by Robert Low
Radoslav. Unfettered and smiling like a cornered rat. All was clear as new rainwater. Finn growled, a low sound that raised the hackles on my neck.
Radoslav merely grinned at my stricken face and spread his arms, his voice reasonable. ‘I gave you every chance. I gave you a ship, my time, my patience and yet still you persisted in the silly story of needing that silly sword to go after the silver you found. I would have been your man if you had, young Orm, but it seems you are too afraid. I am not. I will go, as soon as you tell us where it lies. So what will make you – who will make you, eh?’
I couldn’t speak, the utter back-stabbing treachery of it robbing me of my tongue. I saw him pulling the dagger from the Dane’s neck in the alley, ducking debris on the stairs under the amphitheatre. All that – and now this?
Finn, though, had voice for all of us. ‘Can you crawl there, you nithing?’ he spat. ‘I will rip off your legs and beat out that tattoo on your head with the wet ends, you pig fart.’
I was still in that alley in Miklagard, hearing Radoslav say, calm as a stone: ‘I heard him call you pig fart.’ How could I have been so wrong about him? Had those seidr witches worked his mind over to them?
I had not, of course, been wrong, only blind. The silversickness was on him from the start and the likes of Thorhalla and Svala had not missed it. It was bright in his eyes now, thick in his voice as he looked Finn over. His smile was dazzling.
‘Hmm … perhaps you, Horsehead?’ he said, then shook his head and laughed. ‘I am thinking not. Orm might even thank us for getting rid of your mouth.’
He studied, then grinned. ‘Him,’ he said, pointing to Botolf. ‘We went to such trouble to get him, after all. Orm will talk if he is facing death.’
Skarpheddin signalled and some of his men moved forward, to be met with growls. They stopped and both sides tensed like rival dog packs. They were armed and our weapons were on the ground, but I knew Finn and the others would fight sooner than see Botolf dragged off. So did Botolf.
‘Heya,’ he rumbled cheerfully, stepping forward. He winked at me and moved into the lee of Skarpheddin’s men, then turned to face us – and knelt. I swallowed as Skarpheddin took the hint.
‘Well,’ he said admiringly, ‘a man who spits at death.’ His sword coming out was a snake-slither of sound.
‘Just so,’ declared Botolf and winked at me again. What was he doing? I was shaking so much I could hear my ring-rivets jingle.
‘I am thinking, though,’ the giant rumbled on reasonably, ‘that you may have to neck me, just to prove the point to young Orm here, who is a deep thinker and stubborn.’
‘Are you so eager to die, then?’ snarled Radoslav, bewildered by this. He was not alone – I looked round at all the grim, puzzled faces. Finn scrubbed his head in an agony of confusion, the sweat rolling off him in fat beads.
Botolf shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘You chose me, Radoslav. I am just showing you the weave of it.’
Skarpheddin stroked his forked beard and then shrugged and raised the sword. ‘So be it,’ he said.
I wanted to shriek, but Botolf winked for the third time and held up a hand.
‘Wait, wait,’ he said and turned to grin at Radoslav. ‘If this is my wyrd – and it looks like it is, for sure – then let me die as fair as I lived. I would hate to shear my hair off with my neck.’
Radoslav blinked, then laughed a nasty laugh, for he had seen – as we all had seen – how vain big Botolf was about his long red hair, now fixed in two massive braids.
‘Do me the courtesy,’ growled Botolf to Radoslav. ‘Pull them free of my neck.’
Radoslav put his back to us as he moved to stand in front of Botolf, gripped a braid in each fist and pulled them forward, so that the massive neck was exposed. I sweated. Did Botolf believe he really was the frost giant Ymir? That his muscled flesh could bounce edged iron like a berserker?
The sword swung up, a red-gold arc in the torchlight.
‘Wait …’ I started to say, then it hissed down, full force.
Botolf gave a bull bellow and his whole muscled torso heaved backwards. Radoslav shot forward, hands outstretched and shrieked with horror as Skarpheddin’s blade sheared through his hands. One was severed completely at the wrist, the other lost all the fingers in a spray of flesh bits and blood.
Screaming, he reeled away, while Botolf rose like Ymir himself, the spider of Radoslav’s left hand still gripping one braid, a grisly hair ornament that swung as he shoved fat-bellied Skarpheddin into Thorhalla, who cannoned into Svala and the Goat Boy.
Something black rasped: ‘Odin,’ and whirred across the room; men scrabbled for weapons; and Brother John roared: ‘Fram! Fram! Brandsmenn! Ljot!’
I scooped up my blade and started towards Svala, to free the Goat Boy. Botolf, roaring and beating with his fists, vanished into the middle of Skarpheddin’s men and Short Eldgrim followed after, Kvasir on his heels. Finn lunged, snarling, towards Thorhalla, who shrieked and danced, her catskin cloak flying as she spat at Finn, shouting, ‘Blunt, blunt.’
It was well-known that a seidr witch could take the edge off a weapon with such a look and chant, but Finn swung his sword anyway and cursed when the Godi bounced off her thick catskin cloak. Thorhalla cackled in triumph, but Finn, grim as a shoal in a storm, whipped up his Roman nail from between his boots and rammed it between her eyes. Later, he said it felt like pushing a knife into an old bird’s nest.
A mailed figure loomed in front of me, bright light flashed on a blade and I struck at his shins as I ducked. They cracked like twigs and he wailed and fell over, so that I moved past him to where Sighvat was collecting the Goat Boy from a shrieking Svala.
She was slumped and bloodied already, whimpering from the ruin of a face. A small puff of wet feathers lay at her feet, but Sighvat’s raven had clawed and pecked her eyes and face before she had torn it to bloody pats, letting loose the Goat Boy to do it.
I hauled the Goat Boy away and he clung to me and looked up into my face, dry-eyed. ‘I was not afraid, Trader,’ he whispered, his voice winking on the brim of tears. ‘I held your amulet and was not afraid.’
I dragged him to one side and hunkered down at the base of the great stern statue while the chamber filled with grunting, panting, howling men, hacking and slashing at each other in a fury of fear and frenzy.
They cursed and staggered and slipped in gore and lashed out at each other. Shadows danced madly in the guttering torches but Sighvat knelt nearby as if he was the only one in that place, gently gathering up the body of the raven, every last bloody shred and pinfeather, cupping it in his hands while Svala lay, face leaking blood between her fingers as she rocked and moaned.
The raven. Had it said ‘Odin’ because Sighvat had trained it to speak, as Kvasir had scoffed when we had first marvelled at it? Had he trained it also to kill, or was that the hand of One Eye? There was so much skin-crawling seidr in this hov, though, that even Sighvat’s raven seemed the least of it.
The fight did not last long, though it seemed so. The last of Skarpheddin’s dreng flung down their weapons when they saw Brand enter the chamber, magnificently mailed and chill as snow. Skarpheddin himself, beaten flat by Botolf, could not even rise or speak, for his ribs were smashed and his jaw broken.
Botolf sat, panting and scowling and running with blood from a dozen cuts as everyone sorted themselves out and realised that no one was hurt save for a few bruises and slices. We all crowded round, demanding to know where he was cut worst and Botolf sighed, holding out a hand, from which dangled one limp braid, sliced off in the fight.
‘Now I will have to get it all shorn,’ he scowled.
We were laughing like girls from the sheer relief of it, echoing loud in that chamber. The Goat Boy danced and shrilled.
Then the whimpers and moans and blood sobered us.
‘Help me, for the love of all the gods,’ yelped Radoslav, his stump jammed under his armpit where it soaked his shirt. His other, fingerless hand he had stu
ffed between his thighs to try and stem the bleeding and he begged Finn to tie off his arms and save him.
It came to me again that he had not, after all, been immune to the women’s seidr magic and that the thoughts in his head had not, perhaps, been all his own. I pitied him – but I was alone in this, as it turned out.
‘You need a Greek chirurgeon,’ Brother John pointed out and Radoslav whimpered agreement.
‘You need a priest,’ corrected Finn in a low, rasping snarl and raised his named sword.
Radoslav shrieked once as the blade – not blunt now, I saw – sliced him through the throat, then gurgled his way to meet his Slav gods.
Finn, grinning madly, leaned over and tore Radoslav’s ruby earring out, then searched him for more spoil. Once, Radoslav had been an oarmate, a sword-brother; now he was pillage and it came to me then that he had managed to avoid taking our Oath and that I had missed that sign, too. I thanked him for it now, all the same; the Oath had not been broken by his treachery and death.
‘He thought you were lying about the runesword,’ said Brother John softly, looking down at the ruin that had been Radoslav. ‘Libenter homines et id quod volunt credunt.’
What men wish, they like to believe. It did not seem much to mark the passing of a man who had once saved my life.
Jarl Brand, his hair and eyes picking up all the red torchlight, stepped over to the groaning Skarpheddin and his dead mother. His sword was one befitting a great jarl, for it took only two strokes – deep, wet sounds – and their heads were off. Then he turned to Svala.
‘Take her and bind her. Cask those two up,’ he said to Ljot, ‘and place the heads on the thighs.’
Which was the correct way, of course, to lay any witch-fetch vengeance to rest, for they cannot walk abroad as undead if they cannot see. Svala would not be killed; no one sensible killed a witch and it was not good that Finn had killed Thorhalla, but I trusted to Odin to watch over him for that. I watched Brand’s men haul Svala by the armpits and take her up the worn steps, her calfskin shoes bumping as they dragged her, blood dripping, fat and red.
Brand turned to me and smiled. ‘A good service,’ he declared. ‘I shall keep my word. Come to me in the daylight and we will see your men well fitted out.’
We left that old tomb, stinking with fresh blood and new fetches to haunt it down the ages, scampering away from it down the moonlit crack between high rocks and out to where the river flowed. There we stopped and splashed water and told Botolf what a saga tale he had made, though all he could think of was his lost hair.
It did make such a tale, too, for that skald Harek – who had stayed true enough to us – took the bones of it and fleshed it into a saga. Though when I heard it, years later, it was part of another tale entirely, about the jomsvikings from Wolin, and nearly all lies.
As we trooped back to the wadmal-camp, the Goat Boy striding beside me, fist clenched tight in the hem of my mail, all I could see were Svala’s red cheeks, lips pursed to blow a strand of hair off her face with a little ‘pfft’ of sound.
‘Lovely,’ she had said.
I could not get the stink of rumman fruit out of my nose all night – and the gods revealed the price to be paid for killing a witch when we stumbled back to our mean camp. The man I had set to watch Martin confessed he had ducked from the tent for a moment – a moment only – to take a piss, for the prisoner had been bound.
When he came back, the monk had gone.
ELEVEN
The click of wooden goat bells and the bleat of camel calves snatched me from a dream which smoked away like prow-spray into the morning, where shadows already grew fat beyond the sheltered overhang of rock where we were camped.
Men yawned and unrolled from cloaks and stretched, farting. Two fires were already lit and Aliabu, our guide, was slapping wet dough backwards and forwards in his hands, expertly making it into thin bread for the hot stones. He grinned, all white teeth and eyes. Nearby, Finn ducked the smoke from his own fire, moving to the lee as he stirred oats and water in a pot, a good Norse day-meal.
Short Eldgrim strolled up as I rolled out from my own cloak and finally found the gods-cursed stone that had stuck in my ribs for most of the night.
‘You look like a camel’s arse, Trader,’ he grunted amiably, hunkering down awkwardly in his robes and mail. Finn threatened him with the wooden spoon as he craned to look in the pot.
‘Fine talk from the likes of you,’ I gave him back, ‘with a face like a bad chart.’
The Goat Boy brought me some of the Arab flatbread and hot goat’s milk, at which a few of the men chuckled. The Goat Boy, still pale and weak, had refused to be left behind with Gizur and the six we had sent to guard the Fjord Elk and the Oathsworn admired his bravery – and enjoyed poking fun at me for his doglike devotion. I had to spit out flies drinking his hot milk, though; even this early they swarmed on any food.
Most of the band were awake and had been since first light, slithering into leather and mail. After that, they shrouded it all in the flowing robes of the Bedu tribes, leaving helmets dangling like pots from the waists and wearing cloth wrapped round their heads in a strange way, which Aliabu and his brothers, Asil and Delim, had to do for the band every day.
That had been Aliabu’s idea, that and the handful of goats and camels which carried our gear, since it made us look more like Sarakenoi in the country that we travelled through. Not that, so far, we had seen many others and those we did find sprinted for it. Ruined farms, shattered houses, broken lives – the armies of both sides were ravaging those who always suffer: the weak.
Now, eight days out from Antioch, we had gone beyond even the Miklagard army scout patrols and the two ravaged steadings we had come across had been destroyed by the Sarakenoi themselves, who were fighting each other now. I thanked the gods we were more battle-ready than we had ever been.
Jarl Brand had been a ring-giver of note to us, for sure. In front of the assembled ranks of his own men and us – and what was left of the sullen, wailing company of Skarpheddin – he had offered his aid to each and every one of the Oathsworn, who had then picked spears, axes, helmets shields and prized ring-coats from a heap gathered up from the battlefield.
There were a few swords, too, but he gave them to me to hand out, which was a fine jarl-gesture and not lost on all there, so that the women who wailed at the sight of familiar battle-gear being lifted by strangers were made easier. That, of course, and the fact that Jarl Brand had swept them into his own hov, which at least gave them a future and made it harder to protest.
He also provided a feast, with heaped platters of food and fat jugs of nabidh, consumed under the stars down by the Orontes, with clever jugglers and fire-eaters and all in honour of the Oathsworn and their leader, Orm Bear Slayer.
Harek, who had now become court-skald to Brand as he had been to Skarpheddin, composed as complicated a draupa as he could manage on the greatness of Orm Bear Slayer while half-drunk, but the ‘hooms’ and ‘heyas’ that made my face flame simply made his tongue more wild.
Of course, as Brand confided to me, his face so close to mine that I could see the light sparkle on his silver lashes, it was what the Oathsworn deserved for having such Odin luck as to have attacked the main baggage camp of the enemy just as it looked as if the Sarakenoi might win.
Instead, they had panicked and tried to get back to defend it, at which point Red Boots and his horsemen fell on them, rescuing something from a bad day. Which was double luck for us: if the Sarakenoi had got back to their camp, we’d have been skewered and considered ourselves fortunate to die so quickly after what we had done there.
‘General Red Boots now commends me,’ Brand went on, ‘which is only right and proper. He has made me Curopalates in Skarpheddin’s stead.’
I smiled and nodded, though I did not think he would have the enjoyment of it for long – Red Boots had not beaten the wily old Hamdanid ruler and, as long as he threatened from Aleppo, Antioch would have to be abandoned yet again.
The army would be reduced once more, until next year, or the year after. As seemed usual, neither the Great City nor the Sarakenoi had gained anything for all the blood spilled.
Perhaps Skarpheddin chuckled at that from Helheim where he surely was, for he and his mother were both carefully casked in a Christ coffin lined with lead stripped from Antioch’s outraged churches. This was so that they wouldn’t leak until they were howed, with due solemn ceremony, four days after we were gone. Of Svala there was no word at all.
‘So you did me a good turn there, too, young Orm,’ Brand was saying, stroking his grease-stiffened moustaches, so that they looked more like frozen eaves-water than before. ‘Which is why I equip you well, as promised. I will also give you some good Arabs, the ones they call Bedu from hereabouts, three brothers and their women led by one Aliabu … something. He will make you look more like his people and, if you travel with the camels I will give him, there is a better chance of avoiding that stake up the arse.’
It was a good plan and I simply nodded, thinking more about how I might just miss getting arrested by Red Boots, who was now galloping off back to Tarsus. I did not hold out much hope of it, all the same – now that he had time to think on it, Red Boots would want that silly container and the lives of all connected with it.
There wasn’t much else to do, I was thinking, except brood on it and watch Kleggi and Svarvar arm-wrestle while Hookeye and Arnfinn raced each other to swallow whole ox-horns at one go. Hookeye finished, dripping and triumphant, while Finn bellowed that he had won only if the bet had been to try and drown himself in nabidh instead of swallow it. Hedin Flayer interrupted to excuse Hookeye on the grounds that his squint made it hard for him to get horn to meet mouth first time out.
I remembered Hookeye, draped like a Miklagard priest and arse going like a washerwoman’s elbow, while the Hamdanid chief’s woman under him shrieked and squealed. She had not been a pretty Sarakenoi princess afterwards.
None of that, though, drove the certainty of what I had to do out of me. So, swallowing the spear in my throat, I did it: I told Brand what we had done on Cyprus, for he was the only one who could, I was thinking, protect us from Red Boots and get the secret to the Basileus of the Great City. I did not tell him we had lifted the prize to trade for the sword Starkad had, all the same. I just told him what we had lifted and what I thought it meant.