Something from the dark places would come in like the fog.

Something bad.

And eight days after the dark ship and men without shadows had gone the first men grew sick.

Two men first.

They became uncomfortably warm and then hot with a burning fever and so weak they could not stand and finally crawled into their huts to lie, still and sweating. Until vomit took them and they could not hold food or hot fish soup, the other men tried to feed them, and then not even water, and the vomit turned to blood and the second day even with what care they could be given the ghosts left the bodies of the two men almost at the same moment and they died.

Died.

Then the man who cared for them was hunted and found by the fever and went down and lost his ghost and likewise died.

Three of them.

But it did not end.

Instead the sickness became like a fire roaring through the camp and soon Old Carl started to burn.

Before he vomited blood, the old man took Leif and Little Carl and put them in the cedar canoe with some food and supplies, and sent them away.

‘Go north,’ he said, pushing them as hard as he could from the shore. ‘The men without shadows made the air here sick with their poison. Head north where the air is not sick and where the water channels are so small they will not let the death ships pass. Keep going north and never come back. Never come back to this place. Never.’

Yet Leif, who did not understand about not being rude, said: ‘But what of you? Can you not come?’ For he liked, loved Old Carl in his fashion and if he found truth in himself he admitted that he felt fear, deep fear, in going off from the camp, into what wildness he did not know.

‘All who are here will pass over the bridge. I am already sick. The fever has not taken you and Little Carl and you must leave. Now. Go away from this bad air, this bad dead place and do not look back, do not come back, do not even think back. Go.’

And Old Carl turned away from the shore and walked back into the camp and the boy would always remember that he walked straight and tall though he was walking to his end, to his journey over the bridge of life into the other. The Other. Valhalla.

Then the canoe caught the moon-currents, which had turned and were heading out, and moved by itself around a point of forest that stuck out and Leif could not see the cove nor the camp any longer.