His senses were sharp, his eyesight, his hearing more acute than that of any man among the crews of Thorgrim’s ships. Starri was a berserker, one of those men gifted or cursed by the gods with a madness in battle beyond that of normal men. “Well spotted.” There was a flurry of motion below and Starri Deathless scrambled up the ladder and stood at Thorgrim’s side. They were just coming through the mile-wide gap between the headland to the north and the sand bar to the south that made up the entrance to the vast harbor, three miles wide east to west and six north to south. Then finally they came into view, four small dots near the edge of the visible world, four ships’ sails seen from several miles away. He squinted and turned his head and stared in the direction that Gudrid pointed, but he still could not see them, not at first. All hundred or so men and one woman at Waesfiord had heard Gudrid’s cry, and now all work ceased, all eyes turned seaward. He turned and jogged over to the wall and up the crude ladder leaning there. ![]() The thick blanket of clouds limited how far he could see, as did eyes that were growing old, and he could make out nothing out of the ordinary. Thorgrim squinted and looked out over the water, running his eyes from the headland to the north across the wide sweep of horizon. ![]() Ships meant Northmen, Norwegians or Danes, but there was no reason to think they were any friendlier than the Irish. There was no such barrier to stop anyone coming from the sea. He dropped the hammer and the iron and rolled out from under Sea Hammer and up onto his feet.Īnyone approaching the longphort was a potential threat, but if they were coming from the land, they were undoubtedly Irish, and there was the wall to stop them. There was not much Gudrid might have said that would get Thorgrim’s attention quicker than that. “Thorgrim!” He heard Gudrid’s voice clearly over the ring of hammers, the chopping sound of axes and adzes shaping wood. But with the great abuse that the ship had suffered in the months since it had first been rolled into the sea, there were places where she was not as tight as Thorgrim would have wished. When Sea Hammer had been built, a length of rope was sandwiched between the planks to keep the water out, and it still did its job, mostly. With a hammer in one hand and a caulking iron, like a dull chisel, in the other, Thorgrim was gently tapping a bit of tarred twine between two of the planks where water insisted on seeping through. He was on his back, the shingle of the beach starting to dig through his tunic, and halfway under the larboard side of the ship, which was pulled up on the beach and resting on its starboard side. He could see nothing but the dark planks of his ship Sea Hammer, a foot away from his face. Thorgrim Night Wolf was not looking out to sea. ![]() That was how far away the ships were when Gudrid spotted them. But that morning, despite the hovering threat of rotten weather, a man could see two or three miles in any direction. That was high enough for a watchman standing there to see trouble coming from a good distance, at least when the land was not under a blanket of gray fog and rain, which was about half the time. The wall had been built up to a height of fifteen feet. Gudrid was standing on the top of the earthen wall that surrounded the makeshift longphort at a place that the Irish called Loch Garman, though Thorgrim Night Wolf called it Waesfiord, which meant inlet of the mudflats. Gudrid saw them because he was the one charged with looking out, a dull task that was shared by all, save for those with eyesight so poor that it was pointless to put them to that job. For that reason, the ships were already through the harbor entrance and making for the longphort when he spotted them. The morning was well on, a gray and uninviting morning, and the view to the horizon was limited, with the far end of the wide harbor just on the edge of visible.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |