by Robert Low
I scrambled to the thwarts and hurled on to the shells and pebbles, stumbled a few steps and saw men ahead, fired by fear of what they might have lost, churning up the stones and coarse sand towards Hestreng.
'Finn . . .' I yelled and he saw it and bellowed like a bull in heat, bringing most of them to a stop.
'Wait, you dirty swords,' Kvasir added at the top of his voice, as men swilled like foam. 'We go together. The Oathsworn. As a crew.'
They roared and clattered blades on shields at that, but the truth was that most of them had sworn no oath yet; even as they trotted after me, panting like hounds, I had to hope they would fight, if only to protect their own wee bits and pieces littering my hall.
It was clear, when we came up over the rise that sheltered Hestreng from the sea, that it was not my hall that burned, or any part of it — I felt a dizzying wave of relief, followed at once by an equal wash of guilt at those who had been unlucky.
'Gunnarsgard; Kvasir said, squinting to the feathered smoke and the red stain beneath it. 'Tor's steading has gone up.'
No real friend to us, but a neighbour for all that and I was on the point of stepping out towards the place when Kvasir bulled off towards Hestreng's hall, dragging Finnlaith and others in his wake. Heading, of course, for his wife; shamed, I followed on.
I heard the clatter of iron on wood and the high, thin bell of steel on steel. By the time I had caught up with Kvasir and the knot of Oathsworn grunting their way round the privy to the yard beyond, I could hear individual panting and roars.
When I spilled into the yard, Finnlaith and Ospak were already screaming 'Ui Neill' and charging at a knot of men held at bay by the great, sweat-soaked figure of Botolf, timber foot firmly rooted in the lower slope of the dung heap and a great long axe circling and scything in his hands. Kvasir, ignoring all of them, charged on towards the hall.
A man, all dirty fleece and snarl, heaved a spear at me, which took me by surprise so that I barely got my shield in the way and had it torn from my finger-short grasp by the smack of it.
There was nothing in me but stoked anger, blood-red and driving. I did not even have my own blade out of the sheath, but placed one booted foot on the shield and wrenched the spear from the linden. Then I came at the man, who had a seax and the red-mawed look of a man who knew how to use it.
I remember using the butt of the spear in a half circle, catching the short blade of his seax and whirling it sideways, bringing the blade of the spear down in a cut that made him jerk his face away. It tore down his fleece and he gave a yelp, but it was all too late for him.
I drove the point into his belly, just below the breastbone and kept moving, so that he jerked like a gaffed fish and shrieked, his legs milling uselessly as I shoved him back and back and back until he hit the side of the brewhouse, where I impaled him on the sagging wattle wall.
Finn dragged me away from him, eventually. Later he told me I had crushed the man into the wall and looked to be bringing the whole brewhouse down, screaming for him to tell me who he was, who had dared attack the Oathsworn.
The rest of the crew came panting up and those arrived too late kicked the dead in their disappointment — and all the men were dead, I saw. Six of them.
Botolf, panting and red-faced, stumped towards me, grinning.
'Nithing whoresons,' he said and spat on the nearest. 'A strandhogg, I was thinking, come to steal chickens and horses. Thorgunna saw them in the meadow, rounding up mares with no great skill and knew them for what they were at once.'
Thorgunna . . . my head came up, ashamed and guilty at having forgotten her, but Botolf broadened his grin.
'A woman, that,' he said admiringly and, just then, Kvasir appeared, Thorgunna with him, Ingrid behind her. Following on came Aoife, with Cormac on her hip and the thralls, Drumba and Heg.
'They had barred the hall door,' Kvasir said.
'That was sound,' Finn offered, beaming and Thorgunna huffed and folded her arms under her ample breasts.
'That was only sense,' she spat back, 'when such friends as yours come to call.'
'No friends of mine,' Finn answered grimly and turned a body with his toe. 'Yet, mind you, this one looks familiar.'
'Parted at birth, I am sure,' Ingrid muttered bitterly and, for all they seemed more angry than afraid, I saw the fluster and tremble in them.
'My sister,' Thorgunna said flatly and I blinked at that, having forgotten that Thordis was at Gunnarsgard, wife to Tor.
'Finn — choose some good men,' I said swiftly, seeing the path clearly for the first time since the smoke had stained my world. 'Botolf — guard the women here. Kvasir — stay with your wife and command the men I leave.'
'Guard the women,' muttered Botolf moodily. 'Guard the women . . .'
'And your tongue,' Ingrid snapped and then, to her horror, burst into tears. Thorgunna gathered her up and turned away.
'They came looking for you,' she said to me suddenly. 'Yelled out your name, as if they knew you.' 'Shot arrows into Hrafn, all the same,' Botolf added grimly, 'when he came at them for stealing his mares. The beast is limping about like a hedgepig, if he is standing at all.'
Finn and I looked at each other and he looked down at the lolled body of the man he thought he knew. 'Old friends,' he grunted.
It was a shock seeing him at his ease beside Tor's hearthfire, feet up on a bench, picking the remains of one of my mares out of his teeth with a bone needle and grinning, for he knew he had caused me as much stir as if I had found a turd at the bottom of my soup bowl.
Klerkon. He had a good Svear name somewhere, but the dwarves guarded it as carefully as they protected the sound of cat's paws, the breath of a fish and all the other things the world had forgotten. Klerkon they called him, after his father, who had been a klerkr. In the Svear tongue, that simply meant someone who had learned Latin, though it was more often given to a Northman who had become a Christ priest.
'A surprise for you,' he said, chuckling out of his button-nosed, bright-eyed face, the curl of grey hair framing it like smoke.
He had a face like a statue I had seen once in the Great City, one long broken in pieces so that only the head remained. It had sly eyes, tiny horns and tight-curled hair and Brother. John, who was with me at the time, said it was a little Greek god called Pan. He had had goat legs and played pipes and fucked anything that moved, said Brother John.
That Pan could have fathered this Klerkon, who shoved a stool towards me and indicated I should sit, as if the hall was his own. In the shadows behind him, as I searched for Tor or Thordis, I saw shapes, the grinning faces fireglowed briefly and then gone, the gleam of metal. I knew the rasp of hard men's breathing well enough and the rich smell of my own livestock cooking reeked through the hall.
When I strode out for the smoke of Tor's steading, sick and furious, a dozen men followed. First we saw that only outbuildings burned — a byre and a bakehouse. Not long after, we found Flann, Tor's thrall and, guddling about for plunder in Flann's blood, a stranger with sea-rotted ringmail and tatters of wool and weave hung about him. He looked like something long dead risen from the grave and climbed slowly to his feet at the sight of us, wiping his palms down the front of his breeks.
'Are you Jarl Orm?' he asked in a voice thick with Finn accent.
'Who wants to know?' I countered and he shrugged.
'I am Stoor and serve someone who wishes you well,' he replied, sonorous as if he was a real herald. 'He bids you come to the hall ahead, in safety. I was left here to guide you.'
'Fuck you,' Finn growled and would have said more, about traps and stupidity had I not stilled him with one hand. I looked at him and he at me. Then I followed Stoor, alone.
It was a wolf den now, Tor's comfortable hov; the idea of it drove a dry spear into my throat and clenched my balls up into my belly.
'There is pleasure in renewing old friendships,' Klerkon went on easily. 'A pity about the misunderstanding earlier, but such things happen on a strandhogg. Men get excite
d chasing chickens, you know how it goes. No slight was intended and little harm done.'
His voice made it clear that what I had lost in the way of livestock was well offset by the death of six of his men. Then he called for ale, which Thordis brought. She did not look at me when she laid the wooden cup at my elbow, but her whole body was hugged tight to her and there was a straggled lock of dark hair escaped from one coiled braid, which she would never usually have allowed.
'Tor,' I said to her and she blinked once or twice. Klerkon gave a little laugh and men shifted out of the darkness, grating a bench into the light. Tor swayed on it, his face a bruise, his lips fat and raw as burst blood puddings. His feet, I saw, hung unnaturally sideways; hamstrung so that he would never walk again.
'I did not think you would object over-much to having an awkward neighbour put at a disadvantage,' Klerkon said. 'We needed some bread and cheese and the men needed to dip their beaks a little, so this place seemed good enough.'
'I am sorry for it,' I said to Tor and his single working eye flicked open.
'Your fault,' he managed to puff through his broken mouth. 'Your kind. Your friends. You brought them here.'
Men laughed at that. I stared at the bald patch on top of Tor's slumped head and felt sick. They were no friends to me, but he had it right — my fault, for sure. For bringing hard raiding men as neighbours to a peaceful bondi farmer. For thinking I could get away with it.
Not now, all the same, for Jarl Brand would see it, too. Once this mess was fixed, he would sigh and have to admit that he had no use for us now that the fighting was done. He would be sorrowful, but point out that he could not have swords such as us waving about on his lands, frightening decent folk, inviting bad cess on them.
Bad cess sat opposite, smiling his Pan-smile and sliding his platter across to me, the meat-grease cooling. I ignored it.
'Not hungry?' he asked and men chuckled. 'Pity — that was a tasty horse.'
'I hope you have silver left from other raids,' I managed to answer him. 'That meat you are enjoying will cost you. Jarl Brand will scour every wavelet for you after this. So will I. It will take a fat blood-price to still our hands.'
He leaned back and waved a languid hand.
'A risk worth taking,' he answered, narrow-eyed. 'I am betting-sure that you can afford a horse and more besides. I hear you have a mountain of silver to draw on.'
Well, there it was. The circling rumours that had brought hard men flocking to join me had whispered in his ear and brought him. I knew Klerkon of old, had sailed with him on many a strandhogg, a supply raid, when we had both fought for Jarl Brand. Even among hard and vicious men like us, Klerkon was shunned as something sick.
'Now you know more, so you know something,' I answered. 'I did not take you for a man who followed bairn's tales.'
'Just so,' said Klerkon, watching me like a cat with a mouse, daring it to move. 'I am not. But just as priests parted us on bad terms, one brings us together, as friends. As partners.'
My left knee was twitching and I could not stop it. The air was thick with rank breath, meat smells and the acrid stink of men sweating fear and he saw me struggle with the bewilderment and curiosity his words had forged. I had crossed him once, over a pair of Christ priests he had captured and I had grown tired of his bloody attempts to shake their faith by having them hold red-hot iron and the like. Klerkon was twisted when it came to Christ priests and some folk who claimed they knew said it was because one had been his father and abandoned him as a boy.
'Priests?' I managed.
'Aye. You knew one, once, I understand. Tame Christ-dog of Brondolf Lambisson, who ruled Birka.'
'Birka is gone,' I harshed back at him. 'Lambisson and the priest with it.'
Klerkon nodded, still smiling the fixed smile that never reached those slitted, feral eyes.
'True, it was diminished the last time we paid a visit. Hardly anything worth taking and the borg had been burned. But we burned it again anyway.'
He slid his feet off the stool and sat forward.
'Lambisson is alive, if not entirely well. The priest also and he is even less good to look on.'
He sat back while the wave of this crashed on me and his smile was a twist of evil.
'I know this because Lambisson paid me to bring the priest to him,' he said. 'In Aldeigjuborg, last year it was. I plucked the priest — Martin, his name is — from Gotland, where he was easy to find, since he was asking after Jarl. Orm and the Oathsworn. Why is that, do you think?'
I knew, felt a rising sickness at what Klerkon might still have to reveal. Lambisson and the priest Martin had set us off on this cursed search for Atil's tomb years before, when I joined the Oathsworn under Einar the Black.
The priest had used Lambisson's resources to ferret out something for himself, the Holy Lance of the Christ-followers and used the Oathsworn to get it. Now I had it, snugged up in my sea-chest alongside the curved sabre it had made and Martin would walk across the flames of Muspell to seek me out and get that Christ stick back. What Lambisson wanted with Martin was less clear — revenge, perhaps.
Klerkon saw some of that chase its own tail across my face and his smile grew more twisted.
'Well,' he went on, his voice griming softly through my ears, 'perhaps this priest wanted his share of Atil's silver and so sought you out. The rumours say you found it, Bear Slayer.'
'If so, only I know how to reach it,' I said, feeling that pointing out that fact at this time might prevent him from growing white around his mouth and a red mist in his eyes.
This time there was no smile in the wrench that took his lips.
'Not the only one,' he said. 'Before the priest, Lambisson gave me another task — to fetch two from Hedeby. I knew they were Oathsworn. Only later did I find out that they knew the way to this treasure of Atil, but I had given them to Lambisson by then.'
Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter. Their names thundered in my head and I was on my feet before I knew it; benches went over with a clatter.
Klerkon leaped to his feet, too, but held out his empty hands.
'Soft, soft — Lambisson wanted them hale and hearty,' he said. 'It was only recently that it came to me there might be more in this than wild tales for bairns or coal-eating fire-starers. It would seem I had the right of it — all the same, Brondolf Lambisson has a head start on us.'
'Us?' I managed to grim out, husky and crow-voiced.
'Together we can take him on,' Klerkon said, as if he soothed a snarling dog in a yard. 'He has gathered a wheen of men round him — too many for me, too many for you. Together . . .'
'Together is not a word that sits between you and me,' I told him, sick with thought of what might have been done to Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter. Neither of them knew enough — Eldgrim, perhaps, who had helped me cut the runes into the hilt of the sword, but the inside of his head was as jumbled as a woman's sewing box.
'This is an invitation you would be wise not to turn down,' Klerkon replied and I could see the effort it took to keep his smile in place.
'There are frothing dogs I would rather walk with,' I said, which was true, though this was hardly the time or place to be telling it. Steel rasped. Someone smeared out an ugly laugh. Klerkon snapped the eye contact with me, straightened a little and sighed.
'Perhaps a trade partnership was too much to expect,' he said softly and the smile was already a fading memory. 'If we cannot join, then I have it more in the way of you telling me all you know and me sparing those you hold in regard.'
'You are crew light for a task like that,' I told him, seeing it for the truth — otherwise he would not have offered any deal. 'I do not think I will tell you anything today.'
'By the time I am done with you,' Klerkon said, whitening round the eyes and mouth, 'you will beg to tell me every little secret you hold.'
I hauled out my blade and the sound of his own echoed it. The sucking whispers of other blades being drawn in the darkness was the soft hiss of a snake slithering in o
n a fear-stunned mouse.
Then the door hurled open with a crash and daylight flared in, catching us so that we froze, as if caught fondling each other.
'Your watchmen are shite,' growled a familiar voice and Finn bulked out the light. 'So I have done you a favour.'
Something flew through the air and smacked wetly on the table, hitting the edge of the platter, which sprayed horse meat and half-congealed grease everywhere. The object bounced up, rolled and dropped neatly into Klerkon's lap.
He jerked back from it, so that it crunched to the floor. The eyes were the only recognizable things in the smashed, bloody ruin of a face. Stoor. Watery blood leaked from the raw mess where his neck had been parted from the rest of him. Somewhere a woman shrieked; Thordis, of course, one hand to her mouth and her hair awry.
'Thordis,' I said and held out one hand. She looked at me, then at Tor and I knew, with a lurch of sick fear, that she would not leave him — and that we could not carry a hamstrung man.
There was a moment where I thought to take her round the waist and cart her off — but it was an eyeblink only. If we failed, Klerkon would know she was sister to Kvasir's wife and would use that to lever the secret he wanted out of me. Finn knew it, too, knew that she was safer if Klerkon stayed ignorant. He laid a free, gentling hand on my forearm; it left bloody smears.
'Time to be going, I am thinking, Jarl Orm,' he said and I moved to the door as the light from it slid down the bright, gleaming blade he called The Godi — Priest. He pointed it at Klerkon and the snarlers behind him, a warning as we backed out of the hall and ran for the waiting comfort of our own armed men.
Even as we sprinted out in a spray of mud and feverish elation, howling at each other with the sheer relief of having cheated our way to safety, there was the bitter taste of it all in the back of my throat, thick and metalled.
The wolf packs were gathering for the feast of Atil's tomb. Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter were prisoners of one, Thordis was prisoner of another.