The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  I knew where this malignant rot came from, too. Einar, I thought, had made a bad bargain, no matter what he believed Hild would do for him now. Whatever Hild was before she was something else now, something … Other … and something that had a plan all of its own.

  She wanted, I was thinking, to get to Atil’s howe. Had to. Needed us to help her do it – and what then?

  Einar’s eyes were too full of silver to see clearly and, worse, he was dragging us all along, I saw with cold despair, in the shackles of our own oath honour.

  He and Valknut forced out the huge stone beam that barred the equally heavy stone doors. No one wanted to ask how a slip of a girl like Hild had managed to shut and bar the door on her own.

  We started down the stairs, reached a landing which led to the left, then continued to where Vigfus’s torches lit the room beyond. Two steps further down, we stopped, amazed, afraid.

  The room was lined with men, armoured in cobwebs and rotting leather and rusting metal lappets. They sat, cross-legged, spears upright and butted into round holes in the floor. A few elaborately helmeted heads had toppled, some skeletal hands had slipped from the spears, but Dengizik’s faithful sat on, in the same position they had once taken up on the day the tomb was sealed.

  The enormity of that stunned me into sitting down on the lowest stair. They had marched in, sat down, butted their spears and died. Poison? Perhaps, though I would not have been surprised to learn that Dengizik’s faithful guard had simply stayed sitting until they died of starvation and thirst.

  They sat in neat lines flanking a flagged approach running from the stair to where Dengizik sat, equally armoured, on a stone throne, a great cross on one side … no, not a cross. Cross-shaped, but from the arm of the T hung hair. Horsetails: the standard of a Hun chieftain, I learned later. A great, ornate helmet was set on the top of it and I realised this was because the withered thing on the throne had no head.

  I got to know those standards well, for the Khazars, who would not have been out of place at Attila’s side, had them, too, as well as the strange disc-standards that marked them as Jewishmen – but I never again came across a howed-up steppe lord with no head.

  Nor were the lines quite as neat now as they must have been for centuries. The tilting stones above opened on both sides and Boleslav had slipped down one on the left, straight on to the grounded spears of the long-dead.

  His weight had snapped the old wood; he had crashed into the dusty corpses beyond and rolled out on to the flagged approach. Now he lay at Dengizik’s enthroned feet, pierced through chest and belly, finished off with a merciful throat-cut.

  All that strength and skill, I marvelled, remembering him spinning the giant Dane axe, laid low by a slip of a girl. And I shivered at what he had done to her to deserve that impaled death. I knew well enough and half the shiver was for me.

  Do not love me, she had said.

  Vigfus stepped forward, splendid in gilded mail and a marvellous helmet that had been new for his great-grandfather, which covered the whole face save for the mouth and eyes and had gilded eyebrows and two huge raven feathers.

  Behind and on either side were his men, desperate-grim and hefting their axes and swords and spears. There was only one sure way out of that room and that was to go through us and there were not nearly enough of them for that.

  Someone flitted past me, back up the stairs and I almost followed, thinking we were well out of it – then I saw it was Bagnose, heading back to the opening, which lay above the room, nocking an arrow as he went. Steinthor, I presumed, was already there.

  ‘I suppose,’ Vigfus said, scowling, ‘there is no bargaining here.’

  ‘None,’ replied Einar with a twisted smile.

  ‘One to one to settle this, winner lets the others go?’

  Einar shook his head, chuckling. ‘What – and let all this planning go to waste? How does it feel, Quite the Dandy, ladies’ man, to have been so trapped by my lady?’

  Vigfus narrowed his eyes at the full import of what had been said. His men looked anxiously from one to the other.

  ‘If she is your lady,’ Vigfus snarled, ‘I wish you well of her. You pair are suited. Personally, I found her a poor, cold, dry hump – but she seemed to want more, so I let my lads have a go. Most preferred to find a goat.’

  Some of his men chuckled. Most, realising that that poor, cold, dry hump was what had led them to this wyrd, were less amused.

  ‘Enough talk,’ said Einar coldly and snaked forward. An arrow hissed from the opening above and one of Vigfus’s men screeched and plucked at the shaft through both sides of his neck. Men closed, steel crashed, shields whumped under blows.

  I was cautious, I ganged up with old Wryneck on one man and, between us, we cut him down in a flurry of blows, me hacking deep scores in his arms and one calf, Wryneck battering lumps off his head and swearing.

  Another hurtled out of the darkness at us and I twisted to face him. Pain sprang from my ankle and I grunted and stopped. Wryneck clashed with his man and I barely managed to deflect a blow meant for him.

  An axe whirred out of nowhere and clattered off Gunnar Raudi’s shield. My opponent, black-bearded, screaming, cut a vicious diagonal slash, which I sprang back from. His momentum carried the blow into one of the dead warriors, who exploded in a great eruption of dust and dead insects and toppled sideways. An arrow from above then smacked Black Beard between the shoulder blades, propelling him straight at me, so that he fell on his face and slid to my feet.

  His shield smashed into my injured ankle and I went down, sick with the pain of it, dropping sword and shield to clutch the thing, howling. Wryneck, too busy with his own man, never spared me a glance.

  Through the sparkling lights of pain in front of my eyes, I saw Einar cut his man down with a swift series of feints and strikes and vicious shield punches. He turned then, to where Gunnar Raudi was trading blows with Vigfus, who scorned a shield and had a boarding axe in one hand and a long seax in the other.

  They cut and leaped and spun, elbowing Dengizik’s dead men aside with curses. The chamber filled with the dust of old death, the fear-stink and blood of new.

  Vigfus was good, too, and I remembered him spidering across rooftops, swinging in and out of shuttered openings, leaping to grab a rope in mid-air. Fast and limber, for all that he had no sense of dress at all.

  Twice Gunnar Raudi had almost lost his sword to the boarding axe, Vigfus swirling it round to trap the sword in the curve of its beard, flicking his wrist to lock it, then trying to wrench it out of Gunnar’s grasp.

  But Vigfus’s magnificent helmet was a hindrance and you could see why sensible warriors had given that type up for one with a simple nasal: you couldn’t see anything out of the corner of your eye and, in a whirling fight like this, that was suicide.

  Gunnar circled. Einar came up behind him and I thought he was moving to Gunnar’s sword side, to make it two on one. As he did, Gunnar Raudi stiffened, half turned – and Vigfus’s axe hurled round and took him between neck and shoulder, cleaving deep in a splinter of rings and bone and blood.

  My scream was lost in the echoing shrieks and yells of the battle. Einar flung himself over Gunnar’s body at Vigfus, roaring his challenge, spittle flying. I half stumbled to where Gunnar lay, blood pooling thickly on the dusty floor.

  He was gone, already white, barely able to speak. His lips moved in the frosted berry beard, now bright with new, vicious red spilling from his mouth. If he had something to say other than with those frantic eyes, I never heard it. When they glazed over, I closed them.

  Vigfus, fingers curling on the wire-wrapped handle of his axe, crabbed sideways, elbowing aside another fighting pair, one of whom aimed a brief, speculative cut at Vigfus as he did so.

  In that helmet, he almost missed it, was left off balance and clattered into another of the Oathsworn, who then stumbled into another of those dead warriors, impaling himself on an age-blackened spear.

  I have been asked by bright-eyed yo
ungsters who have never fought for their lives with shield and steel what it’s like. I never tell them that it is four or five minutes of mad fear and luck, of slashing cuts and savagery, of shit and blood and shrieking.

  The sagas tell it better and the one about the battle between Einar and Vigfus would, no doubt, have been memorable for its superior, clever kennings and nobility. Reality was different and vicious.

  Einar, snarling, his sword dripping blood, slashed at Vigfus in a flurry of steel and Vigfus danced sideways, raised himself on his toes and swung the axe downwards in a vicious arc, screaming as he did so.

  It took Einar’s shield just below the rim, a solid pine on pine wheel of wood, and split it lengthwise. With a swift shrug, Einar was out of the straps, both hands on the hilt of his sword and Vigfus, still holding the buried axe, was jerked sideways by the dead weight of the dropped shield.

  Too late, he released his grip. Einar’s two-handed blow spanged off one side of that helmet, took Vigfus on the top of the left shoulder with the splintering crack of bone and sheared down through mail, bone, flesh and sinew until it popped out of his armpit with a sucking sound and a spray of ruined iron rings.

  Vigfus roared, spun away from his falling arm and clapped his remaining hand over the great rush of blood from the stump. The second blow crushed mail rings into his ribs. The third slashed a steak out of his thigh. He went down, bellowing as Einar hacked shreds off him until there was no more noise.

  The others of his crew tried to give up, but Hild would not have that. Screeching, hair flying like a Valkyrie, she demanded they all die.

  Two of the Dandy’s men threw down their weapons and Einar cut them down where they stood with a few swift strokes. After that, the others fought on with the desperate ferocity of the cornered, but it was short and they were all chopped to bloody ruin by packs of Oathsworn.

  Then there was silence, save for the pant and gasp of ravaged lungs. Someone was puking, hard and noisy, and the impaled man was growling and yelling as others tried to lever his arm off the spear-point. The iron stink of blood was everywhere; the floor of the tomb was slushed with viscous red mud.

  And I sat there in a widening slick of Gunnar Raudi’s blood, his head in my lap, watching the other sluggish pool form slowly from the stab wound in his back.

  TWELVE

  Eight men were dead; twenty-four more had wounds, some of them deep. In the stunned twilight of battle, Ketil Crow and Illugi took me under the armpits and hauled me up and away from Gunnar Raudi.

  I let them, numbed by what I thought I knew, never taking my eyes off Einar. Had he stabbed Gunnar Raudi in the back, hard enough to wound, to distract him? In that half-light and confusion I turned it over and over and still it vanished like smoke.

  In the end, I knew, with a deep, sick feeling, that he had, but there was nothing I could do. He was, I thought with a flush of fear, as fetch-haunted as Hild. And had broken his oath yet again in that mad moment.

  Then I kept hearing Gunnar Raudi’s warnings and knew, with a nauseating certainty, that I would be next.

  None of it would bring Gunnar Raudi back. Illugi and I, working without a word between us while the others bound up wounds and sorted out their gear, cleaned Gunnar Raudi as best we could and laid him out on his back, hands folded on his sword. I had to tear strips off his underkirtle to bind his shoulder back to his body, rather than have that terrible gape, so like a lipless mouth.

  Einar came across after we had done this, stared down at the body and where we hunkered near it. ‘A good man,’ he said. ‘He died a good death.’

  I could not speak. Blood leaked into my mouth from biting the inside of my lip to keep from screaming at him: You killed Gunnar Raudi. You killed him. Like you killed Eyvind.

  Einar ordered him laid at the feet of the throne, where the mouldering, fur-rotted remains of Dengizik sat, skeletal hands on the stone arms, the fur rim of his rusting helmet festering on his neck.

  Everyone wanted out of that place, especially when Hild drifted like silent smoke down the stairs, to stand over the carved remains of Vigfus and smile her beautiful, fey smile.

  ‘Dengizik has no head,’ Einar noted, his voice cracked with dryness.

  ‘The Romans took it and put it on a pole,’ Hild answered, her voice seeming sucked out of her in a hiss. ‘His faithless young brother Ernak, who would not stand with him against the Great City, had permission to take the body, on condition the Romans sealed the tomb, lest his fetch return. Five hundred years and more it has sat here. My mother told me this.’

  There were looks flying one to another, from eyes round and white with fear. Tongues snaked over dry lips as the dust settled, mote by mote and almost sibilant. No one liked talk of a fetch in such a place.

  ‘Is there anything we need from here?’ Einar demanded of her, his voice crow-harsh in the blood-reeked twilight.

  ‘Not for me,’ she answered, soft as the rustle of a shroud. ‘But this is Atil’s son and those swords were made by the same smith who forged Atil’s blade from the end of the Christ spear. My distant kinsman, Regin the Volsung.’

  Two swords lay across the cobwebbed, dusty brocade of Dengizik’s robed lap, but no one even wanted to go near them, never mind claim them as spoil.

  We left that place, treasureless and afraid, not even having looted Vigfus’s men. By the time we had got back across the timber bridge – knocking it spinning into the waterfalled chasm after everyone was safely across – and down the steps, the storm had ended. The sun was out, the sky a clear-washed cloudless blue, and the ground steamed in the heat. But every leaf had a muddy wash, rapidly drying to dust in the heat.

  At the stream, we refilled leather skins and bottles, soaked our heads, and considered how best to go on. There were seven of us with wounds likely to slow everyone down and I was one of them, but we were paired with others who helped us back up the brush-covered ravines and on to the steppe.

  Thereafter, it was simply a long world of pain, step by fire-laced step, hour after hour, back to Kiev.

  That ankle has never been right since; it aches in cold weather and, now and then, simply gives out and throws me over like a sack of grain, always when I am trying to impress with my gravitas and dignity. Each time it flicks pain at me, I remember Gunnar Raudi.

  Others suffered much more. By the second day, the man whose forearm had been speared was running a high fever and his arm had swollen like a balloon. By the time we reached the outskirts of Kiev he was being carried in a cloak held at all four corners by his oarmates, drenched in sweat and moaning piteously, while the arm had turned black to the armpit.

  Illugi tried what he knew, a potion made from bark of aspen, quickbeam, willow and wych-elm: fifteen barks in all made up this one. It failed, so he tried a poultice made from the ashes of burned hair and everyone contributed some, even Bersi, whose waist-length flamered hair had never, ever been cut and who believed it bad luck to do so.

  It was certainly bad luck for Illugi’s patient, who died thrashing in his sleep that night in Kiev, having made it to safety. I watched him being wrapped for burial and knew only that his name was Hedin and that he had once kept bees in Uppsala.

  On the open steppe we had spotted distant horsemen, beyond arrow range and moving with us like a pack of questing wolves. But they did not come near and everyone agreed it was probably because we had come out of the tomb. Perhaps, it was argued, they thought we were fetch warriors and did not dare to contest us.

  I thought it was because of Hild, the only one unconcerned by them. She walked with bold, long strides in her red half-boots, swishing the skirt of her long, blue, red–embroidered dress and only slightly soiled overmantle, a Rus zanaviska, her dark hair spilling free.

  She was the perfect picture of a Norse maiden – until she turned to look at you and you saw that almost all her eyes were almost entirely black, all dark pupil, with only a thin corona of white. Regin’s kinswoman and, if you knew of him, you could see the resemblance.
>
  ‘Is that the same Regin from the tales, then?’ demanded Bersi during one rest halt, when we all hunkered and panted, wiping sweat out of our eyes. ‘Sigurd’s oarmate?’

  ‘So she seems to say,’ Skarti growled, glancing uneasily at where Hild sat, neat in her dress and staring at the horizon.

  ‘Not an oarmate,’ growled Bagnose, putting one finger to his nose and snotting to the side.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Not an oarmate,’ repeated Bagnose. ‘Regin had Sigurd as fostri. He was brother to Fafnir, who became a dreaded wyrm through gold-greed and a curse. Regin was a skilled smith, though, who made Sigurd a marvellous sword. Sigurd killed Fafnir the wyrm and ate his heart, which gave him wisdom to see Regin planned his murder, so he killed Regin, too.’

  ‘That’s a lot of killing, it seems to me,’ Steinthor said, ‘even for a saga tale.’

  ‘Over a hoard, too,’ noted Bersi and we all fell silent, brooding on that, until it was time to move off.

  ‘It’s all just tales for fucking children,’ growled Wryneck. ‘Why we bother with this is the only mystery in it.’

  Two other men died in Kiev, of the same sort of thing, their wounds swelling and turning black. A Greek doctor, whom Illugi summoned in desperation, shook his head and said the men must have had something get in the wound, a miasmic rot that festered their injuries.

  We never told him where we had been, but knowing looks were exchanged. Dengizik’s reach was long, it seemed, and everyone agreed that it had been deep thinking not to have taken his swords, even if they had been Regin’s work.

  We wrapped and buried our dead in Kiev and I listened to Illugi’s soft, long chants on the wyrd of men, one usually sung by mothers mourning children.