Chapter 15
The storm got worse.
Water was coming into the ship faster than it was going out, and Samira finally understood the thing nobody had explained to her before she came aboard: a snekkja sits very low in the water.
She is built that way on purpose, so she is fast and so she can be run up onto a beach.
But it means her sides are low, and in a heavy sea the waves do not break against the hull.
They come over it.
Men were bailing with leather buckets.
Samira was hauling on a line near the mast when the ship went over hard to the left and her feet went out from under her.
She slid across the wet planking with nothing to stop her, and the far side of the ship came up very fast, and then a hand closed round her upper arm and stopped her so hard it hurt.
Torstein set her on her feet.
He did not let go immediately. His grip was too tight and he was saying something and she could not hear a word of it over the wind, but she could see his face, and his face was not angry.
His face was afraid.
He let go and turned back into the storm without another word.
"The steering oar!"
Everyone turned.
The snekkja had no rudder at her back. She was steered by a single great oar mounted on the right-hand side near the stern, held tight against the hull by a thick twisted rope of willow called a withy, which ran through the oar and through the hull and was made fast inside.
The oar pivoted on that rope. That pivot was how the ship turned.
The withy had slipped down off its block. The steering oar was swinging loose against the outside of the hull with the whole weight of the sea behind it, slamming into the planking with every roll.
If it tore away, they had no way to steer at all. In this sea that meant the ship would come broadside to the waves and go over.
Torstein was already moving, hand over hand along the side. "Njal, get behind me! Leif, light!"
Samira went after him and got there first.
She looked at the problem for two seconds and saw exactly what it was. The withy had to be lifted back up over the raised wooden block and seated again. To do it, somebody had to get an arm down through the gap between that block and the hull, and work blind, by feel.
The gap was the width of a man's forearm.
"You will not fit," she said.
"Get back!"
"Torstein." She caught his sleeve. "Look at the gap.
Look at your arm. You cannot get past the elbow.
Neither can Leif and neither can Njal and Mathias is thicker through the shoulder than any of you.
" The ship rolled and the loose oar hit the hull hard enough to feel through her feet.
"I can reach it. I have small hands and I know what a withy is because our ships use them on the cargo booms, and I know what it should feel like when it is seated properly. "
"No!"
"Then we lose the steering oar and we all drown, and you will have been very protective of me right up until the moment the sea took the both of us."
Leif had come up behind them.
"She's right about the gap," Leif said.
Torstein turned on him. "Do not argue with me on this."
"I'm not saying I like it." Leif was already pulling a coil off his shoulder. "I'm saying I've had my arm in that space in dry weather at anchor and I could nae reach the block, and neither could you."
Mathias arrived at a run, took in the situation in one look, and said, "Let the mistress do it."
"Mathias—"
"Rope around her, you on her back, Tor, holding her down, me and Leif on the oar." Mathias wiped rain out of his eyes. "It's that or we go over. I'd rather be shouted at than drowned, and so would you."
Torstein stood there for one long second with the storm going around him.
Then he snatched the rope out of Leif's hands.
"Around her waist," he said. "Twice. And Njal takes the end, because Njal is the only one of you who will actually pull when I say pull instead of standing there having opinions."
He was cursing steadily under his breath the entire time he tied it, a low, continuous, deeply inventive stream of Norn that Samira could not understand.
"If I tell you to come up," he said, jerking the knot tight, "you come up. You do not finish what you are doing. You do not tell me you are nearly there. You come up. Do you hear me, wife?"
"Yes."
"Say it back to me."
"I come up when you say so and I do not argue." She met his eyes. "Torstein. Let go of the rope."
He let go of the rope.
***
SAMIRA WENT DOWN FLAT on her front on the wet planking. Torstein knelt over her and put one hand flat between her shoulder blades and pushed down, pinning her to the deck with his own weight so the roll of the ship could not take her over the side.
She pushed her right arm through the gap to the shoulder.
The sea came over both of them twice while she worked.
She could see nothing. She found the withy by touch, thick, cold, slick as a fish, and traced it up to where it had slipped off the block.
She got two fingers under the loop and pulled, and it came up, and then she could not turn her wrist far enough to get it over the top of the block and seated.
"I need the oar lifted," she shouted. "Only a little. A hand's width. It is pulling the rope down and I cannot get it over the top."
"Leif! Mathias! On three!"
The weight came off. She felt the withy go slack in her fingers.
She shoved the loop up and over the block, hauled it round twice more for good measure, and felt the whole thing bite and hold.
"Done! It is seated! Pull me up!"
Njal pulled her up.
Her sleeve was torn open from elbow to wrist and her arm was bleeding freely. She did not notice either of those things for another two hours.
Torstein got her upright and enveloped her in his arms, holding her tight. He had one hand still on the rope at her waist and the other on her shoulder, and he was looking at her the way a man looks at something he has just nearly lost, and he was still swearing, very quietly, in Norn.
"Your cursing is useless," Samira said. "I cannot understand you, Viking."
He cursed again before slamming his lips across hers in a passionate embrace. His ship, his men, the storm, all of it be damned. Samira responded with equal fervor.
When they broke apart, only then did Torstein untie the rope and place her hands firmly on the rail before returning to his post.
***
THE STORM RAN UNTIL well after dark.
Somewhere in the middle of it a crewman named Olvir lost his footing at the bow and went over the side as far as his waist. Samira had both hands in his belt before the man standing next to him had finished turning round.
She was not strong enough to pull him back in.
She only held him there for the two heartbeats it took for someone who was to get a hand on him.
Afterwards she saw Leif and Mathias look at each other. She did not know what the look meant.
By full dark the wind had eased. Men began moving around the deck with more ease. The sail was split in two places, four oars were gone, but the hull was sound.
Torstein came and found her sitting with her back against the hull and her knees drawn up.
"Your arm."
"It is nothing. A splinter from the rail."
"Aye." He crouched down in front of her so that his eyes were level with hers. "Salt water gets into a thing that is nothing and turns it into something that kills you. I have buried men who had nothing wrong with them." A beat. "Give me your arm before I lose what is left of my temper."
She gave him her arm.
***
UNDER THE AWNING AT the stern it was almost warm. A small soapstone lamp burned oil and threw a circle of light about the size of a table.
Torstein pushed her ruined sleeve up past the elbow and turned her forearm toward the lamp. The cut ran a hand's length below her wrist. Not deep. Ragged at one end where the wood had dragged.
"This will burn," he said, and pulled the stopper from a flask.
It burned. She made no sound. He glanced up once when she did not, and then went back to work.
His hands were enormous and they were not clumsy. He took two splinters out with the point of his knife, slowly, the way a man threads a needle. Then he smeared honey along the cut. She could smell a crushed herb mixed into it that she recognized but could not name in Norn.
"Where did you learn to do this?"
"Every man in the north learns some of it.
The sea road is long and there is no one else to do it.
" He began winding a strip of clean linen round her arm.
"My mother is better at it than any of us.
Runa. She is known for it in Kirkwall. People come up from the shore villages when their own remedies have failed.
She taught me what her mother taught her. "
"A woman of knowledge, then."
"She would tell you she is a woman of good sense and no patience. She would be lying about the second part." He tied off the linen. "And your mother?"
Samira watched the lamp flame.
"She was Sahrawi. Desert people, from the south.
She could tell you three days before a sandstorm came exactly what the sky was going to do, and she was never once wrong, and she could never explain to me how she knew it.
" A pause. "She taught me the stars. Her people have to navigate across country where there is no landmark of any kind, no tree, no hill, nothing. The sky is the only map they have."
"And she died guarding the stone?"
"When I was young."
"I am sorry."
"So am I," she replied.
Torstein's fingers were still resting against the inside of her wrist where he had finished the knot. Neither of them moved. The ship rolled gently underneath them and the lamp went on burning and somewhere forward a man laughed at something.
"You should get out of those wet clothes," Torstein said.
"So should you."
Neither of them moved.
A shout came down the deck about the split sail. He was on his feet at once and gone.
Samira sat where she was with her arm throbbing and her heart doing something she had absolutely no intention of examining.
***