by Robert Low
Later, as I sat with Jon Asanes composing a careful letter to Jarl Brand, I paused to watch the bustle in the courtyard, dictating as Jon scratched in his best hand.
‘Now there’s the thing of it,’ declared Jon, following my gaze as I rubbed one of Thorgunna’s salves into the ankle that always gave me trouble in cold weather. ‘Old Sveinald there is no fool and could not miss such preparation as this, yet he rides off without a backward glance at all these carts and loading and such. Is he burning too much at what happened to his boy to wonder what we are doing?’
‘It is his boy who is burning,’ I pointed out, ‘and will, I am thinking, for a long while yet.’
‘Yet one more trouble to add to the heap,’ answered Jon and his voice was so wormwood bitter that I turned to look at him. By then, however, he was hidden behind his hair, hunched over, scratching away at the vellum with his tongue between his teeth.
Jon was smart, even when he sulked. Our going to seek out Atil’s silver was the worst secret never kept; the markets were alive with it and men arrived every day to clamour to join Vladimir’s druzhina, or the Oathsworn.
Sveinald knew of it, for all his indifference. That meant Jaropolk, whom I had last seen as a spotty youth, knew of it. So would Oleg, the second of Vladimir’s brothers and even allowing for the fact that there were stones more clever than him, he would know the importance of it, even if someone had to spell the words of it for him.
It was, I was thinking, as if Odin – a Volsung himself, I remembered – had bent and twisted and heated and forged this treasure hoard into an ever-increasing curse, dragging more and more people into it, beating it white-hot and ever-larger. But for what?
The wet feathers of the white raven drifted, light and cold on my upturned face, making me blink as they fastened on my lashes. Perhaps Crowbone had the right of it after all – perhaps this was Fimbulwinter, the heralding freeze at the end of the world.
Then, on the day the white raven stuck its head under a wing and roosted, permitting a blue sky and a red sun, we left Novgorod and went out on to the wolf sea.
NINE
The Oathsworn were lined up in a parody of the prince’s druzhina but only half-mocking. Anything the dour folk of Novgorod could do, good men from the vik could do better they had decided.
Vladimir rode out to look his own men over. He was all gleaming with gold and silver, wearing a little sabre and perched like an acorn on a too-large black horse – so I had to wear my own finery and that cursed sabre and stride out to look the Oathsworn over.
The good people of Novgorod cheered and the carts creaked and the horses and ponies stamped in the cold, dropping cairns of steaming dung on to the freshly-swept oak walkways. I felt, at that moment, closer to being a jarl than I had ever felt.
They did not look too bad, the Oathsworn, for all that they had drunk through most of the money they had won from raiding Klerkon and rattled every whore in the city until her teeth loosened. Some had even thought to squander money on sensible gear fit for a winter steppe.
There was Kvasir, wearing a new coat padded and sewn like a quilt and stuffed with cotton. We called it aketon, which was as close as any norther could get to mouthing al-qutn, the Serkland word for cotton.
We knew the benefits of having padding under mail, but three wool tunics were usually enough, until we had found the soldiers of the Great City wearing these Turk garments. Not only did they keep off arrows but dulled a hard dunt that might otherwise break your ribs – and kept you warm in weather like this, too.
On the other hand, there was Lambi Pai, the Peacock, barely old enough to grow a wisp of beard and shivering in his new, fat silk breeks striped in red and white, with a silly hat fringed with long-haired goat. Which was still not as silly as the one Finn wore, which was Ivar’s weather hat with a strip of wadmal tied round it and over his ears – but at least Finn’s would keep him warm.
They were all grinning back at me, stamping feet and blowing out smoke-breath and stuffing their fingers inside cloaks and tunics to keep them warm; Klepp Spaki, Onund Hnufa, Finnlaith the Irisher, Bjaelfi – whom we called Laeknir, Healer, because he had some skills there – Gyrth, wrapped in sensible furs so that he looked like a dancing bear and all the others. Well – all grinning save Jon Asanes, who looked sour as turned milk and stared blankly back at me.
I saw Gizur and Red Njal and nodded acknowledgment of Hauk Fast Sailor’s wave. Beyond them all, wrapped up like bundles in the carts, Thorgunna and Thordis watched me, while the deerhounds alone seemed immune to the chill on a day of blue skies and a blood sun with no heat left in it.
I wanted to tell them it was foolishness, of how many had already died on this quest, but I knew they had heard all that already from those who had survived the first time. It did not matter now – the silver hook was sunk deep and Odin reeled us all in. Bone, blood and steel – that oath would haul us all out on to the cold-wasted steppe.
So we trooped out through the gate, a long, winding column of sledge-carts and horses, men and boys, thralls and women and one reluctant Christ priest.
The little princes rode together, surrounded by the hulking shapes of Sigurd and Dobrynya and picked men of the druzhina in full mail and helmets and lances with forked pennants fluttering, forcing the thralls and drovers to scamper or be ridden over. I saw that a lot of the drovers were Klerkon’s crewmen, reduced to hiring on as paid labour and lured to this demeaning thrall-work by the gleam of distant silver.
I vowed to watch them, in case any were holding grudges for Klerkon’s death – though I did not think the man attracted such loyalty, I remembered what we had done on Svartey.
I forgot my vow, of course, a week later, when the winter steppe closed its icy jaws and gnawed even reasoning out of us.
There was snow, night and day and yet again, then it eased but only to give the snell wind a chance to catch up. Then it snowed again, small-flaked and dry, piling round the camp in high circles where the fires kept it at bay.
It fell, fine as flour from a quern, from a lead-dulled sky, sifted like smoke along the land, stinging the face and piling up, all the time piling up so that, finally, you could not get your feet above it and had to plough through it. Yet, when I turned, once, to get the sting out of my face and free my lashes from ice, there was not a mark; all smoothed and smothered, the snow left not even the voice of it to show where we had been.
The Great White, Tien called it and he should know, being a Bulgar from the Itil River, which Slavs call Volga. Vladimir had brought him, along with some Khazars as guides and his name, he told us with a grin, meant nothing. It was a good joke for it was true – tien was the name of a small coin, a trifle in the language of his tribe, the Eksel.
‘I will trade you my fine name,’ moaned Pai when he heard this, ‘for your hat and coat.’
Tien laughed with fine, strong teeth. He wore a cone-shaped fur hat with flaps right down over his ears, a long sable coat belted at the waist with a sash and long fur boots, all of which were eyed enviously. In the sash, though, Tien had a curved dagger in a sheath and his hand was never far from it – particularly when the Khazars were close.
Sviatoslav had broken the power of the Khazars before he died and the tribes of the Bulgars, once dominated by the Khazars, were now free – nothing marked this more than Tien, who had gone back to the old ways of the Eksel, even to calculating the seasons and the years. It was a deliberate heathen insult to the Khazar Jews.
‘This is the Time Of Small Frosts, in the second year of the Hedgepig,’ he told us on the last night of our first week in the steppe, the oval of his face flickered by firelight. The camp was so sunk that no-one wanted to go far from it for private business, for you could not see it a hundred steps away, save for blue smoke in the last hour of evening – at night, even the red glow vanished.
‘Small frosts?’ grunted Gyrth. ‘Any larger and Finn’s other ear will drop off.’
Finn, who did not like mention of his missing ear
, scowled and there were chuckles at Gyrth getting the better of him for once – but not many and not for long. The cold seeped into bones, even round the fire, so that your face and toes were warm but your back was numbed. It sucked away even the desire to laugh.
Tien shrugged. ‘It has been colder,’ he said and looked across to where the Khazars sat, stolidly listening and saying nothing.
He graciously accepted a refill from Kvasir’s horn – green wine, I knew, cold as a whore’s heart and which burned satisfyingly in your belly – and smacked his lips. Finn gave a sharp grunt of annoyance as Kvasir’s shivering spilled some while pouring, for he loved that green wine and there was precious little of it with us.
‘There was a time,’ Tien went on, ‘when we fought the Khazars, even as we were part of the Khazar nation and even when no-one else dared.’
The Khazars stayed quiet, though their eyes were chips of blue ice in the firelight. Red haired and blue eyed were the Khazar Jews, while the little Eksel Bulgar was dark as an underground dwarf – which he may well have been, as Jon pointed out, for he knew more than any other Greek about the Old Norse.
‘Alas,’ said Tien, ‘we were forced to flee, for I was a boy then and, clearly if I had been a full fighting man, we would have won. We went north and more north still and winter came.’
He swallowed and we waited. He smacked his lips and grinned, his eyes drink-bright in the firelight. ‘That was when the green wine poured like honey, thick and slow,’ he said, almost dreamily, ‘so cold it was. When trees exploded with a crack and shot blue fire when they fell. When first I saw the whisper of stars.’
‘What?’ we demanded.
‘The whisper of stars,’ he repeated and blew out his breath in a long stream of vanishing grey. ‘When you speak, the very breath in your body turns the words to ice and they fall to the ground with the sound of a whisper,’ he explained.
There was silence, then a snort from Avraham, one of the Khazars, a big man with a bigger scowl and the haughtiness of a man who thought well of himself.
‘Your stories are like your name, little man,’ he said. ‘But, as you say, you fled there having been beaten by us, so perhaps grief and shame clouded your boyish memories.’
‘Once Kiev paid you scat, of a sword and a squirrel skin for every home,’ Tien answered smartly, ‘but Kiev came and destroyed you, which is clearly the will of Senmerv, Mother Goddess. Nothing will cloud my memory of Itil burning.’
Avraham half-raised himself, but was stopped by the smaller one, Morut. ‘Bolgary, too, if I remember,’ he said softly and Tien acknowledged, with a slight nod, that Sviatoslav had torched his people’s capital city as well.
Avraham waved a deprecating hand and added: ‘Which is what comes from worshipping a woman. The maker of heaven and earth must, of his nature, be male, otherwise the creator would be female. Which is absurd since, all over the world we know, the female is subject to the male. How, then, can it be different in heaven?’
There was a derisive snort from the other side of the fire and some, recognizing Thorgunna, chuckled.
‘Oior pata,’ said Tien and both the Khazar Jews stiffened.
‘We do not speak of them,’ Avraham replied flatly.
‘What is it?’ demanded Jon Asanes curiously. ‘Is it the name of a Jewish goddess?’
Avraham grunted and glared back at Jon, with little courtesy. ‘If I thought you genuinely sought the truth, I would enlighten you,’ he declared. ‘Yet, afterwards, you will still worship those evil, heathen spirits of the North, unconvinced.’
‘I am a Christian,’ Jon answered indignantly, but Avraham curled a lip.
‘Only the Jews, the Chosen People of God, have been granted the true insight into the nature of the creator,’ he said stiffly.
‘That did not help you much against Sviatoslav and the gods of the Slavs,’ growled Finn and the Khazar scowled.
‘We are the people of exile,’ he commented bitterly. ‘The world lines up to scatter us every time we gain a country of our own, paying scat to no man. They envy us for being the Chosen of God.’
‘More likely they wanted to be rid of paying scat of their own,’ I offered him back. ‘The Romans, for one, will help one people one day and another against you the next.’
‘They are Christian,’ Avraham noted with a scowl, shooting a glance at Jon. ‘They hate us.’
‘What does he mean?’ Finn wanted to know and Jon shrugged.
‘The Jews killed Jesus,’ he answered. ‘Everyone knows that.’
‘Truly?’ enthused Finn, turning to Avraham. ‘You killed this White Christ? You are the torturers of the Tortured God?’
‘No,’ replied Avraham, defiantly sullen. ‘The Romans did, but now they follow the Christ ways and blame us for it.’
Finn sat back, his delight at what he had learned tempered. He shook his head, sorrowful and bemused.
‘Even dead this white-livered Christ certainly knows how to cause trouble in an empty room,’ he declared and Jon shot him an angry look.
‘Still – it was no Christ-follower who warred on the Khazar and Bulgar,’ I offered and there was silence at that as folk remembered Sviatoslav, great Prince of Kiev.
‘Idu na vy,’ said Tien sadly and everyone fell silent. Idu na vy – I am coming against you – was what Sviatoslav had sent as his last message to those he planned to conquer. Now he, too, was gone and the steppe was unleashed. Avraham scowled at the memory.
‘Will they fight each other?’ Jon asked softly and I shrugged. Tien said nothing for a moment, while we all watched with interest – it was nothing to us if they snarled at each other like dungheap dogs.
‘We will see how cold it gets,’ the little Bulgar said at last in his halting, thick-accented Norse. ‘I can read the signs. If we stay this far north in the Great White you will see the green wine turn to syrup.’
‘Well,’ grunted Gyrth, looking like a mangy bear woken too early from winter-sleep, ‘we had better drink it all then before such a tragedy happens.’
Finn toasted him, then thrust his drinking horn at Thordis, who looked at him steadily, then accepted it and drank.
‘Move closer,’ Finn ordered her, ‘and find warmth.’
‘That’s an old trick,’ Thordis replied flatly.
‘No trick,’ said Finn. ‘You are cold. I am cold. I owe you heat, at least, as weregild.’
Her eyes widened, for it was the first time that such had been mentioned, though the fact of it had hung between us all like a blade – her husband had died because raiders came looking for the Oathsworn, after all, yet the same Oathsworn had risked their lives to rescue her from slavery. It would take a lot of waggling grey beards to law-speak that one out at a Ting.
Thorgunna nudged her sister pointedly and she moved up the fire a way and into the lee of Finn’s body. He grunted, satisfied.
‘Well,’ declared Kvasir, beaming round, ‘here we all are, warm and fed and heading for riches. Life could be worse.’
‘As the swallow said,’ answered a familiar, lilting voice from the darkness. Olaf stepped in, the elkhound padding after him to the fire, while all the eyes watched him and only Thorgunna’s were warm.
‘What swallow?’ demanded Jon and Crowbone, so pale his lips and cheeks were blood-red, gathered the great swathe of fur-trimmed white wool round him and sat down at Thorgunna’s feet, while she dreamily took off his white wool cap and began to comb his lengthening yellow hair.
‘There was a swallow who ignored winter,’ Olaf said and everyone grunted and shifted to be more comfortable, for though he unnerved them, they liked his stories.
‘Let’s call it Kvasir,’ he added and people chuckled. Kvasir raised his wooden cup across the fire to the little prince.
‘So Kvasir-Swallow dipped and swooped and enjoyed himself all summer and well into the russet days, when all his friends and brothers and sisters told him they were leaving to be warm elsewhere, before the snows came.
‘But Kvasir-S
wallow was having too much fun and ignored them, so they left without him. And he continued to swoop and dip, though it grew colder and he caught less to eat with his swooping.
‘Then, one day, it was so cold he knew he had made a mistake. “I must fly hard and fast and catch up with my brothers and sisters and friends,” he said to himself. So he did, but it was too late. Blizzards came and howled down on him, flinging him this way and that and far, far off course …’
‘Sounds like every journey in the Elk,’ growled Klepp Spaki, who had discovered he hated the sea. People shushed him and Olaf went on.
‘Half freezing, he flew on and on, then the snowstorms blew harder than ever until his wings froze entire and he tumbled, beak over tail, down from the sky.’
He paused, for he had a feel for such things – he was never nine, that boy.
‘What happened?’ demanded an impatient Jon, leaning forward.
‘He died, of course,’ growled Finn, which brought some belly laughs, for that was an old tale-telling trick.
Olaf, grinning, said: ‘He would have – but he fell into the biggest, fattest, freshest heap of dung just shat by a grain-fed milk cow in the farm that lay under his flight. The heat of it thawed him. In fact, it made him realize what a narrow escape he had just had, so he fluttered about and sang loudly about how lucky he was – at which point the farm dog heard it, came out, sniffed and ate him in one gulp.’
There was silence and into it, looking round the stunned faces, Olaf smiled.
‘So it is clear,’ he said slowly. ‘If you end up in the shite and are warm, happy and safe – keep your beak shut and stay quiet, for worse will happen.’
We laughed long at that one, for it was a fine tale, well told and made us forget the keen edge of winter for those moments. Though, as Kvasir said when he had stopped laughing, it was no good omen to hear your name spoken in such a way. Olaf merely smiled, as if he knew more he was not saying and moved quietly to me when we were alone.
‘There are men to be watched,’ he said, unblinking serious. ‘Klerkon’s old crew – especially the one called Kveldulf.’