The White Raven

by Robert Low

  Finn sat nearby, watching and silent and Thordis, between tending to the fire and the food bowls and other business, shot him frequent, worried glances. Then she fetched me a bowl that steamed and a chunk of black bread, hunkering at my knee as she delivered it.

  'This looks good,' I said and it was no lie; I was astonished at how savoury the stew was.

  'Food is not a problem now, Jarl Orm,' she said. 'It seems these nithings we defeated had stolen most of the supplies from Lambisson. The ones who went on will be hungry by now, I am thinking.'

  I would have been pleased, save that Short Eldgrim was one of them. I had the feeling Cod-Biter would not last the night and now Short Eldgrim looked more doomed than ever. What with Runolf Harelip's death, it seemed the old Oathsworn were fated not to get back to Atil's hoard.

  Thordis nodded seriously when I said this. She jerked her head in Finn's direction.

  'He is getting Klepp Spaki to paint his forehead with the valknut,' she said harshly. 'Soon he will come to you and ask for that amulet you have.'

  I blinked at that. If it was true, then Finn was dedicating himself to live or die at the whim of Odin and that was as good as hurling himself off a cliff for, in a fight, he would not retreat until he had had some clear sign from One Eye that it was good to do so. I felt like a house whose roof was falling.

  I finished the stew, though the joy in it had gone by then. I lay back, feeling the warmth and the full belly, my head full of shrieking gulls; Vladimir and his uncle and what they would do when the howe was reached. Finn. Odin. The silver hoard. The Man-Haters and whether the one who led them was really Hild. The rune sword she had. The one I had.

  I tried not to sleep in the hope that I would, but all of that whirled like an ice wind inside my head until it scoured the back of my eyeballs sore. When Finn loomed out of the dark and hunkered beside me, it was almost a relief and I handed him the amulet before he spoke, unlooping it from around my neck.

  He did not ask how I knew but took it and looped it round his own neck.

  'This is a hard road you take,' I muttered, sick with it. Sailing once in a badly-trimmed knarr I had felt like this —every time the wind hit a certain quarter it would heel over and the steerboard would lift clean out of the water, so there was nothing to do but run until the wind died enough to drop the steerboard back in the water — or you hit something.

  'Rather this one than another,' he growled, miserable as mirr.

  'Which one is that, then?'

  He shifted uncomfortably, then looked at me, flat and grindstone hard. 'The one that ends with me drooling by a fire, with women laughing behind my back at how my vingull is limp and my back bowed.'

  For all that he was grim with it, I had to swallow a smile, since the word he used — vingull — meant the prick of a horse rather than that of a man. So I knew he still had some pride in him yet.

  'You listened too long to Martin the monk,' I gave him back. 'Too afraid to live? Too old? Is this Finn Bardisson from Skane?'

  'Who knows? Who will know? Who will remember Pai? Or Harelip? When all of us are dead, Bear Slayer, only Pinleg and Skapti and others will be remembered, locked in that stone we raised in Aldeigjuborg. They are the ones with fame-luck.'

  'We will have a stone . . .'

  'Too late, Trader. It seems to me unlikely we will make it back to where Klepp Spaki can carve it. And if we do — what then? Back to that steading with the chickens and all the silver we can carry? What then, the point of raiding? So we squat and wait for the Norns to snip off the last threads of our life.'

  'So all that is left to do is find a good death, Finn Bardisson?'

  He grunted and said: 'I made a vow in the pit prison. To One Eye. He kept his side of the bargain.'

  Then he straightened and forced a grin. 'In the end, as Pai knew, there is only one thing.' Then he intoned:

  'Cattle die and kinsmen die,

  you, too, soon must die

  but one thing never will die,

  the fair fame of one who has earned it.'

  'There is that, right enough,' I said, bitter as lees at him for finding it so easy to follow this path. Then I gave him back a verse of the Sayings of the High One, the one everybody forgets.

  The lame can ride a horse, the handless drive cattle,

  the deaf one can fight and prevail,

  happier for the blind than for him on the bale-fire,

  but no man cares for a corpse.'

  Finn might have had a reply to it, but Cod-Biter woke up and moaned then. He did that for most of the night and then died, his screams shaving the hairs off our arms, just as the dawn came up.

  There was too much food in the end and men came down with the squits and belly gripes, so that Bjaelfi had to feed them a cure made from the newest root of a bramble which had both ends in the earth, boiled up with mugwort and everlasting and the milk of a mare, a goat and a cow.

  'Does it work?' demanded Skula, a raw-boned youth who had started skinny and was now yellow and wasting. Thorgunna, who was feeding him with it, assured him it was infallible, but from the face he made swallowing it down I was glad I did not have the squits.

  'He will get more out of the other part of Bjaelfi's cure,' Thorgunna muttered as she passed me. The bit that has him rest in the soft and warm.'

  Too many were dead, or dying, or sick. In the end, I had to gather the Oathsworn together and ask for people to stay with those too sick to travel, partly to make sure the villagers remembered their manners, partly to try and make sure they lived.

  I had expected a torrent of volunteers, but was surprised; only two said they would stay, making out that is was for the good reason of tending their sick comrades but really because they were too weak themselves and knew they could go no further. The others were determined to go on and, in the end, I had to tell two more they would stay and listen to them grumble.

  One was Skula and, though he curled his lip at my decision, looked more relieved than annoyed; he was weak enough to die if he left the village and knew it.

  The other was Tjorvir, whose boils were now beyond Bjaelfi's powers to prevent and Thorgunna and Thordis' lancing prowess with a needle and wool. They erupted where clothing chafed, so that his neck and wrists were a mass of sores and pus — but he was frowning at my leaving him behind.

  'This is not a good thing,' he declared, shaking his head, so I pointed out that he could barely walk, use a sword or wear a helm but it made no difference. In the end, Finnlaith clapped him on the back — from Tjorvir's wince, he had found a new boil — and said: 'Don't worry — I will serve the weregild and make sure you get your share.'

  It was Jon Asanes who explained it to me, which did not make me feel any better about being put on the straight path by a stripling and one who had been weeping-sad since his friend, Pai, had died.

  'The ones who came with Thorkel feel bad for what he did and do not wish you to think badly of them,' he told me. 'They will follow you to the door of Helheim — as will the others and not because of the oath they made in the eye of Odin.

  'They don't call you Bear Slayer, they call you Trader,' he added with a quiet grin, 'because everyone knows that, if you fare with Orm, you get a good deal. They know you are All-Father's favourite and think that will bring most of them home, too.'

  We spoke quietly, under four eyes only, about Olafs plan to keep Jon in Novgorod. I knew enough about Crowbone not to find it strange that a mere boy of nine should be deciding the future of one I had known since he was a child himself.

  Jon did not smile. He looked uncomfortable and scrubbed at what I saw was the beginnings of a passable beard, dark against the pale olive of his skin. The gesture made my heart skip, for it was so like old Rurik, the man I'd thought my father, as to have been a copy. Then I realized he had picked the gesture up from me.

  Crowbone dreams his dreams,' Jon said wryly, 'and depends on the actions of birds to make them come true — one more to a flock here, a flutter to the left there. He wi
ll fail in the end, for no true god guides his hand in that.'

  'You can say that?' I countered. 'Even after all you have witnessed with us?'

  'Always the hand of the White Christ — the Hvitkristr — is in it,' Jon answered levelly. 'That has ever been a barrier between us.'

  Not on my account, nor would it and I said as much, so that he flashed those white, straight teeth at me, big as rune-stones now in a face made too thin from hunger.

  'You call him hvitkristr for a reason,' he answered. 'Perhaps you have used it for so long that you no longer hear it as I do.'

  'Which way is that?' I asked, though I already knew it.

  'The way that hvit means not just "white" but cowardly,' he replied, then dropped his eyes from mine. 'That and worse. So I am tarred with the same. I cannot fight well, nor can I take the Odin-oath. I am neither fish nor fowl in this company.'

  It was true enough, though I did not see how a godlet who let himself be nailed passively to a lump of wood could be anything but white-livered, as we Northmen say. I did not say that, all the same, out of deference to Jon Asanes' beliefs.

  I had not known — or not thought — of any of this and it came as a shock of cold water to hear him speak as though we were strangers. I looked at him and remembered him as the skinny Greek boy on Cyprus. It rose up in me and barred the door of my mouth, so that the words I should have spoken were blocked.

  He grinned, shamefaced, his too-large eyes bright. 'I know bribage and port dues and lading weights,' he said. 'I know the worth of a dozen coins and how they relate to each other and how to tell bad amber from good. I speak Greek and Latin and write in both and my runes are passable. I will be a good trader myself one day. But I am not a northman and I am not a pagan and I am not Oathsworn and never will be so.'

  'All true,' I managed to reply, but the wormwood of the moment made my tongue bitter. 'Perhaps you should also remain here, being so valuable.'

  He shook his head sadly, which shamed me to silence. Then, he lowered his eyes to stare at the floor.

  'When you first arrived in Novgorod I was . . . ashamed. Finn stank and Kvasir was not much better. Even you, Trader.'

  I shrugged. He had been too long away from honest Northmen, that was all. And we had left him when he was but a boy. I said as much and he nodded, still ashamed.

  'You looked like all the tales the priests told — hard men, who smell bad and spend your days killing men and humping unwilling women.'

  'Not unwilling, some of them,' I managed and that trembled a grin on him but it vanished just as quickly.

  'I am a Greek who is no longer a Greek, fighting with a varjazi and yet not a Northman. Crowbone imagines he is favouring me; the prince also — but I have my own ideas on what my life will be.'

  It was true enough and the ache of knowing it, having it said and so made real, was keen and swirled in me like molten metal until it finally forged itself into anger. We had been good to Jon Asanes and I said so. Whatever his life would be, he owed it to us.

  He looked at me and there was dark fire in those olive eyes.

  'You came to Cyprus and what you did there killed my brother and forced me to go with you into the scorching Serkland. I was shot by an arrow and almost died, then finally carried far from the world I knew to the far north, a bitter cold place of unwashed folk who wear skins.'

  That made me blink with the harsh of it, but he had more of the same.

  'I have had no say until recently and had plans of my own — until you returned to my life. As soon as you did I faced the stake and am now here, in this frozen waste, where I may die.'

  He stopped and smiled sadly. 'That is your goodness to me? I would hate to have you be bad to me, Trader.'

  The anger went from me; sadness and -loss surged in to fill the space. Whatever the future held, it seemed the Goat Boy was gone from us.

  As Gunnar, my real father, had often said — everything you need should be in a sea-chest; everything else can be left behind. Like all simple solutions, it was flawed, relied on making no attachments to people. In the end, of course, even he realized that for he could not leave me behind.

  'It would be nice all the same,' Jon Asanes added wistfully, 'if I could have a cut of those runes on your stone, just like all the others.'

  I nodded, unable to speak. Runes on a stone, or a finekenned verse. That is why no-one wanted to be left behind, huddled in a bed in a village — those left standing get the most honour from skalds, unless their death was particular.

  Finn, it seemed, had decided on a particular death.

  As the dawn struggled up, we stood and watched him stand in the cold — no Northman kneels, even to the gods — bareheaded and facing north, sprinkling the best white emperor salt in a cup of meltwater, which he then dedicated to Odin with all of All Father's names. Finally, he rammed The Godi into the earth, bowed his head, clasped the hilt and made his chilling vow, as promised to the god in the pit prison of Novgorod.

  I was filled with a distant, dull pain, a swill of memories of myself at the same age as Jon Asanes, hunting out thrall women in Skirringsaal in the first long winter with the Oathsworn, while Einar plotted and watched. Had Einar felt this same ache? He had been as separate and alone, I remembered.

  I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.

  Two days later, we crawled out on to that snow-scattered waste and headed away from the village, leaving the boat-marked ground that was the last home of Harelip and Cod-Biter.

  'A brass sun seeped through the dull lead of the sky and the stands of birch, no higher than a man on a horse and clumped like a bad beard on the face of the world. They were grim, clawed affairs, these trees, as black as if they had sucked their own shadows back up. Snow lay clotted on a brown heave of land and the air was still and raw.

  The carts lurched and rumbled to a halt, ponies standing splay-legged, heads bowed. We had fitted the wheels since there was more earth than snow, but that had been a mistake — the ground was hard frozen and the carts banged and slapped in every iron-forged rut, so that even the tired and sick got out and trudged with everyone else rather than suffer the lurch and bruise of it.

  Gizur and I stood at the stirrup of Vladimir's big black, all rib and bone hips, while he looked at the trees. We all looked at the trees and the opaque ribbon they fringed — the Don.

  'See,' said Gizur, his breath freezing in his beard as he spoke. 'The middle is darker, where the water is only just starting to form hard.'

  'A thaw is coming,' Dobyrynya declared, but Gizur knew the ways of water and shook his head, hard enough to rattle the ice points of his moustache.

  'No. The ice was broken recently. Less than an hour — look, you can see where the grue of it reformed from a time before that, too.'

  'There is traffic on the river,' Sigurd grunted, wiping the icicles from the bottom of his silver nose, where they clogged the hole that let him breath.

  'Just so,' Gizur beamed. 'Boats are breaking their way up and down to Sarkel and regularly enough to stop the centre channel freezing hard.'

  We all knew that we were on the Don, where it turned east into a great curve that went south, then slithered west to the Maeotian Lake, which the Khazars call Azov, meaning 'low' for it is so shallow. Following that great curve would bring us to Sarkel and take weeks.

  Gizur was beaming, because he had navigated us from a point four days east of Kiev to here as if we had been the ocean — give or take a tack here and there, as Avraham declared later, sullen and mournful over the loss of Morut. Yet now we had to choose, either the short way, a plunge straight across the Great White, or follow the Don's long, cold curl to Sarkel.

  'A long way still,' Dobrynya said 'with no respite at Biela Viezha.'

  No-one had to ask why; the Prince of Novgorod, arriving with a tattered band like us, miles from his own domain and firmly at the far frontiers of his brother's lands, would excite more than a lit
tle attention. If his brother's name still held sway at Sarkel — called Biela Viezha, the White Castle, by the Slavs — now that Sviatoslav was gone.

  All eyes were on me. Somewhere in that bleak ice waste was what we sought and I had to steer them all to richness with the hilt runes on my sabre. The smile I gave them back was, I hoped, as bright and sure as sunrise.

  We turned back to the line of carts and people, where only a few of the druzhina were now horsed and everyone else so swathed in chapeless bundles that it was hard to tell man from woman, or warrior from thrall. They huddled into their clothes and stamped feet made fat in braided straw overshoes, which the horses kept trying to eat.

  'What now, Trader?' demanded Kvasir, wiping the weep from his good eye. Thorgunna made to help and he slapped her hand away, irritated. She scowled in return.

  'It needs proper attention.'

  'I am doing so. Go and weave something.'

  Thorgunna fixed him with her sheep-dropping eyes. 'It is time I died,' she declared firmly. 'Time I was dropped in my grave, for I have nothing left, it seems, to offer this life or the man I have in it.'

  'You may live or die as you see fit,' growled Kvasir, sullenly, 'providing you decide without poking my eye. Whatever your decision, we will all have to live with the consequences.'

  Finn, hunched up like a seal in clothes and swaddled cloak, offered up a cracked bell of a laugh as Thorgunna threw up one hand in annoyance and left Kvasir and his eye.

  'We should cut across the Great White, south to Sarkel,' Finn added. Avraham, hearing this, gave a short, sharp bark of laughter, while Gizur frowned and crushed the ice out of his beard, for the Great White was one sea he could not navigate.

  Did you bleat?' Finn asked, sour-faced.

  'What has been crossed so far is as nothing compared to what lies out there,' Avraham said, waving a hand in the general direction of the east. 'That is a howling wilderness, which offers nothing to men, summer or winter.'

  'You have been there?' Gyrth interrupted and Avraham cocked a haughty eyebrow.