The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  They took us all out to witness their sharp judgement on the thrall woman, Danica.

  While his skilled men worked with their stake, I looked up to where little Prince Vladimir stood. Today he was a fine-looking prince, in brocaded breeks and silk shirt, his dark-blue coat hemmed in red and with gold at the cuffs, wearing an over-robe of the same colour decorated with gold and fastened with a ruby clasp. Topping all this was a sable cap crowned with silver and the great crushing weight of an eagle-headed gold torc screaming on his chest. His two pillars were with him. And nestling under the embrace of Sigurd’s comforting hand on his shoulder was Olaf, who had found his lost uncle.

  At the end of it, both Dobrynya and Sigurd inclined their heads to the beards of the veche, the horsehair plume on Dobrynya’s helmet stirring in the snow-thick wind. This one slave woman was clearly not enough: the veche shook their heads to a man. They wanted us all in a neat line, turning the snow to red slush.

  Martin waved his hand in front of his chest in that Christ-sign they use to ward off evil and even Finn and Kvasir looked stone grim when the guards prodded us back to the pit. The other thrall woman was dissolving into snot and tears and had to be carried by Thordis and Thorgunna.

  Finn gave a bitter laugh, the only laugh left of the ones which had floated us out of the pit prison to this moment. ‘Little turd,’ he muttered, glancing bitterly back at Crowbone, safe beside his new uncle.

  In the dark of the pit I still heard laughter and knew who it was, though I did not know what he had to laugh at. It had seemed to me as if Odin was steering me, like a wind-driven knarr, back to Atil’s mountain of silver – yet making sure we would never reach it. Even for him, this was a twisted knot of planning.

  ‘I will not die a nithing death on a stake like that,’ Finn growled and Kvasir agreed. In the fetid dark they started on a plan to break free and fight until they were killed, with decent weapons in their fists. The women said nothing and Martin muttered prayers.

  ‘Are you with us, Jon Asanes?’ asked Kvasir and I heard the trembling answer.

  ‘Yes – but I am not much of a fighter.’

  ‘Orm?’ growled Finn. I said nothing and wished he would stop yapping; there was something strange, a sound …

  ‘Odin’s bones, boy, you are our jarl. Will you lead us?’

  It was laughter, pealing and rolling like distant chimes. Odin …

  ‘Perhaps his bowels have turned to water,’ growled Finn and Kvasir snarled at him to watch his tongue, but he was uncertain and added that it might be that my thought-cage had warped a little.

  ‘Bells,’ I said, recognizing the sound. ‘Bells.’

  It was. Chimes, rich and deep, tumbling like water down a cliff face.

  I could not see their faces in the dark, but I could feel them look one to the other and back to me. Bells in Novgorod meant something momentous and there was a stirring in me, a hackle-raise that let me know Odin had passed close by.

  As the dawn emptied thick silver light down the shaft of the pit – our last dawn in this world, I was thinking – Finn shouted up to the guards, asking what had happened.

  ‘The great Prince is dead,’ answered the guard, his voice stunned and hushed by the tragedy of it.

  ‘Vladimir?’ demanded Kvasir.

  Finn hugged himself and shook his head with awe. ‘I asked Odin for it,’ he said, an awed voice in the dark. ‘I called on him in the dark and he has answered me.’

  ‘Ha!’ snorted Martin with disgust.

  ‘What did you call for?’ demanded Kvasir angrily. ‘Revenge? And what did you offer?’

  Finn said nothing and yet spoke loudly.

  I knew differently, all the same – there were too many bells for Vladimir to be dead and I felt the Odin-moment of it. Sviatoslav, his father, was the one who was dead – I learned later how he had been ambushed by his own Pechenegs, bribed by the Great City he had challenged and failed to beat. The ruler of all the Rus, gone at the hands of a hairy-arsed steppe warrior with a bow and an arrow you get by the dozen for a copper coin. His skull would end up set in silver as a drinking cup for a Pecheneg chief.

  But in the pit, knowing only that Vladimir’s father was dead, I felt the power of Odin and bowed my head to him.

  With Sviatoslav gone, Vladimir was in trouble. He was the youngest of the three brothers and the one least considered, being born of a woman most thought little more than a thrall. Of the other two, Oleg was stupid and strong while the eldest, Jaropolk, was shrewd, cowardly and vicious.

  They would fight, these brothers, sooner rather than later and the bells for Sviatoslav could be a knell for the least of his sons – unless that son had some clout in his fists.

  Like a hoard of silver.

  Now I had no way of avoiding a return to Atil’s howe; Odin had strapped me to the prow beast of his ship and blew a wind that would not be avoided.

  Finn and Kvasir were bewildered by the laughter that spilled out of the pit. It even sounded crazed to my own ear and me it was doing it.

  EIGHT

  When the starling fell from the roof beams, stone dead with cold, Olaf Crowbone stirred it with his toe and said it was the last one we would see this year, for they had all gone into hiding save for this one, who was clearly killed of stupidity.

  ‘Hiding?’ demanded Thorgunna, swathed in wool and fur so that only her eyes showed. ‘Hiding from what?’

  ‘The white raven,’ Crowbone answered, his cheeks rosed in his pale face. A few of those within earshot looked uneasily at the boy and Thordis made a warding sign. Sunken-eyed, she was, from all she had suffered and Finn, standing close to her, moved closer still.

  ‘You should not speak of such things,’ Kvasir said, looking up from where he worried a piece of leather into a new strap for his helmet. Crowbone shrugged and pulled the white-furred cloak tighter round him, for snow had blown in under the door of the hall and spread across the floor. A pool of mead was frozen in an amber lump, stuck through with the floor-straw – even the spiders were dead and the nets they curled in trembled in the snell wind, thin and sharply cold as the edge of a shaving knife.

  Onund Hnufa gave the grunt that led any speech he made.

  ‘I don’t need that bird to tell me it will be a bad winter,’ he growled. ‘The green wine is icing a month early.’

  Jon Asanes leaned over, his breath smoking warmly in my ear. ‘White raven?’ he asked in a whisper.

  I told him of the white raven, which the dwarves held in keeping with all the other secret things of the world – the sound of a cat’s paw, the hairs of a maiden’s beard, the roots of a mountain, the dreams of a bear, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird. All the things that should not be heard or seen, yet had to be kept somewhere.

  The dwarves hid them and only revealed them once, when they used some to make Gleipnir, the chain that bound the devouring wolf, Fenris. He was tricked into being tied with it only because the god Tyr placed his hand in the beast’s mouth as security that the gods would untie the wolf afterwards. Tyr lost it as a result, but his sacrifice allowed the world-eating wolf to be secured.

  The only thing the dwarves made sure they did not use in making Gleipnir was a feather from the white raven, Odin’s third pet.

  Sometimes old One Eye sends that bird into the world, as he sends the other two, Thought and Memory – but the white one does not come back to whisper secrets in the god’s ear. It flies over the world shaking out feathers as snow to make the worst winters; a warning that, one day, it will make Fimbulwinter, the great freeze that heralds Ragna Rok.

  ‘So Crowbone is telling us the end of the world is here?’ demanded Jon.

  Finn gave a sharp bark of laughter. ‘Little Crowbone is telling us that the birds think so,’ he corrected. ‘Since birds have thought-cages so tiny they can only keep a few in them, I am not concerned about what birds think.’

  ‘Not all bird thoughts are of songs,’ Crowbone said and that brought an echo of Sighvat, long dead in Se
rkland. I remembered Sighvat, hunkered down on the steppe, looking at the battered silver plate ripped out of the earth as we dug into Atil’s tomb. It was the first sign that treasure was there at all, a blackened piece of a plate with pictures round the edges, which Sighvat said were the dreams of birds.

  ‘I never heard of a white raven,’ growled Gyrth and Finn told him this was because he was an ignorant outlander. Gyrth gave him a scowl – he was named Gyrth Albrechtsohn and was as big as Botolf, with a belly bigger than Skapti’s had been, but solid as a barrel. When he had strolled up like some huge bear to join us in Kiev and claiming to be a Dane, Finn had laughed.

  ‘Gyrth is an Englisc name,’ he had chuckled, ‘and your da was a Saxlander, which is plain to see. I don’t see any Dane there.’

  ‘My ma was,’ Gyrth had rumbled back, frowning.

  ‘Perhaps she had a horse, too,’ Finn grinned, ‘or a fast faering, to have got round so many men. You may not have any Dane in you, but she had, I am sure of it.’

  Men laughed and Gyrth blinked and frowned.

  ‘You are Finn,’ he said slowly, ‘who fears nothing. If you talk of my ma any longer, you will fear me, for I will fall on you.’

  Finn held up placatory hands and admitted that having such a rock fall on him would be a fearful experience, right enough. Then he clasped Gyrth by the wrist.

  ‘So Steinnbrodir it will be then – welcome aboard.’

  And Gyrth, grinning lopsidely at his new by-name – Boulder Brother – lumbered into our midst like an amiable bear, one Finn was never done baiting, as now.

  ‘An ignorant outlander,’ Finn repeated. ‘Whose marvellously-travelled ma was too occupied to tell him such tales.’

  ‘I saw a white crow once,’ Gyrth admitted, frowning. ‘All its black brothers stabbed it with their beaks and chased it off.’

  ‘None is found so good that some fault attends him, or so ill that he is not of use for something, as my granny used to say,’ Red Njal offered him.

  ‘Never heard of a white raven,’ Gyrth persisted stubbornly.

  ‘But the green wine is icing,’ Jon pointed out, shaking me back from where I still hunkered with Sighvat on the steppe, into the wither of Finn’s frown. The iced wine was a sign you could not ignore.

  Made from young wheat, the brew was filtered through seven layers of charcoal and seven of clean, fine river sand and the resulting liquid was as clear as tears and casked in oak, which was Perun’s wood. It was then left outside most houses all winter and people passing tried to guess when such a casking would grow the first ice crystals.

  They were removed at once, for ice is water and the more you removed, the more powerful – and green – the drink that was left. The colder the weather, the more ice formed on the green wine, the more you removed and the stronger it got.

  It had to be cold for ice to start forming on the green wine at all and that was a bad sign this early, as was the snow and the clear, cold air that promised more of the same. This year would produce some of the strongest green wine and only those who had drunk too much of it would head out on to the steppe now.

  I had pointed this out to young Vladimir after we had been hauled out of the pit the morning Sviatoslav’s death was announced in Novgorod and after I had told him of the hoard and how the Oathsworn were a benefit to him.

  ‘If what you say is true,’ he answered in his strong, high voice, ‘then this man Lambisson from Birka is already out on the steppe and every day we leave him, the closer he comes to my silver hoard.’

  And he looked at me with his clear blue eyes on either side of a frown.

  His silver hoard. Dobrynya saw the sick look on my face and offered only a throaty grunt of a laugh from the other side of the table, where I had spent an hour explaining why we should not be staked like Danica, the thrall woman.

  ‘By the time we have done with the rites for your father, the meetings with your brother’s representatives and preparing for such an expedition,’ Dobrynya then said gently to his young prince, ‘it may well be so late in the year as to be better waiting for the thaw.’

  Vladimir shook his head angrily. ‘Uncle, my brothers may not wait.’

  He had the right of it there, sure enough and all that Dobrynya had spoken of was simply time wasted for Vladimir, so that he was fretted like a dog’s jaw with impatience.

  It took two days of tough talking with the veche and a deal of promises here and there to get them to accept the thrall woman as their only victim. It was finally managed with some cunning from Dobrynya, who told the veche that young Vladimir would not sully the memory of his father with the blood of common criminals. That one they bowed to.

  So we were released, but kept in the fortress, supposedly for our own protection, for the next five days. On the sixth day, as Vladimir and all Novgorod prepared to enter into the rituals to mourn the loss of Sviatoslav, Jaropolk’s hounds appeared at the gates.

  Sveinald and his son Lyut they knew them as here, the father a grizzled old Dane who had served Sviatoslav as a general and who had brought back the remnants of the army after his master’s death. Now he advised Vladimir’s elder brother Jaropolk, as Dobrynya advised Vladimir.

  Jaropolk, though eldest of the three Rus princes, was barely into his teens and easily swayed. Sveinald and Lyut had always been an arrogant pair and now that they held their young prince in thrall they acted as if they ruled Kiev and not he.

  They had arrived as Jaropolk’s representatives, to honour the funeral rites for Sviatoslav – at least, on the front of it. In reality, they were here to find out what Vladimir would do and had brought at least a hundred men, seasoned druzhina warriors with their armour and big red shields marked with a yellow algiz rune, which had been the symbol of Rurik when he had founded Kiev. Shield, it meant, and alertness, too – but now the Kiev Slavs called it ‘a golden trident’ from the shape, which was like one of those three-tined forks.

  It took four days to send Sviatoslav to the halls of his gods, four days of wailing and bowing and kneeling and bloody sacrifice round Perun’s pole, where horse heads were stuck on stakes and young Vladimir exhausted himself, the gore dripping off his elbows. But everyone agreed he had done well for a boy of twelve.

  At night he had no rest, having to preside over the feasts in the kreml hall, where his men and the druzhina of old Sveinald snarled at each other, barely leashed. Here, the high table was a tafl game of words as Sveinald tried to find out if Vladimir was going to acknowledge Jaropolk as Prince of all the Rus or resist him and young Vladimir and his uncle tried not to say one thing or the other. Oleg, the third brother, I noted, was not considered at all.

  The rest of the Oathsworn had turned up by this time, summoned south from Aldeigjuborg and having brought the Elk with them. Gizur insisted on this despite the sweat and labour on a river already porridge thick during the day and iced over every night, for he did not want it left almost untended near Dragon Wings.

  ‘Klerkon’s crew is divided,’ he reported. ‘Dragon Wings is too laid up for winter to sail and the way out to the Baltic is frozen solid anyway. Half of them are swearing revenge on us, led by Randr Sterki. The other half is leaving, in twos and threes. Most of those are hoping to take service with Vladimir, so they are coming here. They wanted to sail down with us, for they knew we were crew light, but I thought it best to let them find their own way.’

  I had all this to chew over – and Finn, scowling-angry because, he said, I had handed away the secret of Atil’s tomb, without even a guarantee that we would get anything out of it. We had our lives, I pointed out to him and he grudgingly admitted that to be true, though it did nothing for his mood and it was a foolish man who crossed Finn at times like this.

  There is always a fool when you don’t need one. Lyut had been elbowing and snarling among his own druzhina on the last feast night. You could see that they were used to it, deferring to him because he was Sveinald’s boy and had power over them as a result.

  So, flushed an
d strutting, he made a mistake when Finn slid on to an ale bench to talk to someone he knew slightly.

  ‘You are in my place,’ he snarled and Finn looked up in surprise.

  ‘Perhaps, though I do not see your name on it. I will not be here long – look, there is a place here and another over there.’

  ‘Move,’ Lyut answered, ‘when your betters order it.’

  Finn turned. There was silence now from those closest, a silence that spread slowly out, like the ripples from a dipped oar.

  ‘Betters?’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘In fact,’ Lyut said, sneering, ‘so much better you should kiss my foot and acknowledge it.’

  He put his foot up on the same bench Finn sat on. No-one spoke. Sveinald, grinning over his ale horn, looked at Dobrynya, then at Vladimir. It was a challenge, pure and simple and all the ruffs were up now. I did not dare speak; no-one did. The silence began to hurt.

  Then Finn grinned, a loose, wicked grin. He inclined his head, as if in acceptance and Lyut smirked. Finn handed his ale horn to his neighbour, then placed both his hands on Lyut’s ankle and raised the foot to his lips.

  I was stunned. Most of us were. I saw Kvasir half rise in outrage – then there was a yelp from Lyut, for Finn had kept on going, straightening with Lyut’s foot in his hands, forcing the man to hop like a mad bird to keep his balance.

  With a final, dismissive gesture, Finn threw the foot in the air and Lyut went over with a yell and a crash.

  ‘Kiss my arse, boy,’ Finn said, dusting his hands. The hall erupted with hoots and bellows and catcalls and it was clear that half of Sveinald’s men were drunk enough to be pleased to see Lyut sprawled in the sick and spilled drink.

  Finn was no fool. A man with no clever in him at all would have turned back to his ale horn and the backslaps and appreciative howls of laughter and Lyut, coming off the floor in a scrabbling rush, whipping the seax from his boot, would have had him in the liver and lights.

  Instead, Lyut found his knife hand slapping into the iron grip of Finn’s left. When he swung a wild fist with the other, he found it shackled in Finn’s right. Then Finn grinned his wolf grin and butted Lyut, so that the snarling boy’s handsome beak of a nose splayed and blood flew.