by Robert Low
‘Jump,’ he said and then was gone, rolling forward into the mass of horsemen; an arrow shunked into him, with no more seeming effect than a skelf in his finger. I saw him grab the bridle of one horse, hauling it almost to his knees then, one-handed, slash the axe head into the face of the rider. The horse struggled, trying to tear free and Gyrth slammed his own helmeted head on the blaze of the beast, so that it gave a grunt and sank to its knees, eyes rolling white into its head.
Then more horsemen surged out of the dark, milling around and I heard him bear-roaring his name at them. Steinnbrodir. Steinnbrodir is here.
‘Orm, you arse – the rope!’
Finn’s roar shook me into the Now of it; the world sped up, the trailing rope whipped away from me and I grabbed it with my left hand. It slithered, iced and slippery, through the few fingers I had, so I dropped the axe and hurled myself at it with the other.
The wrench tore shrieks from my arms, but I held on with both hands, in a whirl of stars and snow, dragged bouncing down the slope as the strug bucked and kicked, galloping down the ice, leaping into the air on its wooden runners.
A man, one of Vladimir’s long-coated druzhina who had run forward to attack us too, was hit as the strug lurched forward, gathering speed; he was flung aside with a crunch of bone and a shriek, while the runners were given extra slick with the smear of him.
There was a great bang and objects whirred darkly around me; I clung on, lost in a world of pain and ice, a small, clear part of me seeing the remains of the wooden cradle of runners spinning away behind me in shards. Vladimir’s men scattered from the path of that plunging stallion of a boat, their faces white stabs of fear whirling away from me into the dark.
The strug lurched and slid, hit the last of the shore, hissing a bow-wave of snow from under it – then ploughed into the black river and the shadows, spouting up a great grue of ice under it as it took us to the slow, cold slide of the crow dark river.
I lost the rope as it whipped me up and there was a marvellous moment of flying, the great wheel of clear stars tilting in a pitch sky – then there was the whooping shock of the water, so cold it burned. I went down and round and spinning into freezing darkness, surfaced once to see the strug forging away from me, while men shouted and howled and tried to get it to stop – then I sank again, the world a muffled roar in my ears.
It was Hlenni Brimill and Onund who saved me, the one spotting me, the other leaping in like a bull walrus to grab me and tow me back to the surface.
When I blinked back to the world, it was on the deck, shivering and soaked, bruised and with fingers scorched with rope burns. Hlenni was rubbing me so furiously I shook, but his hands burned feeling back to my limbs. Nearby, Red Njal did the same for Onund, who shivered under a cloak, but managed to grin and wave. I trembled out a nod, acknowledgement of what I owed him.
‘Pull, fuck your mothers!’ Gizur roared, as the arrows whicked and plunked – but screams and shouts told where Vladimir’s men now fought the garrison of Sarkel in the confusion of darkness.
They pulled, fuck their mothers, hard and grunting and too busy hauling oars to think about what had been lost and gained, only that the arrows were fired blindly and we were leaving them all behind.
Later, when the rowers groaned and drooped and tried to stop their lungs burning, Klepp Spaki tallied the loss – Katli Bjornsson and his brother Vigo, both of them gone in that fight, leaving, I knew, a mother to weep alone.
And Gyrth. Finn, stone-faced, told how the Boulder had rolled into the horsemen, then vanished from sight. In my head he roared still; Steinnbrodir is here.
‘Where is Odin’s gift in all this?’ Klepp asked bitterly, while I shivered and ached and did not want to tell him how it was a gift, of how One-Eye had held his hand over us. If he had not, we would all be dead.
Thordis found the rest of One-Eye’s double-edged gift, when she and Bjaelfi went to attend to Thorgunna. They found her lying, as Fish had been found, on a haphazard tumble of furs – covering roughly-bagged silver coins, armrings, bent plates and twisted jewellery, all the small stuff that had been in at least one of the carts. A fortune, hidden with Thorgunna in a good place and gleaming at me, accusing as a curse; little Vladimir would be furious.
I was still gawping at this, wondering if Vladimir would cut his losses, or stamp his little foot and come after us, when Fish dragged the rest of our wyrd out into the moonlight, while the fit men bent and dug and pulled down the middle of the river.
‘Does this belong to anyone?’ he asked, limping out from where he had been scouring the boat for food and warmer clothing. A white-swathed shape hung by the scruff of the neck in one hand.
Hearts stopped; men glanced up and blanched and I groaned. The silver was bad enough, but this would have men rowing in our wake until they threw up, for sure.
‘I did not like to leave Thorgunna alone,’ Crowbone said, blinking up at me from a tear-stained face. ‘She was good to me.’
EIGHTEEN
It took a while for the unease to settle on what was left of the Oathsworn, a haar that dusted everyone with droplets like morning dew. We had silver after all and there was cheering at that – yet we also had Crowbone and that would bring men after us. There was muttering about Fafnir’s curse.
Those crew left – nineteen by my count, including the hirpling Fish – had to keep rowing down the fat, sluggish Don to the Maeotian Lake, which the Serkland Turks call the Azov Sea; that hard task did not help matters.
It was a boat made for fifteen oars a side, so we were crew light, as usual. It was made from one tree, an oak the length of nine good men and extended by willow planking, though we had lost some of those in the mad slide. It was two men wide and straked with planks nailed to make the freeboard as high as a standing warrior and fitted to take the oars.
Great bundles of large reeds, each one thick as a barrel, had been laid along the length of those freeboard planks, bound with bands made of lime or cherry. This made the whole thing virtually unsinkable even if swamped – which was useful, for it had no deck to speak of and we had few men to spare for bailing.
It had an ill-worked sail, which proved that it was capable of going into deeper water, probably along the coast of the Azov and the Sea of Darkness, which suited us all fine. But, as Gizur pointed out, you only wanted the mast and sail up in fair weather; if a blow got up, it was best to row for it.
Finally, the shipwrights had fitted heavy ribs and crosspieces, slathered pitch where necessary – and sometimes where not – and put a steering oar at each end, since the entire clumsy affair was too long and too heavy to turn on a river, so you simply reversed your rowing and went the other way.
And right there was the problem. It was a light boat made for dragging from river to river with a full crew but, crewed by too few of us and laden with Odin’s cursed silver, it was as limber as a quernstone. It would not sink, sure enough, but it would scarcely move either under the oar-muscle we had – and twice we held our breath as the bottom of it tugged and scraped on unseen banks, or balked at crushing a path through the sluggish, half-formed ice.
There would come a time, too, when rowers would have to sit the opposite way from each other and haul until their temples burst to get the beast round the narrower bends.
I remembered, from the last time I had come this way – a lifetime since – that the river split as it reached the Azov. The south fork of it was straight and true and short, while the north twisted and turned and was longer – but that one forked again along its length and so was one more way to lose pursuit. Both were fretted with rills and rivulets, reed and swamp.
The south route was the one I knew and Hauk, Finn, Hlenni Brimill and Red Njal, who had been with me at the time, agreed that way was best, provided we did not find men up our arse before we hit the first fork. Even Short Eldgrim had a moment of clarity and recalled that he had been this way before.
‘This is all that remains,’ Red Njal said suddenly, looking round
from one to the other as we talked, resting our oars and grabbing some tough bread from the stores we had found on board.
No-one spoke, for he was right and it was a hard matter to consider. Seven were all that was left of the original Oathsworn, those who had been with Einar the Black when I joined the crew. Eyes strayed to the wrapped bundles – Kvasir and the Bjornsson brothers, brought aboard and bound for where we could decently bury them. Finn sighed and Thordis, passing on her way to attend to Thorgunna, brushed his tangled hair with one hand.
The mist trailed along the black water of the river and ice nudged the strug as we sat, rich as kings and feasting on dry bread and cold river water, each thinking of his share of the silver – and his share of the curse.
Yet we would not dump Odin’s gift without a fight.
‘We need to haul in and light a fire,’ Bjaelfi declared, coming up to attend to a deep cut on Ref Steinsson’s arm.
‘No,’ I said, ‘unless you are fancying a fight with those big Slavs Vladimir has.’
‘Thorgunna needs to be properly attended to,’ added Thordis. ‘Which needs hot water and a little time.’
It was a heft of a swell, but I rode it, right through to her black scowl.
‘We cannot stop. Let Bjaelfi do what he can.’
‘I have done,’ the little healer declared sourly, scrabbling in one of the dangling pouches he had. ‘But Thordis has the right of it, all the same.’
He broke off, unstoppered a small flask and poured some of the contents into the cut on Ref’s arm; the smith went white and bit his lip until blood flowed, while Bjaelfi bound it in a rag marked in charcoal with healing runes.
‘The juice of crushed ants,’ Bjaelfi said, clapping Ref cheerfully on the shoulder. ‘That and runes made by Klepp, who never makes a mistake, will stop the rot.’
Ref managed a moody grunt, for he had lost his sea-chest and all his tools, some of them made by himself. The possible loss of his arm was almost nothing by comparison.
‘She will die,’ Thordis declared firmly, glaring at me until her eyes seared through the common-sense and found the heart in me. Finally, I nodded.
‘There was once a man,’ said a piping little voice and, before it made another sound, there was a sharp whack of sound and Crowbone shot backwards, arse over tip and landed in a knot of rowers, who shoved him off, protesting loudly.
Rubbing his ear, Crowbone scrambled dazedly to his feet, pulling his dignity and his white cloak round him. His eyes filled with tears – more of rage than pain, I was thinking – and Thordis moved to him, glaring seax-sharp looks at Finn.
‘Not now, boy,’ growled Finn, blowing on his freshly-burst knuckles. Hauk Fast-Sailor chuckled and shook his head at Finn’s audacity.
‘Hel slap it into you,’ noted Onund mildly, ‘which is all you deserve if that notable man-boy takes it into his head to work curse-magic on you for that blow. Anyway – I like his stories.’
‘Fuck him,’ growled Finn. ‘I am just after recalling how we got to this place, thanks to him and his little axe. And his stories are always like eating those limon fruit from Serkland, which look so sweet and clappit your jaws. Besides – how much more cursed can I be?’
Those who heard this last, despite their admiration for a man who had tasted limon from Serkland, groaned and shook their heads, with much clutching of amulets and talisman pouches.
Even I had to shake my head with mock sorrow, though there was less mock in it than I would like. That was not the sort of matter you aired when you suspected any gods were listening – sure enough, we would have an answer to it.
Red Njal’s da’s ma, as ever, had something to say.
‘When you hear the gods whisper,’ he offered, savage as a wet cat in a bag, ‘hurl your spear into their breath.’
Not long after, we saw smoke as we slid down and round the black, ice-fringed river that had started to wander like a drunk down a street. We steered for those fuzzed grey curls, round one bend which almost had us pulling in opposite directions to turn the strug, and came across a swathe of sand and pebble beach with a clot of yurt beyond.
People scattered and yelled and I had to balance awkwardly in the prow, my arms upraised to show how my hands held no weapons. Behind me, hidden from view, Fish nocked an arrow and watched.
We came in slowly, not wanting to beach the boat, because Gizur warned that we might not get her off again in a hurry. Finnlaith and Hauk splashed ashore with lines and fastened them securely; slowly, creep by creep, cautious people came closer to us.
They were Khazars, wintering here in their yurts with flocks and herds. When they found the magic glint of silver rather than steel in our fists, all fear was forgotten and we carried Thorgunna off and into a yurt, which amazed me with its bright comfort. Almost as amazing as finding I was paying for it with coins stamped with the head of some ruler called Valentian and dedicated to the glory of Old Rome.
We stayed there all that day and the rest of the night, in the cloak-wrap comfort of sights, sounds and smells we had all but forgotten – the hanging braids of garlic and onions, the limp, naked, dangle-necked bodies of duck and hare, the stink of burning hair and singed feathers, the quarrelling snarls of dogs fighting over the same scrap.
That night, Klepp Spaki proudly held up a louse between finger and thumb and declared that, with the return of such vermin, he now knew he was alive.
We spoke no common tongue with these Khazars, for all that we could summon up Greek, Latin, our own Norse, a good smattering of Serkland Arab and even some Krivichian and Chud. The Khazars spoke their own tongue, which some said was the same as the one spoken by Atil’s Huns long ago and so no-one among us knew that. They also had the language of the Jews, but all anyone knew of this were the foul swearwords Morut used.
However, trade is a common tongue to all and so we had food and even some green wine – which Finn immediately took charge of – and, above all, news that the ice was melting from the centre of the Azov, for the whole sea had been frozen. It meant that there was now a flow to it and that had broken the ice in the narrowest part, where it entered the Sea of Darkness.
‘So there is a way out for us,’ beamed Gizur, having laboriously learned all this. ‘We can sail anywhere you want, Jarl Orm.’
Onund cleared his throat meaningfully. ‘As long as it does not take us more than a long swim from land. I do not trust this log boat.’
In the morning, I was chivvying them up and loading stores on board. In the night, we had howed up the Bjornsson brothers, re-wrapping them in full view of the Khazars so that they would see the dead had nothing with them worth digging up. That and a gift of hacksilver from the hoard would make sure the Khazars let the brothers sleep peacefully. They had no weapons or armrings, but I had openly promised their shares to their mother, so I thought their fetches would stay happy with what had been done.
Kvasir stayed with us, all the same, though I was not sure where he would finally rest – he would not last all the way back to Ostergotland – but Thorgunna had to have a say in that and she was pale as milk and sleeping when we brought her into the shelter of the boat’s prow.
We pushed sweatily away into the middle of the river, while children ran up and down, cheering and pitching sticks at us as their parents looked on and waved, smiling.
Slowly, groaning with the effort of it, we swung the riverboat round the bend and away down the black river, the oars chopping up the thin porridge of ice, while the banks grew thicker with birch and willow. I watched until even the smoke of the Khazar camp had vanished, then turned and almost fell over Crowbone, wrapped in his filthy white cloak and staring over my shoulder with his double-coloured gaze.
‘What?’ I asked, thinking he still brooded on Finn’s blow. ‘Do not let Finn’s manner bother you; he thinks well enough of you, but tempers are short …’
‘No,’ he said, still looking over my shoulder, ‘I am not concerned with Finn – one day, I will claim weregild for that blow, all the
same. It is the birds I am watching.’
Then I turned to look, squinting into the low, creeping mist. A skein of ducks arrowed high overhead.
‘Good to see birds back,’ I agreed, smiling. ‘The winter is losing grip.’
‘All the ducks are skinny,’ remarked Crowbone. ‘Like the ones hanging in that village we left. They are feeding furiously now that the ice is broken.’
I frowned, remembering the skinny ducks and not understanding why he was so concerned. Then he turned his flat, two-coloured gaze on me.
‘Why, then, are hungry ducks flying off the water?’
It took me several seconds to answer that in my head and when I did, my heart leaped up and threatened to bang through my teeth and out my mouth entirely. Everyone else started with astonishment when I suddenly sprang forward, screaming.
‘Row, fuck your mothers – row!’
We were too few and too late. The long black shapes slithered round from where they had set up feeding ducks, seemed to fly up to us, even laden with Vladimir and his mailed druzhina warriors.
Two boats; my heart collided with my battered boots. One would have been enough. In the end, I told my crew to ship oars and they did so in a scramble and started sorting out weapons and equipment, even before they had stopped puking and heaving in air.
‘Well,’ growled Finn, climbing up beside me in the prow that faced them. ‘This will be a hard dunt of a day, I am thinking.’
A deadly dunt of a day, I was thinking, as I hefted the only weapon left to me, an adze axe I had found on board. All they had to do was sit back and have those Slavs and their curved bows shoot us down; half of us had no shields and we had one bow and a handful of arrows left.
The boats came closer, one with Dobrynya and the little shape of Vladimir up in the prow, the other with Sigurd Axebitten and a strange half-animal which dragged goose-flesh up on my arms until I realized it was Kveldulf, with a whole wolf pelt draped round his shoulders, the mask up and over his helmet.