The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  It was true enough, though I did not see how a godlet who let himself be nailed passively to a lump of wood could be anything but white-livered, as we Northmen say. I did not say that, all the same, out of deference to Jon Asanes’ beliefs.

  I had not known – or not thought – of any of this and it came as a shock of cold water to hear him speak as though we were strangers. I looked at him and remembered him as the skinny Greek boy on Cyprus. It rose up in me and barred the door of my mouth, so that the words I should have spoken were blocked.

  He grinned, shamefaced, his too-large eyes bright. ‘I know bribage and port dues and lading weights,’ he said. ‘I know the worth of a dozen coins and how they relate to each other and how to tell bad amber from good. I speak Greek and Latin and write in both and my runes are passable. I will be a good trader myself one day. But I am not a northman and I am not a pagan and I am not Oathsworn and never will be so.’

  ‘All true,’ I managed to reply, but the wormwood of the moment made my tongue bitter. ‘Perhaps you should also remain here, being so valuable.’

  He shook his head sadly, which shamed me to silence. Then, he lowered his eyes to stare at the floor.

  ‘When you first arrived in Novgorod I was … ashamed. Finn stank and Kvasir was not much better. Even you, Trader.’

  I shrugged. He had been too long away from honest Northmen, that was all. And we had left him when he was but a boy. I said as much and he nodded, still ashamed.

  ‘You looked like all the tales the priests told – hard men, who smell bad and spend your days killing men and humping unwilling women.’

  ‘Not unwilling, some of them,’ I managed and that trembled a grin on him but it vanished just as quickly.

  ‘I am a Greek who is no longer a Greek, fighting with a varjazi and yet not a Northman. Crowbone imagines he is favouring me; the prince also – but I have my own ideas on what my life will be.’

  It was true enough and the ache of knowing it, having it said and so made real, was keen and swirled in me like molten metal until it finally forged itself into anger. We had been good to Jon Asanes and I said so. Whatever his life would be, he owed it to us.

  He looked at me and there was dark fire in those olive eyes.

  ‘You came to Cyprus and what you did there killed my brother and forced me to go with you into the scorching Serkland. I was shot by an arrow and almost died, then finally carried far from the world I knew to the far north, a bitter cold place of unwashed folk who wear skins.’

  That made me blink with the harsh of it, but he had more of the same.

  ‘I have had no say until recently and had plans of my own – until you returned to my life. As soon as you did I faced the stake and am now here, in this frozen waste, where I may die.’

  He stopped and smiled sadly. ‘That is your goodness to me? I would hate to have you be bad to me, Trader.’

  The anger went from me; sadness and loss surged in to fill the space. Whatever the future held, it seemed the Goat Boy was gone from us.

  As Gunnar, my real father, had often said – everything you need should be in a sea-chest; everything else can be left behind. Like all simple solutions, it was flawed, relied on making no attachments to people. In the end, of course, even he realized that for he could not leave me behind.

  ‘It would be nice all the same,’ Jon Asanes added wistfully, ‘if I could have a cut of those runes on your stone, just like all the others.’

  I nodded, unable to speak. Runes on a stone, or a fine-kenned verse. That is why no-one wanted to be left behind, huddled in a bed in a village – those left standing get the most honour from skalds, unless their death was particular.

  Finn, it seemed, had decided on a particular death.

  As the dawn struggled up, we stood and watched him stand in the cold – no Northman kneels, even to the gods – bareheaded and facing north, sprinkling the best white emperor salt in a cup of meltwater, which he then dedicated to Odin with all of All Father’s names. Finally, he rammed The Godi into the earth, bowed his head, clasped the hilt and made his chilling vow, as promised to the god in the pit prison of Novgorod.

  I was filled with a distant, dull pain, a swill of memories of myself at the same age as Jon Asanes, hunting out thrall women in Skirringsaal in the first long winter with the Oathsworn, while Einar plotted and watched. Had Einar felt this same ache? He had been as separate and alone, I remembered.

  I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.

  Two days later, we crawled out on to that snow-scattered waste and headed away from the village, leaving the boat-marked ground that was the last home of Harelip and Cod-Biter.

  FOURTEEN

  A brass sun seeped through the dull lead of the sky and the stands of birch, no higher than a man on a horse and clumped like a bad beard on the face of the world. They were grim, clawed affairs, these trees, as black as if they had sucked their own shadows back up. Snow lay clotted on a brown heave of land and the air was still and raw.

  The carts lurched and rumbled to a halt, ponies standing splay-legged, heads bowed. We had fitted the wheels since there was more earth than snow, but that had been a mistake – the ground was hard frozen and the carts banged and slapped in every iron-forged rut, so that even the tired and sick got out and trudged with everyone else rather than suffer the lurch and bruise of it.

  Gizur and I stood at the stirrup of Vladimir’s big black, all rib and bone hips, while he looked at the trees. We all looked at the trees and the opaque ribbon they fringed – the Don.

  ‘See,’ said Gizur, his breath freezing in his beard as he spoke. ‘The middle is darker, where the water is only just starting to form hard.’

  ‘A thaw is coming,’ Dobyrynya declared, but Gizur knew the ways of water and shook his head, hard enough to rattle the ice points of his moustache.

  ‘No. The ice was broken recently. Less than an hour – look, you can see where the grue of it reformed from a time before that, too.’

  ‘There is traffic on the river,’ Sigurd grunted, wiping the icicles from the bottom of his silver nose, where they clogged the hole that let him breath.

  ‘Just so,’ Gizur beamed. ‘Boats are breaking their way up and down to Sarkel and regularly enough to stop the centre channel freezing hard.’

  We all knew that we were on the Don, where it turned east into a great curve that went south, then slithered west to the Maeotian Lake, which the Khazars call Azov, meaning ‘low’ for it is so shallow. Following that great curve would bring us to Sarkel and take weeks.

  Gizur was beaming, because he had navigated us from a point four days east of Kiev to here as if we had been the ocean – give or take a tack here and there, as Avraham declared later, sullen and mournful over the loss of Morut. Yet now we had to choose, either the short way, a plunge straight across the Great White, or follow the Don’s long, cold curl to Sarkel.

  ‘A long way still,’ Dobrynya said ‘with no respite at Biela Viezha.’

  No-one had to ask why; the Prince of Novgorod, arriving with a tattered band like us, miles from his own domain and firmly at the far frontiers of his brother’s lands, would excite more than a little attention. If his brother’s name still held sway at Sarkel – called Biela Viezha, the White Castle, by the Slavs – now that Sviatoslav was gone.

  All eyes were on me. Somewhere in that bleak ice waste was what we sought and I had to steer them all to richness with the hilt runes on my sabre. The smile I gave them back was, I hoped, as bright and sure as sunrise.

  We turned back to the line of carts and people, where only a few of the druzhina were now horsed and everyone else so swathed in shapeless bundles that it was hard to tell man from woman, or warrior from thrall. They huddled into their clothes and stamped feet made fat in braided straw overshoes, which the horses kept trying to eat.

  ‘What now, Trader?’ demanded Kvasir, wiping the weep from his good eye. Thorgunna made
to help and he slapped her hand away, irritated. She scowled in return.

  ‘It needs proper attention.’

  ‘I am doing so. Go and weave something.’

  Thorgunna fixed him with her sheep-dropping eyes. ‘It is time I died,’ she declared firmly. ‘Time I was dropped in my grave, for I have nothing left, it seems, to offer this life or the man I have in it.’

  ‘You may live or die as you see fit,’ growled Kvasir, sullenly, ‘providing you decide without poking my eye. Whatever your decision, we will all have to live with the consequences.’

  Finn, hunched up like a seal in clothes and swaddled cloak, offered up a cracked bell of a laugh as Thorgunna threw up one hand in annoyance and left Kvasir and his eye.

  ‘We should cut across the Great White, south to Sarkel,’ Finn added. Avraham, hearing this, gave a short, sharp bark of laughter, while Gizur frowned and crushed the ice out of his beard, for the Great White was one sea he could not navigate.

  ‘Did you bleat?’ Finn asked, sour-faced.

  ‘What has been crossed so far is as nothing compared to what lies out there,’ Avraham said, waving a hand in the general direction of the east. ‘That is a howling wilderness, which offers nothing to men, summer or winter.’

  ‘You have been there?’ Gyrth interrupted and Avraham cocked a haughty eyebrow.

  ‘I am Khazar. I have been everywhere.’

  ‘But there especially?’

  Avraham shifted a little. ‘No,’ he admitted, then thrust his chin out belligerently. ‘What sane man would go where there is often no water for flocks in summer, nor reason to be there in the depths of winter? Anyway, it is … cursed.’

  He looked half-ashamed, half-defiant, but it was clear he believed it and it came to me then that where Atil’s tomb lay would be thought a cursed place, even if no-one knew it was there. So many deaths to build it, stock it, carry him to it; the steppe here was crowded with moaning fetches every time the wind blew.

  ‘So,’ said Jon Asanes sadly, ‘you cannot guide us then, if we choose that route.’

  Avraham bristled. ‘I am Khazar and this is my land – I can guide you anywhere. For a reasonable price.’

  ‘Ha!’ growled Finn. ‘This is not your land now, though, you prick-cut thief. The Rus rule here.’

  ‘What price?’ I asked, seeing Avraham’s face darken. He remained staring into Finn’s glare for a moment longer – which was brave of him, I had to admit – then quoted the cost of a small farm.

  Finn roared before I could even speak. ‘You can have the rust off my balls, you arse.’

  Avraham smeared a sneer on his face.

  ‘Balls of poor iron – that explains the clinking I heard, for I knew a man such as yourself could not have a purse so rich.’

  ‘My balls were smelted in northern forges, little man,’ Finn replied with a broad grin, ‘in such a heat where the likes of you would smoulder like an eider duck’s tail. They were quenched in cold that makes this seem like a balmy day.’

  ‘I suspect we are speaking in the singular,’ Avraham answered. ‘I had heard the Norse had to share a pair between two.’

  ‘You heard wrong. Gulls use my prick as a perch, thinking it a mast. When I shit over the side of a racing drakkar, my turds choke whales. I piss fire and fart thunder. And that which you call a howling wilderness is just another little sea to me.’

  Others were gathering, hugely enjoying this. It drove away the cold and misery and I was grateful for that. Better still, the chances of them coming to serious blows had slipped away.

  ‘You spout a deal of empty nothing like a whale does, that much I have seen,’ Avraham replied and those nearest gave approving noises that made Finn scowl.

  ‘That which we have called the Great White,’ Avraham went on, ‘is merely those who know being kind to you. The real Great White is a few wheel turns from here, directly south. You will see it from a long way off, because it is a dazzle of ice. After that, if you should survive, you will just have time to make peace with your heathen gods before your famous perch freezes and snaps like a twig. If you ever find this silver hoard it will be because some wolf, tired of gnawing your arse-bone, drops it nearby.’

  Finn made a dismissive gesture into admiring ‘heyas’ of those who thought this a good flyting.

  ‘You are like all who have not had the benefit of being born in Skane, when faced with open space, whether sea or land,’ he declared expansively. ‘You fear to lose sight of safety. No open space frightens us from Skane and a horizon is an invitation, not a limit. Odin and Vili and Ve fixed the stars for us to find our way and, with them, I know where I am in this world to the length of a sparrow’s fart.’

  He cocked his head and closed one eye reflectively, blowing out his ice-hung moustaches.

  ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘you have never seen a blowing whale, you land-fastened nithing.’

  There were appreciative hooms and nods at this, though everyone knew Finn could not find his arse with both hands when it came to navigating a ship and had never seen any live whales himself.

  ‘The steppe respects no-one,’ Avraham declared haughtily and I thought this had gone on long enough and said so.

  ‘If the steppe respects no-one, then a guide such as yourself would be useless,’ I added and everyone cheered at that – even Finn. Avraham acknowledged defeat with a rueful smile, which he lost when I asked if he could, in fact, guide us.

  He looked from me to Finn’s challenging grin, to Gyrth and Jon Asanes and then back to me. Then he shook his head and would not meet anyone’s eye.

  Gizur shifted a little and thumbed snot out of his nose.

  ‘Well,’ he declared challengingly, ‘I admit it with now shame – the Great White is not known to me and none of my skills will take you safe across it. Best we follow the river.’

  ‘Ah – who needs this Khazar,’ Kvasir bellowed. ‘Cross the Great White. It will not be a hard trail to find, I am thinking, Just follow the ruin of Lambisson.’

  That thought threw ice into all our veins, though none admitted it as we set off across the Great White. In the end, Avraham came with us, since he had the choice of doing that or staying by the river to die, but it could not be said he guided us anywhere after that.

  The Great White swallowed us. The snow drove down in small, slanted flakes, persistent as gnats, piling high round camping places and kept at bay only by the heat of fires and our own bodies. We woke every morning, moving carefully within tents and shelters so as not to shake down the frost which had formed on the inside. We chipped the horse tethers out of the frozen earth, made fires, cooked porridge and, after three hours, were usually ready to move off.

  The cold rot turned more noses and toes black; Bjaelfi, Thorgunna and Thordis kept little knives sharp for paring off the spoiled flesh and, at first, we seemed aimless as ants on a sheepskin. Then, as Kvasir had said, matters grew simple; we followed the ruin of Lambisson, while the snow sifted out of the pewter sky, trailed along the land like smoke, stung like thrown gravel in our faces.

  It was a trail of tears a blind man could track, from splintered wagon to dead horse to blue-white corpses, little knots of tragedy in an ice-rope that most thought would hang us all. At each one, sick with apprehension, I searched for the familiar face of Short-Eldgrim.

  Then, on a day where the sky was the colour of Odin’s one bright eye, I was moving carefully to a private spot – but not out of sight – to risk a shit and saw little Olaf standing wrapped in his once-white cloak like a pillar of dirty snow on the dark earth, watching black birds wheel.

  They were waiting for us to quit the latest wolf-chewed remains, followed us, hungry and hopeful as gulls on a fishing boat and, like them, a handful of wary men trailed little Crowbone, seeking scraps of wisdom.

  ‘So – you are saying that if one more bird joins them from the west something terrible will happen?’

  Red Njal’s voice was suspicious, but the thickness of disbelief in it was like the ice on the
Don – broken and uncertain.

  ‘Mind your words, too, boy,’ he added, ‘for there is naught so vile as a fickle tongue, as my granny used to say.’

  Olaf said nothing at all, merely nodded, watching intently.

  ‘Freyja’s arse,’ growled Klepp Spaki, his voice muffled. No more than his eyes could be seen in the swaddle of hood and wadmal round his head. ‘What makes that happen? How do you know? What runes do you use?’

  ‘The birds are their own runes,’ answered Olaf.

  ‘How?’ demanded Onund Hnufa, lumbering up and towering over Crowbone, who did not even glance up at the terrible hunch-shouldered effigy hanging over him like a mountain. ‘By what rules? What signs?’

  ‘Here,’ said Olaf and touched his head, then his heart. He hunched himself back in the cloak as Red Njal grunted scornfully.

  ‘Thor’s red balls, boy – I was the same when I was your age. Running about making black dwarves and trolls appear and fighting them with a wooden sword.’

  We all chuckled, for all of us had done the same. Olaf broke his gaze from the birds to turn his odd eyes on Red Njal’s cold-roughed face. The seidr, it seemed to me rolled off him like heat haze, so that I had to blink to steady my eyes.

  ‘No offence,’ muttered Red Njal hastily. ‘Be never the first to break the bonds of friendship, as my granny used to say.’

  A bird fluttered in and landed. ‘Aha,’ said Crowbone. ‘Today, something bad will happen.’

  ‘This is all shite. A boy’s will is the will of the wind, my granny said,’ declared Red Njal when Olaf had trudged out of earshot. He turned and looked at me, his eyes like small animals in the ice-crusted hair of his face.

  ‘Is it not shite, Trader?’

  ‘I saw and was silent, pondered and listened to the speech of men,’ I offered, remembering the old saying; his frown chewed that until I thought his forehead would crack.

  ‘Shite,’ I clarified and he cracked the ice of his face with a smile, then left me to my own awkward business.