The Prow Beast o-4

by Robert Low

  ‘Your men have made camp, but lit no fires,’ he declared, almost admiringly. ‘None of my scouts have been able to approach closely without being seen. Perhaps you should ride out and hail them before there is unpleasantness.’

  I was pleased as I edged the horse forward — and not a little anxious that Kuritsa would do something rash in the twilight, for I was sure he was watching. When I could no longer see the Magyars behind me, I decided enough was enough and bellowed out my name.

  The voice, soft and almost in my ear, made me leap and teeter in the saddle with the shock of it.

  ‘I see you, Orm Bear Slayer.’

  Finn slithered out of the dark, with Kuritsa close behind, arrow nocked.

  ‘Good to find you alive,’ Finn growled with a grin. ‘With a horse, too. And new friends.’

  ‘Magyar traders,’ I answered flatly, as if such a thing was no more than to be expected from the likes of me. ‘Ospak and Dark Eye are safe in their camp. How are things with us?’

  Kuritsa shook his head admiringly.

  ‘I had heard that if Orm Trader fell in a barrel of shite he would find the only bag of silver in it,’ he laughed. ‘Until now, I had not believed it.’

  I acknowledged the praise with a nod and a grin, but kept looking at Finn for an answer to my question.

  ‘Four dead,’ he said flatly. ‘Or so we believe. They were the weakest of the sick and have not, like you and Ospak, surfaced from the river.’

  ‘The ship?’

  He did not answer, but turned away, so I rode down to the river with him, past men iron-grey in the growing dark, shields up and helms on. One or two grinned and called greetings; just as many gave me blank looks, or even scowls.

  Short Serpent was snagged tight to the heavy bole of a tree, which was furred green with moss. Slimy clumps of frog eggs drifted in tattered skeins along the riverbank, while the river itself growled and spat still, a mud-brown coil like a snake’s back.

  Men clustered round the drakkar, leaping on and off her, fetching and carrying; a smaller group stood by the prow — Onund, Crowbone, Trollaskegg and Abjorn — who turned as I came up.

  ‘Odin’s arse,’ Onund said, his pleasure as clear as a dog’s. ‘Here is a good sight.’

  ‘Doubled,’ Finn said, ‘for he has Ospak safe and found us food and shelter.’

  ‘If my sea-chest survived,’ I added and Trollaskegg said that it had and a lot of gear had been saved. Crowbone, eyes bright, nudged Abjorn.

  ‘See? You owe me six ounces of silver — I said he was not dead.’

  Abjorn looked at me and shrugged apologetically.

  ‘It was a wild river,’ he said by way of excuse, ‘but I am glad it did not claim you, for we have been holding a Thing on it and could not agree on who would now lead.’

  ‘Aye, well, include me out of that now,’ shouted a cheerful voice and Styrbjorn hurled something over the side of the ship, then followed it, both splashing wetly on the bank and spraying mud, to a chorus of curses. Undaunted, Styrbjorn hefted his prize and held it out to Onund; it was his carving of the elk head, antlers proud against the wood.

  ‘Yours,’ he said. ‘All that is left of this ship.’

  ‘The ship is exactly like my carving,’ Onund agreed, mournful as a wet dog. ‘Finished.’

  I did not need him to tell me that, for the whole proud curve of the bow was staved in and the water frothed and gurgled in and down the length of it. The prow beast, white with gouges, still snarled even though the teeth in its mouth were broken and it hung by a splinter.

  ‘We could cut new planks,’ argued Trollaskegg and looked desperately at Crowbone for support, but even little Olaf knew, with all the wisdom of his twelve years, that we could not repair his wonderful ship.

  ‘Short Serpent put up a good fight against that tree,’ Crowbone said softly and Abjorn picked up the elk head.

  ‘Lash that to a spear shaft,’ I told him. ‘We will have new fierceness yet. Light fires in hollows where they will not be seen — these Magyars are safe enough, but others are out hunting us — then give me half-a-dozen men with drag-poles to fetch back supplies. Finn — you command here. I will go back and stay with the Magyars, for the trading.’

  Their faces asked all the questions, but their mouths stayed shut. Abjorn simply nodded and went off to see some of it done, handing his armful of prow beast to Onund, who gave a grunt and sloshed off to higher ground to see to the camp, rolling in his great, bear way. Crowbone and Trollaskegg stood, twin pillars of misery, looking at the ship.

  ‘When it is empty of everything we can use,’ I said, knowing I sounded crow-voiced and that they would not realise it was from the river and not from harshness, ‘cut it free and let the river take it. With luck, the Saxlanders will see it — or find it if it makes it to the opposite bank — and think us dead.’

  I found my sea-chest, and Red Njal sitting on it, with Finnlaith and Murrough nearby. All the Irishers were happy to hear that Ospak had survived. Alyosha and Kaelbjorn Rog and others came up to see for themselves the marvellous event that was Orm, returned from the river with Ospak in tow. Not one of them, or anyone else, cared whether Dark Eye had lived or died, I noted.

  I rummaged in the chest and found what I was looking for in the last of my treasures — a handful of hacksilver and three armrings, one of them already cut almost to nothing.

  But there was a torc, too, and I took it out so that it gleamed pale in the last light of day. The Irishers were drawn to it like bright-eyed magpies and it has to be said it was a fine piece I had guarded carefully, an old necklet taken from Atil’s hoard.

  Not as fine as the one I wore round my neck, the torc of a jarl — even with its dragon-head ends battered and the twisted length of it nicked and cut — but a rich thing, of gold and ambermetal, which the Romans call electrum, with bird-head ends. It was those I had remembered, seeing the old man’s cloak-pin.

  Jutos’ eyes widened when I presented it to him back at the camp as what I had to trade. He turned it over and over in his hands, the firelight sliding along it and folk coming up to look and admire. I saw them point to the bird-heads and heard the word turul repeated in awe and wonder. It turned out that I had been right — this bird, the turul, was worshipped by the Magyar.

  Jutos wanted to know where it had come from and I gave him it straight, so he would know he dealt with more than just another trader from the north. The treasure hoard of Attila, I told him and watched his eyes grow round and black as old ice, for Attila was as good as a god to them.

  Then he looked at Crowbone, who had come along because he had never seen Magyars before, and you could see the thoughts flit across his face like hound and hare, for the distant, misted tales of the Oathsworn and the strange odd-eyed boy who was one of them had suddenly arrived at the fire where he was sitting.

  So he went to the old man with the torc in his hand while we ate and drank in a dusk thick and soft as unseen smoke, with the quarrelling of women and the bark of dogs comforting as a cloak. Enough food for a night’s decent meal was sent off back to the Oathsworn, so I was content enough with the start of this Thing.

  Later, in the black of night, we went away from the others, to where the pool shimmered and there she moved to me. Others moved, too, so that the beech mast rustled; there was a laugh in the throat here, a groan from over there.

  There was no love-talk — little talk at all between us, though she murmured soft, cooing sounds in her own tongue — nor even much kissing or hugging, but we moved as if we had known each other before and there was little need of any of the rest, for my heart was huge and urgent and in my throat and I knew it was the same for her.

  She was white and thin, all planes and shadows, smelled of woodsmoke and warmth and crushed grass and there was not night long enough for us. As the dawn silvered up I lay back, with her breathing slow and even on my chest, snugged up under the same cloak.

  ‘What will you do with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Giv
e me a minute,’ I answered. ‘Perhaps two.’

  She thumped me on the chest, no more than the flutter of a bird wing and I laughed.

  ‘Will you take me back to my father?’

  ‘Was that what this was about?’ I asked, made moody by her now. She struck me again and this time it was a small, hard nut of knuckle that made me wince.

  ‘You think that?’ she demanded and her eyes were big and round and bright in the dark. Just her eyes alone made me ashamed of it, so that I shook my head.

  ‘If you are not taking me back,’ she went on, slow and soft in the dark, ‘then why am I here?’

  I told her; because the Sea-Finn’s drum had said to bring her. She was silent, thinking.

  ‘Did it say to bring me to your home, after the ice-headed boy is found?’

  That made me blink a bit, thinking of Thorgunna and what she would have to say about a second woman — wife, I realised with a shock, for I would have to marry Dark Eye. I was still thinking of an answer when she shivered.

  ‘I will not marry you,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ I wanted to know, chastened and wondering if she could read thoughts. She raised her head for a moment, then pointed out across the water of the tarn, where a mallard drake, all jewel-flashing in green and purple, swung down into the waters with a hissing splash.

  ‘That is why not,’ she said. The drake made for the nearest of the ducks and mounted her, vicious and uncaring, leaving her half-drowned and squawking.

  ‘That is the lot of such as me,’ she said, ‘no matter whose I am at the time. A strange woman in a house of women. The men will all want to mount me, the women to peck my feathers off.’

  Half-sick with the truth of it, I growled some bluster about what would happen to any who treated her in such a way, but she laid her head on my chest again and I could feel her soft smile.

  ‘I do not know what path I am to take,’ she answered. ‘I am away from my people and cannot go back to them, since that would start a war. I am Mazur and if I am to marry I do not intend to do it in a land of ice.’

  She stopped and looked into my face, her eyes looming like a doe’s.

  ‘But there will be a child,’ she declared with certainty and I felt the skin-crawling whenever seidr presented itself to me. ‘It will be a son and I can only offer it a safe place if I go with you.’

  She stopped and shivered. ‘Iceland,’ she said. ‘A country made from ice.’

  I laughed, more from relief at being able to steer off the topic we had been on.

  ‘It is not made of ice,’ I told her. ‘Anyway, I am not from Iceland. Onund is.’

  ‘Somewhere as cold,’ she muttered, snuggling tight to me. ‘At the edge of the world.’

  I liked the feeling and pulled her closer still.

  ‘Iceland is not at the edge,’ I answered, drifting lazily. ‘Near the centre. North of Iceland is the maelstrom. You follow that star there.’ I pointed to the bright North Star and she looked, squinting.

  ‘What is the maelstrom?’

  I told her; the place where the giant women, Fenja and Menja, turn the great millwheel Grotti, blindly churning out the last order they were given before the ship carrying them all sank — to make salt. Which is why the sea tastes the way it does. The maelstrom is a great whirlpool caused by them turning and turning the handle far beneath the waves.

  Sleepily, she laughed. ‘Good tale. The Christ worshippers, though, say the centre of the world is in Jorsalir, where their White Christ was nailed to his bits of wood.’

  ‘What do you believe?’ I asked, but there was no reply; she slept, breathing soft and slow and I began to wonder if it was not the will of the gods to bring her back to Hestreng. What other reason could the Sea-Finn’s drum have had? It was never going to be possible to travel all the way across the land of the Pols to her own Mazur tribe, hunted every step of the way.

  Of course, the gods laughed while we slept, were still laughing when the sun strengthened, rich and red-gold and we dressed and moved back to the others, me prepared to endure the jibes from Ospak and Crowbone.

  I started to hear the gods cackling when I saw Crowbone rise to his feet, slow and stiff, as if he had spotted a draugr coming across the space between the wagons. But he was not staring at us, but off to our right, where I saw the old man tottering forward with his two warrior pillars and his son.

  Even then I thought Crowbone had spotted the old man’s face and had been stunned by it, for it was a swung stick to the senses, that face, and I was chuckling when I came up.

  ‘He is not half as fierce as he looks,’ I said. ‘I would not worry over much.’

  Crowbone looked at me, then back to the old man, who came up closer to us.

  ‘Nose,’ Crowbone said, pointing and I turned.

  The shock of it dropped my jaw; the gods’ laughter grew harsh and loud as disturbed ravens.

  The old man had come in his finery, from brocaded coat to red-leather riding boots and fine-hilted sabre. Round his neck he already wore the bird-ended torc, to show he had accepted the trade and we would now haggle only over the price.

  But his last piece of jewellery was what staggered those who knew it by sight. Bound by a blue-silk ribbon, carefully tied to show his lack of ears, was the final statement on his flag of a face.

  Sigurd’s silver nose.

  SEVENTEEN

  We scarred the laden drag-poles over a sodden land steaming in the new sunshine, ripe with new life and old death, thick with the smells of dark earth and rotted carcass. We scattered birds from the raggled corpses of drowned cattle and, at the end of the first day, sent up a cloud of rooks like black smoke from dead sheep the retreating waters had left hanging in gnarled branches like strange fruit.

  ‘Why are we pushing so hard?’ panted Kaelbjorn Rog, who only voiced what others thought. ‘We are leaving a trail a blind wean could follow, never mind some Magyar scouts.’

  I said nothing, but grimmed them on through the fly-stinging, sweat-soaked day, the sick tottering along with the shite rolling down their legs rather than be bumped in drag-poles, for it was not the Magyars I feared, nor was I entirely running from enemies. Only Crowbone shared my thoughts on why we truly scowled our way so swiftly across the land and he was still mourning the distance between him and his uncle’s silver nose.

  Jutos had seen Crowbone’s reaction and knew something was not quite right; slowly the tale of it was hoiked up and sense was made of things that had been said earlier, of northers encountered and hard bargains being struck.

  The Oathsworn had not been the first band of Norse the Magyars had met; that honour had been given to Randr Sterki and some eighteen or so survivors of his own river-wyrd, stumbling out on the floodplain, starving and thirsting, for they dared not drink the foul water they sloshed through.

  ‘My father wanted the boy they had,’ Jutos told us, ‘a rare child, white as bone. Their leader, a man with skin-marks on him, offered us a Greek Christ priest, but that was no trade for us. We said to take him to the Pols, who might give them a little food, for I thought the Pols might know better what to do with a priest from the Great City.’

  ‘Where did they go?’ I asked and Jutos shrugged, waving vaguely in the direction of the distant blue mountains.

  ‘South, this side of the Odra,’ he replied. ‘After he had traded this marvellous nose for enough supplies.’

  He paused and grinned widely. ‘If you happen to have ears that match, we will make ourselves go hungry to acquire them.’

  I told him the torc was rich enough and tried to get the nose back, for Crowbone’s sake. In the end, though, we got supplies only — and the only bargain in it came as we were leaving, hauling the drag-poles away on a surprising gift of three horses.

  Jutos came up and thrust out his hand, so I took it, wrist-to-wrist, in the Norse fashion and he nodded.

  ‘We part as traders,’ he said formally, then paused. ‘I will give you a day, then send riders to find the Pols and te
ll them of you and the Mazur girl. That will stop them raiding us when they find out we helped you. The horses we have given you will let you travel faster away from them.’

  It was as fair as you could expect from Magyars and, at the end of that first day, I told the rest of the Oathsworn what we could expect and that Randr Sterki and the boy we had come to rescue lay just ahead. There was silence, mainly,

  and Finn had the right of it when, later, he demanded to know what else I had expected from the crew.

  ‘The fact that we have enemies ahead as well as behind is not a joy of news,’ he added, to which I could find no answer.

  The next day we had grown used to the smell of rot, so used to it, in fact, that we stumbled into horror when we should have been warned long since.

  When we came round the side of a hill and saw the grod, we slowed and came to halt; men unshipped weapons and shields and stood uncertainly, looking from one to another and then at me.

  It was a good grod, a well-raised earthwork, wooden stockade surrounding a cluster of dwellings, with a big covered watchtower over the gate. It had been built on a hill above the floodplain and the rising waters had swept round it like a moat, save for a narrow walkway of raised earth and logs, which led to the gate. The watery moat had since sunk and seeped almost back to the river, leaving bog and marsh which steamed in the sun.

  The gate in the stockade was wide open and there was not a wisp of smoke. No dog barked, no horses grazed. Then the wind shifted slightly.

  ‘Odin’s arse,’ Finn grunted, his face squeezed up. He spat; the stink was like a slap in the face, a great hand that shoved the smell of rot down your throat.

  ‘A fight, perhaps,’ Styrbjorn said. ‘Randr Sterki and his men, I am thinking. The villagers have all run off, save for those he has killed.’

  Styrbjorn grunted out that this was good work from only eighteen men, but most ignored him, cheered by the idea of a whole village lying open and empty and ripe as a lolling whore — perhaps Randr and his men had left some loot, too.