The White Raven o-3

by Robert Low

  Thorkel had gone to be with a woman in Dyfflin. Now he sat in my hall drinking ale and telling everyone how he had failed at farming, how the woman had died and how he had failed at selling leather and a few other things besides.

  He sat in my hall, having heard that the story of the hoard of Atil silver was true, the tale he had scoffed at and the reason he had wanted to leave the Oathsworn in the first place.

  'We should call you Lucky,' Finn grunted, hearing all this. Thorkel laughed, too hearty and trying to be polite, for what he wanted was back into the Oathsworn and a chance at the mound of treasure he had so easily dismissed.

  'Ever since he came back,' Kvasir mused pitching straw chips into the pitfire, 'all our men have been leaning to the left a little more.'

  I did not understand him and said so.

  'As if they had axes or swords weighing their belts,' he answered flatly. He shifted sideways to allow a deerhound to put its chin on my knee and gaze mournfully up at me.

  'Eventually, a man has to choose,' he went on. 'We came up the Rus rivers of Gardariki with Jarl Brand almost five years ago, Orm. Five.'

  'We agreed to serve him every year,' I pointed out, feeling — as I always did when I fought this battle — that the earth was shifting under my feet. 'I am remembering that you, like the rest, enjoyed the pay from it.'

  'Aye,' Kvasir admitted. 'The first year and the next were good for us, though we lost as much as we gained, for so it is with men such as we — it comes hard and goes easy. Those were the times we thought you had a plan to get us outfitted and so return to the Grass Sea to find Atil's silver tomb again. Then you took land from the jarl.'

  'We had no ship of our own until we built one,' I protested, feeling my cheeks and the back of my neck start to prickle and flame at the lie of it. 'We need a. .' The word 'home' leaped up in me, but I could not say it to these, whose home was the shifting sea.

  'Anyway,' I ploughed on stubbornly, 'while there was red war we were welcome in any hov that esteemed Jarl Brand; when red war is done with, no-one cares for the likes of us. Why — there are probably not two halls along the whole coastline here glad to see a boatload of hard men like us sail into their happy lives. Would you prefer sleeping in the snow? Eating sheep shite?'

  'The third year of war was hard,' admitted Kvasir, 'and made a man think on it, so that we were glad, then, of a hall of our own.'

  That third year of red war against the enemies of Jarl Brand had spilled a lot of blood, right enough, but I had not known the likes of Kvasir had thoughts such as he admitted to now I gave him a sharp look, but he matched me, even with one eye less.

  'Last year made it clear you were finding reasons not to go where we all thought you should,' he declared. 'And while we spent, you hoarded, which we all thought strange in a young jarl such as yourself.'

  'Because you spent I hoarded,' I replied hotly. 'A jarl gives and armrings are expensive.'

  'Aye, right enough,' replied Kvasir, 'and you are a byword for the giving out, for sure. But this year, when Erik became rig-jarl of all, you had to be made to start the Elk building and thought more of trade and horses.'

  'A ship like the Elk costs money,' I bridled back at him. 'Good crewmen need purse-money and keep — or had you planned to go silver-hunting with what remains of the Oathsworn only? There are a dozen left in all the world and two of them are in Hedeby, one caring for the addled other. Hardly enough to crew a knarr, never mind go raiding.'

  Kvasir rode out the storm of my scorn, then thumbed snot from his nose and shrugged. He took to looking at me with some sadness, I was thinking, which did not make my temper any cooler.

  'You have tried to make those left into herders of neet and horses, with a hayfield to plough and a scatter of hens scratching at the door,' he growled.

  'Shows what you know,' I snapped back, sulky as a child, digging the point of the sabre into the beaten earth at my feet and gouging out a hole. 'We coop our hens — had you not noticed?'

  He wiped his fingers on his breeks.

  'No. Nor want to, when it comes to it,' he replied levelly. 'I am thinking none of the others know much about hens, or hay, or horses either. They know ships, though — that's why all of them are cutting and hauling timber for Gizur every day, building the new Fjord Elk. That's why they stay — and I would not be concerned at gaining a crew, Orm; Thorkel, I am thinking, is only the first to arrive looking for a place at an oar. Even after five years the silver in that hoard is bright.'

  'You have a wife,' I pointed out, desperate now, for he was right and I knew it. 'I was thinking you meant it when you hand-fasted to her — is she as easy to leave as the chickens?'

  Kvasir made a wry face. 'As I said — she will have to learn to like the sea.'

  I was astonished. Was he telling me he would take her with us, all the way to the lands of the Slavs and the wild empty of the Grass Sea?

  'Just so,' he answered and that left me speechless and numbed. If he was so determined, then I had failed the tap-tap of the adze and axes drifting faintly from the shore was almost a mockery. It was nearly done, this new Fjord Elk, the latest in a long line. When it was finished. .

  'When it is finished,' Kvasir said, as if reading my thoughts, 'you will have to decide, Orm. The oath keeps us patient — well, all but Finn — but it won't keep us that way forever. You will have to decide.'

  I was spared the need to reply as the door was flung wide and Gizur trooped in with Onund Hnufa, followed by Finn and Runolf Harelip. Botolf and Ingrid had moved to each other, murmuring softly.

  'If you plane the front strakes any thinner,' Gizur was saying to Onund, who was shipwrighting the Elk, 'it will leak like a sieve.'

  The hunchbacked Onund climbed out of the great sealskin coat that made him look like a sea-monster and said nothing, for he was a tight-lipped Icelander at the best of times and especially when it came to explaining what he was doing with ship wood. He sat silently, his hump-shoulder towering over one ear like a mountain.

  They all jostled, looking for places to hang cloaks so that they would not drip on someone else and yet be close enough to the fire to dry. The door banged open again, bringing in a blast of cold, wet air and Red Njal, stamping mud off his boots and suffering withering scorn for it from Thorgunna.

  'The worst of wounds come from a woman's lips, as my granny used to say,' he growled, shouldering into her black look.

  Ingrid unlocked herself from Botolf to slam it shut. Botolf, grinning, stumped to the fire and sat, while the children swarmed him, demanding stories and he protesting feebly, swamped by them.

  'I would give in,' Red Njal said cheerfully. 'Little wolves can bring down the biggest bear, as my granny used to say.'

  'Pretty scene,' growled a voice in my ear. Finn hunkered down at my elbow in the smoke-pearled dimness of the hall. 'As like what you see in a still fjord on a sunny day, eh, Orm? All that seems real, written on water.'

  I glanced from him to Kvasir and back. Like twin prows on either side of my high seat, I thought blackly. Like ravens on my shoulders. I stared, unseeing, at the hilt of the sabre as I turned it in my fingers, the point cutting the hole at my feet even deeper.

  Finn stroked the head of the blissful deerhound and kept looking at this pretty scene, so that I saw only part of his face, red-gleamed by the fire. His beard, I saw, threw back some silver lights in the tar-black of it; where his left ear should have been was only a puckered red scar. He had lost it in Serkland, on that gods-cursed mountain where we had fought our own, those who had broken their Oath and worse.

  There were few left of those I had sailed off with from Bjornshafen six years ago. As I had said to Kvasir — hardly enough to crew a knarr.

  'Keep looking,' I said sourly to Finn. 'Raise your hopes and eyes a little — written on water below, real enough above.'

  'Real as dreams, Orm,' he said, waving a hand to the throng round the pitfire. 'You are over-young to be looking for a hearthfire and partitioning a hall. Anyway — I
know how much you had and how much you have laid out and your purse is wind-thin now, I am thinking. This dream feeds on silver.'

  'Perhaps — but this steading will make all our fortunes in the end if you let it. And the silver itch is not on me,' I answered, annoyed at this reference to my dwindling fortunes and to dividing my hall up into private places, rather than an open feasting space for raiding men.

  He looked at me at last, his eyes all white in the dark of his face, refusing to be put aside. I saw that look and knew it well; Finn only had one way of wresting silver from the world and he measured it by looking down the length of a blade. In that he was not alone — truth was that I was the one out of step with the Oathsworn.

  'But the sea itch is on you. I have seen you look out at it, same as the rest of us,' he answered and I was growing irritated by this now. The closer the new Elk got to being finished the worse it became and I did not want to think of the sea at all and said so.

  'Afraid, Bear Slayer?' Finn said and there was more taunt in it than I think even he had intended. Or perhaps that was my own shame, for the name Bear Slayer had come to me falsely, for something I had not done. No-one knew that, though, save the white bear and a witch-woman called Freydis and they were both dead.

  I was afraid, all the same. Afraid of the sea, of the tug of it, like an ebbing tide. There was a longing that came on me when I heard the break of waves on the shoreline, sharp and pulling as a drunk to an ale barrel. Once on the whale road again, I feared I would never come back. I told him so and he nodded, as if he had known that all along.

  'That's the call of the prow beast. There's too much Gunnar Raudi in you for sitting here, scratching with hens,' he said. He was one of the two — the other was Kvasir — who knew I was not Orm Ruriksson, but Orm Gunnarsson. Gunnar. My true father, dead and cold these long years.

  Finn's stare ground out my eyeballs, then he flicked it to the hilt of that rune blade as I turned it slowly.

  'Strange how you can scratch into the hilt, yet that rune serpent spell is supposed to keep it and you safe from harm,' he murmured.

  His voice was low and scathing, for he did not believe that my health and lack of wounds came from any runes on a sword and both he and Kvasir — the only ones I had shared this thought with — spent long hours trying to persuade me otherwise.

  'The spell is on the blade,' I answered, having thought this through myself, long since. Hilts and trappings could be replaced; it was the blade itself that mattered in a sword.

  'Aye, perhaps so, for it never gets sea-rot or dull-edged,' he admitted, then added a sharp little dismissive laugh. 'The truth of it is that the power of that blade is in the hand of the one who wields it.'

  'If that was true,' I answered, 'then you and I would be worm food.'

  There was a pause, while both of us remembered the dying and the heat and the struggle to get back this sword after it had been stolen. Remembered Short Eldgrim, who had lost the inside of his head and was looked after now by Cod-Biter who hirpled from side to side when he walked. Remembered Botolf losing a leg to the curve of this same sword whose hilt now rested under my palm, heavy with the secret of all the silver in the world. Remembered all those who had chased the mystery of Atil's silvered tomb and fallen on the road.

  Then Finn shifted, rising to his feet.

  'Just so,' he grunted heavily. 'Oarmates have died under wave and edge and fire from the waters of the North Sea to the sands of Serkland in order to be worthy of Odin's gift of all the silver of the world. I can hear the Oathsworn dead growl that they did not suffer all that to watch us sit here growing old and wondering about what might have been. I hear better with just the one ear than you do with both, it seems.'

  There it was, that oath. 'Odin's gift is always a curse,' I answered dully, knowing he was right. Every feast brought the inevitable bragafull — the toasts drunk and wild promises made — followed later, when the drink had made us mournful, by the minni, the horns raised in remembrance. It grew harder, in the harsh, sober light, to ignore either of them.

  This hov had double-thickness walls, was sunk deep into the soil, windproof and waterproof and sitting in it made you feel as solid and fixed as the runestone I planned to have carved. Yet a fierce wind was blowing us all away and I felt the scent of it in the air, with the wrack and flying salt spume that leaped the ridgeline and hunted round the roofs. It was the breath of the prow beast, snorting and fretting at anchor and wanting to be free.

  We sat for a while in the swirling smoke, listening to the wind fingering the door and rapping to get in, while Botolf, more belly and less muscle on him these days, stretched out his carved timber foot to ease the stump and told stories to the children.

  He told them of Geirrod the Giant and Thor's Journey to Utgard and the Theft of Idun's Apples and Otter's Ransom. This last was told deliberately, I thought, for it touched on the dragon Fafnir, Regin the Smith and a hoard of cursed silver, the very one sent to Attila, the one buried with him — the one we had found.

  Into the silence that followed came Thorgunna and Ingrid, doling out bowls of stew and it was so good everyone forgot Otter's Ransom. She had taken me at my word and made good cheer in a cauldron; there was mutton, hare, duck, eel, prawns, mussels, barley, onions and root vegetables in that stew. I tasted kale and seaweeds and watercress and the lees of red wine.

  'By Thor's balls, Thorgunna,' growled Red Njal, 'the sea is the test of a man as the cauldron is of a woman, as my granny once said. Jarl Brand doesn't eat as well as this.'

  'He does,' Thorgunna answered, 'but he adds cinnamon to his, I have heard. And watch your tongue.'

  'Cinnamon,' muttered Gizur. 'There's fancy for you. I cannot think that it would add much to the taste of this, all the same.'

  'We had buckets of the stuff once,' Hauk Fast-Sailor said as I elbowed him aside to get a place on a bench nearer the fire. The high seat was my right, but too far from a good heat.

  'Remember, Orm?' he said, nudging me so that stew slopped over my knuckles. 'On that island where we fought the Serkland pirates? We used the dead Dane for a battering ram on the door to their stronghold.'

  'That was later,' Kvasir growled, wiping ale from his beard. 'The island where we got the cinnamon was where we found some of Starkad's men who had been taken prisoner and had their balls and tozzles cut off by the camel-humping Arabs. They had killed themselves in their shame. The last ran himself at his prison wall until his head broke open.'

  'I have missed some moments, it seems,' Thorkel said into the silence that followed. I ignored him as much as I could, though I felt his eyes on me as I spooned my stew.

  The smoke eddied, dragging itself to the eavesholes and out into the rain and wind while I listened to Red Njal and Harelip arguing about where other enemies and old oarmates had died. All gone, pale-faced fetches sailing my dreams as dark shapes on a charcoal sea.

  Thorgunna came softly up behind me, dragged the hair back over my shoulders and began to tie it off.

  'Don't get your hair in your food,' she said softly. 'And those stories are not ones for children.'

  Finn clattered his bowl angrily to the ground and rose, while the deerhounds came in among us, licking platters and fingers and wolfing scraps. Cormac came with them, scrabbling and laughing.

  'Perhaps we should set this one to routing out a stag or two before winter comes,' chuckled Botolf, sweeping the gurgling boy up. Aoife grinned and Ingrid fired arrows at her from her eyes.

  Finn looked at them, then at me, then shook his head and banged out in a blast of rain-cold wind.

  'Why does Finn have a face like a goat chewing a wasp?' demanded Botolf as Ingrid glared at Aoife and hung on Botolfs big arm.

  'He thinks we are living in a dream and going soft,' Kvasir said, wiping bread round his platter and tossing it into the snapping maw of a deerhound. He looked softly at his wife. 'Being chided for how we speak and needing our hair cut. He thinks we should be off on a hunt for silver.'

  Botolf
, who knew what he meant, grunted thoughtfully. Thorgunna, who simply thought it was warriors being restless, snorted.

  'Go raiding then — though it is no pastime for honest men if you ask me. At least you will be putting in some effort for the food in your bowl. Seems to 'me Jarl Orm is overly tolerant of every lazy one of you.'

  She scooped up bowls with meaningful noise and shot me one of her looks as she went. No-one spoke for a moment or two, for it is a well-known saying that there are only two ways of arguing with a woman and neither work.

  There was moody silence after this.

  'Play music instead,' I said to Botolf, 'in the event you find yourself attracted to the story of Otter again.'

  Botolf, grinning ruefully, fetched his hand-drum and Hauk fished out his pipes and they tootled and banged away while the children danced and sang and even the thrall women joined in, sheathed in drab grey wadmal cloth, linen kerchiefs tied around brows and braids. For a while they stopped being chattels worn threadbare to the elbows — the power of drum and piping whistle has never ceased to amaze me.

  A heathen thing that scene these days, thanks to the White Christ priests. The hand-drum is banned for being pagan and fine children all stained with bastardy, where no such mark was when Odin smiled on us and every child was as good as the next.

  That day, while the wind wrecked itself against the hall and the rain battered in from the sea, it was as warming a heartscene as any sailor could dream of on a rolling, wet deck — but somewhere, I was sure of it, Odin had persuaded the Norns to weave in blood scarlet for us.

  The thought worried me like a dog on a rat's neck, made me get up and go out into a night smelling of rain and sea, to where the horses were stabled. They stirred and stamped, unused to being so prisoned, swirling up the warmth and sweet smell of hay and bedding. In the dark, the air was thick and suddenly crowded, as if a host of unseen people were there, circling me.

  I felt them, the hidden dead of the Oathsworn, wondering what they had given their lives for and my belly contracted. I thought someone laughed and the dark seemed odd, somehow glowing.