Crowbone

by Robert Low

  It was the stripling, a thoughtful look on his face and Balle snarled and went to strike, but the axe seemed stuck to the ground. Then something flashed and there was a burning sensation in Balle’s throat, harsh and fierce enough for him to drop the axe and spin away. He did not want to touch his throat, was afraid to touch it, but thought to get away from the stripling for a moment, get his breath and then work out how to get back in the fight, for it had clearly gone awry.

  He could not hear properly and could not catch his breath and there was a terrible gargling, roaring sound; he found himself on the ground, felt a draining from him, like slow water falling, looked down at the huge bib of red that soaked his tunic.

  Never get the stains out of that, he thought. My mother will be furious …

  Crowbone stuck his seax in a patch of coarse sand once or twice, then wiped the rest of the throat-clot off it on Balle’s tunic sleeve, the only bit that was not already covered in the big man’s blood. He felt his left thigh start to twitch and hoped no-one had noticed either that or the fear-sweat that soaked him, stinging his eyes to blinking.

  No-one spoke, then the Burned Man walked up with Crowbone’s second spear, the one that he had thrown with his left hand, the one that had sliced open Balle’s belly so deftly that the axeman had scarcely even noticed it until he fell over his own insides. He handed it politely to Crowbone and smiled, unnervingly white, out of the great dead-black of his Hel face.

  ‘Am I leader here?’ asked Grima in his hoarse whisper. Men nodded and shuffled.

  ‘Am I leader?’ Grima roared and then they bellowed back that he was. Grima, the roar almost the last breath left in him, slumped back in the makeshift throne and whispered to Berto, who nodded and straightened.

  ‘I told Balle I would see his death before mine and so it is and I can let Asgard take me,’ Berto said and, for all his piping and thick accent, no-one doubted it was Grima’s voice. ‘Prince Olaf will be jarl. My silver is his. My ship is his. If you have any clever in you, you will follow him – but mark this. The Red Brothers die with me. You swear to him and the Oathsworn now.’

  Men looked at the so-called prince, a stripling digging his spear point into the sand to clean it. The giant with the hook-bitted axe, grinning, worked the other spear point from the shield, then handed the shield back to Mar.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘there is a fair wee peephole in it now. A good thick leather patch is needed – ask Onund if he has some left from fixing our steer oar. He is the man with the mountain on one shoulder. My name is Murrough macMael.’

  Mar looked thoughtfully at the finger-length gash and then nodded to Murrough.

  ‘I will leave it as it is,’ he answered blankly. ‘The breeze through it will be cooling in the next fight.’

  The tension hissed away from the beach. The ring-mailed throne-carriers picked up the chair with Grima in it and started back to the knarr; the Red Brothers began to go back in little knots to their fires, but the stripling cleared his throat and they stopped.

  He did not say anything, merely pointed – once, twice, picking two men. The third time was at the bloody remains of Balle. The men he pointed out hesitated for an eyeblink; Mar stepped in to that, scowling.

  ‘Pick him up,’ he said to the men. ‘He was a Christmann so we will bury him.’

  He looked at Crowbone. ‘Do you have a priest in your crew?’

  Crowbone eyed the man up and down, taking in the neat-chopped hair that came down round his ears only, the close-trimmed beard, the cool eyes the colour of a north sea on a raining day. The one, he noted, who had handed his shield to Balle with a look as good as a spit in the eye. A good friend to the Burned Man and the pair of them better on your side than against it. He smiled, for he felt good and the thigh-twitching had ended; he was alive, his enemy was dead and the triumph of it coursed through him like the fire of wine.

  ‘I am a priest,’ he said, ‘though a good Christ-follower would not think so. Better you say words over him, I am thinking. Better still, of course, if you kept him, for Grima will die tonight and he was no Christmann, I am sure. It would be good to lay this dog at his feet as he burns.’

  Mar blinked.

  ‘Is that your command?’ he asked and Olaf spread his empty hands in a light, easy gesture and said nothing at all.

  Mar nodded, satisfied; here was a follower of the old gods, but not one with his face set against the Christ as hard as he had heard the Oathsworn were. They lifted Balle and carried him away to be buried and Kaup stumbled out some Christ words, as many as he could remember.

  Afterwards, they dug him up again and brought him back to the driftwood pyre being prepared for Grima; Mar nodded to Olaf, who smiled at this cunning.

  Men came to the pyre, no matter which gods they followed, out of respect for Grima, and Crowbone watched them as Hoskuld, scowling at the cost, spilled expensive aromatic oil on to the driftwood. Crowbone saw which of them mourned, stricken, for Grima and which of them did him honour for what he had once been. There were others and he watched them closer still, the ones who hung at the back and shifted from one foot to the other, trying not to look at each other and make it obvious they were plotting.

  Grima burned, hissing and crackling, throwing shadows and lurid lights over the strand. Crowbone stepped into the blooded ring it made and held up his hands.

  ‘You are the Red Brothers of Grima,’ he said loudly. ‘You have travelled as one, fought as one. You have rules for this and I want to know them.’

  Men looked one to the other and Crowbone waited.

  ‘None may steal from another,’ said a voice and Crowbone knew who it would be, had already marked it and turned to where Mar was.

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Death,’ answered Mar. ‘Unless mercy is shown, but Grima was not a merciful man.’

  There were grunts and a few harsh laughs at the memory of what Grima had been. Mar folded his fingers, rule by rule, to mark them.

  ‘Equal shares for all. If a man loses a finger in battle, he gets an extra share, but if he loses two he gets no more shares, for one is a sad loss, but two is careless.’

  Orm would not have grown rich here, Crowbone thought, thinking of the three lost fingers on the Oathsworn jarl’s left hand.

  ‘If a man loses a hand, all the same, he gets a share for every finger and thumb on it, provided it was taken off with a single blow, for a hand removed by more than one blow shows the owner of it was not fighting well or hard enough.’

  Crowbone nodded, but said nothing. These were good rules and he would remember all of them, though they consisted mainly of what a man got for losing pieces of himself. Death gained him nothing, though it was expected that the jarl would pay weregild to any family, if they were ever found, out of his own wealth.

  ‘If one man kills another,’ Mar went on, ‘there is no crime, provided it puts no-one else in danger, or sends the ship off course. Another may claim the right to settle blood-feud on such killing, but if there is none to right such a wrong, then no wrong has been done. If a Brother insults, offends or otherwise does you injustice, you may kill him for it, unless he kills you first.’

  There were more, which were all the same matters, Crowbone noted – those with sharp edges and skill were in the right. Those with dull blades and fumbling were in the wrong.

  Mar stepped back respectfully, leaving the flame-dyed space to Crowbone and the lifting sparks that whirled Grima to Odin’s hall.

  ‘The Red Brothers die here. We are the Oathsworn,’ Crowbone said and it was clear he meant all of them assembled, not just the ones who had come with him on the knarr. ‘We have no such rules and need none, for we have an Oath. We will all take this Oath while Odin is close, watching Grima come to him as a hall-guest. Those who do not take it will leave at once, for if they are nearby and in sight come dawn, anyone may kill them.’

  He stopped and the fire hissed and the sea breathed.

  ‘Be sure of your mouth and your heart, where these words c
ome from,’ he said and suddenly did not seem a stripling any longer, seemed to have swelled so that his shadow was long and eldritch. There was flickering at the edges of vision and those who believed in such things tried not to look, for it was clear that the alfar were close and those creatures made a man uneasy.

  ‘Once taken, this Oath cannot be broken without bringing down the wrath of Odin,’ Crowbone went on. ‘You can take it as a Christmann and stay one if you can – but be aware that the Christ god will not save you from the anger of breaking this Oath. This has been tried before and those who did so found all the pain of their suffering a great regret.’

  ‘God will not be mocked,’ said a voice and Mar turned to see it was Ozur, one of Balle’s men. Langbrok – Long-Legs – they called him and Crowbone listened to all of what he had to say, patient as the man’s bile flew like froth. At the end of it, Ozur spat into the funeral fire. Men stirred and growled at this insult, even some Christ worshippers who were friends of Grima; if they did not agree with a pagan burning, they at least wanted to do him honour.

  Mar sighed. It would be Ozur, of course, who was hotter for the Christ than this funeral fire and now those who had followed Balle were at his back, uneasy that they were now in the few and not the many.

  ‘I will not foul my mouth with such a heathen thing as your oath,’ declared Ozur finally, then stared round the rest of the faces. ‘Neither should you all. It is a bad thing, even for you idol-worshipping scum.’

  Eyes narrowed, for few men had liked Ozur anyway and none of the Thor and Odinsmen here cared for his tone. Yet there was a shifting, from one foot to the other, like a nervous flock on the point of bolting and Mar heaved another sigh; there had been enough blood and upset. The Red Brothers were gone for sure and nothing was left but for each to go his own way – or become Oathsworn. It wasn’t as if men like them had much of a choice, after all.

  He said as much, marvelling at the faces turning to listen to him. Ozur scowled. Crowbone cocked his head like a curious bird and marked Mar with a smile; he liked the man, saw the pure gold of him and how he could be worn like an adornment for a prince.

  ‘You also are a pagan,’ Ozur spat back at Mar. ‘God alone knows what you and that burned devil you keep so close to you get up to, but it does not surprise me that you will take something as foul as this oath into your mouth.’

  Rage sluiced over Mar and he was already curling his fingers into fists and looking for a hilt when there was a wet chopping sound and men were spilling away from where Ozur had stood. Now there were two figures, one on the ground and, as Crowbone and the others watched in amazement, Kaup – stripped naked and no more than a shadow in the shadows so that his eyes were the palest thing to be seen of him – heaved up the body of Ozur after plucking his knife from the man’s throat. He took three steps and threw it on to the pyre. Sparks flew.

  ‘This Ozur child should have paid more heed to the fact that I was not so close to Mar tonight,’ said Kaup in his thick, low, smile of a voice. Then he jerked his head at the pyre and Crowbone.

  ‘Now he goes to the feet of Grima. Say your oath, for I have a mind to take it.’

  Crowbone recovered himself, blinked away the shock and surprise of what had happened and looked at Kaup.

  ‘That was the last such killing you will do among oathed crewmates,’ he said, ‘once you have spoken the Oath from your heart.’

  He and Kaup stared at one another for a long moment and, in the end, the Nubian nodded. Crowbone said the words of the Oath and Kaup repeated them, then crossed himself, as if to clean off a stain and went to find his clothes. Slowly, in ones and twos, men stepped forward into the pyre light and intoned the Oath.

  We swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel, on Gungnir, Odin’s spear we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.

  Crowbone stood and listened to them, the stink of oil and burning flesh circling him like a lover’s arms. There was a sudden sharp moment of heimthra, of longing for that which was gone; Orm’s Hestreng, where the jarl had tried so hard to bring the Oathsworn to rest, and failed, for they were raiding men, not farmers. There would be new grass in the valley there, unfolding leaves making tender shadows. There would be a sheen on the fjord and the screams of terns, swooping on everyone who came too close to their carelessly-laid eggs. It was a good jarl’s hall and Crowbone had envied Orm for it.

  Crowbone wanted that. He wanted that and more of the same, with the great naust, the boatsheds, that went with it, huge lattice-works of wood as elegant as any Christ cathedral and, in them, the great ships and all around them the iron men to go in them. Ships and men enough to make a kingdom.

  Why have the Norns brought me here, to this beach, Crowbone wondered, binding the thread of my life into the frayed remains of Grima? My greatness is lifted up by the last act of the jarl of the Red Brothers, as sure a sign of Odin watching over me as a one-eyed face appearing in the blue sky.

  He brooded on that the rest of that long night and into the dawn, while men moved to fires and left the pyre to collapse into ash and sparks, hushed and reverent and awed by everything that had happened, swift as a stooping hawk, on this dark and lonely beach.

  In the morning, they howed Grima’s ashes up in a decent little mound, marked out with light-coloured stones plundered from the shingle and circled in the shape of a boat to show a man from the vik lay here. Then they packed up their sea-chests and started to board the two ships.

  Crowbone, last to leave, turned to look at the stone-ringed mound of Grima’s howe, a fresh scab just above the tideline, as far removed from the north mountains as you could get. Crowbone wondered if his fetch would be content with that.

  He walked away, feeling the unseen eyes on his back from under that boat-grave, thinking on a band of sworn-brothers and the wyrd of their last leader, old, alone and dying on a distant shore.

  FOUR

  The Frisian coast, a day’s sail later …

  CROWBONE’S CREW

  ONLY the Norse do not fear the dark on the open sea. At least, so any who travel on the whale road tell folk. The truth is that only the whales do not fear the night sea – but men from the north sail it anyway, when the likes of Greeks and Englisc and Saxlanders and Franks give in and snag their ship close to the shore with ropes.

  Grima’s gift-ship was called Skuggi and it well-matched the name, Crowbone thought, for it was pitch-tarred all over the hull so that the wood was as black as if it had been burned, though streaked with salt and gull shit here and there. Skuggi meant shadow to most people, but northmen took more from the name, to them it spoke of an ominous shade, a spectre.

  The sail did not make the ship or name sweeter, for when it was hauled up it was the colour of old blood. Crowbone was well content, all the same, for this was a proper drakkar of twenty oars a side – old, Onund said, and stiff with new wood here and there, but sound.

  Fast, too – they had to leash the Shadow so that Hoskuld’s panting Swift-Gliding could keep pace. Crowbone had left Rovald and Kaetilmund on board the knarr, just to make sure the new steering oar kept Hoskuld on the same course; he needed Hoskuld yet, to point out this Drostan to him when they found him, but the trader was more reluctant and scowling than ever since Berto had whacked him with an axe handle, ruining his attempt to be the figure of a warrior.

  They had a long, good sail that day. Crowbone had confirmed men in their old standings, so that the Shadow’s shipmaster was still Tjorvir Asmundsson, who was called Stikublig. Stick-Starer was an apt by-name for him, since he spent a lot of time throwing little wood chips over the side and watching intently to judge the speed, the better to work out where they were.

  Crowbone was content; with the men working at familiar things it seemed little had changed save for the jarl standing next to the steersman and a few new faces. Mar and Kaup and some others knew that everything had changed but, by the time they ran up on a quiet shore, the crew seemed happier
than they had been at the start of the day.

  Fires were lit and food cooked; Kaup surprised Crowbone and others by making something tastier than they could have done themselves from little twisted packets of herbs and spices he had hidden round himself in various places. The crew who knew him well chuckled at the delight on the new faces.

  After they had finished eating, in the thin light before sunset, Crowbone sat with Onund and Murrough, waving Mar and Kaup, the Burned Man, to join them.

  ‘How is it with them?’ he asked Mar and the man knew at once what Crowbone meant.

  ‘They sit a little apart from your Gardariki men,’ he said, ‘though that will change over time. Most of the men here are new and have not seen what men who were with Grima for a long time have seen. Those ones are easier in their minds – though no-one is yet comfortable with the Oath they swore.’

  ‘You?’ asked Crowbone and Mar nodded. His questioning eyes at Kaup got him back a nod and a grin like the flash of a magpie wing. Crowbone was silent for a time.

  ‘I hope Grima’s fetch will be content where we put him,’ he said eventually, ‘in a land far removed from the north mountains.’

  Mar looked at Crowbone curiously.

  ‘It is as fitting an end for a Red Brother as any,’ he answered then, to Crowbone’s surprise, smiled sweetness into his face. ‘Do you know how that band got their name?’

  That band, he had said and Crowbone marked it. They were already gone, the Red Brothers, sliding into the grey haar of yesterday, the Oathsworn stepping into their worn boots. Crowbone shook his head and waited to hear how the Red Brothers were so called; such a blood-dyed name must have a good tale behind it.