“Going into Hrafnsey now?” said Shef. “How are we to get there?”
“There is a way,” said Echegorgun. “No Thin One would find it, but I can show you. One thing I had better tell you, though. The whale-folk are not good at telling Thin Ones apart. Nor do they care much. Anyone on the water is at risk tonight.”
“Show us how to get across,” said Shef. “I swear to repay you for all this. Even if I have to become king of this land to do it.”
The men of the two-masted ship moving under light sail towards Hrafnsey harbor had had a long voyage up the Norwegian coast in which to get used to their unfamiliar weapons and sail-rig. For the most part they were men of Agdir, Queen Ragnhild’s homeland. In the turmoil following the sudden death of Halvdan and the seizure of power by Olaf, one of the skippers of King Halvdan’s fleet had decided his best interests lay with Ragnhild, and had placed his ship at her service. Most of his crew had not stayed with him, but had deserted, their places taken by Ragnhild’s own men. With them had come Valgrim the Wise, defeated in his plan to control the College of the Way, and eager to take revenge on the one who had thwarted him. Not only him—but also to set the Way and his misguided colleagues back on the true path of Othin, the path that would lead to victory, not defeat, at Ragnarök. He and his backers had built the catapults and trained their users. They were eager, too, to redeem their failure in the Gula Fjord.
Yet the driving force behind them all, skipper, crew and Valgrim as well, was the hatred of Queen Ragnhild for the man who had killed her son, or caused him to be killed. The man who had stolen the luck to which she had pledged her life. Ragnhild had seen her mother-in-law Queen Asa go to the gallows without blinking, had poisoned her husband King Halvdan without a tremor. One day, maybe, she would breed a new race of kings from her own loins. But before that the beggar-Englishman she had seduced, hidden, and thought to use to clear the path for her son: he must go to Hel to serve her son and her for all eternity.
As the great warship closed on Hrafnsey, its goal, its crew had ceased to follow the coastline and had moved offshore, into the Atlantic rollers but out of sight of land, coming in again only a few miles from where they reckoned their quarry to be. There they had lain upon a deserted inlet, one of the thousands on that jagged coast, seen by no-one. Or at least, no human.
Yet they had not lacked for close information. After the butchery was over at the grind, the real work had started for the men of Halogaland. Vital to cut the carcasses up and salt as much meat as possible. Even more vital to rig the cauldrons on the beach itself, strip off the blubber, start the long job of rendering down the whale-oil, immensely valuable for lamps, for fuel and even for food through the long winter nights. Firing the cauldrons was not a problem. Once the oil had been cooked out of the blubber, the strips that were left became fuel for the next rendering. But every barrel the Halogaland coast possessed would hardly be enough for the sudden windfall of wealth that the grind brought. Boats were passing up and down in all directions, loading up barrels, towing strings of them, sending messages for urgent assistance. One whale-boat with two men in it passed by the fjord where Ragnhild’s warship lay, to be snapped up immediately by its pinnace.
The Norsemen, mostly and with exceptions like Ivar the Boneless and his father Ragnar, were not torturers of each other, whatever they might do to slaves. Ragnhild had taken them on board and told them plainly that they had two choices: to be beheaded at once over the side of the ship, or to tell her the situation at Hrafnsey. The fishermen had decided to talk. Ragnhild knew the outline of the harbor, including its catapult defenses and its two longships. She knew, too, that half the men of the area were still boiling blubber at the grind-beach, and the rest were exhausted from hours of loading and unloading, making trip after trip between beach and harbor. What she did not know was that Shef and Cuthred were missing. Her prisoners had simply not noticed, preoccupied with other things.