The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  ‘That is because we were not there for it,’ Finn chuckled and Botolf scowled blackly at him.

  ‘Just so – which was the cause of what happened next. Prince Yaropolk came back, with his father and brothers – and Starkad, who pointed us out as Einar’s men. Since Einar had run off from Yaropolk’s retinue and disgraced him, Starkad thought to get his drakkar back that way, but burned his fingers, for Yaropolk took us and the ship. Us he sold to Takoub, a slave-dealer I will one day meet and whose head I will tear off.’

  ‘Did you not get our messages, then?’ I asked and he nodded grimly.

  ‘Starkad came to where we were shackled and told us, with some delight it seemed to me, that Einar and Ketil Crow and others had all died on the steppe – and that little Orm had been made jarl.’ He paused then and glanced at me, a little shamed it seemed. ‘This we thought a barefaced lie,’ he added, ‘since the likes of Finn Horsehead and Kvasir were still alive. Valgard said it was unlikely that the likes of Orm would be preferred to Finn. No offence, young Orm.’

  ‘What happened then?’ I asked, ignoring this, though my face burned. Botolf shrugged his massive shoulders.

  ‘Starkad said it was true, all the same, at which Valgard spat and said we could now expect no rescue from … I mean no offence, here, young Orm … a nithing boy.’

  ‘Skafhogg needs a slap,’ Finn growled and Botolf, teeth gleaming in the half-dark, nodded agreement. I signalled for him to go on and he pursed his lips and frowned, thinking.

  ‘Starkad wanted to know where that Martin monk had gone, but Valgard told him to go away and that he could as well die, screaming in his own piss. After that, we were shipped south, all the way to Kherson, and sold to the goat-fucking Arabs. Takoub packed us, nose to feet, in a big ship and sailed us off to Serkland.’

  He stopped and blinked, the closest Botolf came to fear, it seemed to me.

  ‘We came off the boat together, which was itself considerable luck,’ he rumbled, shaking his shaggy head at the memory. ‘That was a grim trip right enough – others died, but none of the Oathsworn.’

  ‘How is it you went one way and they another?’ I asked.

  ‘Someone saw me, I am thinking, and thought I would be better fighting than any of the others. All I know is that I was unshackled from them and shackled to another lot and we were taken away – north, I think. The others went their own way, towards Damascus, I heard.’

  ‘Together?’ I asked and he nodded.

  ‘Even that little rat-faced Christ-man, Martin,’ he said. The news rocked us all; I heard the rumble of One Eye laughing in my head.

  ‘The monk?’ gasped Finn and Botolf nodded, grinning.

  ‘Aye, he was rounded up with us – Starkad did not see him and Valgard thought it a good joke that what he sought so avidly was feet away from him all the time.’

  ‘Heya,’ breathed Kvasir, looking at me. ‘Odin’s hand, right enough, Trader. There you are telling Starkad what you believe to be lies and it was the truth all along.’

  ‘What of the icon?’ demanded Brother John, dabbing his cut head and Botolf frowned with puzzlement, then remembered and brightened.

  ‘That spear thing? Oh, Takoub took it with him.’

  ‘Where are the others now?’ I asked, shooting annoyance at Brother John’s interruption.

  Botolf shrugged.

  ‘So we have lost them, then,’ growled Finn.

  ‘Not lost,’ answered Botolf cheerfully, finishing examining his cut. ‘They went to Fatty Breeks. I heard men say so.’

  ‘Who in the name of Odin’s hairy arse is Fatty Breeks?’ shouted Finn and then rounded on all those who woke and told him to keep quiet, folk were trying to sleep.

  ‘Easy, Horsehead,’ I said, laying a calming hand on his arm. ‘Let’s sleep on it and see if we can find someone who knows about it when it is full daylight.’

  Grumbling, Finn curled up, scowling. Botolf shrugged, then grasped my wrist.

  ‘You did well, Orm,’ he said. ‘Valgard Skafhogg was sure it was our wyrd to die like nithings, for he did not think you had the balls for the task of saving us. It will be good to see his face when we shake his chains off.’

  He lay down and started to snore almost at once. I envied him, for I still heard that thumping beat of my thoughts, a tern-whirl of confusion. Now we had our oarmates to consider, as well as the rune-serpent sword, and I dared not wonder what came next, for it is well known that the Norns weave in threes.

  In the morning, after we had splashed water on our faces, we went around Skarpheddin’s camp, asking about Fatty Breeks, which got us strange looks and a few scowls, which big Botolf deflected with a look of his own. We learned nothing.

  The camp was a busy place, a village of wadmal cloth in fact, where folk carried on as if they were still in a toft set in hills soft and round as a breast, clothed with the tawny grass of spring and alive with gull and raven.

  They worked the pole lathe, turned shoes, pumped bellows and forged, cooked solid fare against a Norway chill and tried to ignore the rising heat, a sky so pale blue it was near white, a sere roll of scrub-covered hills and the slaughtered-pig screech of the norias on the Orontes River, those huge water wheels that carried buckets up to the old arched aqueducts of the Romans and watered the fields around Antioch.

  Into this bustle came the merchants, the spade-bearded Jewish Khazars whose brothers I had seen in Birka and fought at Sarkel, fat-bellied Arabs, plush Greeks and even a few Slavs and Rus, smelling trade and bringing bargains.

  Since Skarpheddin had parted with some of the silver he owed us, we took the chance to repair our gear and I sent Finn back to the Elk eventually, with instructions to have men on six-strong watches for two days at a time, the rest to come up and camp here as one body.

  I was frantic to be gone from here, to be on some sort of trail, but no trail presented itself, neither of Starkad, nor of this mystery place, Fatty Breeks.

  Radoslav, Brother John and I then haggled for good wadmal to make tents with and I managed to get a new set of striped Rus breeks and a cloak with a fine pin to go with it.

  Brother John took the chance to examine my knees and eventually straightened, scratching his head and then looked at the palms of my hands, all of which was alarming.

  ‘What?’ I asked, making more light of it than I felt. ‘How long do I have, then?’

  He frowned and shook his head. ‘Longer than anyone else,’ he replied and grabbed Radoslav by the hand. ‘Look here.’

  Radoslav’s hand was calloused and scarred, old white ones, new red ones and a couple that looked yellow with pus.

  ‘So?’ I answered. ‘Everyone gets them. Ropes. Sword nicks.’

  ‘Yours are all old,’ Brother John said. ‘Healed long since. Your knees, which you skinned on Patmos, will have scarcely a sign of scar.’ He sighed. ‘It is an ill-served world, right enough. Vitam regit fortuna non sapientia – chance, not wisdom, governs human life. There is you, whose youth repels all ills, it appears. Then there is Ivar Gautr, who is turning yellow and shrinking, even though the arrow wound in his cheek is healed.’

  I felt the chill of it, for I had an idea what repelled all ills – would this fail, in time, now that Rune Serpent was far from my hand? Then Svala came up and drove all thoughts from me, for she seemed to glow.

  Ignoring Radoslav and his broad smiles and winks, she cocked her head at me and said: ‘The whole city is buzzing with talk of how the amphitheatre under-galleries were flooded last night, though no one can be found who saw it done.’

  ‘You say so?’ I replied flatly. ‘To think we missed all this.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘The Roman soldiers are stamping up and down asking people questions and the engineers are fixing a huge leak in the arena’s old underground cistern. There is talk of a giant and an axe.’

  At which point Botolf came up, brandishing a new comb and trailing two or three giggling girls who were, it seems, intent on using it on his mane of red-gold hair. Sp
otting Svala, they found other business more pressing and looked almost afraid, which was strange. Svala smiled winsomely up at Botolf.

  ‘A giant,’ she said, then looked at me. ‘But no axe.’

  ‘It broke,’ Botolf said with a grin, ‘but if Orm gives me hacksilver, I have seen another at a fair price.’

  I poured money from my limp purse, conscious of her eyes on me. Radoslav, chuckling, found something else to do and, suddenly, I was alone with her and my mouth worked like a fresh-caught cod.

  ‘You are not as honey-mouthed as I had been told,’ Svala said, then smiled and slipped an arm into mine. ‘But that is no bad thing, for there is much about you that is strange and grand in one so young.’

  ‘Just so,’ I managed to croak, dazzled. Her face darkened.

  ‘Your dreams, for one thing.’

  My body was a sea where my stomach and heart heaved on the swell. What did she know of my dreams?

  She said nothing more, though, and we walked the camp in silence for a while, examining this and that. I saw Botolf again, stripped to the waist and showing off his skill and strength by spinning a Dane axe in one hand and a heft-seax in the other, which was a long, single-edged broad knife on a long pole. In the end, as the crowd applauded, the owner of the heft-seax had to allow he had won his bet and knocked down the price of both weapons.

  Delighted, Botolf came and presented them to me for approval and I duly admired them. Behind, I saw the same giggling girls as before and, as he went off, they slid to his side. Svala snorted.

  ‘That Thyra is always in rut, so she comes as no surprise – but Katla and Herdis have no right to be doing that,’ she declared. ‘Their mothers will be furious, to say nothing of their fathers. And Katla should know better, for she only has to look at a prick and her belly swells. She has two babes already and a stupid husband, though his brain is not so addled he’ll assume another is his, too.’

  It was the word ‘prick’ that did it. On her lips it would have made one of the Christ saints kick in the door of his own church. Dry-mouthed, I could only stare at her and she must have felt it, for she turned, saw my look … and looked down to where my new breeks, fat and striped as they were, could not hide what I was thinking.

  A slow smile spread on her face and she looked me straight in the eye, put her head to one side and then laughed. ‘As well you got some extra ells of material in the fork of those new breeks,’ she said archly. ‘Let us go into the city, for the walk will cool you, I am thinking.’

  So we did that day. And the next. And the one after. We saw gold from Africa, leather from Spain, trinkets from Miklagard, linens and grain from the Fatamid lands, carpets from Armenia, glass and fruit from Syria, perfumes from the Abbasids, pearls from the sea in the south, rubies and silver from even further east.

  On the fourth day, Brother John came with us, for we still searched for the strange Fatty Breeks and, though we again discovered nothing of that, I learned of the lands of Cathay, from which poured shiny-glazed pottery, the feathers of peacocks, excellent saddles, a thick, heavy cloth called felt and richer stuff worked with fine gold and silver wires. There was also a strange, purple-coloured stick with leaves known as rhubarb which was worth its weight in gold – though I did not know why, for it clapped your jaws with its tartness and made your belly gripe.

  There was also the achingly familiar: the amber, wax, honey, ivory, iron and good furs from my homeland. Most painful of all, though, was the sight of speckled stone, the fine whetstones of the north. I snuffled them like a pig in a trough, fancied I was drinking in the faint scent of a northern sea, a shingle strand, even snow on high mountain rocks.

  It was that night, thick with evening mist, floating with songs from the firepits around my own wadmal hov, that I kissed her on soft lips, at a lonely spot near the river, keening with insect songs.

  It was that night that she panted and gasped and writhed against me, while at the same time warning that nothing must happen – then gripping me in a strong hand, like she was about to chop wood, she gave three or four deft strokes, for all the world as if she milked an annoyed goat, and there I was, gasping, squint-eyed and bucking like a mad rabbit, emptied.

  It had been a time since, I consoled myself, while she chuckled and said that it was for the best – yet while she spoke to me like a polite matron, her lower body had not stopped twisting and grinding against me, so that when I put my hand down, she guided it to a spot and gave a gasp.

  After that, she became a moaning snake woman, until, suddenly, she subsided, panting and smiling at me from flamered cheeks, her eyes bright, her face sheened with sweat. Then she blew a strand of hair off her face with a sharp little ‘pfft’ and heaved a sigh. ‘Lovely,’ she said brightly. ‘That was good.’

  ‘It could be better,’ I said, lost in those eyes, desperate for what they could give, for what they promised. For love, which I felt once with the doomed Hild, for a moment as brief as the flick of a gnat’s wing. My head drowned in a sea of dreams.

  ‘So you think,’ she said, ‘but that’s as good as it gets.’

  ‘After we are married, I shall expect more,’ I answered, astounded at myself. I don’t know what reaction I expected, but the one I got made me blink. She laughed.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Do not think of it. It will not be approved.’

  ‘Why? Am I not good enough?’

  She stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth and grinned at me. ‘You are a jarl-hero, are you not? That’s good enough. But you may have to kill more than a white bear to get what you want.’

  She mocked me and I was not so young as I had been when first I had boarded Einar’s ship, that I would rise to it. Instead, I wondered why she made light of it, but nothing more was said, though it was plain that she was a treasure hoard as removed from me as any belonging to Attila.

  Nothing more was said because she had recovered her breath and desire and was starting to guide my hand again. But for all that she was sticky as a rumman fruit, it would have taken Miklagard engineers to storm that citadel – and I was too easy to disarm.

  Afterwards, as I lay listening to the squeal-clunk of the norias, feeling the night breeze drift her hair on my cheek, I counted that night one of the best times I ever had, for I did not dream at all, whereas afterwards, I did not spend one night where I slept without my head crowded with the dead.

  I should have known then, of course, that Odin sleeps, as they say, with his one eye open, waiting for his chance to punish the smug. It was a harsh raven trick when it came – and heralded by the arrival of a banner with that black-omened bird on it.

  Svala and I had parted with the first thin-milk smear of dawn and later, just as I was eating the day-meal by the firepit with the rest of the band, she walked up as if nothing had happened.

  Radiant and smiling, she held out a swathe of folded white cloth, while I became conscious of the others looking at me looking at her. I saw Short Eldgrim nudge Sighvat and whisper something I was glad I couldn’t hear.

  ‘I have heard tales of this brave band,’ she said, cool and clean as new snow, ‘but saw that you lacked one thing. So I have made one for you.’ And she unfurled a strip of dagged white cloth embroidered with a thick black raven.

  ‘Heya,’ said Finn admiringly and the others rose up, wiping their greased fingers on beards and tunics, to admire the stitching.

  I managed to stammer my thanks and she smiled, even more sweetly than before.

  ‘You need a good long pole for it,’ she said archly, looking straight at me. ‘Do you know where to find one? If not, I do.’

  I was dry-mouthed at the cheek of her and felt the blood rush to my face, for her words had inspired exactly what she sought. I sat quickly before it became obvious. There was the taste of rumman fruit in my mouth when I managed to stammer my thanks.

  She left, swishing the hem of her dress over the grass, and I felt Sighvat come up behind me. He fingered the new banner and nodded.

  ‘F
ine work,’ he offered, then looked at me. On his shoulder, a raven fluffed and preened. ‘That one is a danger,’ he went on, which made me blink and almost spit back angrily at him to mind his own business, save that I had good respect for Sighvat and what he knew. He saw the questions and the anger in my face and stroked the head of the raven.

  ‘Neither of the ravens will sit near her,’ he went on. ‘Now one is gone, for I set it to watching the jarl’s witch-mother and have never seen it since. There is something Other at work here, Trader.’

  Coldness crept into my belly and crouched there. I knew the Other well enough and the sudden vision-flash of Hild, black against black, that snake-hair blowing with no wind, almost made me drop the new banner in the firepit.

  Big Botolf scooped it up and put it back in my lap, grinning. ‘A fine banner. Do you want me to find a pole for it? I was thinking of putting a new shaft on this heft-seax and if I made it a long one, there would be a weapon at the end of the banner-pole, which would be useful.’

  There and then, to his delight, I made him banner-bearer and he was still grinning when Kvasir trundled up, saw the raven flag hanging in Botolf’s griddle-iron fists and grunted his appreciation.

  ‘Just in time, Trader,’ he said, ‘for another jarl has arrived – a score of good hafskipa are now in the harbour and a thousand people, no less.’

  This was news right enough and the tale of it bounced from head to head. Jarl Brand of Hovgarden, a Svear chieftain who had backed out of the fighting there for a while, had gone west and south, down past the lands of al-Hakam of Córdoba, through the narrows of Norvasund, which the Romans call the Pillars of Hercules and into the Middle Sea, with twenty ships and a thousand people, at least six hundred of them warriors.

  Suddenly, in the middle of a distant, Muspell-hot country of the Sarakenoi, there were more good Norse than I had ever seen in one place in my life.

  We stood with the throng and watched him and his hard men come up the road from the port to the city of Antioch, he on a good horse, they striding out, despite the heat, in full helms and gilt-dagged mail and shields.