Raven

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Raven, Penda, gather their weapons,’ Sigurd said, gesturing behind us. ‘We’ll take the best of them. Svein, break the rest.’

  ‘Shame to leave good iron behind,’ Bram grumbled. ‘We can come back for them.’

  ‘A wise guest knows when to leave the table,’ Sigurd replied, eyeing the blaumen.

  ‘Bram wouldn’t know about that,’ Bjarni said, ‘as no one ever invites him to their house.’

  Bram spat. ‘Wouldn’t go if they did. The mead your wife served last winter tasted like horse piss.’

  ‘It was horse piss,’ Bjarni said, his face straight as a spear.

  ‘Bring the amir to me!’ Sigurd called to Völund. ‘Make sure they do not move, Floki.’

  Floki nodded and, slinging his shield across his back, stepped forward with his yew bow, calling for Aslak, Bjarni and Wiglaf to join him. Those four each drew one good arrow from the quivers at their belts and nocked it, standing close enough to the blaumen not to miss but far enough away to throw a spear or draw their swords should the enemy make a desperate charge.

  Völund pushed the amir towards Sigurd and the blauman stumbled and fell, tipping on to his face, so that some of the Norsemen laughed. But Sigurd handed me his spear and walked over and helped the amir to his feet, even brushing the dust off the robes over his enormous belly. ‘That is no way to treat a chieftain in front of his warriors,’ he said. Svein threw Kveldulf’s rolled-up brynja to Völund who was already half out of Long Beard’s white robes.

  ‘The women do not look like slaves, Völund,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Some of them are the amir’s wives, Sigurd,’ the blauman replied, his smiling face appearing through the neck of the brynja. ‘Some are just for … how you say … swiving?’

  ‘Aye, lad, swiving,’ Bram put in. ‘Good to see you know the important words.’

  ‘The blaumen have more than one wife?’ Svein asked, looking afraid for the first time since I had met him.

  ‘Some of them, yes,’ Völund said. ‘The rich ones anyway. You can believe they will all be beautiful,’ he went on, nodding towards the women. A change in the breeze brought their smell to my nose. It was sweet and woody and reminded me of Gerd’s Tit.

  ‘Good,’ Sigurd said, ‘because we are taking them.’ The others looked at him, their faces beneath their helmets half astonished and half ravenous as a man before a feast. Penda and I had chosen the best of the blaumen’s swords – or at least we had chosen the straighter ones among them – and Svein was standing on the ends of the others and one by one gripping the hilts with two hands and bending them. Some bent right over but some snapped, at which Bram shook his head, still rankled by the waste of it. The amir’s men and carrying-slaves we herded into the mosque like sheep and they went peacefully enough, though I could feel the hatred coming off them like heat. Then we shut the door, filled our skins with fresh water from the troughs, and showed our spears to the amir’s women so that they knew that the best thing for them was to do as Völund told them. The blauman told us that there was nothing worth taking in the mosque itself and we believed him, so none of us even looked inside it. Now that we knew it was a god-house we thought it best to keep our distance. I did wonder what Völund had done with Long Beard, because there had been neither sight nor sound of him, but I never asked. We pushed the amir and his blauvifs south-west towards our ships, our spears flat across our waists, fencing them in, while Black Floki, Aslak and Bjarni hung back to make sure we were not followed. When we came to the goat track that wound down to the cove we found Kalf waiting.

  ‘Óðin spit in my eye!’ His mouth hung open and his head jutted forward on the neck he was scratching. The wince that he’d worn in his face ever since he had taken an arrow in Frankia was gone, replaced by disbelief that became wonder that became joy as his eyes ranged over our plunder. ‘What do they look like?’ he asked Svein, who merely shrugged his huge shoulders. ‘You don’t know?’ The wince was back. ‘So which one is mine?’

  ‘You can have this one, Kalf,’ Bram said, yanking the fat amir forward, so that he shrieked pathetically. He’d been made to carry an assortment of swords bundled together with rope and his arms shook, so that it was a wonder he had not dropped them. The poor man’s trembling face was fear-sheened, his dishevelled beard dripping, and the linen wrapped round his head was coming undone to reveal wispy strands of glistening black hair. His once sky-blue and yellow robes were dark now, soaked through with sweat, and a sorrier-looking man I have never seen. Even his shoes, which seemed to be made of the same fine cloth that swathed his enormous body, were tattered shreds, so that his fleshy feet were nudging out.

  ‘Völund, ask the amir which one is his favourite,’ Sigurd said, gesturing at the women, who were clinging to each other and crying now that we were so close to the sea. Before we left Sigurd had assured the blaumen that their lord would be returned to them in one piece and because they had not caused us any trouble he meant to keep his word. Völund spoke to the amir, whose face suddenly took a grip of itself as though he had at last found some courage. He said nothing but stared balefully at Völund, his beard lifted as though inviting the former slave to do his worst. Völund shrugged and so, drawing his knife, Sigurd strode over and gripped the amir’s fat neck in one big hand. He put the blade to the amir’s eye and told Völund to repeat the question and this time the amir pointed towards one of the blauvifs in a nearby group. The other women stepped back as that one stepped forward, and I noticed that she was a little fatter than the rest. Then this woman lifted the fine cloth covering her face and gave the amir a sad smile.

  Her skin was dark as a chestnut and you could see she had been a beauty in her day. Now, in place of beauty she wore pride, and the amir could not take his eyes off her.

  ‘She stays,’ Sigurd said, shoving the amir towards her. The woman threw her arms round the amir as the rest of the blauvifs began to wail. ‘Get the others down to the ships.’

  I looked at Penda who nodded in approval of the jarl’s small mercy as we turned to make our way down the goat path, leaving the amir and his woman where they stood.

  ‘I knew Sigurd wouldn’t let that fat son of a sow get away with it that easily,’ Bram said. And we laughed all the way down to the ships.

  We put the blauvifs aboard Goliath and gave them food, skins and furs. Sigurd threatened Yngvar’s crew that they would be carved up and flung overboard if they so much as laid a finger on the women let alone took their bollocks from their breeches. The blauvifs were to keep their faces covered, too, for Sigurd thought that his men would be less sorely tempted to force themselves upon them if they could not see their faces. Olaf disagreed with him on this. ‘Not knowing what is in the pot only makes a man hungrier,’ he said. But Sigurd had his way and so we were left imagining the dark-skinned treasures beyond the wind-stirred, shimmering cloth.

  Völund had suggested we could wait above the mosque for more rich men to come for surely some would bring their treasures with them rather than leaving them aboard their ships. But Sigurd was more than happy with the catch.

  ‘This is the best kind of treasure,’ he said, eyeing one of the amir’s women, tilting his head to work with the sunlight. In the right light you could sometimes catch a glimpse of a face through the thin weave. ‘Because it has its own legs, meaning you don’t have to lug it around.’

  ‘And you can fuck it,’ the Dane Beiner suggested, which had several men nodding in agreement.

  We were sailing north now, though we knew we would be turning our prows south-east again soon enough, for that way lay Miklagard and the rich fame that awaited us there.

  After leaving that rugged island we had crossed an angry sea and many of us had sailed with one eye on Goliath and promised Njörd rich offerings if he spared her precious cargo. I even heard one of the Norsemen ask Rán, Mother of the Waves, to take one of the Danish crews to a watery grave if she must, rather than the blauvifs. But Goliath’s crew, which was really too small for her size, fought wit
h her lines and kept her beaked prow into the swells and it became clear that Yngvar knew something of sea-craft. Nearer the coast we escaped the great surges that had lifted Serpent high, then sent her surfing down steep, rolling walls of water. But there were other dangers. The wind would change without warning and the sea was a patchwork of dark shades as currents fought each other, forming whirlpools in places which threatened to suck us down into oblivion. Serpent’s mast creaked indignantly. Her ropes twisted and water seeped through gaps where the seething waves forced her hull strakes out of true. Jörmungand snarled, defiant as ever, but Knut was ashen-faced at the tiller and Olaf was struggling to match the sea’s ever-changing moods. It was cold, too. Much colder than it had been further south. Winter was upon us and only a fool sails in winter, so we began to watch the coast and the offshore islands for some deserted place where we could rest up and make repairs to the ships whilst the worst of the weather passed.

  That place was an island we would later name Lyngvi after the island on which the wolf Fenrir was chained. It was a barren, wind-whipped, marshy place, where sand banks separated freshwater lagoons from shoals of brackish brine, which was surely why no one lived there. But this made it a safe place to make camp and after two days of wading through freezing water some of us located a large mere in which we could moor the ships out of sight from the open sea. Cold, half drowned and miserable, we trudged back to the ships, leaving torches burning along the edges of a dozen narrow ditches. Then we guided them through rolling fog, beckoned on by the small flames, back to the place, as silence fell like a blanket the deeper we went.

  But Goliath did not have a dragon ship’s shallow draught and got stuck in the mud a short way into the third channel, so we had to leave her behind like a dying animal and hope she would still be there when we moved on.

  West of the mooring, past boggy fields of sea lavender and saltwort, the ground rose a little and was covered in tall swaying grass. That was to be our camp. The fog, thick as dragon breath, seemed to forever swirl about the place, though we soon came to see this as a useful thing because it meant we had no fear of lighting cookfires. There were no trees as such but everywhere were dense thickets of salt cedar, which we found burnt well and provided good shelter against the wind. Fires burnt night and day, for none of us had ever seen so much waterfowl, and the birds were easy to snare or shoot, so that our bellies were always full of roasted meat.

  And we would need both fires and meat soon enough, for the bitter winds came. They tore down from the north-west, cutting across the dunes and marsh and biting into us like blades. To the east, Bram and Bjarni had found a small island thick with trees that were the height of ten men but more resembled giant bushes because of their twisted trunks and enormous rounded crowns, the leaves of which smelt spicy and resinous. Father Egfrith said they were almost certainly juniper trees, though I did not see how he could know such a thing having never seen their like before. Nevertheless, we took our axes and cut many of them down, using the wood to make a rough palisade against the wind. From this wind-break we ran thick reeds down to the ground to make frames on to which we laid thickets of salt cedar for warmth. Upon the whole thing we piled skins, making passable lean-tos, and inside we laid thick furs. Still we froze. Yet all agreed it would have been worse at sea where we could not light fires to cook with and dry our clothes.

  The blauvifs suffered worst. It seemed that they were not used to that cold and Völund said they would have all lived together inside the amir’s palace and would rarely have been allowed outside. They would have bathed every day in hot water and attended the amir’s every lustful desire. There was no bathing now. But there was desire. By now Sigurd had let the men have their way with them. He had waited until the first grumbles had begun around the fires from men who were wondering where the glory and riches were which their jarl had promised them. I had thought Sigurd’s intention was to sell the blauvifs on as soon as possible, for they were surely worth a great deal, but I might have known my lord had a deeper use for them. The grumbles stopped as the swiving began. And they were beautiful. At first many of them clung to each other and wailed and fought, but after a time they seemed to accept their fate. Some wisely sought certain men’s protection and got it, too. Early on one clung to Red Svein and from then on no other man came near her. Sigurd chose a full-lipped beauty for himself and no one complained about that. And then there was Amina. I had noticed her watching me and I had thought she was perhaps curious about my blood eye. But then, as I was building my shelter against the bulwark, my fingers blue with cold, she had smiled at me, shivering beneath a bearskin. I had smiled back. It probably had more to do with the fact that Byrnjolf the Dane was sniffing around her like a randy dog, and his breath stank like rancid meat. But by then I was under the spell of those eyes which were a mix of grey and golden brown and the shape of mint leaves. When I had finished my shelter she had simply walked over and crawled inside it and from then on she was mine.

  At first I had wondered what Cynethryth thought. Soon, and to my disappointment, I knew that she did not feel one way or the other about it. Neither did she bond with the women as Penda had suggested she might. Instead she was always off amongst the marshes, hunting and learning the old ways from Asgot, and not even Father Egfrith could get through to her much any more.

  The weeks passed and eventually we grew sick of waterfowl, especially when some of the Danes who had been out hunting spoke of seeing boar tracks in the mud. So we set about digging pits in the soft ground to try our luck. We would make a large hole and throw salt cedar bushes into the bottom so as not to lose any creature we caught in the water that soon seeped in. Then we laid thin branches across the top over which we scattered long grass to disguise the whole thing. It was in such a pit that Cynethryth caught a wolf. One bitter night, amongst the constant grunting and croaking of frogs and toads, we had heard a wolf’s howl. I did not know until long after the beast was caught that Cynethryth and the godi had been baiting their trap with fresh meat. Eventually, the wolf’s curiosity had got the better of it and the beast had ended up in Asgot’s pit. There it stayed and Cynethryth and the godi fed it every two or three days until its fury was spent and its knowing golden eyes had begun to look for other ways to survive. It was a big male, at the shoulder level with a man’s waist, with teeth that could tear your arm off. The rest of us would go to the pit to look down at the animal and men would mutter that it was an ill thing to trap such a beast and keep it alive. For all men had heard of how even the gods had watched in horror as Fenrir Wolf had grown, its hatred of them seething even as they bound it and placed a sword in its jaws. And all knew that one day, at Ragnarök, when the doom of the gods is upon us all, the beast Fenrir will kill Óðin himself.

  Eventually, though, on our own Lyngvi, that wolf became almost as tame as a hound, at least while Cynethryth was around. It would still growl and bare its wicked teeth to the rest of us just to remind us that it was a killer and that we should beware, but for the most part it padded behind Cynethryth, its tail hung low and its tongue lolling out. She named it Sköll after the wolf that pursues the sun through the sky, and I suspected that Sigurd thought its capture a good omen because his war banner was a wolf.

  ‘It’s hard to remember the girl she was,’ Penda muttered one morning as he fed the camp’s main fire which we rarely if ever let go out. ‘She’s a lost soul that one,’ he added, shaking his head. We had made the fire in a pit to protect it from the worst of the wind and behind it we had piled up a wall of branches between two sloping uprights staked into the ground. This wall bounced the heat back at us, so that men would stand for hours before that trench, holding out their hands to the heat and talking. Völund never strayed from those flames. It seemed that for all his muscle the blauman was no match for the cold and he shivered pathetically, so that I feared his white teeth would rattle themselves out of his jaw and be lost in the mud.

  The women had their own fire, which they tended themselves, thoug
h they could often be found round ours.

  ‘That old goat has poisoned her mind,’ I told Penda and he knew I was talking about Asgot. Above, against a grey sky, a marsh harrier circled, beating its powerful wings every now and then, and I remembered that I had used to call Cynethryth my peregrine. I stared into the flames, trying to lose myself in their ravenous dance. After a while I said, ‘I loved her, Penda.’ My eyes were dry from the heat though I could feel still the wind’s ice-cold teeth biting into my back.

  ‘I know you did, lad,’ Penda said, never taking his eyes from the fire.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ONE MORNING WE WOKE TO A DAY THAT THE NORTH-WEST WIND had forgotten to flay. We knew it would be back for it was still winter, but the wind’s absence made it feel almost warm. Some of the men had suggested going hunting. Not digging pits and setting snares but proper hunting with bows and spears. We had caught two boars in our pits but there was nothing like facing one down and coming away the winner. And so Sigurd decided to make a contest of it. Some of the men chose rather to spend the day swiving and sleeping, but those of us who took up the challenge split into four parties of five men each. The first party to bring back a fully grown boar would win the weight of the beast’s head in silver, which meant that none of us would settle for a small animal. Five men is a small hunting party if you are after a full-grown boar. One can break your legs without thinking about it. It will slash its tusks up into your belly and rip out your guts. It will even bite chunks out of you. And so we would need every man and spear in our group, which was unfortunate because we were lumbered with Father Egfrith.

  ‘I have always wanted to hunt for boar,’ he said, huffing into his hands and rubbing them excitedly. ‘I went with Mauger and the ealdorman once many years ago.’ He frowned from under bushy brows. ‘But I can’t claim to have helped, because as soon as we got near the beast’s nest Ealdred made me climb a tree.’ I laughed at that and Egfrith looked embarrassed. ‘Then off they went, tearing through the forest after the creature while I was still stuck up that tree like poor Zacchaeus.’