the ship. He’s hidden it in the fen.’
Wayland looked at the swaying reeds. ‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’
‘Soon. He’s fishing. He’s been gone since dawn.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s disgusting.’
Wayland sank down. The girl sank down, too. They watched each other. Wayland broke a biscuit in half. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Syth. I told you. You should pay more attention.’
He hid a smile. That really did sound like his sister.
She clutched the biscuit in both hands and devoured it like an animal, darting glances up at him. She was so skinny that he fancied he could see her bones through her skin. He handed her his own share. ‘I already ate,’ he said, and went and studied the sea.
‘Here he comes.’
Out of the marsh came a man poling one-handed, the pole steadied between his ribs and the stump of his other arm. Some further disfigurement on his forehead – a brand burned into the bone. An ugly specimen, features squeezed together, no chin to speak of, a wispy beard crusted with food and snot.
He stepped ashore, tied up the punt and lifted out a plaited rush pot. Ignoring Wayland, he reached inside and dangled an enormous eel in front of the girl. Writhing black and bronze coils half-filled the pot.
‘Look at ’em beauties. Fattened ’em on a corpse I found drownded in the fosse. Picked him white in a night, they did. I’ll sell these ’uns at Norwich. Normans like eels. Won’t tell ’em how they got so meaty.’ His accent was a weird mixture of Norse and some local dialect that sounded like feet slurping in mud.
Wayland stepped in front of him. ‘I hear you’re master of a ship.’
‘Lots of furriners lose their way in the marshes,’ said Snorri, raising his voice. ‘Ain’t I right, me dear?’
‘We want to charter it.’
Snorri pointed at his punt. ‘Titty thing like that? Buy yer own. I need thissun for me fishing.’
‘I’m talking about the knarr you sailed from Norway in.’
Snorri cackled. He turned in a circle, arms spread wide. ‘You see any knarr?’
‘The one you’ve hidden in the marshes.’
Snorri scowled at the girl. ‘Go look iffen ye want. Search all year. Don’t blame me iffen ye come to harm. Fens and fitties ain’t no place for folk what ain’t bred and born to ’em.’
‘We’ll pay you.’
Snorri looked straight at Wayland for the first time. ‘Git on. Ye ain’t got nowt but the breeks to cover yer arse.’
Wayland opened the purse and flashed silver. Snorri’s tongue darted over his lips. Wayland pulled the pursestring tight.
‘Show me that ’un again.’
Wayland put the purse away.
Snorri leered. ‘Sell ye the girl iffen ye fancy. Pretty little mother. Make ye a good wife.’
Wayland glanced at her. ‘She isn’t yours to sell.’
‘Ain’t no one else’s. Kin all dead. If t’weren’t for me kindness, she’d be graveyard mould too. Don’t ye fret. She’s a virgin far as I know. Protecting me investment. But that don’t mean she can’t do things to make a fella’s eyes bulge.’ He pumped his stump up and down. ‘She’s me right-hand girl iffen ye get me meaning.’
The girl clutched her torn tunic and fled.
‘Her’ll be back,’ Snorri said. ‘Nowheres else to go.’
Wayland fought back the urge to strangle him. The dog’s teeth chattered with rage. ‘I’m not interested in the girl.’
‘Iffen ye want a ship so bad, why don’t ye charter one in Norwich or Lowestoft?’
‘Come on,’ Wayland said to the dog.
‘Where ye want to go, anyhow?’
Wayland gave a loose wave.
Feet padded behind him. Snorri pawed at his elbow. ‘Let me taste that silver.’
Wayland held up a coin. Snorri snatched it, licked it, bit it, closing his eyes like a gourmet savouring a delicacy. Wayland plucked the coin from his hand.
‘Satisfied?’
‘German. Ye can’t get enough of that.’
‘Have you got a ship or not?’
‘Come with me, young master, and we’ll see what Snorri’s got.’
He stepped into the punt and held out a hand. Wayland ignored it and climbed in. Snorri pushed off.
‘Folk say me wits is twizzled, but that don’t bother me. Fact is, I judge a man’s sense by how rum he thinks I be. Ye can’t bamboozle Snorri Snorrason. In the fens, Snorri be king. Any harm comes to me, ye’ll never git out on yer ownsome.’
Wayland saw his hand brush a knife ground to a sliver.
Snorri cackled. ‘I makes ye nervous, don’t I? I makes ye twitchy.’
‘Look at the dog. Go on, look at it.’
Snorri looked. His grin curdled.
‘It’s the dog that’s nervous. Like you said, you’ll never get back on your ownsome.’
Snorri left the main river channel and navigated an amphibious maze. Some of the waterways were as broad as fields, some no wider than the punt. Wayland and the dog sat upright in the bow, marvelling at the wealth of wildlife. Huge black rafts of coot scooted across the meres like panicked monks. Ducks banked in tight echelons. Skeins of geese scrolled overhead. Birds of shapes and patterns Wayland had never seen before stalked and muttered in the reed beds.
Snorri bared a broken yellow smile. ‘Lost already, ain’t ye?’
Wayland looked about him. Channels and inlets led away in all directions. The sun gave few clues to direction. One minute it was in his eyes, the next athwart him. Looking behind, he couldn’t have said which passage they’d just taken.
‘Took me five years to find me way to and fro. And that’s only because I was apprentice to a man whose folk have lived in these marshes since Noah’s flood set ’em down hereways. He had six webbed toes on each foot and that’s no lie. Taught me all he knew.’ Snorri tapped his temple. ‘All in here. Ain’t no signs or waymarks. Place changes from year to year, storm to storm.’
‘They say you fought at Stamford Bridge.’
Snorri didn’t answer and after a while Wayland stopped waiting for an answer.
‘Two hundred ships crossed from Norway and when the fighting was done, no more than thirty sailed for home. I lost me arm on the retreat, and the two were with me were wounded worse than me, one of them holding his guts in his lap. They were dead that same day, the sail gone. Even if I’d got both me hands, a man can’t row to Norway. I drifted for three days and on the fourth day a wind crashed me on this coast. That’s where me master found me.’
‘Was he the one who firebranded you?’
Snorri clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘That’s a lie. That was done in battle.’
Mumbling, he poled on. They came out of an alley into a mere, startling a heron into clumsy flight. Snorri stopped poling. The punt glided until it nudged the bank. The ripples died.
Cautiously, Wayland stepped on to the spongy shore. Snorri pulled the punt out of the water and led the way towards a thicket of reeds. He stopped in front of them.
‘I don’t see any ship,’ Wayland said.
‘Ye ain’t supposed to.’
Wayland looked all about.
‘She’s right afront of ye,’ Snorri said. He grabbed the reeds with both hands and pulled. A six-foot gap opened up and Wayland found himself looking at a section of clinkered hull.
‘There she be.
Shearwater
. Me sea-steerer, me wave-rider.’
‘It’s a wreck.’
Snorri was outraged. ‘She’s not even seven years old.’ He rapped on the hull. ‘Hear that? Oak heartwood, not a trace of worm. See that,’ he said, pointing to the stempost. ‘That come out of a ship that sailed to Norway in a fleet led by Cnut. Carved from a single tree. What d’ye think of that?’
‘My grandfather fought with Cnut.’
Snorri regarded him. ‘Thought ye might have a drop of Viking blood.’ He stroked the rivets that joined the strakes. ‘Forged by me uncle, the cunningest smith in Hordaland. And looky here,’ he said, leaning over the gunwale and pointing to the lashings that tied the strakes to the frame below the waterline. ‘That ain’t no cheap spruce root. That be whalebristle.’
Wayland swung himself up onto the deck. The ship was much bigger than he’d expected. ‘It’s holed.’
‘Course she’s holed. If she wasn’t hurt, I’d be back in Hordaland, drinking in the ale hall with me comrades.’
The ship lay canted over in a silted-up channel. Wayland looked back at the mere. ‘You’ll never get it out. The water’s too shallow.’
‘No shallower than the day I brung her here. She draws less than two feet without ballast. Asides, ye’re looking the wrong way.’ Snorri pointed his nub in the opposite direction to the mere. ‘The river’s only a titty bit yonder.’
‘How many men needed to row?’
‘Oh me, oh my, the man knows nowt about shipcraft. She’s a sailing
ship, ye numpty. In a fair wind I could sail her to Norway on me own-some.’
‘And if the wind isn’t fair?’
‘Four at a pinch, six would be better. Wouldn’t quarrel with eight.’
‘Is it repairable?’
Snorri stroked the hull with pride. ‘A boat as well crafted as thissun can take a lot of harm before she loses seaworthiness. Like a living thing, almost mends herself.’
‘How long to repair it?’
‘Hold ye hard. Ye’re jumping ahead of yerself.’
‘Just tell me what needs doing.’
Snorri twisted his scraggy beard. ‘First there’s the oak for the new strakes. Not any old oak, but oak standing two hundred year and rooted in clay, riven when green and tied with rivets shaped to clinch and tempered so they give in heavy seas. A boat’s like a horse. Ye want them yielding no matter how hard ye ride. Needs a new sail of close-wove wool or linen. Ye can buy good flax from Suffolk, but Norfolk wool is stronger. The caulking needs seeing to, and then there’s—’
‘How much?’
Snorri sucked through the gaps in his teeth. ‘Materials and labour, ye’re looking at sixteen pounds.’
‘Quiet.’
Snorri cringed. ‘Course, depends where ye voyage. If it’s a sea crossing, there ain’t no good cutting corners. Ye’d regret those pennies when the waves start coming up over yer eyes. But if ye were just coasting, maybe ye could make do with pine boards and—’
‘I said shut up.’
The dog’s ears were pricked.
‘Only a bull of the bog,’ Snorri said. ‘Lots of marsh fowl make calls like humankind. I tell ye, there’s places even Snorri Snorrason don’t like to be abroad after dark, when the corpse candles light and the lantern men go walking.’
‘Take me back.’
After a while Snorri heard the cries, too. ‘Ye didn’t say ye’d brung more furriners.’
Three men were waiting by Snorri’s shack – Hero, Richard and a stocky, bearded stranger they must have recruited as a guide.
Hero’s expression was doom-struck. ‘We’re finished,’ he said. ‘Vallon’s been taken. Raul, too.’
Richard spoke in a stunned staccato. ‘Noon yesterday we went to collect the money. Aaron was anxious, didn’t want to admit us. Enquiries were being made about us. The transaction was off. Vallon forced himself into the house, showed his sword, told Aaron that he’d take him down to hell if he didn’t produce the money. As soon as we got it, we returned to the house. Raul was waiting. He warned us that soldiers were combing the city street by street. Vallon was burying the money in a midden behind the house when they turned up. They broke down the gate. Raul held them up. The soldiers gave him a terrible beating. They would have killed him if I hadn’t told them I was Count Olbec’s son. They were the same ones who questioned Vallon and Raul at the west gate. The sergeant said they were arresting them on murder warrants sworn by Drogo. They demanded to know your whereabouts. I told them we hadn’t seen you since the day we left the castle and that Hero had parted company with us days ago.’