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He swam clear of the wreckage, and found the meagre current carrying him downstream, toward the Viking ship and the rippling sheets of green canal scum. None of the northmen had noticed him yet, though the citizens on the wall and the bank were absolutely convulsed with merriment.
Still clutching his broken sword, Duffy dived and swam a distance under the surface - he'd discovered his mail-shirt to be a bearable encumbrance - hoping to avoid the worst of the scum and mockery. It's just possible no one recognized me, he thought as he frogkicked his way through the cold water.
Bugge looked up when he heard splashing by the Larboard gunwale, and at first he thought some Viennese had fallen into the canal and was trying to climb aboard. Then, the blood draining from his wide-eyed face, he saw two slimy green arms appear at the rail, followed a moment later by their owner, a tall, grim-looking man covered with canal scum and clutching a broken sword. In a moment this ominous newcomer had clambered aboard and was standing in a puddle of water between the rowers' benches.>There seem to be a few teeth left in the old wizard's head, he reflected. He wasn't mincing any words with Antoku in denying him whatever it was that he was after - filthy opium, it sounded like. I wonder why he's always so apologetic and hinting and equivocal with me. I wish he wouldn't be - knowledge is better than wonder, as my old mother always said.
Shrub leaned in the back door. 'Uh. . .sir?'
'What is it, Shrub?'
'Aren't you going to come fight the Vikings?'
Duffy sighed. 'Don't bother me with these kid games you've somehow failed to outgrow.'
'Kid games? Have you been asleep? A dragon-prowed Viking ship sailed down the Donau Canal early this morning, and stopped under the Taborstrasse bridge.' Shrub's voice rang with conviction.
Duffy stared at him. 'It's some carnival gimmick,' he said finally. 'Or a travelling show. There haven't been real Vikings for four hundred years. What are they selling?'
'They look real to me,' Shrub said, and scampered out into the yard.
The Irishman shook his head. I'm not, he told himself firmly, going to leave this warm room to go see a troupe of puppeteers or pickpockets or whatever they are. I'm at
least old enough not to be tempted by cheap thrills. But good Lord, whispered another part of his mind.. .a Viking ship.
'Oh, very well,' he snarled after a few minutes, eliciting a surprised stare from a passing cook. The Irishman got impatiently to his feet and strode outside.
The first thing that struck the roof-crowding, street-choking spectators - after the wonder of the painted sail and the high, rearing dragon figurehead had worn off -was the age and dispirited look of these Vikings. They were all big men, their chests sheathed most impressively in scale mail; but the hair and beards under the shiny steel caps were shot with gray, and the northmen eyed the thronged canal-banks with a mixture of apathy and disappointment.
Sitting in the ship's stem, by the steering oar, Rikard Bugge pulled his weary gaze from the Vienna crowd when his lieutenant edged his way aft between the rowing benches and knelt in front of him.
'Well,' Bugge said impatiently, 'what?'
'Gunnar says we're caught fast, captain, in the canal-weed. He thinks we'd better wade in with swords and cut our hull free.'
Bugge spat disgustedly over the rail. 'Does he know where we are? This isn't the Danube, I believe.'
'He is of the opinion that this is Vienna, captain. We apparently turned into this canal last night without realizing we were leaving the river.'
'Vienna? We overshot Tulln, then. It's those damned west winds this past month.' He shook his head. 'If only Gunnar could navigate. He's lucky a river is all he's got to contend with - what if we were at sea?'
'Listen,' the lieutenant said, a little reproachfully, Gunnar's got problems.'
'So I should smile when he pilots us into a smelly ditch,
to be laughed at by beggars and children?' He pointed expressively at the crowd. 'Well, go on, then. Get them over the side and chopping the water lilies.'
Bugge slumped back, trying to scratch his stomach under the sun-heated mail. But it's no good, he thought. We may as well go home. We'll never find Sigmund or the barrow now, even if they do, as Gardvord swore, exist.
The grizzled captain cast his mind back, nostalgically. now, to the low-roofed, candle-lit room in which he and thirty other retired soldiers of the Hundested parish had sat at a table and cursed in astonishment and outrage at the tale told to them by old Gardvord, while the bitter wind whooped at them from the darkness outside and fumbled at the shutter-latches.
'I know many of you heard the untraceable voice from the Ise fjord yesterday,' Gardvord had missed in that meeting five and a half weeks ago. 'A voice that called, over and over for a full hour yesterday morning, "The hour is come, but not the man"' The old wizard had spread his wrinkled hands. 'It troubled me. I therefore spent most of last night laboriously questioning the senile and reclusive huldre-folk about that prodigy - and it's grim news I got for my trouble.'
'What was it?' Bugge had asked, impatient with the old hedge-magician's narrative style.
With a have-it-then glare, Gardvord turned to him. 'Surter, the king of Muspelheim in the distant south, is leading an army north to capture and destroy the funeral barrow of the god Balder.'
Several of the assembled men had actually gasped at that, for the old legends agreed that when Surter of Muspelheim marched north, Ragnarok, the end of the world, was not far off; a couple of the men had spasmodically blessed themselves, scared by their old pagan heritage into taking cover under the newer Christianity; and one old fellow, gibbering the beginning of a Pater Noster, had even attempted to crawl under the table.
'Odin look away,' Gardvord had sneered. 'The men of the north aren't all they used to be.'
