Читать книгу Viking Terror - Tom Henighan - Страница 8

That night the wolf came again, and the two young hunters left the settlement at dawn in pursuit of the marauder.

A few hours later, just beyond the last homestead, where the low rolling hills gave way to steeper, wilder land, Rigg found the second sheep.

It lay beside a great boulder, in the heart of the immense, barren, treeless country he called home. Its throat had been torn apart and its limbs chewed so that the bones shone through the skin. Not much remained of its bloody carcass, which had been mauled and dirtied by the beast that stalked and killed it.

Rigg breathed deeply and touched the slender shaft of the fine elm bow that he had slung on his shoulder when they left home. Though the dead and half-eaten animal at his feet revolted him, he knew that its killer was a skilled hunter, one of the great white wolves from the mountains, that had satisfied its ravenous spring hunger at the expense of the Norse farmers.

Well, if the wolf’s nature was to kill for food, Rigg’s duty was to prevent such killing! He had gladly taken on the task of hunting the predator, even if it meant tracking the beast to the edge of the White Lands, to the high mountains and glaciers that rimmed the tiny Viking settlement on Greenland.

Up there, far to the north, well beyond the farms of his grandfather, Erik the Red, well beyond the lands of his father, Leif, and those of the poorer Norse settlers, lay a region of unimaginable cold. No one could go far into that land and survive. And there, if anywhere, one might find Jotunheim, the icy kingdom of the Frost Giants.

Even now, as he gazed north, Rigg shivered a little. Dark peaks rose, streaked with snow, against the blue sky, and suddenly he longed for his home fire, for the warm presence of Fianna, his mother, and for the wisdom of Tyrkir, the old rune master who was his teacher. He longed too for the deep woods he remembered from Vinland, woods he had explored with Tyrkir more than a year before.

He often dreamed about those lost Vinland woods and of the strange but impressive race he had discovered there. Rigg found that he missed the new country and, since he was indeed a dreamer, at that moment he forgot about the dead sheep lying at his feet and the marauding wolf and his duty to trap or kill it. He slipped into a daydream in which some of the marvellous sights he remembered from Vinland appeared almost palpably before him. In his mind’s eye he saw a native camp by a river, then another place, one of ghosts and ancient ruins, and finally, the face of a native boy with whom he had wrestled for mastery during a strange midnight vigil...

“Rigg! You’ve found another! Why didn’t you call me?”

The voice startled him; he jumped and whirled round, and this brought a roar of laughter from the young man who had just spoken.

“Good old Rigg! Lost in never-never land as usual. It’s you who should be trained for bard and poet, not me. But oh!” — and here the young man caught sight of the bloodied sheep — “I see our friend the wolf has dragged another lamb dinner halfway to the wilds. The blood looks fairly fresh too. We might catch up with him this morning after all.”

The second young man, Ari Bardasson — a strong, sturdy, dark-haired youth — bent over the sheep and, to Rigg’s mild disgust, touched the torn neck of the slaughtered animal.

“Ari, I can see you’d be skilled at offering sacrifice. You don’t mind wetting your hands with blood and gore. But as for the sheep-killer, from what Tyrkir told me it could well be a she-wolf. It seems they’re often the boldest hunters. And if we’re going to catch her, we’d better be off at once.”

The young men walked on, still wearing their heavy winter tunics and cloaks. Their leather boots made tracks in the softening earth, and from time to time, as if for reassurance, they touched the amulets at their necks, the daggers at their belts, and the good elmwood of the longbows that were slung loosely over their shoulders.

Slowly, they climbed a steep barren ridge, one that rose high above the last of the settlement lands. Around them, the grassy meadows and thin green turf of the home farms had given way to bare stone and a brown furze carpet the colour of a deer hide.

Gulls wheeled above them, and a hawk patrolled a nearby hill. A trio of hares danced playfully beyond a stony cairn, and then, in a flash of white, disappeared as the hunters advanced on them. Underfoot, the earth still revealed here and there the lightly imprinted tracks of their prey.

When they reached the top of the long ridge, the two young men stopped to survey the landscape. Far below, down past the barren hills they had just climbed, Rigg caught a glimpse of the shining blue-green waters of Eriksfiord, still dotted with a few tiny spring ice floes. It was down there in the fiord, on an exploratory trip, that his grandfather Erik the Red had first planned a Norse Greenland settlement. Not long afterward, he had sailed from Iceland with twenty-five ships. Only fourteen vessels had made it safely to the new country; from the immigrants on board two settlements were founded. The Eastern Settlement, as it was called, was centred here in Erik’s Brattalid farm, and from here Rigg had sailed with his father, Leif, to the new world in the west.

Now both of the colony’s great figures had again weighed anchor, leaving Thiodhild, Leif’s mother, and some of the older settlers to look after things at home. Erik had gone with his son Thorstein, Rigg’s uncle, in search of Vinland, while Leif, months before, had sailed off on a hunting expedition to the far north.

In that arctic region — which lay a few days’ sail beyond the other Viking coastal settlement — was the Nordsetur, the wild lands where the Norse harvested walrus, narwhals, and polar bears. The walrus tusks and hide, the polar bear skins they took there, and the live falcons they caught near both their settlements made valuable trading goods, which they sent to Europe in exchange for iron, timber, and the extra grain they needed to feed the growing colony.

Rigg’s father was a great trader and an ambitious man, and his journeys in search of wealth and adventure were nothing new. Rigg and his mother were used to his long absences — yet no news of him had reached them for some time, and they were beginning to grow concerned.

Now, as Rigg stood there pondering his own adventurous past and trying to imagine the future with his father, Ari was busy searching the rough brown turf and stony outcroppings at their feet.

“We’ll lose the trail soon,” his friend reminded him. “But I think I know where she’s heading — if it is a she.”

Rigg nodded. “You mean the Valley of the Nine? I think so too — unfortunately. That’s a place I like to avoid. You remember how Aunt Freydis did the trance there?”

Rigg’s aunt had put on her blue cloak with a strange hood that was embroidered with the magic stones from the land of the Svear, or Swedes. She wore gloves made of wildcat skin and boots with fur on the outside. She carried a magic staff and took along her charms in the skin bag Rigg’s grandmother, Thiodhild, had given her before the old lady converted to the new religion of the Christ.

“That was when your good aunt went into the seidhr, the visionary state, and predicted a dire end for us all, for the whole colony! I know, I know! But Rigg, how can you take such nonsense seriously?”

“Don’t underestimate Aunt Freydis,” Rigg cautioned him. “Just before we left Brattalid, Tyrkir warned me to be very careful on this hunt. I think he suspected that the killer wolf would hide out in the Valley of the Nine, and he believes that Freydis has put some spell on the place. He doesn’t offer such warnings lightly, as you know, and to back it up he told me something very interesting. It seems that Freydis is disgusted with Grandmother Thoidhild’s taking up with Christianity — something I suspected but didn’t know for sure. My aunt doesn’t want a Christian church in Greenland and will do anything to stop it. Apparently she asked Tyrkir to help her. He didn’t commit himself, but he’s worried now. He says the valley is one of Freydis’s power channels. We have to be careful when we get there. The wolf may not be the only danger in that wild valley.”

Ari stopped in his tracks and gave Rigg a searching glance. “I suppose I must take this seriously, even though I have little faith in the power of the old magic. For my taste, the sooner we get rid of it and accept the new religion the better. As a student of the craft of poetry I respect and treasure the old stories. But as a man who wants to travel and live in the great cities, I’m disgusted by this backwoods stuff! In Constantinople itself they are Christians, and Olaf Tryggvason, our Norwegian king, has taken up the new faith. Since I hope to practise my poetry at such glorious courts I must accept the faith of the Christ myself — or so it seems to me. And, mark my words, Rigg, the colony will soon be Christian. You know yourself that Thiodhild, as Erik’s wife and Leif’s mother, has great influence. What she wants is very likely to come about.”

Rigg shrugged his shoulders and walked on. He did not want to argue with his friend, although he knew that both Tyrkir and even Fianna — brought up as a Christian — were resisting the changes. While they did not love the black arts of Freydis, they saw much good in the traditional ways and did not want to lose all contact with the old gods.

For half an hour the two young men trekked on in near silence, each wrapped up in his own thoughts. From time to time they paused, bent down to examine the trail, and exchanged knowing glances. In a few places their experienced eyes detected faint but telling signs of the passage of their prey. At last they left the sloping ridge and descended, by easy stages, to a bleak and barren valley. Here the sky seemed to close in above them, its cold blue splendour dimmed by low drifting patches of cloud.

Now all traces of the wolf’s passage had vanished. They were tracking by instinct; at the same time, Rigg recalled Tyrkir’s guess — or was it more than a guess? — that the marauding beast would have its lair somewhere in the Valley of the Nine.

That awe-inspiring place lay only a few miles away. Rigg turned to Ari and started to speak, but his friend’s silence, his determined march forward, made him swallow his words. Ari’s hunched shoulders, his straight-ahead gaze, seemed to indicate that he expected the worst and wanted to confront it as soon as possible.

Rigg knew his friend well enough to respect his silence. Ari was nineteen, two years older than Rigg, and much more careful and cautious. In comparison with his friend, who loved words and languages, Rigg sometimes felt almost tongue-tied. But while Ari had the skills of a poet, Rigg had the soul of one. Rigg also had the good looks of a blond Viking and the lithe body of an athlete, while Ari, the son of a Wendish mother from the Baltic, was already bald-pated and monkish-looking, although physically strong and fit enough.

Rigg always kept in mind that it was Ari’s way to try to find a rational explanation for everything, that one of his friend’s deepest fears was to come upon something for which no ordinary explanation would suffice. And Rigg’s experience in Vinland had already taught him that life was full of surprises, full of mysteries. Life, he had decided, was like the weather he was used to in Greenland: changeable, uncertain, and often frustrating in its seemingly inappropriate shifts and turns.

Even now the blue sky of the morning had vanished, giving way to a blanket of low-lying clouds that had obliterated the high peaks to the north. A chill wind blew down the valley, and to Rigg’s dismay, large snowflakes came swirling down, cancelling all of the past few days’ hints of spring and bringing memories of cold winter walks, lost trails, and shivering retreats to the hearth fire.

“Just our luck,” Ari grumbled. The young men had stopped for a frugal meal of bread, cheese, and dried caribou meat. “Now we’re in for it, I guess.”

Rigg couldn’t help laughing at his friend’s gloominess. “We can turn back if you like — but I don’t think we’d get much praise if we did.”

“Who would care? With Erik, Leif, and Thorstein all off voyaging, we can pretty well do what we like! Maybe Rolf the Navigator will ask a few questions, or Tyrkir, or one of the old Vinland crew, but they won’t mock our hesitations or our caution. ... Even so, I think we would be ashamed of ourselves if we turned back!”

Rigg laughed again. “True! Well, at least we’ve got warm clothing. And the Valley of the Nine is not far now. You see up ahead where that ridge falls away from that rocky spur? It runs east-west from there, I think.”

“I only hope our friend the wolf is there.”

“Don’t worry, I’m certain we’re on her trail.”

“Oh yes, you and your famous intuition! On the other hand, the tracks back there did point this way.”

They finished their meal, pulled their heavy cloaks more closely around them, and continued their march up the bleak valley.