Page 38 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

They come over it.

Men were bailing with leather buckets.

Samira was hauling on a line near the mast when the ship went over hard to the left and her feet went out from under her. She slid across the wet planking with nothing to stop her, and the far side of the ship came up very fast, and then a hand closed round her upper arm and stopped her so hard it hurt.

Torstein set her on her feet.

He did not let go immediately. His grip was too tight and he was saying something and she could not hear a word of it over the wind, but she could see his face, and his face was not angry.

His face was afraid.

He let go and turned back into the storm without another word.

"The steering oar!"

Everyone turned.

The snekkja had no rudder at her back. She was steered by a single great oar mounted on the right-hand side near the stern, held tight against the hull by a thick twisted rope of willow called a withy, which ran through the oar and through the hull and was made fast inside. The oar pivoted on that rope. That pivot was how the ship turned.

The withy had slipped down off its block. The steering oar was swinging loose against the outside of the hull with the whole weight of the sea behind it, slamming into the planking with every roll.

If it tore away, they had no way to steer at all. In this sea that meant the ship would come broadside to the waves and go over.

Torstein was already moving, hand over hand along the side. "Njal, get behind me! Leif, light!"

Samira went after him and got there first.

She looked at the problem for two seconds and saw exactly what it was. The withy had to be lifted back up over the raised wooden block and seated again. To do it, somebody had to get an arm down through the gap between that block and the hull, and work blind, by feel.

The gap was the width of a man's forearm.

"You will not fit," she said.

"Get back!"

"Torstein." She caught his sleeve. "Look at the gap. Look at your arm. You cannot get past the elbow. Neither can Leif and neither can Njal and Mathias is thicker through the shoulder than any of you." The ship rolled and the loose oar hit the hull hard enough to feel through her feet. "I can reach it. I have small hands and I know what a withy is because our ships use them on the cargo booms, and I know what it should feel like when it is seated properly."

"No!"

"Then we lose the steering oar and we all drown, and you will have been very protective of me right up until the moment the sea took the both of us."

Leif had come up behind them.

"She's right about the gap," Leif said.

Torstein turned on him. "Do not argue with me on this."

"I'm not saying I like it." Leif was already pulling a coil off his shoulder. "I'm saying I've had my arm in that space in dry weather at anchor and I could nae reach the block, and neither could you."

Mathias arrived at a run, took in the situation in one look, and said, "Let the mistress do it."

"Mathias—"

"Rope around her, you on her back, Tor, holding her down, me and Leif on the oar." Mathias wiped rain out of his eyes. "It's that or we go over. I'd rather be shouted at than drowned, and so would you."

Torstein stood there for one long second with the storm going around him.

Then he snatched the rope out of Leif's hands.