"You won't get nearly as much as it's worth, here in La Rochelle," Gest called after him. But Thor ignored him.
Gest shrugged. "The man's got a mighty thirst on him." He turned his attention to me. "Well, welcome aboard the good ship Sif" he said. "What's your name, lass?"
"Rose," I replied.
"Rose, is it? I am Gest, at your service, and this is my mate, Goran." The fair-haired man nodded at me. "I don't suppose, Miss Rose, you know how to make raspberry cake out of salt pork and hard bread?"
"Perhaps not, but I can manage rommegrot, if you have a measure of wheat flour," I said.
A wide smile creased his face. "Ah, bless you, child," he said.
"May I ask," I said, "where exactly this ship is headed?"
"You may well ask. The destination is upward of Suroy, but with old Thor at the steering oar, you never can tell. If he's full of ale, which is what that golden dress is headed for, he's likely to steer us into a storm cloud thinking he's found Valhalla."
I felt giddy with excitement. Suroy was near the top of Njord and this was just what I'd hoped for, though I was also a little uneasy at Gest's words. I could only pray that he was exaggerating.
I decided to use the time until sundown to write a letter to my family. When I was done I went back to the caravel and, keeping out of sight of Captain Contarini, managed to find a friendly sailor who was willing to take my letter—along with the last of my coins—across to Tonsberg, and then make sure it got from there to Andalsnes. Of course, I had no guarantee he would do as he said, but I sensed an honesty in him, as well as a dislike for the way his captain had treated me.
It was approaching twilight when I found my way back to the knorr. But before I even saw the ship, I could hear Thor singing at the top of his voice.
"Reach for your mead horn and raise it high.
Odin the great! Thunder god Thor!
Balder the mild, and Freya sweet.
We toast until Valhalla is reeling!"
As I came up to the knorr, I smelled a strong stink of ale.
Thor was sprawled at the rear of the ship, his hand gripping the steering oar. Gest greeted me cheerfully, helped me aboard, and gestured to me to take a seat. "Could be a rocky departure," he warned.
"Ready to cast off?" he called to Thor.
Thor kept singing.
Gest nimbly unfastened all the ropes binding the boat to the dock, and he and Goran pushed off. The sail filled and the ship lurched forward. "That old souse won't give up the steering oar for the life of him," Gest muttered as he passed me, grabbing at a rope that was whipping around the deck.
Anxiously I gazed ahead at the seawalls protecting the entrance to the harbor. We looked to be heading straight toward the starboard one, but eventually Thor heaved the steering oar and we just cleared it. He laughed loudly and then resumed his song. We were out on the open sea.
"We are lucky," Gest said. "We have a southeast wind." It served us well for the first two days of the journey.
I had never been on anything larger than a rowboat, much less a ship such as this. It was clinker-built, Gest told me, which was a style of boat building that involved overlapping the planks in a fashion that made it shimmy through the waves like a sea-dwelling snake.
Surprisingly, I took to life aboard the knorr without difficulty. Gest had predicted I would get seasick, being such a landlubber, but I did not. I loved the sea wind on my face and the feeling of skimming the waves.
On the second day of the journey, we spied the brooding white cliffs of the land called Anglia to the northwest. If I had not known better, I would have thought the cliffs were snow-covered, but Gest told me they were white because of limestone, a chalky rock.
Soon we came out on Njordsjoen, the sea I had traveled through in a sealskin, borne by the white bear.
The journey was uneventful for the next five days. I learned how to cook on a knorr when the water wasn't too choppy, using a small cauldron hung on a tripod. My cooking was only just adequate, given what I had to work with, but Gest praised me lavishly—mostly, I think, to annoy Thor. Gest was an extremely amiable, entertaining traveling companion, while Goran remained silent, and Thor spoke only to the two men, ignoring me almost completely.
Eventually Thor sobered up, at least for a time, and it became clear that he knew his boat and the seas—and that he would have been a very good captain, were it not for his weakness for ale. Gest had been right; most of what Thor got for the golden dress had gone to buying casks of ale. They were stowed in the sturdiest part of the storage area belowdecks, and Thor visited there frequently, refilling a smaller cask that he would keep at his side.
There was one time when Thor lay passed out at the rudder as we hit a patch of choppy seas. Goran took over the steering oar and held us fairly steady, although when Thor had finished sleeping it off, he groused that Goran had put us off course. Goran and Gest seemed to be used to Thor's unreliable behavior, however, and took it all in stride.
For navigating, Thor used a leidarstein, an ugly brown stone he always carried with him in a small leather pouch. My mother had a leidarstein that had been handed down to her from her mother, so I had seen how one worked. But it never failed to amaze me, watching the needle slowly swing toward the polestar in the north.
On the sixth day we came into sight of the Shetland Islands, and Gest told me that the southern region of Njord lay directly east, though we were too far away to see it. If we continued at our current rate of travel, he said, we should reach Suroy in eight or nine days.
But the next day the wind deserted us. After several hours becalmed, Thor suddenly shouted at me to take over the steering oar. Until then my jobs had been confined to cooking and bailing out water (which, because of the low sides of the knorr, was an ongoing and crucial job). Gest and Goran lowered the sail, while Thor gruffly instructed me on how to hold the tiller steady. Then, because he was the largest of the three men, Thor took an oar on one side of the ship while Gest and Goran manned two oars on the other side.
It did not take me too long to get the feel for holding the ship steady, especially with Thor barking out instructions. The rowing was hot, backbreaking work, and I felt sympathy for the three men, their muscles straining and sweat rolling down their faces. At midday Thor came back to the steering oar while I prepared a meal of smoked fish and hard bread. He took many breaks from steering to refill his mug of ale, and I could see that Gest was watching him closely.
The sky began to cloud over, and naively I thought this a good thing because the rowing wouldn't be so hot for the men. But the air felt strange, making my skin prickle. When the wind began to blow again, whitecaps appeared on the waves. It was coming too quickly. And the sky kept getting blacker.
Thor jumped up, draining his mug. "Raise the sail!" he shouted.
Gest frowned. "Looks a big one, Thor. Best we not risk the sail."
"Let it blow!" Thor threw back. "We'll ride her out. And make good time, too."
"But the wind has shifted all around the compass these past few minutes," Gest responded, "from south to east to west. You know that portends..."
"We'll raise the sail!" Thor thundered. '"Rather founder than furl,'" he said, sounding as if he was quoting something.
Reluctantly Gest and Goran went to unfurl the sail. The wind tore at them, and the fabric snapped as they struggled to raise it. But finally the sail was aloft, and as the wind filled it, we shot forward through the roiling sea.