The White Raven

by Robert Low

  'Then we go on,' growled Dobrynya. Tor we have no choice and none of the gods seem to be listening to my pleas.'

  We all knew that, had seen the charred remains of his quiet sacrifices to Perun Thunderer, Svarog Heaven-Walker, Stribog of the winds and even Yarilo, the Shining One, who was not much more than a great prick on legs. None of those Slav fakers were a match for All-Father Odin, who gave the whispered mystery of magic to the world and none answered Dobrynya's begging to have little Vladimir come to his senses.

  'Ah well,' muttered Sigurd, 'a sandpiper isn't big, but it is still a bird, as they say in Lord Novgorod the Great.'

  'Have you an old granny, by some chance?' I demanded. 'If so, it may be that Red Njal is another long-lost relation.'

  The boys heard this and stopped talking to look back at us briefly, before bursting into laughter at the scowl on Sigurd.

  It was scowl-dark, too, in the storehouse the Oathsworn were using as a hov. It was thick with fug and heat from a newly-dug pitfire but the faces round it, glowing in the red-dim light, were drawn and long. They made an effort to be pleased to see me — Onund Hnufa even smiled — but Pai was sick and the weight of a dying lay on them and smothered all joy.

  Pai was in a shadowed corner, the wheezing rasp of his breathing ripping through the bellies of all those in the storehouse we now called our hall. Bjaelfi hovered nearby, while Jon Asanes sat at the boy's head, pressing cooling cloths to his brow.

  Naked and gleaming, slick with sweat, every breath from Pai was a sucking wheeze. Thordis kept trying to wrap him, for it was chilled this far from the fire, but Pai would throw the covers off, thrashing droplets of sweat everywhere. I looked at Thordis, whose stare was blank and yet said everything. Bjaelfi moved away, back to the fire where a pot bubbled.

  'How is the boy?' demanded Gizur and Bjaelfi hunkered down to stir the pot.

  'Not good,' he admitted.

  'He is choleric,' declared Jon firmly. 'I read it in one of the monk's books in Kiev. Fevers mean you are choleric.'

  'Just so,' muttered Bjaelfi. 'I am sure you know best, Jon Asanes.'

  Stung, Jon scowled back at him. 'What cures are you giving him? We would all like to know.'

  Bjaelfi spooned some of the liquid from the pot into a wooden bowl and straightened with a grunt. He gave his beard a smooth and Jon a level stare.

  'Sharing such wisdom would be like pouring mead into a full horn with you, boy,' he said finally. 'Much of it would be wasted.'

  Men chuckled and Jon flushed. Wearily, Bjaelfi turned to move back to where Pai lay and almost collided with me.

  'Jarl Orm . . .'

  Tjaelfi. How bad is he?'

  The little healer shook his towsled head mournfully. 'He will die. The cold has taken his lungs. I have seen it before and have used what I know — honey, lime flowers and birch juice, plus a good Frey prayer I know. Some recover — I thought he might, being young. But he is weak in the chest. Always coughing is Pai.'

  I watched the little man move back to Pai's side, then found Kvasir at my elbow, his face strange in the darkness because his patch and the charcoal he smeared round the other eye against the day's white glare melded into one and made him look like a blind man, eyes bound in a rag.

  'Two of the druzhina will die this night also,' he told me quietly. 'One with the same thing as this, the other bleeding from the backside. He spent too long squatting to have a shit and it froze in him, they say. He burst something inside straining, which is no way for a warrior to die.'

  Thorgunna appeared, holding a bowl of something savoury and a hunk of dark bread. She smiled and nodded. 'Hard times, Trader,' she said. 'I wish I was back at Hestreng, for sure. I have a feather-filled blanket there I am missing now. That Ingrid will be cosied under it with Botolf.'

  She said it wistfully, with no hint of bitterness, using the sometime-name, Trader, that folk called me in happier times.

  I touched her arm in sympathy, Knowing how she felt, sick with the knowledge of what we would have to face before she got back to her feather-filled blankets. She went back, chivvying the two Scots thrall women, Hekja and Skirla, into some work.

  Later, when Bjaelfi indicated that it was time, I moved to where Pai lay, panting and rolling with sweat, his hair plastered to a face as white as the snow outside. Finn was there, with Thorgunna and Thordis busy with cloths and soothing on one side, more to keep them from weeping than any help for Pai.

  Jon Asanes, pale and red-eyed, was on the other, his hand soft on Pai's wrist. I remembered that they had been of an age and had been friends from the moment they had met in Kiev, had laughed and drunk together, as youths will. I remembered because I was not so much older and yet it seemed there were stones younger than me; I could never be part of their joy, envied them as they tested their strength and walked, arms draped round each other's necks.

  'Heya,' I said softly to Pai. 'Here you are, then, lolling about with women dancing round you. I might have known.'

  He managed a smile, struggling so much to breathe that he could not speak. His eyes were wild, though, fretted and white.

  'I . . . have done . . . nothing,' he managed and Finn shook his head.

  'The gods need no reason to inflict what they do,' he growled, bitterly.

  'No. I mean . . . I have . . . not lived . . . enough. I wanted . . . to be known. My name . . .'

  He stopped, exhausted and I heard Finn grunt as if hit, the muscle in his jaw shifting his beard. Olaf stepped into the space between us and Pai managed a faint grin while his chest heaved.

  'Story,' he said. 'A funny . . . one. Keep . . . it . . . short, mind. I have . . . places to go.'

  Olaf, his jaw so clenched I wondered if he could speak at all, nodded. They had been friends of a sort, I remembered — Pai admiring Olaf for his abilities, envying him for his status and Olaf, always amused by the glorious clothes that gave the youth his nickname, Pai, the Peacock. And, strangely, Olaf envied Pai, wanted to be that age himself, just that bit older than now and a young hawk in the wind.

  'There was an outlaw who had outstayed the time allotted for him to safely quit the land,' Olaf began in a voice so low only those close to him could hear it. 'We shall call him . . . Pai. He drank too much in a feasting hov and fell asleep, then dreamed a dream that the other guests had decided to kill him, since he was now fair game. Four came at him from every side. One held a spear, to stab his eyes from his head. One had an axe to smash his fingers to pulp and chop his legs. One had a sword of considerable size, planning to ram it down his throat and the last had a knife, to cut off his tozzle and stick it in his ear.'

  Pai gasped out a laugh, started to cough and could not stop for a long time. As he grew quieter, Olaf cleared his throat.

  Pai woke with a scream to find that he had, indeed, been snoring in a feasting hall, but not a friendly one — he was surrounded by enemies. One had a spear and the grin of an eye-remover. One had an axe that had clearly smashed fingers before. One had a sword of considerable size — but there was no fourth man with a knife.

  'Pai looked everywhere, but there was definitely no fourth man. "Thank you, Odin," he gasped, settling back on his bench as the men closed in, "it was only a terrible dream."'

  Pai chuckled and coughed and jerked and his chest heaved for a few moments longer, then stopped. Thorgunna, after a pause, wet her cheek and placed it close to his mouth, then shook her head and closed his eyes. Jon Asanes bent his head and wailed.

  Finn let out his breath in a long sigh. 'Fair fame,' he grunted, to no-one it seemed to me. 'That was what he wanted. In the end, that is all there is.'

  'A good tale,' I said to Olaf. 'You gave him what he wanted and not every man can do that for a dying friend. You have a gift.'

  Crowbone, his different-coloured eyes glittering bright, shook his head, made so white in the light that he looked like a little old man.

  'Sometimes,' he whispered, 'it is an affliction.'

  There was talk of treating our dead in t
he old way, for we were all sure the people of the village would dig up the bodies and strip them of their finery. Vladimir refused, since that would have involved demolishing a building for the timbers to burn him.

  'You have stripped them of winter feed, so that they will have to slaughter what livestock they have left,' growled Sigurd, annoyed that his men might not lie peacefully under the snow for long. 'They will be eating their belts and lacing thongs by Spring — what does one building mean now?'

  Vladimir folded his arms and glared back at his druzhina captain. 'They are still my brother's people — but I will rule them one day. I want them to fear me — but not hate me.'

  Sigurd could not see the sense of it, that was clear — I was having trouble working out this princely way of ruling myself — but Jon Asanes made Vladimir smile and nod.

  'The Prince is a shepherd to his people,' he observed. 'A shepherd fleeces his flock. He does not butcher them.'

  I left them weaving words round it, feeling like a man walking on greased ice. I knew what Jon and Vladimir and little Olaf did was the future of the world, the way jarls and princes and kings did things these days and in the ones to come. I also knew I did not have one clear idea of how to do it myself and that Jon Asanes was more fitting to be a jarl of this new age than I was.

  But not a jarl of the Oathsworn. Not them, stamping their feet against the cold as they stood in sullen clumps round the dark scars of new-mounded graves, hacked out with sweat and axes from a reluctant earth. These were men of the old ways.

  I took the chance to braid them back to one with a few choice words on breaking oaths and what it had cost. No-one needed much telling; all those who had run off with Martin and Thorkel had died and Finn made it glaringly clear that anyone else who tried the same would not live to feel Odin's wrath.

  We spent the morning sorting gear and finding new ways to wrap against the cold. Then we untied the tether ropes, bashing the stakes out of the frozen ground, chipped ice out of the horse's hooves with a seax and lurched off south, into the steppe.

  I twisted in the saddle once, to stare back at the settlement. On the earthwork walls I saw a figure and, though I could not clearly make it out, I knew it was Tien and felt his eyes on me long after he had vanished from sight.

  The steppe spread out like a sea, like frozen waves. The sky was so big, the clouds in it rushing, whipped into strange shapes and sliding fast, like driven woodsmoke.

  'Only the wind saves us,' Gyrth noted gloomily which, since it made life colder still, brought grunts and growls of disagreement.

  'Snow has a plan,' Gyrth went on between gasps, his breath smoking and freezing his beard to spines. 'It wants to cloak the world in white, purest white, like a bleached linen sheet — but the wind says no. We will have some more here than there, says the wind. Get it off that roof and on that tree, says the wind. The snow hates the wind but cannot stop it from blowing. Which is why, when it is a windless day in winter, you can hear the snow sigh, for it knows the wind will come and make a mess of all its work.'

  Which was nearly good enough to laugh some warm into us, but not quite. Our fingers and toes ached and we bound them in wadmal and layered grass between, the fuzzed tops of the yellow steppe grass, which was the best barrier against the cold. It kept toes from turning black, but made our feet so fat they would not fit in the stirrups.

  One day merged into the next, shadows of life. Horses died, one after the other and the men on them now staggered and stumbled on foot. One or two of the druzhina threw their armour away because the long skirts and the weight of it made walking twice as hard. The Oathsworn, used to walking, jeered at them — then Sigurd killed one of the druzhina as a warning and that ended all laughter and armour-throwing.

  So we listened to the snow sigh.

  Sixteen more men died in as many days, mostly the druzhina, though two of the Oathsworn had to be left, too stiff even to be laid out flat, arms broken so as to fold them on their breasts. Klepp Spaki, blowing on his fingers, tapped out the runes of their names on small squares of bone — Halli was one and the other was

  Throst Silfra. Both just lay down, patiently waiting for the sweet relief from the hunger and cold, the gentle frozen sleep as the white raven folded them in huge wings.

  Throst's closest oarmates, Tjorvir, Finnlaith and Ospak, threw some hacksilver into the shallow grave, then Finnlaith came to me, his wide face reddened with cold and buried in a tangled mass of cold-stiffened beard. His eyes were iced blue.

  'It seems to us three that Throst also knew of Thorkel's treachery,' he said, which was flat-out bold enough to make me blink. These were words for an Althing, where convention kept the speaker from being killed.

  'It is no surprise to us, then, that Odin took his luck,' he went on levelly. 'If more of those who came with Thorkel die, we want you to know, Jarl Orm, that it will be the wish of another god and not Odin's curse on an oath-breaker.'

  Then he nodded and stumped off, leaving it clear to me that, if I could trust no others, I could depend on those three at my back.

  It was, I noted wryly to myself, good to know. There were fewer now who could truly be depended on, even among the Oathsworn. Bone, blood and steel were all brittle in the cold and even the binding fear of the wrath of Odin was cracking. They had taken enough and all of us, hugging our shivers to ourselves, wondered whether we would do the same as Throst, this day or the next, just lie down and let our heart stop and think ourselves winners of that bargain. Some, I knew, wondered whether to let matters get that far.

  Then there was the sabre and the runes on it. I took to wearing it, wrapped in the bundle Martin had made of it, looped over my shoulder like -a bow. Folk thought it was so it was handy for me to study the hilt, but the truth was that I just wanted it to look that way.

  The truth was that the runes were useless, for we were coming down from the north and would have to reach Sarkel and track back to find Atil's howe. It was a truth I did not want men who were dying to know.

  We stuck Klepp's runed squares on dead men's tongues, in the hope that we would be able to identify them on the way back, for the wolves would dig them up from the shallow scrapings we rolled them into. There were a few who wondered if that was a waste of time and Klepp's talents, sure we would never be back in the warm lap of summer to howe their bones up properly.

  The wind won and the land changed, from glaring white to patched brown and then to limitless miles of dun-coloured earth, frozen solid and dusted with snow, thick in drifts here and there. Leafless trees, squatting in sullen clumps, brushed their skeletal fingers across an icicle sky and the wind rattled the frozen stalks of yellow grass like chattering teeth.

  'The whole world is ice,' whimpered Jon Asanes that night, shivering close to anyone he could find — as we all did — and the dung fires. Anyone close scooped it up as the horses dropped it, sticking it inside their clothes to leach the warmth and stop it freezing too hard to burn later. But the fodder was running out; horses were eating less and shitting less. Those that were not dying.

  'This is nothing,' answered Onund Hnufa. 'I have hunted whales up where the ice forms mountains. I am an expert on ice.'

  'Aye,' agreed Gizur, as if he had done the same, though he only wished he had.

  'It is a world of ice, up there in Bjarmaland,' Onund went on, in a bass rumble like a mating seal. 'Sea ice forms in autumn and early winter, out of the milk sea, which is thick with grit ground out of the land by the moving ice.

  'Fast ice is what we call ice that is anchored to land; it breaks up with tides in spring. Floes are large and flat bits of ice, like those tiles they make pictures with in the churches you spoke of, Trader. They are broken up by wind and wave and moved with the same.

  'Pack ice is formed from floes that herd like sheep and are crushed against each other. There is pack ice a hand's breadth thick and more, yet which bends on waves, fitted to them like cloth.

  'Ice grows old, too, like people. You need to see that if you
plan on taking a ship near it. Young ice is clear, a hand-width thick and brittle as stale bread — you can carve through that easily enough. First-year ice is as thick as a man is long and at two years it is thicker still, stands higher in the water, has small puddles and bare patches and is the colour of Olafs left eye. You sail far round that stuff if you are smart.'

  Olaf smiled and winked his blue-green eye to let everyone see what Onund meant. He had wandered over from Vladimir's fire, attracted by the savoury smells from ours and offered a story for a bowl of what we had. He gulped and chewed it down even as it burned his lips.

  'Good,' he said and then made the mistake of asking what it was.

  'Does it matter?' Finn demanded with a grin, but the boy's pinched face was unsmiling when he replied.

  'You have never been a thrall Finn Horsehead,' he said, serious as plague. 'It is never necessary to know what it is you are eating; it is, I have found, vital to know what it was.'

  Grinning, Gyrth tossed him the frozen, bloodied paw of a deerhound. 'That's Other Dog,' he said, rheum-throated with the cold. 'Dog we ate yesterday.'

  'The oldest ice is thicker than two men, one standing on the other's shoulders. It is sometimes as blue as the sky,' Onund continued, in a voice heavy with heimthra, the longing for things that have been and are now lost, perhaps forever.

  'Enough ice talk,' muttered Kvasir. 'I am cold enough already.'

  They called for Olafs story while I was marvelling at old humpbacked Onund, a man who had walked on a mountain of ice and saw that it had puddles and bare patches and was coloured blue-green. Even the Great White did not bother him.

  In the morning, after an hour of travel, the Khazar scouts came back, flogging their bone-thin horses into staggering runs towards us. They spoke urgently with Vladimir, who was perched on his horse like the white raven itself.

  Later, warily, we came up on what the scouts had found; the remains of a couple of wadmal and felt tents, a litter of snow-dusted debris; a saddle, brassware, a wooden bowl, a sword stuck in the earth and abandoned to rust, the hub of a wheel with a couple of spokes left in it. There were dead horses, thin steppe ponies sprawled on their sides, their legs stuck out straight like carved wooden toys that had fallen over.