by Robert Low
For two days we lived like this, repairing gear and sharpening edges, braiding ourselves back together like a frayed ship's line.
We swam in the waterfall pool, while the black-shawled women who came with jars for water shrieked at our nakedness and scuttled away, hiding their faces in their hands — and peeping, giggling, through their fingers. There were even women we could touch, sent by al-Mi§ri, whom everyone agreed was as fine a jarl as any open-handed Northman. If any had worked out that it was because he needed us to kill ourselves on his behalf, no one spoke it aloud.
On the night before we were to march to Masada, while the insects whirred and flicked round the fire, I sat and listened, half lost and yet — Einar would have been proud — feeling out the Oathsworn's mood.
Someone was playing a pipe, going through the notes rather than playing a tune. Finn was trying to make scripilita out of the local flatbread, arguing with Botolf about when he was going to get the rest of his money for being right about Inger. Kvasir and Hlenni, whom they called Brimill — Seal — because he slicked back his hair with scented oil, were playing 'tafl and arguing because it was really too dark to see.
And Kleggi was sitting with the Goat Boy near the prone figure of Short Eldgrim, who had taken a sword hilt to his temple and was one of the six wounded we had and the worst of them, too.
At first it had seemed just a blow to the head and he had got up from it, staggering and rubbing the blood away, grinning. He had hoiked up his belly an hour later and an hour after that had folded up like an old tent and stayed that way, his breathing so hard I could hear the snore of it from where I sat.
I would leave him here, together with Red Njal and Thorstein Cod Biter, the one with his thigh laid open, the other missing two toes off his left foot. I hoped they would keep Short Eldgrim alive for us to find on the way back. If we came back. Then the Goat Boy loped over and plunked down beside me, greasy-grinned and chewing Finn's efforts. Goat Boy, as everyone agreed, was the perfect name for him, for he ate anything and everything and all the time.
`How is it?' I asked and he nodded, cheek bulging, frantically chewed and swallowed so he could speak.
`Good. Almost as good as the ones in Larnaca.'
Ah, wait until you taste it in Miklagard,' I said to him and he grinned brightly and chewed for a moment.
Then he said: 'Will Short Eldgrim die?'
I shrugged. 'Odin knows. By that snoring, though, he is sleeping only. He will be awake by the time we get back.'
More chewing. Then he said: 'If he does die, can we wash him? Not the women?'
I blinked at that and agreed we could. His smile was relieved. `Why?' I asked. 'I should think Short Eldgrim, even dead, would like to be washed by women.'
The Goat Boy wrinkled his nose. He knew what I spoke of, but girls were creatures who got in the way and women were worse, always wanting to comb his tangled hair.
`They laugh,' he said. 'I heard them when they washed the red-haired man.'
`Well,' I offered, only half listening, 'he was their enemy.' He had, I thought, probably sent them screaming and running and had maybe thrown at least one on her back.
The Goat Boy knew what I meant; he knew us well by now He shook his head, swallowed the last of his scripilita and looked at me with those dark, cat-stare eyes. 'They laughed because he had no. . no. .
nothing,' he said and grabbed his crotch. 'Does Short Eldgrim have a pisser, Trader?'
The night air was suddenly blade cold, enough to creep my flesh. 'What?'
He heard the change in my tone and grew uneasy at it, wary and silent.
`What about Inger?' I demanded, more fiercely than I had intended, and he blinked and shrank. I took a breath and smiled. Asked him again, gently.
`When they stripped him, he had no pisser. The women laughed and said he was no man. Had no balls, nor pizzle.'
I was dry-mouthed and silent, thoughts tumbling like water down the falls. No balls. No pisser. Cut.
And then the other thought that had nagged me crept in and grinned with wolf teeth, making a mockery of all, leaving me stunned and silent and lost.
I was still lost when we were standing under the dawn-smeared night at the top of the Serpent Path, rope coiled round me and the rest of the Oathsworn hunkered down, watching, pale and grim in the blue shadows.
Easy as shinning up a mast,' growled Finn, mistaking my silence for worry about the climb. He looked even more worried when I didn't tell him to go fuck his mother or something like it, but he clapped a hand on my shoulder after a moment and both of us looked up at the wall of it, which seemed to tower into the dawn.
It wasn't the climb that bothered me but what I would find at the top. What I could not — dare not — tell the others, though they would have to know soon.
The first four feet went well enough and the night wind hissed puffs of dust from under my handholds, which was a sign I did not miss. This was no black sea-rock, slick with spray and gull shit, where terns screamed at you and puffins whirred out of their secret holes into your face — that I knew well enough. This was dry and crumbling and treacherous with dust.
I went on, fumbling in the half-dark for small folds and fissures that didn't even deserve the name of handhold, feeling the weight of the rope drag at me, feeling the wind bite with the chill of night, yet the sweat on me was slick as oil.
Halfway and I rested, looked down, saw only a black fleece of shadows. Out on the horizon, the smear of light was larger, brighter, and I knew I had little time left.
Two feet further up and my foot slipped, pulling loose my left hand, the one with the fingers missing. I swung, held only by my right arm, dangling like a hanged man, feet flailing. I would have screamed if I hadn't bitten my lips until they bled; the sinews in my arm were doing all the shrieking for me anyway.
I heard my grunts, loud in my ear. My feet kicked rocks loose and, from below, I heard a faint hiss that might have been curse or query.
Panting, I curled at the waist, as far as the rope would let me, scrabbled, caught one foot, lost it, caught it again. Swung against the rock, slapped my ruined hand back on rock and clawed into a niche.
Sagging a little, I felt the sweat run in my eyes and tasted salt in my mouth. My arms and thighs and calves all creaked with pain, trembling against the rock.
I reached up, my hand fluttering like a lost moth, found another handhold, clamped fingers on it and brought a foot up, hearing the leather seaboots rasp, knowing they would be finally wrecked, shredded on these rocks. Strange what bothers you at the oddest times.
The top came as a surprise and I heaved myself over the last of it, panting and gasping. The Serpent Path was lost in darkness away to my left and there were no ramparts here. The bulk of Herod's tiered palace slouched to my right and the wind hissed and moaned over the plateau, studded with strange shadows and the red flowers of fires. Somewhere, goats bleated.
I moved up slowly, trying hard to listen and not scrabble like a mad chicken on the rock and loose scree.
There was a nub of stone, the last of a fat pillar that had once held up a shaded walkway. Now it took a loop of the rope and the rest of it slithered over the edge in a rustle of stones and dust.
I waited, crouched and watching, while the milk-smear on the horizon grew wider and more honey-stained and the wind mumbled through the ruins like a hot breath. Yet I shivered.
Kvasir was first up, panting and grunting, hand over hand. I helped him over and he collapsed, breathing like a fighting bull. 'Odin's. Arse. Tough.
Finn swarmed up as if he were climbing the rigging of a large mast. Barely out of breath, he handed me my shield and sword, which he had brought up with his own, and his grin was feral-yellow.
`Well done, Trader. You are the one for the climbing, right enough.'
They came up one by one, rasping with hard breathing, clinking and clanking in mail and shields and weapons. I winced at every noise, never considering the feat of it until afterwards. Even with a r
ope that had been a hard climb for men in mail — and Botolf brought my own up, wrapped neatly and slung over one shoulder.
Last up was the Goat Boy, struggling, with the slight strength of his knot-muscled arms almost gone, and my belly was in the back of my throat — until I saw him fastened to Botolf by tunic belts.
Botolf, grinning, got to the top, reached down and plucked the Goat Boy up as if he were picking an ear of wheat. I swallowed drily, for I had not wanted the Goat Boy on this one but that had got me sideways looks from everyone else, since he had been in every other hard place with us.
I measured the distance to the nearest building, which was a grand affair, once two storeys, now partially collapsed into ruins. It was a long run across the open plateau and I didn't like the look of it much. . The Arabs were set to attack when the sun was up, which meant we were here for too long a time, squatting like stupid ewes in fast-vanishing shadows.
`What do you reckon, Trader? Make a run for it?' breathed Finn in my ear.
Truth was, I didn't know. Either way seemed to mean discovery and even if most of the brigands were close round those fires, someone would go for a piss and the Serpent Path Gate was a hawk and spit away.
There was almost certainly a guard on that who could not fail to see us as the light grew and I could not rely on him being as blind as he clearly was deaf and stupid.
As if he heard me thinking, there was a query from the darkness, neither Greek nor Arab, but West Norse.
We froze. The query came again, harsher this time, and I heard the shink-chink sound, saw the spark of flint and steel as the guard tried to light a torch. Folk looked at each other, bewildered eyes white in the dark, and Finn growled. He peeled the slavered Roman nail from his mouth, so that I knew he was about to reply
— but then the Goat Boy bleated.
It was as perfect a bleat as any pathetic goat I had heard and he did it twice more. I stilled Finn with a hand on his arm, felt rather than saw his unease in the darkness. A Norseman on guard? Not friend, but foe.
.
There was a muttered curse of annoyance and the guard moved back. Silently, Botolf ruffled the Goat Boy's hair and his grin was white in the darkness.
I looked at the sky, trying to judge how much time we had, but could make no sense of it. The whole horizon was an ugly yellow and the wind had died to nothing.
Odin is the All-Father, the Great God. He is a shapechanger when he is seen at all, but if you want to feel the presence of One Eye, go into a lonely place and wait and listen. I have done it and felt the passing of him through a forest, in the thousands of mysterious sounds and breaths, in the soft sough of wind that blows through the leaves and branches, in the storm-wind that racks trees and shows where the All-Father passes on the Wild Hunt.
But most of all, you'll feel him in the strange and awful stillness that settles sometimes on sea and hill and wood.
It is easy to feel One Eye in a land of mirrored fjords, tumbling ice water, bare, granite cliffs and the hot, heavy pine forests of summer — but that night, on the bare waste of a flattened mountain in Serkland, we all felt One Eye descend in a silence that seemed to suck the air.
Eyes gleamed, looking one to the other, aware in the hackles and creeping of arm flesh that something was happening. Something smacked my bare arm and I jumped, touched it, felt wetness and grit.
Another time, another place. On a rock stairway outside a Hun chief's tomb near Kiev I had been splashed by gritty water from a sky yellow as a wolf's eye.
Dengizik,' I said in Finn's ear and saw his wide-eyed look, saw him remember the Hun chief's name and what had happened there, even as the wind rushed in, flattening the distant flower-fires to the ground.
`Run.'
We sprinted as the world turned to darkness.
The sandstorm had roared in under cover of night from the parched Nabatean hills bloated with heat from the wastes of Zin, flexing muscles all the way from Aqaba.
It seared everything in its path in the long Wadi Araba, shrieking with dancing dust jinn and blurted itself into the Valley of Salt. Then it crushed its massive shoulders between the rusted stones of the Moab and the folds of the Judean hills round the Dead Sea, so that it reared up like a screaming stallion and fell on Masada with hooves of wind and scouring dust.
It sucked the air from lungs, shoving us with huge blows this way and that and howled like Fenris released, while the sun was stillborn and dawn never came.
We staggered like drunks, clung to each other, were bowled over as the wind caught shields like sails.
Scrabbling on all fours like dogs, we clawed to the shelter of the ruined building, scurrying ratlike into the gaping holes in the back walls, hurling down behind anything that was shelter. Anything to get away from that sand-studded wind that drew blood like a lash.
There was light and heat — lanterns and a fire, throwing long, strange shadows on the men round it, who rose up as we crashed in, panting and gasping, stumbling over the rubble litter.
They gabbled in surprise and I heard Greek and Arabic, but all they heard were grunts and hissing steel and it was only when their worst nightmare snarled down on them that they realised these men who had staggered in were not friends.
It was a struggle as short and vicious as most of them were. In the end, eight men lay dead and no one cared how loudly they screamed, for no sound would be heard above the vengeful shrieking wind outside.
Only one had actually managed to get a hand on the hilt of a weapon and that was as he died.
Slack-jawed and heaving, the Oathsworn sank down, heads drooping. I looked round, kicking scattered embers back to the fire. We were in one large room with a huge square of stone in it — an altar, I recognised, to the Roman Christ.
There was one door in and out and it was still shut, though it fluttered and battered against its lintel as the wind hammered it. Sand filtered in from the ruined room we had just come from and the fire guttered, making huge shadows dance strangely on the walls.
`Thor's wind,' muttered Kvasir, then grinned. 'Our Orm weaves his own wyrd, it seems. Perhaps we have found favour with old One Eye at last and he called in a marker with the Thunderer for us.'
Men made warding signs and held amulets to their own gods for protection, for on this night, when it seemed the membrane between worlds was thinner than before, it was not wise to talk of such things.
It was widely known that a man's wyrd — his Norn-weaving — was not set, but could be unravelled.
Einar had believed it and, for a while, it seemed he had succeeded, but boasting of it tempted those three sisters to weave something worse — especially Skuld, mistress of That Which Might Be.
Anyway, I had my own thoughts on the matter. Odin, unless I had misjudged One Eye as a kindly old uncle, had made his purpose clear to me, if not everyone else. I knew what we yet had to face and could not bring myself to tell the others.
Now that we were squatted in this blood-reeked place, looking around at the shadows and the strangeness, men licked their lips and wondered at it.
`The Great City's men made the Christ altar, but before that this was where this Herod kept his thralls,'
Finn told them knowingly. 'He was King of the Jews.'
And he stayed here?' demanded Hlenni Brimill. 'Anyway, I thought the Christ was King of the Jews.'
Finn shrugged. 'Maybe this was another one. Anyway, nine hundred Jewish warriors were once besieged here by the Old Romans, who built that ramp to get to them.'
There was silence, for we had all seen and marvelled at the ramp. As Finn said, it was as if Bagnose had leaned his neb against the mountain, but there were few left who remembered old Geir Bagnose, so his joke fell flat.
Did they win?' asked Botolf.
`Who?'
`The Old Romans. Did they beat the Jewish warriors?'
Of course,' answered Finn, but Kvasir hawked and spat.
`No warriors died here,' he growled. 'That Syrian whore in En Gedi, the on
e with the wen, told me of this place when she learned that was where we were going. When the Old Romans attacked they discovered no one to fight. All the Jews had killed themselves: men, women and children.'
There was a deeper silence and men tried not to look over their shoulders at the fetches haunting this place.
I climbed into my mail and we waited, watching through the hole in the back wall as the storm thrashed and the dust whirled in and flared like embers in the fire.
It was as dark as I remembered it, gleaming still with those great, age-blackened piles of silver and the throne he sat on was massive. The shackles that had once held Ildico to it dangled from one arm, but of her bones — or Hild — there was no sign.
There was only Einar, sitting on Atil's throne as I had first seen him sitting in Gudleif's at Bjornshafen, bulked by a great fur-collared cloak, one hand resting on the hilt of a straight-bladed sword, turning it gently on its point, the other stroking his moustaches.
Framed by the crow wings of his hair, his face was how I remembered it last in this howe, milk-pale, with yellow-cream cheeks and eyes so sunk they had disappeared into black pits. I had shoved my sword through him at the last, a bloodprice blow for his murder of my father.
`Will you tell them what you know — or let them find out?'
And when my silence was the answer, he lowered it again.
`Now you know the price of a rune serpent,' he whispered and the light caught the blade of that turning sword, flash on flash on flash, blinding me. .
The sun was up, shining in my eyes and Finn was standing over me, kicking my tattered boots to wake me. Stiff from sleeping in a coat of iron rings, I stumbled upright into the day and we waited, watching the sun arrive through the hole in the back wall.
When the first warmth of it touched my face, spearing into the room and spilling us all with gold, I turned to see the last of the Oathsworn, waiting and silent, faces hard as grindstones.
Then I knew, felt the Other-rush of it, the surety of it, and I told them that we had been tested and that those who stood here, in this room, were those Odin had deemed fit to have his Oath in their hearts and on their lips. We were Odinsmenn and the way home was one last battle. Einar's curse was lifted. Kvasir gave a hoom in the back of his throat and I waited, half hoping one of them would have enough clever to work out the part I had not told them. For a moment I thought Kvasir had, but then he shrugged. Finn's grin was tight and harsh and he spoke through his teeth when he turned to the rest of them.