by Robert Low
I knew Crowbone had some reason for hating this Kveldulf but, even so, his warnings made sense – the men from the Dragon Wings kept to their own fires and, more often than not, Martin sat with them. This had suited me, since his company was not one I cared for, but now Crowbone’s warning made me uneasy.
Yet, I was thinking, what could they do? Out in this cold, we lived or died by what we did together; no-one would survive long alone.
This was proved the next morning, when we found two good horses dead from that cold, solid as stones, their eyes open and frosted and their hides too hard even to flay off them for the leather.
We trudged on, slithering and sliding across frozen grass, the snow blown into drifts and frozen-crusted on top, cloud soft beneath. One day followed the next and more horses died, all the ones too fine for the steppe and mostly ridden by the druzhina warriors. Then it was the turn of people to suffer.
Four of the hunter-scouts Vladimir had hired – all Klerkon’s men – came to Bjaelfi Healer after being out on the steppe on their own, showing him their blackened toes and one the tip of his nose.
Onund Hnufa knew what it was at once and told them. ‘The cold rots the flesh. When it turns black it is dead and such will spread. The only cure is to have it lopped off and quick.’
The least hurt was the big, strong, dangerous Kveldulf, who submitted to having the ends of three toes nipped. Two of the others, however, died of the cure the next day, for Bjaelfi had to take a foot from one of them and most of all the toes from another. Before he died, the toeless one revealed that he had seen the smoke of fires, no more than a day’s journey to the west – for a man with two good legs, he added mournfully.
The last one, with most of his nose removed – and part of the tip of an ear – told us nothing at all, but moaned and wept about his plight.
Onund was hard on him. ‘You should have spent more on fur and less on fucking,’ he growled. ‘At least you had the sense of a pair of good wool socks. Those others had bare feet in their boots.’
‘You should have spent Orm’s money wisely,’ Gyrth added, stamping his warmly-booted feet. The others of Klerkon’s crew looked grimly and pointedly at one another and I marked it – though the village we came on next day was such a welcome sight that it made me forget. Again.
The Rus called them goradichtches and I thought it was the name of the place at first, but it turned out only to be their name for villages. In summer, it would have been a pretty place, snuggled up to the banks of a river, which flowed quietly and dreamily between two rows of gently sloping hills, clumped with lush, tall willows. Now the trees were skeletal and the river marked only as a glittering ribbon between the faint snow-blown squares of fields and meadows.
On the far side of the river was a vast flat plain that glittered, studded with the tufted spears that told us this was marsh in summer. In the distance, a faint haze of blue hinted at ground higher than the rolling steppe.
There were no fences, only rows of willows to mark boundaries around this place and the snow piled deep at the base of a sea of those trees, which sheltered the fields. In summer, they would be orchards, fields of hemp and sunflowers, grain and, in the fringes of the marsh, thick-growing sedge. Now they were just clumps of stiffened tawny grass across which the snow blew.
The village was an earthwork circle with a huddle of houses, hunched low to the ground to fool the winter snow and the summer heat. The gaps between the houses were lined with tall willows that seemed to have been planted there on purpose, but the big Khazar said they were willow fence poles which had taken root, for this was the rich lands of the south, where you could stick a stripped pole in the ground and it would sprout.
A high tower dripped with ice and held a bell and there was a brewhouse and a brace of forges, for these Polianians were noted for sword-making and made most of their trade in blades. The place had been well fortified against the Khazars when they were a power and now there were new and uncertain dangers with the death of the Great Prince of Kiev.
As we rode up, the bell rang out and the place seethed. Women shrieked and children burst into tears because their mothers were crying and their fathers were shouting.
Sigurd rode forward and called out to them, which was not, perhaps, the cleverest move with his silver nose. Where it touched his face, the cold had turned the flesh as purple as an emperor’s robe and if it had been me I would have kept the gates shut on him, for he looked blue-black as a dead man.
But they were Polianians and knew of Sigurd Axebitten, so eventually, the gates opened and we rode in – though the wailing had not stopped and the headman, his face as blank as the white steppe, stood with his hat in his hands as we slid misery through his gates.
He was old, lean and tall, with a pale, worn-out face, a long greyish moustache and eyes sorrowed as a whipped dog. Deep furrows scarred his cheeks and forehead, his rough hands and the wrinkled back of his neck. The skin on his fingers and palms was cracked and creased as if burned by fire. There were thralls who looked better than he did.
Kovach he called himself and Malkyiv he called the place – Little Fortress, I worked it out as, though I could have been wrong – and he had a right to look sorrowful, for a Prince had arrived with too many men and even more animals and that was worse than steppe raiders. Those he could have fought, at least, before they burst in to demand the winter stores.
Our men were quartered under every roof, elbowing for floor space, shoving aside livestock and considering themselves lucky to be in such warmth. The Oathsworn had two storehouses – conspicuously empty – and piled in, dumping gear and setting fires while the stolid-faced locals came and offered what service they could.
As they did so, I stumped across to the headman’s own hut, where the prince had naturally taken himself and as many of his retinue as could be crammed in.
‘Four days from Kiev,’ Dobrynya said softly, pointing to the chart as he and Vladimir and Sigurd and myself huddled together at one end of the hut to plan what to do next. Which, as Vladimir would have it, was simple enough and he laid it out for us, pointing at the chart with his little bone-handled dagger – we go on, swiftly.
‘We should stay here,’ Sigurd argued, which was sense. Getting this far had taken three times as long as it would have in summer, floating downriver to Kiev. But, of course, we could not go to Kiev; even four days east was too close to Vladimir’s smart brother, Jaropolk and the two men I least wanted to meet – Sveinald and his face-ruined son.
‘We will gather what fodder and supplies we can take from here,’ the little prince said in his piping voice, ‘and head to the Don. Tomorrow, or the day after, but no later than that.’
‘What of the villagers, my prince?’ Dobrynya said and Vladimir frowned, knowing that to take what they had would condemn them.
‘Pay them,’ said Olaf and he and Vladimir looked at each other and nodded. Vladimir then turned and stared straight back into his uncle’s eyes until Dobrynya lowered his and nodded. Everyone knew full well what he had ordered; the villagers could hardly eat hacksilver.
The headman, Kovach, knew it, too. He came into the presence of the little prince, greasy fur cap in hand and head lowered as was proper. For all his deference, he was like the willow, bending in the wind yet rooted and immovable. There was food and it was hidden and he would not tell where it was, nor would searching do much good, for there were too many floors to be dug up, too many roof-spaces.
‘Do you know who this is, old one?’ demanded Dobrynya sternly, pointing to the whey-faced, tight-lipped Vladimir, but Kovach had endured shrieking winter and broiling summer and red war, so the likes of Dobrynya and a pouting boy was not going to cow him. Even Sigurd’s silver nose only made him blink his rheumy pale-blue eyes.
‘I thought it was my prince,’ he answered levelly, ‘the young Jaropolk, come in answer to my pleas, but I see this boy is too young.’
‘This is his brother,Vladimir, prince of Novgorod,’ Sigurd growled. The
headman nodded and the ploughed furrows on his forehead grew deeper.
‘Is that the right of it? Well, well … but if you did not come in answer to my pleas, it puzzles me why you are on the steppe at this time of year.’
‘No matter of yours,’ Dobrynya snapped. ‘All you need to know is that we are here and you must tell us what we want to know.’
‘Ah well,’ answered Kovach, ‘as to that, I am thinking that the prince of Novgorod, fine boy though he may be, is asking for what belongs to his brother. I am wondering if his brother knows.’
I chuckled, for there was a fox look in those pale eyes, which then flicked to me, interested. Little Vladimir flushed and his lips tightened.
‘It is not your place to think,’ he snapped, though his voice broke on it, robbing it of much of its sting.
This was pointless. Kovach was not about to break, even if I strung him, his daughter and all his relatives up by the heels and carved away the lies from them with the Truth Knife nestled in the small of my back. This was a stone of a man, like all his sort and there was much to be admired in how he could endure.
Beside – these were not Vladimir’s lands and he could not do as he liked without raising the ire of his brother, Prince Jaropolk.
‘What pleas?’ I asked and heads turned. Kovach raised his eyebrows as he looked at me questioningly, mild as milk. Oh, he would have been a terror in Miklagard’s marbled halls of intrigue, that old bondi.
‘Orm,’ I told him, as pleasantly as I could, for it does no harm to start politely, offering names and smiles.
‘A Norse,’ said Kovach, rasping a gnarled hand across his stubble. ‘I know some of that tongue. Your name is … serpent?’
‘Wyrm,’ I said lightly, then leaned forward. ‘It would be better to speak, old one. We are hungry as serpents and you know what hungry serpents are like.’
He blinked and nodded, then smiled, more gap than grin.
‘My pleas,’ he said and, remembering I had asked, I nodded. Dobrynya cleared his throat pointedly, but we ignored him.
‘Vodoniye,’ he said and there was a hiss of breath from Dobrynya and Sigurd. Little Vladimir went pale. I had no idea what he meant and said so.
‘Creatures,’ muttered Dobrynya. ‘They feast on the souls of the drowned.’
‘Child’s tales,’ added Sigurd, but he did not sound convinced.
‘They live in the high ground in the middle of the swamp,’ Kovach went on, his voice flat and level and bitter as wormwood. ‘There are forty-eight families in this village and all of them have suffered.’
‘Suffered how?’ demanded Dobrynya.
‘They come, these vodoniye, to steal our women and make them into rusalka. For years, once, perhaps twice every year.
They came in the autumn this year and took another. My granddaughter.’
He fell silent and I felt a chill in this warm, stove-heated hut that had nothing to do with winter draughts.
‘Yet you have done nothing,’ piped Vladimir and Kovach cocked one spider-legged eyebrow in his direction.
‘We sent men into the swamp at first,’ he said. ‘Six died the first time and we did it again and lost four and they were all good forgemen. We did not send any more, for we need men to make blades and work fields and can fight most things, but not this. So we built up our defences instead and each year we send to Kiev for help and each year it never comes.’
‘Your defences are not good, old man, if they keep stealing from you,’ I said.
‘Magic, one supposes,’ Kovach said matter-of-factly, though his eyes were cunning slits. ‘They come at night and from the marshes. I saw one, once – scaled like a serpent, running through the streets in the moonlight, making no sound. Now you have come. Perhaps Perun has sent us a warrior called Wyrm to bring an end to these Scaled Ones, who are clearly hatched from a serpent’s egg. The god has, after all, sent this cold, which has frozen the impassable marsh; I cannot remember the marsh ever having frozen.’
From the looks on the faces of those who knew him, I guessed it was the most that old Kovach had said in one place at any time and the silence after it was longer and more still as a result. It was broken only by the sudden pop of a log bursting in the fire; sparks flared and flames dyed everyone red.
‘So – if we end this menace, you will share your hidden food, is that it, cunning old man?’ growled Sigurd. He greeted the nod of reply with a sharp snort of disapproval.
‘Hung from your stringy thumbs,’ he added, ‘you will tell us soon enough.’
‘Hung from thumbs,’ Dobrynya said into the silence that followed, ‘any one of your charges would tell us. Do you want us to do that? I can bring, say, the mother of your granddaughter.’
Kovach blinked and his head went down; when all was said and done, he was a poor man, with no say in the storms that lashed him – but there had been so many storms in his life they had honed him; he had less fear than Finn, I was thinking.
Dobrynya and I exchanged glances, all the same. Dealing harshly with these nithing farmers and smiths was a privilege that belonged to Vladimir’s brother and abusing them could provoke the very conflict Novgorod did not want.
‘A small trek across some frozen marsh,’ Dobrynya said finally, shrugging and and looking at me. ‘Little enough.’
‘Then let him take it,’ growled Finn bitterly when I shared this out in the place the Oathsworn had been bundled into and proudly called a hall. ‘What the fuck is a voy-ded-oy, or the other thing?’
‘Vodoniye,’ answered Crowbone brightly. ‘Water draugr. It is said they take young girls and make them into rusalka, spirits of the marshes and water’s edge. These rusalka are beautiful, pale-skinned and with long green hair that is always damp – if their hair ever dries out, they die, and thus they always carry combs with them, combs which can cause floods when pulled through their tresses. They are said to be able to turn into waterbirds and have webbed feet …’
He tailed off when he realized we were all staring at him.
‘I know a tale about them,’ he added, defiantly.
‘Then keep it behind your teeth,’ rasped Finn, furious with frustration. ‘This old fuck of a headman has a thought-cage twisted by the cold. Does he seriously believe all this?’
‘If he is touched,’ Thorgunna declared, ‘then others are, too – there is a woman and her man mourning for the loss of a daughter in this very house.’
She was Kovach’s own daughter, who stood with wooden spoons in each hand, stirring life back into some old ale as she told us – between sobs – of seeing a shadow in their house, hearing a muffled scream. Her round face was chap-cheeked, brown eyes red-rimmed and mournful; I did not tell her how things could have been worse for her, strung up by the thumbs and questioned by Sigurd and Dobrynya. She sounded scared enough, all the same and her tears were real.
Her husband claimed to have tackled the creature with a hand-scythe and I looked him over as he dragged out the tale of it. He had a broad, flat face, where the cheeks and nose stuck like galls on an oak and the wind had ploughed out wrinkles in it until tree bark looked softer. His hair was braided and had never been cut, only burned, so that the ends were crumbled.
He did not look like a man easily cowed and had arms hard with work-muscle, skin-marked roughly with the outline of a horse.
‘Scaled like a chicken’s leg,’ he confirmed, but his eyes kept shifting and I wondered why.
The creature had run off with their daughter, fourteen summers old and corn-hair pretty, according to her ma and others I spoke to. There were other stories, some of daughters stolen, others of livestock taken and, because they were who they were, it seemed the grief-loss was equal to these people. Yet there was something rank as lutefiske about the affair.
Later, in the lumpen, shifting shadows, surrounded by murmur and the laughter of those with full bellies and warm feet, I sat and breathed in the smell of ale and unwashed bodies, while a small girl, one eye blind-white as a boiled egg, played fox
-and-hens with the men and made them laugh when she won with considerable skill.
Huddled in a corner, faces murked by the uneasy glow of the fire, me and Finn, Kvasir and some others talked round this matter we had clearly been tasked with, quiet as the smoke which swirled round a sooted kettle.
None of us liked the idea of scaled creatures who could scamper silently over a deadly marsh, cross a stream, then a palisade and evade all the guards, both in and out, laden with struggling women or bawling calves.
By the time our tongues hurt, it came down to the same as it had been at the start; we would have to go to this place in the marsh and see for ourselves.
‘We will find only some ragged-arse outlaws,’ Kvasir declared. ‘Mark me. Runaways, living badly out on the steppe and stealing what they need – including a decent hump.’
‘Invisible outlaws I do not need either,’ I growled back and that left them, like me, chewing on whether Kovach and the villagers were being entirely truthful.
In the end, Red Njal broke his silence, heaving himself up and sighing.
‘Well, there is no way but to do it,’ he growled. ‘Steady and careful. The sun rises little by little, but it crosses all the world in a day, as my granny told me.’
‘I wish it was your granny who was going and not me,’ Finn grunted back.
In the morning, it had been decided that myself, Kvasir and Finn would go, with Sigurd and a dozen of his men, all suitably mailed and armed, as well as Morut and Avraham. Jon Asanes was sulky, because I had said he could not come with us for, as he admitted himself, he was no great fighter.
‘Olaf is going,’ he pouted back bitterly. Crowbone was going because his Uncle Sigurd was going and I had no say in that, but it did not help Jon’s sulk. Crowbone teased him about wanting the princely gift of a smile from Vladimir, which made Jon flush to his ears and stamp off.
Blowing and stamping, we came out to our horses. We all had horses, which Finn looked at dubiously, for he hated riding; it did not help to see me easy in the saddle and smiling down into his scowl.