The White Raven o-3

by Robert Low

  'Do you no harm,' Finn answered and Gyrth patted his belly and smiled.

  I was aware of the winter steppe, the Great White, brooded on it all the rest of that long day while the men in the hall surfaced, stretching and farting and shivering into the breath-smoking chill, dousing their heads and breaking ice in the bowls and buckets to do it, roaring and blowing.

  Thorgunna and Thordis, who had wisely avoided the affair and the risk of being up-ended and tupped by drunks — and the obvious reactions of Kvasir and everyone else to that — were the freshest faces in that hall and made sure their healthy cheerfulness set everyone else's teeth grinding. They and the thralls bustled in, stirring the hearthfire to life, hanging pots, rattling skillets.

  Eventually, chewing feast left-overs and picking their molars, most of the men all wandered off to sort out their lives — Sveinald's men were heading home and I heard that Lyut was having to be litter-carried. That he was alive at all was good luck, I was thinking.

  My own crew were staying, of course, and getting as ready as they could for a trip into the open steppe in winter. Most of them were unworried by what I had done — they still thought they would get a share as they had been promised, and few looked beyond that. Some counted the involvement of. Vladimir as jarl-cleverness by me, since it would mean more protection and better supplies for such a dangerous trip.

  Outside the keep, in the crushed snow of the kreml, there was now noise and purpose and carts with sledge-runners, the wheels slung on the sides like shields on a drakkar, just in case they were needed. There were strong little horses for pulling and others for riding and supplies being loaded and men sorting out gear and weapons.

  Vladimir had expected me to point to his carefully-drawn vellum chart and mark it with the location of Atil's cursed tomb, but when it came to it, there was just a dot — that read 'Biela Viezha', which was the Slav name for Sarkel, and acres of grey-white skin. Nor was I daft enough in the head to lay out the X of it, for him then not to need me at all.

  No-one but me knew exactly where the tomb lay and the path of it was scratched on the hilt of my rune-bladed sabre. Short Eldgrim had a rough idea of it, for he had helped me with the runes I made, but even he did not know all the steps. Neither did I unless we got to Sarkel, the first landmark.

  They saw it, of course, Vladimir and big Uncle Dobrynya. They looked from one to the other as I glanced scornfully at the vellum.

  'I can take you,' I said, hoping my sweat was not visible in the dim light of that private room. 'There is no landmark on this chart.'

  Silence, in which I was sure I heard men greasing a stake. Then Dobrynya rolled up the chart with brisk movements as he said: 'Of course you will.'

  Now I wondered. The steppe in winter was as grey-white an emptiness as Vladimir's vellum chart and a sick chill washed me; I was loading a lot of lives and hope on those few runes I had scratched out.

  Ostensibly, the Oathsworn were free to come and go — yet all had been brought into Vladimir's own hall, even Martin the monk. Dobrynya had insisted: everyone who knew anything of the matter was to be kept where they could be seen. Now Martin was thrashing around like a fish in a keep-net.

  He scurried up to me in the cold light of the morning, as Olaf chucked and snapped his fingers at the unresponsive elkhound, finally following it as it wandered off.

  'Which pup is taking which for a walk?' demanded Finnlaith and others laughed, though they did so when they were sure little Olaf Crowbone could not hear and none of them was ashamed of being afraid of a nine-year-old boy.

  'Speaking of dogs,' growled Hauk Fast-Sailor and nodded towards the hurrying figure of the monk. I sighed; the deerhound sighed. Neither of us wanted to be bothered with this.

  'You must speak to the prince,' Martin declared, his eyes wild and black from under his tangled hair and matted beard. 'I will not go on this cursed fool's errand.'

  'Must I?'

  'I will not go.'

  I leaned slightly towards him, thinking — yet again — that I should have killed him when I had had the chance.

  'Vladimir has decreed it. I do not want to go and yet I must,' I answered, more weary than patient. 'If I cannot get out of it, what makes you think I can make him leave you behind?'

  'Christ will provide,' intoned Finn, in what he fondly believed was a mock of the Christ-priests. Martin savaged him with a glare, then folded his arms and stuck his chin out until his beard bristled.

  'I will not go.'

  'Then stay and sit on a sharp stick,' Kvasir said with a shrug, raising his head slightly from repairing the strap. 'You mistake us for folk who worry about you.'

  'This is no matter of mine,' Martin insisted. His ruined mouth made white foam at the corners. 'I want no share in this silver foolishness.'

  'Good,' grunted Finn morosely, 'then we'll take your share. If any of us get a share at all, that is.'

  He shot me a knowing look but, to my surprise, it was Martin who managed to knock him off his perch.

  'Why do you want it, this silver?' he snapped.

  Finn blinked owlishly, for it was clearly a stupid question, which he said, then added: 'A hoard of silver? Why would you not want it?'

  'For what it can buy?' countered Martin. 'The fine food, the best drink and the most beautiful of women. And so you have them all — what then, Finn Horsehead?'

  'A magnificent sword,' commented Pai wistfully. 'Fine furs for a cloak.'

  'Ships,' Jon Asanes threw in, grinning.

  Martin nodded, but Finn was frowning.

  'Until you have them all and more,' the monk said, flecks spilling from his ruined mouth. 'Then what? More of it until you puke and your prick drops off? What is the use of a magnificent sword if you never use it for raiding, eh Finn? Yet what is the point of raiding if you already have all you can want and more?'

  'Ha,' said Red Njal, waving one hand dismissively. 'You are a Christ-priest, so what do you know of such things? You want riches, too — that spear is your hoard. Deceit sleeps with greed, as my granny used to say.'

  Martin's glance was sour, then he turned it back on Finn.

  'I know it is no good thing for folk such as you to end your days bent-backed and stumbling with age, drooling on a bench and wondering if you have hidden your coin well enough to fool all the women who laugh because you can do nothing with them now, while your sons conspire and cannot wait for you to die.'

  That straw-death vision silenced everyone and I was surprised to see something slither across Finn's face that I had never seen before.

  Fear.

  Into that long, painful silence, Jon Asanes offered: 'You will still have to go, I am thinking.'

  'I will not go,' Martin said stiffly.

  'Say that once more, you streak of piss and I will make it come true — you will stay here forever,' growled Red Njal. 'Put to the sword those that disagree, said my granny and she had the right of it there, for sure.'

  'I am, at one and same moment,' chuckled Gyrth, 'both sorrowed and glad that I never met this granny of yours.'

  'You will go,' I answered Martin, staring back into the black coals of his eyes. 'I have a stick that you will follow.'

  He blinked, hesitated. His face twitched, but a new hook was in and deeper than any. 'You promised me the Holy Spear for what I told you,' he snapped, hoarse with anger, trembling with it, so that his fingers shook and clenched.

  'Things change. I don't care if you end up spitted, but Vladimir thinks you belong to me and so I am responsible. You will put no-one at risk. Obey me and you will get your little stick at the end.'

  'Disobey,' added Runolf Harelip with a twisted smile, 'and you get a little stick in your end.'

  Martin sucked in breath as if it pained him, while everyone else laughed.

  'Am I to believe this promise above the last?'

  'I swear it, as Odin is my witness.'

  He sneered out a black grin. 'You swore that before, on your pagan amulet in the square in Novgorod. You swore
to give me Christ's Holy Lance in return for the news I brought you. Is this new oath any better than that one?'

  My head jerked at that — who was he to dare accuse the jarl of the Oathsworn that he did not hold to any oaths? I leaned over and opened my sea chest, drew out a cloak, the runed sabre and the wrapped bundle that he wanted. He was fixed by the sight of it and his tongue darted like a snake's. I almost waved it back and forth to see if he would follow it with his eyes.

  'I promised you your silly spear and so you will have it. I did not say when.'

  I dropped it in the tall, narrow sea chest and slammed the lid, so that he jumped with the bang of it. His eyes were poison pools, but I held the stare, for I hated him enough in return.

  'If you run,' I said. 'We will bear the hurt of it and Vladimir and his uncle will hunt you down with all the power they have. So will Oleg. So will Jaropolk. All of them will want what you know and all of them will stake you out rather than have you tell the others.'

  'But I know nothing,' Martin declared angrily. 'I was not part of your silver-greed, as you know. Tell them.'

  'You think they would believe me? Anyway — you know what Eldgrim and Cod-Biter remembered. It is not as good as what I know, but it is good enough for Vladimir to keep you close. You know too much, monk — even Lambisson will want you dead now Little Vlad only keeps you alive now because you are a holy man and he fears the curse of your White Christ if he has you killed.'

  He blinked once or twice. Then his shoulders slumped as the weight of what he knew to be true crushed him. The safest place was with us, even if it meant coming into the steppe snows of the Great White. More than all that, he would follow the spear, snuffling for it like a dog after a bitch in heat.

  'Anyway,' said Gyrth, wandering into the middle of this tense moment to peer hopefully in the pot and hunker by the fire, 'it is worse than that for you, monk. The White Christ followers are never staked here.'

  Surprised, we all looked at him and he became aware of the eyes, stopped searching for more food and grew flustered at our stares.

  'I had it from a Jew trader,' he explained. 'They hang those condemned who are Christ followers upside down. Like their god on the tree, only the other way up.'

  Martin's eye twitched, for it was a terrible thing, it seemed, for Christ men to be hung — crucified, they called it — upside down. It was also a hard and long way to die.

  'Our little Christ priest is used to that,' Finn sneered. 'He has been hung upside down before.'

  Those who remembered Martin from the first time we had met him — slung from the mast of our ship, spraying tears and piss on to the planks together with everything he thought we might want to know — chuckled.

  'He can do it standing on his head,' agreed Kvasir sombrely and the hoots and thigh-slaps chased after the flapping hem of Martin's robe as he strode from the hall.

  'He will run,' Kvasir said, tilting his head to peer closely at his strap work.

  'Not without his little stick,' Finn declared.

  They took odds on it but I knew he would run only when he had the spear cradled in his arms and was sure of being able to run to somewhere safe; out on the winter steppe, I was thinking, the only safe place was with us.

  Finn and others, meanwhile, muttered with their heads touching about how, when the time came, we might have to fight the druzhina of Vladimir to get their silver hoard. I let them; it was as lunatic as trying to throw a loop around the moon, but it kept them from becoming too morose. All the same, when the time came, I was thinking, I would have to come up with some gold-browed plan or they would be looking upward and shaking out hopeful rope.

  Later, as I sat with Jon Asanes composing a careful letter to Jarl Brand, I paused to watch the bustle in the courtyard, dictating as Jon scratched in his best hand.

  'Now there's the thing of it,' declared Jon, following my gaze as I rubbed one of Thorgunna's salves into the ankle that always gave me trouble in cold weather. 'Old Sveinald there is no fool and could not miss such preparation as this, yet he rides off without a backward glance at all these carts and loading and such. Is he burning too much at what happened to his boy to wonder what we are doing?'

  'It is his boy who is burning,' I pointed out, 'and will, I am thinking, for a long while yet.'

  'Yet one more trouble to add to the heap,' answered Jon and his voice was so wormwood bitter that I turned to look at him. By then, however, he was hidden behind his hair, hunched over, scratching away at the vellum with his tongue between his teeth.

  Jon was smart, even when he sulked. Our going to seek out Atil's silver was the worst secret never kept; the markets were alive with it and men arrived every day to clamour to join Vladimir's druzhina, or the Oathsworn.

  Sveinald knew of it, for all his indifference. That meant Jaropolk, whom I had last seen as a spotty youth, knew of it. So would Oleg, the second of Vladimir's brothers and even allowing for the fact that there were stones more clever than him, he would know the importance of it, even if someone had to spell the words of it for him.

  It was, I was thinking, as if Odin — a Volsung himself, I remembered — had bent and twisted and heated and forged this treasure hoard into an ever-increasing curse, dragging more and more people into it, beating it white-hot and ever-larger. But for what?

  The wet feathers of the white raven drifted, light and cold on my upturned face, making me blink as they fastened on my lashes. Perhaps Crowbone had the right of it after all — perhaps this was Fimbulwinter, the heralding freeze at the end of the world.

  Then, on the day the white raven stuck its head under a wing and roosted, permitting a blue sky and a red sun, we left Novgorod and went out on to the wolf sea.

  9

  'The Oathsworn were lined up in a parody of the prince's druzhina but only half-mocking. Anything the dour folk of Novgorod could do, good men from the vik could do better they had decided.

  Vladimir rode out to look his own men over. He was all gleaming with gold and silver, wearing a little sabre and perched like an acorn on a too-large black horse — so I had to wear my own finery and that cursed sabre and stride out to look the Oathsworn over.

  The good people of Novgorod cheered and the carts creaked and the horses and ponies stamped in the cold, dropping cairns of steaming dung on to the freshly-swept oak walkways. I felt, at that moment, closer to being a jarl than I had ever felt.

  They did not look too bad, the Oathsworn, for all that they had drunk through most of the money they had won from raiding Klerkon and rattled every whore in the city until her teeth loosened. Some had even thought to squander money on sensible gear fit for a winter steppe.

  There was Kvasir, wearing a new coat padded and sewn like a quilt and stuffed with cotton. We called it aketon, which was as close as any norther could get to mouthing al-qutn, the Serkland word for cotton.

  We knew the benefits of having padding under mail, but three wool tunics were usually enough, until we had found the soldiers of the Great City wearing these Turk garments. Not only did they keep off arrows but dulled a hard dunt that might otherwise break your ribs — and kept you warm in weather like this, too.

  On the other hand, there was Lambi Pai, the Peacock, barely old enough to grow a wisp of beard and shivering in his new, fat silk breeks striped in red and white, with a silly hat fringed with long-haired goat. Which was still not as silly as the one Finn wore, which was Ivar's weather hat with a strip of wadmal tied round it and over his ears — but at least Finn's would keep him warm.

  They were all grinning back at me, stamping feet and blowing out smoke-breath and stuffing their fingers inside cloaks and tunics to keep them warm; Klepp Spaki, Onund Hnufa, Finnlaith the Irisher, Bjaelfi — whom we called Laeknir, Healer, because he had some skills there — Gyrth, wrapped in sensible furs so that he looked like a dancing bear and all the others. Well — all grinning save Jon Asanes, who looked sour as turned milk and stared blankly back at me.

  I saw Gizur and Red Njal and nodde
d acknowledgment of Hauk Fast Sailor's wave. Beyond them all, wrapped up like bundles in the carts, Thorgunna and Thordis watched me, while the deerhounds alone seemed immune to the chill on a day of blue skies and a blood sun with no heat left in it.

  I wanted to tell them it was foolishness, of how many had already died on this quest, but I knew they had heard all that already from those who had survived the first time. It did not matter now — the silver hook was sunk deep and Odin reeled us all in. Bone, blood and steel — that oath would haul us all out on to the cold-wasted steppe.

  So we trooped out through the gate, a long, winding column of sledge-carts and horses, men and boys, thralls and women and one reluctant Christ priest.

  The little princes rode together, surrounded by the hulking shapes of Sigurd and Dobrynya and picked men of the druzhina in full mail and helmets and lances with forked pennants fluttering, forcing the thralls and drovers to scamper or be ridden over. I saw that a lot of the drovers were Klerkon's crewmen, reduced to hiring on as paid labour and lured to this demeaning thrall-work by the gleam of distant silver.

  I vowed to watch them, in case any were holding grudges for Klerkon's death — though I did not think the man attracted such loyalty, I remembered what we had done on Svartey.

  I forgot my vow, of course, a week later, when the winter steppe closed its icy jaws and gnawed even reasoning out of us.

  There was snow, night and day and yet again, then it eased but only to give the snell wind a chance to catch up. Then it snowed again, small-flaked and dry, piling round the camp in high circles where the fires kept it at bay.

  It fell, fine as flour from a quern, from a lead-dulled sky, sifted like smoke along the land, stinging the face and piling up, all the time piling up so that, finally, you could not get your feet above it and had to plough through it. Yet, when I turned, once, to get the sting out of my face and free my lashes from ice, there was not a mark; all smoothed and smothered, the snow left not even the voice of it to show where we had been.