by Robert Low
‘Together is not a word that sits between you and me,’ I told him, sick with thought of what might have been done to Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter. Neither of them knew enough – Eldgrim, perhaps, who had helped me cut the runes into the hilt of the sword, but the inside of his head was as jumbled as a woman’s sewing box.
‘This is an invitation you would be wise not to turn down,’ Klerkon replied and I could see the effort it took to keep his smile in place.
‘There are frothing dogs I would rather walk with,’ I said, which was true, though this was hardly the time or place to be telling it. Steel rasped. Someone smeared out an ugly laugh. Klerkon snapped the eye contact with me, straightened a little and sighed.
‘Perhaps a trade partnership was too much to expect,’ he said softly and the smile was already a fading memory. ‘If we cannot join, then I have it more in the way of you telling me all you know and me sparing those you hold in regard.’
‘You are crew light for a task like that,’ I told him, seeing it for the truth – otherwise he would not have offered any deal. ‘I do not think I will tell you anything today.’
‘By the time I am done with you,’ Klerkon said, whitening round the eyes and mouth, ‘you will beg to tell me every little secret you hold.’
I hauled out my blade and the sound of his own echoed it. The sucking whispers of other blades being drawn in the darkness was the soft hiss of a snake slithering in on a fear-stunned mouse.
Then the door hurled open with a crash and daylight flared in, catching us so that we froze, as if caught fondling each other.
‘Your watchmen are shite,’ growled a familiar voice and Finn bulked out the light. ‘So I have done you a favour.’
Something flew through the air and smacked wetly on the table, hitting the edge of the platter, which sprayed horse meat and half-congealed grease everywhere. The object bounced up, rolled and dropped neatly into Klerkon’s lap.
He jerked back from it, so that it crunched to the floor. The eyes were the only recognizable things in the smashed, bloody ruin of a face. Stoor. Watery blood leaked from the raw mess where his neck had been parted from the rest of him. Somewhere a woman shrieked; Thordis, of course, one hand to her mouth and her hair awry.
‘Thordis,’ I said and held out one hand. She looked at me, then at Tor and I knew, with a lurch of sick fear, that she would not leave him – and that we could not carry a hamstrung man.
There was a moment where I thought to take her round the waist and cart her off – but it was an eyeblink only. If we failed, Klerkon would know she was sister to Kvasir’s wife and would use that to lever the secret he wanted out of me. Finn knew it, too, knew that she was safer if Klerkon stayed ignorant. He laid a free, gentling hand on my forearm; it left bloody smears.
‘Time to be going, I am thinking, Jarl Orm,’ he said and I moved to the door as the light from it slid down the bright, gleaming blade he called The Godi – Priest. He pointed it at Klerkon and the snarlers behind him, a warning as we backed out of the hall and ran for the waiting comfort of our own armed men.
Even as we sprinted out in a spray of mud and feverish elation, howling at each other with the sheer relief of having cheated our way to safety, there was the bitter taste of it all in the back of my throat, thick and metalled.
The wolf packs were gathering for the feast of Atil’s tomb. Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter were prisoners of one, Thordis was prisoner of another.
I set men to watch and we held an Althing of it round the hearthfire as Thorgunna doled out the night-meal. No-one felt much like eating, though and our weapons were within hand’s reach.
Botolf was all for taking all the newly sworn crew in an attack in the dark to finish it all. Kvasir spoke up for blocking Klerkon from leaving and sending to Jarl Brand for help. Thorgunna wanted to know what we were going to do about her sister. Ingrid wept.
Finn stayed silent until everyone else had talked themselves exhausted. He went out once – to check on the guards, I thought, which was sensible. When he returned, he sat in the shadows and said nothing.
Then he came and hunkered by the fire, while I slumped in the carved chair and tried to think up a way out.
Attacking was no answer – it would be a sore battle and one of the first things they would do would be to kill their prisoners, who would be hand-bound only and able to run if not watched.
Running to Jarl Brand might help, but no matter how gold-browed my words were to him, all the same, it came out as too many sea-raiders running around his lands, frightening folk with their swords and I did not think he would take kindly to me having kept the secret of Atil’s tomb from him all these years. Worse, I had barefaced lied to him about the tale being true.
There was a deep sick feeling in me that I might, after all, have to trade with Klerkon.
‘We should beware the night,’ Botolf declared. ‘Klerkon is a fox for cunning and he has that Kveldulf with him, too.’
Kveldulf – Night Wolf – was a man rumoured to be other than a man when the moon came up. Finn grunted and picked some choice morsels out of the pot and Botolf tilted his head questioningly, just as Ingrid told him to pull his wooden foot back from the fire, for it was charring.
‘You do not agree, Finn Horsehead?’ Botolf said mildly, though he was annoyed, both at his own foot-carelessness and Finn’s casual dismissal of his plan.
Finn, wiping gravy from his beard, chewed and shook his head.
‘You have all gone soft and forgotten about what we truly are,’ he said, harsh as crow-song, his face blooded by the fire. ‘What would we do in Klerkon’s sea boots?’
There was silence. Botolf looked at Kvasir, who looked at me, cocking his head like a bird, the way he had taken to doing recently. The certainty of it struck us all, so that we almost leaped up at the same time. Thralls squeaked; Thorgunna, alarmed, demanded to know what was happening, grabbing up the long roasting fork.
‘It has already happened,’ Finn declared as we headed for the door. ‘I went outside to see for myself.’
‘And said nothing?’ I roared, sick with the surety that, even knowing, I could have done nothing. Kvasir ducked out the door and Thorgunna shushed the squealing thralls and demanded to know what was happening. Cormac bawled, red-faced.
Kvasir came back in, the rain-scented night swirling in with him, rank with woodsmoke. He nodded to me.
‘What is happening?’ demanded Thorgunna with a roar. ‘Are we attacked?’
We were not, nor would we be. Klerkon had done what any sensible sea-raider would do, given that his enterprise had not woven itself as tight as he would have liked. He had made the best of matters.
As Kvasir explained it, soothing and soft and patting to Thorgunna, I opened the door and stepped out to where the wind soughed, driving a mist of cloud over the moon, heavy with smell of wet earth and rain. But that could not hide the sharp tang of smoke and the horizon glowed where Tor’s steading burned.
In the smeared-silver dawn, I rode over with Kvasir, Finn and Thorgunna to where the raven feathers of smoke stained the sky, but there was nothing left of Gunnarsgard other than charred timbers. Flann’s body was where it had been and crows flapped heavily off it as we came up, but they had taken Stoor, body and head both. There was only one other corpse and that was a shrivelled horror perched on a bench in the black ruin of the hov.
Thorgunna slithered off the back of her pony, her dress caught up between her legs and looped over her belt in front for riding, so that it looked as if she wore fat breeks. Her strong calves flexed as she stumped to where the hall smoked damply and stood, legs slightly apart, rocking backwards and forwards for a long moment, staring at the grisly mess.
‘Tor,’ she said eventually and I nodded. It made sense – Klerkon dealt in profit and had killed the useless, hamstrung Tor, then taken his thralls and his woman and everything he could, down to the very chickens.
Thorgunna bent, picked something up, turned and walked back, looking up at whe
re I sat on the pony.
She placed one hand on my knee and I felt it tremble like a nested bird. In her dirt-calloused palm was a snapped thong and a bone slice threaded on it. Tor Owns Me, said the runes on it; one of the tokens Tor tied on the neck of his thralls in case any thought of running. Klerkon had herded them to Dragon Wings and a new market – and not just the thralls.
He had taken what profit he could and gone off to brood and chew his nails on what to do next to prise the secret of treasure from me and it was clear he did not yet know Thordis could be used for it. If he found out …
‘We will go after my sister,’ Thorgunna said. I looked at Kvasir, who peered at me sideways and nodded. I looked at Thorgunna; it was clear this was not a question.
So I nodded.
‘Heya,’ said Finn and I could have sworn there was joy in his voice.
FOUR
The sea was the colour of wet slate, the spray coming off the tops of the chop like the manes of white horses. Somewhere, at that almost invisible point where the grey-black of sky and sea smeared, lay the land of the Vods and Ests.
Two days. Three days. Who knows? A day’s sail from a shipmaster is how far a good ship takes to travel some thirty ship-miles – but it could take you two sunrises to do it. Gizur kept saying we were three days from the Vod coast, looking for a range of mountain peaks like the teeth of a dog, but we never seemed to get closer.
Everyone was boat-clenched, which is what happens when the weather closes in. You sink deeper inside, like a bear in winter, sucking into the cave of yourself where you hunch up and endure.
The sail was racked midway down on the mast, we were driving east and a little south with a good wind and the oars were stowed inboard, so most of us had nothing to do but huddle in our sealskin sleeping bags. Everyone was busy, in silence, trying to keep dry and warm, while the lines hummed and the rain slashed in.
Thorgunna and the thrall women and the deerhounds huddled beside me under the little awning which was my right as jarl. Not that it gave much more than the illusion of shelter, but there was the warmth of shared bodies and the added, strange enjoyment of them being women.
I had done Botolf little favour appointing him steward in my absence – though Ingrid took the store keys from Thorgunna with a triumphant smile, which made Kvasir’s wife scowl. It was bad enough what Thorgunna was leaving behind – her chest of heavy oak with its massive iron lock, filled with fine-wrought wool and bedlinen stitched by her grandmother’s hands – without handing over her status in my hall to another woman who was not my first-wife. Not even my wife.
I then had to promise to get those keys back for her when we returned.
‘Stay quiet, do nothing,’ I advised Botolf, who was unhappy at being left behind and thought it more to do with his missing leg than anything else. I needed a level head and a brave heart, for Tor had friends in the region and there was no telling who they would blame or what they might do. Ingrid would supply the first and Botolf the second.
‘I plan to deal with Klerkon, get Thorgunna’s sister back, then go to Gardariki lands and find Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter,’ I explained. He nodded as if he understood, but the truth was there was as much clever in Botolf as in a bull’s behind. Now and then, though, he surprised me.
‘Jarl Brand will have much to say on this and none of it good,’ he declared. ‘You should find a way of telling him how matters stand, before he takes it into his head to make you outlaw.’
Then he grinned at my astonishment.
‘You should sell Hestreng to me for an acorn, or a chicken,’ he added. ‘Then I can sell it back when you return. That way …’
‘That way,’ I finished for him, ‘Jarl Brand would spit blood at me selling that which I only hold from his hand.’
He stared for a moment, then astonished me further.
‘If you want Hestreng and the love of Jarl Brand,’ he grunted, ‘then you will have to put a rare weight in the pan to counter what he is thinking – that you lied to him about Atil’s treasure and are running about frightening decent farming folk with your sea-raider ways.’
His eyes went flat, like a sea where the wind has died to nothing.
‘It comes to me that you will need to travel all the way to Atil’s tomb and take all the silver you can,’ he added, his voice bitter-bleak because he knew he would not be part of that. Then he forced a smile and stuck out his hand.
‘I expect my share, all the same,’ he ended and, mazed at all this, I clasped him, wrist to wrist, more sure now that I had left matters in Hestreng in good hands. Then I stole the smile from him.
I told him we would be taking Drumba and Heg and three thrall women as well, because we had Thorgunna with us. This was a hard dunt for Botolf; two thralls had died in the winter before and losing five more was bad enough without also waving goodbye to Thorgunna, who was a pillar of Hestreng. I did not want her with us, but Kvasir did and Thorgunna was determined to chase after her sister, so there it was. I pointed this out patiently to a scowling Botolf.
‘We are oar-short on the Elk,’ I added, ‘but at least all those hard men with big bellies will be going with me, so you won’t have the expense of feeding them.’
There were twenty fighting men, bench-light for a drakkar like the Fjord Elk, which properly needed two watches of thirty oarsmen apiece – we barely had enough to sail her, as Gizur pointed out at the oath-swearing.
Hrafn provided the blood for it, as expensive and sad a blot offering as Odin would ever have. We found him, flanks heaving for breath, streaming blood and sweat, lying in the meadow shot full of arrows, as Botolf had said. Now his head reared accusingly on a shame-pole of carved runes, streaming out bad cess at Klerkon’s steading on Svartey, the Black Island, hidden miles beyond the grey mist and sea. Unlike us, Klerkon had no hall, but this was a winter-place he used and it was likely he was heading there.
‘We will pick up more men,’ I told Gizur and the new Oathsworn, more firmly than I believed. It was more than likely we would – but not from the land of the Livs and Vods and Ests. We would get no decent ship men until we reached Aldeigjuburg, which the Slavs call Staraja Ladoga and so would be raiding the steading of Klerkon with about half the men he had.
Finn pointed this out, too, when everyone was huddled in the hall out of the sleet, fishing chunks of Hrafn out of the pot, blowing on their fingers and trying to forget the hard oath they had just sworn.
‘Well,’ I said to him, uneasy and angry because he was right, ‘you were the one who wanted to go raiding. You were the one never still-tongued about Atil’s silver hoard, so that men would come to Hestreng and force me back to the tomb. Pity you did not think that the likes of Klerkon would hear you, too.’
Which was unfair, for he had saved my life in Tor’s hov, but all of this had smashed whatever shackles bound me to the land and the thought that Finn had had a hand in it nagged me. There was more cunning in it than he had ever shown before, so I could not be sure – but I was watching men eat my prize stallion and so was in no mood for him at that moment. He saw it and had the sense to go away.
Kvasir came to me while men shouted and fought good-naturedly in the ale-feast that followed the oath-swearing. He hunkered down at my knee as I sat, glowering and spider-black over the fun raging up and down the hall, and took his time about speaking, as if he had to pay for the words in hacksilver and was thin in the purse.
‘You were hard with Finn, I hear,’ he said eventually, not looking at me.
‘Is he aggrieved of it?’ I asked moodily.
‘No,’ answered Kvasir cheerfully, ‘for he knows you have other things to think on. Like me, he believes the sea air will clear your head.’
Well, Finn had the right of that, at least, though I did not know it myself at the time – or even when I was in the joy of it.
But when it happened, Finn came and stood with me in the prow, while the wind lashed our cheeks with our own braids and sluiced us with manes of foam.
The spray fanned up as the Elk planed and sliced down the great heave of wave, moving and groaning beneath us like the great beast of the forest itself. Those waves we swept over would not be stopped save by the skerries and the cliffs we had left behind. Only the whales and us dared to match skill and strength with those waves – but only the whales had no fear.
I was filled with the cold and storm, threw back my head, face pebbled with the salt dash of the waves and roared out the sheer delight of being in that moment. When I turned, Finn was roaring and grinning with me, while Thorgunna and the thralls watched us, sour and disapproving, hunched with misery and the deerhounds under a dripping awning that flapped like a mad bird’s wing.
‘You look a sight,’ Finn said, blowing rain off his nose. Which was hard to take from a man wearing a hat whose broad brim had melted down his head in the rain and was kept on his head by a length of tablet-woven braid fastened under his chin.
I said so and he peeled the sodden thing off looking at the ruin of it.
‘Ivar’s weather hat,’ he declared, ruefully. ‘There must be a cunning trick to it, for I cannot get it to work.’
‘Keep trying,’ urged Klepp Spaki, peering miserably out from under his cloak, ‘for if you can get the sea to stop heaving my innards up and down, I would be grateful.’
Others nearby chuckled and I wondered, once again, about the wisdom of bringing Klepp along at all. He had turned up at the hall with the rest of some hopefuls and I had taken him for just another looking for an oar on the Elk, though he did not look like the usual cut of hard men. When he had announced he was Klepp Spaki, I groaned, for I had forgotten I had put the word out for a rune-carver and now I had no time – nor silver – for his service.
However, he had looked delighted at the news we were off on a raid and said he would do the stone for free if he could take the oath and come with us, for he had never done such a thing and did not feel himself a true man of the vik.
Now he sat under his drenched cloak, hoiking up his guts into the bilges, feeling exactly like a true man of the vik and no doubt wishing he was back in the best place by the fire, which was his due as a runemaster of note. It was a joke on his name, this journey – Spaki meant Wise.