‘I have.’
‘Then Christ help the three hundred,’ he said, ‘because they’re doomed.’
It was madness.
And, as Finan had said, sometimes madness works.
She was called Middelniht, a strange name for a war boat, but Kenric, the man selling her, said she had been built from trees cut down at midnight. ‘It gives a boat good luck,’ he explained.
Middelniht had benches for forty-four oarsmen, an unstepped mast made of spruce, a mud-coloured sail reinforced by hemp ropes, and a high prow with a dragon’s head. A previous owner had painted the head red and black, but the paint had faded and peeled so the dragon looked as if it suffered from scurvy.
‘She’s a lucky boat,’ Kenric told me. He was a short wide man, bearded and bald, who built ships in a yard just to the east of the Roman city’s walls. He had forty or fifty workers, some of them slaves, who used adzes and saws to make merchant ships that were fat, heavy and slow, but Middelniht was of a different breed. She was long, and her midships were wide, flat and lay low in the water. She was a sleek beast.
‘You built her?’ I asked.
‘She was wrecked,’ Kenric said.
‘When?’
‘A year ago on Saint Marcon’s day. Wind blew up from the north, drove her onto Sceapig Sands.’
I walked along the wharf, looking down into Middelniht. Her timbers had darkened, but that was likely to have been the recent rain. ‘She doesn’t look damaged,’ I said.
‘Couple of bow strakes were stove in,’ Kenric said. ‘Nothing that a man couldn’t make good in a day or two.’
‘Danish?’
‘Frisian built,’ Kenric said. ‘Good tight oak, better than the Danish crap.’
‘So why didn’t the crew salvage her?’
‘Silly bastards went ashore, made a camp and got caught by Centish men.’
‘Then why didn’t the Centish men keep her?’
‘Because the silly bastards fought each other to a standstill. I went down and found six Frisians still alive, but two of them died, poor bastards.’ He made the sign of the cross.
‘And the other four?’
He jerked a thumb towards his slaves working on a new boat. ‘They told me her name. If you don’t like it you can always change it.’
‘It’s bad luck to change a boat’s name,’ I said.
‘Not if you get a virgin to piss in the bilge,’ Kenric said, then paused. ‘Well, that might be difficult.’
‘I’ll keep her name,’ I said, ‘if I buy her.’
‘She’s well made,’ Kenric said grudgingly, as if he doubted that any Frisian could build ships as well as he did.
But the Frisians were renowned shipbuilders. Saxon boats tended to be heavy, almost as if we were frightened of the sea, but the Frisians and the Northmen built lighter ships that did not plough through the waves, but seemed to skim across them. That was a nonsense, of course; even a sleek ship like Middelniht was laden with stone ballast and could no more skim than I could fly, but there was some magic in her construction that made her appear light. ‘I planned to sell her to King Edward,’ Kenric said.
‘He didn’t want her?’
‘Not big enough.’ Kenric spat in disgust. ‘West Saxons have always been the same. They want big boats, then they wonder why they can’t catch the Danes. So where are you going?’
‘Frisia,’ I said, ‘maybe. Or south.’
‘Go north,’ Kenric said.
‘Why?’
‘Not so many Christians up north, lord,’ he said slyly.
So he knew. He might call me ‘lord’ and be respectful, but he knew my fortunes were at a low ebb. That would affect the price. ‘I’m getting too old for sleet, snow and ice,’ I said, then jumped down onto Middelniht’s foredeck. She shivered beneath my feet. She was a war boat, a predator, built of fine-grained Frisian oak. ‘When was she last caulked?’ I asked Kenric.
‘When I repaired her strakes.’
I pulled out two of the deck boards and peered down at the ballast stones. There was water there, but that was hardly surprising in a boat that had been left unused. What mattered was whether it was rainwater or the saltwater brought upriver on the tide. The water lay too low to be reached and so I spat and watched as the blob of spittle floated on the dark water, suggesting it was fresh. Spittle spreads and vanishes in saltwater. So she was a tight boat. If the water in her bilge was fresh then it had come from the clouds above, not from the sea below.
‘She’s staunch,’ Kenric said.
‘Her hull needs cleaning.’
He shrugged. ‘I can do it, but the yard’s busy. I’ll charge.’
I could find a beach and do the job myself between the tides. I looked across Kenric’s slipways to where a small, dark merchant ship was moored. She was half the size of Middelniht, but every bit as wide. She was a tub, made for carrying heavy cargo up and down the coast. ‘You want that instead?’ Kenric asked, amused.
‘One of yours?’
‘I don’t build shit like that. No, she belonged to an East Saxon. Bastard owed me money. I’ll break it up and use the timber.’
‘So how much for Middelniht?’
We haggled, but Kenric knew he had the whip and I paid too much. I needed oars and lines too, but we agreed a price and Kenric spat on his hand and held it out to me. I hesitated, then took his hand. ‘She’s yours,’ he said, ‘and may she bring you fortune, lord.’
I owned Middelniht, a ship built from timbers cut in darkness.
I was a shipmaster again. And I was going north.
I love the whale’s path, the long waves, the wind flecking the world with blown spray, the dip of a ship’s prow into a
