The White Raven o-3

by Robert Low

  We did not speak for a while. I fell asleep, or lost my senses more like, for when I awoke, it was clear Crowbone had been busy and had adjusted his eyes to the gloom under here. The wind howled, the snow flurried in the cracks, but not so much now, which meant it was piling up on that side.

  Crowbone had stacked three bundles at the door he had clawed out, to stop the wind. As my eyes adjusted, I saw one of the sacks was split and rye spilled out.

  'Well,' I managed, 'we have grain and snow for water. If we had a fire we could make flatbread.'

  'If we had meat and gravy we could make a feast,' he answered, then grinned. 'But we have some old bread and even some strips of dried meat, so we will not starve. Do these storms last a long time, Jarl Orm?'

  I shrugged, which could have meant anything. I did not know, but thought it best not to admit that — for all his resource, little Olaf was still but nine years old and his voice quavered when he asked.

  I chewed and scooped snow to drink, plastered more on my aching leg and wished I could see how bad it was. That turd Martin had kicked me — but he had lost his shoe doing it. He was out there, surely dead by now I hoped he had frozen slowly, starting with his bare foot that he had used to take the skin off my shin.

  I remembered the bundle now and dragged it over. The sword cut I had parried had slashed the ties and the wadmal cloth hung in tatters, so I peeled it off. I half-expected to see Martin's Holy Spear, but it was my rune-marked sabre and I realized that the monk had stolen it as part of the package to sell to Sveinald — me and the rune blade, the secret of the silver hoard.

  Then I had to wonder at the Odin-marvel of getting it back.

  'That's the one you took from Atil's howe,' Crowbone said, peering at it. I turned it over in my hand, seeing the beautifully carved hilt and the runed scratches on it, how the blade gleamed even in this poor light, how it looked rainbow-slick as if oiled, the serpent of forged runes curling down the blade.

  'Is it magical?' he asked and reached out one finger to touch it. He stopped a knuckle-length away and drew his hand back. He looked at me. I wrapped the weapon up and it seemed even darker with it covered.

  We sat for a while longer as the storm swooped and swirled, savaging us through the knotholes in planks and rocking the upturned cart. Snow sifted in. My head hurt and little Olafs teeth clattered loudly.

  'Get closer if you are cold,' I said. There was silence but he did not move. Then he cleared his throat.

  'I pissed myself,' he chattered, his piping voice thick with the shame of his battle fear.

  'Never mind,' I grunted at him. 'It will be the last piss you ever take if you do not get closer, for it will freeze you to the marrow.'

  I felt him creep to me then, huddling in the lee of my arm, where we leached warmth from each other and trembled with cold in the fetid dark — but, in the confined space, with the cart wrapped in snow, it grew warm enough for the rime to melt and freeze into new and stranger shapes on the inside of the cart.

  He smelled faintly of piss and the shame came off him in waves, as like heat as made no difference to me.

  I watched the rime-shapes, slipping into sleep, knowing it and fighting it, for there is not a man from the north who does not know the cold that droops your eyes towards death.

  I was in the prow of the Elk as it curved andflexed over a great swell of cold sea, the spray flying. When I turned I saw old faces — the closest to me was Kalf, who had vanished over the side on my first-ever run to Birka, slapped overboard in a careless moment by sodden sails and gone in an eyeblink. He grinned at me and waved and I knew I must be dead and heading for Aegir's kingdom — though how I had ended up in that underwater hall when I had died on land was a puzzle.

  I turned back to stare beyond the prow for a clue to it, but the spume stung like an angry byke of bees, then a creature flew up in my face, a squid, or a jellyfish, straight on to my face, sucking and squelching. .

  'Leave off him. Good boy, well done — leave him, you hole.'

  Light blinded me, white and flickering with shapes. Something whuffed and panted and rasped my face with hot wetness.

  'Get off.'

  The deerhound yelped as Finn whacked it, then his great grinning face loomed over me and he chuckled.

  'He deserves a few kisses, all the same, Bear Slayer, since his nose has found you where nothing else could. Good trick, that cart business.'

  11

  'I was lucky, as Bjaelfi pointed out back in the shelter of the village, while he poked and prodded the back of my skull. There was a bruise between neck and shoulder the colour of Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Valholl, while my shin was scraped raw, but no bones were broken.

  I saw Kvasir look at me and shake his head with wry mirth. He knew I believed the sabre had powers to heal its owner and kept pointing out that nothing had happened to me that could not be put down to youth, strength and Odin-luck.

  I looked back at him and nodded, adding: 'Bone, blood and steel.'

  He acknowledged my thanks for the rescue with a dismissive flap of one hand, then tossed me an object, which I caught awkwardly. It was Martin's thick-ridged shoe.

  'We unearthed it from the snow, just outside the entrance you dug under the cart,' he said. 'Near where we found Thorkel.'

  I weighed the oxhide shoe, bouncing it in my hand and realizing how lucky I had been, for such a kick with one of these could have snapped my leg like a twig. I said so and Kvasir rubbed his good eye and shrugged.

  'Its owner perhaps had a hand in that good luck — or a foot,' he answered with a grim chuckle and nodded at the shoe when I looked at him with bewilderment.

  'Helshoon; he said and I blanched and carefully put the thing down, seeing now what it was. A Hel shoe, crafted for one wearing and one wearing only — on the feet of a man whose lack of mercy would take him to Hel's hall along a last road studded with thorns and across a river sharp with iron. With such thick-soled shoes he could avoid the pain of being sliced to shreds, an unwarranted kindness from those who had howed him up.

  'Aye,' growled Finn, coming up in time to catch this. 'Somewhere on the road to Hel, a hard-hearted man is cursing that monk for robbing his grave.'

  It would not have bothered Martin much, unearthing the dead he considered heathen to steal what he needed. Still, it marked how far Martin had sunk from the neat, fastidious Christ priest who had once argued gods with Illugi Godi in the polished hall of Birka's fortress.

  'The boy?' I asked and Finn grinned.

  'Piss-wet and a little cold. You saved his life.'

  'He saved mine,' I answered. 'The trick with the cart was his.'

  Finn raised both eyebrows and looked at me, which was enough speech on the matter, for he knew what I must be feeling, owing weregild to that boy for my life.

  What was I feeling, then? As if I had slithered into a mire. Sooner or later, little Crowbone would claim his due from me and it would not be cheap nor simple. There was worse to worry about now, all the same.

  'And the other. . body?' I asked, hoping against hope that it had somehow changed from what had been unearthed alongside Thorkel's corpse.

  'Still a woman, Trader,' grunted Finnlaith and we all turned to stare at the cloth-wrapped bundle, stiff with cold, that we had brought back from where Thorkel had killed it. Her. For a dizzying moment I heard her scream, saw the whirl of snow and the mad-mouthed frenzy of Thorkel, howling his hate and his blade on her before he died.

  'Oior-pata,' Tien had whispered when Ospak had cleared the snow from the woman's face. The little Bulgar had hunched into himself after that and would say nothing more. It was Avraham, the big red-haired Khazar, who had finally told us it was an old Skythian word meaning 'man-haters'.

  She was hacked bloody by Thorkel's mad rage, but enough was there to see the fine decorated clothing, the tattoos on her face made stark with her blood-drained pallor, the marks of old scars blue white on her cheeks, the hair gathered in braids and tied back, the way a fighting man doe
s.

  Young, too — but no thrall, nor a maid you would want to flirt with, as Jon Asanes pointed out when he and Silfra loaded her on the cart. She had a single boar's tooth on a leather loop round her neck and I did not doubt that she had killed it herself. Her palms, at the base of the frozen fingers, were callous hard and her thumbs muscled and ridged with hard flesh, the draw-ring still fitted to one.

  'Sword and steppe bow,' Finn pointed out. 'She is bowlegged, too — see. She spent more years on a horse than on her feet and those hands did not get like that making soup or skelping bairns.'

  But it was her head that bothered us all. Strange, stretched, sloping, it only accentuated the deep scars on either cheeks, too straight to be accidental. Men made signs against the evil eye; whispers of Nifelheim rose up like fumes from a swamp.

  'Dwarves?' scoffed Gyrth. 'Underground smiths? When did they become spear-headed women from the Great White who ride and fight like men?'

  It was Jon Asanes who knew it, even as the big Khazar, Avraham, muttered on and on about the Jewish sacred writings forbidding dealings with such unclean spirits.

  'Herodotus,' Jon said, bright with the light that had sparked up in his head.

  'Who?' growled Finn, trying to back the spare horse they had brought into the shafts of the cart, now turned back upright.

  'A Greek. He wrote of women like these back in the old days of Greek heroes. Amazonoi they were called — warrior women of the Skyth tribes. Herakles, the strongest man in the world, fought them once, long ago. I read it in a book in the monastery in Novgorod.'

  The fact that he had seen a book and even read it impressed most to silence for a moment and they stared, seeing the Greek youth in a new light.

  'They live still,' said Morut, the small, dark Khazar. 'They are part of one of the tribes of the Yass. .'

  'There is cherem on even the mention of this,' thundered Avraham but Morut, though he flushed a little, merely shrugged.

  'No matter of mine, cherem,' he said and Avraham stormed angrily off.

  'What is this cherem?' Gyrth asked.

  'A sort of decree,' Morut answered, 'that says you are no longer a follower of the Torah.'

  The Torah was their name for their sacred sagas. Breaking such a decree would mean Morut was no longer a Jew and I had met enough of such people — Khazars and Rhadanites both — in Birka to know that was the worst of punishments for them.

  The dark little Khazar shrugged again. 'I am a trapper and a hunter,' he said. 'Avraham is of the warrior caste, so he must be a Jew and embraced it properly, even to getting his foreskin cut as a boy. I did also — but now half my family are in the south and have probably become Mussulmen. I may go there too, so may become one myself, though it means forsaking green wine and ale, which is a hard thing.'

  Finn ranted and argued firmly on the foolishness of a religion which stopped you drinking, not to mention one which put a blade anywhere near your pizzle. I was storing away the knowledge that not all Khazars were Jews. Warriors and other high born were, but I found out later not even all of them. There were Khazars in the guard hird of the Great City who were baptized Christ-men.

  More importantly, here was the strangeness I had come across before and was bewildered by. How could you put on and remove a belief in the gods, as if it were no more than a clean cloak?

  Back in the village, I had more to worry about than that. After my head had been looked at, I met with Vladimir, Sigurd and Dobrynya in a quiet place, where we were joined by Crowbone. He and Vladimir went off into one corner, the latter clear in his delight that Olaf was safe.

  'Bone, blood and steel,' I offered dryly as the other two offered their congratulations on my safe return. 'That old oath of ours even brought my sword out, too.'

  Sigurd stiffened, for he knew I implied that he had only come after Crowbone, while Vladimir worried only about the sabre and how I could read a path from it to 'his' treasure. Only the Oathsworn had come after me alone, driven by the oath and the unveiling of that fact still left me dazed and shivering at the power in it — a power I had scorned and kicked against almost all my life, it seemed.

  Crowbone, on the other hand, smiled a knowing twist on to his face.

  'Right enough,' he said flatly, which could have meant anything, but Sigurd looked as if he would argue the point, then swallowed, admitting it even as the truth made him avoid my eyes.

  Then Vladimir clasped Crowbone by both wrists and they stared into each other's faces, like long-lost brothers and I felt a doubt about Vladimir wanting only the silver secret and the sword that guided me.

  I wondered, with a sudden sick lurch, if that boy was working some subtle seidr on the young prince. Even as I said the words: 'He is only nine' to myself, I could not rid myself of the suspicion. And now I owed him my life.

  'They were almost too late,' Dobrynya went on in his bass rumble. 'Tien says the buran came on more fierce and swift than any he has ever seen.'

  The buran, I had found out, was the name for these winter ice storms. Kvasir said that the rescue party had only survived it because Tien had insisted they pack his yurt, those little round steppe huts which seemed just a puzzle of saplings and acres offelt. Finn agreed, saying admiringly that the yurt was as stout as an Iceland steading.

  'Not just the buran was a danger,' growled Sigurd.

  'Yes,' I agreed. 'There is the woman.'

  Dobrynya tugged his beard into a two-tined fork and scowled. 'Tien says it is likely they were all women, all the ones who attacked. He says they are believers in the old ways, the old Hun ways, including some strange practices that stretch the heads of chosen children.'

  We were all silent with wonder and the thrill of disgust over that one, while Vladimir and Crowbone grew loud in their private corner, laughing over Crowbone's account of events. I gave odds on it including nothing about pissing himself.

  'These warrior women now belong to the Yass,' Dobrynya went on, 'though that tribe have little control over these women now. The Khazars ruled the Yass tribes and kept these Man-Haters from riding while they were a power, but now that we have broken the Khazars, it seems we have unleashed a horror on to the steppe.'

  'Why do they ride?' demanded Sigurd, frowning.

  'To stop us,' I said before Dobrynya could speak. I was sure of it, as sure as if someone had skeined the runes of it for me to read. 'To stop us reaching Atil's howe.'

  Dobrynya looked up through the grizzle of his eyebrows and grunted.

  'So Tien believes. He says the ancestors of these women were favourites of this Atil when he was a great chief of all the steppe tribes. Chosen, Tien says, because they amused him with their fierceness. In turn, they were his most loyal warriors, because it lifted them out of their womanly place.'

  'How did you not know of this?' Sigurd demanded of me. 'Did they not try to prevent you the first time you reached this tomb?'

  They had not and that was because they did not dare ride while the Khazars ruled. After all, these warrior women were the smallest part of one tribe of the Yass and the Khazars were a mighty empire at the time.

  I mentioned this — but kept other thoughts to myself. Like how they knew where the howe was. Later, Tien said he thought it likely that such knowledge was passed on to a chosen few. I said nothing and had my own thought on who had led them to the place; the last sight of Hild, black-eyed with hate as she hacked at me inside Atil's tomb, rose up from the grue of my memories, like a corpse from silt.

  'We have broken the steppe apart and now that Sviatoslav is also dead, there is no strong hand to stop these madwomen,' Dobrynya said.

  Sigurd carefully adjusted the press of his silver nose against the flesh of his face, for scowling made it hurt and he was doing a lot of that.

  'So we have a few women on horses who want to fight us as well as this Lambisson person ahead of us,' he growled. 'My lads are a match for all of them.'

  'Tien will go no further without a sword in his back,' Dobrynya pointed out and Sigurd wh
istled down his silver nose, which was what passed for a snort of derision from him.

  'We should stake the little turd for that — but what of it? We have other guides.'

  It was Tien's fear that mattered and I said so as Dobrynya nodded agreement. These Man-Haters may have been no more than a handful of good steppe light horse, but it was their strangeness, the sheer Other of having women shrieking down on you with bow and sword, that counted. Especially ones with stretched heads and blue marks all across their faces.

  The skjaldmeyjar — shield-maidens — were no strangers to us, but they were from the Old Time, when Thor and Odin walked the earth. Visma was one and Vebjorg another and there were more, who had led a considerable number of heroes during old King Bjarni's day if the fire-tales were true, and so must have been hard women.

  But that was then and this was now. While we admired a good woman who could take up weapons to defend what was hers, no man nowadays liked the idea of a woman who gave up hearth and homefire to stand in a shieldwall.

  So the rumours would spread; Tien's fear would spread. Men's bowels would turn to water by degrees and the magic of these women would grow at every conversation round a mean fire in the cold night.

  'We cannot turn back because of. . women!' Sigurd exploded and Dobrynya hushed him to silence, his eyes moving from him to me, grim and sharp as a nail to the palm.

  The Prince would not agree to that, certainly,' he said bitterly, glancing at me. 'You knew the power of this hoard, eh, Jarl Orm. You have seen it at work before on the hearts of men.'

  I nodded, which was all that was required. The sickness of it was plain to see, slathering little Vladimir like an invisible slick of poison, feeding him dreams of salvation and greatness.

  'Then we go on,' growled Dobrynya. Tor we have no choice and none of the gods seem to be listening to my pleas.'