The Long Hunt (The Strongbow Saga) (29 page)

"We will help you," Hastein told him. "We will carry your people across to the island."

Torvald continued to protest after the Oelanders departed. "They have boats," he said. "They do not need our ship. Why must we involve ourselves with this?"

Hastein frowned. "It is but a small thing they ask us to do."

"Let these islanders deal with their own problems. I think they are still afraid of the pirates, even though there are only six of them left on the island. These men are not warriors. Did you see them? It is no wonder the pirates chose to stay here."

"I have decided, Torvald. We will help them." Hastein was beginning to sound impatient. But Torvald would not stop.

"Why must you always right others' wrongs that do not concern us? We have lost good men who came on this voyage only out of loyalty to you. This is not our concern. None of it is. It is not our fight."

I could feel my face turning red. Torvald was no longer speaking of carrying the Oelanders across the channel. And he was angry. I had never seen him speak so to Hastein. Did others among our men feel the same as he?

If Hastein noticed the meaning thinly concealed in Torvald's words, he chose to ignore it. "The pirates have been robbing ships that pass through these waters for months now. Do you not think they will have taken much wealth from them?"

Torvald's scowl gradually faded as he considered what Hastein had said. "Perhaps," he finally said.

"If there is treasure to be found in the pirates' encampment it is rightfully ours, for we defeated them," Hastein told him. "Even had the Oelanders not asked me to, I would have crossed the channel to the island to find their camp, once I learned of it. It is but a small thing to take them with us when we go, so they can search for their stolen women-folk."

After the sun had passed its noon peak, we sailed the
Gull
north along the shoreline of Oeland, traveling at a leisurely pace with the sail close hauled to catch the gentle breeze blowing out of the east. Nori accompanied us to show us where we should anchor for the night. The rest of the Oelanders whom we would carry across to the island—there would be nine of them, each a man whose wife or daughter had been taken by the pirates—would join us on the morrow, before dawn.

All that day, the Oelanders had gathered brush and wood, building a great pile on the ridge above the anchorage which Nori directed us to. "In the morning, when we are ready to cross the channel, they will light it," he'd explained to Hastein. "Even through the fog, you should be able to see it for most of the crossing—for all of it, if the fog is not too thick. If you keep its light dead astern, your course will take you straight across the channel to the center of the island on which the pirates have built their camp, at a point where the beach is soft sand and the water shallow and free of rocks."

Because of the casualties suffered in the battle with the pirates—eight members of the
Gull
's crew had been killed, and five badly wounded—Hastein had drawn ten men from the crew of the
Serpent
to help man the
Gull
. The
Serpent
's losses had been lighter: four dead, and five, including Stig, with serious wounds. Our company, which had numbered eighty-one when we had sailed from Jutland, was now reduced to just fifty-nine warriors who were still fit to fight. As Hastein had observed, the strong advantage in numbers we had once held over Toke was being whittled away.

Most of the prisoners had been left back at our original encampment on Oeland with our wounded and the other two ships. But at my suggestion, we had brought Skjold with us.

"After we land on the island, he can lead us across it to the pirates' encampment," I'd explained to Hastein, before we had sailed north. "We will be far more likely to be able to take them by surprise if we do not have to search for it."

"Do you trust him not to try and warn those in the camp?" Hastein had asked.

"I do," I said. When I had approached him about it aboard Sigvald's ship where the prisoners were still being kept bound and under guard, Skjold had readily agreed to guide us, even though others among the pirate prisoners had given him black looks for it.

"He seems very willing to help us—and eager to please you. If you were not bound by the promise I made to the prisoners when they surrendered—if I released you from it, and gave Skjold to you to do with as you wish, would you kill him when we are through here?"

I thought it a strange question. "Why do you ask?"

"He clearly hopes to buy mercy from you with his cooperation. I am curious if your oath of vengeance will make his hope in vain."

I did not answer. I thought Hastein was misjudging me, for I would have killed Skjold aboard the pirate ship the day we had taken him prisoner, had Gudfred not stopped me. Yet it was true that Skjold was trying hard to win my favor, and had I not known he had served Toke, I would have found him likeable enough.

*   *   *

As Nori had predicted, fog crept in across the water during the night. Although by dawn it was not so thick that I could not see the
Gull
's bow when standing in her stern, it was dense enough that had I shot an arrow out across the water, I could not have seen where it fell. Even if the pirates kept sentries posted in the watchtowers at either end of the island—which I thought unlikely, at least during the night hours, since there were only six of them—they would not be able to see the
Gull
when we made landfall in the island's center.

The nine men who were rowed out to our ship as the night's blackness began to give way to gray all bore some sort of arms, but Torvald had been correct. The men of Oeland were not warriors. They were farmers and fishermen, peaceful folk. All had knives or seaxes in scabbards on their belts, and most carried axes, though the axe one man brought was a heavy-bladed one for splitting logs, far too clumsy to use as a weapon. Three also carried spears and one a bow, but only two of them bore shields, and there was not a sword or helm among them.

One of the village headmen who had accompanied Nori the morning before—the man with the long brown beard, who'd seemed so angry when Skjold had revealed that two of the captured women had died—was among them. It was he who had the bow. His name, I learned, was Osten. His wife had been taken by the pirates in their first raid on Oeland. He paced anxiously back and forth across the
Gull
's deck as we rowed slowly across the channel. I could well imagine why. Even if we were successful and rescued the Oelanders' women, two of these men would not find those who had been taken from them.

Despite Nori's assurances that on the course he'd set us upon we would encounter no hazards that could damage the
Gull
, Hastein ordered her to be rowed at half speed. He stood on the fore-deck, peering ahead through the fog, while Torvald manned the steer-board in the stern. I was in the bow, too, waiting just aft of the fore-deck. Einar, Gudfred, Asbjorn, and Hallbjorn—all armed with their bows—were with me. Hastein had ordered that as soon as the
Gull
reached the island, we were to be the first ashore, to scout for enemies and stand watch as the rest of our men disembarked.

Behind us, the light of the beacon fire grew steadily dimmer, until all that could be seen of it through the fog was a pale yellow spot glowing in a shapeless wall of gray. Then even that was gone.

"How much further till we reach land?" Hastein asked Nori tensely. The old man shrugged and answered, "It is hard to say."

An annoyed expression on his face, Hastein called for Bryngolf to join him on the fore-deck. "Throw the line," he told him. "Let me know when you find the bottom."

Bryngolf pulled the heaving line—a long rope with knots tied along it an ell's length apart, with a fist-sized stone that had a hole pierced through its center tied to its end—from where it was stowed underneath the fore-deck. Grasping the coil of rope in his left hand, he payed out ten knots worth of the line in loops into his right, then let the stone hang down from it by an ell's length. Stepping to the ship's side, he swung the stone in a circle and let it fly, the rope in his right hand slipping through his fingers as it arced out ahead of the
Gull
and splashed down into the sea.

After giving the weighted line a few moments to sink, Bryngolf glanced at Hastein and shook his head, then pulled the rope in, coiling it again in his right hand as he did, and repeated the process.

I had long lost count of how many times he had thrown the line when Bryngolf finally turned to Hastein and said, "It has struck bottom. Nine ells down."

The sea bed off the shore we were approaching proved to have a long, gentle slope to it, with shallows extending far out into the channel. Bryngolf threw the line three more times, and the count was down to six ells, before the outline of the island first showed ahead through the fog as a dark shadow against the gray. Hastein passed word back to Torvald, who slowed the cadence for the rowers even more, and we approached the unfamiliar shore at a cautious pace. But Nori's assurances proved true. When we drew close enough to see the land ahead of us clearly, a sandy beach, free of rocks, was revealed. At Torvald's command, the rowers pulled hard over the last, short stretch to the shore, driving the
Gull
's bow almost to the water's edge before she ground to a halt, the front of her hull resting against the sandy bottom.

I dropped over the side into the shallow water and waded ashore, my four men with me—Einar and Gudfred to my right, Asbjorn and Hallbjorn on my left. We nocked arrows on our bows and crossed the beach, spreading out as we did, then moved into the trees. The fog had not penetrated there, and it had grown light enough by now to see clearly even under their shadows, for although we could not spy its shining orb, up above the fog the sun had risen.

Hastein was wasting no time. By the time we returned to the beach to report that all was clear, the gangplank had already been wrestled into position and most of the landing party was ashore. Ten men would stay with the
Gull
to guard her. The rest, with the men from Oeland, prepared to march across the island in search of the pirates' camp.

"Are there any trails?" Hastein asked Skjold. Though I did not think he would try to escape us, I was taking no chances. His hands were bound in front of him, and Bram was holding onto a short length of rope, the other end of which had been tied in a loop around Skjold's neck.

Bram looked much more a warrior now than he had when we'd departed Jutland. Although only a few of the pirates had possessed mail brynies, at my urging he had acquired one of them, stripping it and the padded jerkin to wear under it from the dead owner's body after the battle. He had also found a helm that suited him, and had returned the one he'd borrowed from me.

"None that come all the way to this shore," Skjold responded. "There is a trail that runs from the north end of the island to the south, between the two watch towers, and another that leads from that one to the encampment."

"You and your men will lead the way," Hastein told me. "Take the prisoner with you. Our main force will follow some distance back, so the noise of our passage will not be heard. As soon as you find the encampment, send word back to me. If possible, I wish to surround it before we make our presence known."

Though my four archers were wearing brynies and helms like I was, we had all left our shields aboard the
Gull
. Only Bram carried one. We would be able to move more quickly and quietly through the forest without them, and if we had to fight, we would do so with our bows.

Our initial progress was slow, for at first there was heavy undergrowth to push through. But before long we reached older woodlands, whose tall trees so heavily shaded the forest floor that it was more open, allowing us to move forward swiftly, spread out in a scouting line rather than following each other's footsteps in single file.

The island was not large. We quickly found the trails Skjold had spoken of, and it was still early morn when we reached the encampment. We crouched, hidden in the trees, and studied it. A clearing had been cut out of the forest along the shoreline of the small cove Skjold had told us of. The stumps of the trees that had once stood there still remained. The camp had no defenses—Sigvald must have felt its concealed location provided security enough. A rough-hewn log longhouse had been built from the felled trees, its roof poorly thatched with layers of cut pine and spruce branches laid across supports. It looked like it would leak badly when it rained.

Two large ship's tents had been pitched on either side of the log building. The only other structure in the camp was a small, strange looking tent that appeared to be made of animal skins sewn together and stretched around a frame of long wooden poles, which had been pitched close to the water's edge just inside the trees along one side of the clearing.

No one was visible. The only sign of life was a small fire that burned in a ring of stones in front of the skin tent.

"Where will the six be?" I whispered to Skjold. It was obvious that none of them were standing watch.

"In the longhouse. When the full company was here, some of the men slept in the tent on the right, but with so few here now, they will all be in the longhouse. It is warmer and dryer there."

Glancing again at the structure's roof, I wondered how true the latter was. "And the Oelanders' women-folk?"

"They will be in the longhouse, too."

Einar was crouched beside me. "What of the small tent, with the fire in front of it?" he asked Skjold.

"That was the Finn's. He slept there."

The Finn—the pirates' archer who had been so deadly. "He died two days past," I said. "That fire—if all are in the longhouse, who lit it?"

Just then the flap that covered the opening into the skin tent was raised, and someone stepped out. It was a female, dressed in trousers and a long tunic. She was short and slight of build.

"No doubt she lit it," Skjold responded. "She is the Finn's daughter."