‘Nor the current for rowing, nor the wind for sails,’ I answered, more sharp than I had intended, for the truth of it nagged me like a broken tooth.
‘Trees down to the water,’ Onund added, which was true. Once they had been the edge of a considerable wood, set back from the river, but it had spilled over and swamped them; hipdeep in it, the men looped rope over one shoulder, padded a tunic, or a cloak or a spare serk under it and hauled, stumbling and sliding. To their left, Alyosha and a handful of men, weighed with shields, weapons and ring-coats, splashed to keep up, as a flank guard.
‘The mast might go,’ added Trollaskegg, watching the bowing curve of it.
‘Or the line,’ added Yan Alf, almost cheerfully.
I wondered if anyone had something good to say and asked it aloud. No-one answered — then Kuritsa appeared, sloshing calf-deep through the water and calling out, so that men stopped pulling and braced instead, holding Short Serpent against the current.
He came up to where the water deepened to the river proper, stopping when it got to his waist. He had his unstrung bow in his hand and a young doe draped round his shoulders like a fur cloak, the hooves cinched on his chest; men yelled at him and grinned, for this meant good hot eating at the end of a wet misery of hauling.
It took some time, but we got Short Serpent closer to him, while he came out until the current threatened to sweep him off his feet. Crowbone threw him a line, he tied the deer to it and it was hauled aboard; another line drew him in like a fish, until he stood on the deck, streaming water and grinning. The rain had stopped.
‘Good hunt,’ I told him and he nodded, blowing snot from his nose. He pulled off his leather cap and checked that the bowstring was dry, then coiled it up again and stuck the hat back on.
‘Up ahead is trouble,’ he said. ‘A barrier of drift.’
Trollaskegg grunted; that was a bad thing to have happen now, but you could have foreseen it without throwing rune-bones, on a river like this and weather like we had.
It was a fallen tree, undercut and ruined, a fine big oak — a keel tree, as Onund pointed out. If we had been wanting one that would be cause for grinning, as I told him; those nearest laughed, though it was a sound as grim as tumbling skulls.
Drift had piled against it, sodden birch and gnarled pine from far upriver, willow branches swollen with new buds, all forming a great dam the length of twenty men out from the east bank and solid enough that men could walk on it.
Around the end swept the water, rippling like muscle, then breaking into dirty-white foam and growling up spits of spray. The air stank with the cloy of death, for there were bloated bodies here, sheep and cattle that had drowned, bobbing and sinking and rising again as they spun in a stately dance down to the sea.
Onund and Trollaskegg and others walked, cat-careful, out onto the barrier and peered and prodded here and there, while the men stood like patient oxen, hock-deep in the water and braced to stop Short Serpent spiralling backwards with the flowing current.
A tree came down, with an animal on it and men yelled and shouted cheerfully; it was a water-slicked wildcat, yowling and snarling, running this way and that as the tree caught the water’s flow and half-turned beneath it.
‘Shoot it,’ Crowbone yelled to Kuritsa, who merely shook his head.
‘Not me,’ he declared. ‘I almost died from shooting one once and I will not do it again.’
‘How could you die from shooting a cat?’ demanded Yan Alf, watching the tree in case it came too close. Kuritsa, his face serious, said it was the speed of the beast that had been his undoing and Crowbone made the mistake of asking how that was so.
‘I came upon one while hunting deer,’ Kuritsa said. ‘Suddenly, without warning. I do not know who was the more surprised — but I had an arrow nocked and shot it, straight down the open mouth.’
He paused and shook his head.
‘This was my undoing, for that cat, like all of its breed, was faster than Perun’s thrown axe. It spun round to run away and my own arrow shot out of its arse. I felt the wind of it on my cheek; an eyelash closer and I would be dead.’
People laughed aloud and watched the tree and the yowling misery of its passenger spin away downriver.
Then Onund hauled himself aboard, dripping like a walrus, with Trollaskegg not far behind. Their faces were gloomier than Hel’s bedspace.
‘It will not be chopped up this side of summer,’ Onund declared.
‘Nor will it be hauled apart,’ added Trollaskegg.
There was a pause and I waited, trying to be patient. Onund grunted and shrugged, the hump of his shoulder rising like a mountain.
‘We will have to pull round it,’ he said and all our hearts sank at that. It meant tethering Short Serpent and bringing everyone on board to take an oar — then loosing the lines and bending to rowing to the west bank. We would lose way, of course, probably back to where we had started pulling that day, before we could tether on the opposite bank. Then we would have to pull all the way back again, this time with the threat of Saxlander horsemen.
It would be a long, hard pull, too, for we would have to put some distance between us and the barrier; no-one wanted to spend a night on the west side of the river, so we would have to repeat the process to take the ship to the east bank again, on the far side of the barrier — with enough room to allow for losing way that would not carry us smack into that gods-cursed drift of trees and sodden corpses in the fading light.
The black, wet misery of it settled on us as we grunted and cursed and slithered the ship to where it could be tethered. The panting, exhausted crew slackened off, the linden-bast rope was hauled in and loosed from the masthead and folk spilled wetly over the side, sloshing towards rowing ports, sorting out their sea-chest seats.
I nodded to Finn and he went round with two green-glass flasks and men grinned wearily and brightened as the fiery green-wine spirit was passed down the line. Dark Eye and a couple of others offered soggy bread and hard cheese, pungent with its own sweat; men chewed and grunted and, slowly, began to chaffer and argue, so that I knew they were recovered.
Then Yan Alf called out that there was a boat snagged in the barrier.
This time, I went with Finn and Onund and others, stepping cautiously out onto the slick, wet tree, treacherous with stubs and broken ends, draped with crushed willow. The boat was half-swamped, cracked like an egg and ragged with splintered wood, but clearly a strug, the solid riverboats Slavs made. It would not have been important at all — there were lots of them and it was hardly a surprise to find one as part of the wreck of this swollen river — save for the crew it still held.
He was snagged by his own belt, hair drifting like weed, pale face fat with water and curdled as old cheese. For all that, it was a face I knew and I remembered him, stumbling back from where he had dug up my silver, showing handfuls of it to the rest of his oarmates, that bloated face bright with the wonder of it. Hallgeir, I remembered suddenly. His name was Hallgeir.
Finn nodded and growled when I told him this, peering up the river; he pinched one side of his nose and blew snot down into the wreck.
‘So, Randr Sterki has met with some trouble,’ he growled. ‘Which can only be a good weaving for us, thank the Norns.’
I did not answer; I was too busy searching the water for signs of a small corpse, my belly sick with the thought of Koll, turning in a slow, stately dance like the sheep dead in the mucky water.
The oak finally behind us, days melted, one into the other and went unnoticed. No-one saw much else other than the red-brown water and the sucking mud as they stumbled, heads down and rope over one shoulder, through the shallowest parts they could find. The boat, that great shackle they were fastened to, fretted this way and that, the prow beast snarling and jerking.