The Shades of Winter a Novel of Averraine Page 6

  “We need to warn them,” Elke said.

  “Oh, that’ll go over well,” Raisa said. “Here: ‘We barely saw it in the darkness, and it cannot possibly be true, but trust us, it’s there.’ Do you think that a man who disbelieved in all those dead bodies at Heilaegr is going to call up the war bands over that? Do you think they’ll come? We’ll be lucky if we aren’t laughed all the way back into the harbour.”

  We all contemplated this.

  “What choice have we got?” Elke asked. “We can’t deal with this alone.”

  I looked at her. She had some colour back in her face, but she was shivering in the damp cold of the breeze. I hoped she wasn’t going to come into a fever, as we had nothing much to offer in the way of comfort for her.

  We’d done our best. We’d improvised some bandaging and wrapped her in a ragged bit of sail cloth we’d found under the deck boards, tucked around a half-empty cask of fresh water and a rough-spun linen sack of raw oats. This lack of provisions constituted another problem, though. It wasn’t much for us to work with, no matter which way our journey went.

  I went back to scanning the stars. We weren’t far off, I reckoned, from the point where the current would seize us, making it that much easier to woo them to my thoughts, but I couldn’t make that decision, not on my own.

  “We need wise ones. Ones with experience in things like this.” I phrased it carefully enough, but it was tricky.

  “Are you planning to talk to the dead?”

  “Sigurd, there are other wise than our own.”

  “I’m sure the Istaran wise will be delighted to help us - right into that pit.”

  “Not them.”

  Lavran made a strangled sound of comprehension, which rather surprised me. He’s not a fool, but deep thinking and jumping ahead of a conversation weren’t the things he was known for.

  Oddhi turned to look at him. “What ails you?”

  Lavran shook his head. “I think you’re mad, Tamar. Skeid’s balls! They’ll kill us before we can say so much as two words.”

  “Not necessarily. Not if we’re careful.”

  “I’ll give you a pound of raw silver if we ever set one foot on shore.”

  “They aren’t savages, Lavran. I think we could manage it.”

  “Does anybody,” asked Ingvold, plaintively, “have any idea of what they’re talking about?”

  “She wants to talk to the wise in Keraine.”

  • • •

  Unlike most of my family, my uncle Arvid had long since set himself on a course to repair his personal fortune by pursuing a steady road of honest trading, rather than the haphazard windfalls of the occasional good raiding season. He’d done quite well for himself, bringing furs, and beads made from gold-coloured sea-glass, down into Fendrais, and coming back with sacks of summer wheat and rolls of fine-woven, bleached linen, to be sold at ridiculously inflated prices in the market that sprang up every winter around Raethelingas.

  He’d even tried to convince me once or twice to follow his lead, since I seemed to him to be less of a profligate fool, in his words, than the rest of his relations. But Dyrsholt had little enough surplus of anything, back in those early days, that would have given me something to work with, and I hadn’t, what with one thing and another, had the will to really try. Not then, anyway.

  The important point was that a few years back, he’d managed to crack the markets of Keraine. It had been no easy feat, since that kingdom was not disposed to see a difference between Raeth and Istara, and more interested in slaughtering any of us venturing near them than in civilized commerce. He’d persevered, though, learning the language and questioning any thralls he met up with who’d been taken from there. Eventually, he’d made a few contacts, and gotten permission to sail into a few of their ports, and he’d made some good profit.

  Three summers before, he’d come sailing into Dyrsholt, along with any number of relatives I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard of before, to see Gunnr fairly wedded. And on a long, hot night, when neither of us could sleep, he’d given me an exhaustive and detailed description of practically everything he had learned about Keraine, in case I ever wanted to try selling Dyrsholt’s timber into a closer market than Ilrae.

  I knew, perhaps better than anyone else on this boat, what a slim chance it would be to get as far as a fair hearing on their Holy Island. On the other hand, I could speak Averran better than most people, since Gwennie had been the one charged with my care in infancy, and Camrhyssi is the same language, really. It’s spoken with an accent that Arvid had shown me to be more one of emphasis and idioms than anything else, and I thought, if he had not been oversimplifying the difficulties, that we might be able to manage it.

  The dawn crept over us, dispelling the last wisps of fog, and the breeze was freshening. It looked to be a fairish day, and I was hoping for warmth, because the night’s chill had worn us all down.

  The mad king of Raeth was shivering in a fitful sleep. We’d coaxed Elke out of her cocoon of sailcloth by way of Ingvold offering her his overtunic in exchange, and we’d wrapped Njall up in the canvas, but it didn’t look good. His head wasn’t bleeding anymore, but he was undeniably feverish, his skin cold and clammy to the touch, and now, with the growing light, we could see what greater toll the years had taken.

  We’d all aged. I’d expected those signs, but they were less apparent than I would have thought: the lines beside his mouth were carved in deep, and he had, like any of us, some greying hair, but he looked remarkably well, all things considered. The scar on his face, the missing eye, well, you could put those down to battle, if you wanted to, and we wanted to, I guess.

  I suppose it’s natural to ascribe the worst traits and the most evil intent to one’s enemies. It makes them easier to kill. But beyond out-of-season raids, and whatever the rumours that escaped out of Alvandir had ever been, no one had ever thought that they were truly monsters. It was just something to say, out of anger or contempt, because we were more or less always at odds.

  In the weak sunlight of the dawn, the marks on his body showed up as pale, silvery lines, criss-crossing his flesh everywhere, a pattern of committed, considered cruelty that had no ties to honoured combat, or even simple humanity. He’d been tortured, continually and without mercy, for over twenty years.

  What with one thing and another, it made sailing into yet another opportunity for almost certain death seem quite a reasonable decision, in the end.

  Chapter 13

  The last time we’d stolen a ship, I was only thirteen.

  According to Njall, we were only borrowing it, and it’s true that in the end, Drifa got her boat back mostly intact. We’d been unprepared for the sheer amount of work that sailing the sea road took, and even less prepared for riding out a storm at sea without older, more experienced sailors to tell us what to do, but we lived through that first, unaccompanied raid without anything truly dire occurring.

  It might only have been luck, of course. Things might have gone horribly wrong. But doing things like that, raiding, fighting, taking matters into your own hands: those are the things that are expected of heirs to great position. My brother Rei had hared off with a passing ship bound for Camrhys when he was barely fourteen, coming home a couple of months later with an assortment of cheap arm-rings, one of those strange calfskin bundles southerners make their rune marks in, two sacks of grain, and a reputation as a strong arm in a fight. When my father died a year later, there wasn’t so much as a murmur from anyone that Rei wasn’t fully capable of being Jarl of Dyrsholt on his own merits.

  So, despite my own serious misgivings, one late summer’s eve I went along without protest as we all snuck down to the eastern edge of the harbour. I helped break the shiplocks on the most seaworthy-looking vessel suitable for the thirty or so adolescents who made up the current population of Njall’s hall. I put my own thin shoulders into the task of pushing her down the beach and into the water, trying hard not show the chilly fear that gripped my heart.


  When we did make landfall, in Fendrais, rather than Camrhys as we’d originally intended before the storm blew us further east than we’d meant to go, I was the first one leaping off the boat. Terror lent me strength - I slammed my shield edge up into the front teeth of a woman in a leather corselet before she could bring her sword down on my idiot skull, and from behind me, Raisa thrust her spear up into the woman’s belly.

  When we got home, Katla had given us a stern talking-to, rather publicly so as to not seem overindulgent of her sons’ recklessness and the notion that we were old enough to do such things on our own. Most of our plunder had to be given up as reparations to Drifa for the loss of the stored provisions as well as two oars and a few shroud pins that had been washed away in the storm, and it was several weeks before Vadik’s broken arm was completely healed - his father was quite unimpressed. Still, it was obvious that Katla was proud of her boys, and of all of us, and we weren’t treated quite so much as children after that.

  How that would have gone had either Njall or Hrolf suffered any real damage, I don’t know. My own experience of motherhood rather suggested that it wouldn’t have ended so happily if so much as a hair on their heads had been disarranged, but perhaps that’s just me.

  It wasn’t the familiar rush of the little boat entering the great current that brought back those memories, though. It was the late afternoon bringing us gathering clouds on the eastern horizon, and the quickening winds that made me think of the more frightening hours on Drifa’s wide ship. We’d nearly lost Solveig to a massive wave that came close to swamping us, and that had been in a far more seaworthy craft than the one we rode in now.

  I didn’t know if we could weather a storm like that, not in this little boat. We’d been making good progress up till now, but we didn’t have any room left for mischances. Elke, for a start, was no worse than she had been last night, but she was no better, either.

  Sometime after dawn, Ingvold had unearthed the ship’s little firebox and an inadequate-looking pot, and after careful study, we had concluded that we could spare a single deck board for fuel. Sigurd had then managed, through sheer stubbornness, to produce a meal of thick, half-cooked porridge for us. Njall, when we roused him, refused to eat no matter how hard we coaxed him to it, and that, too, was worrisome.

  The winds were changing much too fast. It was the season for it: in another moon’s turning or so, this voyage might be nigh on impossible. It was beginning to shift already, coming in wild gusts and more strongly from the north, and there was a chill to it that even last night had been absent.

  Raisa clambered over three sets of sprawling legs to perch up beside me at the steering oar and nodded towards the gathering clouds on the horizon.

  “Can we outrun it?” she asked.

  “Not likely.”

  “Well, then, do we shorten the sail now?”

  “Gods, no. I want as much distance as we can get before that weather rolls in. If the Istaran wise realize where we’re headed, I’d rather be as close to Keraine as we can be.”

  I could have saved my breath. The wind kicked, and shifted again, and the waves sent up a plume of cold water over the bow. Raisa didn’t bother to ask again, she was already slipping down towards the forward shroud pins and calling out to Lavran to get to the leeward side.

  I hate squalls. The little boat was rolling hard now, rattling like a child’s toy, and when she pitched sideways, I could feel the pain right from my hands on the steering oar, all the way up my arms, across my shoulders and down into my aching back.

  Ingvold loomed up out of nowhere, grinning like a crazy man.

  “Curse of the Oldrungs! Are you wishing they’d spitted us on the docks of Alvandir yet?” he shouted into the wind.

  “I’m wishing they spitted you, at least!”

  He laughed, and I watched as he walked, as easily as if on the driest of dry land, along the lurching keelway to help Audric and Sigurd with the bailing-out.

  We were drenched now, because it wasn’t just spray anymore - whole waves were arching over the strakes and trying to swamp us - so when the rain began, I hardly noticed. Curse of the Oldrungs, indeed. It would be a gift of the gods if we survived this, and if we didn’t, well, that would be down to me and mine.

  We’re an ill-fated name.

  If we died out here…I pushed the thought away. We could not. We would not. The gods could not be so cruel as to let us come this far, only to drown us all now.

  I concentrated on keeping our stolen ship from turning sideways into the waves and watched the sky. It was not as dire as it had seemed. I could feel the wind slackening already, and from the way the clouds were breaking, we were probably through the worst of it.

  The wind was pushing us west at a furious pace, though, which might have been all right, if only I could keep us steady and had not utterly misread that old chart.

  Was it three days or four, west past Raethelingas, that Arvid said was when to head south again? Maybe it was five - at this point, I mistrusted my own memory of that late night discussion. And had he said all that about the towers of Dungarrow or some other place? I was almost certain he’d meant Dungarrow. Almost. But then, how far was Alvandir along that path? The map, I thought, had shown it as being about halfway or more, but Keraine had not been uppermost in my mind back then, and I was beginning to doubt everything about this venture from stem to stern.

  We were, I reckoned, about two candle-marks away from sunset. If there was a decision to be made, we needed to make it now. The storm might be nearly over, but the winds were still strong, and with the current, it would keep pushing us south. Better to head more fervently west now, maybe, while we could still be sure of our heading, and just chance it that we didn’t miss our mark.

  No one argued with me about it, when I outlined the dilemma. There was no question that it would be better to make the course changes while there was yet some light. Even Oddhi could see the sense of that, although he held to his contention that we ought to have made for home to begin with. Sailing into a hostile country looking for charity was daft, he said, and then laughed with surprising good nature when I agreed with him.

  “Never a quiet moment, with you.”

  It made for another miserable night, even so. There was no real sleep to be had, being so wet and chill, and once, Njall scared the heart right out of me when he almost reached a standing position and seemed headed over the side by design. Audric only barely managed to catch at his feet and pull him back down.

  We tied him to one of the oar holes after that. It was only sense, of course, but it was hard to do it, all the same.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning, it was as if the storm had never been. The sun rose into an unbelievably clear blue sky and proceeded from there into wholly unseasonable heat.

  Perhaps we should have been grateful. At least we were dry again.

  But then, the wind had pretty well died on us with the dawn, and the fact was, we couldn’t row all the way to Keraine.

  We wallowed in the placid water, borne on only by the current, and we shared out the last of the water carefully. If we didn’t make landfall by the next morning, things were probably going to get pretty unbearable pretty fast.

  The sun was nearly at its zenith, and there still wasn’t a cloud in the sky to give us any relief. That was bad enough, but the real danger might come after dark, when a more seasonable cold would set in. I looked at where Elke sat, trying to seem healthy so as not to worry us, and then at Njall, who was shivering despite the heat.

  In short, everything untoward that could possibly happen was happening. Whatever good luck had been with us was gone.

  I was suddenly and overwhelmingly filled with rage at my own stupidity. What in the name of all the gods had I been thinking? The longer we sailed on, the worse it would get: for all I knew, we might be drifting on the endless seas forever, since I had not the faintest idea of where the coast was or how far from here it might be. I didn’t even know where “he
re” was, to be completely honest.

  The others had been right all along. We ought to have tried for home.

  And then, right when I was on the point of giving up entirely and announcing my faults to the world, there was the barest shiver on the air. The sail flapped and then stilled again, but then the shiver became a breeze. Just a light one, more rumour than reality, but moments later it began to strengthen, and finally, we began to move again.

  As if the gods wanted to drive the point about my lack of faith in all the way, it wasn’t more than a candle-mark after mid-day when Halvar, who had been lying listlessly on the cross-brace at the prow, sat up suddenly and let out a triumphant whistle.

  We’d made it to someplace, after all.

  We were too far off to see any details, so where along the coast we were in relation to where we needed to be, I had no idea. But I had worked out, based on Arvid’s descriptions and the bit of the drawing I could remember, that if the land began to turn sharply southwards, we would have overshot the mark. Where we needed to go was to Dungarrow and the mouth of the River Braide, and according to Arvid, it would be hard to miss.

  We needed to be closer in, though. Not too close, of course. They might not be so keenly on the watch this late in the season, and common report might agree that the people of Keraine almost never took the fight out to the sea, preferring to harry raiders once they landed, but there was no point in antagonizing anyone. If we stayed well off until we needed to row into the river, well, it might tip them off that we weren’t here for violence.

  There were other things we could do to help that along. They weren’t things that would come easily for us, but Arvid’s advice had been pretty clear.

  In fact, Arvid’s information turned out to be spot-on. A few candle-marks later, Halvar sang out that he could see a headland and evidence of a port, and as we tacked in a bit closer, we saw that he was right. The towers of a huge fortress, presumably Dungarrow, stood out against the bright blue sky, and beyond that, there were the hopeful signs of an open river mouth teeming with small craft.