The White Raven

by Robert Low

  'We will gather what fodder and supplies we can take from here,' the little prince said in his piping voice, 'and head to the Don. Tomorrow, or the day after, but no later than that.'

  'What of the villagers, my prince?' Dobrynya said and Vladimir frowned, knowing that to take what they had would condemn them.

  'Pay them,' said Olaf and he and Vladimir looked at each other and nodded. Vladimir then turned and stared straight back into his uncle's eyes until Dobrynya lowered his and nodded. Everyone knew full well what he had ordered; the villagers could hardly eat hacksilver.

  The headman, Kovach, knew it, too. He came into the presence of the little prince, greasy fur cap in hand and head lowered as was proper. For all his deference, he was like the willow, bending in the wind yet rooted and immovable. There was food and it was hidden and he would not tell where it was, nor would searching do much good, for there were too many floors to be dug up, too many roof-spaces.

  'Do you know who this is, old one?' demanded Dobrynya sternly, pointing to the whey-faced, tight-lipped Vladimir, but Kovach had endured shrieking winter and broiling summer and red war, so the likes of Dobrynya and a pouting boy was not going to cow him. Even Sigurd's silver nose only made him blink his rheumy pale-blue eyes.

  'I thought it was my prince,' he answered levelly, 'the young Jaropolk, come in answer to my pleas, but I see this boy is too young.'

  'This is his brother, Vladimir, prince of Novgorod,' Sigurd growled. The headman nodded and the ploughed furrows on his forehead grew deeper.

  'Is that the right of it? Well, well . . . but if you did not come in answer to my pleas, it puzzles me why you are on the steppe at this time of year.'

  'No matter of yours,' Dobrynya snapped. 'All you need to know is that we are here and you must tell us what we want to know.'

  'Ah well,' answered Kovach, 'as to that, I am thinking that the prince of Novgorod, fine boy though he may be, is asking for what belongs to his brother. I am wondering if his brother knows.'

  I chuckled, for there was a fox look in those pale eyes, which then flicked to me, interested. Little Vladimir flushed and his lips tightened.

  'It is not your place to think,' he snapped, though his voice broke on it, robbing it of much of its sting.

  This was pointless. Kovach was not about to break, even if I strung him, his daughter and all his relatives up by the heels and carved away the lies from them with the Truth Knife nestled in the small of my back. This was a stone of a man, like all his sort and there was much to be admired in how he could endure.

  Beside — these were not Vladimir's lands and he could not do as he liked without raising the ire of his brother, Prince Jaropolk.

  'What pleas?' I asked and heads turned. Kovach raised his eyebrows as he looked at me questioningly, mild as milk. Oh, he would have been a terror in Miklagard's marbled halls of intrigue, that old bondi.

  'Orm,' I told him, as pleasantly as I could, for it does no harm to start politely, offering names and smiles.

  'A Norse,' said Kovach, rasping a gnarled hand across his stubble. 'I know some of that tongue. Your name is . . . serpent?'

  'Wyrm,' I said lightly, then leaned forward. 'It would be better to speak, old one. We are hungry as serpents and you know what hungry serpents are like.'

  He blinked and nodded, then smiled, more gap than grin.

  'My pleas,' he said and, remembering I had asked, I nodded. Dobrynya cleared his throat pointedly, but we ignored him.

  Wodoniye,' he said and there was a hiss of breath from Dobrynya and Sigurd. Little Vladimir went pale. I had no idea what he meant and said so.

  'Creatures,' muttered Dobrynya. 'They feast on the souls of the drowned.'

  'Child's tales,' added Sigurd, but he did not sound convinced.

  'They live in the high ground in the middle of the swamp,' Kovach went on, his voice flat and level and bitter as wormwood. 'There are forty-eight families in this village and all of them have suffered.'

  'Suffered how?' demanded Dobrynya.

  'They come, these vodoniye, to steal our women and make them into rusalka. For years, once, perhaps twice every year. They came in the autumn this year and took another. My grand-daughter.'

  He fell silent and I felt a chill in this warm, stove-heated but that had nothing to do with winter draughts.

  'Yet you have done nothing,' piped Vladimir and Kovach cocked one spider-legged eyebrow in his direction.

  'We sent men into the swamp at first,' he said. 'Six died the first time and we did it again and lost four and they were all good forgemen. We did not send any more, for we need men to make blades and work fields and can fight most things, but not this. So we built up our defences instead and each year we send to Kiev for help and each year it never comes.'

  'Your defences are not good, old man, if they keep stealing from you,' I said.

  'Magic, one supposes,' Kovach said matter-of-factly, though his eyes were cunning slits. 'They come at night and from the marshes. I saw one, once — scaled like a serpent, running through the streets in the moonlight, making no sound. Now you have come. Perhaps Perun has sent us a warrior called Wyrm to bring an end to these Scaled Ones, who are clearly hatched from a serpent's egg. The god has, after all, sent this cold, which has frozen the impassable marsh; I cannot remember the marsh ever having frozen.'

  From the looks on the faces of those who knew him, I guessed it was the most that old Kovach had said in one place at any time and the silence after it was longer and more still as a result. It was broken only by the sudden pop of a log bursting in the fire; sparks flared and flames dyed everyone red.

  'So — if we end this menace, you will share your hidden food, is that it, cunning old man?' growled Sigurd. He greeted the nod of reply with a sharp snort of disapproval.

  'Hung from your stringy thumbs,' he added, 'you will tell us soon enough.'

  'Hung from thumbs,' Dobrynya said into the silence that followed, 'any one of your charges would tell us. Do you want us to do that? I can bring, say, the mother of your granddaughter.'

  Kovach blinked and his head went down; when all was said and done, he was a poor man, with no say in the storms that lashed him — but there had been so many storms in his life they had honed him; he had less fear than Finn, I was thinking.

  Dobrynya and I exchanged glances, all the same. Dealing harshly with these nithing farmers and smiths was a privilege that belonged to Vladimir's brother and abusing them could provoke the very conflict Novgorod did not want.

  'A small trek across some frozen marsh,' Dobrynya said finally, shrugging and and looking at me. 'Little enough.'

  'Then let him take it,' growled Finn bitterly when I shared this out in the place the Oathsworn had been bundled into and proudly called a hall. 'What the fuck is a voy-ded-oy, or the other thing?'

  Wodoniye,' answered Crowbone brightly. 'Water draugr. It is said they take young girls and make them into rusalka, spirits of the marshes and water's edge. These rusalka are beautiful, pale-skinned and with long green hair that is always damp — if their hair ever dries out, they die, and thus they always carry combs with them, combs which can cause floods when pulled through their tresses. They are said to be able to turn into waterbirds and have webbed feet . . .'

  He tailed off when he realized we were all staring at him. 'I know a tale about them,' he added, defiantly.

  'Then keep it behind your teeth,' rasped Finn, furious with frustration. 'This old fuck of a headman has a thought-cage twisted by the cold. Does he seriously believe all this?'

  'If he is touched,' Thorgunna declared, 'then others are, too — there is a woman and her man mourning for the loss of a daughter in this very house.'

  She was Kovach's own daughter, who stood with wooden spoons in each hand, stirring life back into some old ale as she told us — between sobs — of seeing a shadow in their house, hearing a muffled scream. Her round face was chapcheeked, brown eyes red-rimmed and mournful; I did not tell her how things could have been worse
for her, strung up by the thumbs and questioned by Sigurd and Dobrynya. She sounded scared enough, all the same and her tears were real.

  Her husband claimed to have tackled the creature with a hand-scythe and I looked him over as he dragged out the tale of it. He had a broad, flat face, where the cheeks and nose stuck like galls on an oak and the wind had ploughed out wrinkles in it until tree bark looked softer. His hair was braided and had never been cut, only burned, so that the ends were crumbled.

  He did not look like a man easily cowed and had arms hard with work-muscle, skin-marked roughly with the outline of a horse.

  'Scaled like a chicken's leg,' he confirmed, but his eyes kept shifting and I wondered why.

  The creature had run off with their daughter, fourteen summers old and corn-hair pretty, according to her ma and others I spoke to. There were other stories, some of daughters stolen, others of livestock taken and, because they were who they were, it seemed the grief-loss was equal to these people. Yet there was something rank as lutefiske about the affair.

  Later, in the lumpen, shifting shadows, surrounded by murmur and the laughter of those with full bellies and warm feet, I sat and breathed in the smell of ale and unwashed bodies, while a small girl, one eye blind-white as a boiled egg, played fox-and-hens with the men and made them laugh when she won with considerable skill.

  Huddled in a corner, faces murked by the uneasy glow of the fire, me and Finn, Kvasir and some others talked round this matter we had clearly been tasked with, quiet as the smoke which swirled round a sooted kettle.

  None of us liked the idea of scaled creatures who could scamper silently over a deadly marsh, cross a stream, then a palisade and evade all the guards, both in and out, laden with struggling women or bawling calves.

  By the time our tongues hurt, it came down to the same as it had been at the start; we would have to go to this place in the marsh and see for ourselves.

  'We will find only some ragged-arse outlaws,' Kvasir declared. 'Mark me. Runaways, living badly out on the steppe and stealing what they need — including a decent hump.'

  'Invisible outlaws I do not need either,' I growled back and that left them, like me, chewing on whether Kovach and the villagers were being entirely truthful.

  In the end, Red Njal broke his silence, heaving himself up and sighing.

  'Well, there is no way but to do it,' he growled. 'Steady and careful. The sun rises little by little, but it crosses all the world in a day, as my granny told me.'

  'I wish it was your granny who was going and not me,' Finn grunted back.

  In the morning, it had been decided that myself, Kvasir and Finn would go, with Sigurd and a dozen of his men, all suitably mailed and armed, as well as Morut and Avraham. Jon Asanes was sulky, because I had said he could not come with us for, as he admitted himself, he was no great fighter.

  'Olaf is going,' he pouted back bitterly. Crowbone was going because his Uncle Sigurd was going and I had no say in that, but it did not help Jon's sulk. Crowbone teased him about wanting the princely gift of a smile from Vladimir, which made Jon flush to his ears and stamp off.

  Blowing and stamping, we came out to our horses. We all had horses, which Finn looked at dubiously, for he hated riding; it did not help to see me easy in the saddle and smiling down into his scowl.

  'Take care,' Thorgunna said to Kvasir, tugging his cloak tighter round his neck. 'There are bannocks and cheese and the last of our meat in a bag on the saddle horn. Oh, and a skin of ale is hooked there. I don't expect you home before dark, so wrap warm this night.'

  'Don't fuss, woman,' he said, though it was lightly done. Finn heaved himself up into the saddle, black-browed at all this. He aimed a storm-scowl at Crowbone and rumbled: 'We are not having that silly dog.'

  Crowbone agreed with a nod, for I had already made it plain that the elkhound was staying behind. He was tied up and yowling as we left through the main gate, circling round to the opaque ribbon of the river, watched by cold-pinched, anxious faces and one of the village curs, who had routed out a bird frozen in the eaves of a house and fallen to the rutted path.

  The river was iced and drifted with powdered snow, so we crossed it where there would have been a shallow ford and never as much as cracked it. In a moment we were into the tussocked, snow-scoured marsh and the palisade of the village shrank to a line behind us as we moved away from it, towards the faint scar at the edge of the sky.

  The marsh glistened and, when it was full thawed, would be a formidable place of bog and sink holes — impassable, as Crowbone pointed out, if you did not know the secret way of it, as these creatures surely did.

  'Outlaws,' Kvasir corrected, rubbing his weeping eye and we hugged that hope to us with our cloaks as we slithered through the stiff-spiked sedges, towards the scab of rock that grew even darker as we came up on it.

  The sun hovered like a blood-drop on the edge of the world and our shadows grew eldritch, thin and long in front of us, while that black rock seemed more ominous with every mile. There was something about it that lined the heart with chill. Trees sprouted, grew stark claws and thickened in clumps as we came up on the dark-cragged gall on the steppe, which was choked with them. In summer, it would be a mass of green and the rock would be softer and more rounded — but now it looked as if Jormundgand, the world dragon, had brushed a coil through the crust of the earth and left a single scale behind.

  'A real outlaw lair,' Kvasir remarked, chewing on some thick bran bread and spitting out little pieces of grit.

  Closer still, we heard strange sounds, like bells would make if they were made of water. The hairs on my neck were up and we all put hands on weapons and went slower, peering this way and that through the scatter of bare, twisted trees; Finn climbed off the horse, for he would not fight on it and .had been complaining about his sore buttocks for so long now that I knew more about his arse than his own breeks.

  Morut found the source of the sounds soon after; in one taloned tree hung the whitened skull of a cow, with other bones dangled from it, fastened by tail hair. In the wind, they turned and chimed against each other and the big, bold, bearded men of the druzhina shifted uneasily and made warding signs until Sigurd snarled at them to stop being women.

  'Outlaw signs,' Finn growled sarcastically. Kvasir said nothing, but glanced back to where the sun trembled on the edge of the world. His look was enough; the idea of being in this place when it got dark was turning my bowels to gruel.

  There was no choice, all the same and at least we had wood for a fire — though it was not only the chill that made us bank it high. We perched round it warily, under a millstone moon and a blaze of stars, so many, when the clouds flitted clear of them, that they made a man hunch his neck into his shoulders, as if ducking under a low arch.

  'There was once a band of men,' Crowbone said, staring into the fire, 'up in the Finnmark, who thought they would hunt out troll treasure.'

  I wished he would not tell one of his tales; they had a nasty way of stinging you. I said as much and he merely blinked his two-coloured eyes and hunched himself under his now dirty white cloak.

  'Let the boy speak,' growled one of the Slavs, a big slab-faced scowl of a man called Gesilo. His comrades in the druzhina nicknamed him Bezdrug, which meant 'friendless' and you could see why.

  'You will not like it,' Avraham growled back, but Gesilo only grunted. Crowbone cleared his throat.

  'There were three of them and they knew the rock trolls in that part of the world were always gathering gold and silver to them and they thought it would be a fine thing to get some of it. One — we shall call him Gesilo — said that it would be easy, for rock trolls became boulders in daylight and only came alive at night. It would be a little matter only to rob them when they were stone and be gone by nightfall.'

  'A smart plan,' agreed Gesilo. 'This man has a good name, for it is a plan I would have come up with myself.'

  He nudged his neighbours, who did not laugh.

  'The three friends travelled hi
gh up into the Dovrefell,' Crowbone went on. 'They saw many a boulder like a stone-fixed troll, but none with any sign of treasure and it was growing harder and harder to find a night-camp where there were no such stones at all.

  'The other two were wanting to go home after a few nights of this, but Gesilo pointed to a great hill, a lump of rock that stood high above the Fell and was shrouded with trees like the claws of birds. He was sure there would be troll treasure there.'

  The listeners shifted and it was not hard to see why, since Crowbone had just described the very place we sat under. I wanted to tell the little cow's hole to clip his teeth to his lips, but I could not do it. Like a man in a longship heading off the edge of the world, I could not turn the steerboard one way or the other for wanting to see what lay through the mirr of falling water.

  'The three friends took all day to travel to the place,' Crowbone went on in his bone-chiming little voice. 'It was growing dark when they came up on it, a great hump of black rock thick with bare-branched trees and surrounded by crops of rocks and boulders, many of which could easily be sun-fastened trolls. The other two said that there would be trouble, for there was no shelter and as soon as it grew dark the trolls would come out, stamping and angry.

  'But Gesilo started up the steep sides of the rock, shouting out that there was a cave half-way up and it was too small for any of these boulder-sized perhaps-trolls to get in if they did come alive.

  'That settled it; the other two followed on and soon reached the cave, which was as Gesilo described. It was too dark to see how far back it went, though it narrowed considerably, so could not be a bear den. It was just tall enough for them to sit in and light a fire, which they did. Darkness fell, but everyone was cheerful, because they seemed safe and had a big roaring fire going.'

  Kvasir threw a stick on our own, which caused the sparks and flames to flare up and some of the listeners to shift. Grinning, rueful and half-ashamed, they sank down as Crowbone tugged his dirty-white cloak round him and went on.

  'Eventually, they ran out of wood and drew lots to see who would brave the dark and fetch some time. One — we shall call him Orm — drew the shortest twig and reluctantly left the safety and fireglow for the dark of the hill.'