by Robert Low
Again I couldn’t say anything and the tears were splashing muddily on his shoulder.
‘Good woman. Loved her after a fashion and she me, I am thinking. Never had a chance to grow.’
He coughed up more blood and I patted aimlessly, helplessly.
‘Lies,’ he said. ‘For good reasons. We each had our true loves. Mine rode the whale road, swift and sure. With a good sail on it I could cut a day … off any … journey anywhere. Find my way by the stars to the end of the world.’
He spasmed; the grin froze. ‘You are my pride, though.’ His eyes went glassy and he hissed, one hand grasping me by the wrist: ‘But not my son. Her true love was Gunnar …’
And he went across the rainbow bridge, while the world spun and crashed and roared like the sea and all my thoughts were dust.
I would have stayed there, but some others passing dragged me away and dropped me safely out of arrow range, beside the huge engines with their Lebanese cedar throwing arms and sweating Greek engineers.
They loaded and fired, loaded and fired, for the assault had failed dismally and the only way into the city now was to pound the walls to rubble. Some of them, seeing the state I was in, gave me water and bound my wounds up with only slightly dirty rags, while I sat and let them, solid as a stump on the outside. Inside, I was … disconnected, like sea-rotted mail, falling link by link.
Not my father. Gunnar her true love. Stammkel hated Gunnar. The new links locked and riveted themselves into place and, though it was patchy, the shape of it was there.
My mother, already carrying me and knowing it, brings herself to my father … no, to Rurik, I realised. To Rurik, who marries her and gets a farm for his old age, he thinks, taking someone else’s son with it. Someone thought dead until he turns up, like a ghost at the feast.
Gunnar. No wonder he had stayed at Bjornshafen and no one dared say anything of it. No wonder, too, that Gudleif had to be sleekit about trying to do away with me, for he must have known.
And Gunnar had stayed with Einar because I was there – had died for being a father and kept it all to himself to the grave. I wept for that, splashing muddy tears down my face, for all the things we would not now say to each other, for all the remembered things that now made sense.
Gunnar Raudi. Swaggering, bracken-haired hard man, a sea-raider who had more in him for fathering than Rurik, who had wanted a farm and peace. Somehow, in a Loki joke, they had swapped lives.
Eventually, the dullness lifted and the tears stopped. I thought of him lying out there, dead in the dust and unclaimed. I couldn’t let that happen, so I went to find the Oathsworn.
I found a man I knew, Flosi, who had been my oarmate on the old Elk and he greeted me with a weary wave. ‘Thought you were gone,’ he said, jerking a grimy thumb behind him. ‘The rest are over yonder – Illugi is taking a tally. I’ve been sent to fetch food and water for us.’
He stood there, grinning madly, his hair a wild tangle and his beard stiff with matted blood and all the same tawny yellow from the dust. His eyes showed white and red-rimmed from the crusted scab of his face but he had no colour in anything he wore, just a coating of that dust. It came to me, then, that I looked no different – save for the tear-tracks, which he did his best to ignore.
Nor did any of the others, slumped in slack-mouthed exhaustion round the remains of what had been our camp, trampled by horsemen at some point, our flimsy shelters scattered. Illugi and Einar were finding out who lived, and who did not.
I was greeted with a raise of the hand, or a nod. Einar, blood streaked in his hair, turned and grinned a lopsided smirk, then jerked his head at Illugi. ‘Better mark him off the dead roll,’ he said.
‘Leave the mark,’ I replied, heaving up a slack skin of tepid water. I sluiced it over my head, then drank some. It was foul.
‘Fair enough,’ said Wryneck. ‘You look more dead than alive – and you just used all the water we had left, so some of us might kill you anyway.’
‘Leave the mark,’ I repeated, but tally it to my father.’
‘Aah,’ groaned Wryneck. ‘Old Rurik? Gone?’
‘A loss we will feel sorely,’ Einar added sorrowfully, ‘when we have the wind at our back and a fair sea. How will we find a course now?’
‘Any course will do,’ I snarled, ‘on the whale road.’
Einar nodded and tried to pat my shoulder as if I was merely overwrought; I glared at him through the streaked crust of my face. Illugi stepped forward, just one pace into that space heating up between us.
‘Anyone else you saw go down?’ he asked.
I blinked away from Einar, into the ravaged creases of Illugi’s worn face, made deeper by the dust caked in them. ‘Skarti,’ I said. ‘Took an arrow.’
‘In the throat,’ agreed Valknut, cross-legged. He was trying to comb the matted tangle of his hair and beard. He looked up, eyes blank, his voice full of wonder. ‘He drowned. I heard him drown in the middle of all the dust.’
‘I saw Eindridi,’ muttered Ketil Crow. ‘At least I think it was him, for I could not see his face. His head was on fire.’
‘A fire-arrow took him in the neck,’ agreed Wryneck. ‘I saw him get it, but he ran off before anyone could help.’
‘We have to recover our dead,’ I said and others growled. Einar nodded, looked round us all, then squinted at the dust. No one mentioned wounded. By now there would be no wounded, for anyone who couldn’t make it back off that field would have had their throats cut by looters. From our own side, most likely.
‘Wait for this to settle, else you will be blundering around achieving nothing,’ Einar said. ‘Food and water will arrive for us. Rest, regain strength and then honour the dead.’
It made too much sense to oppose, so that’s what we did, all through the settling haze of that golden day, while the great engines thumped and the sick and injured moaned and screamed.
The rations arrived, were prepared by women, some of whom were genuinely weeping for men who were lost. For once, we had more than enough to eat, since they had given rations for more than a hundred and there were, by Illugi’s final tally, forty-three of us fit enough to eat.
The dust never quite went away, but cleared enough for us to see the sun begin to die in streaks of gold and purple on a distant horizon, so we went out, naked to the waist in the shimmering heat, shoving the cart that rations had come in.
Until it became too dark to see, we loaded the bodies of those we recognised on to the cart and trundled them back to a place by the river, where the women keened and cleaned them as best they could, even though the entire Don was tinged pink and the twilight insects came in stinging clouds.
I found Rurik, untouched by the hordes of plundering boys, no longer after arrows but out to rob the dead. Skarti, however, had been stripped, his body white under the soft golden layer of dust.
We prised him from a crusted pool of his own blood, thick with gorged insects, and the arrow in his throat came out with a soft suck of sound and a gobbet of red. The one in his thigh wouldn’t come out at all, so I had to saw the shaft short, an awkward job with my bound hand.
All the while I could feel the eyes on me from the cart, the dead eyes of the man I had known as my father, and the storm in me rolled and swelled, for I was angry at him for having kept the secret so long, so that I did not even have my real father. Sad as a wolf-howl for him, too, that he had borne it all this long.
Skarti’s pox-ravaged head lolled sideways as I closed his eyes, hearing his voice say: ‘But you never see a cat on a battlefield,’ and we placed him on the cart, too.
We also laid out Eindridi – well, we were reasonably sure it was him, from the shield and weapons he bore, but even his own mother would not have known the blackened, peeling thing that had been his face.
We found Hrut, who knew more riddles than Bagnose, and Kol Otryggsson, who could carve out delicate, swirling patterns in leather with an awl, and Isleif from Aldeigjuborg and Rorik, the half-Slav from Kiev, who had com
e up to Holmgard for the season and joined us there, had hardly been with us long enough for anything to be known about him.
Then there was Ranvaik Sleekstone-eye, one of the old Oathsworn, his odd-coloured eyes closed for ever, the centre of his face punched bloody by one of those lead pebbles.
And more, each ragdoll body a new keening for the women, another stone in the heart of us all.
Einar and Valknut looked at Ranvaik’s corpse, blank-faced and wordless. Ketil Crow, almost tenderly, wiped the crusted mess from the dead face. There were, I knew, no more than a handful of the original Oathsworn left, the ones who had once sailed from where the bergs calved off in floating mountains to the lands where sand was drifted by the wind into a parody of the ocean.
Flosi came back for the cart eventually, eyeing with distaste the smear of fluids streaking it, for our bread and meat had to be piled there. Grumbling, he headed down to the river to clean it out, muttering that he wished he had known all this before he had taken that binding oath.
And, on the way, he flung back carelessly at Einar: ‘A new lot have arrived from up north, well-mailed and – armed Danes. Maybe you can tempt fresh men from them. Their leader is talking to Sviatoslav. Walks with a bad limp, calls himself Starkad.’
FOURTEEN
A wind snaked out of the north and drove a thin spray of grit and dust against me, whipping my cloak so hard I stumbled sideways. It was driving against our shield side and a few had decided to walk with the things up as shelter.
My arm was too sore for that, the pain throbbing out from the missing fingers all the way up to my elbow, so I had hauled up the cloak round my head and hunched into it, wondering whether my ankle hurt more than my hand, or if I had miasmic rot in the stumps of my fingers. I remembered the bee-keeper from Uppsala and his arm, blackening as he raved into the long night.
Up ahead strode Einar, alongside the jolting cart where Hild sat, cross-legged, swathed and veiled in his fine red cloak.
When he had heard Flosi’s news, Einar had stopped in his tracks and the matted yellow dust on his face had not hidden how he had paled. Ketil Crow had hawked and spat and said, ‘Loki’s hairy arse.’ Illugi had just looked sick with weariness.
Then Einar shook himself – physically, like a dog, so that the dust came off him like water – and growled, ‘Time for us to go, then, I am thinking.’
‘Do we have enough dead yet?’ I snarled back at him and he whirled, taking a step towards me. I think he expected me to back from him, remembering the steel of his fingers round my neck, but I was savage for it, wanted it more than my life, even though the thought flashed through me that I was dead.
‘Enough for what?’ asked a bemused Wryneck, with his tic-twitch.
Einar stopped, forced a grin and shrugged. ‘Our Bear Slayer has lost his father,’ he declared, for all to hear, ‘and it is not surprising a little of his mind has gone with him.’ He turned to Wryneck. ‘Look after him, old one, while I arrange for the proper rites for our fallen.’
Then he looked round the rest of us, raising his voice so all could hear. ‘Wash. Dress in your finest, for these are your oath-brothers and deserve it.’
So we all straggled out, searching for our scattered belongings from where the horsemen had dragged them, then went down to the river and cleaned ourselves and our clothes, as much as we could in that pink-tinged, mud-tainted flow.
But the Don was wide here and swallowed all our filth. By the time Ketil Crow and Einar came back, with thralls leading a dozen carts, each with two solid wheels and a stringy pony, we were, if not shining, more fitting than we had been before.
But I did it only for Rurik. I wanted to spit in Einar’s eye.
We took the bodies north into the steppe as the twilight grew, far out from where the city smouldered, until the fires of our own camp were distant enough for some to be uneasy about getting back. Of course, I knew we weren’t going back.
In the half-dark, thralls dug out a great boat-shaped pit in the black earth and placed the bodies in it, for there wasn’t enough wood left for a pyre after all the great burnings we’d already had.
It was a dark and silent affair, of hissing wind and the grunts of the thralls as they dug the earth with chopping sounds. Nearby, like a great storm crow, Hild squatted in her dark dress, knees up at her ears, hands clasped in her lap, presiding over it like some idol.
I folded Rurik’s hands on his chest over the hilt of his sword and silently asked the AllFather to guide him. Then the thralls filled the pit in with furious, nervous energy, as the dark came down and they grew ever more fearful.
They were right to be afraid. Maybe one or two suspected, but most were scared of the wrong people for, after they had unloaded the head-sized white stones we had begged or stolen from the Greek engineers and placed them as a border round the grave, Ketil Crow had them all seized.
Illugi Godi led the chanting prayers as, one by one, their throats were slit and they were laid out in a circle, head towards the mound, feet away. Hild stirred then, as the iron stink of blood swirled on the steppe wind and unfolded herself.
‘Are we done here?’ she rasped and heads turned angrily to her, only to be silenced by the cold stare they had in return.
It was a hasty excuse, half-ashamed in the dark, for a proper burial in the old way, with fire and dignity, but I made my own peace with Rurik then, for I thought it unlikely I would be back here – or that the scavengers would leave much. But all were safely across Bifrost, the rainbow bridge.
Afterwards, Einar told them what he planned: to strike out north and east, round the city, then back to the river beyond it and on down to the greatest wealth of silver they had ever seen.
Thirty agreed at once and eight thereafter, reluctant and muttering about every hand being against them.
‘Did you think such a prize was to be had lightly?’ Einar demanded, as much to all of us as to them.
‘No,’ answered one of those who still refused – baptised Christ-followers to a man, I noted. ‘I did not think to have to pay my soul as the price.’
‘Your soul?’ snarled Ketil Crow. ‘What is this? The afterlife in Christ-Valholl? If so, it seems a poor place, full of poor people and gods who scorn a hard arm.’
The man, a Dane from Hedeby called Aslaf, was not fazed by Ketil Crow and merely shrugged, since he had no gold-browed argument and Christ hung on him like a new tunic, still creased and scratchy here and there.
For all that, he and his three oarmates would not give in and stood their ground, shuffling their feet and keeping a wary eye and a hand on a hilt.
‘You swore an oath,’ Illugi reminded them and Aslaf glanced at him, uneasy now that this door had opened. But he had courage, this Dane, and pushed it a little wider.
‘Not made to the One God we follow,’ he countered defiantly, then licked his lips and stared hard at Einar. ‘Anyway, I am not the first to break that old oath. I will not follow a madwoman into the Grass Sea in search of a tale for children.’
The words hung in the air with the flutter and whine of insects and the gutter of new torches in the rising wind.
‘Nithing turds,’ Ketil Crow growled, waving a dismissive hand. ‘I hate fucking Christmen; they are not even worth killing.’
Hild laughed, high and crazed and cracked like a bell, and half of those who had already agreed to go almost changed their minds there and then, I saw. I was one.
For a moment I thought Aslaf would ruin it all, for his eyes narrowed and I could feel him flush from where I stood. If he fought, he would die, that was certain.
Then he relaxed, took two or three steps backwards, insultingly, until he was beyond range of a backstab, whirled and trotted into the night, back to the sprawling fires of the camp. With a brief wild look at each other, the other three did the same.
‘If Yaropolk doesn’t kill him,’ Einar growled to the uneasy stirrings around him, ‘then Sviatoslav will. If Starkad doesn’t get to them first, that is.’
&n
bsp; The men round him growled with bare-toothed, savage delight at that, the fate these oathbreakers deserved. But it was the wolf-grin of the desperate.
There wasn’t much left now to bind us. Not oath, certainly – like a badly built hov, the roofbeams of which were splitting. For some, the lure of the hoard was still enough. For most it was the sick realisation that, unsteady as it was, the shrinking band of Oathsworn was the safest place to be for the moment.
And for me? There was only one reason I was going now. A son cannot leave his murdered father without taking revenge.
We moved out through the darkness, keeping the fires to our back until they disappeared. Then we turned east, with Steinthor questing ahead and Bagnose to our shield side.
Now the men knew of the plan, a few were cursing that they had left this or that behind, thinking they’d return. Short Eldgrim and Kvasir were the most loud and furious, since they’d bought a concubine between them and spent almost all they had on her only to have left her behind.
Most were as varjazi always had been. They wore all they possessed, carrying wealth in boot or under armpit. If you could not leave something behind in an eyeblink, you were a fool.
By dawn, the wind had risen to a snake-hiss and we trundled across short grass peeking from between stones, over endless, rolling hills, cut with steep-gulleyed streams, some dust-dry, some trickling with water and almost choked with eager growth.
It was well named, this Grass Sea, a great, undulating vastness unmarked as an ocean. When the city had shrunk behind us to a scab on the distant horizon, Einar put the wind at our back and headed us to the river. Now and then he spoke softly with Hild, but she made not a sound and no one wanted to go near her, not even me, for the Other rose off her like a sweat-stink and made the hairs on your arms stand up.
We spotted the first dust, whipped away like smoke on a sighing wind, as we tramped tiredly up to another of the steep gulleys, which those Novgorod Slavs among us called balkas. They were annoying, for the shelter let scrub and stunted trees spring up and the carts had to be manhandled over them. Even the tough little ponies were tiring.