Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [103]
His father had made him little wooden weapons first: an axe, a sword, a dagger and shield. For two years it was like a game he would play, teaching Harold to strike, parry, thrust, and dodge. “Move away. Hold your ground. Strike now!” he would call. And, weaving, ducking, or whirling his toy axe, the boy would go through every exercise his father could devise. By the age of twelve, his skill was remarkable and his father would laugh: “I can’t catch him!” At thirteen, Harold was given his first real weapons. They were light, but a year later his father gave him heavier ones. At the age of fifteen, his father confessed he could teach him no more, and sent him to a friend up the coast, whom he knew was highly skilled. It was there that Harold learned not only greater agility but even to make use of his physical peculiarities to strike unconventional blows that would take any opponent by surprise. By the age of sixteen, he was a killing machine.
“Strangely enough,” his well-meaning father once remarked to him, “by threatening your life, that Dane may have done you a favour. Think what you were then, and look at you now.”
And Harold kissed his father affectionately and said nothing, because what he knew was that he had developed extraordinary skills, but that he was still a cripple.
“The lines are fine,” Harold called to Morann, as the craftsman clambered over the ladder. And indeed they were. The long clinker-built lines of the ship swept forward to the huge prow so smoothly and with such power that when you imagined it in the water its swift passage didn’t just seem natural, it seemed inevitable—as inevitable as fate, in the hands of the pagan Nordic gods themselves. “The space for the cargo,” Harold was gesturing towards the empty centre of the huge vessel, “is nearly a third larger than anything else on the water.” He pointed down to the bottom of the ship, where the mighty spine of the keel ran like a blade. “Yet the draught is still shallow enough for all the main rivers on the island.” The Liffey, the massive Shannon waterway in the west, every major river in Ireland had seen the Viking oarsmen come skimming up their shallow waters into the interior. “But do you know the real secret of a ship like this, Morann? The secret of its handling under sail, on the sea?”
They were strong. They never capsized. The craftsman was aware of these. But with a grin, the Norwegian went on: “They bend, Morann.” He made a wiggling motion with his arm. “As you feel the power of the wind on the sail, running down the mast, and you feel the power of the water against the sides, you can feel something else. The keel itself bends, it follows the water’s curve. The whole ship, braced against the wind, becomes at one with the water. It’s not a ship, Morann, it’s a snake.” He laughed with delight. “A great sea snake!”
How handsome he looked, the craftsman thought, with his long red hair, like his father’s, and his bright blue eyes, so happy on his ship.
Once Freya had asked Morann, “Did you never wonder why Harold left the farmstead and came to work in Dyflin?”
“He loves building ships,” he’d answered. “It’s in his blood,” he had added. It was obvious to any man.
And indeed, if there was more to the matter than Morann Mac Goibnenn supposed, he had never heard of it from his young friend
Harold had been almost seventeen the summer when they presented him with the girl. She came from over the sea, from one of the northern islands—a girl of good ancestry, they told him, whose parents had died leaving her in the care of her uncle. “He’s a fine man,” his father told him, “and he has sent her to me. She’ll be our guest for a month and you’re to look after her. Her name is Helga.”
She was a fair, slim girl, blue-eyed, a year older than he was. Her father had been Norwegian; her mother, Swedish. Yellow hair framed her cheeks, pressing them close, like a pair of hands taking her face between them before the