16
It was three days since they'd cast off from Greenland and they'd not even sniffed a hint of land. Erlandr's doubts were growing. Dvalinn's quiet confidence and the dispassion of the man called Drudge only made them worse. Had he gravely erred in coming with them? He'd made the decision in haste, and hasty decisions were often wrong. Would life with Goll have been so horrible? He would have carried their possessions, made food, hunted, constructed things with his hands. It would have been work, but did not farmers and herders also work? But too embarrassed to ask Dvalinn, who had done so much for him, and not yet desperate enough to talk to Drudge, Erlandr kept his doubts to himself and the sea. The sea, however, was the epitome of indifference. Its depths said nothing and all its surface suggested was that there was never any choice at all: fate was the same in all directions. It was a cold comfort.
It was colder still at night, when the others were resting or asleep and Erlandr couldn't stop his imagination from crafting his doubts into a waking nightmare in which they sailed forever on a forever sea, finding nothing and unable to turn back. When their ale ran out, they drank seawater. When they had no more food, they caught and ate fish. When the fish disappeared, they decided to die but couldn't. They couldn't drown or starve or freeze, and all the salt they'd ingested began corroding them from the inside, leaving them writhing in the boat like fish pulled out of the water and thrown onto an overheated slab of rock...
A sudden movement ended the nightmare.
Erlandr wasn't sure whether the movement was his, a nervous tick, or somebody else's. He remained still. His immediate emotion was fear: of the monsters that Goll had taken such glee in scaring him with on the voyage to Greenland. He shook that fear out of his head and studied first Dvalinn, then Drudge. Neither of them were moving. Drudge was snoring.
The movement repeated.
It was a gentle bulging of the cloth covering their supplies.
Erlandr rose, unslung his axe and covered the short distance between where he'd been sitting and the cargo. His axe raised, ready to swing, he grabbed the cloth with his other hand, yelled, and pulled it free, exposing a tangle of supplies and:
The startled face of Kaspar, moving desperately to cover with his own body the body of another—
"Agata," Dvalinn said.
The axe in Erlandr's hand shook. It took all of his willpower to prevent it coming down and inserting its blade into Kaspar's head, whose face beseeched him even as his fist brandished a knife pointed at Dvalinn. Goll's knife.
"Please," Agata said, "it will do you no good to kill us.” She turned to look at Drudge. “I beg you. I'm not my father. You weren't my slave. I always treated you well and with respect. Repay me my kindness, please."
Erlandr noticed that a third of their supplies were missing, the casualties of two stowaways making space for themselves.
"Let us go when you make landfall in the east," Kaspar said. "That is all we want, all we've ever wanted, to be together in peace. We are—" He wrung as much pathos out of the words as possible. "—in love."
But whereas his words were melodramatic, their body language was painfully sincere. The way she clung to him despite her age and the way he shielded her despite the slenderness of his body, it truly was the two of them against the world, come what may and take no prisoners. That was what made it so heartbreaking to Erlandr when Drudge said, "We are not eastward bound, Agata. We are sailing westward."
"Get up," Dvalinn said.
Kaspar got up first. Agata rose behind him. "Westward?"
Erlandr wondered whether it was vile that it calmed him to no longer be the only distraught passenger on the boat. At least he had agreed to come along, however much he now regretted it. Kaspar and Agata had stolen aboard mistakenly.
"How much of the supplies did you remove?" Dvalinn asked, clear headed as always.
Kaspar stammered out an indistinct answer. "Most of the food," Agata said. "We decided you needed the drink and you might have a use for the other things, but that you didn't need that much food to sail... east. We wanted to be thoughtful."
Dvalinn pulled at one of the ends of his moustache. He directed a question to Drudge. "You know her best. Do you vouch for this woman?"
"I do," Drudge said.
"And I vouch for the boy," Erlandr blurted out a little too quickly, surprising everyone, including himself. "He is good at navigating the forest and accurate with a bow, traits I assume will serve us well in the new land." He felt a kinship with his fellow herder.
Kaspar bowed his head in thank you. "But if there is no new land?"
"There is. I stake my life on it," Drudge said.
"You stake all of ours."
"I did not accept your coming aboard this boat," Dvalinn told Kaspar, before addressing Agata as well. "You are both stowaways. I will not kill you, but we are not heading back to Greenland. This you must understand. You have no say here. When we make landfall you are mine to command. If you disobey or become a burden to this expedition, I will put you to the sword. I have killed men, women and children in my time."
"I'm not a child," Kaspar said, no longer stammering.
"We shall see."
"When do we reach this new land?" Agata asked.
Drudge shrugged his shoulders.
"I do not know," Dvalinn said. After Agata scoffed, he pointed to the moon in the sky. "How far away is that?"
"Too far to go by boat," Kaspar said, probably intending it as a joke—but neither Erlandr nor any of the others reacted, because after having followed Dvalinn's outstretched arm to the sky, the sky is where their attentions had remained. Ahead, Erlandr saw it being ripped alight by flashes of lightning.
The first raindrops splashed against his face.
"Storm,” Dvalinn said.