by Robert Low
‘Well, now we are off to a fine beginning for two folk who are not merchants,’ I answered, ‘for we are trading insults well enough. It is not Bluemouth, but Bluetooth, though I am thinking you know this.’
His eyes flicked a little, but he kept his lips tight as a line of stitching.
‘You are right to call us Ascomanni – Ashmen – for we are northers with good ash spears,’ I went on into the stone of his face, ‘but we are not Bluetooth’s Danes. At least, not the ones you know of, from Joms, for they are mostly Wends of no account, but I am thinking you know this, too. We are mostly Svears and a few Slavs from further east and north, whom the Serkland Arabs call Rus, but I am not expecting you to know that. Perhaps a Dzhadoshanie or an Opolanie would have known that – even one of the Lupiglaa – but I make allowances for the wit-lack of the Slenzanie.’
I had been listening well at Joms, too. Two red spots appeared on Kasperick’s cheeks at this and there was a sucking in of breath from the ghosts who listened and watched in the dimness at the mention of the other, rival, tribes of the Silesians.
Kasperick controlled himself with an effort, though the smile started to tremble a little. He drank to cover himself and took a breath or two.
‘No matter who you are,’ he said after a moment or two and waved a dismissive hand, ‘you all appear the same to me, you Northmen. It is what you carry on your ship that matters.’
‘Ah, you still have your merchant hat on, I see,’ I replied and then spread my hands in apology. ‘I suspect some folk from downriver have tried to mire our good name, but they are mean-mouthed nithings. We have nothing much more than some wadmal and a few furs. Hardly worth your time. Besides – I have handseled a deal on that.’
‘You have the Mazur girl,’ he answered, his voice like a slap.
Finn growled and I took a breath. How had he known that? My thoughts whirled up like leaves in a djinn of wind.
‘Slaves?’ I managed to answer. ‘One slave? She is thin and you have, I am thinking, plumper girls closer to hand.’
‘I like Mazur ones,’ he replied, enjoying himself now he had set us back on our heels. Oiled smooth as a Greek beard he was now and Finn’s scowl revealed how he did not care for it much.
‘To a man used to Slenzanie women, I suppose she would be sweet,’ he grunted. ‘They all smell of fish, though they are never near the sea.’
The red spots reappeared and Kasperick leaned forward, his eyes narrowed and his fingers steepled.
‘You are the one called Finn,’ he said, ‘who fears nothing. We will see about that.’
Now how had he known that? A suspicion trailed fingers across my thoughts, but Finn was curling his lip in a sneer, which distracted me.
‘The Mazur girl,’ I said hastily, before Finn spat out a curse at him, ‘is not a slave and good Christmenn do not enslave the free, or so I had heard.’
I nodded at the cross peeping shyly out from above the neck of his tunic and he glanced down and frowned.
‘This? I took this from a Sorb, one of a band I had to deal with. You probably saw them on the way in, safely caged. I am a Christ follower but not one of these Greeks, who can all argue that God does not exist save in Constantinople.’
I stopped, chilled, as he brought it out and waved it scornfully – the Christ cross was a fat Greek one, plain dark wood with a cunning design of the Tortured God on it worked in little coloured tiles; I had seen it before, but not round Kasperick’s plump neck.
‘You are Christ-sworn yourself,’ he went on, smirking, ‘and I suspect this Mazur girl is not. So passing her to me is no sin.’
It was my turn to look down and frown. He had seen the little cross on a thong hanging on my breastbone.
‘This? I had this from the first man I ever killed,’ I told him, which was the truth – though it was truer to say the man had been a boy. I had been fifteen when I did it.
‘That other trinket that looks like a cross is a good Thor Hammer,’ I added. ‘There is another, the valknut, which is an Odin sign.’
Kasperick frowned. ‘I had heard you were baptised.’
I shook my head and smiled apologetically, more sure than ever about who had been whispering in Kasperick’s ear.
‘If your God is willing to prevent evil but not able then he is not all-wise and all-seeing, as gods are supposed to be,’ I told him. ‘If he is able but not willing, then he is more vicious than a rat in a barrel. If he is both able and willing, then from where comes all the evil your priests rave about? If he is neither able nor willing, then why call him a god?’
‘So,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘A follower of Thor? Odin? Some other dirty-handed little farmer god of the Wends, one with four faces? No matter – they will help you here no better than the Sorbs I caged outside, no matter how clever your words.’
‘I thought those Sorbs were good Christmenn,’ I answered, trying to think clearly as I spoke. ‘Like you.’
‘I took this cross from them, as they took it from a Greek priest they sold. They used the money to get drunk and once drunk they killed a man. So there is the Lord at work – even if it was only a Greek priest he worked through.’
I blinked with the thunderbolt of it, a strike as hard as Thor’s own Hammer. I had been right about the cross, then.
‘Did this Greek priest have a boy with him?’ I asked. ‘A Northerner – a Dane.’
Kasperick, bewildered at the way this conversation had suddenly darted off the path, waved an irritated hand.
‘They sold them both to another of your sort. He was going upriver.’
Upriver. A slave dealer going upriver and buying a Greek monk and a boy. The chill in me settled like winter haar.
‘The dealer,’ I asked. ‘Did he have marks on him, blue marks? A beard like a badger’s arse?’
The conversation was now a little dog which would not come to heel and Kasperick was scowling a leash at it.
‘There was such a man,’ he hissed, ‘but enough of this. Fetch the girl and be done with it, for you have no choice in the matter.’
Randr Sterki had Leo and Koll and one swift glance sideways let me know that Finn and Crowbone had realised it, too. So did Red Njal, who had been strange since Hlenni’s death and was now starting to tremble at the edges, the way wolf-coats do when the killing rage comes on.
‘Red Njal,’ I said sharply and he blinked and shook himself like a dog coming out of water. Kasperick, wary and angry as a wet cat, lifted a hand and men appeared, leather-armoured, carrying spears and bulking out the light. Finn, who hated Saxlanders, curled his lip at them.
‘Step out and go and fetch the Mazur girl,’ I told Red Njal and he looked at me, then at Kasperick and grinned, nodded and hirpled away on his bad leg. I settled on the bench, waiting and Crowbone cocked his head sideways, like a bird and stared curiously at Kasperick.
‘What?’ demanded Kasperick, suspicious and scowling, but Crowbone merely shrugged.
‘Once,’ he said, ‘a long time gone – don’t ask me when – up in Dovrefell in the north of Norway, there was a troll.’
‘This will pass the time until folk return with my Mazur girl,’ Kasperick announced pointedly and there was a dutiful murmur of laughter from the dim figures behind him. Crowbone waggled his head from side to side.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘perhaps not. This is not a long tale, for this troll was famous for two things – he was noted for his ugliness, even by other trolls and that fame was outstripped only by his stupidity. One day, he found a piece of bread in a cleft in the rock and was delighted, for food is scarce for trolls in Dovrefell. So he gripped it tight – then found he could not get his fist out unless he let the crust go. He thought about it a long time, but there was no way round it – he had to let go, or stay where he was and he could not make up his mind. For all I know, he is there yet, with a fistful of stale crumbs, but determined never to let go.’
‘Trolls are notorious fools,’ Kasperick agreed sourly.
‘A man
should always know when to let go of something he cannot hang on to,’ Crowbone countered blankly.
In only minutes, it seemed, someone pounded breathlessly in and hurled himself to the ear of Kasperick, whispering furiously. The red spots flared and Kasperick leaped up.
‘Only a troll tries to hang on to what is beyond his grasp,’ Crowbone announced and Kasperick bellowed as the ox-shouldered guards dragged Red Njal back in and flung him to us; there was blood on his beard and on his teeth, but his grin let us know Short Serpent was safe away.
‘The bigger the bairn, the bigger the burden,’ he said, then spat blood at Kasperick.
‘As my granny used to say,’ he added.
Kasperick, his face a snarl, snapped an order and the oxen Saxlander guards lumbered towards us. From the dimness, one of the ghosts gained shape, sliding forward onto the bench opposite and grinning at me as hands ripped our weapons from us.
Now I knew how Kasperick had heard so much of us. That face, with no grin on it at all, I had last seen on the hard-packed floor of Hestreng, where the hot iron that had seared the ugly scar across it and blistered one eye to a puckered hole, had started a fire on his chest. I had put it out and left him.
‘Bjarki,’ I said into his weasel smile. ‘I should have let you burn.’
FIFTEEN
The place stank like a blot stone, all offal and roasted meat and was not much of a prison, just a large cage in an old storeroom strewn with stinking straw, the bars made from thick balks of timber reinforced with iron.
The cage was up against one wall of this stone room, part of the lower foundations of the keep and once an underground store for the kitchens, for the stone walls were cold. Now the place was hung with chains and metal cuffs, dark with stains and leprous from the heat of the brazier. There were two thick-barred squares to let in light and circling air but they did not do much work on either.
The Saxlanders flung us into the cage and one locked the door with a huge key, his tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on getting it right. They had taken away everything of value and left our weapons on a nearby table where we could see them, but not get to them.
When they were gone, leaving us alone in the half-light, a grinning Finn fished in one boot and brought out his long, black Roman nail.
‘If those Saxlanders had any clever in them,’ he said, grinning, ‘it was well hidden. Unlike my nail, which they should have found even if they were looking for my money – boots, balls and armpits, as any raiding man knows.’
He went to the lock and discovered, in short order and at the cost of a bloody finger, that this prison was no little chest of treasures with a dainty lock that could be snapped. The one penning us in was huge and solid and would not be cracked open with a Roman nail, which was also too thick to use as a pick.
‘That Bjarki,’ Finn growled, sucking the grimy, bleeding finger as if that man had done it to him personally. He shoved the nail back in his boot.
‘This is not much of a prison,’ Crowbone mused, looking round. It was not, as I agreed, but it was enough of one for me; what bothered me most were the wall chains and cuffs, the glowing brazier and the thick, scarred wooden table littered with tools I did not think belonged to a forge-man, though some of them were similar.
‘I did not like the look of that Kasperick at all,’ Red Njal grunted. ‘He has the eyes of one who likes to see blood spilled, provided it is not his own and there is no danger in it. A man who, as my granny used to say, prefers to build the lowest fences, since it is easiest for him to cross.’
‘Well,’ said Finn, settling down with his back to one wall, ‘we will find out soon enough.’
I did not like the idea and was envious – not for the first time – of how he could sit with his eyes half-closed, as if he dozed on a bench near a warm fire after a good meal and some ale. I said as much and he grinned.
‘The smell, I am thinking,’ he answered wistfully. ‘It reminds me of the feast we had at Vladimir’s hall, the one just before we all went out on to the Grass Sea to hunt down Atil’s treasure.’
‘Is that the one where you threw someone in the pitfire?’ Red Njal demanded, though he grinned when he said it and I was pleased to see that; the death of Hlenni had been sitting heavy on him.
‘Not someone – the son of the advisor to Prince Yaropolk, Vladimir’s brother,’ Crowbone pointed out and both he and Finn laughed.
‘One side of his face now looks like Finn’s left bollock,’ Crowbone added, ‘wrinkled and ugly.’
‘You never saw my bollocks, boy,’ Finn countered, ‘for you are not struck blind and dumb with amazement and admiration – besides, it was not for quarrels that I remember that feast night. It was for the blood sausage. I ate one as long as my arm.’
‘You were as sick as a mangy dog,’ Red Njal reminded him and Finn waved a dismissive hand.
‘That was a swallow or two of bad ale,’ he corrected. ‘Anyway – I ate another arm-length after, to make up for what had been lost.’
That feast had seen great cakes of bread and fried turnips and stewed meat, fished out of pots on the end of long spits, I remembered, for Vladimir held to the old ways of his great-grandfather. But the smell of a man’s face and hair burning in the fire had soured much of it for me and left us with a lasting enemy – another one, as if we did not have enough of them.
Boiled blood and spew, that’s what this place reminded me of and I said as much.
Finn shrugged.
‘I recall it now only because we were all in prison there, too,’ he added. ‘You, me and Crowbone at least. And we got out of that.’
True enough. We had been flung in Vladimir’s pit-prison when Crowbone put his little axe in Klerkon’s forehead, which was not a bad thing in our eyes. However, he did it in the main square of Holmgard, Vladimir’s Novgorod, which had not been clever. That time, we faced a stake up our arses; now we faced a hanging-cage until we starved or were stoned to death.
‘Any tales that might help?’ I asked Crowbone and he frowned; it was one of his better stories that had made us all laugh and got us hauled out of the pit-prison, since laughter was not usually the sound that came from such a place.
‘It would be better if I stopped telling such tales,’ he answered moodily. ‘They are child’s matters and I am a man now.’
‘Your voice has snapped,’ Finn pointed out, ‘which is not the same thing. Let me know when your own bollocks drop like wrinkled walnuts and then I may consider calling you a man.
‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I like your tales.’
Which was an astounding lie from the man who had once rattled Crowbone into the thwarts of a boat at the announcement ‘Once there was a man…’. Crowbone merely looked at Finn with his odd eyes narrowed.
‘So we die here,’ Red Njal grunted, in the same voice he would have used deciding on where to curl up and sleep for a while. ‘Well, not the place I would have chosen, but we wear what the Norns weave for us. Better ask for too little than offer too much, as my granny used to say.’
I was thinking we would not die, for this Kasperick wanted the Mazur girl and the profit that could be had selling her to the Pols – or her own folk, whichever paid most – but he had to lay hands on her first. He would use us to trade with the crew of Short Serpent.
‘He is a belly-crawler,’ Finn pointed out when I mused on this. ‘He will not hold to such a trade and will kill us anyway.’
Then Bjarki came in, sliding round the storeroom door like rancid seal oil, his grin stretched to a leer by the ruined side of his mouth.
‘Kill me now,’ Finn growled when he saw him, ‘rather than have to suffer the gloat of a little turd like this.’
Bjarki, who was alone, came and sat carefully out of reach beyond the bars.
‘No easy death for you, Finn Horsehead,’ he slurred through his twisted mouth. ‘Nor, especially, for you, Orm Bear Slayer. I owe you an eye and a scar.’
‘When you meet Onund,’ I warned him, �
��be ready to pay more than that.’
‘Expecting a rescue, Bear Slayer?’ Bjarki jeered.
‘You should be afraid,’ answered Crowbone, ‘for the Oathsworn are coming.’
Bjarki curled his lip.
‘You are a little diminished,’ he pointed out. ‘A king with no crown, a prince with no hird. A shadow of what you were, boy. Soon even that will be gone.’
‘A shadow is still a powerful thing,’ Crowbone said. ‘Once there existed somewhere in the world – do not ask me when, do not ask me where – a place where the Sami learned to be workers of powerful seidr magic. Wherever this place was, it was somewhere below ground, eternally dark and changeless. There was no teacher either, but everything was learned from fiery runes, which could be read quite easily in the dark. Never were the pupils allowed to go out into the open air or see the daylight during the whole time they stayed there, which was from five to seven years. By then they had gained all they needed of the Sami art.’
‘Ha,’ scowled Bjarki. ‘What a poor tale. How did they eat in all this time, then?’
‘A shaggy grey hand came through the wall every day with meals,’ answered Crowbone without as much as a breath of hesitation. ‘When they had finished eating and drinking the same hand took back the horns and platters.
‘They saw no-one but each other and that only in the dim light of the fiery runes,’ he went on and Bjarki, scowling, was fixed by it. ‘Those same runes told them the only rule of the place, which was that the Master should keep for himself the student who was last to leave the school every year. Considering that most folk who knew of the place thought Loki himself was the Master, you may fancy what a scramble there was at each year’s end, everybody doing his best to avoid being last to leave.
‘It happened once that three Icelanders went to this school, by the name of Sæmundur the Learned, Kálfur Arnason, and one called, simply, Orm; and as they all arrived at the same time, they were all supposed to leave at the same time. Seven years later, when it came to taking the bit of it in their teeth, Orm declared himself willing to be the last of them, at which the others were much lightened in mind. So he threw over himself a large cloak, leaving the pin loose.