by Robert Low
‘“Too late,” the old man said. “The cat’s run off and hidden the amulet.” Then he turned his face to the wall and died.
‘The dogs slunk away, howling and arguing with each other and began to look for the cat, but Martin was long gone. So from that day to this, dogs have fought each other and only stop to chase every cat they see, hoping it is Martin with the amulet. They have distrusted all cats ever since – and men, if they are wise, should do the same, for not all those who carry the cross are good Christ-believers.’
In the silence that followed, the hissing wind was loud and mine was the only chuckle. Then men started half-up, afraid, as something flitted silently overhead.
‘Only a hunting owl,’ Martin snapped, then rounded on Thorkel, Tyrfing and the others and savaged them for their twitchiness.
‘This is what comes from listening to that damned boy,’ he thundered and they hunched their heads deeper into their shoulders, as much to endure him as the cold and the long night. Then he looked sideways at Olaf and made the sign of the cross.
‘If you have such a Christ amulet,’ growled Tyrfing, trembling with cold, ‘now would be a good time to use it, priest.’
Martin only shook his head at such foolishness. The silence was brooding.
‘A good tale,’ I whispered to Crowbone when I could. ‘It did not miss the mark, I am thinking.’
He turned to me, eyes round and serious. ‘The owl tells me to watch out tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Things will happen and we must be ready for them.’
He turned back to stare at the flames and I felt the racing creep of my flesh that always told me when the Other was close, when the membrane between the worlds was thinnest.
He may have been earlier in the day, but he was not nine now, that little Crowbone.
Tyrfing was dead next morning, sitting by the black scar of the iced-over fire, wrapped in his cloak and ghost-white with rime. His face was a faded blue, his eyes fastened shut with lashes fine as silver wires.
‘He will be the lucky one,’ Olaf piped up and the remaining men scowled; Heg even reached out as if to cuff the boy, but freedom sat too new on him to behave like that.
Martin, a dark scar himself in that place of frosted ground and frozen white birch trees, slapped men to get them to move and they did, slowly, as if underwater. Thorkel, too, added his curses and cuffs and they staggered into a world like the inside of the frost-giant Ymir’s skull, a huge curve of iced sky and snow plain that seemed to have no beginning and no end and was turning pewter-dark by the minute.
The last pony, trembling and head-bowed with misery, was fetched from where it had been tethered and Martin told us to get back in the cart.
‘They should be made to work,’ Drumba argued, scowling. ‘That one pony will scarce pull the load. Get them out and pushing.’
Martin gave in and we climbed out, stiff with cold and me with my head aching still, each step a stab of pain in it. The wind hissed snow in my face and the pearl sky slid towards darkness.
‘Whatever happens,’ Olaf said, looking up into my face, ‘do not worry. Yesterday, I saw a magpie in a tree over there and a raven joined it and they sat together for a while, watching us. Then the raven chased the magpie off.’
Raven – magpie? I heard it, as if from a long way off. The boy was mad for birds. Or just mad.
He saw my look and smiled, his lips blush-red against the pallor of his pinched face. ‘The magpie is Hel’s bird, made like her face – half ruin, half beauty. The raven belongs to Odin and the message is clear … Odin will prevent Hel from claiming us this day.’
‘Not a straw death, at least,’ I managed through my clattering teeth.
‘If the Norns weave it,’ Olaf answered, ‘no death at all.’
Thorkel was trying to back the pony into the traces, had it halfway hooked up when someone yelled, shrill and high as a woman.
Drumba half-turned and the arrow took him high on the shoulder when it should have pinned him between the shoulderblades. Thorkel, fighting to hold the pony, took one there, a deep shunk of sound that staggered him – but he stayed upright and only seemed angrier.
The horsemen spilled around us like ghosts, the white cloths that had draped them and their horses flailing like winding sheets. Those cloths had hidden them from sight, the snow had hidden them from sound and now, breaking right and left round the little copse of trees, they galloped in a spray of white flakes and arrows.
Heg fled, screaming, vanishing into flurries of snow. Another arrow thudded into Thorkel, in his chest this time and he staggered back with the force of it and lost his grip on the pony, which reared and fought in terror.
They were silent, these horsemen. Silent and agile as cats, climbing up and ducking under, whirling almost completely round to keep the arrows coming while they rode round and round, flailing their horses into stumbling runs, the snow like gruel under their ponies’ hooves.
Thorkel, snarling now, dragged out a sword – the frozen-stiff fur he wore was as good as armour against the arrows and he whirled one way, then another, spiked with them, like a mad hedgepig. Drumba choked off his last yelping cry when another arrow skewered his chest and punched a little way out of his back in a flick of time. He went down in a swirl of moans and red-dyed snow.
The wind was howling, I realized. Crowbone tugged my cloak and I saw him hunkered at my feet, but the pony and the wind and the screams of men turned him into a gawping fish, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly to me.
A figure lurched into me, bounced off and started to move away, half-turning to fling me away with a curse from a black-toothed, ruined mouth.
I grabbed out, caught something and heard him yell. Pain slammed into my shins and made me howl and something arced up and sideways into the snow – a great, hard-ridged leather shoe. Then something snapped and I fell backwards, clutching what I had grabbed, knowing Martin had just escaped.
The pony was mad with fear now, plunging and bucking. The cart tilted, went on one side, then over again, the sledge-runners in the air. The traces snapped and the pony staggered off.
Crowbone, on his knees, started to dig, while I lay there, head muzzed and pounding, waves of sick pain flowing up my leg from the kick on the shin.
Now I saw how dark it had become, how most of the shrieking was the wind and that the horse warriors were vague shapes in the seething snow and barely moving. I managed to get to my knees just as one of the horse-warriors lumbered out of the swirl, bow cased and a curved sword in one hand.
I heard a series of shrill screams as the sword went up and came down, threw up the bundle I had and heard the edge whack on it, the blow almost jerking it from my hand and flinging me flat again. The rider gave a howl of triumph, fought the horse round, leaning out to be able to hit me.
Then Thorkel snarled out of the white mist of snow, the sword swinging, smacking the rider out of the saddle. Roaring and hacking, Thorkel flurried more blows on the fallen shape, half of them bouncing off because he was wild with fear and anger and using the flat as much as the edge.
‘In here, Jarl Orm,’ shouted Crowbone, tugging my leg. ‘In here.’
He had dug out the snow at the edge of the cart, like the sunken door to an Iceland toft and, even as I moved, Thorkel spotted it and lumbered towards me, a hedgepig bristled with arrows that seeemed to have done him no harm at all.
Then, as ever with Thorkel, his luck ran out. He was three steps from me when the last arrow whirred out of the snowstorm, fired blind by riders already making off for shelter. It took him in the left eye, seemed just to appear there and came out above his right ear in a great gout of dark blood and bone shards. He was whirled by the force of it and fell away with a last, despairing shriek on the bad cess of his life.
I scrabbled furiously, while the dawn turned to midnight and was half-hauled by little Olaf into the shelter of the cart. In the dark, panting and sobbing with pain, I lay for a long time, while the snow-wind hissed through the cracks in the planks and the cart sho
ok and trembled with the power of it.
We did not speak for a while. I fell asleep, or lost my senses more like, for when I awoke, it was clear Crowbone had been busy and had adjusted his eyes to the gloom under here. The wind howled, the snow flurried in the cracks, but not so much now, which meant it was piling up on that side.
Crowbone had stacked three bundles at the door he had clawed out, to stop the wind. As my eyes adjusted, I saw one of the sacks was split and rye spilled out.
‘Well,’ I managed, ‘we have grain and snow for water. If we had a fire we could make flatbread.’
‘If we had meat and gravy we could make a feast,’ he answered, then grinned. ‘But we have some old bread and even some strips of dried meat, so we will not starve. Do these storms last a long time, Jarl Orm?’
I shrugged, which could have meant anything. I did not know, but thought it best not to admit that – for all his resource, little Olaf was still but nine years old and his voice quavered when he asked.
I chewed and scooped snow to drink, plastered more on my aching leg and wished I could see how bad it was. That turd Martin had kicked me – but he had lost his shoe doing it. He was out there, surely dead by now. I hoped he had frozen slowly, starting with his bare foot that he had used to take the skin off my shin.
I remembered the bundle now and dragged it over. The sword cut I had parried had slashed the ties and the wadmal cloth hung in tatters, so I peeled it off. I half-expected to see Martin’s Holy Spear, but it was my runemarked sabre and I realized that the monk had stolen it as part of the package to sell to Sveinald – me and the rune blade, the secret of the silver hoard.
Then I had to wonder at the Odin-marvel of getting it back.
‘That’s the one you took from Atil’s howe,’ Crowbone said, peering at it. I turned it over in my hand, seeing the beautifully carved hilt and the runed scratches on it, how the blade gleamed even in this poor light, how it looked rainbow-slick as if oiled, the serpent of forged runes curling down the blade.
‘Is it magical?’ he asked and reached out one finger to touch it. He stopped a knuckle-length away and drew his hand back. He looked at me. I wrapped the weapon up and it seemed even darker with it covered.
We sat for a while longer as the storm swooped and swirled, savaging us through the knotholes in planks and rocking the upturned cart. Snow sifted in. My head hurt and little Olaf’s teeth clattered loudly.
‘Get closer if you are cold,’ I said. There was silence but he did not move. Then he cleared his throat.
‘I pissed myself,’ he chattered, his piping voice thick with the shame of his battle fear.
‘Never mind,’ I grunted at him. ‘It will be the last piss you ever take if you do not get closer, for it will freeze you to the marrow.’
I felt him creep to me then, huddling in the lee of my arm, where we leached warmth from each other and trembled with cold in the fetid dark – but, in the confined space, with the cart wrapped in snow, it grew warm enough for the rime to melt and freeze into new and stranger shapes on the inside of the cart.
He smelled faintly of piss and the shame came off him in waves, as like heat as made no difference to me.
I watched the rime-shapes, slipping into sleep, knowing it and fighting it, for there is not a man from the north who does not know the cold that droops your eyes towards death.
I was in the prow of the Elk as it curved and flexed over a great swell of cold sea, the spray flying. When I turned I saw old faces – the closest to me was Kalf, who had vanished over the side on my first-ever run to Birka, slapped overboard in a careless moment by sodden sails and gone in an eyeblink. He grinned at me and waved and I knew I must be dead and heading for Aegir’s kingdom – though how I had ended up in that underwater hall when I had died on land was a puzzle.
I turned back to stare beyond the prow for a clue to it, but the spume stung like an angry byke of bees, then a creature flew up in my face, a squid, or a jellyfish, straight on to my face, sucking and squelching …
‘Leave off him. Good boy, well done – leave him, you hole.’
Light blinded me, white and flickering with shapes. Something whuffed and panted and rasped my face with hot wetness.
‘Get off.’
The deerhound yelped as Finn whacked it, then his great grinning face loomed over me and he chuckled.
‘He deserves a few kisses, all the same, Bear Slayer, since his nose has found you where nothing else could. Good trick, that cart business.’
ELEVEN
I was lucky, as Bjaelfi pointed out back in the shelter of the village, while he poked and prodded the back of my skull. There was a bruise between neck and shoulder the colour of Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Valholl, while my shin was scraped raw, but no bones were broken.
I saw Kvasir look at me and shake his head with wry mirth. He knew I believed the sabre had powers to heal its owner and kept pointing out that nothing had happened to me that could not be put down to youth, strength and Odin-luck.
I looked back at him and nodded, adding: ‘Bone, blood and steel.’
He acknowledged my thanks for the rescue with a dismissive flap of one hand, then tossed me an object, which I caught awkwardly. It was Martin’s thick-ridged shoe.
‘We unearthed it from the snow, just outside the entrance you dug under the cart,’ he said. ‘Near where we found Thorkel.’
I weighed the oxhide shoe, bouncing it in my hand and realizing how lucky I had been, for such a kick with one of these could have snapped my leg like a twig. I said so and Kvasir rubbed his good eye and shrugged.
‘Its owner perhaps had a hand in that good luck – or a foot,’ he answered with a grim chuckle and nodded at the shoe when I looked at him with bewilderment.
‘Helshoon,’ he said and I blanched and carefully put the thing down, seeing now what it was. A Hel shoe, crafted for one wearing and one wearing only – on the feet of a man whose lack of mercy would take him to Hel’s hall along a last road studded with thorns and across a river sharp with iron. With such thick-soled shoes he could avoid the pain of being sliced to shreds, an unwarranted kindness from those who had howed him up.
‘Aye,’ growled Finn, coming up in time to catch this. ‘Somewhere on the road to Hel, a hard-hearted man is cursing that monk for robbing his grave.’
It would not have bothered Martin much, unearthing the dead he considered heathen to steal what he needed. Still, it marked how far Martin had sunk from the neat, fastidious Christ priest who had once argued gods with Illugi Godi in the polished hall of Birka’s fortress.
‘The boy?’ I asked and Finn grinned.
‘Piss-wet and a little cold. You saved his life.’
‘He saved mine,’ I answered. ‘The trick with the cart was his.’
Finn raised both eyebrows and looked at me, which was enough speech on the matter, for he knew what I must be feeling, owing weregild to that boy for my life.
What was I feeling, then? As if I had slithered into a mire. Sooner or later, little Crowbone would claim his due from me and it would not be cheap nor simple. There was worse to worry about now, all the same.
‘And the other … body?’ I asked, hoping against hope that it had somehow changed from what had been unearthed alongside Thorkel’s corpse.
‘Still a woman, Trader,’ grunted Finnlaith and we all turned to stare at the cloth-wrapped bundle, stiff with cold, that we had brought back from where Thorkel had killed it. Her. For a dizzying moment I heard her scream, saw the whirl of snow and the mad-mouthed frenzy of Thorkel, howling his hate and his blade on her before he died.
‘Oior-pata,’ Tien had whispered when Ospak had cleared the snow from the woman’s face. The little Bulgar had hunched into himself after that and would say nothing more. It was Avraham, the big red-haired Khazar, who had finally told us it was an old Skythian word meaning ‘man-haters’.
She was hacked bloody by Thorkel’s mad rage, but enough was there to see the fine decorated clothing, the t
attoos on her face made stark with her blood-drained pallor, the marks of old scars blue white on her cheeks, the hair gathered in braids and tied back, the way a fighting man does.
Young, too – but no thrall, nor a maid you would want to flirt with, as Jon Asanes pointed out when he and Silfra loaded her on the cart. She had a single boar’s tooth on a leather loop round her neck and I did not doubt that she had killed it herself. Her palms, at the base of the frozen fingers, were callous hard and her thumbs muscled and ridged with hard flesh, the draw-ring still fitted to one.
‘Sword and steppe bow,’ Finn pointed out. ‘She is bowlegged, too – see. She spent more years on a horse than on her feet and those hands did not get like that making soup or skelping bairns.’
But it was her head that bothered us all. Strange, stretched, sloping, it only accentuated the deep scars on either cheeks, too straight to be accidental. Men made signs against the evil eye; whispers of Nifelheim rose up like fumes from a swamp.
‘Dwarves?’ scoffed Gyrth. ‘Underground smiths? When did they become spearheaded women from the Great White who ride and fight like men?’
It was Jon Asanes who knew it, even as the big Khazar, Avraham, muttered on and on about the Jewish sacred writings forbidding dealings with such unclean spirits.
‘Herodotus,’ Jon said, bright with the light that had sparked up in his head.
‘Who?’ growled Finn, trying to back the spare horse they had brought into the shafts of the cart, now turned back upright.
‘A Greek. He wrote of women like these back in the old days of Greek heroes. Amazonoi they were called – warrior women of the Skyth tribes. Herakles, the strongest man in the world, fought them once, long ago. I read it in a book in the monastery in Novgorod.’
The fact that he had seen a book and even read it impressed most to silence for a moment and they stared, seeing the Greek youth in a new light.
‘They live still,’ said Morut, the small, dark Khazar. ‘They are part of one of the tribes of the Yass …’
‘There is cherem on even the mention of this,’ thundered Avraham but Morut, though he flushed a little, merely shrugged.