A Burning Sea by Theodore Brun (snow like ashes series TXT) 📗

a thousand leagues away, to the west or the north or. . . anywhere. After all, they only had the word of a ten-year-old to go on. . . Perhaps he was dead.

Besides these gloomy doubts, the more immediate problem was how to shift a fifty-foot longship dozens of leagues overland to the Dnipar.

‘I don’t see how it can be done,’ she told Valrik when the ship was finally empty.

‘There ain’t much in this world can’t be done if you’ve a mind to do it,’ was his reply.

He was as good as his word, and was soon stripped to the waist in the water, heaving away and bellowing orders in all directions until his men had dragged the ship onto the floodplain. This done, he ordered half his men to fell the straightest trunks they could find in a nearby pine wood and fashion them into rollers and levers.

Meanwhile, he and another man named Bayan – who apparently knew something of the native tongue spoken in those forests – together with three others, packed knapsacks, slung axes and shields, and went looking for help. The rest stayed behind to guard the ship and their gear. And wait.

‘He likes to give an order, that one,’ said Einar, flopping down on a bale of pelts as they watched Valrik’s little party hiking up the hill.

‘He knows what he’s doing,’ Lilla replied.

‘Maybe. But do you trust him?’

‘It’s a bit late if she don’t,’ said Gerutha.

Lilla sighed, wiping away the sweat on her brow. ‘He has stakes in this game. He wants to find his sons. So yes. I do.’

It was three days before the shout went up. Lilla recognized Valrik’s white crop of hair at once, bowling down the slope towards the encampment at the head of his band of scouts, and with them there were a dozen more. A few had the look of warriors; the rest looked like bondsmen or thralls. They were leading four pairs of oxen, each pair drawing a cart.

‘Did you miss me, girl?’ he grinned rakishly, as the other crew members greeted each other.

‘I was worried you were dead, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Not yet,’ he chuckled.

‘You’ve made some new friends, I see.’

‘Maybe.’ A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. ‘We made a deal anyhow.’

‘They’re a funny-looking bunch, aren’t they?’ hissed Gerutha in a low voice. Certainly they looked nothing like the people of the north. Their faces were dished and clean-shaven, with sharp, high cheekbones. Their hair was dark and long and woven into a single braid at the back. The thralls among them stood in a huddle to one side, muttering to each other, while the warriors strutted like stags in rut, perhaps for her benefit, perhaps for the other Northmen.

‘So. . . do you know where we are?’ she asked.

‘Aye. In the right place,’ he grunted, tossing his knapsack to one of his men who had already started loading up the carts with their cargo. ‘More or less.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We’re a day and half’s march from the Dnipar valley. This lot live in a village on its northern bank.’

‘You’ve seen the river?’ exclaimed Lilla, suddenly excited.

‘Aye,’ he replied. ‘I’ve seen it.’

‘And?’

‘And she’s as beautiful as ever she was.’

Lilla felt her heart lift with hope. ‘A day and a half’s march. Why, that’s not far at all!’

‘Huh! You can walk it in a day and a half. It’ll take us closer to five hauling that big beast.’ He shot her his rakish smile. ‘Well, Lady. I hope you’re ready for a nightmare.’

A nightmare was what they got. Four days of physical toil and exhaustion as they hacked a swathe through the land. All the while, the scent of pine sap mingled with the stink of sweat and animal grease, and the woods echoed with the whine and gnaw of straining ropes as Fasolt bucked and yawed like a monster of the deep over its wooden rollers. Axes thumped, timber fell, whips snapped, oxen bellowed.

Meanwhile their warrior escort – from a tribe calling themselves the Varkonni, according to Bayan – rode along, sullen and suspicious, observing the Northmen’s struggles with disdain. As if such work was far beneath them. Lilla didn’t much care for their sidelong glances at her or Gerutha either.

At last the land descended out of the hills into what Lilla hoped was the Dnipar valley. And around noon on the fifth day, with the sun ablaze in a cloudless sky, they crested the final ridge line and there below them was the sweep of a broad, green river. The mighty Dnipar. The crew let out an exultant cheer.

‘How’s that for a sight?’ said Valrik, coming up beside her.

Lilla smiled. ‘It’ll do. But I’ll be happier when we see the halls of Miklagard.’

Valrik laughed. ‘Gods, didn’t I always say a woman is never satisfied?’

‘I wouldn’t admit to that if I were you,’ she murmured, already shielding her eyes and looking east.

‘Hah! And there was me thinking a lady like you was too lofty to be interested in such things.’

‘I’m a woman, aren’t I? Like any other,’ replied Lilla, still gazing out over the landscape. Below them, she could see smoke rising from a settlement nestled beside the river.

‘Not like any woman I’ve known,’ Valrik said, his voice growing even deeper. But when she gave no answer, he cleared his throat. ‘Anyhow, that’s their village.’

She turned and grinned up at him. ‘So what now, skipper?’

Valrik glanced back at Fasolt’s prow, its fierce figurehead glaring over the horizon like a silent watchman. ‘We put this grumpy bitch back in the water. And then. . .’ He shrugged. ‘With a bit of luck, we feast.’

There was no mead-hall, no barns, no temple. The village was nothing but a perimeter of felled tree trunks piled to the height of a man’s chest, enclosing a jumbled collection of wattle-anddaub roundhouses and sheep pens.

The headman turned out with all his clan for their arrival. Dogs barked, children raced about shrieking, the menfolk – in sheepskin jerkins and deer-hide trews