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Outwards I plunge head-first, piercing the turgid flow; sinking rapidly, in freefall, limbs loose, light-headed. In the cloudy depths, watery power shudders like a blustery wind. The drift carries me in gusts. Noises above water — muffled to my ears — grow faint and disappear. The ebb runs swiftly. I offer no resistance. My body tumbles weightlessly; traces somersaults through the fast-moving swell.

  My feet touch bottom. I land on a bed of sludge, sink to my knees in ice-cold mud. I sink deeper, sink to my waist, then to my shoulders. Taken unawares, I stretch my arms towards the surface, expecting uplift. Nothing happens. The silt holds me solid in its sucking grip. The river-bottom is cold; comforting; restful. I feel my chest relax. Air escapes from my lungs. Bubbles stream above my head.

  Towards me, through the murky depths of the creek, comes Cormac my brother, the hero, the joy of my boyhood; Cormac, whose drowned body lies buried in the sands at Suthyre. He comes to me with a swagger, hands tucked smartly in his belt, as he always did, and now here he is again, swanking with ease on the creek bottom. Look at him, breathing unhampered under water, strolling, as calm as you like, without sinking in the soft mud! Who’s that with him, close on his heels? — My foster brother, Sigi Leifson! He greets me with a knowing smile, beaming ear to ear; Sigi, whose ashes I sent on the makeshift raft to a watery grave under Grisedale tarn — Sigi, a pair of ice-skates slung over his shoulder, revived, renewed, slim and agile as ever. Sigi takes hold of my right arm. Cormac nods to him — a grin exchanged between them — with a firm, rough hand Cormac grips under my left arm.

  Surface-wards on my brothers’ arms I soar to light and air.

  Chapter 8

  Hakon, when I pull within reach, goes on his back in the swell, floating with head above water, toes in the air, no longer kicking. At my approach he raises a fist; he has a blade in his left hand. ‘Come to finish me off, are you?’ He grits his teeth. ‘I will give you what for!’

  ‘You have it wrong, Skipper.’ I hold off, treading water at safe distance for fear he might use the blade. ‘Saw you drop below; thought you were going down; told the young man that I’d come for you.’

  ‘You are not one of them?’

  ‘Who?

  ‘The bastards who took the Meuris.’

  ‘No, not me; but the Meuris? Is that not a strange name for a ship?’

  ‘Not if you knew how the ship’s name was earned.’ Hakon’s voice softens. He puts away the blade. I swim towards him. No longer threatened by a knife, I lose interest in the ship’s name — I had asked only to distract him from slashing me — but what I want to know is why his barnacled old vessel runs adrift, and why two crewmen were brutally murdered on-board.

  ‘No one took your ship, Skipper,’ I reply at last. ‘It was cut loose from its moorings and sent out to scupper on the tide.’

  ‘I know the very Ostman who will have done it. I had a quarrel with him last night on the jetty; left my men on-board to keep an eye on the cargo. You saw no sign of them?’

  ‘I found two dead, their throats cut.’

  ‘Poor sods,’ says Hakon ruefully, smacking the water with his fist. ‘That will be old Lunan and his son Kotter — been with me for years — by Thor and by Jesus the murdering shits who did it will have me to answer to!’

  A branch of willow floats by in the flood; broken off at the stump and still with its drooping glow of yellow summer leaves. I grab it for a handy float, free my arms; pull shoulders above water. ‘Why have you stopped swimming?’ I ask the skipper of the Meuris.

  ‘Dead legs,’ explains Hakon. He drags a hand through his wet hair in annoyance. ‘Dead from the knee down; first one seized up, then the other; daren’t turn on my belly to swim or I will drop like a stone.’

  ‘Like a cramp?’

  ‘No, not cramp exactly — frozen veins, solid as ice; no feeling in my legs. Rubbing doesn’t help. All I can do is wait; the hardness will melt by and by.’ And then he adds, ‘You met young Baldr, eh? He will put the Meuris to rights. What I wouldn’t give for a sight of him and my ship.’

  ‘Too late, I fear, to make it to the ship! Can’t you feel the tow under us? We are caught in the spill. Tide has us.’

  Hakon doesn’t reply. He holds steady in the water, his face reflective, becalmed. He seems unworried by the prospect of braving the rapids; or by the risk of his being pulled under by ‘the mighty-runner’; or by the certainty of our being swept dead or alive out into the estuary. He has the look of a man well used to taking his chances in a boiling tide.

  *

  ‘What’s that?’ I turn sharply; cock my ears amid a clamour of gushing water to listen for the crackling of the barnacled hull. I am mistaken. I’d thought the Meuris was on the wave behind me. But what I hear through the mist is a rush of white-water where the creek joins an-Ruirthech.

  A sudden jolt below my feet and, next instant, a sharp swirling of muddy bubbles on the surface — the undertow separates me from Hakon and wrenches us apart, a gap of five ells or more. Weeds spun into chains by the current fetter my ankles. I kick free of the weeds and push towards my companion. I close the gap, my legs jerking like a frog, one arm threshing water, the other clenched to my willow branch. ‘Hakon,’ I yell, ‘Here! Take hold of this.’ The skipper of the Meuris puts both hands on the willow-stump; flashes back a nod of thanks. For a split moment his darting eyes rest on the mark around my neck.

  ‘Hola!’ Above the noise of wave and flood Baldr’s cry rings sharp and true.

  On the very beat of the young man’s loud-hailed alert we hear a bounce of keel slapping water. Breaking mist, the barnacled prow of the Meuris rears above us, so close that spray blows off the bow in our faces. In no time — by the third bounce of the keel, with the sail swinging windward, the hull sweeping larboard — we find ourselves at the stern of the ship. And with us in the water, tracking the bumpy furrow of the wake, is the ship’s skiff launched aft by Baldr, the light-weight shore-boat, now tied by trailing line to stern-deck. And there stands M’lym, feeding out rope — lengthening the life-line on the boat to Hakon and me — her brave, determined face beside Baldr’s at the helm.

  *

  Hakon is alert, propped upright against the tiller, still shaky on his legs. His angry brow is shiny with seawater. He peers into the mist, steering towards the rapids, his gaze averted from the corpses of Lunan and Kotter. With white-water looming ahead we have had no thought for father and son; no time to cover their wounds or make them decent in death. M’lym, after a no-nonsense word from Hakon on what she must watch for, has gone to sit at the prow. We step to it on Hakon’s order, dropping yard and sail in haste. Baldr and I are too rash with pulley and gordings. With only two of us to hold it, the yard comes down with a bump. The hull rolls. The heel of the ship sends a swill of death-blood and rainwater from beam to beam. The dead crewmen are not thrown about; they lie across the thwarts, unmoved from where they fell in death, their legs trapped under the weight of yard and sail.

  While Baldr was chasing about in mist to fetch Hakon and me out of the water, he had sailed the Meuris to the very brink of the outflow. He was careful — or lucky, more like — not to let the hull be sucked into the jaws of the quickening eddies. Hakon, once on-board, unable to retrace a course upstream, is left with no choice but to follow the ebbing rapids that will flush his ship into the river-mouth. His plan — shared with us in a confident manner that brooks no doubt of its being accomplished — is to tack to and fro in the estuary until the tide turns, and then, come evening, to sail the Meuris back into the creek, as the rapids reverse their flow with the rush of next incoming tide.

  I won’t be part of Hakon’s plan. I won’t wait for the tide to turn. I will seize the moment. I will jump ship, swim for the first beach to hit my eyes on the northern shore. I can’t take M’lym with me; this time I must go alone. Does Baldr suspect me of jumping ship? I think he might. He is amidships; standing rigidly, glancing neither left nor right. His hand is on a clamp where the pulley-end of the halyard-rope is
fastened. He has the air of a seaman who will be told at any moment to haul sail.

  The young man must think that his skipper will order ‘full canvas’ before we are past the rapids and safe off the river. Hakon would be a fool to risk it. But let Baldr think what he wants. Let him ‘stand by’ under the mast for as long as he chooses. He can stay there till the ship reaches mid-estuary. By then I will be in the water, swimming half-way to the shore. A thought leaps into my head. What if Hakon gives the order to make sail while we are almost off the river but not yet come to the estuary; what shall I do? I can’t ignore his call for help. I can’t stand idly by. But if I lend a hand, the delay will scupper my bid for freedom. On ships rigged like the Meuris — easily manned though they are — hauling yard to mast is no mean task. It won’t be done in a trice. Storm-river and ebb-tide will drive the ship out to sea before our rope-work is finished. My chance for flight will have gone.

  ‘Stand by!’

  The shout from Hakon tears me from my thoughts, lays waste to my speculations. We are five ship-lengths from the foot of the rapids — the creek’s turbulent passage as it ebbs into the big river. Ebb-water escapes in a rush through a channel where Hakon will take the ship. The ebb drains off more slowly on the seaward side over shallow sandbanks that are hidden at high water and shift with the tide. At low water cockle-pickers walk out on the mud-flats to rake for shellfish. In this estuary, sandbanks may turn up anywhere, inshore, outshore or farther down the coast. The harr has lifted to seawards, replaced by a red morning sky. Ahead of us — beyond the whirling outflow of the creek — shadowed from sunlight at the foot of the rapids, an-Ruirthech runs grey as stone.

  *

  ‘Stand down!’ Hakon manoeuvres the ship’s prow off the white-water. He steadies the rudder on the tumbling flood of an-Ruirthech. ‘Too soon for sail.’

  ‘Aye, aye, Skip!’ Baldr cups his hands and gives reply.

  Hakon yells. ‘All hands abaft, dead or alive! Abaft, I say! All hands by me!’

  Acting on his skipper’s command, Baldr drags off the sail and uncovers the younger crewman who died. Together Baldr and I bear Kotter’s frame to the stern and lay the dead crewman cold and stiff at Hakon’s feet. Lunan’s wrinkled body has gone limp and sags under us. The older man is heavier than his son. Baldr and I stagger over the bloodied deck to take our places by Hakon at the stern.

  M’lym runs from the prow, tugs at my legs with a burdensome embrace. The girl clings to me; sobs in terror; buries her face at my knees.

  The Meuris rides the flood; no sail aloft. The ship is stern-heavy with ballast to balance the weight of the stinking cargo in the hold. Now that we are assembled at the helm — crewmen dead and alive — the ship lists no deeper to stern-side, but Hakon is taking no chances: he has followed the old wisdom of having his entire crew aft in the belief that it will tip the dipping prow above water.

  The Meuris is not set on the skipper’s chosen course, not driven by wind or sail, but carried seawards on the ebbing tide. Steadied — we are steadied, not steered — by Hakon’s pitch of the rudder. He guides the hull as near as he dares to the far bank, where swollen eddies, escaping the full weight of the ebb, run less swiftly than at mid-river. If he finds a soft stream in the flood, he will hold to it, hold fast while he can, bearing north from the shallow sandbanks.

  *

  The air off the river blows fresh on our faces, but cannot clear the filthy stench in the hold. As we come to the river-mouth, grey ebb-waters — swollen, swelling, and now chased by storm-waters from the mountains — buffer abeam the ship and toss white wavelets from the flow. The wavelets chase over the surface; looping, foiling; frisking like tails of horses at the gallop. White flurries of foam fly off the wavelets ahead of us, out-pacing ship and surging river. Torn asunder in flight by the brisk air, the white flurries fall to flood and fade to grey, replaced afresh by others that chase, fly and fade, living for an instant in their race to the sea.

  *

  ‘Stand by, stand by to make sail!’ Hakon’s call is made as soon as the Meuris has run clear of the sandbanks — hidden due south of us under glossy ebbing water — where an-Ruirthech widens its eastward course into the estuary. ‘Jump to it,’ he shouts as if he were hailing a score of seamen on every part of the ship, and not a meagre crew of two, only an arm’s length away on stern deck. ‘Take your place at the prow,’ he says softly to M’lym, leaning down to her in a fatherly way. When she refuses, he chides her. ‘Crack to it, girl! See that you keep your eyes peeled. Do as I told you before.’

  I release M’lym’s hand from my knee; lift her to her feet. ‘You must do as he asks.’ My urging is whispered to her ear. As my lips touch her cheek, it occurs to me that these will be the last words I speak to her. M’lym hesitates. Unsteady on her feet, caught by a roll of the tilting deck, she waits for the keel to grip water and then darts off with that ungainly run of hers to the prow.

  Baldr takes his position under the mast, and stands ready to haul the pulley. Hakon peers at me quizzically, as if trying to read my thoughts. My tousled hair, caught for a moment by a gust of sea air, hides my face from his gaze. Moments before, the skipper will have seen me staring, not for the first time, toward the most northerly point of the bay, where two rocky cliffs — the headlands of Eadair — spill into the waters of the estuary. Topped green and dewy in the sunshine, they have been looming ever bigger as we drift towards them. From what I can judge, by fixing my eyes on the cliffs as a guide, the rip tide has set the Meuris on a part-northerly, part-westerly bearing. The tide pushes us inland. The skipper can’t have failed to notice it, but he hasn’t corrected our heading. In-shore drift has brought us — has brought me — to within swimming distance of the strand.

  I turn from Hakon, step down from stern towards amidships, and now again, my eyes sweep over the long, curving stretch of sand that runs west from Eadair as far as an-Ruirthech, and from there, after a break at the river-mouth, returns east along the south shore of the estuary.

  The sea-harr has melted in the offing behind a seal-shaped hump of rock on the horizon — named Inis-deilg in the Erse tongue — and what Ostmen call the ‘Isle of Thorns’. Sun has risen to first quarter in a clear sky. The wide circle of estuary is linked by a ring of crested sandy shores around the bay. Sunlight has settled on the dunes, burnishing them to a glow like precious metal in a forge. They have the look of a heavy neck-chain of gold, the kind worn as proof of power on a kingly breast.

  ‘We are close in,’ says Hakon unexpectedly, giving a nod towards the north strand. ‘You should be able to make it from here, powerful swimmer like you. No skin off my nose,’ he adds, ‘you have your chance of freedom. Take it while you can.’

  My response is so forceful that it takes him — and me too — by surprise. ‘I did want to go, Skipper, it is true, but I can’t go now. How can I abandon the orphaned girl? And besides, you are short of crew. I won’t see you in the lurch. Your man is waiting. He needs my help on the pulley.’

  ‘Three can pull better than two,’ returns Hakon with a grin, and with his grin it is clear there will be no more talk of my escape. ‘It is a tough haul,’ he says, nodding aloft. ‘The yard runs up tight as a horseshoe on the mast. I will shake my sea-legs and help you. After we make sail, I will give poor Lunan and his son a drink of seawater — it will be their last.’

  Chapter 9

  We are in open sea, a morning’s drift away from the headlands of Eadair. The headlands stand distant in our wake at the northernmost tip of the bay.

  ‘A tough haul,’ Hakon had said of raising yard to mast on the Meuris. He hadn’t spoken in jest. We floated southwest across the bay, drifting on a cross-tide at strong mid-ebb. Without sail, without wind to fill it, we had drifted out to sea before Hakon finally gave the go-ahead to unfurl full canvas. Even with three of us to man the ropes — while M’lym did a spell on the tiller under Hakon’s watchful eye — it took four attempts on the pulley; numerous adjustments on gordings and clew-lines, be
fore the skipper declared we were safe with running ropes and rigging.

  We are southbound still, but now settled under sail and facing into a light south-easterly. The ship passes languorously through the strait that separates Inis-deilg from land. Lunan and Kotter lie at peace on the ocean floor at the gateway to the ‘Isle of Thorns’. Each man was stripped of his bloodied serk. The serk was knotted to a loose bundle, filled with ship’s pebbles, and looped to his belt. Father first and then the son — both anchored with ballast from the Meuris — were launched from their skipper’s arms into the wake. The dark spill of their blood on the thwarts has dried in the sunshine.

  ‘We will round the isle to leeward,’ says Hakon with a sigh, after his hull is lighter of two men and their pebble weight. ‘Once we have turned about and are heading north into the bay, we will catch what there is of this stingy south-easterly.’

  ‘How much longer at slack-water? When do we start the run in?’ Baldr shouts aft without lifting his head. He squats at the prow, splicing a ship’s rope. While he splices, he shows M’lym how to tie the ship’s knot.

  ‘Not much show of it here,’ answers Hakon, after a study of the waves on both beams of the ship, ‘but I expect some movement by the time we pass the east coast of the isle.’

  M’lym throws her unfinished knot to deck and runs to me amidships. ‘We can’t go with them,’ she says in tears. ‘We can’t show our faces back there. Tell the man he must put us off somewhere.’ Baldr shows no interest in the outburst from M’lym-kun despite her having dumped the rope at his feet and run off in haste from the prow. He bites at loose threads of hemp and pulls them with his teeth, as if splicing rope, and nothing else, consumes his attention.

  Hakon ignores her too. Eyes fixed aloft, he turns the tiller gently inboard. He releases the leeward sheet little by little, and loosens the aft-clew of the sail, teasing more wind from larboard. Having trimmed canvas, he puffs out his cheeks in thought. ‘There is a sandy cove after we turn into the bay. We come to it before the sandbanks — before the strand where they pick cockles. Last winter-fall I beached there to pick up logs for the king’s feasting house — spicy apple-wood for his cooking-fires.’ He looks at me questioningly. ‘What do you say, stranger, if I set you down on the beach before dark? The pair of you can find cover in the apple woodlands, rest overnight, and set off at first light — to wherever you are going.’