She had found it among Thorn’s gear, as a matter of fact.
‘You could take the dog – for fifteen silver crowns.’
Hal went to protest, but Thorn held up his hand.
Jerard looked at Kloof, who thumped her tail enthusiastically on the deck as she ripped the upper part of the boot away from the sole. ‘I told you. I don’t have any money left to pay you,’ Jerard said doubtfully.
‘I’m not saying you should pay us. I’ll pay you to take her off our hands,’ Thorn told him.
Jerard looked at him uncertainly, then looked at the dog and made a rough estimate of how much she would cost to feed.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
Thorn shrugged. ‘It was worth a try.’
Once they had recovered the canvas tent that had been wrapped around the trader’s hull, the Herons wasted little time lingering in Gretagne. The breeze was onshore, coming from the north, so Hal took the ship out of the harbour under oars. When they were half a kilometre from the harbour mouth, he ordered the oars to be stowed and the sail raised. Within minutes, the Heron was skimming the waves like her namesake, carving a pure white wake in the grey sea.
‘That’s better!’ he said to no one in particular, exulting in the light, easy movement of the ship after the wallowing, jerking passage with Hirondelle under tow.
Gradually, the stench of the tanneries lessened as they moved down the coast. The fresh salt air was a welcome change to all of them.
‘Phew!’ said Jesper, drawing his first deep lungful of air for some time. ‘How do they live with that vile stink?’
‘I suppose they get used to it,’ Lydia said, but Jesper shook his head doubtfully.
‘How could you get used to anything as awful as that?’ he asked.
‘Oh, it’s possible to get used to anything, no matter how annoying it might be. Or anyone,’ Stig said, looking meaningfully at the ex-thief. Several of the others grinned. Jesper could be an irritating person at times. He was invariably the one who queried any course of action, always the first to complain about discomfort or difficulty. He noticed the reaction from his shipmates and turned a hurt look on Stig.
‘Are you saying I stink?’ he asked resentfully.
Stig shook his head. ‘No. Just that you’re irritating. If you stank as well, that’d be too much.’
Jesper drew breath to reply but Hal was tired of the senseless argument that was developing.
‘Let it go,’ he said crisply and Jesper subsided, muttering, onto his rowing bench.
Watching and listening, Thorn smiled quietly. He remembered the early days of the brotherband, when Hal had been reluctant to assert his authority. Now it came naturally to him. He was secure in his position as skirl and, as a good captain should be, he was always ready to nip trouble in the bud before it got out of control. Thorn’s smile faded as he glanced down into the rowing well. Kloof had another boot in her mouth, and was proceeding to chew it, holding it steady between her forepaws.
His temper flared when he saw that it was the companion of the boot she had destroyed some time earlier.
‘Give me that, you numbskull!’ he roared, and grabbed at the boot.
As far as Kloof was concerned, this was an excellent game. As Thorn tugged one way, she set her forepaws, raised her backside in the air and tugged in the opposite direction, shaking the boot as she did so in an attempt to break Thorn’s grip.
Unfortunately for Thorn, he was leaning over when he first grabbed the boot and Kloof’s sudden and violent counter-action dragged him off balance, sending him sprawling. The Herons shouted with laughter – laughter that was quickly silenced as Thorn turned a murderous gaze on them.
He picked himself up. Kloof waited eagerly, tail lashing back and forth, the boot dangling from her jaws, ready for another bout of tug-of-war. It was her favourite game – no doubt because, with a body weight of forty-five kilograms, a low centre of gravity, and four massive paws to grip the ground beneath her, she usually won.
Thorn deliberately climbed to his feet and stood in front of Hal, his hands – one real and one wooden – on his hips.
‘If that dog of yours doesn’t stop chewing my things, I’m going to brain her with my club-hand,’ he threatened. Hal had equipped Thorn with several different devices to replace his lost hand. One was a simple smooth wooden hook. Then there was Thorn’s gripping hand, an ingenious split hook that hinged open and closed like a clamp, and allowed Thorn to grip items firmly in place. Finally, there was his club-hand. It was a massive, iron-studded wooden club on the end of an artificial arm. It was a terrifying weapon when wielded by the old warrior and had caused havoc in the streets of Limmat when the Herons had attacked the pirates who had overrun the town.
Hal glared at the dog. He had to admit, Thorn had a point. She seemed to have taken a liking to his belongings. Unfortunately, when she liked something, she showed her affection by chewing it.
‘Drop!’ he roared at the dog. Obediently, she slid her forepaws out in front of her and dropped to her belly on the deck. The boot was still dangling from her mouth.
‘Not you! The boot!’ Hal yelled. ‘Drop the boot!’ Kloof thumped her tail on the deck and he raised his eyes to the heavens in exasperation.
‘That’s great. One word from you and she does exactly what she wants,’ Thorn said sarcastically. ‘That’s the second boot of mine she’s got at! She’s already destroyed the other one.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’ Lydia asked sweetly. She had been the butt of many of Thorn’s jokes and she revelled in the chance to even the score. He glared at her suspiciously, his bushy eyebrows drawing together like storm clouds gathering.
‘The problem is, my lady, that she’s chewing my boots!’ Thorn’s voice and volume rose as he said the last few words, pointing angrily at the boot that still dangled from Kloof’s jaws. Kloof, aware that they were talking about her, dropped the boot and barked cheerfully. She kept the boot close between her forepaws, however, ready to snatch it up again if Thorn tried to grab for it.
‘But you said she’s already destroyed the first one,’ Lydia pointed out.
Thorn nodded sarcastically. ‘Oh, you understood that part, did you. Yes, she has. She’s torn the other one to pieces!’
‘Then what good is this one to you?’ Lydia asked, maintaining her tone of reason, and smiling angelically at the furious warrior.
‘What . . . ?’ Thorn hesitated, frowning even more deeply. He had a sense that he’d been outsmarted, but he was so angry he couldn’t work out how. ‘What good is it? It’s my boot! They are both my boots. I have two boots and they are them!’
‘That’s not grammatically correct,’ Edvin said, very careful to maintain a straight face. ‘You can’t say they are them. You have to say They are they. Are is a reflexive verb.’
‘Is that right?’ Thorn took a step towards Edvin.
The boy stood his ground and nodded seriously. ‘Yes. I’m pretty sure it is.’
Thorn raised his polished wood hook and shook it in front of Edvin’s face.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a reflexive hook. How would you like me to shove it up your reflexive nose?’
Edvin considered the comment for about five seconds, then decided that standing his ground wasn’t such a good idea. ‘I don’t think I’d like that at all,’ he said, and backed away a few paces.
‘Well, that’s a very wise decision,’ Thorn said. He glared around at the rest of the crew, who were all being very careful not to smile. They were so careful, in fact, that it was blatantly obvious that they were not smiling. ‘Anyone else got anything to say?’ he demanded.
Heads shook and blank looks were the order of the day.
But Lydia wasn’t ready to let him off the hook. ‘All I’m saying is,’ she repeated, ‘that you said Kloof destroyed your other boot –’
Kloof! barked the dog, hearing her name.
‘Shut up!’ Thorn snarled at the massive dog. Then he looked back to Lydia
, suspicion writ large on his features. He sensed he was being set up for a killer blow here. ‘That’s right,’ he said.
Lydia shrugged disingenuously. ‘So what good is this boot?’ she asked. He glared at her, then had an inspiration.
‘I was planning to repair the other boot,’ he said triumphantly.
Lydia had to consider that. His recent appearance at the festival notwithstanding, Thorn was not what might be called a snappy dresser. It was true that he was prone to patching and repairing his clothes until they were more patches than garments. In fact, he had been known to repair and wear clothes until they simply disintegrated around him. But she still had one card up her sleeve.
‘So . . . why did you throw it overboard as we left Gretagne?’ she asked.
Thorn’s face began to grow redder and redder. ‘Because that idiot dog destroyed it!’ he yelled in frustration.
Lydia smiled at him, content that she had made her point.
The discussion could have gone on for some time. But Hal had noticed a line of dark clouds on the northern horizon. There was a change in the weather coming and a squall was bearing down on them. He glanced quickly to the west, where a long headland jutted out into the Stormwhite. They were going to need sea room to get round it once that squall hit them, he knew. He cursed under his breath. That meant they would have to swing to the north – heading away from the course they needed to follow if they were to catch Nightwolf. Still, there was nothing for it.
‘Sailing stations!’ he snapped. ‘We’re going to come about!’
They continued beating to the north for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, until Hal judged that they had enough sea room to clear the headland.
Then he brought the little ship round to port again, holding the wind on her beam as they sped across the rolling waves of the Stormwhite. Lydia, who was standing by Hal and Stig at the steering platform, noticed that the young skirl seemed to be preoccupied, sweeping his gaze around the sea to the west of them.
‘Looking for anything in particular?’ she asked.
He shrugged disconsolately. ‘Tursgud and his ship,’ he said. ‘Although I’m afraid they have too much of a lead on us now.’
‘They’ll be long gone,’ Stig agreed.
‘But aren’t we faster than them?’ Lydia asked. In her time as a member of the Herons she had come to assume that their ship could outperform any other ship, in any manoeuvre. She was surprised when Hal shook his head.
‘Not in these conditions. This is one of our best points of sailing – with the wind coming from abeam. But it’s the same for Nightwolf. She’ll be moving pretty much as fast as us, or even faster.’
‘Of course, if we were sailing into the wind, we’d have a big advantage,’ Stig said. He didn’t like hearing that any other ship could outperform, or even equal, Heron. ‘We can point much closer to the wind.’
‘But we’re not,’ Lydia pointed out. ‘We’re sailing across the wind.’
Stig frowned, having to concede that there were some situations where Hal’s ingenious design gave them little or no advantage.
‘Maybe so,’ he said. ‘But we’ll make less leeway.’ He saw she wasn’t totally sure what that meant. ‘We’ll be blown downwind a lot less than he will be. We’ve got that new fin that Hal designed. Nightwolf’s keel is a lot shallower than ours, so she has less grip on the water.’
‘But that won’t be enough to let us catch her?’ Lydia said.
Hal decided he should rescue Stig. He was touched that his friend wanted to show their ship in the best possible light, and didn’t enjoy discussing her shortcomings.
‘No. I doubt it,’ he said. ‘We’ll just have to keep watching and hope we run across him on the way south, once we round Cape Shelter. Of course,’ he added after a pause, ‘that’s assuming that he is heading that way. He may have turned around and gone east across the Stormwhite.’
But in his heart, he doubted it. Tursgud had been travelling west when he encountered the Gallican trader and Jerard had told them that Nightwolf had continued in that direction when Tursgud left the crew of the trader to drown with their ship. It hardly made sense that he would then reverse his course and head back into the Stormwhite.
If they hadn’t been sidetracked by the need to help the Gallican ship, and then further delayed by the deteriorating weather, they might have had a chance to catch him. Now that chance was negligible. Hal doubted they would ever set eyes on Tursgud and his dark blue ship again.
They rounded Cape Shelter three days later, emerging from the Stormwhite into the Narrow Sea, then swinging due south for Araluen.
They had sighted half a dozen other ships during that time, and closed eagerly with all of them. But none of them were the dark blue Nightwolf. Two were fishing trawlers from Teutlandt and three others were trading ships from Sonderland – big, clumsy craft with huge lee-boards in place of keels. It was a design feature that allowed the ships to traverse the shallow sandbanks that fringed the Sonderland coast with the boards raised and the ships’ draught reduced, then lower them in deep water to act as keels.
There was also one Gallican ship, heading up from the western coast of Gallica towards the Stormwhite Sea. It was a small craft, looking too flimsy for the robust conditions in the Stormwhite.
They went south with a steady following breeze, the kilometres slipping under their keel with each passing hour. The crew lapsed into the patient, accepting attitude that became the norm on most long trips. The weather was fair. The wind was favourable. They were making good speed and could do nothing to make the ship go faster.
Admittedly, they were sailing in new waters. None of them had come this far west before. But the waters looked the same. The sea was blue on a sunny day, grey when it was overcast. The fresh air smelt of the same salt. There would be no novelty in their lives until they reached new foreign ports. The sea was, after all, the sea.
As a result, they lapsed into a strange, limbo-like feeling of suspended activity and passive acceptance of the passing hours.
Except for Ulf and Wulf.
As ever, with time on their hands, they devoted themselves to endless, and senseless, argument. Watching them, Hal had the feeling that neither of them actually meant what they were saying. They were so accustomed to disagreeing with each other that it was an automatic reaction to not having much to do.
Mindful of Hal’s standing orders, which had Ingvar ready and willing to throw them overboard if they bickered too much while they were at sea, they kept their voices lowered. And they kept a surreptitious watch on their skirl, to make sure he wasn’t becoming annoyed.
Their current subject of dissent was a boot belonging to one of them – although nobody on board was sure which of them it belonged to. Kloof, barred from touching Thorn’s belongings, which Thorn now kept safe in his kit locker, had taken to prowling the rowing benches, searching for unsecured belongings. She was now happily gnawing on the boot, watched by the twins.
‘It’s your boot,’ said Ulf. Or perhaps it was Wulf – nobody was ever sure.
‘No. It’s definitely yours. She wouldn’t chew my boot. She likes me better than you.’
‘Then that’s why she would chew your boot. And anyway, whoever said she likes you better than me?’
‘Are you saying she prefers you?’
‘Of course. Everyone does. That’s a well-known fact.’
‘It’s not a fact, and it’s certainly not well known. After all, our mam loves me better than you and the dog is simply following her example.’
‘You think our mam likes you better than me?’ challenged whichever one was the other. (Don’t blame me. I’ve lost track too.)
‘Obviously.’
‘What makes you say that?’ The challenge was couched in a pugnacious tone. The two boys were getting louder, without realising it. The rest of the crew, who had been content to let the argument ride as long as it didn’t become too intrusive, were all watching the twins now.
&nb
sp; ‘Ever noticed,’ said Lydia to Hal, ‘how things get loud and aggressive once a mother’s love is invoked?’
‘Every time.’ Hal sighed. He raised his voice. ‘Ingvar?’
The massively built boy was sitting amidships. He looked towards the stern, squinting to see Hal more clearly. He sensed what the skirl had in mind.
‘Ready any time you say, Hal,’ he called.
The twins looked up nervously, first at Hal, then at Ingvar, who was still sitting peaceably on the deck, his feet hanging down into the rowing well. Ingvar was big and it was easy to equate size with clumsiness. But they knew from bitter experience that he could move as quickly as a cat if the need arose. They lowered their voices. Lydia smiled.
‘So . . . what makes you say that Mam loves you more than me?’ one of them – let’s say it was Wulf – muttered.
‘Everyone knows it. Even the dog senses it. She senses it in your reaction.’
‘What reaction?’ Wulf demanded angrily and his brother made a tut-tutting noise.
‘The dog can sense that you’re angry, and she senses it’s because our mam loves me more than she does you.’
‘I’m not angry because of that!’ Wulf shouted. ‘I’m angry because you’re an idiot!’
Ingvar looked questioningly at Hal. Hal held up a hand for him to wait.
‘An idiot?’ Ulf asked.
Wulf glared at him. ‘And a blithering twit. How’s that?’ He beamed triumphantly, then stopped beaming as his brother grabbed him in a headlock. They struggled together for a few seconds, then Hal signed for Ingvar to intervene.
‘All right, Ingvar. Throw one overboard.’
‘Which one, Hal?’ Ingvar asked.
Hal shrugged. ‘Do I look as if I care? Pick one and throw him overboard.’
Ingvar stepped down into the rowing well and grabbed one of the struggling twins by the scruff of his neck. With no apparent effort, he dragged him clear of his brother and hoisted him to his feet. He looked at Hal to make sure. They’d threatened this punishment many times but never actually carried it out at sea.