“Ceolwulf,” he called out. “I expect you’ve been used to good stuff. Come and try this.”
The former thane stepped forward, took the wooden mug held out to him, sniffed the liquid, drank deeply, rolling it round his mouth before swallowing.
“What does it taste like?” asked Karli anxiously. “Is it as good as the last barrel?”
Ceolwulf paused to give weight to his words. “What it tastes like,” he said, “is water that’s been used for washing old musty grain. Or maybe it’s very very thin old porridge.”
Cwicca seized the mug from him, drank deep in his turn, lowered the mug with an expression of complete disbelief. “You’re wrong there, Ceolwulf,” he said. “What this tastes like is gnat’s piss.”
As the other men dipped their mugs into the pot to confirm the judgment, Udd stared open-mouthed at the brew, the fire, the condensing steam on the membrane that covered the glassless window.
“The strength was there,” he muttered. “It’s not there now. It must have gone off in the steam. But it doesn’t go off when you freeze drink. The ice and the steam are different. The ice is water. So the steam must be—something else.” Experimentally he put out a finger, ran it along the steam-wet membrane, licked it.
“So don’t keep the brew that’s left,” he concluded. “Keep the steam. But how to collect it?” He looked consideringly at the copper pot.
Weary and anxious, Shef decided to spend an afternoon in the steam-bath. It was a small wooden hut built out on the end of a pier, with a platform beside it overhanging the deep water of the fjord that led down to the Hrafnsey harbor. Every day men lifted hot stones out of the pit where they had been heating overnight and trundled them along to the hut, where they lay glowing for hour after hour. It was a common thing for those who had nothing to do, or who were weary from some task or other, to stroll along and sit in the heat for an hour or so, dropping water on to the stones, and from time to time going out on to the platform for a plunge into the freezing water.
When Shef stepped in to the dark hut, he realized there was someone already there, sitting on one of the benches. Peering into the gloom, he saw from the light of the opened door that it was Cuthred, sitting not naked, like every other man who went there, but in a pair of ragged woolen drawers. Shef hesitated, went in. He did not know of anyone else who would willingly sit in the dark with Cuthred, but something told him he had nothing to fear. Cuthred did not forget, even in his berserkergang, who had released him from the mill. He had said, also, once he found out how Shef had recognized him, and that Shef had been there at the start of the whole story, the capture of Ragnar, that he knew their fates were twisted.
After they had sat together in the dark for a while, Shef realized that Cuthred had started to talk, very quietly, and almost to himself. He was talking, it appeared, about Brand.
“Big fellow, he is,” Cuthred muttered. “But there’s nothing special about size. I’ve known some almost as big, and one or two who were taller. That Scotty I killed, he was seven feet tall, I measured him. Brittle-boned, though. No, it’s not the size that gets me about that son of a bitch, he’s just not normal. His bones are wrong. Look at his hands, they’re twice the size of mine. And his eyes. Over his eyes.”
A hand reached out, rubbed firmly across Shef’s eyebrows, the voice muttered on. “See. Normal people, they have nothing under their eyebrows, just a socket. I haven’t felt his eyebrows, can’t get close enough, but I’ve looked carefully. He has a bone ridge there, makes his eyebrows stick out.
“And his teeth, now.” Again the hand, peeling Shef’s lower lip down. “See, most people, nearly everyone, the top set of teeth goes over the lower set. When you bite with your front teeth, it’s like scissors, the one sliding over the other. Now his teeth aren’t like that. I’ve watched for a long time, and I reckon his teeth fit edge to edge, they don’t slide over each other at all. When he bites, it’s like an axe on a block. And his back teeth, they must be real grinders. Something very strange about him. And not just him, quite a lot of them round here. His cousins have it too. But he’s the worst.