by Robert Low
‘The prince looked back at her and said: “I will cure your father if you will marry me.” Silver Bell loved another, a fine, strong hunter of wolves – frightened, she pulled the reins and galloped off. “At dawn tomorrow I will come to you,” the prince called after her.’
‘This does not sound like any prince I know,’ growled Dobrynya meaningfully.
‘Really, uncle?’ said Vladimir with a delighted chuckle. ‘I know two brothers just like this.’
Olaf smiled quietly and went on, soft and level and compelling. ‘The stars had barely melted in the sky, the meat in the kettles had not yet been cooked, the fine white rugs were not yet spread, bread had not yet been made, when there was a loud clattering of hooves at Silver Bell’s home. The prince had arrived.
‘Silently, looking at no-one, he dismounted and, greeting no-one, he went into where the sick man lay. The prince wore magnificent clothes, dripping with silver weighing eighty pounds if it weighed an ounce. All day, from dawn to sunset, the prince sat beside the sick man without lifting his eyelids, without moving, without uttering a word – but it was clear that Silver Bell was not going to come to him and he grew angrier and angrier at her presumption.
‘Late at night, the prince stood up and pulled his fine sable hat down to his scowl. Then he said: “Drive out Silver Bell. An evil spirit resides in her. While she is in the house, her father will not get up from his illness. Misfortune will not leave this valley. Little children will fall asleep forever; their fathers and grandfathers will die in torment.”’
Dobrynya made a warning growl; even Sigurd shifted uneasily. Vladimir said nothing at all and Olaf did not even appear to notice any of this. Sweat trickled down my back and I felt it freeze there. He would get us all back in the queue for a stake …
‘The women of the camp fell down upon the ground in fear,’ Olaf said. ‘The old men pressed their hands over their eyes with grief. The young men looked at Silver Bell; twice they turned red and twice they turned pale.
‘The prince smiled to himself. “Put Silver Bell into a wooden barrel,” he declared. “Bind the barrel with nine iron hoops. Nail down the bottom with copper nails and throw the barrel into the rushing river.”
‘This said, he rode off to his hall in the fine, large borg and called his thralls round him. “Go to the river,” he told them. “The water will bring down a large barrel. Catch it and bring it here, then run into the woods. If you hear weeping, do not turn back. If cries and moans spread through the woods, do not look back. Do not return to my hall in less than three days.”
‘For nine days and nine nights the people of the encampment could not bring themselves to carry out the prince’s orders. For nine days and nine nights they bid the girl farewell.
On the tenth day they put Silver Bell into a wooden barrel, bound it with nine iron hoops, nailed down the bottom with copper nails and threw the barrel into the rushing river.’
‘This sounds a suitable punishment for one who insults a prince,’ noted Dobrynya. Vladimir frowned uneasily and I swallowed the thickness in my mouth.
‘It is a tale about Odin,’ I declared and saw Sigurd’s head come up at this manifest lie.
‘Is it?’ asked Vladmir, his frown deepening. ‘He does not sound godlike to me.’
‘A master of deceit,’ I acknowledged. ‘Always his gifts are suspect. Recall the tale of the nine thralls and the whetstone …’
I was babbling and heard myself, so I stopped. Olaf, blank as a cliff, gave me his two-coloured stare and cleared his throat, a high little sound.
‘On that day,’ he began, ‘the day the barrel went in the river, the hunter who loved Silver Bell was examining his traps, saw the barrel, caught it, brought it out of the river, picked up an axe and knocked out the bottom. When he saw Silver Bell, the hand that held the axe dropped and his heart leaped like a grasshopper. At last he asked: “Who put you into the barrel?” She told him.
‘The hunter thought for a minute, then went to his traps, where a huge wolf, white as silver glared at him and then got back to gnawing through its own paw. At this point, the hunter would have knocked it on the head; instead, he caught it by the ruff and dropped it in the barrel, nailed down the bottom with copper nails and let the barrel float downstream.
‘The prince’s thralls pulled out the barrel, brought it to the great hall and put it before the prince, then left as he had ordered. Even before they had closed the door, they heard him knock out the bottom of the barrel and call for help. Faithfully, they did as they had been bidden. They heard shouts, but did not turn back. They heard moaning and cries, but did not look back. For such were their lord’s orders.
‘Three days later they returned and opened the door. A great, silver-ruffed, three-legged wolf, dead of exhaustion and blood-loss, lay on the floor. Nearby was the prince, more dead than alive – his flesh was torn to shreds, his fine clothes were tattered and torn and, when the thralls crowded round to find out what had happened, all that he could say that made sense was … “silver” and “curse”. He never spoke sense ever again.’
Into the silence that followed, Sigurd cleared his throat. Olaf, unsmiling and cool as a river stone, hopped down from his bench and silently placed a hand on Vladimir’s shoulder. I waited, dry-mouthed, for the flaring of princely rage that would follow.
Instead, Vladimir blinked once or twice, then nodded, as if Olaf had whispered to him.
‘When this business is finished,’ he said, ‘you must stay with me in Lord Novgorod the Great.’
‘Of course,’ said Olaf with a smile. ‘And you will give me ships and men and I will fight on your behalf. Jon Asanes must also come, for he is a clever man. Together we will make your name greater than that of your father.’
The clarity of it shocked me, like the stun of a blow taken on your forearm. Of course – little Vladimir, hag-ridden by his father’s memory, wanted only that; to be greater. That was what drove him after Atil’s hoard.
I stood up and took my leave while I was in the eye of this storm and – not that I was surprised – little Crowbone caught up with me not long afterwards. Outside, in the dark of the dead day, he trotted at my heels, pulling his cloak round him and trying to keep up with my strides.
‘You were right,’ I said to him angrily. ‘That is an affliction.’
He shook his head, glancing up at me with that two-coloured frown and I was disconcerted, for he looked wise as a greybeard, then grinned like the boy he was.
‘That was clever about Odin,’ he declared. ‘As you say – beware his gifts, as the nine thralls should have done.’
Then he was gone, silent as an owl, leaving me with the vision of those thralls, scrabbling for the whetstone One Eye threw in the air and cutting their own throats with their scythes in their greed. I shook my head over him, and not for the first time. Like his eyes on colour, I could not make up my mind on Olaf Crowbone.
At the hut we had taken over, the original family bobbed and grinned, eager to please and keep their lives while they tried to hide valuables and food. The Oathsworn counted, washed and prepared the dead for burial.
‘How many?’ I asked and Kvasir looked up, his good eye red and weeping. Thorgunna had warm water and was bathing it.
‘Two will lie on either side of Harelip – Snorri and Eyolf.’
Snorri I remembered getting an arrow through the foot. I did not recall seeing Eyolf, whom we called Kraka – Crow – because he was lefthanded.
‘Aye, Snorri got pinned in the one place and danced round his foot until he ran out of steps,’ Kvasir said, waving Thorgunna away irritably. She made a disgusted face at him and went. I saw she had applied more soot-black round his good eye.
‘A big Slav cut him down when he could dance no further,’ Kvasir finished.
‘Eyolf?’
‘His sheath killed him.’
I remembered how Eyolf had loved his hand-tooled sheath, leather the colour of old blood, stretched over oak and sheep-lined. I looked at
Kvasir and he shrugged.
‘He would not take it off and the baldric caught on the timbers on top of the gate. He could not get free and hung there, afraid of being shot with arrows. So he wriggled until the strap broke and he fell – the sheath snapped and the wood of it drove into his liver and lights and he died.’
I remembered the man struggling at the top of the gate while I fought for Cod-Biter’s life. I remembered, too, the same man crashing down, the screaming and writhing. An idiot death; no man wears a sheath in a battle, for if it does not tangle in your legs then something stupid like this happens. Stabbed by his own sheath – there was a straw death to make Odin’s hall ring with laughter.
‘Cod-Biter?’
Kvasir shrugged and pointed to where Bjaelfi was working, Jon Asanes holding up a pitch torch for more light. Bjaelfi’s elbow was pumping furiously and I knew what he was doing – trimming Cod-Biter’s arm straight, cutting more bone and flesh from him. Cod-Biter was mercifully limp but not dead, otherwise Bjaelfi would not be bothering.
Finn sat nearby, watching and silent and Thordis, between tending to the fire and the food bowls and other business, shot him frequent, worried glances. Then she fetched me a bowl that steamed and a chunk of black bread, hunkering at my knee as she delivered it.
‘This looks good,’ I said and it was no lie; I was astonished at how savoury the stew was.
‘Food is not a problem now, Jarl Orm,’ she said. ‘It seems these nithings we defeated had stolen most of the supplies from Lambisson. The ones who went on will be hungry by now, I am thinking.’
I would have been pleased, save that Short Eldgrim was one of them. I had the feeling Cod-Biter would not last the night and now Short Eldgrim looked more doomed than ever. What with Runolf Harelip’s death, it seemed the old Oathsworn were fated not to get back to Atil’s hoard.
Thordis nodded seriously when I said this. She jerked her head in Finn’s direction.
‘He is getting Klepp Spaki to paint his forehead with the valknut,’ she said harshly. ‘Soon he will come to you and ask for that amulet you have.’
I blinked at that. If it was true, then Finn was dedicating himself to live or die at the whim of Odin and that was as good as hurling himself off a cliff for, in a fight, he would not retreat until he had had some clear sign from One Eye that it was good to do so. I felt like a house whose roof was falling.
I finished the stew, though the joy in it had gone by then. I lay back, feeling the warmth and the full belly, my head full of shrieking gulls; Vladimir and his uncle and what they would do when the howe was reached. Finn. Odin. The silver hoard. The Man-Haters and whether the one who led them was really Hild. The rune sword she had. The one I had.
I tried not to sleep in the hope that I would, but all of that whirled like an ice wind inside my head until it scoured the back of my eyeballs sore. When Finn loomed out of the dark and hunkered beside me, it was almost a relief and I handed him the amulet before he spoke, unlooping it from around my neck.
He did not ask how I knew but took it and looped it round his own neck.
‘This is a hard road you take,’ I muttered, sick with it. Sailing once in a badly-trimmed knarr I had felt like this – every time the wind hit a certain quarter it would heel over and the steerboard would lift clean out of the water, so there was nothing to do but run until the wind died enough to drop the steerboard back in the water – or you hit something.
‘Rather this one than another,’ he growled, miserable as mirr.
‘Which one is that, then?’
He shifted uncomfortably, then looked at me, flat and grindstone hard. ‘The one that ends with me drooling by a fire, with women laughing behind my back at how my vingull is limp and my back bowed.’
For all that he was grim with it, I had to swallow a smile, since the word he used – vingull – meant the prick of a horse rather than that of a man. So I knew he still had some pride in him yet.
‘You listened too long to Martin the monk,’ I gave him back. ‘Too afraid to live? Too old? Is this Finn Bardisson from Skane?’
‘Who knows? Who will know? Who will remember Pai? Or Harelip? When all of us are dead, Bear Slayer, only Pinleg and Skapti and others will be remembered, locked in that stone we raised in Aldeigjuborg. They are the ones with fame-luck.’
‘We will have a stone …’
‘Too late, Trader. It seems to me unlikely we will make it back to where Klepp Spaki can carve it. And if we do – what then? Back to that steading with the chickens and all the silver we can carry? What then, the point of raiding? So we squat and wait for the Norns to snip off the last threads of our life.’
‘So all that is left to do is find a good death, Finn Bardisson?’
He grunted and said: ‘I made a vow in the pit prison. To One Eye. He kept his side of the bargain.’
Then he straightened and forced a grin. ‘In the end, as Pai knew, there is only one thing.’ Then he intoned:
‘Cattle die and kinsmen die,
you, too, soon must die
but one thing never will die,
the fair fame of one who has earned it.’
‘There is that, right enough,’ I said, bitter as lees at him for finding it so easy to follow this path. Then I gave him back a verse of the Sayings of the High One, the one everybody forgets.
‘The lame can ride a horse, the handless drive cattle,
the deaf one can fight and prevail,
happier for the blind than for him on the bale-fire,
but no man cares for a corpse.’
Finn might have had a reply to it, but Cod-Biter woke up and moaned then. He did that for most of the night and then died, his screams shaving the hairs off our arms, just as the dawn came up.
There was too much food in the end and men came down with the squits and belly gripes, so that Bjaelfi had to feed them a cure made from the newest root of a bramble which had both ends in the earth, boiled up with mugwort and everlasting and the milk of a mare, a goat and a cow.
‘Does it work?’ demanded Skula, a rawboned youth who had started skinny and was now yellow and wasting. Thorgunna, who was feeding him with it, assured him it was infallible, but from the face he made swallowing it down I was glad I did not have the squits.
‘He will get more out of the other part of Bjaelfi’s cure,’ Thorgunna muttered as she passed me. ‘The bit that has him rest in the soft and warm.’
Too many were dead, or dying, or sick. In the end, I had to gather the Oathsworn together and ask for people to stay with those too sick to travel, partly to make sure the villagers remembered their manners, partly to try and make sure they lived.
I had expected a torrent of volunteers, but was surprised; only two said they would stay, making out that is was for the good reason of tending their sick comrades but really because they were too weak themselves and knew they could go no further. The others were determined to go on and, in the end, I had to tell two more they would stay and listen to them grumble.
One was Skula and, though he curled his lip at my decision, looked more relieved than annoyed; he was weak enough to die if he left the village and knew it.
The other was Tjorvir, whose boils were now beyond Bjaelfi’s powers to prevent and Thorgunna and Thordis’ lancing prowess with a needle and wool. They erupted where clothing chafed, so that his neck and wrists were a mass of sores and pus – but he was frowning at my leaving him behind.
‘This is not a good thing,’ he declared, shaking his head, so I pointed out that he could barely walk, use a sword or wear a helm but it made no difference. In the end, Finnlaith clapped him on the back – from Tjorvir’s wince, he had found a new boil – and said: ‘Don’t worry – I will serve the weregild and make sure you get your share.’
It was Jon Asanes who explained it to me, which did not make me feel any better about being put on the straight path by a stripling and one who had been weeping-sad since his friend, Pai, had died.
‘The ones who came wit
h Thorkel feel bad for what he did and do not wish you to think badly of them,’ he told me. ‘They will follow you to the door of Helheim – as will the others and not because of the oath they made in the eye of Odin.
‘They don’t call you Bear Slayer, they call you Trader,’ he added with a quiet grin, ‘because everyone knows that, if you fare with Orm, you get a good deal. They know you are AllFather’s favourite and think that will bring most of them home, too.’
We spoke quietly, under four eyes only, about Olaf’s plan to keep Jon in Novgorod. I knew enough about Crowbone not to find it strange that a mere boy of nine should be deciding the future of one I had known since he was a child himself.
Jon did not smile. He looked uncomfortable and scrubbed at what I saw was the beginnings of a passable beard, dark against the pale olive of his skin. The gesture made my heart skip, for it was so like old Rurik, the man I’d thought my father, as to have been a copy. Then I realized he had picked the gesture up from me.
‘Little Crowbone dreams his dreams,’ Jon said wryly, ‘and depends on the actions of birds to make them come true – one more to a flock here, a flutter to the left there. He will fail in the end, for no true god guides his hand in that.’
‘You can say that?’ I countered. ‘Even after all you have witnessed with us?’
‘Always the hand of the White Christ – the Hvitkristr – is in it,’ Jon answered levelly. ‘That has ever been a barrier between us.’
Not on my account, nor would it and I said as much, so that he flashed those white, straight teeth at me, big as runestones now in a face made too thin from hunger.
‘You call him hvitkristr for a reason,’ he answered. ‘Perhaps you have used it for so long that you no longer hear it as I do.’
‘Which way is that?’ I asked, though I already knew it.
‘The way that hvit means not just “white” but cowardly,’ he replied, then dropped his eyes from mine. ‘That and worse. So I am tarred with the same. I cannot fight well, nor can I take the Odin-oath. I am neither fish nor fowl in this company.’