Solveig lay very still. She took slow, deep breaths and tried to drift herself to sleep. But she was too aware of her companions, some sniffing, some snorting, some tossing and turning after the troubled day that had begun with the lighting of the pyre and ended with the search for Brita in the darkness.
Despite walking right around the little island and going back to the pyre where the embers were still glowing, Odindisa and Slothi couldn’t find their daughter. Torsten and Bruni and Edwin all called for her, but their voices fell into night’s dark pit.
I know sky’s made of air, thought Solveig, but sometimes when it breathes it’s so thick and heavy and smooth. It’s like that roll of material I saw in the market in Kiev. Velvet!
Skin can be like velvet, too. Brita’s cheeks, they are.
Where is she?
Flying late, a curlew cried out its loneliness and longing. Then a warm night wind got up and the giant fig tree growing beside their mooring flapped its leathery hands.
Then Solveig heard Brita’s voice, mellow as the low notes of Slothi’s pipes, saying: “I want to go with Solveig.”
Solveig sat up in the dark.
“I want to go with Solveig.”
She knew then where Brita was. Where she must be hiding and waiting.
Why didn’t I think of it before? she asked herself. And why didn’t I just stop thinking and let my heart tell me?
In the moonlight, Solveig stood up. She slipped on her shoes, padded down the gangplank, and picked her way to the huddle of little boats at the far end of the quay.
“Tucked in . . . next to the bigger one at the end.” Isn’t that what Mihran said?
The little boat was covered with some kind of skin—sealskin, maybe—glistening silvery in the moonlight.
Solveig listened. Nothing. Nothing but the sips and kisses of the great river against the sides of the boats lying side by side in the darkness.
“Brita!” said Solveig, under her breath almost.
Nothing.
A little more loudly: “Brita!”
Nothing.
Then Solveig got on her knees and reached down and grasped the skin. She lifted it and peeled it away from the stern.
And there, with Solveig peering down at her, the moon gazing down at her, lay little Brita—eyes shining, white-faced, and shivering.
Solveig reached down to her, and Brita reached up to Solveig.
Then, with her strong arms, Solveig lifted Brita into the air, up and out onto the quay. Without a word, the two of them embraced: Brita with her arms around Solveig’s waist, Solveig with her arms around Brita’s neck.
“I want . . .” whispered Brita, and she swallowed loudly.
“I know,” Solveig replied. “I do know.”
For a while, Solveig went on holding Brita, and Brita went on shivering.
What were you going to do? wondered Solveig. Cram yourself into the bows? You didn’t really think . . .
“Can I?” whispered Brita.
“Sometimes,” said Solveig in a low voice, “we have to do things we wish we didn’t have to.” She paused, trying to find the right words. “I mean, I wish I didn’t have to take you back. Brita, I wish you didn’t have to accept this. I wish I didn’t have to go to Miklagard without you.”
Brita buried her face in Solveig’s arm.
“Come on, now.”
“Third wishes,” sobbed Brita, “come true sometimes.”
Back aboard, Solveig let Brita find her own way back to her mother, and as she listened to their murmuring and sniffing and cooing, she felt so lonely. She thought of her mother’s grave by the stony, yapping shore. She thought of Edith’s children in far England. She thought of all the children on this middle-earth divided from their mothers by distance or death.
I know how much I want to see my father, she thought. He’s been father and mother to me. I’m traveling halfway across the world to be at his side, and there’s not been one day when I haven’t thought about him. With love, and with such longing, with everything I want to tell and ask him.
But then Solveig began to wonder what Halfdan would think when he saw her.
That dream I had when I saw my grandmother, and she was warning my father: “You should have left her out on the ice . . . You mark my words, the day will come when Solveig’s weakness will harm others—maybe her own father.”
He will be glad to see me, won’t he? What will he say? What if he’s living with Harald Sigurdsson and all the other men . . . or with another woman? With her own children, like Kalf and Blubba? What if . . . ?
As Solveig left the sad island of Saint Gregorios, she almost took wing. Sitting alongside Edith and across the boat from Edwin and Mihran, she waved. She waved and waved until all she could see of her companions were pink hands, waving.
“Poor Brita!” she said. “I wish I’d given her a bone pin or something. I hope she’ll get back to Kiev safely.”
“So do I,” said Edith anxiously.
Solveig turned to Mihran. “But now!” she said, her voice lifting. “Now! Three days?”
“Three four,” said Mihran.
“Is the water black?” Solveig asked him. “In the Black Sea.”
“Darker than the Baltic,” Mihran told her. “Darker than Marmara and the Great Sea.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s so deep. So deep there are mountains under the sea.”
“How do you know?”
Mihran shrugged. “Everyone knows.”
“Have you heard of the White Sea?” Solveig asked him.
“I have,” said Edwin. “It’s north of Norway, north of north. A traveler came to the court of King Alfred and told him about it.”
“Sometimes it’s covered in ice and snow,” Solveig explained. “That’s why it’s white.”
“And the Red Sea,” Mihran told them, “is next to Egypt. The shores are red, and the people there have red skins.”
“Is there a Yellow Sea?” asked Solveig.
Mihran screwed up his face. “I hope not,” he said. “A whole sea of scummy piss!”
The boat was much as the river pilot had told them: just the hollowed-out trunk of an oak tree, shaped to have a shallow keel, fitted with a small mast, a single sail, and oarlocks and oars and a steering paddle in the stern. And if he and Solveig and Edwin and Edith had lain head to toe, head to toe, they would have been longer than their boat.
“Long and narrow,” said Mihran, “Easy to capsize. Bend your knees when you’re moving around, keep as low as you can.”
“And turn your backs,” said Edwin, “when one of us has got to turn the Black Sea yellow.”
When he smiles like that, thought Solveig, his buckteeth stick right out. He looks as much like a rabbit as a human being.
“I’ve never seen a boat like this before,” she said. “It’s not a smack and not a skiff, not a scull and not a shell and not a canoe, not a coble and not a coracle.”
“You could call it a dugout,” Edwin suggested.
Mihran nodded. “That’s what it is.”
The farther the little boat skipped and slid, skated almost, the wider the Dnieper became.
Solveig could see people on the banks, but she couldn’t really see what they were doing. And the light was so bright that for much of the time she had to screw up her eyes.
“Hot and damp,” said Edith, pink-faced and squirming. “It makes me sweat.”
“All the same,” said Edwin, “better than a black wind. Better than a skriver or scouring of hail.”
“Today’s like a sponge,” Mihran said.
“What’s a sponge?” asked Solveig.
Mihran smiled. “Sponge!” He opened his hands, slowly squeezed his fists, opened them again. “Grows in water.”
Solveig shook her head.
“We use for cleaning us. Washing us. Blue sponge.”
So the hours passed, not so much with thinking about everyone they’d left behind and everything that had happened as with responding to the smells and sights and sounds around them. And when Solveig trailed her fingers in the water, her whole body felt how quickly the boat was skimming downstream.
In the evening, Mihran and Solveig rowed the dugout to one bank or the other and bought food from the villagers. They scooped out a fire pit and grilled river fish on it. They ate grainy bread and summer fruit—plums and cherries. They drank ale. They slept unafraid.
“I told yous,” Mihran said. “Downhill. Tomorrow, the Black Sea. And the last danger.”
“What danger?” asked Solveig.
But Mihran didn’t reply.
So the river opened her arms to the sea. Beneath the boat the water began gently to rock, and Solveig could feel it was at one moment holding them back, the next drawing them forward.
Some days pass so slowly, thought Solveig, some so fast. It’s only four days since we left Saint Gregorios, but I’ve seen so much that it seems a long time since I found Brita nestling here.
“Black Sea,” announced Mihran very proudly, almost as if he owned it. “No more reeds rushes.”
Edith gently shook her head. “No more water lilies,” she said, remembering something.
“But fields,” said Edwin. “Crops. What’s that over there?”
“Flax,” said Mihran. “Blue purple flowers. And there—how do you say?—tea.”
Solveig frowned. She’d never heard of it.
“Drink,” Mihran told her. “Hot. Very good.”
Solveig smiled. “I want to try it,” she said eagerly.
“Now,” Mihran told them, “we sail west. We stay close to shore. All the way to the river.”
“Another river?” complained Edwin.
“Danube,” said Mihran. “Long as Dnieper.” He pulled a long face.
“No!” said Edwin, looking concerned.
Mihran grinned. “We go past her,” he told them.
It’s true, thought Solveig. The Black Sea is much darker than any water I’ve seen before—the mountain streams dashing and clattering down to the fjord, and the many-fingered fjord itself, and the Baltic Sea between Sigtuna and Ladoga, and the rivers of Garthar, and Lake Ilmen.
“Many moods,” Mihran told her. “Sudden wind. Sudden rain.”
“Squalls,” said Solveig.
“But now . . .” the river pilot went on with the most expansive gesture.
“Sunlight,” said Solveig. “Calm seas.”
“Jason sailed from here,” Mihran said.
“Who?”
“Jason!” repeated Mihran, as if everyone in the world had heard of him. “He could only win his kingdom if he found the Golden Fleece.”
“Fleece?”
“Golden,” said Mihran.
“It sounds like sheep grazing up in Asgard,” Solveig said. “The realm of the gods. Did he find it, then?”
“He did,” said Mihran, “and he sowed the dragon’s teeth, and he came into his kingdom.”
Will I? wondered Solveig. Will I come into my kingdom?
To starboard lay fields and more fields, fields of flax and maize, apple orchards, pear orchards and, on the slopes above them, woods of beech and alder. To port lay the subtle black and silver sea. Above and around stretched the crown and girdle of the sky, crisscrossed by black cormorants and red-breasted geese.
“I saw a wonder!” announced Edwin. “That’s how one English poem begins. Here, there are wonders everywhere! Red-breasted geese, water mint, bald ibis, tamarisks.”
“It’s how you see,” Edith said. “If you’re sharp-eyed, anything and everything becomes a wonder.”
Before long, Solveig rummaged in her bag, pulled out a little slat of bone, and began to carve. And as she did so, she talked to Edith.
“Do you keep thinking about Red Ottar?” she asked her.
Edith’s brow tightened, and she sighed. “Yes . . . well, no. More about his baby.”
“Oh, Edie! If it’s a girl, will you keep it?”
Edith gave Solveig a startled look. “Of course! Of course I will. I’m not a Viking.”
“Where will you go?”
“When?”
“After Miklagard?”
At once Edwin replied, “Back to Kiev.”
“Kiev!” exclaimed Solveig.
“Until I can ship you back to York,” Edwin told Edith. “Back home, back to your children.”
“Emma and Wulf,” said Solveig. “I remember.”
Then Solveig told Edith she kept thinking about her father, wondering what he’d say when he saw her and whether he’d be glad. “And then I start to worry,” she said. “I mean, what if he’s not there? Harald Sigurdsson’s followers are fighting men. They may have gone away. To fight.”
Edith placed a warm hand over Solveig’s carving hand and her metal pin.
“Or to die,” said Solveig in a dark voice.
“What did you suppose before you left home?” Edith asked her.
“Not those things. I was so miserable and so lonely. That’s why I decided to come. But I was still afraid. Afraid and yet hopeful.”
“That’s how you have to be now.”
“I know, but what if he wishes I hadn’t come? What if . . . ?” Solveig’s bright blue eyes were full of doubt. “I keep telling myself I’ll be all right, and I’ve come here on my own from Trondheim, so I must be strong enough to look after myself. I keep saying I can ask Edwin and Edith to help me.” Solveig could hear her voice rising. “But you’re going back to Kiev.”
“What about Mihran?” asked Edith.
“He’ll go away too. He’s a river pilot.”
“If you were back at home now,” Edith asked, “would you still choose to make this journey?”
“Oh, yes!” cried Solveig.
“Everyone would say you’re brave,” Edwin chipped in, “but some would say you’re foolhardy.”
“What’s that?” asked Solveig.
“Almost unwise. I don’t think that, though. You knew this journey would be long and difficult.”
“And dangerous,” said Edith.
“But unless we take risks . . .” said Edwin. “I mean, you can sit at home by the fire and stir the stew pot and nothing much will change, or you can say your prayers and step out and face what’s unknown.”
The nearer they came to their journey’s end, the more precious to Solveig her companions became. You’re my lifeblood, she thought. I can’t wait to reach Miklagard, but I can’t bear to think of being without you.
How strange I am, all made up of opposites: brave and afraid, and laughing and crying, and friendly and lonesome, turn by turn, or even at the same time.
Solveig went on shaping the bone slat, and as she did so she gave a secret smile. Yes, she thought. That’s what I’ll carve. I won’t tell Edith, though.
But she did ask Edith two questions. The first was: “What was your mother’s name?”
“The same as mine,” said Edith. “Why?”
“So if your baby’s a girl, will you call her Edith too?”
“How should I know?” said Edith. “I won’t decide until I’ve seen it.”
On the fourth evening after they had reached the Black Sea, Solveig was fishing with some of the hooks Vigot had given to her when she noticed that although the east wind was still shouldering them toward the shore, the water beneath the boat was pushing them away from it.
“Danube,” said the river pilot, waving at the shore. “Huge river. The river water pushes us.”
“I can feel it,” said Solveig.
“Now last danger,” Mihran said. “We must cross open sea.”
“Not in this . . . tree trunk!” exclaimed Solveig.
“We sail overnight,” Mihran told them. “We sail across open sea, very far from land.”
“Do we have to?” Edith asked, alarmed.
“No choice,” said Mihran, shrugging his shoulders. “The Danube is our strong mistress.” He reached forward and patted her lap. “We do it.”
“We can!” insisted Solveig. “We’ve come through the cataracts.” But then she wished she hadn’t said that and avoided Edith’s eye.
“The danger,” said Mihran, “is black wind, sudden storm. The danger is . . . we roll over. If the wind gets up and snatches us, I take our sail down.”
“What if we do?” asked Edwin.
“Do?”
“Roll over.”
The river pilot pursed his lips. “Very far from land,” he said in a flat voice. “No other boats . . .” Mihran didn’t complete the sentence.
“Couldn’t we right her?” asked Solveig. “I think we could.”
“Next morning,” said Mihran. “Maybe. Sleep now. Try to sleep. I am your guide.”
But Solveig couldn’t sleep. She stared into the dark until her eyes ached. She sniffed the thick scents of a summer night in the south. She listened to the whirr and slap of the water passing under the boat, and the boat itself groaning, the mast cracking, the sail straining and easing . . .
In the middle of the night, Solveig and her companions were sprinkled by a shower; the raindrops were warm.
Then Solveig remembered Asta telling her that each day, childbearing women must drink a little of the dew that falls from Yggdrasill, the ash tree with arms spread out over the whole world.
I think Edith should drink some of this sweet rain, she thought. It will keep her baby safe.
Before long, there was a second shower, sharper than the first, and as it died away Solveig could see lightning on the eastern horizon. Not forked sticks or sharp spears but whole sheets, momentarily lighting up the whole sky, the sea, their little boat.
Mihran cleared his throat. “You, Solveig,” he said quietly. “You boat woman. What you think?”
“You’re asking me?” Solveig replied, not taking her eyes off the eastern horizon, not for one moment. “The lightning and thunder aren’t going away, but they’re not coming closer. Don’t take down the sail yet. Otherwise we won’t be making any headway.”
“Boat woman,” Mihran said again, and Solveig could hear the approval in his voice.
“I’ll keep watch with you,” said Solveig. “One is one. Two is better.”
In the darkness, Mihran smiled. “Two is better,” he repeated. “For them, too, I think. Edith and Edwin.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yous see,” said Mihran.
When the danger came, it wasn’t in the shape that Solveig or Mihran had imagined. It wasn’t a lightning strike, it wasn’t a sudden squall or a half-submerged tree trunk, it wasn’t a leak or a ravening sea monster or the rocky shore of a floating island.
As day began to dawn in the murky eastern sky, while Edith and her baby and Edwin still slept the sleep of the English, Solveig spotted a boat coming up astern.
Mihran gazed at it intently.
“Who?” asked Solveig. “Who are they?”
The river pilot shrugged.
The boat was a good deal larger than their dugout, in fact not much smaller than Red Ottar’s boat. It had two sails as grubby as the dawning day, and after a while Solveig and Mihran were able to count at least thirteen people.
“There may be more,” said Solveig. “In the hold. Why do I feel afraid?”
“Wake Edith and Edwin,” Mihran told her. “Tell them I change course.”
Without letting go of the sail, Mihran grabbed hold of the steering paddle. He dragged it to one side so that the dugout lurched and swung right around from the south to the west.
At once the boat behind them changed course too and quickly closed in.
The men aboard the boat began to yell, and as soon as she’d woken Edith and Edwin, Solveig scrambled down to the stern.
“No weapons,” she told Mihran. “Not as far as I can see.”
Then Solveig and Mihran heard wailing.
“Women!” exclaimed Solveig. “Women as well!”
Solveig saw two of the men were holding long grappling hooks. They waved them at the wicked sky, they reached toward the dugout . . . And only then did Solveig see the rotting faces and club hands of the passengers.
“Lepers!” growled Mihran, and he covered his eyes in terror.
The witch fingers of the two hooks grabbed the inside of the dugout and hoicked it sideways. Still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, Edith and Edwin were thrown back into the bottom of the boat.
“Away!” cried Mihran. “Away!” And he warned his companions. “Don’t touch their hooks! Don’t look at them! Don’t breathe the air they breathe!”
The passengers moaned. Some of them grunted.
Solveig did look up at them. One man was reaching down toward her, and Solveig could see he had only two fingers on one hand, three on the other, and they were more green than white. She looked up and saw one woman with bluish-red nodules all over her face, each as big as her own glass bead, and another whose face was twitching on one side but stiff as ice on the other, and a man without a nose and no eye in the left socket.
“Don’t look at them!” Mihran begged her. “You become one of them.”
“No,” said Solveig. “That can’t be true.”
One of the lepers called out in Solveig’s language. “In the name of the gods,” he bawled, “in the name of whichever god you believe in, Mokosh or Odin, Christ, Allah . . .”
Around him, all the passengers cried and wailed and tore at their own bodies.
“In the name of all the gods,” begged the man, “give us alms. Give whatever you can.”
Edwin stood up and pulled off his little wooden cross inlaid with silver from around his neck. Then he murmured something to Edith and tore a narrow strip from the bottom of her tattered shift. Edwin wrapped the cross in the material and threw it up to the leper boat.
Seeing this, Mihran dug into a pocket and pulled out a bronze coin and tossed that up too without looking exactly where he was throwing it.
“You,” he told Solveig.
“What?”
“You throw.”
“What?”
Edwin reached up toward them. “May Christ sail with you in your terrible plight,” he called out. “May Christ save your souls.”
“Food?” asked Solveig nervously. “Our wheaten loaf?”
“No!” snapped Mihran.
“No!”
While Solveig was still hesitating, the two lepers loosened their hold on the dugout with an experience born of practice. They set the dugout adrift, and it bobbed on the water like a cork.
Then the leper boat swung away from them.
“It’s looking east,” said Edwin with a deep sigh. “As we Christians must.”
“And Muslims,” said Mihran.
“Where are they going?” asked Solveig.
Mihran shrugged. “Around and around. They only come to land to buy food.”
For a while the four companions sat silent, still troubled, still sorrowful.
Edith gave Solveig an anxious look. “I wish you’d given them something,” she said.
Blood rushed to Solveig’s cheeks. “I wanted to. I did! I even thought I’d give them my glass bead, but that would have betrayed Oleg.” Solveig shook her head fiercely. “But I’d rather be dead than alive like that.”
“Lepers aren’t animals,” Edith protested. “They’re human beings. Humans in need.”
“You Vikings!” said Edwin scornfully. “God will call each of us when He chooses.”
My father, thought Solveig. What would he have done? Did he see those lepers? Did he look into their faces?
What if I get there and no one has seen him? Would Harald Sigurdsson help me? It’s true, I’ve got the gold brooch. My father told me it’s worth more than our farm and all our animals. If he’s not there and Harald’s not there . . . My father’s gift, that could save me.
“I remember,” said Edith in a dreamy voice, as if she were thinking of something that had happened in a far-off land long ago. “Red Ottar told me that one of the Åland Islands—where we sailed to, me and Solveig, after we left Sweden—yes, one of the Åland Islands was a leper island.”
“In that case,” ventured Solveig, “maybe that ship sweeping past us in the middle of the night . . .”
“You’re right,” agreed Edith. “When Torsten saved us. Maybe the crew weren’t ghosts but lepers.”
The bleary-eyed sun rose in the east.
Mihran puffed out his cheeks and dragged his fingers through his oily dark hair. “Today,” he informed them, “and one more night.”
“At sea?” exclaimed Solveig.
Mihran thrust up his chin and raised his eyes.
“You didn’t tell us,” said Edwin, frowning.
“Say one day at a time,” Mihran replied.
That night, the sea breeze was light and the sea swell gentle, and the four companions gossiped and ate and drank and dozed, but then Solveig had a terrible dream. The leper boat had grappled their dugout for a second time, and because Solveig hadn’t given them a gift, the lepers lifted her, dangling, with their grappling hooks. They lowered her into their own boat and began to take away the parts of her body they were missing themselves. One gouged out her left eye, and one twisted off her nose, and one snapped off most of her fingers, and one tore at her growing right breast.
Solveig was too terrified to go back to sleep again, and she jammed herself against Mihran in the stern.
But day did dawn. It dawned at last, and Solveig could see land, a blue rib to the south, steep slopes to the west.
Mihran opened his arms as wide as the world. “This!” he said rather proudly. “All this. The Empire of Byzantium.”