by Robert Low
A clever move, to see if the garrison at Biela Viezha was willing. Now that Sviatoslav was dead there was no guarantee that this frontier fortress, so recently Khazar, would stay loyal. If it did, then it would be loyal to Jaropolk, prince of Kiev, not Vladimir, prince of far-away Novgorod.
Dobrynya nodded blandly when I pointed all this out.
‘They will be loyal to profit,’ he answered smoothly. ‘Novgorod’s prince is still a son of Sviatoslav. We will get supplies and horses, enough to use as a pack train. We will come back, take what we can from this place and organize boats to take us downriver to the Dark Sea, for it is clear that the ice has been broken that far.’
Out and away, fast as raiders, that was what Dobrynya had persuaded his nephew was best. He was not wrong; we could not plunder the whole wealth of Atil’s tomb, but even what we had now was a fortune. After a visit to Biela Viezha, though, the place would be no secret; scavengers would arrive in droves and the fighting would begin over who owned it.
I nodded agreement, adding: ‘As soon as I have seen to Short Eldgrim.’
Dobrynya blinked a bit and I saw he was hoping to go at first light and that my hunting around in Atil’s howe for someone he clearly thought dead was a waste of crucial time. To be honest, I thought this also and did not much care about Brondolf Lambisson, huddled in the dark with his cold silver. That and the fear of what Hild-fetch lurked there made me want to agree with Dobrynya – but Short Eldgrim and the Oath drove me into the dark.
His pause was brief, then he nodded and smiled. We clasped wrists on it and he went back to his little eagle, sitting at the fire and laughing with silver-nosed Sigurd. Crowbone was now there, sitting with his uncle – and Kveldulf, which I did not like.
And Jon Asanes, which I liked even less.
SIXTEEN
It was the heart of ice, that dread tomb. So cold it froze flame, as Finn had once promised and even he now saw the raw, gleaming power of it as he slid down the knotted rope with his nail in his teeth and one hand clutching a guttering torch.
I held its twin, clutched the rune sword in my other hand – I would not have gone down into the maw of that hole without that blade – and waited for him. The flicker of torchlight turned the rime-slathered place into a bounce of sparkles, like the sun on moving sea, as we turned, half-crouched and prepared for anything.
I had been in this place once before, but Finn never had and I saw his jaw slacken so that the slavered Roman nail fell from it, hitting the frosted floor. It should have clattered out echoes, but that place sucked sound in and he only noticed it was gone from his mouth when he breathed, ragged and gasping.
The rope trembled when he let it go, a thin hope that led back to the patch of pale light and the world of the living. Here, though, there was only death, grinning from the huge, silver throne, leprous with cold; I could hardly bring myself to look at it.
When I did, I saw the faded brocade of once rich robes, laid neatly on the throne as a cushion for bones, including the skull that smiled welcome. Atil’s skull.
‘Einar?’ Finn managed at last from lips that trembled and not from the cold of the place.
I shook my head. There was a scatter of bones in front of that great ice-slathered throne and some of them belonged to Ildico, the princess who had killed Atilla – one forlorn wrist and forearm, five centuries yellowed, hung still from the shackles that had fastened her forever to Atil’s last seat.
The others belonged mostly to Einar; I saw a skull, still with long straggles of black wisping it, all that remained of his crow-wing hair, and pointed to it it. Swallowing, Finn made a warding sign and fumbled to pick up his Roman nail.
‘Heya, old jarl,’ he whispered, as if afraid to speak aloud. ‘We have come back, as you see. Treat us kindly.’
I did not think he would, much. I had left Einar sitting on that throne, skewered by me but dying even as I finished him. Atil’s remains, swaddled in those rich robes, had been torn from the seat by Hild in her frantic eagerness to seize one of his two rune swords.
Yet now they were back, neatly placed and Einar had been scattered like a dead dog at Atil’s feet. I peered and poked warily, found and rolled other skulls into the light of the torch – Ketil-Crow, Sigtrygg, Illugi, who had all died here.
I said their names, the sound of my voice falling like snow off a roof, dull and soft.
‘And her, Bear Slayer?’ Finn asked, tucking the nail down one boot, recovering a measure of his old swagger. ‘This one looks a little small to be any head I remember. Perhaps this is Hild.’
Ildico, I was thinking, as he held up the yellow grin and empty sockets of her, whose arm was still fastened to the throne. I did not think we would find Hild, for I did not think she was dead. Someone had restored Atil to his throne and made a clear gesture with the bones of intruders. I did not think Lambisson had done it and said so.
That made Finn frown and think and not like what he came up with. He held the torch up higher, shifting the light on the dark paths between tall cliffs of bulked blackness. I saw his face the moment the truth hit him, knew that he was about to ask where all the silver was hidden, when he saw it.
He gasped aloud and sank to his knees with the sheer scale of it. All that bulked blackness WAS the silver, age-dark and heaped up like old lumber. Bowls, ewers, wine pitchers, statues, plates, cups, most of them decorated with embedded gems, half buried in seas of coins and armrings, fastened together by age and ice.
There were shields, too, spearheads, blades, even bits of armour, crushed together with great platters fixed with mother-of-pearl, silver statues of animals with gold fangs, dancing girls poised on alabaster bases, gleaming, cold-frozen birds with amber eyes and ivory wings.
Under our feet was a massive auroch horn, banded in silver and jasper, a necklace of silver with porphyry stones, a great two-handed silver cup studded with deep-green serpentine, the mask from an ancient helmet, fixed with staring amethyst eyes.
Finn lifted each one, letting them fall from fingers numb with wonder and cold, then unearthed a half-bent silver plate, big as a wheel, crowded and leaping with ornamental life – palm leaves and lilies and grapes, silvered birds clinging and fluttering among branches, all twined together into an endless network of gleaming buds and plumes. Coins spilled from it like water, a ringing chime of riches.
He knelt, this man who never bowed the knee and his head and his shoulders shook as he wept at the sheer immensity, at the fact that, after everything that had happened and all who had died, the wild hunt of the Oathsworn ended here, now.
I was not sure whether he wept for those who had died, or what we had found, or that we had found it at all after all our trouble. Nor did he. It was a sky-cracking moment, seeing Finn shed tears.
Eventually, he laid the great wheel of silver plate reverently down and fumbled The Godi out its sheath, stood it point down on the silver-litter and clasped his hands on the hilt, head bowed.
‘All Father, one of your own gives thanks this night,’ he said. ‘Warrior he, faithful he, with companions you know and who walk with you already and who died here. To them I say: “Not now, but soon.” To you, I give our thanks and your names.’
Then he started to recite them, grim and cold names, one by one. As godi, I should have been more reverent, but I had experienced One Eye before and did not think he deserved all this for bringing us here – we had already paid dearly and were not finished, I was sure of that. Distracted, I looked round and saw, from the corner of my eye, a balk of wood and moved to it across an ice-slither of floor.
It was the collapsed mouth of our old tunnel, the one we had dug into the side of the howe when first we had arrived here with Einar leading us. I remembered Illugi, slamming the butt of his staff into the ground a step away from here, calling on the gods – who were deaf to him by then – to aid us all against the black fetch that was Hild. It had splashed, I remembered, for the howe was flooding …
It had not flooded, all the same. The
timber sticking from the wall was from the cart-planks we had used to shore up the tunnel and I remembered floundering in the sucking mud, felt the crushing panic of it while Hild sliced through the supports with the scything rune sword she wielded in her desperate, savage, snarling desire to get to me. The water had been flooding in then, pouring down the balka as it always did when it rained on the steppe, making a lake here, save in the drought of really high summer.
I laid a palm on the cold, slick freeze of that timber. In there, she was. Her efforts had brought the tunnel down, sealed the howe and left only a slick of water inside it in the end. If she had died, she lay only a few feet away, perhaps only inches, still grasping the other sword; I touched the wall, but it was iced as tempered steel, too hard to dig out the truth of it.
‘Vafud, Hropta-Tyr, Gaut, Veratyr,’ intoned Finn, then finished, unclasping his hands from The Godi’s hilt and climbing to his feet like an old man.
‘By the Hammer, Orm boy,’ he kept saying, shaking his head. ‘Just look at it.’
I blew on my numbed fingers and laid the other hand, lamb-gentle, on one shoulder; he blinked once or twice, then took up his torch and sword and puffed out his cheeks.
‘Well, I have stood here and seen it for myself,’ he said and his eyes were bright when I met them. ‘All the silver of the world. Now I know. Now I know, boy.’
We moved down between the frowning balkas of riches, guttering torchlight throwing eldritch shadows and bouncing diamond-sharp darts back from the hanging icicles that made a silver hall for a warlord’s hoard.
From his mouldering brocade cushion, Atil grinned and watched us go with his dark, dead eyes.
We found Lambisson a little way down one of the rat-nest passages – or, rather, he found us, for he was crouched in the dark and we came up in the red glare of torches. He was sitting on a pile of scraped-together spoil, all the lighter stuff such as coins and neckrings, little items you could put in a bucket. He looked like a mad frog on a stone.
‘Brondolf,’ I said to him, companionably and stopped well short of him, beyond blade reach, for he was just a shadow against the dark to me and I did not know what he had in his hands, or where Short Eldgrim was.
‘You must be Orm Bear Slayer,’ came the voice, a whisper of a thing, faint as a Norn thread in that place. Finn moved closer, held up the torch and we saw him more clearly.
Lambisson was all but gone. The white raven had made a wasteland of his dreams, turned his mind to silver-white while tearing his face to a raw sore and he was so thin his fine tunic hung on him like a drying net on a beach. Hunger and sickness had leached his life away and he no longer resembled the Brondolf Lambisson I had seen, seal-sleek and confident in his fancy mail and helm on a hillside long before. That man was dead; this one surely would be soon enough.
Yet he had a steel handful that gleamed sharp in the twilight between us and could still summon up a laugh, like moth wings, as he shifted his eyes away from the glare of Finn’s light.
‘I do not remember your face and we scarcely met,’ he sighed out to me. ‘I remember Einar, but not you. Yet the Norns wove us together more fixed than brothers. Is that not strange, Orm Bear Slayer? I know you better than any woman I ever had.’
The laugh fluttered out again and was lost in the dark. Finn moved sideways and I squatted.
‘Not so strange,’ I answered. ‘The Norns weave and we can only wear what they make.’
‘This is a poisoned serk, right enough,’ he whispered back – then flung some iron into his voice. ‘It would be better, I am thinking, if your companion stayed still.’
Finn stopped at once, waved an acknowledging hand and squatted, as if by a friendly fire.
‘I am Finn Bardisson from Skane,’ he said easily. ‘I can kill you if I want to, Brondolf Lambisson, whether you have blade or not. It is better you know this from the start.’
‘I want Short Eldgrim,’ I added. ‘There need be no killing here. Frey witness it, there has been enough of that. All I want is Eldgrim.’
He stirred and I saw the head droop, but the steel-holding hand was steady enough.
‘You speak as a friend,’ he hissed. ‘We can never be that.’
‘No, but we need not be enemies.’
There was silence for a heart-beat or two, then he said: ‘Do you like my new fortress, Bear Slayer? Fine, is it not. Rich.’
The chuckle that came with it was the hiss of a corpse’s last breath. ‘Rich enough to save Birka, I had thought – but that place is dead.’
‘Keep it,’ I replied flatly. ‘I want Eldgrim. Then you can fill your boots and go away with no fighting at all.’
He leaned forward, that ice-sore face even bloodier in the light of my torch, patched by the black of cold rot eating his cheeks. He shook his head, his eyes glittering like rime; blood oozed from the cracked remains of his blackened lips.
‘I did not think so,’ I sighed. ‘Well, here is my last offer. Finn and I will go back to the hole in the roof and climb out. You send out Short Eldgrim. Then you can stay or go, as you please.’
‘And you will walk away, leaving all this?’
‘All what?’ I countered. ‘You can eat none of it, Brondolf, nor suck warmth from it. You are cold, sick and starving to death down here. I do not …’
He moved, so fast that I only realized how tricked I had been when he flowed like darkness itself across the space between us, his blade already hissing. Not as sick as he had made it seem.
I had a flash, like a moment seen in lightning, of Ketil-Crow, stumbling over heaps of tinkling silver with the blue coil of his entrails tangling his ankles, with the same flowing darkness after him. Only then it had been Hild and her rune sword.
That memory almost did for me, for I hesitated with the vision of it. He had strength enough for this one mad rush and the sword hissed round, so that I lurched backwards and my own rune blade, laid handily across my knees, reared up – and blocked the cut.
It sounded like a hammer on an anvil. I heard a cracked-bell sound, knew it to be his sword breaking on mine and then he hit me, raving and slavering, following the ruin of his sword, half-turning as he smashed into me like a mad bull with just a hilt and a jagged nub end in his hand.
We went over in a rush of panting breath and crushing bone and whirling stars. There was a grunt and a scream and a moment of mad thrashing, which ended with a wet smack of sound.
A hand grabbed my forearm and I came up into Finn’s embrace, wet with Brondolf’s blood and brains. He lay face down, a diamond-shaped hole in the back of his head and blood spreading thickly under him.
‘All we wanted was Short Eldgrim,’ panted Finn, as The Godi dripped gleet and blood. ‘He did not have to take the hard way to it.’
He did, all the same, for he had no Short Eldgrim to trade. We skulked and slithered around and over the gleam and the dark of that place and found no trace of him. Then we came back to where Lambisson lay and turned him over into the grue of his own blood, for it was said the truth lay fixed in a dead man’s eyes.
His raw sore of a face was sucked in with hunger and collapsed and already blue-white, his dead eyes glittering with reflected ice, sharp and bright as silver. So the truth was there, right enough. Just not what we needed.
Finn looked round, at the great piles of silver and the shimmering walls, then peeled off the valknut amulet and looped it round the stiffening, dead fingers. I was astonished; the amulet was mine, for a start and I would not give the skin off my shit for Lambisson. I said as much and Finn nodded as if he understood.
‘It is not for him,’ he rasped. ‘This is the end of it, Orm, and that cursed little monk had it right – all the struggle to get to it and for what? We would have to live here to make sure of keeping it all and fight everyone and his mother every day. I would give twice the amount to have Pinleg and Harelip and Skapti and all the others waiting at the top of that rope. Aye, even Einar, though you would not agree, I am sure.’
He shook
his head and climbed to his feet, while his words crashed on me like a fall of snow. He had the right of it, for sure – we could fill our boots and carts and make sacks out of our tunics and cloaks and still would hardly dent the treasure heap of this place. After us would come a ravening horde of others, friends of Morut and Avraham and friends of their friends and brothers and the relations of every man in the druzhina and Oathsworn, all ripping the heart out of Atil’s last resting place. There was no secret now.
Odin’s gift. It had not been worth it, as I suspected all along and I said so. Finn agreed with a nod and then made a gesture so surprising I almost dropped my sword. He laid a hand on my forearm and said, straight into my face and serious as a fall of rock: ‘You had the right of it, not wanting to return here. We should have listened to you.’
Then I felt the hot wash of shame. Oh, aye, I had railed against it, scorned it, dug in my feet like the point man in a heaving boar snout – but who was it had scratched those runes on the hilt of the sword, knowing full well he would need them, sooner or later, knowing he could not resist coming back?
We were climbing stiffly to our feet when the voice drifted like cold mist down through the dark heaps and round the rat passages. A high, thin, voice. Female. Calling my name, so that it wrapped chill round my heart.
Hild.
I looked at Finn and he at me and, for once, I saw no scorning scowl, only the flick of his tongue on dry lips.
‘O-o-orm.’
‘By Odin’s eye, boy,’ said Finn in a hoarse whisper.
‘F-i-nnn.’
‘Did you hear that?’ I asked and had back a suitable curl of lip.
‘Even with my one ear, I can hear that,’ he growled, then hefted The Godi in one hand and the torch in the other and rolled his neck muscles. ‘Well, if it is that dead bitch, I am coming for her.’
Finn was noted for being afraid of nothing at all, but the fear was an unseen force that I had to push against, step by step round one gully of age-dark riches, halfway round another, to where a torch flickered and the pale light spilled from the hole in the roof. No more than a score of steps, it was the longest walk I ever took.