And then they slid down it. Faster the ship went, and faster still, tobogganing insanely-to the next wet mountain that bulked up even as a grey colossus. Should the steersman fail to keep her head aright, Raven would wallow and do her best to gulp in half the Bay called Treachery-and go swiftly to the bottom.
Ordlaf held her. He plied the weighty steering-oar with neither panic nor hesitancy. Even so, Raven took water. Men were kept bailing all the while, and all the while more water sluiced over the deck and into the bailing well. No; was hardly the best of jobs. But then neither was Ordlaf’s: Nor was Wulfhere’s, for he was master of Raven and thus responsible.
All this, while the weather stayed fair.
The girl from Nantes attached herself to the end of one oar-bench, as a limpet to its rock. She quickly became abominably seasick. Her lovely complexion went all greenish and she suffered the humiliation of retching and chucking until there was naught left in her stomach. After she loosed the first spasm inboard, someone seized her by the neck and flung her to the wale like a puppy not yet trained.
“The fish want it,” she heard the Danish pirate say. “We do not.” And the callous dog had himself a feel of her while he was at it.
Much later, she crawled back to her old position. She was still miserable, and now there was no relief. Her stomach was empty, and sureness wasn’t on her that she had not vomited up her guts as well.
Then the weather worsened.
The men from the fjord-sliced north had it that Thor created thunder by hurling his hammer “Miller,” which struck with a shower of sparks that was lightning; indeed his keep was called Bilskirnir, Lightning; and that sleepy Aegir was lord of the sea below. But Aegir mostly slumbered. Not so his wife Ran, who had the temperament of a she-cat in heat and no toms about. The Tyrannis of Cormac’s people was probably the same as the nordic Thor. Not so Lir, who was the sea, and his son Manannan. And was Manannan MacLir ruled the waters of salt. It mattered not who was right; the Saints or “Christians” said the father of their Dead God ruled land and sea on all the ridge of the world, the pompous jackals, and the Romans of the old way had it that Neptune did.
Perhaps they were all right, aye and the Greeks too with their Poseidonis. Whatever the case and Whoever ruled: He or She was restless.
Now restlessness became anger.
The wind that gave Treachery Bay its name began it, in roaring gusts. It blew at random from eight several directions and all at once. Forty feet tall, the mast creaked and its foot-thickness began to seem frail. The sail cracked and boomed with the winds’ unpredictable shifts. At first, Wulfhere tried trimming it accordingly, but his orders were useless ere they could be carried out; a new wind pre-empted. Judging from the darkening sky, worse was accusing.
Wulfhere dolorously bade his men lower sail.
Wind-roughened water seethed about, complicating the ocean-swell. The longship bucked and slammed. Raven was become the sea’s prisoner. Clodia lost her grip, lurched three paces and fell, banging her hip that was wide and wide for childbearing. She whimpered, knowing she’d bear a colourful bruise. The girl who’d never afore been asea sought some new haven, any place to anchor herself, and again she missed hold. Clodia tumbled across the foredeck with a noise that sounded more like exasperated protest than aught else-though it broke on a note of despair. As if to add insult to injury, the wind screamed angrily at her and hurled a great splash of cold water over the merchant’s daughter.
Impatient hands, big hands and leathery-rough of palm and calloused fingers, seized on her and Clodia first squeaked, then made a grateful noise.
It was Cormac mac Art who tucked her under a battle-hardened arm, and paused to seek and be sure of his balance. Clodia hung there, a dazed, dead weight. In a plosion of long swift strides, Cormac gained the mast. He hugged its solid thickness with his one free arm, again pausing.
Wind blew so hard as to bang him with his own sword-scabbard. Setting his feet on the X of crossed beams that were braced within Raven’s sides to support the mast, he lashed Clodia thereto. This task he performed impersonally as he might have seen to a loose bit of cargo.
She’d be safe now from plunging overboard or disrupting working men, and no nuisance in her landhugger’s clumsiness.
Cormac remembered something.
Without ceremony, he plunged a hand between Clodia’s excellently blooming breasts. Astonished, the young woman knew the fleeting thought that this was scarcely the time, but she made no objection. She instead smiled, and lifted her wet face.
Cormac’s groping hand found the Egyptian sigil, all that was left of his hard-won loot. He plucked it forth.
“Doubtless it’s keeping it warm for me ye were, just,” he said with flat-voiced cynicism. “Thanks. If drown I must, it’s as a man of property I’ll be going down to visit the son of Lir.”
“You great swaggering boar!” she screamed out, eagerly hitting upon an object for her misery and wrath. “You-you fathom of scars and ill manners! You with your mailshirt cleaving to ye like a second skin with the crusted sweat and blood and stink of the five years you haven’t had it off! I know now why your enemies run away in droves! The sole reason your friends do not the same-”
She railed on. It was not true, but he said nothing. She added several imaginative hypotheses about his friends. Cormac had ship’s matters to attend to, wherefore he paused but long enow to drop the winged serpent about his own neck, beneath the battle-gear and cloth. Then he turned away, and Clodia knew with rage that she was already forgot. Hardly comforting; she knew well that she was a savoury, ripe morsel for male lust. And this one couldn’t even be bothered bidding her hush, or denying her allegations, or so much as slapping her.
Little cause had she to feel hurt. He’d made her safe, assuming Raven survived.
The weather remained foul and the wind continued to veer wildly and shriek like the Ban-Sidhe or Banshee of Cormac’s own homeland. Men broke their backs rowing and bailing, and snatched what rest they might between turns. Ordlaf Skel’s son manned the steering-oar until he was nigh dropping, and Wulfhere relieved him then, to stand braced like the Colossus of that southern isle called Rhodes.
Again and again the wind shifted direction and tried to creep up behind them like a hungering hyena, or blow Raven onto her side.
A howling squawl hit them like a hammer of Thor. It tossed the ship about as if she’d been a chip in rapids, and none slept while that lasted. Had Raven turned broadside-on to those maniacal seas, she must have capsized in a moment-as she almost did in any case.
Minutes of high excitement became hours of anguish.
After midnight, they enjoyed a spell of clear weather. Men sagged and breathed through open mouths while with dull eyes they stared at wet boards.
Cormac, passing the mast on his way to rest, was put in mind of Clodia. Hours had passed. He paused to free the sodden bundle with stringing hair gone dark with wet and frost-flecked with brine. The knots binding her to the mast were soaked stiff and salty, hard as lumpy iron nodules out of a cold forge. Annoyance that had driven another man to shrug and forget it made the Gael persist, while a sailor’s respect for good cord kept him from simply cutting it. His tough fingers opened the knots at last.
Clodia virtually fell away from her support.
“Thank you, Cormac,” she gasped, and she meant it. Conviction had come on her that, left there longer, her limbs had begun to rot off. A like thought had occurred to Cormac. Yet necessity was on them to raise sail, and Clodia had been in the way.