Читать книгу Viking Terror - Tom Henighan - Страница 11

Rigg opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, bound hand and foot, and his head hurt. He could barely move, and the flickering light on the cave roof seemed like a taunt to his misery. For a few frustrating minutes, he strained at his bonds without loosening them.

He was sore all over, as if he’d been rolled down a rocky slope, and his pride was quite deflated. He’d been clubbed and trussed up proper, like some helpless animal victim. The very thought made him groan. Once again, he tried to shift his body and failed. An answering groan sounded from close by.

After a few minutes, Rigg managed to raise his head. There was Ari — alive, at least, but hanging upside down from a ceiling beam set in the stone roof — just where Rigg had glimpsed him before being attacked. A much-diminished fire flickered underneath his friend. He seemed to be conscious, too, but was so far saying nothing. What a pair of fools they were! And now they would surely have to pay for it.

“Ari! What happened?” Rigg whispered. His own voice sounded hoarse and afraid. His shame deepened.

“What happened? Someone hit me over the head, then trussed me up here. Not a pleasant experience. I thought I was going to be roasted for dinner. But I’m very glad you’re alive, Rigg! I was beginning to wonder.”

Rigg was relieved to hear Ari sounding very much like his usual self. “But who attacked you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I found this cave, entered from a passage below, and started to explore it,” his friend continued. “Someone struck me from behind — I didn’t see him. When I came to consciousness, I found myself strung up over this fire. I thought I was dead and consigned to that fiery pit the Christians talk about. I should have become a believer, I thought! Now I see I’m still on earth — more or less on earth. But I’m feeling a little light-headed, upside down like this.”

Rigg couldn’t help smiling at his friend’s patter. Clearly, a very clever enemy had trapped them both. Things could be worse, though — they hadn’t been killed outright. And now, with no one in sight, they had a few minutes to try to plan an escape.

“Ari, listen! We’ve got to do something! Can you swing your body a little? Maybe you can break that leather thong that’s holding you up. If you could crawl over here, I might be able to loosen your bonds with my teeth.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you wriggle this way? You might be able to burn off those bindings in the fire!”

“All right. I’ll just move like this, and —”

Rigg stopped in mid-sentence. Someone had suddenly started singing or chanting quite close by. It was the voice of a girl or a woman. A beautiful sing-song, Rigg thought, of which he understood not a word.

When he got over his surprise, Rigg called out to his friend: “Can you make that out, Ari?”

Ari Bardasson was nothing if not a student of language. From childhood he had attempted and largely succeeded in mastering every single foreign tongue he encountered. These included Latin, Greek, and even some Arabic, picked up from the crew of the occasional merchant ship that had visited the great city of Constantinople, where so many languages were spoken.

“You must go to the court of Olaf Tryggvason in Norway,” Tyrkir had told him. “They have great need of your skills there and you will do well.”

Now Rigg listened and was sure he had heard the language of that song before. But Ari was the expert.

“That’s no mystery,” Ari told him. “Even hanging upside down like this I can recognize Tornit when I hear it. It’s a Skraeling that’s singing out there, and she’s singing a song to a wolf-spirit!”

Tornit! Rigg was astounded. No wonder the language sounded vaguely familiar. It was the tongue of the native Greenlanders, and — standoffish as the Norse were — occasionally one heard it around Brattalid. It would be even more common in the Norse settlements along the coast and quite familiar in the Nordsetur, the fishing and hunting territory where the Norse and Greenlanders met with some frequency.

“Then it was the Tornit who ambushed us!” Rigg cried out. All of a sudden he was really angry. The Vikings wouldn’t tolerate this! They considered themselves far superior to the Greenland natives — Skraeling was a word of contempt. At the same time they all knew that the Tornit were quite skilled with their own weapons and were excellent hunters and trappers.

“Now I understand,” Rigg said. “It’s a Tornit hunting party. They wanted to take some game for themselves, and knew they were trespassing in our valley. They attacked us before we could attack them. I’m sure we can get out of this. We can swallow our pride and tell them it’s fine for them to hunt here for a while. That should satisfy them. Besides, they won’t want the whole Norse colony coming after them — which is what would happen if we don’t return. You can tell them all that, Ari. Then they’ll release us.”

“I hope you’re right!”

“We won’t try to escape now,” Rigg suggested. “They might not like that! Let’s talk with them first and see what happens. We can threaten them with reprisals if they don’t co-operate.”

“So you’re going to let the Tornit have our wolf?” Rigg frowned. “What are you talking about?” Ari didn’t know he had wounded the wolf.

“That girl is singing to the wolf spirit, asking its forgiveness for killing it. The Tornits must have killed the wolf after we spotted it. If we let them keep it and the settlement folk find out, we’ll be the laughingstock of the colony.”

Rigg groaned. Of course Ari was right. Even so, there were more important issues at hand. “Let’s get them to free us first,” he said. “Then we’ll decide what to do. Can you call to them in the Tornit language?”

“Of course. Except that since I’m hanging upside down it may come out backwards.”

Rigg laughed. “Just get talking, my poet friend!”

Ari began calling out in the fluid Tornit tongue, a language that made Rigg think of melting ice and flowing water.

The girl’s singing stopped at once. There was a long pause.

“Why don’t they come in here?” Rigg wondered aloud. From where he lay, even by twisting his head, he couldn’t quite see the entrance to the cave chamber.

Ari started to call out again, then stopped in mid-sentence. He was staring at the cave entrance, a look of surprise on his face.

“It’s the girl herself,” he whispered to Rigg. “The singer.”

“Yes, it is! And how are my prisoners?”

Rigg was astounded. A female voice had spoken from close beside him, using the Norse language. He tried to get a glimpse of her, failed, then with a great effort wrenched his whole body round, and at last beheld the figure standing in the arched cave passage.

It was a Tornit girl of Rigg’s age or younger, tall and slender, and dressed in brown skin garments fringed with fur. In her right hand she held a small club with a carved wooden handle and a mallet-end made of stone. She cast a wary glance first at Ari, then at Rigg, then moved slowly forward and stood regarding the two captives, apparently waiting for them to speak.

“You understand Norse?” Ari asked her, seemingly doubtful about what he had just heard. “Where are the other Skraeling hunters? We are from a nearby Norse settlement. This is a valley of ours — the spirits of our people are here — and we demand to be released.”

The girl considered these words for a moment, then burst out laughing. Rigg noticed her striking dark eyes, the mobile features of her face. She had broad cheeks and a high forehead; her skin was olive-coloured, smooth, and healthy.

“There are no other hunters,” she told them. “I captured you and you are my prisoners. And I will not release you, because if I do, I know you will kill me or do me harm.”

Rigg could contain himself no longer. “You mean you’re the one who attacked us? ... It’s not possible!”

The girl held up her club. “My brother used it for seals, why not I for men?” she said. Then she added something in Tornit, which Ari translated for Rigg.

“She says we are a couple of blunderers,” he reported. “It’s amazing we can feed ourselves if we move so noisily among the hills. We must be shamans and depend on magic to keep us safe.”

Rigg was furious; he writhed on the stone floor, struggled mightily with his bonds, but could not break free. The Tornit girl’s musical laughter added to his frustration. Finally, he got control of himself and asked her where she had learned to speak Norse.

She explained that she was from the northern coast. There were many Viking hunters there. “Sometimes they are not very friendly,” she added. Some months ago, she explained, she had been with her brother and her cousin. The men were hunting seals and made a good kill. They were about to take them back to the local Tornit village, when two Norsemen attacked and killed her dear ones and stole their cargo. She had barely escaped with her life.

“Although I had never visited your dwellings, I had been warned never to trust the Norse,” she said. “Now I understand why.”

So she had come from the northern hunting grounds, the very place where his father’s hunting expedition had gone! If she could travel so far, why couldn’t Leif return safely? He had a good ship and companions, and this girl had come many miles on land, alone.

Her account of Norse violence, though, dismayed him. Not for the first time, Rigg was ashamed of his own people. In Vinland he had seen Norse violence spoil the exchanges between Viking and Skraeling. Was it not possible to be a warrior and yet to avoid the folly of giving way to rage and anger, of using power to prey on the weak? Did a strong man always have to be a cruel and unreasonable man? He hung his head and thought, This girl suffered terrible violence; now she will kill us, and things will never heal.

Ari, however, posed more questions. “But how and why did you come here? You can’t have travelled alone. No one could survive such a trip.”

“My people helped me. There are some houses along the way, and the land and sea are known to us. The spirits helped me too. I had a dream that made everything clear. The Norse who injured me would also save me, the dream said. I would bring good things to my people. But first I must make my way south, so as to find a ship to take me back home. It would be a ship like none other, possibly a magic ship, my dream said. I was going to the place you call the Ostri Bygd, the Eastern Settlement, to ask help from the Norse, when you came stalking me.”

Rigg cast a sharp glance at Ari, then said to the Tornit girl, “It was a wolf that we stalked, not a woman.”

“That wolf I killed myself. The poor creature was hungry and tried to steal my food, so I had to kill it.”

“You could not have killed it!” Rigg objected. “We saw it roaming this hillside not many hours ago.”

“Perhaps you did not see my wolf,” she replied. “Perhaps you saw another.”

“I think we also saw you, dressed in your brown skins,” Ari told her. “We thought you might be a werewolf.”

The girl’s eyes sparkled but she did not reply to this.

“If you release us and say nothing of what happened we will not kill you or harm you,” Rigg said. “I have sailed far to the west and met Skraelings and I did not harm them.”

“We will take you to our settlement,” Ari added. “We will find you a ship going north. We are not like the Norse who killed your relatives.”

For several long minutes the girl regarded them closely. She said not a word but looked first at Ari and then at Rigg, studying them so intensely she might have been reading their innermost thoughts and impulses.

After this, she walked back and forth across the cavern, mumbling certain words under her breath.

“I will consult the wolf spirit,” she told them, and slipped away into the semi-darkness of the outer cave.

“I am not very hopeful,” Ari said. “Perhaps I have been hanging upside down too long.”

But Rigg was so excited he could hardly speak. “Didn’t you see it — she walked with a limp! She favoured her left leg when she walked back and forth in front of us!”

“And what do you make of that, my friend?”

“Ari — before I was attacked, I took a shot at the wolf. My arrow struck the wolf’s left hind leg. And now it seems we might have been wrong about the shapeshifter — maybe it did not change from man to wolf. Is it possible this Tornit girl is a werewolf?”