Chapter 47
Forty-Seven
“We will have guests with us on this voyage. I would suggest you all keep in mind these are the treasured friends of our dear King Arik.” Though Flojer wasn’t yelling, his voice carried as if he were.
A ripple of laughter spread throughout the crew—forty rowers, half sitting at their benches, oars in hand, the other half lounging in three or four smaller groups wherever the ship had space. All fearsome to behold in their own tattooed, braided ways.
“Let us not be the last ship there,” Flojer said with a feral grin.
He needed to say nothing else. The drummer began to play, and the rowers heaved their oars. A steady rhythm of drums and sea splash and grunting began.
As the ship lurched beneath us and clouds rushed overhead, Flojer pointed at Fell. “You can row?”
“I can.” Fell grinned.
“And you have a young son so are not sleeping at normal times—you can join the evening rowers.”
Fell lifted his chin, revealing his thick throat. “Yes, Kaker.”
Oh dear. Why was he so beautiful? How are we going to last without bedding one another for nine whole days? King Arik had told me the voyage could be accomplished in three to four days, but there would be frequent stops as other ships joined with us.
“And you—” Flojer pointed at Rowan. “You would like to learn?”
“Yes, Kaker,” Rowan said, his hands clasped in front of him. It was how sworn swords stood before grainkeepers in our country.
“I would learn as well,” Fara said. “If you would have me.”
Flojer pressed his lips together and squinted. “Ah, but you are a friend to the herbs, no?”
She looked utterly wicked as she smirked. “I am.”
“And you read?”
“Yes, Kaker. Feathers are what come easiest. But stones and palms and stars…” She tucked her hands behind her back. “Most things, if given enough time with them.”
“I would offer you a half-row? I expect our healer would like to speak with you. And… a few others might be interested as well, for personal reasons.”
“Of course, Kaker.”
Flojer didn’t address me in the way he had the others. He simply looked at me, his eyes crinkling in the corners with mirth. “There is space to sit and enjoy the sea.” He pointed to the nose of the ship.
Everyone else had said, “Yes, Kaker,” so it was what I said as well, and there was some ease in obedience being the correct course, as it had been for so long in my youth, but there was unease in being treated differently than the others.
As I took careful steps toward the place he had suggested, Flojer nodded at Fara. “Stay with her until I know voyaging agrees with the child’s stomach.”
I sat as instructed at the head of the ship but pushed myself back as far as I could manage, my spine pressing into the sole enclosed room onboard. Several torturous imaginings of Halvar falling over the front of the ship flashed in my mind’s eye.
Fara knelt beside me, running twitching hands up and down the wood of the ship’s nose, eventually lowering her ear to the deck.
She laughed her shrill, strange giggle. “This is a most marvellous ship,” she said.
“It has a heart that beats and beats and beats. Long after we are all dead, this ship’s heart will still rush on. ”
“Let us not talk of dying,” I said, trying to force away the image of Halvar plummeting into the sea out of my mind. He was growing comfortable—perhaps even sleepy—in my arms. The end of one of my braids was clenched in his little fist, one of his chubby cheeks squished against my shoulder.
“Let us not look at the land we are leaving behind,” Fara said, righting herself and sitting beside me, leaning against the cabin. “Let us look at the big open space we are rushing toward.”
Quickly, I lost interest in speaking or thinking. The glint of white caps among the black waves emptied my mind, and the emptier my mind became, the closer to sleep Halvar seemed.
I cannot say how long we sat there like that, staring at the sea, but eventually, Flojer came and sat just to my right.
“I can hold the boy some, if your arms need rest,” he said.
“He might wake,” I said sleepily.
“I will face those consequences bravely,” Flojer said, smirking and holding open his arms.
My arms were sore—I’d been holding him nearly all day. Perhaps it is worth the risk, I thought, lifting Halvar gently.
He stirred, but didn’t wake, settling into Flojer’s big arms.
“Thank you,” I said, grabbing hold of my left elbow with my right hand and stretching it, feeling the muscles loosen.
“Do not think of it,” he said. “I had one this young once. I remember what it was like.”
For a moment, it seemed Fara and I didn’t exist. Flojer stared at baby Halvar, looking entirely lost in his own thoughts.
“May I examine his palm?” Flojer said finally, looking back at me with warmth in his eyes.
I nodded. “Only do not tell me what you see. I do not want Halvar’s story told to me by anyone but him.” It was a phrasing I had adopted because people were always trying to read Halvar’s palm back at court.
Flojer snorted, opening Halvar’s little fingers with his calloused captain’s hand. He pressed his lips together and nodded to himself, seemingly holding back laughter. “This is the right ship for such a child. Pray tell, what is his name?”
I smiled. “Halvar.”
“Fervynd,” Fara added. “Halvar from the Storm.”
“Interesting,” Flojer said, his eyes shining as they locked with mine. “You decided this name yourself?” There was something knowing in his smile.
“I…”
The wind surged around us, driving my skirt wild. I quickly tucked it beneath my outstretched legs, suddenly aware of why Fell had suggested I consider trousers so many times.
“You need not answer,” Flojer said, turning to Fara. “Might I glimpse your skael as well?”
Her palm shot out willingly, and Flojer leaned forward to look. “Ah. We share something.” He slid Halvar onto his lap, stirring the baby once more, before holding his hand out to Fara, pointing at one line in particular.
Fara smiled. “I am nervous for it.”
And suddenly I felt I was very much intruding on a private moment between two people who I wasn’t sure should be having a private moment at all. They held each other’s gaze for what felt like a long while.
“You need not be nervous,” Flojer said finally.
Our days passed sweetly aboard The Fearsome Beast.
Flojer took to calling Halvar Kakyi, which meant: Little Captain. Most nights, Halvar would sit in Fell’s lap for the beginning of his row, and much to many rowers’ adoration, he could sometimes be set so that it looked like he was holding the oars.
“He wants to raid!” someone shouted the first time.
“We need only to set him ashore, and he will do the rest for us!”
“It is in his blood now,” one warned me. “You will never take him from the sea.”
In the mornings, when Fell was finished rowing, he’d sometimes take Halvar to the head of the ship and hold him near the edge so the sea could spray him.
This struck me mad with terror, but Halvar would get a shocked look on his face and then make a spitty sort of sound that drove Fell wild with laughter.
And it was on the way to Byernen that Halvar began to pull his body along the deck. He wasn’t yet crawling—it was a terrible, floppy mess—but still, he moved himself, and I felt so overjoyed and terrified and cherished and abandoned that I grew dizzy and had to sit down.
“The sea makes him strong,” Flojer remarked patting my shoulder as Fell cheered for Halvar.
“You can do it, reach. Yes! You are so strong!”
Halvar flailed in my direction.
Quickly, a chorus formed.
“Go Kakyi, go!”
“Come on, come on!”
Most of the crew were a fair bit older than I was, but there was one among them who was younger than I: Yarlav, son of Flojer.
He was twenty-one, and I recognized him from his visit to court, when he’d demanded Flojer’s release.
He was mildly drunk the night Halvar first pulled himself across the deck.
It was a common jest that Yarlav got drunk quickly, and several on the crew tried to fashion a crawling race between Halvar and Yarlav, as surely Yarlav was drunk enough, having had his second helping of mead, that the contest would be fair.
Wagers were placed, though the contest didn’t actually occur, as Halvar grew distraught, I think from so many people looking at him.
The following afternoon, with Fell resting his head on my lap, trying to sleep in preparation for his next turn on the rowing benches, with Halvar squawking in Rowan’s arms in the cutest of ways, I learned that everyone on the crew was from a mountain village called Gyden.
The village was so small that they had only one ship, and even then, The Fearsome Beast didn’t have as many rowers as other ships.
“Norsern think because Gyden is so far south, it is not truly Norsern,” one man said.
“But this is false thinking,” said another.
“Every rower from Gyden is as strong as seven regular Norsern.”
“At least,” agreed another. “And when Yarlav is bigger, and more practised, we will say nine Norsern. Maybe even ten.”
Yarlav frowned. “I cannot be pulling down so—”
The man who’d spoken wrapped an arm around Yarlav’s neck, playfully—but forcefully—pinning the young man to the deck.
“It is the most feared of all ships,” said another.
“The young woman spends her time at court. She has enough nonsense to deal with without you all telling tales about this ship.”
Everyone sat up straighter as Flojer approached. He’d been in his cabin since midday.
He squinted in the sun. “Yes, my crew is strong, but this is not what makes them great. They are watched by the gods. They obey the gods—this is what is important.”
“Always he says this,” Yarlav whispered to me when his father walked away. “That the day will come when the gods ask something special of us. So he does not prepare us for raiding. He prepares us for doing the work of Hyrold.”
The oldest man on the crew was named Aslak.
He wasn’t thick like most of the rowers, but thin and lanky with grey hair.
He was the ugliest man I’d ever seen, and it didn’t help that he always looked terribly uncomfortable.
Whenever my eyes met his, I knew in the pit of my stomach that he was capable of dark and twisted things.
I kept away from him, and he mostly didn’t partake in anything that was ongoing, but that afternoon, he’d heard what Yarlav said.
He scoffed. “You have never rowed on another ship, so you cannot understand your father’s words.”