Thorgar's Arc

Chapter 6 of 13

Two days before the tide, Thorgar walked down to the water where Harek had beached the boat. The hoard-coins rode in the pouch at his belt, cold against his hip. He meant to see the boat readied and the men fed. But the hull told a different story than the map in his head. Harek crouched at the bow, running his ruined hand along a seam. Ash streaked his beard. He did not look up. "Come see," he said. Thorgar knelt. Harek pressed a thumb into a dark line in the planking. Wood flexed under it. A crack, hair-thin, ran a foot along the seam. "That'll open in ice," Harek said. "Cold water hits it, the seam splits. We go down two days past the cave. All of us." He stated it plain, the way he named the tide. Thorgar's gut went tight. He had killed the beast, bought the crew, named the prize. Now a finger's width of bad wood could drown twelve men before they saw a single coin. "Can you fix it?" "Iron ribs over the seam. Rivets set hot." Harek held up his hand, the two-finger gap showing. "Costs ore. I've got none spared. Ore's scarce down where I work." Thorgar thought of the smith who worked the coast. Iron there ran dear, and dearer for a stranger. He had silver, but not enough. He stood and looked at the boat, small against the gray water. Kjell came down the shingle then. He had endorsed Thorgar before the sailors, laid his old rune coin on the table, and the men had joined for his word, not Thorgar's. Now he stopped beside the hull and read the crack in one glance. Teeth and claws swung in his beard. "That kills us," Kjell said. "I need ore for ribs," Thorgar said. "I'm short." Kjell said nothing for a moment. Then he reached to his belt and drew the pouch of hoard-coins Thorgar had already returned to him once. He weighed it. "Show these to the smith. Not to spend. To promise." Thorgar took the pouch back and understood. He carried the coins up to the smith's forge and poured them across the anvil. Worn gold, strange runes, the weathered gleam of a lord's buried hoard. "There's a mountain of this two days north," he said. "Set my ribs now. Take your cut from the haul." The smith turned a coin in the firelight. Greed moved in his face. He named his share. Thorgar struck his hand on it. By dusk the smith's boy hauled ore to the beach. Harek set the iron ribs across the seam and drove the rivets hot, hissing into the wet wood. The crack vanished under banded iron. The boat would hold the ice now. But Thorgar had promised a stranger a cut of a hoard he had not yet touched, guarded by a thing that would not die.