“Not much risk from ice this late in the spring,” Hagbarth had said, the first time his southern passengers had jumped to their feet in alarm at the knocking beneath their feet. “But we won’t risk it just the same.”
Shef had been profoundly glad, and Karli even gladder, of the reduction in speed, and not just out of fear of what awaited them at journey’s end. Neither man, not even Shef, had made a fast passage in a Viking longboat before. It was an experience very different—Shef now realized—from the stately waddle of the Norfolk up the Dutch coast, the sickening roll and lurch of sailing in a Yorkshire fishing-coble. The Viking boat, Hagbarth’s own Aurvendill, had seemed to slide over the water like a great, supple snake. Each wave as it came towards them rose far above the gunwales, looked down on the undecked hull, seemed certain to crash down on it in a swamping torrent. Then the prow rose, swarmed up, seemed like an intelligent creature to look over the other side and begin its downward curve while the stern-post was still rising. After a while Shef, his nerve starting to return, found Karli sitting staring in horror at the lower planks below the waterline. They shifted continually, moving away from the boat’s ribs and then moving back again, held only by lashings of twisted root or sinew. Often the gaps were large enough for a man to put foot, hand, or even head through. At such moments there seemed to be nothing except habit holding the side-planks together at all. For a while after that both Karli and Shef sat together, convinced deep in their bellies that if they slackened the tension of their watch, the charm would break and the sea come rushing through.
As for anything striking the egg-shell’s sides, the thought was unbearable. Shef had once asked Hagbarth if Norsemen ever carried horses or oxen from place to place, and if so, how they prevented the beasts from rushing to and fro in panic. Hagbarth had laughed. “If you put a horse in my Aurvendill,” he said, “I have always found that any of them, even the fiercest stallion, takes one good look round him and then stands very, very still.” Shef could see why.
And yet they had had to hurry, ice or no ice, running under full sail all the time during daylight, moving at a speed only a little under a horse’s full gallop or a man’s all-out sprint, as fast as a young man would go if he had nothing to carry and no more than a quarter of a mile to cover. For hour after hour. In the twelve hours of daylight on their first day Shef thought they might have traveled more than a hundred and fifty miles, though it was true they had tacked continually, making it less than that in a straight line. In the two nights and two days of their voyage, maybe four hundred all told—four hundred miles to bring them from the spring of flatland Denmark to the settled chill of Norway and the mountains.
All the way Hagbarth, explaining their haste, had commented on the immediate dangers on one or either side. Ships of King Hrorik had convoyed them up the South Jutland coast by night and through the Great Belt, the gap of water between the Danish mainland and Othin’s own island of Fyn. Not too much risk there, Hagbarth had said. Hrorik has an arrangement with King Gamli of Fyn. But then they had swerved sharply out to sea with dawn and the turn-back of Hrorik’s escorts. King Arnodd of Aalborg, Hagbarth had explained. Not hostile, does business like anyone else. But part of his business is robbing ships. Anyone without his leave, not related to him or his jarls, or just too weak to resist. Anyway, he feels threatened now: has to keep up a reputation.
Who’s threatening him, Shef had asked, wondering already if the sea-legs he had acquired weeks before would keep off sea-sickness in the strange swoopings of the Aurvendill. Hagbarth had spat carefully past Karli’s vomiting form and jerked a thumb to starboard, to the dim shapes of Fyn and Sjaelland beyond.