The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  A figure stood there, dark and menacing, holding the torch high and peering like some hound from Hel.

  ‘Here I am, bitch!’ yelled Finn and even if his voice cracked a little at the end, I admired him, for my throat had so much dry spear rammed in it I could make no sound at all.

  ‘Is that you there, Finn Bardisson? Step to where I can see you – and, if it is you, stop calling me names.’

  We blinked, looked at each other and then Finn grunted as if he had been slapped. ‘Thordis. It is Thordis, by Odin’s hairy arse.’

  If she wondered about us charging out and all but raining kisses on the upturned petal of her sweet face, she was too agitated and fearing to comment on it.

  ‘Get off! Get off me,’ she panted, cuffing us like dogs.

  ‘Aye, but you are a sight, right enough,’ chuckled Finn, trying to grab her again. The Godi whirled round her ears and she winced back, so that he fell to apologizing and trying to grab her and sheath it at the same time.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked, feeling a coiled tendril of new chill unfold in my bowels.

  ‘Right enough,’ huffed Thordis, tugging her linen kerchief back over her hair, one braid unfastened and dropped almost to her belt. She blew a stray wisp off her chapped cheeks and wriggled herself together. ‘I would have said before, but for this … this …’

  ‘Tell it now.’

  She told it and set us frantic, scrabbling to the knotted rope and calling up for help.

  Vladimir and his company had taken the silver and gone. Our men had grumbled about it, but I had told Kvasir not to do anything rash, so he kept them from the druzhina’s throats and the Oathsworn let themselves be herded on to the island and disarmed under the bows of the big Slav warriors. Their weapons were left a little way off and, as soon as the treacherous little rat prince was beyond bowshot range, the Oathsworn lumbered out and got them back.

  Then Kvasir went after them, on foot, for we had no horses. Gizur was left in charge and – I cursed him to the nine worlds and back for it – Thorgunna had stayed behind when everyone trekked back to the tomb with their weapons. Then she had set off after Kvasir. Once back at Atil’s tomb, Gizur sent Thordis down to find us – and the fact that he had sent a woman into that place should have told me all that was needful, but I was too red-raged to see it.

  ‘What possessed Kvasir?’ roared Finn, levering himself out of the hole.

  Below, Thordis yelled back: ‘Jon Asanes is missing – Kvasir went after the boy.’

  ‘And Thorgunna?’ I demanded, putting both hands on her backside and shoving her up the rope.

  ‘She went after Kvasir’ she answered, panting with the effort of climbing. ‘And watch your hands, Jarl Orm, otherwise we will have to wed me for the liberties.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered and followed her up.

  At the top, Gizur waited and we were ringed with backs as all the Oathsworn formed a shielded circle round the hole, facing outwards. Nearby sat Fish, with Hauk Fast-Sailor’s bow and his last six arrows.

  ‘What made her go after Kvasir?’ I wanted to know, raging, half-turning to Gizur. ‘And why did you fall in with her plan, you gowk?’

  ‘He is her man,’ Thordis answered. ‘The sight is going in his remaining eye and he can barely see at all and soon will be blind entire – for all that, he has clearer vision than yourself, Jarl Orm, for that has been staring you in the face for months.’

  I gawped; Finn scrubbed his beard with embarrassment and it was clear he had known. Gizur, too. Everyone, I suddenly realized, but me. Yet the truth of it was there now and I saw it, in every axe stroke Kvasir had missed, in that bird-cock of his head to focus better, the ragged linen strip against the light.

  The despair stripped away the anger – briefly. Gizur cleared his throat and I sprang on him, fresh prey for my abuse.

  ‘You should have stopped her,’ I yelled. ‘Stopped him, too, you cow hole. Have you sent men after them?’

  He staggered under the wind of it a little, righted himself and came about, grim and quiet.

  ‘Kvasir commanded, so what he said I did,’ he replied evenly. ‘Allowing Thorgunna to go after him was the best I could do under the circumstances, Jarl Orm.’

  ‘What fucking circumstances?’ I bawled, red-lit with anger now.

  He pointed, out beyond the shoulders of the Oathsworn – all of them weaponed and mailed and with their shields up – at the snow-whirled steppe.

  The anger hissed from me like the last breath of a dead man. In a ring, on both sides of the steep-banked frozen lake, the woman warriors sat on their little steppe ponies, silent as trees. Hundreds of them – three hundred, at least I saw, with that part of my mind that still worked – waiting like wolves in a circle round the tiny wall of shields on the island of Atil’s tomb.

  There were twenty of us, no more than that, the last Oathsworn in the world, each one worn as a whetstone, a dark snarl of beard where ice glistened like tears, cheeks sunk, eyes rimmed red, noses dripping. The men who called me jarl hunched under rust-spotted helmets, knees no more than lumps of bone above ragged garters or shredded boots, feet two lumps of frozen flesh and knuckles purpled with sores that itched and bled.

  Yet they had shields up and spears greased and blades that gleamed with edge, reflecting in the eyes that watched the ring of horsed women. They parted those frozen beards and grinned the same old fanged grin, of men with cliffs before them and wolves behind and not one of them with the thought to run or throw down their weapons – not even Fish, who was not oathed.

  I loved them then, none more so than Finn, who put out a voice for them all, blowing out his cheeks and grinning until his lips bled.

  ‘Odin luck for us, then,’ he beamed, ‘that we got our weapons back in time. Now we have these Man-Haters where we want them – they will not get away from us this time.’

  The others roared at that and banged on their shields. The riders stirred and then threw back their heads and started up a shrilling, that yipping-dog sound that so chilled us every time we heard it; from three hundred throats it swamped our bellows.

  Fish, hirpling painfully on the wrapped ruins of his feet, forced his way to where he could shoot, drew back and let fly. Whether he meant it or not, the shaft zipped true and the arrow he had picked had a making-flaw in the head, a small hole that fluted the wind. It shrieked, loud and shrill, all the way into the trembling throat of one rider, cutting her dead in mid-yip and tumbling her backwards off her pony.

  As if he had shot them all in the throat, they stopped. There was such a silence after it that we could hear the stricken rider choking, drowning in her own blood while her horse snorted at the iron-stink of it.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Hauk Fast-Sailor admiringly. ‘I never got a shot like that out of that old bow.’

  ‘First time I saw a Fish hook a catch,’ added Gyrth and there were chuckles. Men banged on their shields again and grinned at one another, as if they had won a battle.

  ‘I think,’ groaned Klepp Spaki, ‘you have annoyed them just a little.’

  They were nocking arrows and my mouth went dry at that. We had barely enough men to form a tight circle as it was and none to spare for a rank to make a roof of shields; three hundred arcing arrows, from every direction, would nail us all to the frozen ground.

  I saw riders moving, heard angry shouts. Finn thumbed snot from his nose and squinted at them.

  ‘Women,’ he sneered. ‘Argue about everything, even the way to kill us.’

  The whack on his helmet was loud and some heads turned. Thordis, flat of the blade she held up and ready for another attack on Finn’s dented helm, scowled blackly and men chuckled. Finn, though, grinned admiringly at her.

  ‘Here they come,’ bawled Fish and stepped back to allow the two mailed shoulders on either side of him to clash together like a wall.

  It was just one rider, edging out on to the ice, her pony stepping uneasily, sliding and slithering. I had a salmon-leap of hope, then, that they
would be madwomen to the end and try and charge us across the lake ice. In the chaos of that we had, perhaps, the sliver of a chance.

  She came on, black cloak billowing, hair snaking in dark braids around her sloped brow. I swallowed; she held up an arm and in it was a scythe of light – the rune sword. Hild’s sword.

  The voice floated across, slathering my bowels with ice.

  ‘Orm, who is called Bear Slayer.’

  It was in good Greek, but even those who did not know the tongue could recognize the name – even Finn, who knew just enough Greek to get his face slapped – and he looked at me as I stood, stricken. He knew what I was thinking … Hild.

  ‘Your girl wants you,’ he said into the air around us, tense as creaking bowstrings, but the chuckles were forced.

  ‘Let him speak soft words and offer wealth, who longs for a woman’s love,’ Red Njal intoned as I shouldered to the front, my legs trembling. I could not feel my feet, but tested the sharp of my tongue on him.

  ‘One day, Red Njal, you must tell me how this marvellous annoying relative of yours lived so long in the close company of other folk,’ I snarled.

  He grinned at me with chapped lips. ‘True, my da’s ma was given a place of her own and rarely visited – but there was wisdom in her, all the same.’

  Then he nodded out to the ring of horse.

  ‘Do not keep her fretting there, Bear Slayer,’ he said wryly.

  I saw the woman nudge her pony on and all the bows dropped a little, though the arrows stayed nocked. I moved forward; she moved forward, off the ice and on to the lip of the island, where the pony had more purchase. She swung a leg over its neck – no small feat in her lamellar coat and thigh-greaves – and dropped lightly, the cloak floating down like hair.

  It was not Hild. I thought she wore a Serkland veil until I stepped closer and saw it was a whirl of skin-marks covering her chin, nose and cheeks, a blue-black knot of some steppe magic marred by the deep scores of old scars, three on each cheek. Her head sloped backwards, too, in that long, eldritch way – but I did not care what she looked like, for it was not Hild.

  She lifted the sabre, the twin of the one I held, wary and watching – then she slammed it into the earth and moved to one side, an arm’s length from the hilt and squatted.

  Dry-mouthed, I moved forward, careful to stay beyond sword reach of her, out of politeness. Then I did the same as she had done and took a knee, Norse-style.

  We faced each other, the width of a man apart, no more, and studied each other in silence, while the wind sighed, lifting little djinn of snow over the stippled ice of the lake.

  She was nail-thin and wasted, but had all her finery on, from golden beads in her braids to necklets of silver animals and fine bangles. Her armour was polished bone leaves pared from the hooves of horses and she wore baggy breeks worked with gold threads. But what glittered most brightly on her were her polished jet eyes.

  The silence stretched until I could stand it no longer, so I nodded politely at her and said: ‘Skjaldmeyjar.’

  She cocked her head like a quizzical bird and, in good Greek, answered me with a smile. ‘I hope that is friendly in your tongue.’

  I told her what it meant – shieldmaiden – though she seemed more like someone who could be called valmeyjar, which most ignorant people who are not from the fjords translate as shieldmaiden, or battle-maiden. Really, that word means corpse-maiden, chooser of the slain and is a name to hand out to a woman who looks like a wolf’s grandmother two weeks dead. I did not tell her this.

  ‘You know my name,’ I added and left that hanging like a waiting hawk.

  ‘Amacyn, they call me,’ she answered. ‘Which is the name given to me as leader of the tupate and the name given to all such leaders, who then forsake all other family ties. It means Mother of the People, but the foolish Greeks once thought it stood as name for us all and so called us amazonoi.’

  ‘Who are the tupate?’ I asked, my mind whirling already. She spread her hands to encompass all the riders. ‘We are. In Greek it would be tabiti. It is hard to translate correctly, but the nearest would be – oathsworn.’

  I sat back on one heel at that. Oathsworn. Like us. I said so and she made a little head gesture, as if to say perhaps yes, perhaps no.

  ‘You have a sword,’ I said in Greek. ‘Like mine. Hild had it last.’

  She smiled, covering her face with her hand, which was custom, I learned. ‘Hild. Is that the name you gave her, then? The one in the tomb of the Master of the World?’

  ‘That is the name she gave herself,’ I answered, breathing heavily, for I felt on the edge of a cliff with a mad desire to fly. ‘How did you come by the sword?’

  ‘Hild,’ she repeated, then laughed, a surprising sound of lightness. ‘Ildico. Yes, that would be part of her penance. Or a twisted joke.’

  I did not understand any of this and she saw it, nodded seriously and adjusted her squat more comfortably, so that her knees came up round her chin, long, thin hands clasped in front of her.

  ‘Long ago,’ she said, ‘when the Volsungs brought their treasure and a new wife called Ildico to Atil, Master of the World, we were the Chosen Ones, charged with making sure of our Lord’s undisturbed afterlife.’

  She waved a hand, slim, pale and languid as a dragonfly in summer heat and talked as if she had been there herself, as if it had been yesterday, or the day before.

  ‘This place,’ she added. ‘We made sure those who laboured on it could not reveal the secret of it, every one, from those who dug, to those who planned, to those who brought the treasure to place in it.’

  She paused and looked at me with those black eyes, so that my heart clenched. I could almost believe she had been there herself, dealing out the slaughter.

  ‘The steppe ran with blood for days,’ she said, ‘so that, in the end, only the Chosen Ones and the flies knew where the tomb lay and if the flies passed it on, mother to daughter, generation to generation, I never knew of it. But that is what the Chosen Ones did.’

  There was a long, wind-sighing pause while she fiddled with the thongs of her soft boots and gathered her thoughts. Mine were of all the shrieking fetches who drifted in this place and if this woman was one, for she spoke so knowingly of five centuries before. No wonder the rest of the steppe kept clear.

  ‘We did not expect the Master of the World to occupy it for some time, of course,’ she went on, ‘but the Volsungs came, with their gift of silver and swords and Ildico, the new bride. They did not stay for the wedding – did not dare, of course, since Ildico planned red murder – and when they left, one of us went with them.’

  ‘One of … you?’ I asked, uncertainly. ‘A Chosen One?’

  She nodded and shifted. ‘Her name, as far as any Volsung knew, was my name – Amacyn. She was then leader of the tupate but forgot her oath for love of the smith, the one called Regin. She went back with him to the north and by the time it was discovered, it was too late. The Master of the World wanted her death, to keep the secret of his tomb, but we were told to wait until after his wedding.’

  By which time it was too late, for Ildico killed him on the wedding night. I licked dry lips, thinking on all the years between then and now and what that love had cost.

  ‘The oathbreaker was not hunted down, then,’ I said, the mosaic of it filling in for me even as I spoke.

  The woman shrugged. ‘The tupate had lost face and the one who favoured us was dead,’ she said. ‘The sons of the Master of the World did not care for us as much – but we had sworn to guard his tomb and so we did, as best as we were able. The last task of that tupate was to carry the Lord of the World to this place – then slay everyone who was not one of us.

  ‘After that, the Chosen Ones went home – but daughters were trained in war, given the secret and served, as best as could be done, down the long years. Faithful to the last task – to keep the secret of the tomb. The oath would not let us do less.’

  I knew that oath and how it bound. Who it bound. H
ild. The woman nodded.

  ‘The oathbreaking Amacyn could not live with what she had done in the end, so it became known,’ she went on softly. ‘She birthed a daughter and did what we all do – passed on the secret of the tomb. My mother did so to me, which is how I know that the oathbreaking Amacyn then went into Regin’s forge and would not come out, sealed it so that it could never be used again. Regin the smith died and some say his heart snapped because of both his loves were gone, woman and forge. All this was found out, piece by piece, over the years.’

  I saw the weft of it then, a harsh-woven cloak of misery visited on the innocent daughters of that forge village. All the ones who came after would not break that chain, waited until a girl was born – or chosen, even – and reached the full of their womanhood, then passed on the secret of Atil’s tomb, an echo of what Regin’s woman had once been. Then they went into the forge mountain, for the shame of what had been done. Probably those who thought twice about it were forced in; it became a god-ritual for the people who lived by the forge and they would be afraid to break it.

  The woman sat quietly and said nothing while I stammered all this out, hammering it straight as I said it.

  ‘Except for Hild,’ I said, seeing it clearly, the sad, untangled knot of it. She had been stolen from that little Karelian village because Martin the priest thought he had found a secret and hired a man called Skartsmadr Mikill, Quite The Dandy, to get it. When he could not find it he and his crew of Danes tried to force the knowledge from the villagers by taking what they clearly valued – the young, bewildered Hild, still raw with the whispered secret, still weeping from the loss of her mother, gone into the forge.

  In the end, Quite The Dandy found out how much she was valued; the villagers attacked them with such ferocity that those hard Danes had run for it, dragging Hild with them as their only prize. By the time she was delivered to Martin of Hammaburg they had taken out their anger and frustration on her so badly that her mind was cracking.