Thunder God by Paul Watkins Read Free Book Online Page A

of our hair and accused me of selling my own son,’ he replied. ‘They thought I could not understand their language.’
    Later that day, Halfdan fetched his belongings from Kalf’s ship. Jokes were made about the fact that I had not been sold. Halfdan took to swatting me on the back of the head, as if this was all my fault.
    We walked away through the muddy street. Halfdan had tied a rope around my neck. He kept the other end knotted in his fist.
    ‘Kalf cheated you,’ I said, as he dragged me along.
    Haldan looked back at me and narrowed his eyes. ‘Kalf steals it all twice,’ he replied. ‘First from places we raid and afterwards from us.’ Then he swatted me again.
    That night we jumped aboard a trading ship bound for the eastern Baltic and began the long journey to a city called Miklagard. It lay far to the south, down a river called the Dnieper. Five times we had to come ashore, while the boat was hauled across the ground over logs to avoid the rock-filled rapids, each one of which had a name – Always Fierce, Always Noisy, The Yeller, The Impassable, The Laugher. And worse than these rapids, I learned, were a people called the Petcheneg, who ambushed travellers here. When we passed through theircountry, rumours were still fresh of a prince named Svyatoslav, whose convoy had been attacked. After the Petchenegs had finished with him, Svyatoslav was placed on a raft, limbless, tongueless, blinded but still living, and sent downstream, where he eventually caught up with those of his caravan who had managed to flee the ambush.
    Despite what had happened at Hedeby, I thought constantly about running away. But as the distance grew between myself and home, the prospects of getting back on my own grew smaller and smaller. Each chance of escape only guaranteed a fate even worse than being this man’s slave. Any hope of fulfilling the promise I had made to Tostig now seemed beyond all possibility.
    I learned, from dozens of smacks on the head, not to talk to Halfdan unless he spoke to me first. Even then I was not to answer unless he had actually asked for a reply. This did not mean that we travelled in silence. He often talked about his home in the north country, where he came from a people called the Svear. Upon the death of his father, his older brother had inherited the family land, leaving Halfdan to seek his own fortune. He had been moving from place to place for many years and no longer seemed to know what he was searching for.
    Often Halfdan would take the black hammer from around his neck and examine it carefully. Again and again he asked me where I had found it.
    I said I had been given it, and that was all I would say.
    ‘There was another black hammer,’ he said, ‘sent down by the gods to be the anchor of our faith. But I heard that it was lost long ago.’
    From then on, until the day he died, the hammer never left its resting place, tucked against the hollow of his throat.
    Each day, wherever our boat put in to shore, Halfdan would find a secluded place to pray. The first time I saw him do this,we had come to a clearing in the vast and ghostly white birch forests south of Starya Ladoga. Sunlight filtered through the trees. Leaf shadows dappled the ground and shimmered in the branches above me. The smell of heated sap hung in the air. Halfdan’s voice remained so quiet and steady that it did not stop the birds from singing in the nearby trees.
    There were different prayers for whatever dangers faced him, as well as different gods to whom he prayed.
    I saw an unexpected gracefulness to his gestures, as he drew his sword and carved a ring around himself in the dirt. He would empty from his leather prayer bag a linen bundle containing rock salt, a tiny fat lamp made of soapstone and a shallow grey-white bowl, which was the brain-pan of the first man he had ever killed. He faced north as he prayed, judging direction from the growth of old moss on the old trees. Holding his arm out straight, he would take