Raven Read Online Free PDF

land.
    ‘I will miss this, Sigurd!’ Halldor yelled. He stood on the foreship, gripping the bowline, square on to the bow breakersand freezing spray, his dark yellow hair daubed against his head and face. ‘This is what we dream of, hey!’
    ‘Men will talk of Halldor who laughs at storms!’ Sigurd yelled back, smiling. ‘We will carve it on your runestone.’ A grin twisted Halldor’s grotesquely bloated face; the pain of it must have been terrible, but the warrior clearly felt warm pride swell in his heart at his jarl’s words, despite the icy spray, because not every man could expect a runestone to be raised in his honour. Halldor glanced at Bjarni, who nodded as though assuring him that he would make a good job of carving Halldor’s rune story. Then Halldor turned back into the spray, his head held high in challenge to the leaden sky.
    Later that day we came to a wide, flat, wind-scoured beach. It was exposed to the storm, a forsaken strand above which gulls swirled like leaves in the wind, but there were no rock walls from whose summits men could drop boulders or rain arrows on us. Knowing it was low tide and fearing we might not come across another such place before nightfall, we turned our prows landward, hoping that that sandy beach extended beyond the breakers. The wind filling our reefed sails, we rode the dragons right in, their keels slicing through the soft seabed and up into the green-brown cloak of weed that lay beyond the water line. Then, the gusts howling in our ears and drowning our voices, we sank mooring posts deep into the sand and lashed the ships securely. We cowered onboard, for that stretch of coast was desolate and there was more shelter to be found in our ships than ashore, which was not saying a lot, and was probably why there were no folk there to attack us or from whom we might steal.
    Serpent rocked in the wind as though she were still at sea, the gusts keening through her oar ports as men tried to sleep. I lay in furs and skins, watching the pale moon slip in and out of the swollen black clouds, when movement at the foreship drew me from a mire of thoughts of which Cynethryth was the centre. By the moon’s pallid light I saw Olaf and Halldoreach gripping the other’s arm. Halldor’s cousin Black Floki was there too, as were Svein the Red and Bram Bear.
    ‘It’s time,’ a low voice said and a hand gripped my shoulder. Sigurd’s face was all shadow but for his eyes which glinted. ‘Find me something shiny, Raven. Something for a warrior.’ His teeth glinted but it was no smile. ‘Seeing as you are awake you may as well join us.’
    ‘Yes, my lord,’ I said gruff-voiced as he moved off. I climbed out of my nest and with a shiver picked my way past the shrouded bodies of men so still they could have been corpses, huffing into cold hands as I knelt by the hold. ‘Something for a warrior,’ I murmured to myself, lifting off the loose planks and skins that protected the cargo in Serpent ’s belly, then I raised the lid of an oak chest to reveal its dully gleaming treasures to that ill night. There were brooches and silver cloak pins and coins and hack-silver. There were torcs, rings and silver chains and I tried to burrow quietly down to the bottom of that chest so that nothing would escape me in the darkness. Then my hand closed around something warm amongst those cold prizes, something smooth. Bringing it into the weak light I saw a figure of a warrior carved from cream-coloured bone, thumb-worn and of little worth compared with the other things in that chest. And yet it was a thing of power all the same, for it was a fine carving of Týr Lord of Battle, one hand gripping the sword hilt at his waist, the other arm ending handless, having been mauled by Fenrir Wolf. His helmet’s nose guard ended in a point between small eyes that were battle-wide because Týr is the god of victory. The figure was the size of my closed fist and would stand on a flat surface, on boots that the