The Hunters

  Hal smiled. ‘It might be more tactful to say he’s an unrealised potential asset,’ he said. ‘But yes, that’s a good idea. Plus he’s smart and he listens. He’ll get the hang of it quickly enough. Let’s go talk to him.’ He nodded to Stig, who took over the helm. Then he and Thorn made their way forward, to where Edvin was sitting beside the supine form of Ingvar, who had been wounded in the attack on the watch towers at Limmat.

  Edvin was concentrating on something, his head bent over as he worked two long thin sticks back and forth, setting up a rapid click-clicking sound. A ball of thick yarn lay on the deck between his feet.

  ‘Edvin?’ Hal said. ‘What are you doing?’

  Edvin looked up at them and smiled. ‘I’m knitting,’ he said. ‘I’m knitting myself a warm, woolly watch cap.’

  Hal and Thorn exchanged a glance.

  ‘I wonder if we might have made a mistake?’ Thorn said.

  ‘Knitting, you say?’ Jesper frowned at the thought of it, but Stefan nodded in confirmation.

  ‘Knitting. He had a big ball of yarn and two needles and he was . . . knitting.’

  They looked aft to where Hal was introducing Edvin to the finer points of steering the ship. Stig and Thorn stood to one side, watching. While Edvin had begun his instruction, Lydia had taken his place tending Ingvar. The Heron was on a long reach, with the wind from the starboard side, and there was little for the sail crew to do. Jesper and Stefan, whose task was to raise and lower the yardarms, had moved aft to sit and talk with the twins, Ulf and Wulf, at the sail trimming sheets.

  ‘I’m not sure that I want someone steering the ship if he spends his spare time knitting,’ Stefan said. It was a ridiculous non sequitur but the others seemed to agree with the sentiment. They all looked at Edvin once more.

  ‘How do you knit, anyway?’ Jesper wondered.

  Ulf shrugged dismissively. ‘It’s quite easy, actually.’

  They all looked at him. Predictably, it was Wulf who responded.

  ‘Is that so? Perhaps you’d tell us how it’s done then.’

  Ulf hesitated. He’d seen his mother, aunt and grandmother doing it and it seemed easy enough. They could knit without looking at what they were doing – and they could carry on a conversation about the weather or the price of salt cod while they did it. So it stood to reason that it was easy. Particularly if his aunt could do it.

  He realised that the other three were all looking at him, waiting for him to answer. He waved a vague hand in the air.

  ‘Well . . . you get some needles . . .’

  ‘Knitting needles?’ Stefan asked and Ulf frowned at him, not appreciating the interruption.

  ‘Of course knitting needles!’ he said with some heat. ‘Did you think you’d use darning needles for knitting?’

  ‘Why do they call it darning?’ Jesper put in.

  Ulf gave him an annoyed look. It seemed that everyone was bent on interrupting him this morning.

  ‘’Cause that’s what you say when you stick the needle in your finger,’ Wulf suggested and the three of them laughed. Ulf maintained his dignity, and directed a pained look at his brother.

  ‘That’s quite good, Ulf,’ Jesper said to Wulf. Ulf rolled his eyes to heaven. This was getting to be too much, he thought.

  ‘I’m Ulf,’ he said shortly. ‘He’s Wulf.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Stefan asked, a ghost of a smile hovering at the corner of his mouth. ‘He looks like Ulf to me.’

  ‘You know,’ said Wulf thoughtfully, seeing a way to annoy his brother, ‘I could be Ulf. When I woke up this morning, I wasn’t completely sure who I was. I thought, maybe they’ve woken the wrong person.’

  ‘That’s what our mother said the day you were born,’ Ulf countered. ‘She looked at you and said, Oh no! That’s the wrong one. That ugly baby couldn’t be mine!’

  Wulf drew himself up a little straighter and faced his brother, his body language confronting. ‘And you’d know that, would you?’

  ‘Yes. I would. Because I was born before you. I remember waiting around for ages for you to arrive. And what a big disappointment that was for everyone,’ he added triumphantly. He was on a roll. The fact that he was the firstborn gave him a certain moral ascendancy over his brother in these arguments.

  Wulf’s face was beginning to redden. ‘Do you seriously expect us to believe that . . .?’ he began, but Lydia, a few metres away, interrupted in a low, warning tone.

  ‘Let it drop, boys. We are at sea, after all.’

  They looked at her and she jerked her head towards the stern of the boat, and the small group clustered round the tiller. Wulf’s mouth twisted into an uncertain line. Hal had banned any bickering between the twins while the ship was at sea. Up until now they had managed to control their natural inclination, but the previous four days had been uneventful and they were becoming bored.

  ‘I don’t think he heard us,’ he said quietly, and was disconcerted when Thorn answered, without looking at them:

  ‘Oh, yes he did.’

  Ulf and Wulf exchanged a startled look. In actual fact, Hal had been too busy instructing Edvin to pay any attention to them. But they weren’t to know that.

  ‘In any event, tell us all about knitting,’ Wulf said.

  His brother glared at him. He’d assumed that they’d moved on from the discussion about knitting. But Wulf wasn’t letting him off the hook as easily as that. Ulf took a deep breath.

  ‘Well . . . you need needles – knitting needles,’ he added quickly. ‘And you need a ball of yar–’

  ‘How many?’ Jesper interrupted.

  Ulf frowned. ‘Just one. One ball of yarn.’

  But Jesper was shaking his head. ‘No. How many knitting needles?’

  ‘Two,’ Ulf said, a warning tone in his voice. ‘Two knitting needles, one ball of yarn.’

  ‘If you used four needles, couldn’t you knit twice as fast?’ Stefan asked, with an air of innocence that was all too obviously faked. Ulf turned a withering look on him, then resumed his discourse.

  ‘Then you wrap the yarn around the needles and sort of push them in and out and you . . . well, you knit.’ He made an expansive gesture in the air as if that explained it completely. The others eyed him sceptically.

  A few metres away, Ingvar’s eyes flicked open as Lydia placed a damp cloth on his forehead.

  ‘What are they blathering on about?’ he said. His voice was weak, which worried her. He should have been recovering a lot more quickly. She smiled at him now. It wouldn’t do to show him that she was concerned.

  ‘They’re talking about knitting,’ she said. ‘They’re idiots.’

  He tried to nod but it was a feeble movement. He muttered something she didn’t catch and she bent closer.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Knitwits,’ he said, more clearly. ‘They’re knitwits.’ He laughed at his own joke, but the movement seemed to cause him pain and he stopped. She took his hand and squeezed it gently, wishing there was more she could do for him.

  Jesper was unsatisfied with Ulf’s explanation. Now that the subject of knitting had come up, his curiosity was piqued and he wanted to know more about it. Truth be told, he was bored, and any subject could have claimed his interest at the moment. He turned to Lydia, who had begun sponging Ingvar’s neck and face with a wet cloth once more.

  ‘Lydia, how difficult is knitting?’ he asked. She paused in what she was doing, then looked up at him.

  ‘How would I know?’ she said in a level tone.

  He shrugged. ‘Well, you’re a girl, and it’s kind of a girly thing, so I thought . . .’

  His voice trailed off as he realised that Lydia was holding his gaze very steadily. She let the silence between them drag on for some time, watching him grow more and more uncomfortable. Finally, she answered him.

  ‘I don’t know, Jesper. I don’t knit.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, relieved that the awkward moment seemed to have passed. You never knew with Lydia, he thought. She wasn??
?t like most girls and that long dirk she wore was very sharp.

  ‘But I can sew,’ she said and he looked at her quickly. Something in her tone told him she had more to say on the matter. He swallowed nervously as her eyes bored into his, daring him to look away. Some response seemed to be indicated.

  ‘You can?’ he asked.

  ‘I can. And if you ever ask me a stupid male question like that again, I’ll sew your bottom lip to your ear.’

  He nodded several times. ‘Right. Right. Lip to ear. Point taken. Understood. Let’s talk about something else, shall we?’ he suggested to the group in general.

  ‘What else do you want to talk about?’ Wulf asked. Jesper darted a nervous glance at Lydia, who seemed to have lost interest in him and had gone back to tending Ingvar.

  ‘Anything. Anything but knitting.’

  On the steering platform, Edvin was beginning to get the hang of things. He glanced quickly astern at the ship’s wake. It was a respectable straight line – not arrow straight the way Hal could keep it, but not too bad at all.

  ‘We’ll make a helmsman of you yet, young Edvin,’ said Thorn and the boy’s face flushed with pleasure. He took the ship off course by a few degrees, then practised bringing her back on course, easing the tiller just before she got there.

  ‘That’s good,’ Hal told him. ‘Did you want me, Lydia?’

  The slim girl had come aft to the steering platform and seemed to be waiting to catch his attention. She nodded at Edvin.

  ‘Edvin, actually, if you can spare him. Edvin, can you come and look at Ingvar? I don’t think he’s doing so well.’

  ‘I thought he was getting better,’ Hal said as he followed Edvin and Lydia to where Ingvar was lying on his improvised bed in the waist of the ship. The huge boy had been wounded by an arrow during the attack on Limmat.

  Edvin pursed his lips. He looked worried. ‘I thought so too. But he took a turn for the worse yesterday and he seemed to deteriorate during the night. I was hoping it was only temporary. But now . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Ingvar was asleep – if you could call it sleep. It was more accurate to say that he was unconscious. His eyes were screwed tight shut and his head tossed back and forth on the pillow. His cheeks were sunken and his skin looked waxy and pale. There were dark circles under his eyes. Edvin knelt beside the huge form and gently placed his hand on Ingvar’s forehead. His worried expression deepened and he gestured for Hal to feel Ingvar’s forehead.

  Hal did so. He turned an alarmed look to Edvin.

  ‘He’s burning!’ he said. Ingvar’s skin was fiercely hot and dry to the touch.

  Edvin nodded unhappily. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I actually thought he’d be better off to be at sea. That infirmary in Limmat was a dark, stuffy place, full of fevers and sickness. Orlog knows what you could catch in an unhealthy atmosphere like that. I thought the fresh sea air would be better for him, and the surgeon agreed. As I say, he seemed to be recovering.’

  ‘What’s caused it?’ Hal asked.

  ‘He’s very weak and he hasn’t slept well. That means he can’t build up strength to fight the sickness. I think there’s an infection started up in the wound again. That’s what’s making him so feverish.’

  ‘What can you do?’ Hal asked Edvin. The quietly spoken boy had been trained during the brotherband period as the Heron’s medical orderly, but it had been a perfunctory training only.

  He shrugged. ‘I honestly don’t know, Hal. All I can suggest is that I clean the wound again, then do what I can to keep him cool and hope the fever breaks. If we can get him through the fever, and let him rest properly, he should begin to recover again. At least, I think so.’

  Hal considered Edvin’s words. He looked up to the nearby coastline.

  ‘Can you do all that while we’re at sea?’ he asked.

  Edvin hesitated, then shook his head. ‘Not really. We’re pitching and rolling too much.’

  Hal nodded. It was a reasonable assessment. He had a brief, horrified vision of what could happen if the ship lurched suddenly while Edvin was probing the wound.

  ‘But once you’ve done that, we can put to sea again?’ he asked. Edvin’s unhappy expression told him the answer before he spoke.

  ‘He can’t rest properly with the deck pitching and heaving like this. You know how it is, Hal. Your body tenses and prepares for the movement. You brace yourself against the roll when you sense it’s coming. Ingvar needs solid sleep. That’s the best healer for him. And he can’t get it while we’re at sea. In fact, that constant tensing and bracing might well have aggravated the wound in the first place.’

  ‘How long then?’ Hal asked.

  Edvin shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe one night. Maybe two. If he can rest properly and I can keep him cooled down, he should improve. We’ll need to keep bathing him with damp cloths to bring his temperature down.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’ Hal asked.

  ‘If the fever doesn’t break, he could die,’ Edvin said. Lydia looked at him in alarm.

  ‘It’s that bad?’ she said and he nodded.

  Hal looked away, cursing silently. Each time he got close to Zavac, something intervened. Outside Limmat, he had had to choose between going after the pirates and leaving Svengal and the crew of Wolfwind to drown. Now he was faced with another choice, with Ingvar’s life in the balance.

  And there was another, practical consideration, in addition to his concern for his friend. Lydia voiced it.

  ‘You need Ingvar if you’re going to use the Mangler,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I know that.’

  The huge crossbow would be their main weapon in the event of a fight with the Raven. Only Ingvar had the strength necessary to cock and load it. Ulf and Wulf could do it together, of course. But in a sea fight, they would be kept busy adjusting the trim of the sails as the ship manoeuvred. That was the problem. Everyone on the ship had an assigned role and everyone was needed in that role. Particularly Ingvar.

  Once Hal had that thought, it was easier to come to a decision. He rose, and looked at the coastline running past them, shading his eyes with his hand.

  ‘We’d better find a place to go ashore,’ he said.

  They ran on for several kilometres before he found a suitable landing place. The coastline was, for the most part, open beach. And it was swept by the north-east wind that was blowing. If the wind got up any further, they could find themselves in trouble in such an exposed position.

  Eventually, he spotted what he was looking for. The land rose and the long, unbroken beach gave way to rocky, low cliffs. There was a narrow opening that led to a cove. He lowered the sail and proceeded further inshore under oars to inspect it. It turned out to be exactly what they needed. There was a sandy beach on the eastern side of the cove, and the headland would provide shelter from the wind.

  The crew lay resting on the oars for several minutes while he inspected it, looking for broken, swirling water that might indicate rocks hidden just below the surface, studying the action of the waves to make sure there was no concealed reef across the mouth of the cove. Finally, he nodded to himself.

  ‘Stig,’ he called, and his first mate gave the order for the rowers to begin pulling once more.

  Hal steered the little ship into the cove. Stefan had resumed his position by the bowpost, searching the water’s surface for any signs of danger. But there were none and the Heron cruised smoothly to a small strip of sand Hal had marked out.

  ‘In oars,’ he called, when they were less than twenty metres from the sand. The oars clattered in the rowlocks as the crew brought them inboard, then clattered once more as they were stowed along the line of the ship.

  ‘Bring the fin up, Thorn,’ Hal ordered, and Thorn heaved the heavy fin up from its lowered position in the keel box. As he did so, Hal felt the now-familiar drift as the ship lost the steadying lateral force of the keel. Then there was a gentle grating sound as the bow ran up onto the coarse sand, finally canting over sligh
tly to one side. Without needing to be told, Stefan dropped over the bow onto dry land, carrying the beach anchor inland and driving it deep into the sand.

  As ever, Hal felt the strange silence that came with the lack of movement from the ship. The constant background chorus of small noises – the slap of ripples along the hull, the muted groaning of the rigging and masts – had ceased and his voice seemed unnaturally loud as he spoke.

  ‘Let’s get a camp set up.’

  The Herons moved to the task quickly. They were well practised now in making camp. They used a large tarpaulin draped over a central ridgepole to create a long A-shaped tent. Edvin and Stefan busied themselves building a smaller shelter for Ingvar.

  When the camp was ready, Stig approached Hal and jerked a thumb towards Rikard.

  ‘Will we leave him on board?’

  Hal considered the question, then shook his head. Rikard was securely chained to the mast and there was little chance he could escape. But Hal was reluctant to leave him unattended on board the ship. He knew Rikard was bitter at not being released and he feared he might damage the Heron in some way.

  ‘Bring him ashore. Chain him to a tree and throw a blanket over him,’ he said. He glanced up. There were a few clouds sliding gently across the blue sky, but no dark masses that might indicate rain. A blanket should be sufficient cover.

  Ulf and Wulf unchained Rikard and led him to a stout pine tree at the edge of the beach, some twenty metres from the main tent. They fastened the chain round the bole of the tree, tested that it was still firmly attached to the hard leather cuffs padlocked around Rikard’s wrists, then handed him a blanket.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Ulf said. Rikard grunted at them and scowled as they smiled back. Then they turned and headed back to the camp site.

  ‘Let’s get something to eat. I’m starved,’ Ulf said.

  ‘You’re always starved,’ Wulf replied.

  ‘That’s because I’m older than you. I’ve been waiting longer for my dinner.’

  Rikard waited as their voices faded away, then looked down to study his bonds. The leather cuffs were stiff and inflexible. They were padlocked in place and would be impossible to loosen with his bare hands.