by C.M. Bell
Three men, three refusals, three jaws bloodied by Fasti’s now aching knuckles. He stood among Novgorod’s docks, unable to continue his Caspian Sea venture. Twenty years he’d pulled oars for other men’s profit. Every piece of silver hoarded, every comfort denied, all for this one voyage that would make him more than another raider with calloused hands and borrowed dreams.
“You seek passage to the Caspian markets?”
The voice came from behind a stack of fresh-cut pine planks, an eastern accent. Fasti turned to find a tall man emerging from shadow, his hair the color of old iron, his eyes flat as river stones. His bands and chains of gold caught the light of the moon, more wealth than most men saw in a lifetime.
“Depends who’s asking.” Fasti’s hand found his seax handle, a gesture born of instinct when strangers appeared from darkness.
“Rulav.” The man offered his forearm in greeting. His grip was firm, his skin cold as morning mist despite the heat bleeding from the nearby fires. “I know every portage from here to the sea, the tribes, the channels, the places where the river runs strange.”
Strange felt like an odd choice of word, Fasti noted. The other guides had used stronger language before they’d fled: cursed, haunted, hungry. But this Rulav stood easy, as if discussing grain prices.
“The others won’t take my silver. They say the river holds doom last several seasons,” Fasti said. “What makes you so unafraid?”
Rulav’s smile was thin. “The others fear what they don’t understand. I’ve made my peace with the river’s appetites.”
Behind them, somewhere in the darkness between the boat sheds, he heard water lapping against wood.
“Your terms?”
“Full share of profits. Authority over the route, where we camp, which channels we take, when we move.” Rulav paused a moment, weighing his words. “And one more thing. No questions about what we might see between here and the Khazar lands. The river shows things to fresh travelers. Best to keep your eyes on your cargo and your thoughts on your profit.”
“A hard bargain.” Fasti studied the guide’s face. No greed, no fear. Just patience.
“Easier than dying ignorant in a muddy backwater. The river has her own will. Treat her right, she’ll carry you to riches. Cross her…” He shrugged, the gesture encompassing a hundred ways Northmen could die a long way from home.
“Deal,” he said, and clasped Rulav’s hand. The guide’s palm felt damp as a drowned man’s.
Later, as Fasti checked on his trade goods, his navigator Birgir approached. The scarred Dane moved with purpose, his expression grim.
“Found us a guide,” Fasti said. “One who won’t run at the mention of the southern route.”
“I saw. Also saw the shipwright’s boy making signs against evil when that one passed. The river folk know things, Fasti. That man’s got the smell of deep water on him.”
“You’ve been listening to too many babushka’s tales.” But even as Fasti spoke, he remembered how Rulav’s eyes had swallowed the fire’s light whole. “Our gods sailed stranger seas than this eastern river.”
Birgir grinned. “Our gods also knew when to cut their losses and run.”
Rulav stood at water’s edge before the sun breached the horizon’s rim, his breath forming no clouds in the cold air. Fasti chewed hard bread and watched him. The guide’s gear sat ready.
“Time.” Rulav’s voice carried that odd undertow again. “The river’s appetite sharpens with waiting.”
Their vessel waited at the water’s edge, a river-knarr, low in the water. Its planks, lapped like the scales of some great wyrm, gleamed black with pine-tar. It was nimble enough to slip through narrow channels, with room for cargo and men, as long as they didn’t mind the smell of each other’s sweat.
Sixteen men gathered to form the ship’s crew. Hakon, fresh from raiding between Truso and Birka. Young Agnar, pulling at his sparse beard and hungry for blood. Others who’d sailed with Fasti before stood ready, they knew the risks, and the rewards.
As they shoved off. The current caught them like a cold hand. Rulav took the steering oar. His fingers moved across the worn ashwood with an intimate touch. As Staraya Ladoga vanished into morning mist.
The first days passed in a steady rhythm of pull and lift, pull and lift, until shoulders burned and hands went numb. The sun tracked across a sky pale as old bone. Sometimes Rulav would call out landmarks and places where the water ran deeper than it should. Fasti had sailed with river-men before, but none who spoke of the water as if it whispered secrets to them.
“Here,” Rulav’s voice carried through the river mist, guiding them toward a sheltered cove. Ancient stones lined the shore, each one tall as a man and worn smooth by forgotten floods. Spirals and angular patterns covered their surfaces, cut so deep that centuries of weather hadn’t erased them. Looking at the designs made Fasti’s eyes water, as if they were trying to follow lines that bent in directions that shouldn’t exist.
“Don’t sleep too close to those stones,” Rulav said, arranging kindling with precise movements. “And keep the fire high tonight. Those old marks were cut here for reasons.” He paused, tilting his head as if listening to something none of them could hear. “Things seep through when men sleep unguarded.”
The words made no sense, yet Fasti’s skin prickled as if touched by winter fog. That night, Agnar woke screaming.
His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed. From his throat came wet, gurgling words. They held him down. Birgir forced a leather strap between his teeth to keep him from biting through his tongue.
“Water,” he croaked. “Black water in my lungs.” Long minutes passed before Agnar’s body went limp. “Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t die. And below…” He stopped, shuddering. “Eyes. Watching. Waiting. So old.”
“River-dreams.” Rulav had approached on silent feet. “Some men’s minds are well tuned. They hear what stirs in the deep places. What has always been there, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Birgir asked. His sarcasm had fled.
“For the stars to turn. For men foolish enough to travel the old routes.” Rulav produced a pouch from his gear. The contents smelled of bitter herbs. “Chew these before sleep. They’ll muddy the dreams.”
Yet Fasti noticed the guide never took the herbs himself. Each overland route Rulav chose, when river bends grew too treacherous or rapids threatened to shatter their hull, held stones with those same spiral markings, worn by wind and rain yet still holding power. Some showed crude images: figures with too many limbs, shapes that might have been boats with writhing cargo, and sea-beasts rising to devour all above.
At one portage, Fasti’s crew hauled their knarr onto the log-rollers with practiced efficiency. A line of figures emerged from the forest edge, Finns heading back north. Their leader, gray-bearded and lean, his cheeks bore scars of ritual markings. When his gaze found Rulav, he stopped mid-stride.
The two men approached each other slowly, like dogs uncertain whether to fight or flee. When they spoke, it was in a language of the deep forests and hidden lakes. The Finn’s weathered face drained of color as Rulav spoke.
Without a word to his people, the Finn backed away. His folk read the terror in his movements and followed, no greetings, no haggling over furs or amber. They moved like deer who’ve scented wolves, not looking back.
“What words passed between you?” Fasti demanded.
Rulav shrugged. “I told him only that we journeyed south to the markets. His people hold foolish superstitions about the deep waters. Think it’s cursed by old powers.”
“And what do you believe?”
“I believe in profit,” Rulav said, but his gaze drifted to the river. Fasti gazed inwards, towards the thought of riches.
Next time they made camp, Agnar found Fasti as the first stars shone in the darkening sky. The young man’s mother had been a Finn, and he’d inherited both her eyes and gift for tongues.
“I understood them,” Agnar whispered, crouching by Fasti’s fire. His voice barely rose above the crackling flames. “Not all, but enough.”
Fasti waited. Around them, men prepared for another night of evil dreams, avoiding each other’s eyes.
“Something about ‘offerings.’ The old one warned Rulav that the river wouldn’t be satisfied this time. Said we should turn back while our bodies still held our souls.”
“Then why did the Finn not warn us?”
“Would you have listened?” Agnar’s laugh held no mirth. “If we haven’t turned back by now, the words of a unknown Finn wouldn’t have changed your mind.”
That night, the dreams came like a tide.
Fasti found himself standing in water that wasn’t water, breathing air that wasn’t air. Around him, shapes moved that his waking mind refused to remember. They spoke without words: What is drowned shall rise. What sleeps shall wake.
Come morning, they found three men sitting at the river’s edge, feet dangling in the current. They responded to neither word nor blow, only stared at the water with an expression of terrible longing.
Rulav observed this with the satisfaction of a merchant watching scales tip in his favor. When Fasti confronted him, the guide spread his hands in mock innocence.
“The river chooses her favorites,” he said, voice flat as still water. “Some men hear her call more clearly than others. In older days, the people who lived along these banks would honor such men.”
“We’re not river-folk with their savage ways,” Fasti spat. “We’re Northmen. We don’t feed our own to hungry waters.”
“No?” Rulav tilted his head like a curious bird. “Tell me, what do you call it when you set a thrall on his master’s burial ship and light the flames? The bloodletting and life offering of livestock and men at great sacrifices? Or have you all forgotten in your hurry to bow to Christ? His followers drink wine and call it blood.”
“That’s different—”
“Is it?” Rulav rose. “The only difference is whose hunger you choose to feed. Everything has a price. We reach the main river tomorrow, and our path will near its end.”
That night, despite exhaustion, few found rest. Between the sounds of misery, Fasti heard a rhythmic whisper, like waves on a distant shore. It came from nowhere, as if something stirred in its sleep, disturbed by their passing.
As if it dreamed of waking.
The Volga opened before them like a great road, broader than the northern waterways. Here the land flattened into endless steppes where nomad horsemen watched from distant ridges.
The dreams stalked more men each night. They woke to find their clothes and sleeping furs soaked though no rain had fallen, their bodies marked with weeping sores shaped like tiny, sucking mouths. Fish floated belly-up in vast shoals, glazed eyes staring at the sky, their bodies unmarked by wound or sickness yet unmistakably, impossibly dead.
At a Khazar outpost marked by wooden palisades topped with the skulls of enemies, they met hostility. Warriors in scale-armor blocked the ship’s landing, curved swords held tight. Their commander in spoke broken Norse with a thick accent, his meaning clear as he pointed at Rulav with a mailed fist.
“The sickness follows where he guides,” he spat. “The water-rot spreads in his wake.”
“What sickness?” Fasti’s hand found his own weapon, the familiar grip steadying his thoughts.
“Men who sail with him forget they are men,” the commander’s voice dropped, as if the words themselves might contaminate the air. “Turn back now. Atil will close its gates to any vessel he steers.”
Atil, the Khazar capital where the Volga emptied into the Caspian, was a sprawling trade hub where wealth flowed like water. Fasti knew that reaching it offered their best hope of surviving the perilous sea journey ahead.
“You follow a doomed path,” the commander continued, voice rising. “He seeks the deep channels not for trade, but for his water-masters.”
Rulav answered in Khazar, but the sounds that left his mouth weren’t speech as men know it. They bubbled and flowed, a torrent of liquid syllables that assaulted the ear.
The commander’s face drained of blood. Without command, his men retreated, backing toward their fortification without turning their backs to the river.
They’d barely cleared sight of the Khazar post when the Volga changed beneath their keel. The Khazar commander’s words echoed: The sickness follows where he guides.
“Rulav,” Fasti called, moving with careful steps on the rushing deck.
The guide didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge.
“Seiðr,” someone whispered. “Dark magic.”
“Time.” Rulav finally turned, and Fasti saw what the morning light revealed. The guide’s neck bore marks like gills, pulsing with each breath. He had taken on a grayish cast, slick with moisture. “Not magic. Truth. The deep masters remember what men were before they crawled onto dry land. Some of you still carry that memory in your blood.”
“Stop this.” Fasti stepped between his men and the guide, though every instinct screamed to draw steel. “Whatever you are, whatever bargain you’ve made, release us. These men have suffered enough. I don’t care about the silver. We’ll.. go back…”
The current died. They rose without splash or warning.
Dozens of them, pulling themselves onboard with webbed hands. Shaped vaguely like men, with hideous heads resembling fish. Their eyes watched the Northmen, bulging and unblinking, as their greenish skin glistened sickly in the moonlight.
Hakon went mad between one breath and the next. Battle-fury took him, and he charged with axe high. Its edge met the rancid fish-flesh as they pulled him to the rail. He fought the whole way. The water swallowed his yells in a series of bubbles.
“The dreams.” Tears ran down Agnar’s face as he walked calmly to them. “Every night, the dreams.” They guided him down gently, as mother with a child.
The rest were taken in similar fashion. Some fought. Some accepted. Birgir remained still, the the old navigator looked at Fasti.
“The stars were never right.” Then he stepped over the rail before they could take him. The water accepted him same as the others.
Fasti stood alone. His sword shook in his hand. The creatures surrounded him, patient as stones, but didn’t approach.
“No.” Rulav’s voice came from everywhere. “Not this one.”
Up close, Fasti saw the truth of him. This thing had never been human. Just worn the shape when needed. The creatures brought up treasure beyond Fasti’s dreams: a vast horde of minted coins, and gems that hurt the eye to behold.
“My men…” Fasti’s words came out hollow.
The creatures watched with their unblinking eyes. Patient.
Years Later
Spring came early to Novgorod. Fasti stood at the docks, counting ships. Three young men approached him. Lean, desperate, burning with the same need Fasti recognized from his own reflection. One spoke.
“I hear you offer guidance south. I’ve saved everything, sold everything, but—”
“It’s still not enough.” Fasti knew without asking. “You seek passage to the Caspian markets?”
They nodded, eager.
“I know every portage from here to the sea, the tribes, the channels, the places where the river runs strange.”
“Your terms?” one asked.
Behind them, he heard water lapping against wood.
Fasti smiled.
C.M. Bell HQ 