Oathsworn 1 - The Whale Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

I take it you have come from Gudleif,' she said to me. 'Since he would only miss this journey if he were sick or injured, I presume that to be the case. Who are you?'
    Òrm; I replied. `Ruriksson. Gudleif fosters me.'
    `Which is it?'
    `Sorry?'
    `Sick or injured.'
    `He has sent for his sons.'

    Àh.' She was silent for a moment. Then: `So were you his favourite?'
    My laugh was bitter enough for her to realise. 'I doubt that, mistress. Why else would he send me through the snow to the hall of a—' I stopped before the words were out, but she caught that, too, and chuckled.
    À what? Witch? Old crone?'
    Ì meant nothing by it, mistress. But I was sent away and I think he hoped I would die.'
    Ì doubt that,' she said crisply, rising so that the cat sprang off her lap and then arched in a great, shivering bow of ecstasy before stalking off. 'Call me Freydis, not mistress,' she went on, smoothing her front. Ànd ponder this, young man. Ask yourself why in . . . how old are you?'
    I told her and she smiled gently. 'In fifteen years, you and I have never met, though we are but a day apart and Gudleif came every year. Ask that, Orm Ruriksson. Take your time. The snow will not melt in a hurry.'
    `He sent me to die in the snow,' I said bitterly and she shrugged.
    'But you did not. Perhaps your wyrd is different.'
    Then the hall changed, to the one I had sat in under her bloodsoaked sealskin cloak, with the roof caved in. Yet still she sat on her bench, the cat somehow back on her lap.
    Ì am sorry,' I said and she nodded her head off her shoulders, so that it tumbled into her lap, sending the cat leaping up with a yowl . . .
    I woke to the cold and wet, wondering if she was fetch-haunting me. Wondering, too, what had happened to the cat.
    Then Pinleg yelled out from the prow, where he was coiling walrus-hide ropes. When he had our attention, he pointed and we all squinted into the pearl-light of the winter sky.
    `There,' shouted Illugi Godi, pointing with his staff. A solitary gull wheeled, staggered in the wind, dipped, swooped and then was gone.
    My father was already busy, with his tally stick and his peculiar devices. I never mastered them, even after he had explained them to me.
    I knew that he had two stones, like grinding wheels, free-mounted. One pointed at the north star and the other was fixed to point at the sun. That way, my father knew the latitude, by seeing the angle of the sun stone. He could calculate longitude by using that and what he called his own time, marked on his tally stick.
    I never understood any of it but at the end of four days I knew why Einar valued Rurik the shipmaster, because we found the land at the point where we were supposed to find it, then my father, leaning over the side, watching the water, announced that a suitable inlet lay no more than a mile away, one where we could get ashore and sort ourselves out.
    He read water like a hunter reads tracks. He could see changes in colour where, to anyone else, it was just featureless water.
    The mood had changed and everyone was suddenly alert and busy. The sail came down, a great sodden mass of wool which had to be sweatily flaked into a squelching mass and stowed on the spar.
    The oars came out, that watch of rowers took their sea-chest benches and Valgard Skafhogg, the shipwright, took a shield and beat time on it with a pine-tarred rope's end until the rowers had the rhythm and away we went.
    Pinleg swayed past me, smiling broadly and clapping a round helmet on his head. He had a boarding axe in one hand and a wild light in his eye. It was hard for me to realise that Pinleg was older than me by ten years, since he was scrawny and no bigger than I was.
    I wondered how such a runt—his leg was permanently crippled, from birth I learned, so that he walked with a sailor's roll even on dry land—had ended up in the Oath-sworn. I learned, soon enough, and was glad I had never asked him.
    Ì'd leave the sheep, Bear Killer,' he chuckled. 'Grab your weapons