One King’s Way. Chapter 21, 22, 23
Chapter Twenty-one
As Cuthred rowed the two-oared boat down the fjord, Shef saw a young man bounding down the rocky slope from one of the outlying farmsteads, waving desperately to be picked up. Shef signed to Cuthred to pull over.
“Maybe he can tell us what’s going on.”
The young man stepped out from one sharp-pointed rock to another, gauged the rise and fall of the boat on the waves, and dropped into the prow like a seal sliding on to a rock. He was smiling broadly.
“Thanks, mates,” he said. “The grind comes every five years maybe. I don’t want to miss it this time.”
“What is the grind?” said Shef, waving down Cuthred’s furious scowl.
“The grind?” The young man sounded as if he was unable to believe his ears. “The grind? Why—it’s when the whales come, in a flock, a school. Come inside the skerries. Then, if we can get outside them, we drive them inshore, beach them. Kill them. Blubber. Oil. Whale-meat for the whole winter.” His teeth showed in an ecstatic grin.
“Kill a school of whales?” Shef repeated. “How many will there be?”
“Maybe fifty, maybe sixty.”
“Kill sixty whales,” snarled Cuthred. “If you could do it, you lying Norse walrus-get, you could never eat them if you sat and ate till Doomsday.”
“They’re only the pilot whales,” said the young man, sounding hurt. “Not the sperm whales or the big baleen whales. They’re only ten, twelve ells long.”
Fifteen to eighteen feet, thought Shef. Maybe it could be true.
“What do you kill them with?” he asked.
The young man grinned again. “Long lances,” he said. “Or else this.” He pulled a knife from his belt, long, broad, single-edged. Instead of a plain point it had a long sharpened hook, sharpened, Shef could see, on both its outside and inside edges.
“A grind-knife,” the young man said. In his thick accent, the “f” became a “v”, the long “i” an “oi.” “Grindar-knoivur. Jump out of the boat in shallow water, straddle the whale, feel for its backbone, stab in to the side of it. Pull back. Cut the spine. Ha! Ha! Much meat, fat for the winter.”
As the boat emerged from the mouth of the fjord, the young man looked round, saw the trail of dories all pulling rapidly away from them to the north, and without further words sat down on the thwart next to Cuthred, took an oar and began to row alongside him. Shef was surprised to see a sour grin on Cuthred’s face, perhaps at the young Norseman’s obvious assumption that Cuthred the mighty berserk needed assistance.
Ahead of them Shef saw the boats eventually ease to a halt, form a loose circle on the waves. And then, perhaps a half-mile beyond, Shef saw for the first time the school of whales they were pursuing: first a slow white spout against the gray sea, then another, then more of them all together. And beneath them, just a glimpse of black backs rolling easily in turn.
The men in the boats saw the rise as well, Shef could see them standing up, shaking their long-headed lances, and hear faint cries of excitement. Even from a distance, though, he could hear Brand’s bull roar shouting them down, giving what sounded like a long string of explicit orders, boat by boat.
“You have to have a grind-captain,” the young man explained between strokes. “If the boats do not work together, the whales will slip out. Everybody works together, and then we all share equally. One share for each man, one share for each boat, captain gets a double share.”
Shef’s boat came up with the main cluster just as they began to separate and move off. At the last moment the young man stood up, hailed a relative, and stepped from boat to boat with the same ease that he had joined them, pausing only to wave a cheerful farewell. Then all the Norse whaleboats, mostly four- or six-oared, moved off in a long unraveling string. Brand, positioned at the center of the line, turned to Shef as his boat moved off and shouted across the waves: “You two! Stay at the back, and don’t do anything. Keep out of it!”