Scramasax by Kevin Crossley-Holland Page A

tree-nails, and they howled.
    The three Greek women repeated the same word over and over again. ‘Aigaion! Aigaion! Aigaion!’ they cried out.
    Then Solveig thought she could hear her own name. She heard someone above her yelling, bawling her name.
    â€˜Solveig! Solveig!’
    Solveig tried to get to her feet and at once she wasthrown sideways again. She gasped, gulped and spat out a mouthful of the foul soup swirling around her feet.
    â€˜Solveig!’ the voice roared, and it wasn’t a sea-god.
    Solveig got to her bruised knees. She grabbed the edge of the counter.
    â€˜Reach!’ the voice insisted. ‘My hands! Reach!’
    Solveig dared, she let go of the counter, she reached, and at once she was lifted, light as thistledown, out of the hellhole, out and into the squall. In the muzz and the murk, she stared up at Harald Sigurdsson, white-faced.
    â€˜To the stalls!’ he bellowed. ‘Now!’
    Solveig choked and spat out more soup.
    â€˜Now!’ Harald insisted. ‘Lose our horses and we’re lost ourselves!’
    â€˜Yes,’ gasped Solveig.
    â€˜Lift them!’
    â€˜Lift?’
    â€˜Strap them!’
    â€˜How?’
    â€˜Over the beams! Understand?’
    â€˜I don’t know. Where is everyone?’
    Harald growled and bared his teeth. ‘Some are down there. Go on, girl! I’ll send more.’
    Solveig’s breath was jerky. Her whole body was shaking.
    â€˜Go on!’ Harald urged her hoarsely.
    Sweat. Foam. Sopping leather. Sloppy dung.
    Just for a moment Solveig flinched. Then she slapped her right haunch, as if she were a mare herself, got on to her knees and reached down with her feet for the ladder.
    It wasn’t there.
    It’s been uprooted, she thought. Everything has. My teeth are aching. It’s a wonder we’re still afloat.
    Then Solveig lowered herself over the edge, took a deep breath and dropped into the horse-stalls.
    At once she could hear what the roar-and-bluster had silenced for as long as she had been up on deck: neighing, whinnying, squealing, screaming and a strange pounding and grinding.
    All the oil lamps hanging from the beams had swung themselves into darkness, but halfway across the stalls, in the middle of a storm of wild horses frothing and skidding, lashing with their back hooves, a single lamp bracketed to a beam-stanchion was still guttering.
    Where is everyone? thought Solveig. Only those three men down at the far end … We need far more than that.
    Solveig saw that while some horses were swinging from side to side as the galley rolled because they were half suspended by leather straps hanging from the stout beams, others weren’t well secured at all. Their own slipping and sliding maddened them. They rammed against each other, they blew and bellowed, they thumped their proud heads against beam-stanchions – that was the hollow pounding Solveig had heard – and they groaned, they whinnied, they tried to jam their hooves into the deck – that was the grinding – and in terror, they screamed.
    Not on my own, Solveig thought. I can’t. Lift them! Strap them! Where is everyone?
    As Solveig tried to pick her way towards the shuddering lamp without being kicked or crushed or trampled, she felt for a moment as if she were a little girl again. She was shuffling out into the waves, shin-deep, knee-deep, and the water was rushing at her from ahead, from her left, her right, and then it was swishing up behind her. She was completely at sea and yet safe; she was crying out not in terror but sheer exhilaration.
    Solveig tossed her head, and her golden hair sparked in the lamplight. There was a man standing right in front of her. His back was turned and he was shoulder to shoulder with one of the horses, his brow pressed against the horse’s brow, right between its wide eyes.
    The man’s fingers were linked under the horse’s muzzle, and Solveig watched as he gently