Hawk Quest (40 page)

She noticed his attention and put her hands on her hips and gave a mock pout. ‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, meaning ‘everything’. ‘I’m glad your hair’s grown. It makes you look … pretty.’ He winced at the lame compliment.

She looked down, suddenly as shy as he was. ‘The day we met you said I reminded you of someone. You never said who.’

Wayland didn’t stop to think. ‘My sister.’

Syth’s smile tightened. ‘Oh.’

‘Only at first sight.’

Orm released Wayland from his torment by thumping him between the shoulderblades. ‘Not far now.’

Syth turned eagerly, a girl again. ‘Will we see snow bears?’

Orm laughed. ‘I doubt it, lovely daughter. In all my trips I’ve only seen three. They live further north.’ His brows waggled. ‘So much the better. They’re bigger than bulls and so strong that they can flip a seal clean over their shoulders. You won’t even see them coming. Do you know why?’

Syth gave a quick shake of her head.

‘They spend all their lives on snow and they’re white all over – except for their black noses. So when they stalk prey, they cover their noses with their paws … ’ Orm suited action to word, ‘ … and creep up, closer and closer … ’ Orm lurched in a crude pantomime of bear strategy, ‘ … until they have you in their grasp and then – Grrr! No, be thankful you won’t see any bears.’

Syth giggled. ‘I don’t believe you. About bears covering their noses, I mean.’

‘Why do you think my eyebrows stand on end? It’s because of all the amazing things I’ve seen in the northland. Up here it’s like living in a daylight dream.’

A pleasant silence fell.
Shearwater
’s sail flapped and filled. The sun was dipping to the lowest point on its endless circle.

‘Where does Greenland end?’ Wayland asked.

‘In mist and ice, the evening of the world and its dawn, the abode of the dead and the realm of the first gods.’

Wayland nodded towards the west. ‘Do you know what lies over the sea?’

Orm stood shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘I do, for men have sailed there in my own lifetime. The West Land we call it, but it can’t be reached by chasing the sun. The sea’s too thick with ice. You have to follow the current north until you can’t go any further, then cross a strait to the west. First you reach Slabland and Flatland, where the snow never melts in summer. Travelling south you pass Markland and the Wonder Strands before reaching Wineland, where even the winters are snowless and the nights of the Yule festival are as long as the days. It’s so fertile that wheat ripens into loaves, and the dew is so sweet that cows only have to lick the grass to grow fat. In Wineland the trees reach halfway to heaven and the forests swarm with deer and sable and beavers. The seas are so thick with cod that a man can cross between islands by walking on the backs of them.’

Wayland smiled. ‘Greenland’s a harsh land. I’m surprised you don’t leave it to make new homes in such a paradise.’

‘They did. In my great-grandfather’s day more than a hundred of them settled in Wineland. As a boy, I met the last survivor of the colony. Bjarni Sigurdason was his name and he never stopped talking about the wonders of the West Land.’

‘Why did he come back?’

‘Why did Adam and Eve leave Eden? Jealousy over the women. Sickness. Above all, strife with the skraelings.’

‘Skraelings?’

‘Screechers. Uglies. God in his wisdom has given the West Land to savages who don’t even know his name. At first they were friendly and happy to trade. They were so unworldly that a settler could buy a bale
of pelts with a scrap of woolcloth no broader than a finger. Soon, though, they became a menace. They stole the settlers’ livestock, not understanding that animals could be personal property, and they threatened hunters who went into the forests which they claimed as their own preserve. Blood was shed on both sides, but the skraelings were many and the settlers were few. After three winters the leader of the colonists decided that there would never be peace with the heathens and brought the survivors back.’

He lapsed into silence and Wayland assumed that he was thinking about the ill-fated colony. But when he spoke again, he pointed north.

‘I’ve seen a skraeling in Greenland – at the furthest end of the northern hunting grounds. I’d been hunting seals out on the pack ice. I returned in the evening and found footprints around my camp. I took my bow and followed them. I climbed over a snow ridge and there he was. At first I thought he was a blind bear because he was dressed head to toe in fur and had white discs where his eyes should be. He saw me at the same time and drew back his spear. I had my arrow aimed at his heart but I didn’t shoot. I don’t know why. He held up his hand and I raised mine and then he began to back away. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He jumped on a sledge and eight white wolves bore him away.’ Orm looked fiercely at Wayland. ‘God’s word. That was three years ago and ever since I’ve been wondering how he came to be in that place so far north, living with tame wolves where we Greenlanders can’t survive for more than three months of the year.’

‘Perhaps he came from the West Land.’

Orm stabbed his forefinger. ‘You’ve got it, boy! That’s what I tell my people, but they laugh and say how could skraelings who don’t have ships, who know nothing about iron, who live in houses made of twigs and leaves – how could such savages cross the icy sea to Greenland? You’ll see, I tell them. Where one has come, others will follow. Then where will we be?’

Glum gave an urgent cry on the other side of the ship. His father ran over and they both leaned over. ‘Come quick,’ Orm shouted.

The whole company gathered. Under the hull passed a school of fish or whales with pallid, mottled bodies and spiral lances sticking out of their heads.

‘Corpse whales,’ said Orm. ‘Some call them sea unicorns. Forget falcons. Catch one of those and you’ll be rich for life. I’ve heard that in Miklagard the value of a narwhal horn is measured by twice its weight in gold.’

‘How do you catch them?’

‘They swim into the fjords to calve and we harpoon them in their breeding bays.’ Orm leaned out along the course taken by the narwhals. ‘It’s a good omen, lad. They’re heading for the fjords where the falcons nest.’ He pointed towards the coast. ‘Red Cape. We’re nearly at the hunting grounds.’

Wayland looked along the golden path laid by the midnight sun and saw that it ended at a colossal escarpment separating two ice-carved valleys.

On a dying wind the crew rowed towards the immense red prow. Hundreds of seals bobbed in the waves, watching them with limpid curiosity. Acres of eider drakes parted around the ship, only shifting when the bow was almost upon them. Giant auks as tall as geese with wings no bigger than a child’s hands waddled to the edge of a skerry and flopped in. Underwater they flew as gracefully as swallows. ‘God forgot to grant them wits the day he made those boobies,’ Orm said. ‘A man can stand in a flock of them and club them all day long.’

From the same islet ungainly leviathans with down-turned tusks and coarse moustaches humped forward on flippers and slid into the swell. ‘Walruses,’ said Orm, and stroked his own whiskers to make Syth laugh. From the cliffs above came a steady roar. Every ledge and gallery was packed with auks and gulls and God knows what other kinds of fowl. The cliffs loomed so high that the birds flocking around the upper heights looked no bigger than gnats.

‘Falcons nest in both fjords,’ Orm said. He indicated the precipices plunging into the southern sea-arm. ‘One of the eyries is up there.’

Wayland’s gaze panned up from the ice-littered channel to the summit crags, then back down again. The cliffs fell sheer to the sea or dropped to talus slopes pitched at sickening inclines. There was no coastal shelf, nowhere to put ashore.

Raul had a finger pressed thoughtfully to his lips. ‘We ain’t going to climb that.’

‘Not from below,’ Orm said. ‘There’s a path to the top on the other side of the cape. Glum will lead you up it. From the summit you can
climb down to the nest. You won’t be able to see it from above. I’ll take the ship up the fjord to mark the spot. First we must make camp.’

They rowed on with the sun behind them, water falling like blood from their oarblades. Around the north side of the cape was a foreshore of tumbled boulders. The skeleton of a whale lay on the strand like the frame of a wrecked ship, each vertebra occupied by a cormorant holding out its tattered black wings in an unholy cross. Orm steered between bluffs enclosing an inlet and brought
Shearwater
to rest. Wayland jumped ashore into the stink of guano and the din of squabbling birds. A sea-eagle with wings the size of a table-top glided close to the tenements, chased by a mob of gulls. Beneath the rookeries, blue foxes sat waiting for the drizzle of eggs and nestlings that fell or were pushed from their nurseries.

Orm’s base camp was a shieling built with granite slabs. The roof had collapsed under winter snow and the company’s first task was to make it sound. Then they carried their equipment ashore and stowed it away. Orm proposed a meal and then rest, but Wayland knew that Greenland’s summer smiles were fleeting and insisted on climbing to the falcon’s nest straight away.

‘Syth and the dog had better stay with me,’ Orm told him. They sorted out the equipment. Glum slung two coiled ropes and an iron bar over his back. Raul carried another pair of ropes. Wayland strapped a wicker basket over his shoulders.

The sun had moved south and they climbed the boulder field in dusky blue shadow, jumping from one ankle-jarring stance to another. They laboured up a scree slope until they reached the foot of a diagonal rift in the escarpment. Between vertical crags fanged with icicles, an ice gully rose in a succession of steep chutes and steps.

Raul’s jaw dropped. ‘Orm said a path.’

‘Use your ice axes,’ Glum said. ‘In the steep places I will cut steps for you. There are some difficult parts where you must use a rope.’

‘Difficult parts,’ Raul repeated.

Glum set off at an easy pace, chopping toeholds with his axe. Wayland stepped on to the ice and realised how tenuous his grip was. He hadn’t climbed more than a few feet before he slipped. He would have fallen if he hadn’t managed to claw the point of his axe into the ice.

Raul struggled up beside him. ‘This is the stupidest thing I ever did in my life.’

Wayland looked up at Glum’s foreshortened outline. ‘Go back if you want.’

On he went, considering each step. Glum was approaching the top of the icestep by the time he reached its base. He surveyed the treacherous cascade. Looking down through his feet, he could see Raul’s head and shoulders and the slick couloir falling away to the bottom of the cliff. If he slipped now, he would carry Raul away with him. Splinters of ice skipped past. Glum hauled himself out of sight over the step.

Use the steps I cut
.

Wayland waited for Raul to reach him. The German’s teeth were gritted in terror.

‘You’d better lower the rope,’ Wayland shouted.

Down it came. ‘You trust him?’ Raul gasped.

‘More than I trust myself.’

Up he went, his feet skidding on the cobbled ice. At the top he found Glum wedged behind rocks at the edge of the gully. Wayland’s gaze shot up past him, hoping to find that the ascent became easier. Instead, there was another cascade of ice even higher than the one he’d just scaled.

‘You should have told us how dangerous it was.’

Glum regarded him calmly. ‘If I had, would you have come?’

Wayland climbed most of the next pitch on the bare rocks at the side of the gully. One awkward manoeuvre involved shuffling around a pillar that had split away from the face and fractured into blocks. He was fully committed, gripping the stack with both hands, when he felt it begin to sway outwards. Somehow he got round without it toppling, but then he heard a scraping sound and saw as if in slow motion the cap of the pillar slide and fall. The rock was twice the size of a man’s head and it shot down the gully towards Raul. Wayland jammed his fist into his mouth, and that’s what saved the German. If he’d shouted a warning, Raul would have looked up and been struck full in the face. Instead, he was concentrating so hard on his next hold that he didn’t hear the rock coming until it crashed in front of him and bounded over his body. It flew over the icestep and Wayland heard it shatter on the walls and go clattering away into the depths. Shocked rigid, he waited for Raul to join him.

The German groaned and collapsed against the crag with his head lolling back and his eyes closed.

‘I won’t hold it against you if you go back,’ Wayland said.

‘Too late. It would be as dangerous to go down as to go on.’

He was right. A grim fatalism overtook Wayland as he climbed the next icestep. If he fell, he fell – a swoop of terror as he lost his footing, a smashing impact, then oblivion.

Above the third step the gully widened and the going became easier. Wayland was able to climb without the use of his hands. A blue skylight opened and he staggered on to the summit plateau. Raul thrashed up behind him and turned and pointed down the gully as if it were the throat into hell. ‘I’m not going back down there. You hear?’

Glum was coiling the rope over his shoulder. ‘Yes, you must. It is the only way.’

The climb had taken them most of the morning and the sky was beginning to skin over. From up here they could see the vast polar desert that covered Greenland’s interior. A cold wind from the icecap stung their faces as they plugged over the plateau, the ground curving away on all sides so that they could see nothing but snow and sky and their footprints dwindling behind them. The slope began to descend and the snow cover grew patchy, exposing fields of frost-shattered rock. Wayland saw the ice-ribboned clifftops on the far side of the fjord, and then the edge of the plateau came into sight – broken columns and buttresses connected to the face by knife-edged ridges. Glum made his way out on to one of the projections. Very vulnerable he looked on that lofty promontory.

He made a slow overarm gesture towards his left and they trudged on into the wind.