The journey across the straits that separated the isle of Senuna from the mainland was one that Sigewulf hardly enjoyed and that he accomplished only with the greatest amount of aid. Where did that aid come from? Why from the likes of Senuna strangely enough. The goddess had maintained from what he was quick to discover thanks to Glædwine’s instructions before his escape, a single ship. Certainly he was young and perhaps too small to be attempting to traverse the seas that separated the islet, but with the aid of Bada this was no great challenge. And as to who might Bada be? He was one of the crewmembers from another of the ships, he had apparently suspected Senuna and had refused for this reason to go anywhere near the palace of Senuna.
It was for this reason that he had kept his distance. It was he who happened upon Sigewulf before the boy had the chance to find the cavern in which the small ship was to be found. At first he had panicked when he had been swept out from the light of day and into the shadows, yet when he realized who it was that had seized him, and hearing him shush him whilst saying he had felt considerably more at ease. “Silence boy! Else they will find you!”
To his surprise at the time, a number of the guards of the islet had passed them by. Startled the youth had looked up once released, “Bada, what are you doing still a man?”
“Pardon?”
“Everyone else my father included have, all been turned into pigs!” Sigewulf told him, only to then realize the other man had previously been utterly unaware.
“I did not know, for I dared not venture forth,” Bada replied at once, if a little defensively his eyes wide with horror.
Much as Sigewulf would have liked to condemn him for his cowardice, he knew this would have been unfair. He had fled himself from the guards of the palace, with the boy rather embarrassed when he was caught staring at one of the man’s facial scars. Bada was a tall man almost six-feet three inches tall, not unlike Hroðgar in this regard, however he was blonder in hair and beard with both neatly trimmed and with piercing blue-grey eyes not unlike a waiting storm. Dressed in the lightest armour one could find, he wore them easily and was easily twice the bulk of most men, though it was all muscle from what Sigewulf had observed. The man had however three scars on his face; one ran across his left brow near to the eye along his cheekbone, the second ran across his forehead and stopped near to the first one and the third scar ran along his right cheekbone. That last scar stopped near his upper lip and near to his right nostril and was partly covered by his short if thick beard.
There was an air of suspiciousness and desperation that hung about Bada, so that he had never seemed particularly likable to a lot of the children. Many of whom liked to pursue him and taunt him for some reason, mostly for his scars and for cowardice as he was rumoured to have fled thrice from battle. One of those times being fairly recently from the Elves of the forests over in on the mainland just before their arrival on Senuna’s islet.
The man had shown him the cavern where he had lived over the past year, after they exchanged stories; of their survival revealed he had been planning his own escape. Eager to get away from the goddess Senuna, he was to be swept up by the mood when he was shown where the small ship was to be found, “Oh such a wonderful discovery! Let us be away from this wretched place!”
It was at this time that Sigewulf began to dream. What did he dream of in the middle of the day and while still awake? He dreamt at that moment, of nothing less than the possibility of finding aid to rescue his beloved father, and all the others who had been captured by Senuna.
Maybe it was that he might find only despair thereupon the coast, a part of him despairing of the darkness he had seen there the last time he had visited that place. It was the only place they could go for the moment, with Sigewulf hopeful that the coast was not being guarded. Certainly, it had been more than a year since last he had journeyed there.
He was also concerned that they might meet with a storm such as that which very nearly knocked their ships down into the bottom of the sea. Thinking upon it, he wondered what he might do to stop the wicked goddess from finishing what she had begun, and devouring those she had already turned into beasts.
O please o gods, please Wotan protect them, do protect and shield them and if you are not the god for this please intercede on their behalf with the correct god who might have influence over our fates, Sigewulf was to pray if only deep within himself. He was later to repeat this prayer later that night when at last they made landfall.
Terrified of what might await him, he was to lose himself to his brooding and pondering what he might do were he to lose his beloved father? Sigewulf did not wish to even consider this possibility and yet there was a small voice deep within his being that whispered that he was already too late. Anxious, he only grew ever more worried and stricken at the thought of what he might have already lost, and what lay upon the horizon.
*****
His mind was wrenched however from memories of the prior day by the ship lurching from side to side, with Sigewulf very nearly knocked overboard. Curses flowed from Bada’s lips as loosely as might blood from a fish stabbed by a pike.
At any other time Sigewulf might well have chortled or grinned, as cursing was rapidly becoming something he was well accustomed to in men. It seemed to be the adult’s tongue he mused to himself, as he considered the man seated to the front of the ship. It was their way just as it was the way of children to bully and push one another to greater feats of madness.
It was vastly preferable he also thought to the slyness and pettiness of the women in Senuna’s service or those girls who had taken the higher rank over all others, among those children kept in her halls. “What is the matter?”
His query won him a sidelong glance from the corner of the man’s eyes as he looked up from the bottom of the ship before him to look back at the boy. “It would appear we have a hole in the bottom of the ship.”
“What? How will we survive such a disaster?” Sigewulf begged stricken at the news that there was a hole in the ship.
“Never fear, the hole is still small,” Bada retorted calmly, adding with a serenity that the boy could only envy. “I was born at sea, and know all that one need know about them, and therefore can say to you with all the certainty in the world that we shall not sink at once into the sea below.”
“But still-”
“Naught shall happen, if you cease tarrying and move hither to help me plug the hole,” Bada growled at the boy impatiently.
The boy needed no further prompting, moving around the older male who pressed himself to the other side of the boat. Reluctant to move about the boat, he was however to swallow his reticence so that he struggled not only physically to move about, but to do so in spirit. His spirit wavering with every lurch of the ship and every millimetre that he moved away from the isle of Senuna, such was the terror that continued to grip him by the throat. Suddenly he missed not only his father, but more than Hroðgar; he missed his elder brother and sister. They always knew what to say, what to do to comfort him.
Comfort when he thought of it, was something his father had always been quick to offer. That is to say in the days prior to the deaths of the eldest children of Hroðgar, so that Sigewulf missed his father of old. The man who had told him he had to be strong when his mother had died, but had also patted him upon the head as they stared into the hearth-fire. The man, who had held him as he wept and never said a word, only stroked the back of his head as he held him. It was that man also who had also taught him boisterously and happily how to trap a rabbit, and how to skin it. It had not been an experience that Sigewulf had wished to do, as he had pitied the hare and yet seeing the proud face of his father had made it worth it.
“I know it is neither easy, nor does it at first feel right to slay and skin such a thing. Yet with time, you will see my son that it is right, and proper so take heart.” Hroðgar murmured as he had wiped at his tears with his thumb, “So wipe away these disgraceful tears, wipe them away and cast them from your heart, as your brother and I had to, and your grandfather before us did. There is no shame in crying the first time, there is only shame in repeated tears every other time.”
And yet he had never cast shame nor ridiculed him for crying the third or fourth time. It was the fifth time when the youth failed to cry that Hroðgar had praised him.
That man though had been replaced by one who never expressed his joy, who never comforted him and never had much more than a grunt to offer. It often felt to Sigewulf as though the father he had revered so, and loved and honoured for so many years, had disappeared and in his place was a figure with his face, whom he did not recognize.
Tearing his thoughts from the memory of the past, he once more turned away from them to confront the present. The present was not at all half as beautiful as the past, yet merited no less the same attention he told himself, remembering this piece of wisdom from his late brother.
Struggling to draw out the water with the bucket that the older male gave him, and throw it out over the side, Sigewulf sweating and panting soon felt his muscles screaming out at him. He wished he could say that he lasted quite some time, before he began cursing and longing for it to be over, yet he could not.
How could this happen, he asked himself. How could the water keep on tearing its way through the small hole? It seemed the more he threw it over the side, the more it poured into the boat. The more he found that water seemed to leak in, and the larger the hole became.
“How is this hole growing?”
“The wood is utterly rotted through,” Bada realized with a flash of horror in his voice and eyes.
His words struck the boy with all the force of a club to the gut, knocking the wind out from his lungs even as the wind was torn from the ship’s only sail, so that it began to slow still further still some distance from the shore. The ship that they had struggled to keep level above the sea soon drew near enough to land, for Sigewulf to say, “I think we should swim.”
“But what of the ship?” Bada asked of him surprised.
“It is already failing us, we are fortunate to have made it so far with it.” He retorted sharply at the sailor who glaring at him took several minutes to ponder his words.
The man did not like his suggestion, at all. Nor did he like the idea of taking orders from a child, never an easy thing for any man to do. He might well have argued were it not for the boat jerking from side to side and the water seeping even more into the boat, so that they were now all of a sudden up to their knees in it.
Gaping down at the water that continued to enter and pour into the boat, as the hole continued to widen and the old, rotted wood that formed the base of the boat gave ever more way. It took several seconds ere either of them could gain some measure of mastery over themselves. Neither one of them wished to jump overboard, despite the knowledge that it was absolutely necessary for them to do so.
It happened though that Sigewulf was to prove himself the braver of the two, as he leapt out into the sea first out of the two of them. Bada for his part, forever shamed by this act on the youth’s part was to throw himself forward with a greater and infinitely louder curse than that uttered by the child.
Both of them had been taught since birth to swim. It was natural for those born in the lands of the Valhol to do so. They were among the most northerly of the lands from whence they came from. It was for this reason that it was their first instinct, just as it was their view that they ought to take matters into their own hands.
Fighting against the sea was a battle that both had considerable amounts of experience with, if only as a kind of a pass-time. In this situation though, it was a battle of life and death. A battle that though it might not have seemed all that great an obstacle so to speak for the likes of Bada however for the likes of Sigewulf it was one of the most difficult he had ever encountered. A small child, he had not the arm-length or the leg-strength that an adult man or even a slightly older child might well have possessed. So that for him this battle, was one that he soon began to find too great a challenge for him.
As far as he pushed himself forward, as much as he might wish to advance he found that for all his efforts he could not swim swiftly enough to reach the shore.
“Sigewulf, I have you, never fear!” Bada called out as he seized a hold of the boy. Crying out, he added almost at once, when the child began to panic when he seized hold of him, “Wait! Hold there is no reason to panic!”
Somehow though, the thin man who had helped him to make it so far from the islet of Senuna, pushed them both by
The forest loomed large as it had nigh on a year prior. It was with more than a little trepidation that Sigewulf eyed the forest. The trees of this particular place rising high as ever, without a single one of them having been disturbed since last he saw them. Each tree was covered in a great many green leaves that were considerably bigger than Sigewulf’s hands. The trees’ branches hanging high overhead as the wind whistled through and about them not unlike a menacing vulture in mid-flight.
Quite why he had thought to return hither to this place, even he did not quite know only that he had been told to find aid. This notion was one that had come suddenly to him, along with the memory of how Glædwine had remarked that the Elves were the finest archers in the world.
“We should not tread further into this place,” remarked Bada in a hushed voice, genuinely alarmed by the sight of the dark forest.
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