The White Raven

by Robert Low

  She cocked her head like a quizzical bird and, in good Greek, answered me with a smile. 'I hope that is friendly in your tongue.'

  I told her what it meant — shieldmaiden — though she seemed more like someone who could be called valmeyjar, which most ignorant people who are not from the fjords translate as shield-maiden, or battle-maiden. Really, that word means corpse-maiden, chooser of the slain and is a name to hand out to a woman who looks like a wolfs grandmother two weeks dead. I did not tell her this.

  'You know my name,' I added and left that hanging like a waiting hawk.

  'Amacyn, they call me,' she answered. 'Which is the name given to me as leader of the tupate and the name given to all such leaders, who then forsake all other family ties. It means Mother of the People, but the foolish Greeks once thought it stood as name for us all and so called us amazonoi.'

  'Who are the tupate?' I asked, my mind whirling already.

  She spread her hands to encompass all the riders. 'We are. In Greek it would be tabiti. It is hard to translate correctly, but the nearest would be — oathsworn.'

  I sat back on one heel at that. Oathsworn. Like us. I said so and she made a little head gesture, as if to say perhaps yes, perhaps no.

  'You have a sword,' I said in Greek. 'Like mine. Hild had it last.'

  She smiled, covering her face with her hand, which was custom, I learned. 'Hild. Is that the name you gave her, then? The one in the tomb of the Master of the World?'

  'That is the name she gave herself,' I answered, breathing heavily, for I felt on the edge of a cliff with a mad desire to fly. 'How did you come by the sword?'

  'Hild,' she repeated, then laughed, a surprising sound of lightness. 'Ildico. Yes, that would be part of her penance. Or a twisted joke.'

  I did not understand any of this and she saw it, nodded seriously and adjusted her squat more comfortably, so that her knees came up round her chin, long, thin hands clasped in front of her.

  'Long ago,' she said, 'when the Volsungs brought their treasure and a new wife called Ildico to Atil, Master of the World, we were the Chosen Ones, charged with making sure of our Lord's undisturbed afterlife.'

  She waved a hand, slim, pale and languid as a dragonfly in summer heat and talked as if she had been there herself, as if it had been yesterday, or the day before.

  'This place,' she added. 'We made sure those who laboured on it could not reveal the secret of it, every one, from those who dug, to those who planned, to those who brought the treasure to place in it.'

  She paused and looked at me with those black eyes, so that my heart clenched. I could almost believe she had been there herself, dealing out the slaughter.

  'The steppe ran with blood for days,' she said, 'so that, in the end, only the Chosen Ones and the flies knew where the tomb lay and if the flies passed it on, mother to daughter, generation to generation, I never knew of it. But that is what the Chosen Ones did.'

  There was a long, wind-sighing pause while she fiddled with the thongs of her soft boots and gathered her thoughts. Mine were of all the shrieking fetches who drifted in this place and if this woman was one, for she spoke so knowingly of five centuries before. No wonder the rest of the steppe kept clear.

  'We did not expect the Master of the World to occupy it for some time, of course,' she went on, 'but the Volsungs came, with their gift of silver and swords and Ildico, the new bride. They did not stay for the wedding — did not dare, of course, since Ildico planned red murder — and when they left, one of us went with them.'

  'One of . . . you?' I asked, uncertainly. 'A Chosen One?'

  She nodded and shifted. 'Her name, as far as any Volsung knew, was my name — Amacyn. She was then leader of the tupate but forgot her oath for love of the smith, the one called Regin. She went back with him to the north and by the time it was discovered, it was too late. The Master of the World wanted her death, to keep the secret of his tomb, but we were told to wait until after his wedding.'

  By which time it was too late, for Ildico killed him on the wedding night. I licked dry lips, thinking on all the years between then and now and what that love had cost.

  'The oathbreaker was not hunted down, then,' I said, the mosaic of it filling in for me even as I spoke.

  The woman shrugged. 'The tupate had lost face and the one who favoured us was dead,' she said. 'The sons of the Master of the World did not care for us as much — but we had sworn to guard his tomb and so we did, as best as we were able. The last task of that tupate was to carry the Lord of the World to this place — then slay everyone who was not one of us.

  'After that, the Chosen Ones went home — but daughters were trained in war, given the secret and served, as best as could be done, down the long years. Faithful to the last task — to keep the secret of the tomb. The oath would not let us do less.'

  I knew that oath and how it bound. Who it bound. Hild. The woman nodded.

  'The oathbreaking Amacyn could not live with what she had done in the end, so it became known,' she went on softly. 'She birthed a daughter and did what we all do — passed on the secret of the tomb. My mother did so to me, which is how I know that the oathbreaking Amacyn then went into Regin's forge and would not come out, sealed it so that it could never be used again. Regin the smith died and some say his heart snapped because of both his loves were gone, woman and forge. All this was found out, piece by piece, over the years.'

  I saw the weft of it then, a harsh-woven cloak of misery visited on the innocent daughters of that forge village. All the ones who came after would not break that chain, waited until a girl was born — or chosen, even — and reached the full of their womanhood, then passed on the secret of Atil's tomb, an echo of what Regin's woman had once been. Then they went into the forge mountain, for the shame of what had been done. Probably those who thought twice about it were forced in; it became a god-ritual for the people who lived by the forge and they would be afraid to break it.

  The woman sat quietly and said nothing while I stammered all this out, hammering it straight as I said it.

  'Except for Hild,' I said, seeing it clearly, the sad, untangled knot of it. She had been stolen from that little Karelian village because Martin the priest thought he had found a secret and hired a man called Skartsmadr Mikill, Quite The Dandy, to get it. When he could not find it he and his crew of Danes tried to force the knowledge from the villagers by taking what they clearly valued — the young, bewildered Hild, still raw with the whispered secret, still weeping from the loss of her mother, gone into the forge.

  In the end, Quite The Dandy found out how much she was valued; the villagers attacked them with such ferocity that those hard Danes had run for it, dragging Hild with them as their only prize. By the time she was delivered to Martin of Hammaburg they had taken out their anger and frustration on her so badly that her mind was cracking.

  I laid out the tale of Hild for this latest Amacyn — poor demented Hild, rescued by us, burdened with a secret and a centuries-old sin, burning for revenge on those who had used her and prepared to lead us all to Atil's tomb in return for the death of Skartsmadr Mikill and all his men.

  We had done that and Hild had fulfilled her part of the bargain —. at the cost of her mind. Had she been made mad by the goddess of the steppe, or the fetch of Ildico, or the guilt of knowing she betrayed the long line of those who had died and kept the secret?

  'Perhaps all of them,' agreed Amacyn, uncoiling slowly to her feet. 'It does not matter — the secret was revealed. She broke her oath.'

  And all who break such an oath end up dead. That I knew well enough.

  'After you quit this place,' Amacyn continued, 'those few of us who survived came here, but war was raging on the steppe and it took some time for us all to assemble, so we missed you.'

  I swallowed at that. If they had caught us then, staggering raggedly down to the Azov and the Sea of Darkness . . .

  'Afterwards,' she went on, 'the Khazar fist had gone, so the last of us came here in force. We had to d
ig through the roof to find out what had been done. There we saw a strange dead man on the throne and the Master of the World cast down and other strangers dead, including a woman. She had one of the Lord's swords; we realized then that one of those who had survived had the other.'

  My cracked lips were glued, now Hild was dead; Finn had been right all along. Then I realized what this woman wanted.

  'Yes,' she said, though I had not spoken. Then she sighed and rubbed the sores on her hands; I realized, suddenly, that she was in as bad a state as I was — as we all were, out on that frozen waste.

  'We are the last of our kind,' she went on, 'It falls to me to be the Amacyn in whose time his tomb is no longer a secret. We knew you would be back and listened for word that northmen were moving on the Grass Sea. It cost us much to come out on the steppe and kill them — but we did not expect another band and certainly not a prince from Novgorod. Then we knew it was all finished for us.'

  She stopped, stiff as the yellow stalks of frozen-dead grass; her eyes burned.

  'We are few and growing fewer,' she said, in a voice like a djinn of wind. 'Man-Haters, you call us, but that is not true. We have fathers and brothers and some of those here have men and children that they value. Too many have already died. We have failed to keep the secret and this fight on the steppe has ended us. We are passing from the world. We will go home to men, stop binding the foreheads of our girl children and cutting their cheeks, so that they feel the endurance of wounds before the nourishment of milk. But there is one last service we can perform for the Master of the World.'

  The words beat on me like raven wings. Passing from the world. Perhaps all Oathsworn are passing from the world, I was thinking, even as I saw, too, that she had ridden out to find a way to resolve matters other than with blood. I understood that only too well.

  Once before, this way had saved the Oathsworn at Atil's tomb and I did not think it would fail us now I looked at the sabre, then at the woman who wanted it more than the world itself. I knew now how she knew my name and what she thought we would want, but I asked, for form's sake.

  'What do you have to trade?'

  After I had asked my question, the warrior woman had put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, as if calling up a dog. Riders had come out, one of them leading a stumbling figure on a tether and, as they came closer, my belly flipped at the sight.

  Short Eldgrim. I had been right.

  He was thin — I had seen more meat on a skelf — and his grin showed that he had lost some teeth. But some of his old wits remained in the summer-blue cage of his head.

  'Ho, young Orm. What brings you here?'

  The woman called Amacyn looked at me.

  'Is this a good trade for you?'

  So we took Short Eldgrim into the middle of us and moved away, leaving the warrior women sitting their mounts and watching, their leader now with two swords. Finn came to me then, handed me a wood axe and a grin. 'You will need this until we can find you another good blade, Jarl Orm.'

  I shivered, wondering what would happen to me now, for I was sure that rune serpented sword of mine had protecting powers — and now it was gone. Forever. As easily as handing it over, no more than an arm movement; yet this was the blade that had once driven us from the Great City to the forge-heat of Serkland, had goaded us to fight and kill men we had once called oarmates.

  I had lingered as the others moved off and had watched what happened, what the women did. When I came back to the Oathsworn, I ignored the questions in their eyes and, since I had given up my runesword for them, they bit their lips and did not ask them aloud.

  Later still, when we were far away, we heard cries, faint on the wind, the yip-yowl chorus of all those warrior women. Eyes gleamed with fear then, for they thought the Man Killers were riding after us, but when I did nothing, they calmed down.

  No vengeful women came; I knew what had happened and said nothing on it, stayed hunched into myself and against the wolfish bite of wind until we came off the rolling white of the Grass Sea down over a series of shallow cliffs thick with scrubby pine and white-barked birch, skeletal and shivering. The sun hung in the pewter sky like a drop of molten metal.

  Ahead, hidden in the ice glare of the marsh that fringed it here, was the mighty body of the river itself, the Tanais, which was once the Scyth name for the Don and came to be the legendary name for travelling the lands we called Gardariki, down among the Mussulmen traders, who gave the name to us that everyone now seemed to use — Rhus.

  To go down the Tanais was every youngling's dream, an adventure without peer. The reality was always different and harsh and usually inscribed by grieving relatives on a memory stone back home.

  I looked to where Klepp Spaki moved, a dark figure trembling with cold; we would not even have a memory stone, for we had taken the greatest rune-carver with us and it was probable he would die here.

  I squinted, watery-eyed against the glare. If it affected me this badly, it was no wonder Kvasir's remaining eye had given up on him; I cursed myself one more time for having been blind myself and missing the signs of it.

  To the south, just above where the Don's black-watered sibling, the Donets, joined it, not far from where both split into a thousand muddy channels, was Biela Viehza, the Khazar Sarkel. Close enough for me to see the feathers of smoke from its fires and, black against their ochre threads, the dark and solitary rider moving steadily in our direction.

  'Seems alone,' Finnlaith grunted. 'Shall I shoot him when he gets in range?'

  'Get Fish to hook this one, too,' added Onund and there were grim chuckles at that.

  'Well, there is no place to hide here,' I said, 'so it seems to me he has seen us as we have seen him. Does he look bothered to you?'

  'I can change that,' Finn said, but he made no move. We stood for a moment and then Short Eldgrim said: 'It is cold here.'

  'I know,' answered Thordis softly. 'We will be warm by and by.'

  I looked at him then, the slow-blinking, washed blue eyes in that white-scarred face, bundled up in cloak and tunics handed over by men eager to see him safe and warm, as if he was a talisman for us all. When we had him safe in the middle of us, Thordis had peeled off his ragged old tunic to give him a fresh and thicker one.

  She had stopped and suckled her breath in, then whirled him round, so his naked back was to me. I blenched; it was a mass of blackened, red-raw sores, the half-healed burns of little Christ-crosses, all making up one large one, down his spine and across the shoulderblades. Now I knew how Martin had unlocked the memories in Short Eldgrim's half-addled head.

  'If ever we find that monk again,' Thordis said stiffly, 'I will want words with him.'

  Now she tried to wrap his head in more wool and he growled at her. 'Stop fussing woman, I am warm enough here.'

  He stamped his feet against the cold and looked at me.

  'I lost Cod-Biter on the way,' he said. Then he stopped and looked puzzled. 'Runes,' he said.

  'I found Cod-Biter,' I said and he smiled at that and nodded. Then he said: 'Where are Einar and the others . . . no, wait. They are gone. Orm . . . sorry, I . . .'

  He stopped, frowning. 'Lambisson. That fucking little monk . . . he hurt me, the little shit, him and his asking about runes and silver . . .'

  He stopped again and a sob wrenched from him, a child's whimper. Thordis wrapped him inside her own cloak and I felt my heart lurch and cold anger settle in my belly.

  'What now?' demanded Gizur. 'Are we going back to the tomb? What about the silver?'

  We were never going back to the tomb and the silver was gone from us, but I did not say that, or how I knew. I felt as if I had forgotten something important, left it lying back there in the snow — but it was only the tug of that sword, so long a part of me and now gone. I felt the loss, like a missing limb, for a long time after, but never counted it a cost when weighed against the bland, blue smile of Eldgrim's eyes.

  'Kvasir and Thorgunna,' I said. Gizur shook his head sorrowfully.
/>   'No sooner do we free one than we lose two,' he said —but the rest of it was in the grim set of his face; our oarmates were there and needing help. There was also silver ahead by the cartload and it belonged to the Oathsworn.

  The rider came closer and Finn said, suddenly: 'Morut.'

  The Khazar tracker came up to us on his indestructible horse, leading another, a short, stiff-maned, patient little animal. He sat a little way off and waited until we came up to him, moving like wraiths over the windswept snow.

  'Heya, wee man,' growled Finn and Morut nodded back, wary at his reception. Since he had ridden openly up to us, I was prepared to let him speak.

  'The little prince is in Sarkel,' he announced. 'Well, not in it exactly. The garrison will not let the prince of Novgorod inside the walls, so they are in the town, down by the river, organizing boats and unloading carts.'

  'Is the garrison likely to let Vladimir inside the walls?' I asked. Morut shook his head and pursed chapped lips, rubbed shiny with fat to stop them splitting further.

  'Avraham has been sent to persuade them, but I am thinking he has exactly the other idea — there are men from Kiev two days march away, led by Sveinald and his son. They would be here already save that the river has frozen over again between him and Sarkel and they have had to abandon their boats and walk.'

  That was news worth the knowing — but I wondered how Morut had discovered it. The little tracker shrugged. 'Tien was with them. They came with only two horses, down the river in those big heavy boats they have. Tien was sent on one horse to Sarkel to find out news and we met, not far beyond the Ditch Bridge.'

  Tien. I cursed him, for it was clear he had headed for Kiev to tell all he knew as soon as we had vanished into the Great White.

  'Yes,' confirmed Morut, 'but Kiev already knew, for that monk Martin came out of the wilderness, as near death as made little difference. He told all in return for them saving his life — though he lost a foot from the cold.'