Thunder God Read Online Free PDF Page B

sail and waited, curious who would be so bold as to come out to meet them.
    It was my father. He stood at the tiller and his wild yelling reached me on the breeze. He must have returned to the town and found out what had happened.
    Tostig’s hand settled on my shoulder. ‘It is no use,’ he whispered.
    I felt my muscles twitch, ready to hurl me into the water, but even if I could have untied the knot around my neck and jumped overboard, the cold would have dragged me down long before I closed the gap between us. I slumped back, as if the weight of Tostig’s hand was too much for me to bear.
    Across the foam-slicked waves, I heard my father call my name.
    When the raiders saw that it was just a small fishing smack, nothing they could use, they tightened the sail lines, hauling them until their knuckles turned a bloodless white. The man at the steerboard arched his body like a bow, arm muscles taut under his skin. The Drakkar seemed to gasp as we lunged forward over the swells. My father’s boat fell far behind, his shouting lost on the wind. His boat slipped behind the waves, then re-emerged and slid away again. Each time, I saw less of it, until the boat had disappeared for good.
    A sudden, bone-hollowing emptiness spread through my body, as all the memories of my home, which until that moment had flickered through my head as if they were alive, like a flock of birds in the blue sky of my eyes, became still, their bright colours already fading.
    *
    Soon after, we ran into thick fog rolling off the land. It smelled of pine and mossy earth, mixing with the salt breath of the sea. The fog wrapped so thickly around us that we lost sight of the other Drakkar. Our boat hauled down its sail and waited. The crew lit torches, shot burning arrows out into the mist and called with hands cupped round their mouths, but the fog had swallowed up their friends.
    As darkness settled on us, Tostig mumbled prayers to his wooden-faced gods.
    The raiders discussed what to do. They were speaking in the Eastern Norse of the Danes and Swedes, not the Western Norse of my own people. They talked of the bad luck they’d seen this year, and how the haul at Altvik had made up for all of it. But now this. The quietest among them was the captain, a short, wide man named Kalf, with eyes almost hidden under a bony ledge of brow and calves that were thicker than my thighs. He covered a bald patch on the top of his head with a small round cap of blue wool and wore a brown cape with a hood. When the night grew cold, he pulled this up and peered from it like a badger from its burrow. He was a Christian and prayed to a brass cross nailed to the mast of his ship, but when the wind picked up, he prayed to Norse gods too. I heard him called an English Dane and learned through my eavesdropping that there were other Norsemen on the crew who had settled in England. They were heading back as soon as they sold off their cargo at a place called Hedeby, which lay further to the south. At Hedeby, the crew would split. Those who lived in the northlands would find their own ways home. The English Danes would take their ships and sail away. From the things they said, it seemed clear that Kalf had made a life’s work of raiding. He came across the sea most years and recruited people from the coastal towns. Some of these men would wait every year for the sight of Kalf’s sails on the horizon, then drop everything and go raiding with him.
    Sitting among them, I felt the impossible frailty of my own life. Each time I raised my head, seeing only tar-black waves beyond the boat, I knew that Tostig and I were beyond all help except what we could pray for or could find inside ourselves.
    I overheard that I was now the property of a man named Halfdan. Now and then, I caught him looking at me the way he might look at an animal, wondering if it could understand what he was saying.
    Halfdan had few friends on the crew. Those he had, he didn’t seem to want. It was clear that they