The Long Ships (15 page)

“Without doubt,” he said, “this Almansur is the best master that a man could wish to serve. All the same, I think it was lucky for you, and for the rest of us, that you did not push him on to his back.”

Next day the army continued its march; and at length they came to the holy city of the Christians, where the apostle James lay buried, with a great church built over his grave. Here there was heavy fighting, for the Christians, believing that the apostle would come to their aid, fought to the limit of their endurance; but in the end Almansur overcame them, and the city was taken and burned. Hither Christians from all parts of their country had brought their most valuable treasures for safe keeping, for the city had never before been threatened by any enemy; consequently an enormous quantity of booty was captured, together with many prisoners. It was Almansur’s especial wish to raze the great church that stood over the apostle’s grave, but this was of stone and would not burn. Instead, therefore, he set his prisoners, aided by men from his own army, to pull it down. Now, in the tower of this church there hung twelve bells, each one bearing the name of an apostle. They had a most melodious note, and were greatly prized by the Christians, in particular the largest of them all, which was called James.

Almansur commanded that these bells should be taken back to Córdoba by the Christian captives, there to be placed in the great mosque with their mouths facing upwards, so that they might be filled with sweet-scented oil and burn perpetually as great lamps to the glory of Allah and the Prophet. They were enormously heavy, and great litters were built to hold them; sixty prisoners were set to carry each bell in one of these litters, working in shifts. But the James bell was so heavy that no litter could be built to take it, and they knew it would not be possible to convey it by ox-cart across the mountain passes. Almansur, however, was very unwilling to leave it behind, for he regarded it as the finest item of spoil that he had ever won.

Accordingly, he had a platform built for the bell to be placed upon, in order that this platform might be dragged on rollers to a nearby river, whence it and the bell could be removed to Córdoba by ship. When the platform was ready and the rollers had been placed beneath it, iron bars were passed through the hasps of the bell, and a number of men tried to lift it on to the platform; but the southerners lacked either the strength or the enthusiasm for the work; and when longer bars were tried, so that more men might help with the lifting, the bars broke and the bell remained on the ground.

Orm and his men, who had come to watch the work, began to laugh; then Toke said: “Six grown men ought to be able to lift that without much trouble,” and Orm said: “Four should be able to manage it.”

Then he and Toke and ögmund and Rapp the One-Eyed walked up to the bell, ran a short bar through the hasps, and lifted the bell up and on to the platform.

Almansur, who had been riding past on his horse, stopped to watch them do this. He called Orm to him, and said: “Allah has blessed you and your men with great strength, praised be His name! It would seem that you are the men to see that this bell is safely conveyed to the ship, and to guard it on its passage to Córdoba; for I know no other men capable of handling it.”

Orm bowed, and replied that this task did not appear to him to be difficult.

Then Almansur had a body of good slaves chosen from among the prisoners, and ordered them to draw the bell down to the river at a point where it began to be navigable, after which they were to serve as oarsmen on a ship awaiting them there, which had been captured from the Asturians. Two officials from Almansur’s staff were sent with them, to be in charge during the voyage.

Ropes were tied to the platform, and Orm and his men set off with the bell and its slaves, some of the prisoners drawing it, and others placing rollers before it. It was a tedious journey, for the path they had to follow led, for the most part, downhill, so that sometimes the bell slid forwards under its own momentum, and in the early stages some of the slaves who were changing the rollers were crushed. Orm, however, made them fasten a drag-rope to the rear of the platform, so that they might be able to control it where the going was steep. Thereafter, they made better progress, and so eventually came down to the river, where the ship lay at anchor.

It was a merchant ship, smallish, but strongly built, with a good deck, ten pairs of oars, a mast, and a sail. Orm and his men lifted the bell aboard and made it fast with ropes and chocks; then they put the slaves in their places at the oars and moved off down the river. This river ran westwards, north of that river up which Krok’s ships had rowed on their way to the margrave’s fortress; and the Northmen were happy to find themselves once again in charge of a ship.

The Vikings took it in turns to keep an eye on the rowers, whom they found mulish and very clumsy at their work. They were disappointed to find that there were no ankle-chains in the ship, for this meant that someone had to keep watch throughout the night; and in spite of this, a couple of the prisoners, who had felt the whip, managed to escape. Orm’s men agreed that they had never seen such miserable rowing before, and that if it went on like this, they would never reach Córdoba.

When they came to the mouth of the river, they found there many of Almansur’s great warships, which had been unable, on account of their size, to sail up the river, though most of the soldiers from them had marched inland to join in the general plundering. Orm’s men were glad to see these ships, and he immediately sent both the officials to borrow as many ankle-chains as possible from the various captains, until he had obtained all that he needed. Then the slaves were fettered to their places. Orm also took this opportunity of laying in stores for the voyage, for it was a long way to Córdoba. Having done this, they lay at anchor by the warships in a sheltered bay, to wait for good sailing weather.

In the evening Orm went ashore, together with Toke and Gunne, leaving the rest of his men to guard the ship. They walked down the shore in the direction of some small warehouses, in which traders had established themselves for the purpose of bargaining for the loot that had been won, and to sell necessaries to the ships. They had all but reached the first warehouse when six men from one of the ships entered it, and Gunne suddenly halted in his tracks.

“We have business to transact with those men,” he said. “Did you notice the first two?”

Neither Orm nor Toke had observed their faces.

Gunne said: “They were the men who killed Krok.”

Orm paled, and a tremor ran through his body.

“If that is so,” he said, “they have lived long enough.”

They drew their swords. Orm and Toke still carried those which the Lady Subaida had given to them, and Toke had not yet succeeded in finding any name for his sword as good as Blue-Tongue.

“Our duty to Krok comes before our duty to Almansur,” said Orm. “All of us have vengeance to reap here. But mine comes first, because I am his successor as chieftain. You two run behind the warehouse, to stop their escaping that way.”

The warehouse had a door in each of its shorter walls. Orm entered through the nearest and found the six men inside, talking to the trader. The latter, when he saw Orm enter with his sword drawn, slunk away behind some sacks, but the six men from the ship drew their weapons and shrieked questions at him. It was dark and confined in the warehouse, but Orm at once picked out one of the men who had killed Krok.

“Have you said your evening prayer?” he cried, and hewed at the man’s neck so that his head flew from his shoulders.

Two of the others immediately attacked Orm, so that he had his work cut out to defend himself. Meanwhile the other three ran to the back door; but Toke and Gunne were there before them. Toke felled one of them on the spot, crying out Krok’s name, and aimed a savage blow at the next man; but there was little room to maneuver, because the warehouse was small and crowded with goods, to say nothing of the men who were fighting in it. One man jumped up on a bench and tried to aim a blow at Orm, but his sword caught in a rafter, and Orm flung his shield into the man’s face. The spike on his shield entered the other’s eye, and he fell on his face and lay still. After that the fight did not last much longer. The second of the two men who had killed Krok was felled by Gunne; of the others, Orm had killed two and Toke three; but the trader, who had burrowed himself almost out of sight in his corner, they allowed to escape unharmed, because he had nothing to do with this affair.

When they came out of the warehouse with their swords all bloody, they saw men approaching to discover what the noise had been about; but on seeing the Vikings' aspect, they turned and ran. Toke held his sword erect before his face; thick blood ran down its blade and fell from the hilt in large drops.

“Now I name thee, O sister of Blue-Tongue!” he said. “Here-after shalt thou be known as Red-Jowl.”

Orm stared after the men from the ships as they ran away into the distance.

“We, too, must make haste,” he said, “for now we are outlaws in this land. But it is a small price to pay for vengeance.”

They hastened to the ship and told the others what had happened. Then, at once, though it had by now grown dark, they weighed anchor and put out to sea. They rejoiced in the knowledge that Krok had been avenged, though at the same time they realized that they had no time to lose in getting clear of this country and its waters. They did their best to whip up a good pace from the slaves, and Orm himself took over the steering-oar, while Almansur’s two secretaries, who were unaware of what had happened, hurled questions at him but received scant reply. At last the ship came safely out of the bay into the open sea; and a wind sprang up from the south, so that they were able to raise a sail. They steered northwards and away from the land, until the day broke; and there was no sign of any ship pursuing them.

They saw a group of islands off their larboard bow, and Orm put in to one of them. Here he sent both the secretaries ashore, bidding them convey his greetings to Almansur.

“It would be churlish of us to quit the service of such a master,” he said, “without wishing him farewell. Tell him, therefore, on behalf of us all, that it has been our fate to have killed six of his men in revenge for Krok, who was our chieftain; though six men’s lives are a small return for his death. We are taking this ship with us, and the slaves that man it, for we think that he will scarcely notice its loss. Also, we are taking the bell, because it makes the ship ride stable, and we have dangerous seas ahead of us. We all think that he has been a good master to us, and if we had not had to kill these men, we should gladly have remained longer in his service; but as things have turned out, this is the only course left open to us if we are to escape with our lives.”

The secretaries undertook to deliver this message, word for word as Orm had spoken it. Then he added: “It would be well, too, if, when you return to Córdoba, you could bear our greetings to a wealthy Jew called Solomon, who is a poet and a silversmith. And thank him from us for having befriended us so generously; for we shall never see him again.”

“And tell the Lady Subaida,” said Toke, “that two men from the north, whom she knows, send her their thanks and greetings. Tell her, too, that the swords she gave us have served us well, and that their edges are yet undented, despite all the work that they have done. But, for your own sakes, do not deliver this message when Almansur is within hearing.”

The secretaries had their writing-materials with them and noted all this down; then they were left on the island with enough food to sustain them until such time as some ship should find them or they should manage to make their way to the mainland.

When the slaves working the oars saw that the ship was putting out toward the open sea, they made a noisy clamor and complaint, and it was evident that they wished to be left on the island with the secretaries. Orm’s men had to go round with switches and rope-ends to silence them and make them row; for the wind had dropped, and they were anxious to lose no time in getting clear of these dangerous waters.

“It is lucky we have them fast in foot-irons,” said Gunne, “or we should have had the lot of them overboard by now, for all our swords. It is a pity we did not borrow a proper scourge when we took the fetters. The teeth of these switches and rope-ends are too blunt for mules like these.”

“You are right,” said Toke, “strangely enough; for we little thought, in the days when we sat on the galley benches, that we should ever come to mourn the absence of an overseer’s whip.”

“Well, they say that no back is so tender as one’s own,” replied Gunne. “But I fear these backs will have to itch somewhat more sharply if we are ever to escape from here.”

Toke agreed, and they went round the benches again, flogging the slaves smartly to make the ship move faster. But they still made labored progress, for the slaves could not keep the stroke. Orm noticed this and said: “Rope-ends alone will never teach men to row if they are not used to oars. Let us see if we cannot persuade the bell to lend us her aid.”

As he spoke, he took an ax and struck the bell with its blunt edge as the slaves dipped their oars. The bell gave out a great peal, and the slaves pulled in response. In this way they soon began to keep better time. Orm made his men take turns in sounding the stroke. They found that if they struck with a wooden club padded with leather, the bell pealed more melodiously; and this discovery pleased them mightily.

After a while, however, a wind sprang up and they had no further need to row. The wind gradually increased, blowing more and more gustily, until it approached gale strength; and things now began to look dangerous. Grinulf remarked that this was only what was to be expected if men put out to sea without first propitiating the people of the water. But others spoke against him, recalling the sacrifice they had offered on a previous occasion and how shortly afterwards they had encountered the ships of Almansur. Gunne ventured the opinion that they might perhaps sacrifice to Allah, for safety’s sake, and a few of the men supported this suggestion; but Toke said that, in his view, Allah had little pull in what went on at sea.