The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  I knew it well – you could not miss the great oak pillar on its mound of concentric circles, the top carved in the shape of a powerful warrior carrying an axe and with a head of silver and moustaches of gold. Perun, the Slav god of storms, who was as like Thor as to be his brother. I nodded.

  We laid out the tale of what had happened to us thus far and Jon sucked it in as if it was no more than air, nodding and silent. At the end of it, he blew out his cheeks, stuffed bread in his mouth and rose from the bench.

  ‘We will start with Martin, then,’ he said simply and slammed out, dragging a warm cloak in his wake.

  ‘Bloody boy goes everywhere at a run,’ complained Magpie.

  ‘He will learn when he gets to our age,’ grunted Kvasir, ‘the truth of the old bull.’

  We chuckled, while Thorgunna scowled. Magpie was too Slav to have heard this tale, so Finn took great delight in telling him, because it outraged Thorgunna that he did.

  ‘Let us not run down and hump one of the heifers,’ Finn finished, in his role of the old bull advising his eager son. ‘Let us walk gently down and hump them all.’

  So we laughed and argued the rest of that morning, in the warm of Magpie’s izba, until Jon Asanes returned and said, simply: ‘Nones’.

  I told them it was Latin for the way Christ-priests from the west judge the day – late afternoon, by which time it would growing dark.

  ‘We will keep a sharper eye open then,’ Finn said cheerfully, ‘in case he has found people stupid enough to try and take what he wants.’

  I thought it unlikely, for he knew I wouldn’t bring the holy spear with me. Better for Finn to go with Kvasir and Thorgunna, who were taking Olaf to buy him new clothes.

  ‘You might need someone to help you string Martin up,’ Finn growled moodily, ‘while you use the Truth Knife on him to get what he knows. He is no stranger to it, after all.’

  I shook my head, while the flash of memory, like lightning on a darkened sea, flared up the scene – Martin, swinging like a trussed goose from the mast of Einar’s Elk, spraying blood and green snot as Einar hacked off the monk’s little finger and threw it over the side. Einar’s magic Truth Knife, which, he told victims, knew when someone lied and would cut off a piece every time they did. It was now sheathed in the small of my back and I had used it once or twice myself. Most did not keep their secrets beyond two fingers.

  Shrugging at my folly, Finn strode off after Thorgunna, Kvasir and Olaf, leaving me with Jon Asanes, who rolled his eyes towards the sky.

  ‘I have not seen Finn for some years,’ he said. ‘He seems even wilder than he was before.’

  ‘As you say,’ I countered, ‘you have not seen him for some years. You have just forgotten how he is.’

  Even though I knew it was a lie.

  We were silent, pushing through the throng on the wooden walkways of the city while the sky pewtered and the rain spat itself to sleet.

  ‘You seem … older,’ Jon Asanes said eventually, as we stopped to watch an army of carters manhandle a huge brass bell, almost as big as a small house, destined for the kreml over the Volkhov Bridge. They love their bells, do the Slavs of Novgorod and Kiev and ring them on every ceremonial they can think of.

  I said nothing. We crossed behind the sweating, shouting men, to where the great statue of Perun, offerings littering his feet, towered over the marketplace.

  ‘I know what it is,’ Jon said suddenly, stopping me to look into my face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why you seem older,’ he said and grinned. ‘You do not smile now,’ he added.

  I gave him one to make him a liar; but he shook his head and forked two fingers at his eyes.

  ‘You can do it with your mouth,’ he said, ‘but not here.’

  He was right and I scowled at him for being so, while being proud of him at the same time. I never had a chance to say anything more on it, for I saw a figure who made my belly curl.

  He walked with a staff, wore a ragged brown robe which ended at his knees, yet trailed strips in the mud and flapped uneven dags wetly round his shins. Under it, he wore heavy woollen breeks, which might have been blue once. He had shoes, new and heavy – a gift, probably, from his German Christ worshippers – and leg-bindings filthy enough to have come from a corpse-winding.

  It was his eyes that told me who it was and they were all that could be seen in the thicket of his face. His beard was long and matted into his hair, which hung below his shoulders – but his eyes, on either side of a nose like a curved dagger, were still the dark ones I remembered, though the calculating look had gone from them, burned away by his obsession. Now they looked like the eyes of a pole-sitter, one of those crazed hermits who go out into the wilderness and perch in high places.

  Martin.

  When I had first seen the little monk, in Birka years before, he wore a similar brown robe, but clean and neat and tied with a pale rope. He slippered over polished floors in soft shoes, though he wore sensible heavy wool socks against the cold. His face then was sharp, smooth, clean-shaven enough to reflect lantern-light, his brown hair cut the same length all round, shaved carefully in the middle.

  His God was not treating him lightly.

  ‘Orm,’ he rasped, the all too familiar voice making my insides turn over. He leaned on his staff, both hands clasping it. I saw his nails were short, broken and black-rimmed, saw the maimed stump of his little finger. When he tried a smile, I wished he had not, for all it revealed was the mess of his mouth, smashed somewhere on his journey and the teeth left to blacken and rot.

  ‘Martin,’ I answered.

  ‘You have grown and prospered,’ he said.

  ‘You have not.’

  ‘I am rich in God.’

  ‘If that is all you have to exchange for your holy stick, we can end this now.’

  He leaned further forward, so tense his beard seemed to curl. Everything quivered, even his voice. ‘You have it?’

  ‘I have it. I took it from Sigurd Heppni in Serkland. He no longer had need of it, since Finn had cut his life away. A bad joke on Sigurd, to be called Heppni.’

  He did not smile, though I knew he had enough Norse to understand that ‘heppni’ meant ‘lucky’.

  ‘I must have it,’ was all he said, those dark eyes glittering.

  Jon shifted slightly, anxious to join in with a few choice insults, but aware that I would be annoyed if he did. Around us, the marketplace of Novgorod heaved with life, buying and selling, shifting with furs and green clay pots and amber and offerings laid at the feet of Perun – yet it seemed that there was a circle round us three and, inside it, we were unseen, unapproached.

  When I did not answer, Martin blinked like a lizard and grinned his rotting grin. ‘I see you have a heathen sign on you, as always. Odin’s sign. Swear on it that you will give me what I seek when I tell you what I know.’

  ‘No great bargain for me there. I have no wish to know how to feed a multitude with a loaf and a herring, even if I believed you knew the trick of it. Mind you, if you know the way to turn water into wine …’

  That harsh voice interrupted me. ‘Judge for yourself. My secret concerns an old enemy and a tomb packed with silver.’ And then he said simply, ‘Brondolf Lambisson is the old enemy.’

  When the dig of that did not make me flinch as he had hoped he narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Brondolf went back to Birka,’ I said, as casually as I could, as if the man meant nothing to me now.

  Martin saw it and nodded.

  ‘Ja, Birka. Where else would he go? He sat there, watching the place die round him and desperate for something to save it. He failed; Birka is a town of empty doorways and crumbling timbers. Brondolf went to Hedeby, following the trade. When he found two Oathsworn he knew there, he must have thought the hand of God was in it – if he hadn’t been a Hell-damned pagan.’

  ‘So? What did he hope to gain?’ I snarled, knowing full well.

  ‘The secret of Atil’s tomb, of course.’

&
nbsp; ‘Cod-Biter couldn’t find his arse with both hands and Short Eldgrim is …’

  ‘Eldgrim,’ repeated Martin, as if tasting the name. ‘The little one with the scars on his face, ja?’ He had become more German these days.

  ‘He is addled,’ I said and Martin agreed with a nod.

  ‘Which is why Lambisson came to me,’ he answered. ‘He thought I owed him a debt, thought that I might know a way into Eldgrim’s head. He had some of it from Cod-Biter, enough to let him know that this Eldgrim knew more.’

  Now the gaff of it took me under the chin and made me jerk and Martin saw it. Aye, Eldgrim knew some of it. Me, who could speak Latin and Greek, had no better knowledge of runes than a bairn. Who else could I have asked to help carve the secret on that sword hilt but the man who, of all the Oathsworn left on the steppe then, made the least mistakes with runes?

  A sore dunt in a fight in Serkland had left him addled. I wished I was sure his mind was washed clean of the secret, but his thought-cage was a strange place now, where he could sometimes recall old events as if they had happened the day before and yet forget everything that happened an hour ago.

  ‘You could not help Lambisson,’ I said flatly to the monk, more hopeful than sure.

  Martin grinned his rotted grin. ‘He persuaded me to do my best. He smashed all the teeth in my mouth and gave me healthy bowls of tough meat, which I could only suck. Until I managed to free something from Eldgrim’s mouth, nothing would pass my own that I could eat.’

  There was clever and vicious in it, but it was only another little Truth Knife when all said and done. I said as much and he glanced at the stump of his finger, remembering. It was a nasty lash from me, born of fear for Eldgrim and Cod-Biter and should not have been done, for he had an answer to it and more.

  ‘I am alive. I ate.’

  I was silent, the words penned up in me and my mouth locked.

  ‘And Short Eldgrim?’ I managed after a struggle.

  Martin twisted his face in what was now the parody of a sneer. ‘Alive. He and I raked through his mind and came up with just enough, when added to what Cod-Biter was persuaded to recall. But Lambisson took them both when he went to Sarkel.’

  That name made me twitch and Martin’s black grin grew even wider. Not for the first time I wished I had killed him when I had had the chance.

  ‘And he let you go?’ I managed scornfully, as if that fact made his tale no more than a confection for children.

  ‘No,’ he answered simply. ‘He needed me, too. I took myself away at the first chance.’

  Aye, he would have done that. Martin had many skills, but his greatest was the ability to vanish.

  ‘He has had a month or more,’ Martin said. ‘He has hired men, as hard as the Oathsworn – Krivichians and even Khazars, I hear. He has taken your friends and gone after Atil’s hoard, but there is a limit to how much Eldgrim can be made to remember. It may take Brondolf some time. He may not find it at all.’

  Then he stiffened and one eye twitched.

  ‘Christ’s bones,’ he said and I turned to where he looked.

  Jon’s hand on my forearm gripped tighter and I thought it was for what had been said, but when I looked, he was staring across the market square – to where Klerkon knelt at the feet of Perun, offering coins and trinkets.

  Martin’s stare was raddled with hate for Klerkon and as I strode past him towards Klerkon I wondered what he had been subjected to by his captor, only seeing, at the last moment, the little man with him, his high cheekboned face turning towards me, a grin revealing more gap than tooth – Takoub.

  He held a length of chain and attached to it were three women, one of them Thordis. On the far side, coming up at a brisk pace, was Finn and, behind him, Kvasir and Thorgunna.

  Klerkon straightened, bowed once to the great oak pillar and turned to see me. He blinked at me, turned and shot a glance round at Finn, then grinned.

  ‘A fronte praeciptium, a tergo lupi,’ he declared.

  ‘That had better be translated as “here you are lads, sorry I stole them”, or you will feel my blade up your arse, Klerkon,’ snarled Finn.

  ‘A cliff in front, wolves behind,’ I informed Finn. ‘Klerkon is caught and wondering how to wriggle out of it.’

  Klerkon raised an eyebrow, stretched a languid hand – slowly, to show it was empty and going nowhere to be filled.

  ‘It would not be a clever thing, I am thinking, to start something in the market square of Lord Novgorod the Great,’ he smiled. ‘Especially since Takoub here has just bought three slaves. Legally.’

  ‘They are not slaves,’ growled Finn, then scrubbed his face in confusion, for two of them were, in fact, thralls from Tor’s steading. Only Thordis was freeborn. I saw her, face set like bad dough but with eyes hard and determined, knowing I would not let this happen. There was also the heart-leap in me at the knowledge that he had not known who Thordis was, or else he would never have sold her.

  ‘Beati possidentes,’ smiled Klerkon. Finn’s mouth twisted and even if he had understood about possession and the law, it wouldn’t have mattered. I raised a hand and he stopped in mid stride.

  ‘Greek boys and – well, well, the very Christ priest I came to find,’ noted Klerkon, glancing over my shoulder to where Martin scowled and crouched like a rat looking for a hole. ‘I was thinking you might come to find him and shut his mouth – not that you would be so quick over it, all the same.’

  ‘You should not have come to Hestreng,’ I told him. He spread his hands.

  ‘Just a wee strandhogg. A dip of the beak. No hard feelings – you hardly lost a thing from it and had a rival neighbour removed. Hodie mihi, cras tibi.’

  I felt Finn tremble on the unseen leash. One more drawl of Latin and there would be blood spilled, which I did not want. Klerkon was right; this was a city ruled by the veche, a council who treated their city as if it were alive, who settled disputes between them with mass brawls on the Volkhov Bridge and who staked people who offended the peace.

  I was almost dizzy with relief, all the same; Klerkon had not known the true value of Thordis as a lever against me and had sold her as a simple slave. He had come looking for Martin, to see what he could force the priest to tell him – I saw that priest, hunched and rat-crouched, looking to sidle away to the shadows.

  Today me, tomorrow you, Klerkon had said and he was right. Except that I had already collected my tomorrow.

  ‘I will buy them,’ I said to Takoub and Klerkon smiled, knowing the price that the robbing little slave dealer would set. He relished me handing over the gold, even if the stone of my face denied him the pleasure of seeing me suffer.

  I was not suffering; the gold was Klerkon’s own and a ludicrous amount of it vanished inside Takoub’s disgusting silks, then he unlocked the chains and the three women were free. Thordis moved to me briefly, tucked herself under my arm and I felt her tremble under my grip though her dirt-smeared face, so like her sister’s, had no tear-streaks. She looked up into my eyes and nodded, just the once.

  Then, from across the square, I heard Thorgunna shout: ‘Thordis!’ The sisters met, embracing, while Kvasir came up to stand near Finn. The two dull-eyed thrall women stood, heads down, like waiting cattle. Klerkon looked from the embracing sisters to me and back again, the truth settling on him slowly, like sifting snow.

  He gathered himself well, though the white lines puckered round his cat’s-arse mouth for a moment.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said, with a forced smile. ‘I missed the prize, it seems and so there is a touching scene to end the day. Almost worth the cost, eh, Orm?’

  He parried well, did Klerkon. No rant or rave about losing the chance to force me to reveal what I knew, just a swift coming about on a new tack. I knew what it was, too – Martin the priest. Klerkon was looking over my shoulder to keep him in sight.

  Finn, of course, could not resist the moment.

  ‘No cost to Orm, you arse,’ he savaged out. Klerkon turned, a lopsided, sardonic smile
on his Pan face. Finn grinned back.

  ‘You need a new bed,’ he said and Klerkon stiffened, jerked his head back to me, then back to Finn. The smile transformed to a feral snarl when he realized what had happened; Takoub shrank back – from experience, I was thinking.

  I was also cursing Finn, for I knew where Klerkon would go, what he would do. I was only hoping that we could get back to the Elk and away back to Botolf before Klerkon managed to rout out his crew, sort out his half-dismantled ship and sail home. Then he would go to Hestreng for revenge.

  Finn saw it, too, almost as soon as the words were out, and knew where his solution lay.

  ‘Finn – no!’

  To his credit, the blade was half out of the sheath and he still managed to slam it back, even when Klerkon sneered at him and turned contemptuously away. I was so rushed with relief, so blinded by it, that I did not see the little shape move across the square.

  He took four quick steps, a skip and a hop. He gave a sharp little shout on the hop, just loud enough for Klerkon to turn and see what was about to happen to him –there was hatred and fear in equal measure on his face as Olaf Crowbone, the little monster, came at him, free of chains, free of the Black Island, dressed in new finery and armed with a brand-new little axe.

  Like a salmon, Crowbone popped up into Klerkon’s astounded gaze and buried his brand-new axe, with as good a stroke as I have ever seen, in the front of his hated captor’s skull.

  SEVEN

  ‘Little turd,’ grunted Finn as we were led to the pit.

  He had started speaking against Olaf almost as soon as we had been dragged to the pit prison from the yelling chaos of Novgorod’s marketplace where the body of Klerkon lay in a spreading pool of blood like some long-nosed beast. People screamed.

  ‘This is what comes of giving thralls a weapon,’ Finn had growled, a scowl twisting his face into worse shadows in the faint light from the hole far above.

  ‘I am not a thrall,’ Olaf piped back. ‘Jarl Orm said so. And I am a prince, besides.’

  ‘The generosity of Jarl Orm is great, I am thinking,’ countered Finn, ‘but not as great as his bad judgement in that matter.’