The White Raven o-3

by Robert Low

  The Great White, Tien called it and he should know, being a Bulgar from the Itil River, which Slavs call Volga. Vladimir had brought him, along with some Khazars as guides and his name, he told.us with a grin, meant nothing. It was a good joke for it was true — tien was the name of a small coin, a trifle in the language of his tribe, the Eksel.

  'I will trade you my fine name,' moaned Pai when he heard this, 'for your hat and coat.'

  Tien laughed with fine, strong teeth. He wore a cone-shaped fur hat with flaps right down over his ears, a long sable coat belted at the waist with a sash and long fur boots, all of which were eyed enviously. In the sash, though, Tien had a curved dagger in a sheath and his hand was never far from it — particularly when the Khazars were close.

  Sviatoslav had broken the power of the Khazars before he died and the tribes of the Bulgars, once dominated by the Khazars, were now free — nothing marked this more than Tien, who had gone back to the old ways of the Eksel, even to calculating the seasons and the years. It was a deliberate heathen insult to the Khazar Jews.

  'This is the Time Of Small Frosts, in the second year of the Hedgepig,' he told us on the last night of our first week in the steppe, the oval of his face flickered by firelight. The camp was so sunk that no-one wanted to go far from it for private business, for you could not see it a hundred steps away, save for blue smoke in the last hour of evening — at night, even the red glow vanished.

  'Small frosts?' grunted Gyrth. 'Any larger and Finn's other ear will drop off.'

  Finn, who did not like mention of his missing ear, scowled and there were chuckles at Gyrth getting the better of him for once — but not many and not for long. The cold seeped into bones, even round the fire, so that your face and toes were warm but your back was numbed. It sucked away even the desire to laugh.

  Tien shrugged. 'It has been colder,' he said and looked across to where the Khazars sat, stolidly listening and saying nothing.

  He graciously accepted a refill from Kvasir's horn — green wine, I knew, cold as a whore's heart and which burned satisfyingly in your belly — and smacked his lips. Finn gave a sharp grunt of annoyance as Kvasir's shivering spilled some while pouring, for he loved that green wine and there was precious little of it with us.

  'There was a time,' Tien went on, 'when we fought the Khazars, even as we were part of the Khazar nation and even when no-one else dared.'

  The Khazars stayed quiet, though their eyes were chips of blue ice in the firelight. Red haired and blue eyed were the Khazar Jews, while the little Eksel Bulgar was dark as an underground dwarf — which he may well have been, as Jon pointed out, for he knew more than any other Greek about the Old Norse.

  'Alas,' said Tien, 'we were forced to flee, for I was a boy then and, clearly if I had been a full fighting man, we would have won. We went north and more north still and winter came.'

  He swallowed and we waited. He smacked his lips and grinned, his eyes drink-bright in the firelight. 'That was when the green wine poured like honey, thick and slow,' he said, almost dreamily, 'so cold it was. When trees exploded with a crack and shot blue fire when they fell. When first I saw the whisper of stars.'

  'What?' we demanded.

  'The whisper of stars,' he repeated and blew out his breath in a long stream of vanishing grey. 'When you speak, the very breath in your body turns the words to ice and they fall to the ground with the sound of a whisper,' he explained.

  There was silence, then a snort from Avraham, one of the Khazars, a big man with a bigger scowl and the haughtiness of a man who thought well of himself.

  'Your stories are like your name, little man,' he said. 'But, as you say, you fled there having been beaten by us, so perhaps grief and shame clouded your boyish memories.'

  'Once Kiev paid you scat, of a sword and a squirrel skin for every home,' Tien answered smartly, 'but Kiev came and destroyed you, which is clearly the will of Senmerv, Mother Goddess. Nothing will cloud my memory of Itil burning.'

  Avraham half-raised himself, but was stopped by the smaller one, Morut. 'Bolgary, too, if I remember,' he said softly and Tien acknowledged, with a slight nod, that Sviatoslav had torched his people's capital city as well.

  Avraham waved a deprecating hand and added: 'Which is what comes from worshipping a woman. The maker of heaven and earth must, of his nature, be male, otherwise the creator would be female. Which is absurd since, all over the world we know, the female is subject to the male. How, then, can it be different in heaven?'

  There was a derisive snort from the other side of the fire and some, recognizing Thorgunna, chuckled.

  Oior pata,' said Tien and both the Khazar Jews stiffened.

  'We do not speak of them,' Avraham replied flatly.

  'What is it?' demanded Jon Asanes curiously. 'Is it the name of a Jewish goddess?'

  Avraham grunted and glared back at Jon, with little courtesy. 'If I thought you genuinely sought the truth, I would enlighten you,' he declared. 'Yet, afterwards, you will still worship those evil, heathen spirits of the North, unconvinced.'

  'I am a Christian,' Jon answered indignantly, but Avraham curled a lip.

  'Only the Jews, the Chosen People of God, have been granted the true insight into the nature of the creator,' he said stiffly.

  'That did not help you much against Sviatoslav and the gods of the Slavs,' growled Finn and the Khazar scowled.

  'We are the people of exile,' he commented bitterly. 'The world lines up to scatter us every time we gain a country of our own, paying scat to no man. They envy us for being the Chosen of God.'

  'More likely they wanted to be rid of paying scat of their own,' I offered him back. 'The Romans, for one, will help one people one day and another against you the next.'

  'They are Christian,' Avraham noted with a scowl, shooting a glance at Jon. 'They hate us.'

  'What does he mean?' Finn wanted to know and Jon shrugged.

  'The Jews killed Jesus,' he answered. 'Everyone knows that.'

  'Truly?' enthused Finn, turning to Avraham. 'You killed this White Christ? You are the torturers of the Tortured God?'

  'No,' replied Avraham, defiantly sullen. 'The Romans did, but now they follow the Christ ways and blame us for it.' Finn sat back, his delight at what he had learned tempered.

  He shook his head, sorrowful and bemused.

  'Even dead this white-livered Christ certainly knows how to cause trouble in an empty room,' he declared and Jon shot him an angry look.

  'Still — it was no Christ-follower who warred on the Khazar and Bulgar,' I offered and there was silence at that as folk remembered Sviatoslav, great Prince of Kiev.

  'Idu na vy,' said Tien sadly and everyone fell silent. Idu na vy — I am coming against you — was what Sviatoslav had sent as his last message to those he planned to conquer. Now he, too, was gone and the steppe was unleashed. Avraham scowled at the memory.

  'Will they fight each other?' Jon asked softly and I shrugged. Tien said nothing for a moment, while we all watched with interest — it was nothing to us if they snarled at each other like dungheap dogs.

  'We will see how cold it gets,' the little Bulgar said at last in his halting, thick-accented Norse. 'I can read the signs. If we stay this far north in the Great White you will see the green wine turn to syrup.'

  'Well,' grunted Gyrth, looking like a mangy bear woken too early from winter-sleep, 'we had better drink it all then before such a tragedy happens.'

  Finn toasted him, then thrust his drinking horn at Thordis, who looked at him steadily, then accepted it and drank. 'Move closer,' Finn ordered her, 'and find warmth.'

  'That's an old trick,' Thordis replied flatly.

  'No trick,' said Finn. 'You are cold. I am cold. I owe you heat, at least, as weregild.'

  Her eyes widened, for it was the first time that such had been mentioned, though the fact of it had hung between us all like a blade — her husband had died because raiders came looking for the Oathsworn, after all, yet the same Oathsworn had risked their
lives to rescue her from slavery. It would take a lot of waggling grey beards to law-speak that one out at a Ting.

  Thorgunna nudged her sister pointedly and she moved up the fire a way and into the lee of Finn's body. He grunted, satisfied.

  'Well,' declared Kvasir, beaming round, 'here we all are, warm and fed and heading for riches. Life could be worse.'

  'As the swallow said,' answered a familiar, lilting voice from the darkness. Olaf stepped in, the elkhound padding after him to the fire, while all the eyes watched him and only Thorgunna's were warm.

  'What swallow?' demanded Jon and Crowbone, so pale his lips and cheeks were blood-red, gathered the great swathe of fur-trimmed white wool round him and sat down at Thorgunna's feet, while she dreamily took off his white wool cap and began to comb his lengthening yellow hair.

  'There was a swallow who ignored winter,' Olaf said and everyone grunted and shifted to be more comfortable, for though he unnerved them, they liked his stories.

  'Let's call it Kvasir,' he added and people chuckled. Kvasir raised his wooden cup across the fire to the little prince.

  'So Kvasir-Swallow dipped and swooped and enjoyed himself all summer and well into the russet days, when all his friends and brothers and sisters told him they were leaving to be warm elsewhere, before the snows came.

  'But Kvasir-Swallow was having too much fun and ignored them, so they left without him. And he continued to swoop and dip, though it grew colder and he caught less to eat with his swooping.

  'Then, one day, it was so cold he knew he had made a mistake. "I must fly hard and fast and catch up with my brothers and sisters and friends," he said to himself. So he did, but it was too late. Blizzards came and howled down on him, flinging him this way and that and far, far off course. .'

  'Sounds like every journey in the Elk,' growled Klepp Spaki, who had discovered he hated the sea. People shushed him and Olaf went on.

  'Half freezing, he flew on and on, then the snowstorms blew harder than ever until his wings froze entire and he tumbled, beak over tail, down from the sky.'

  He paused, for he had a feel for such things — he was never nine, that boy.

  'What happened?' demanded an impatient Jon, leaning forward.

  'He died, of course,' growled Finn, which brought some belly laughs, for that was an old tale-telling trick.

  Olaf, grinning, said: 'He would have — but he fell into the biggest, fattest, freshest heap of dung just shat by a grain-fed milk cow in the farm that lay under his flight. The heat of it thawed him. In fact, it made him realize what a narrow escape he had just had, so he fluttered about and sang loudly about how lucky he was — at which point the farm dog heard it, came out, sniffed and ate him in one gulp.'

  There was silence and into it, looking round the stunned faces, Olaf smiled.

  'So it is clear,' he said slowly. 'If you end up in the shite and are warm, happy and safe — keep your beak shut and stay quiet, for worse will happen.'

  We laughed long at that one, for it was a fine tale, well told and made us forget the keen edge of winter for those moments. Though, as Kvasir said when he had stopped laughing, it was no good omen to hear your name spoken in such a way. Olaf merely smiled, as if he knew more he was not saying and moved quietly to me when we were alone.

  'There are men to be watched,' he said, unblinking serious. 'Klerkon's old crew — especially the one called Kveldulf.'

  I knew Crowbone had some reason for hating this Kveldulf but, even so, his warnings made sense — the men from the Dragon Wings kept to their own fires and, more often than not, Martin sat with them. This had suited me, since his company was not one I cared for, but now Crowbone's warning made me uneasy.

  Yet, I was thinking, what could they do? Out in this cold, we lived or died by what we did together; no-one would survive long alone.

  This was proved the next morning, when we found two good horses dead from that cold, solid as stones, their eyes open and frosted and their hides too hard even to flay off them for the leather.

  We trudged on, slithering and sliding across frozen grass, the snow blown into drifts and frozen-crusted on top, cloud soft beneath. One day followed the next and more horses died, all the ones too fine for the steppe and mostly ridden by the druzhina warriors. Then it was the turn of people to suffer.

  Four of the hunter-scouts Vladimir had hired — all Klerkon's men — came to Bjaelfi Healer after being out on the steppe on their own, showing him their blackened toes and one the tip of his nose.

  Onund Hnufa knew what it was at once and told them. 'The cold rots the flesh. When it turns black it is dead and such will spread. The only cure is to have it lopped off and quick.'

  The least hurt was the big, strong, dangerous Kveldulf, who submitted to having the ends of three toes nipped. Two of the others, however, died of the cure the next day, for Bjaelfi had to take a foot from one of them and most of all the toes from another. Before he died, the toeless one revealed that he had seen the smoke of fires, no more than a day's journey to the west — for a man with two good legs, he added mournfully.

  The last one, with most of his nose removed — and part of the tip of an ear — told us nothing at all, but moaned and wept about his plight.

  Onund was hard on him. 'You should have spent more on fur and less on fucking,' he growled. 'At least you had the sense of a pair of good wool socks. Those others had bare feet in their boots.'

  'You should have spent Orm's money wisely,' Gyrth added, stamping his warmly-booted feet. The others of Klerkon's crew looked grimly and pointedly at one another and I marked it — though the village we came on next day was such a welcome sight that it made me forget. Again.

  The Rus called them goradichtches and I thought it was the name of the place at first, but it turned out only to be their name for villages. In summer, it would have been a pretty place, snuggled up to the banks of a river, which flowed quietly and dreamily between two rows of gently sloping hills, clumped with lush, tall willows. Now the trees were skeletal and the river marked only as a glittering ribbon between the faint snow-blown squares of fields and meadows.

  On the far side of the river was a vast flat plain_ that glittered, studded with the tufted spears that told us this was marsh in summer. In the distance, a faint haze of blue hinted at ground higher than the rolling steppe.

  There were no fences, only rows of willows to mark boundaries around this place and the snow piled deep at the base of a sea of those trees, which sheltered the fields. In summer, they would be orchards, fields of hemp and sunflowers, grain and, in the fringes of the marsh, thick-growing sedge. Now they were just clumps of stiffened tawny grass across which the snow blew.

  The village was an earthwork circle with a huddle of houses, hunched low to the ground to fool the winter snow and the summer heat. The gaps between the houses were lined with tall willows that seemed to have been planted there on purpose, but the big Khazar said they were willow fence poles which had taken root, for this was the rich lands of the south, where you could stick a stripped pole in the ground and it would sprout.

  A high tower dripped with ice and held a bell and there was a brewhouse and a brace of forges, for these Polianians were noted for sword-making and made most of their trade in blades. The place had been well fortified against the Khazars when they were a power and now there were new and uncertain dangers with the death of the Great Prince of Kiev.

  As we rode up, the bell rang out and the place seethed. Women shrieked and children burst into tears because their mothers were crying and their fathers were shouting.

  Sigurd rode forward and called out to them, which was not, perhaps, the cleverest move with his silver nose. Where it touched his face, the cold had turned the flesh as purple as an emperor's robe and if it had been me I would have kept the gates shut on him, for he looked blue-black as a dead man.

  But they were Polianians and knew of Sigurd Axebitten, so eventually, the gates opened and we rode in — though the wailing had not stopped
and the headman, his face as blank as the white steppe, stood with his hat in his hands as we slid misery through his gates.

  He was old, lean and tall, with a pale, worn-out face, a long greyish moustache and eyes sorrowed as a whipped dog. Deep furrows scarred his cheeks and forehead, his rough hands and the wrinkled back of his neck. The skin on his fingers and palms was cracked and creased as if burned by fire. There were thralls who looked better than he did.

  Kovach he called himself and Malkyiv he called the place — Little Fortress, I worked it out as, though I could have been wrong — and he had a right to look sorrowful, for a Prince had arrived with too many men and even more animals and that was worse than steppe raiders. Those he could have fought, at least, before they burst in to demand the winter stores.

  Our men were quartered under every roof, elbowing for floor space, shoving aside livestock and considering themselves lucky to be in such warmth. The Oathsworn had two storehouses — conspicuously empty — and piled in, dumping gear and setting fires while the stolid-faced locals came and offered what service they could.

  As they did so, I stumped across to the headman's own hut, where the prince had naturally taken himself and as many of his retinue as could be crammed in.

  'Four days from Kiev,' Dobrynya said softly, pointing to the chart as he and Vladimir and Sigurd and myself huddled together at one end of the but to plan what to do next. Which, as Vladimir would have it, was simple enough and he laid it out for us, pointing at the chart with his little bone-handled dagger — we go on, swiftly.

  'We should stay here,' Sigurd argued, which was sense. Getting this far had taken three times as long as it would have in summer, floating downriver to Kiev. But, of course, we could not go to Kiev; even four days east was too close to Vladimir's smart brother, Jaropolk and the two men I least wanted to meet — Sveinald and his face-ruined son.

  'We will gather what fodder and supplies we can take from here,' the little prince said in his piping voice, 'and head to the Don. Tomorrow, or the day after, but no later than that.'