Growing into the Job, Post 622: Bloodline: Viking (Patreon)

The Stýrimaðr had insisted they meet after dark, in his cabin, after the men were in their bunks, after the night watch was at their posts - not, he’d say, because he feared the red woman herself, but because he feared how he would lose the respect of the crew if they believed every decision aboard his ship had not been his own..

The cabin beneath the stern was scarcely large enough for the heavy oak table bolted to the floor. A single whale-oil lamp swung gently overhead, making the carved coastlines spread across the map seem almost alive as the ship rolled beneath them. Driftwood markers, polished by years of voyages, marked islands they’d found, storms they’d survived, and places where other captains had simply disappeared.

She leaned over the chart, studying it in silence.

gods, they are enormous

Her breasts seemed to dwarf everything. They were absolutely massive. The years had been kindly generous to them, and to her, as they were to the sisters and daughters of her blood. Tall, taller than the captain himself she was, and when she stood, she did with poise and authority. Her copper hair, pulled back loosely, caught the amber glow of the candle while the pale fabric of her fitted dress gathered naturally at a waist that seemed almost impossibly slight before flowing over strong hips that looked like they could birth an entire herr - though he was unsure whether she had yet born daughters. Around her neck sometimes hung a small leather pouch filled with dried herbs, gifts from another sister she’d visited three nights before boarding the ship. Tonight it was not there, but inside her new lay yarrow, mugwort, juniper berries, and a sprig of something even older whose true name had long ago ceased to be spoken aloud.

The captain watched her far more carefully than he watched the map. Not just because she was beautiful - though she undeniably was, and many men had trouble looking anywhere but at her if she was in the room - but because every voyage she’d ever agreed to accompany had returned, eventually. Some with fewer men than they’d departed with, but all with stories.

He spoke to her of routes, storms, horizons. Supplies and provisions.  “You’ve stopped listening to me, woman,” he observed, having had to gather his courage when he noticed her attention elsewhere, on the map.

“I was never listening,” she spoke, dryly. 

His beard twitched, hiding a twist to his lips. Women did not speak to men this way. He knew he needed to hold his tongue, though, around this one. “So?” he finally managed, knowing he needed her help, looking at the map himself, “Which way?”

He watched as she extended one long finger - on a hand that was bigger than his own, he noted - across the parchment until it rested on open sea, far beyond the last coastline anyone aboard had ever seen.

“West,” she said.

He frowned. “There is nothing west,” he said. 

“There is,” she said, with even more certainty.

“You’ve seen it?” he asked.

“No.” Not with my own eyes. “But it is there.”

The captain leaned back, considered her. Considered what a trip to the West could entail. Outside, waves struck the hull with the slow rhythm of a breathing animal. Above them came the muffled footsteps of sailors on watch, the creak of rigging, and somewhere overhead the familiar croak of ravens that had refused to abandon the mast since the voyage began. Most of the crew considered that a blessing, but a few thought otherwise.

He folded his arms. “My navigator says the current turns north.”

“He is correct,” she nodded.

“And you’re telling me to sail west?” And risk all our lives?

“Yes.”

Silence settled between them. Whenever she grew quiet, she was usually listening to something the rest of the world had forgotten how to hear.

Finally he asked the question: “How certain are you?”

She smiled - not warmly, but knowingly. “You asked me that before the ice closed around Greenland...”

He nodded once. He had.

“…and before the storm near the Orkneys…” she continued.

Another nod.

“...and before your brother decided he knew the sea better than I did.”

The captain looked down at the map. “Aye,” he said, hearing the regret himself, in his voice. He had never found his brother. Since then, though, he’d learned to not doubt the woman, and she now traveled with him on his longest journeys. She’d not take silver, or any coin. For her services on this foray, she’d been promised what she’d asked for, and he had acquired. Wrapped carefully in oilcloth inside a cedar chest below deck were three weathered manuscripts rescued from a monastery fire farther south. To most men they were curiosities. To the scattered völur, or seið-women who remembered one another they were inheritance.

She rested her fingertips lightly upon the map again. “West,” she repeated.

The captain studied her for a long while. Then, without another question, he picked up every carved marker representing the planned course, and quietly moved them to the West…

…

By the ninth morning the birds changed.

They no longer circled the mast before turning east toward home. Instead they flew steadily west, disappearing into a pale mist that seemed unwilling to lift. Even the sea had become different. It carried the smell of earth now, of pine and wet leaves instead of salt alone.

No one aboard slept much after that.

When the lookout finally shouted, every soul on the ship rushed toward the rail.

“Land!”

The word echoed from bow to stern, followed by cheers loud enough to frighten the gulls into the sky. Men embraced one another. Some laughed. One dropped to his knees and thanked Odin. Most thanked the captain.

The captain only looked toward the red woman, who smiled once.

“I told you,” she said.

The longship scraped gently against a stony shore as the tide carried it in. Ropes splashed into the shallows. Boots struck unfamiliar sand. The men hurried forward with axes, banners, and impossible dreams of timber, furs, and glory.

She waited, considering the portent of this moment for her kind. When at last she stepped from the ship, the damp earth yielded softly beneath her bare foot. She stood still for a long moment, letting the wind move through her hair. It smelled different here. Older, somehow. Untouched.

She closed her eyes.

There were plants she had never known. Birdsong unlike any she had heard across the western sea. And beneath it all: life. Abundant and patient and waiting for her. Behind her, the captain was already giving orders. Men argued over where to build shelter before winter. Others were carving their names into trees, eager to leave proof that they had been first.

She knew better. No one was first. No one ever was. Every land remembered someone older. She knelt and pressed her hand against the dark soil. It answered not with words but with recognition. For the first time in generations, she allowed herself to imagine not merely surviving another season, or another king, but something greater. A daughter born beneath different stars. Granddaughters who would know forests and shores and cities she would never see. Women carrying the old knowing farther and farther west.

The world had become larger overnight, and so had the places where her kind might flourish.

Behind her, the captain called for her. She rose, brushed the damp earth from her palm, and turned back toward the waiting men. They believed, she saw, that they had discovered a new world. She smiled, quietly to herself, knowing that the new world had not been waiting for them…but for her.

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