Raptor (111 page)

“I hold
you
responsible for this!” she snarled at me, after she had finally capitulated. “Until you came along, Frido was a submissive and governable child. You have undermined his filial regard for his mother. Well, I promise you, this will be your last association with him.”

She bellowed for servants, and barked orders at them, sending them scurrying to start the packing of everything the prince might conceivably need on the voyage. Then she again jutted at me her prognathous teeth and gums. I expected her to charge me with keeping the boy safe while we were gone. Instead she said:

“Four of my trustworthy palace guards will go along, and not solely to shield Frido from harm. They will be instructed to see that you are never alone with him, to infect him with any more of your seditious notions of rebellion. When the voyage is done, Marshal, you are to leave here. But if Frido shows any slightest sign of being still unruly, you will leave here with your back flogged to ribbons. Is that understood?”

I was not greatly frightened by that threat, for I did not intend to get flogged. But I had to concede in all honesty that I would eventually deserve to be. For I was planning to sin, not just against the laws of Gothic kinship, but worse, against the universal laws of hospitality given and received.

The ship’s master, still averse to making the voyage, received us grumpily and with further remonstration. I think he might have contrived some last-minute excuse to keep from going—possibly even holing his ship’s planking—except that Queen Giso had come with us to the docks and speedily made herself so disagreeable to everyone in sight that the Sarmatic Ocean seemed a better place to be than Pomore. So the master threw up his hands, ranged his men at their oars, and we cast off.

The ship was a broad, apple-bowed merchant vessel, much like those I had seen in the Propontís, only not so big. It had two masts, but of course any sails would have been impediments because we were heading directly into the north wind. So we had to depend for propulsion on the oarsmen. There being only a single bank of those at either side, the ship moved slowly enough to make me believe that the Sarmatic Ocean really was as “soupy” as Frido had described it. Except for the brutal cold, I found this sea travel not very different from being out in a tomus fishing smack on the almost as gloomy waters of Lake Brigantinus.

However, young Frido was thrilled and excited to be taking his first ride upon any water, and I was pleased for him, remembering my own first time, when old Wyrd and I had ridden a barge across the river Rhenus. Once we were out of sight of the Amber Coast, the ship’s master too seemed inspirited by being on the open sea; he gradually shed his surliness and became friendly again. Of course, he and I and Frido, when we tired of loitering topside and gazing at the gray water—which we very soon did—could retire to shelter in the enclosed cabins at the stern of the ship. The four guards sent by Giso were already under cover there, and the ship’s crewmen not on duty, and even the ship’s two steersmen were sheltered by a canopy. But the men laboring at the oars had no protection and no reason to be glad at having put to sea. Though their benches were beneath the upper deck, hence roofed against the elements above, those men still had to endure the cruel cold wind and spiteful cold spindrift that lashed in at them through the rowports. I could not make out the Rugian words of the chant with which the rowing leader was setting the stroke, but I suspected that it was a long, protracted cursing of me and Frido.

As we went ever northward, the weather and the surrounding view changed, too, but only for the worse. The steel-cold air got ever colder, the glass-shard wind ever sharper, the sheet-lead sky ever heavier and lower. If the sea had been soup in the Wendic Gulf, it turned into slush as we proceeded across the Sarmatic Ocean proper. The water got genuinely thick with granular ice, and the rowing leader’s chant got slower and slower because the oarsmen had to pull so hard against that pulpy muck. Though the steersmen in the stern had had little work to do in the first three or four days out from Pomore, having only to hold the straight northern course, they too began to find their task laborious. They soon were manipulating their sweeps almost continuously, to guide the ship between or around immense floating slabs of what those seamen call “toross”—ice piled on ice, layered, overlaid, heaped up into hummocky gray bulks as big around as our vessel and frequently as tall.

Even Frido, so enthusiastic at the start of the voyage, was finally going on deck only once a day, each morning, to see if the seascape had become any more worth looking at. Since it never did, he spent most of his time below, with myself and the ship’s master, being our interpreter as we talked and drank beer. Queen Giso’s four guardsmen never participated in that, and never tried to enforce the queen’s order that Frido and I be kept apart. If the fat old men had tried, I would have pitched them overboard, and they probably knew that. The ship’s master and I talked of many things of no consequence, but I did glean from our talks one more new scrap of information for my historical compilation, one more name to add to my roster of early Gothic kings.

“It was a King Berig,” the master told me, “who commanded the ships that brought the Goths from Gutaland to the continent. The old songs say that there were three ships, but I dispute that. Unless they were each the size of Noah’s Ark, I am sure there must have been many more ships—a whole fleet of them. I have sometimes wondered: what became of those ships after the crossing? Did Berig simply abandon them on the Wendic shore? Did their masters take them empty back to Gutaland? But akh, that was ages ago. The ships have long been rotted to nothing.”

At last, after how many days I do not remember, when the cold and the dreariness and the confinement and the monotony had become well-nigh unendurable, the ship’s master one afternoon broke off our three-way conversation. Without going to glance overside, without having received any notice or impulse that I could detect, he said suddenly and simply, “We ought to be raising the island right about now. Will you come and have a look?”

Frido went scrambling for the upper deck, and I followed almost as eagerly—and there was the first land we had seen since leaving Pomore behind. There was Gutaland, just emerging from the gray sea haze on the northwestern horizon, off to our left front. I wish I could report that what we saw was a land as enchantingly beautiful and alluring as the Fortunate Isles of Avalonnis are said to be. But it looked more like that other fabled island, Ultima Thule, the Farthest Place of All. Gutaland was but one more dismal feature of that dismal Sarmatic Ocean, only one more of the many abodes that I could see the Goths had had good reason to leave.

The prince and I gazed at it over the sea. Or rather—because for many days we had seen little actual water between the innumerable floating islands of toross—he and I gazed out over those drifting gray hillocks of pack ice. And if we had not been forewarned, we might have taken Gutaland to be just another and exceptionally gigantic toross. From our distance, I could not well judge dimensions, but the island was a long one, extending out of sight in the haze at either extremity. And it was a high one, consisting of cliffs that rose sheer from the gray sea. The cliffs were of gray rock columns like pillars bunched together, but here and there unbunched columns stood apart from the rest, individual spires and spikes sticking up from the water. Those could have been the fraying, raveling edges of the ragged last outskirts of the world.

The ship’s master certainly saw our disappointment at having come this long and weary way to find so little, and he may have felt slightly gratified, because he had promised us exactly that. But he courteously refrained from saying, “I told you so,” and said instead:

“I am sure you will wish to set foot on your ancestors’ homeland. The only decent harbor is far around on the western coast of the island, and solidly icebound in this season, impossible to reach. So I have brought you along this high eastern shore because I know of a little half-moon cove here, where the water is deep enough for a mooring. Also it is the habitation of that aged and demented Gothic woman of whom I earlier spoke. You may as well have a word with her. Who knows? She may prove to be your own many-times-great-grandmother.”

I very much doubted that, and I also doubted that an old madwoman would have anything of interest to tell me. But the master was doing his best to be helpful, so I let him put the ship into the cove. It required closely concerted work by the steersmen, the rowing leader and the oarsmen—with the master confidently shouting instructions to them—to edge our vessel through the drifting, shifting, colliding, crunching toross ice. But before dark, the seamen had brought the ship in to a scooped-out cavity in the cliff wall, where the rock columns loomed above a tiny shelf of shingle, and there we anchored for the night.

Frido and I were awakened early the next morning by a thin but urgent outcry from somewhere. Thinking it must be the ship’s sentry calling an alarm, we hastened on deck, and found that the shouting was coming from the shore. Over there a small and nondescript figure was doing a sort of dance on the shingle, gesticulating and shouting incoherently. So we went to where the ship’s master was directing some men in lowering a small leather boat overside. But he was doing that with no hurry, and said offhandedly:

“No danger, no distress. It is only old Hildr. She gets wildly excited whenever any vessel puts in here, because every master brings her a gift of provisions. I think it is all she gets to live on, and I do not know how she manages to live between feedings..”

The ship’s cook dropped into the boat a large slab of smoked pork and a skin of beer, and the master himself rowed me and Frido over. There was only a short stretch of water between the ship and the cove shelf, and only a few chunks of drifting ice, no hindrance. As we closed the distance, I could see that the ash-colored cliffs were pocked with numerous hollows and caves. I could also espy the woman’s pitiful abode, nothing but a heap of driftwood haphazardly piled against the cliff wall, thatched and chinked with dried seaweed.

When we stepped ashore, the woman danced up to us, dressed in gray rags and ribbons of some kind of very limp and flimsy leather. Without ceasing to dance—her lank white hair flopping, her sharp old knees and elbows madly jerking—she babbled and plucked at our sleeves as we hauled the boat up on the shingle. I could tell that she was speaking a dialect of the Old Language, but little more. She employed a great many words that I had seen in old Gothic manuscripts but never had heard uttered, and she spoke with bewildering rapidity. Prince Frido’s young ears were perhaps quicker than mine, for he translated, “She is thanking us for whatever we have brought her.”

The master took from the boat the provisions the cook had loaded, and Hildr, still jigging and jogging in her old-bones dance, clasped them to her scrawny chest. She blithered some more, then turned and scuttled away toward her cliffside hut, but beckoning for us to follow.

Frido said, “To thank us, she offers to show us something of interest.”

I glanced at the ship’s master. He grinned and nodded. “Come along. She has shown it many times to me. I told you old Hildr is mad.”

So we followed the aged woman, and had to get down on our hands and knees to squeeze into the hut behind her. There was nothing inside except a smoky fire of faggots laid in a ring of stones, and a pallet made of dried seaweed and filthy rags. The single room was scarcely big enough to contain all four of us, but there was unused space beyond; I could now see that the hut had been built by leaning the pieces of driftwood about the dark opening of a shoulder-high cave in the cliff wall.

However, if there was anything to show us, the crone had other things to do first. Without even heating her smoked pork slab over the fire she was already tearing at it with her few snaggle teeth, and swigging from the spout of the beerskin. Hildr was incredibly old, so wrinkled and gnarled and leather-brown and ugly that she could have been one of the three Furies. She possessed only one eye, with a vacant hole where the other had been, and her nose and chin nearly touched when she munched. Her chewing did not stop her babbling, but it slowed the articulation to where I could comprehend it. I now heard her say, quite clearly, even quite sanely:

“The master will have told you I am mad. All say that I am mad. That is because I remember things from long ago, things other folk never knew, so they do not believe those things. Does that prove me mad?”

I asked gently, “What sort of things do you remember, good Hildr?”

Chewing hard, she waved a greasy old hand, as if to indicate that the things were too numerous to list. Then she swallowed and said, “Akh, among others… the great sea beasts that used to exist… the monster kraken, the creature grindl, the dragon fafnir…”

“Mythical monsters,” the ship’s master said aside to me. “Seamen’s superstitions.”

“Myths? Ni allis!” snapped old Hildr. “I can tell you, Sigurd hooked and netted and beached a many of them in his time.” With the haughty pride of a grand lady, she fingered the sleazy rags she wore. “Sigurd slew those beasts so he could dress me in fine raiment.” Seeing her leather rags up close, I could recognize them as dogfish-skin.

I said, “Good Hildr, you are a Gothic woman. Would you remember any of the other Goths once habitant in this Gutaland?”

Spraying chewed matter, she exclaimed, “Weaklings! Fainthearts! Softlings! Nothing like Sigurd, they were! This Gutaland was too harsh for them, so they fled. Some went west with Beowa, most went south with Berig.”

I had already calculated that King Berig must have lived about the time of Christ, so if old brown Hildr was claiming to remember him, she was either mad indeed or old indeed. Humoring her fancy, I asked, “Why did you not go with them?”

“Vái!” Her one bleary eye looked at me with astonishment. “I could not leave my Sigurd!”

“Are you saying that your Sigurd and King Berig lived at the same time?”