The Rule

Chapter Three

Bjọrn Egilsson came awake gradually, and for a moment didn’t remember where he was.

A cool drizzle finer than sand grains was tickling his cheeks. The sky he saw above him was a shroud of grey vapour, so dense that it swirled and mingled before his eyes like smoke drifting from a damp log smouldering on a low fire. His back ached. His left leg felt like it was lying in something wet, and the woollen cloak that covered him was heavy on the same side with damp. He sighed as his senses returned to him, and then freed an arm to elbow his brother.

Eiric was the deepest of the sleepers. It took three attempts to draw a response, and even then he did no more than throw an elbow back. Bjọrn rolled over and pressed a finger into his eye.

‘Wake up.’

Eiric grunted and slapped the hand away. ‘Not until there’s someone to kill.’

‘I heard a gull.’

‘Then tell it to bloody be quiet.’

Bjọrn shook his head with a helpless smile and clambered to his feet, twisting his cloak back behind his shoulders. He stumbled over to the prow of the ship and leaned against it for balance as he looked around. The great serpent carved into the stempost was glaring off into the distance, head erect, long tongue tasting the air, but at that moment there was nothing for it to see but fog. It had closed in on them from all sides during the black night, so that no more than a yard of ocean was visible in any direction. The water looked choppy and restless. It slapped against the hull, shunting the boat from side to side.

Bjọrn turned and waded towards the stern, stepping carefully through the clutter of stowed oars and sea-trunks and blanketed men in various states of repose. The mast and sail were down and packed away, but even if they hadn’t been Bjọrn might not have been able to see them through the brume. The men he skirted around were huddled together as closely as whelps piled against the teat. All of them were slumbering, apart from one. The man emerged last through the folds of vapour, seated by the steering-board at the rear, where Bjọrn had placed him with the task of keeping them on a straight course while the others stole some sleep.

‘Well?’ Bjọrn asked quietly, as he gained the man’s side. Toki was his name. He was a full-faced, hulking farm lad, too young to have ever been a sea-farer, but he’d been the loudest voice prattling away for most of the voyage, and Bjọrn had wanted to see whether weariness might finally shut him up.

Toki slapped the tiller. ‘I haven’t let this thing so much as twitch. Wind stayed down so we shouldn’t have done much drifting. Waves have only started getting up since first light.’

‘And did you hear that gull?’

‘Now and then since the dark started thinning. Can’t tell if there’s lots of them or the same one circling.’

Bjọrn cast a speculative glance up at the hidden sky above. ‘A gull is supposed to be a sign that there’s land, isn’t it?’

Toki shrugged. He knew as little about sailing, especially the long-distance kind, as Bjọrn did. The glory days of sea-raiding had missed them by a generation or more, Helvik’s sense of adventure having diminished along with her strength. Only a few men aboard the ship were old enough to remember how to read the signs out on the open water, how to chart a course through cloud, and they needed their rest more than most. Bjọrn decided he would probably have to wait until they roused themselves.

He returned to the bow of the ship, and found Eiric snoring gently with his mouth agape like a day-old corpse. A thin swill of water was running up and down the planks, and his brother had somehow managed to sleep through the night with his head in it, the slop lapping up around his ear every time the boat tipped to the steering-board side. If there was that much leakage up by the prow, then Bjọrn dreaded to think what it was like beneath the bodies in the low belly of the ship. Once, the vessel had been the pride of Helvik, but in recent years it had become more a resented reminder of better times passed. For almost as long as Bjọrn could remember it had lain up on the beach on wooden stilts, played on by the children like an old horse, and when the stilts had rotted away no one had bothered to replace them. Moss and slime had caked its hull when, in the half-light just before dawn, Bjọrn and his men came to drag it free from its berth. But it had floated, and there was no time to require anything more. Bjọrn just hoped that it continued to do so.

With the sole of his boot, he pressed down gently on Eiric’s throat until his brother’s mouth started working like that of a landed fish and he burst awake flailing his arms. ‘Get up,’ Bjọrn said. ‘I need your help.’

Eiric scowled and lay there rubbing his neck. ‘What do I know? Just keep going straight and try not to sail up Rán’s arse.’

Bjọrn sighed and kicked his brother in the shoulder. The plan had sounded like such a simple one when they’d volunteered to carry it out. Their father needed riches with which to mollify the invaders, but Helvik had none left, some would say none to begin with, and so it had been decided that a group of Egil’s soldiers would take their old boat and sail along the coast until they found somewhere that did have the wealth to spare, and take it from them instead. But by now, the start of the third day of their voyage, they had lost the coast, and a measure of their resolve. Bjọrn needed his father there, or Hákon at least. It had been his idea, after all. But Egil would not be seen to desert the town at such a time. And Hákon claimed that he had to stay where the invaders could find him, for he was the only one they trusted.

Eiric groaned and got up, wringing the seawater from his hair. ‘What happened to your gull?’ he asked.

Bjọrn rested his weary head against the serpent’s neck. ‘Gone. But Toki heard it too. I’ve heard it said that you can follow them to land.’

Eiric rubbed at his beard and nodded past his brother’s shoulder. ‘Why don’t we just follow that light?’

Bjọrn whipped his head around and glared into the fog. There was nothing there, only the cloud dancing slowly before his eyes, opening and closing like drapes in a breeze. He spun back around and aimed a punch at his brother’s head, but Eiric caught his fist, and pointed.

This time he saw it. He’d been looking too low before, scanning the tops of the waves, but now he realised with shock that the light was in fact high above him, shining bluntly through the haze like a star on a winter’s night. It could have been a great bonfire blazing a mile in the distance, or a tiny lantern hanging there just out of reach. But it was certainly land.

Bjọrn clamped a hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘What make you of that, then?’

‘Settlement. Must be,’ Eiric replied, crowding closer to the rail. ‘A beacon to welcome lost travellers.’

Bjọrn sucked on his teeth for a moment. ‘We need to get out of this fog to see what defends it.’

‘Drift in at this speed and they’ll have the whole army roused before we’re even landed. Even a lonely crofter would turn us back.’

‘Aye, but if we rush in then there’s no rushing out again.’

Eiric shrugged, and his face came alive with excitement. Bjọrn studied the eager eyes of his brother and gnawed on his lip, hesitating. He glanced around at his men, still slumbering obliviously beneath their cloaks, and then back out at the light, twinkling there like a prize waiting to be snatched. ‘What would our illustrious brothers do at a time like this?’ he pondered.

Eiric grinned. ‘Hákon would be too busy throwing his guts up over the rail to do anything. Fafrir would doubtless propose we turn for home. And Gunnarr would probably suggest something sensible like mooring up the coast until the fog lifts. But we’re not as soft or as clever as them, are we Brother?’

Bjọrn smiled, but his lower lip was still clamped between his teeth, and his face made an expression like a cat baring its fangs. ‘I don’t particularly want to lose our father’s ship. Especially when we’re the only hope he has of saving our home.’

‘Courage, little brother,’ Eiric urged, slipping an arm around Bjọrn’s shoulders and worrying his cloak. ‘Let us take this chance to remind the old man that his young sons are worth every bit what his older ones are. Let us make a friend out of this fog.’

Still Bjọrn delayed. He gazed again at the light. It seemed to be growing clearer, as somewhere the morning sun rose ever further and burned away the vapour. High above them, a gull released a keening cry. Bjọrn looked across at his brother, and slapped him heartily between the shoulders. ‘Wake the men,’ he said, and Eiric whooped and ran to obey.

The raiders were up and seated on their trunks in the work of a moment. Those few that owned mail threw it on and then hurried to get their oars in the water with the others. Bjọrn bellowed at Toki to steer them straight at the beacon, and then found his sword and slung it over his shoulder and took up his shield from the rail. The men at the oars grunted in unison with each stroke, driving the sleep from their limbs. The head of the vessel lifted, as if the serpent was preparing to strike, and they flew over the water like an eagle skimming for fish.

As sudden as a ram splintering through a gateway, they burst out from the fog and found the whole landscape waiting before them. Two hundred yards ahead, great cliffs the colour of bonemeal reared up into the air. An empty beach, open and flat, lay at their feet. And at the top, framed against the streaked dawn sky, stood a solitary building, the largest and grandest that Bjọrn Egilsson had ever seen. The treacherous beacon burned in a stand at one end of it, twinkling innocently, guiding the raiders to their prize.

Eiric came to join his brother at the prow, and Bjọrn roared his rowers to even greater speed. A hundred yards out, as their keel began to smash through the rollers, he noticed a single figure scrambling down a cut in the cliffs towards the shore. The man’s feet reached the sand, and he began to labour along the beach to intercept the ship. Bjọrn gave a grunt of admiration, and drew his sword.

The figure was stumbling the last few paces as the ship ploughed its belly into the ash-grey sand. Bjọrn stood high against the masthead and looked down at him. He was some kind of old and wretched man, clothed in only a coarse brown robe with an old length of rope about his waist. The top of his head was as bald as a skull, but so symmetrically so that Bjọrn was tempted to think he had shaved it that way deliberately. He went without boots on his skinny grey legs. He was not even armed.

The man peered up at them and opened a nervous mouth as if to speak, but then he seemed to see something that made his neck gulp and the words crumble on his lips. Too late, he realised he had made a grave mistake. He babbled something in a tongue that Bjọrn did not understand, a beseeching look upon his face, and then turned and stumbled into a run. Before he had made it two paces, Eiric jumped down into the shallows, caught him by the robe, and hacked him into the sand.

‘See?’ Eiric roared, turning back to the ship. ‘Easy!’

Bjọrn and the others leapt down into the surf behind him, and he led them towards the cliffs at a run.

Chapter Four

On the eighth day following Olaf Gudrødsson’s arrival as a noose around Helvik’s throat, Gunnarr Folkvarrsson rose at first light. He dressed in hurried silence so as not to wake his wife and mother, before ducking out into the freshness of dawn to check his traps.

It was a routine that, by now, he could probably have conducted before waking. He let himself out through the bolted east side-gate and stalked through familiar parts of the lowland woods, carefully inspecting each snare. Unfortunately, the outcome of his forages had become all too repetitive as well. The land was parched of wildlife, and all his traps were empty. He wandered weary-eyed down to the shore, hoping to have had better luck with the sea.

By the time that the sun was fully risen, Gunnarr was stooped waist-deep in the ocean shallows. He wore an old pair of sealskin trousers to keep some of the water off, and stepped across the smooth ocean rocks barefooted. His hands moved in brisk, familiar patterns, working across the stiff twine of his nets. After a short while longer he sighed and straightened, smearing a dash of seawater across his furrowed forehead as he flicked a strand of hair away with the back of his palm.

His nets were empty, as usual. Once he would have undergone the laborious process of drawing them in to the shore first, and replanting them elsewhere if unsuccessful, but he had long since learnt that that was wasted effort. The disappointment had been too much to bear. He snatched a section of netting up to his chest and began trying to knot together an area where the salt had corroded through the joints. At another point further along he noticed a darker piece of material from where Kelda had repaired it previously, and he smiled sadly to himself. The poor girl had spent days trying to mend the nets at one time or another, using anything she could find that would tie, even lengths of her own hair when there was nothing else. With so few fish to be had it seemed there was little point to the exercise, but Gunnarr knew that it wouldn’t be long before she insisted on taking another look at them to see what could be done. He often wondered whether she had been born with that positivity, or if it had been beaten into her through Helvik’s hard schooling.

A movement inland caught his eye, and he raised a forearm across his brow to watch a rider climbing slowly up the hillside leading out of town. It could only be Hákon Egilsson. As the oldest son of the ruler of Helvik he had been riding the mountain path regularly to ‘negotiate’ with the invaders. Gunnarr felt that was a generous term for such one-sided bargaining, but this appeared to be one matter in which his opinion mattered little. So many days of ceaseless waiting had allowed the townsfolk time to scare themselves half to death. Many now saw Hákon as their only hope.

Pointing, he called across to the two friends who were also checking their catches at either side of him, prompting them to straighten their backs and wade over to his position. Ári and Hilario were their names. Like most of those in Gunnarr’s life, Ári had been with him for as long as he could remember. Hilario was one of the rare few who had come in from the outside, arriving as a boy with a sprawling family of travellers and finding as a man that he did not want to leave, even as the rest of his kin were disappearing over the hills.

‘Mine are empty,’ Hilario stated as he drew up beside Gunnarr. He was a short, curly-haired man with a face full of expressions. ‘Someone’s been at the nets,’ he concluded. He often chose being robbed over being unsuccessful.

Ári had caught something, albeit small, and he took a knife and skilfully emptied the fish’s innards into the water, using his thumb to hold back some of the dark waste flesh. The good meat would be saved for his wife and son, and the innards would make oil for his lamps. He would have whatever there was left.

‘How long do you reckon he’ll be up there this time?’ Ári asked, giving his blade a quick rinse in the water.

‘Not long,’ Gunnarr replied, still watching Hákon on his ascent. ‘I doubt they’re as welcoming when he comes empty-handed.’

Hilario ignored Hákon, instead running an inspecting eye along the lie of Gunnarr’s nets. ‘I suppose we’ll be some of the first to know whether he’s persuaded them to be patient,’ he said eventually. ‘He’ll be coming down that hill pretty quickly if not.’

Ári sheathed his knife with a click. ‘Or not at all.’

The others murmured in agreement. Together they started to wade back to shore, the splashing of water between their limbs steadily increasing in pitch as the depth shallowed off.

‘When will you next speak to Egil, Gunnarr?’ Hilario asked.

‘There’s to be a meeting when Eiric and Bjọrn return from their raid, to discuss a more permanent solution.’

Hilario smirked with light-hearted affront. ‘In the old days they’d hold great big gatherings for the whole town to attend. Is everyone invited to this one?’

‘I think Egil worries that might become unruly.’

‘Well,’ Hilario said, as they reached the stony beach, ‘if he does happen to ask for my considered opinion, tell him that if we’re going to end up fighting, I’d rather it was sooner than later. Anything is more fun than a famine.’

Gunnarr sat, and began to sweep the dirt from the soles of his feet. He could manage a smile at the words, but he wasn’t surprised when Ári did not do the same. His friend had been a stern adolescent when Gunnarr was a child, son to a proud old metal worker who had liked nothing better than to spend the day working himself into the ground whilst complaining about the damage that it did to him and the laziness of those that did not do the same. As a boy, Ári had had a man’s concerns. Now a man, he showed no sign of taking the opposite approach. Not that he had any choice.

‘You have only yourself to worry about,’ Ári said dismally, and his face appeared drawn with the strain of the last few days. ‘My Tyr is too young to fight, and before long he’ll have a little brother to protect as well as his mother.’

Hilario scoffed, striving, as always, to keep the mood light. ‘Well, it seems I’m the only one with a bit of sense in this town. There’s little enough food and few enough breasts to suckle on around here without having to share it all with some squalling child.’ He looked down at Gunnarr, smiling. ‘How long for Kelda now? I saw her yesterday; she looked as if she’s carrying an army of her own in that belly.’

Gunnarr’s bleak expression made way for a brief smile with the thought of Kelda waddling around beneath the weight of the first child she was carrying. ‘Before the close of the moon, they say. Poor lad couldn’t be born into a worse situation. He’ll probably try and climb back inside once he gets out.’

The three men produced a muted bout of laughter, and Gunnarr began to pull on his boots. At dawn it had looked like the day might stay clear, but already the clouds were rolling in, the same colour as the wet stones on the beach.

‘Another day for inside work,’ Ári said, glancing up at the sky.

Gunnarr sprang to his feet and brushed off his legs. ‘I have two tups turned out on the hillside. I may go and bring them in, before they find themselves roasting over an army’s camp fire. But that depends on Eiric and Bjọrn.’

He went over to stand beside Hilario, who was gazing out to sea.

‘They’re out there somewhere,’ Hilario said. ‘But I don’t see any sign of them coming back today.’

The others agreed. For a few moments they stood and stared out beyond the waves. Of raids they knew nothing, for Egil had put an end to what had been a dying occurrence. Enough lives had been lost on home soil without going looking for fighting overseas as well, and in some cases it had been asking for bloodshed even to put certain men in the same boat together. There had still been deep-water fishing trips though, sometimes even whale hunts, and as sharp-eyed young lads Gunnarr and the others had been stationed around the prow and told to bellow when they saw something. Gunnarr remembered crowding along the rail with the other sighters, waiting for a glistening back to crest the surface with a hiss from its blow-hole and present them with a target they could drive in to shallow waters and strand on the beaches for killing. But that he had seen once, maybe twice. As with everything else, the people of Helvik had soon learnt to give it up.

‘Gunnarr?’ From behind them, the sound of a female voice interrupted their viewing.

‘Fun’s over,’ Hilario sighed, without turning around. ‘Is that wife or mother?’

Gunnarr swivelled and located the source of the sound. A dainty figure waited politely for him at the edge of the beach.

‘Looks to be neither,’ he replied, with an air of intrigue.

‘Aren’t you the lucky the one?’ Hilario grinned, suddenly keen to take a look for himself. Gunnarr ignored the comment and left them, walking steadily across the shore to meet the woman.

‘Forgive my interruption,’ she called in a quick, nervous voice as he approached, and Gunnarr smiled away the apology as he made a short study of her appearance. She wore grubby woollen skirts, tattered and muddied around the bottom and flecked with stains across the front. Her limbs were slim, too slim, and though she attempted to hold herself presentably, her posture was slumped with a look of perennial exhaustion. She smiled self-consciously, and Gunnarr realised that she could be very pretty to some, but for the gauntness of her face, the skin around her eyes being dark and sunken from lack of food and sleep, and the element of worry in her expression.