by Robert Low
The Oathsworn did not bother with them much — there was no room in Hoskuld’s boat for slaves and enough of the better-looking ones had stayed, cowering, for men to look over and decide what to do with.
Hoskuld’s crew did the fighting and chasing, yelling and waving weapons, slick with the raid-lust that comes on men who never usually get a lick of the rann-sack — even Hoskuld himself puffed along with a long, single-edged old seax in one fist and kicked a door, beaming from the great headland of his face. His snarling joy was spoiled a little when the door did not give way and the force of his kick landed him on his arse. He got up, looking right and left, while folk pretended not to notice.
There were only two fighters. One was the white-hair, who came storming round the side of the main steading of the place, an axe in either hand and both wrists with enough old memories in them to show that, in his youth, he would have been feared.
Gorm aimed a wild swing at him, which the man easily dodged and, if he had not been slowed by age and stiffness, the return would have spilled a deal of Gorm’s belly into the kale patch. It did enough to make Gorm back off and call for help, so that Halk rushed in from one side and the old man, snarling with the desperation of the doomed, hurled himself on the Orkneyman with a shrill cry, like an owl threading the night with screech.
Crowbone watched Gorm and Halk cut the old man down, flurrying blows long after the blood-speckled grey hair was the only thing that moved on the man, wisping stickily in the wind.
‘Bravely done,’ Murrough growled and spat. Crowbone said nothing; brave or not, it was done and that was what mattered.
The other fighter was the idiot thrall, who took up the wood axe and moved to the caged man, turning this way and that, standing guard. Hoskuld scrambled up from his episode with the door and launched himself at the thrall, thinking the stub of a nithing would turn and run.
Instead, the axe whirled up and cut. It would have been a death-blow, for sure, save that the loose axehead flew off, back over the thrall’s shoulder and made Vandrad Sygni hunch his neck into his shoulders as it whizzed past him. But the thrall’s blow was with the haft only, which was battleluck for Hoskuld, since it took him in the left ribs and drove the air out of him as if he was a dead cow. Then the thrall followed it up with a head smack that laid Hoskuld flat with a groan.
‘Do not kill him!’ Kaetilmund yelled, as Vandrad, scowling, nocked an arrow to his bow. ‘That thrall is too valuable to waste.’
The Oathsworn agreed with some chuckles — all save Vandrad, who still had the memory of the axe-bit bird-whirring too close to his head — and closed in on the thrall, who half-crouched with his stick. Inside the cage, the shadowed figure stirred and Crowbone saw the gleam of white hair or beard.
‘Hold there,’ Vigfuss said. ‘Drop that little stick and no harm will come to you.’
A choking laugh came from the shadowed figure in the cage. ‘Too late for that,’ he wheezed.
The thrall did not move at all, but a young dog the colour of yellow corn suddenly bounded out from behind some huts and skidded up to stand before him, legs splayed and growling.
The Oathsworn tensed a little, for no-one liked dogs, which were just fur bundles with a mouthful of filthy blades.
‘Call that hound off, thrall,’ Vandrad rumbled. ‘Or I will kill it and whack your bottom with your little stick.’
‘It is a bitch,’ the caged man growled. ‘A guard for the village.’
‘Not such a good one,’ Crowbone pointed out and felt the caged man’s eyes appraising him. He did not like to be watched where he could not see and so moved a little way round, to try and see more than just the gleam of white hair or beard; the thrall watched him, flexing his hand on the axe-shaft. The yellow dog wagged her tail and licked the back of the thrall’s hand.
‘It liked everyone too much,’ the caged man observed.
‘Now you have your reward,’ Crowbone said, ‘for if it had been on guard, perhaps your village would not be leaking blood down the street.’
‘Not my village,’ said the caged man and now Crowbone saw him clearly — a thin face, like a ravaged hawk, with a shock of white hair and a tangle of grey-white beard. He had a tunic and breeks, which had once been fine but were now smeared and stained with blood and the leakings from filthy wrappings round both of his hands. The eyes that met Crowbone’s own were fox-sharp, all the same.
Murrough, hearing women shriek and wanting to be off in that direction, finally had had enough. ‘Throw down that stick,’ he growled jutting his jaw, but the look he got back caught Crowbone’s attention and made him study the thrall intently.
There was no wolf at bay in those eyes, nor was there the wild flare of darting looks that sought an escape. Most revealing of all, there was the stare itself. A thrall who knew that his place was no more than that of a sheep would have stared at the ground. Instead, the thrall’s eyes, slightly narrowing, were a blue appraisal of Murrough, as if marking where he would strike for best effect. It was then, too, that Crowbone saw the thrall was fastened by a length of chain to the cage and, for a moment, felt the sharp bite of his own thrall’s chain on his neck, tasted the acrid stink of the privy.
Murrough saw the thrall’s look, too, and was made wary by it — which showed sense, Crowbone thought, but still he snapped a command for Murrough to be still just in case the Irishman launched an attack certain to include pain for one or the other and possibly a deal of blood. The others watched, wary as hounds round a stag.
‘Berto,’ said the grey-head, almost wearily, ‘I am done. Let their leader come up.’
The youth called Berto let the stick drop a notch and half-turned to the man in the cage, his bland, beardless face furrowed with concern. The tension leached away and, lumbering up like a great bear, Onund Hnufa clapped Murrough on one shoulder and glanced at the thrall.
‘Not bad, fetar-garmr,’ he said and folk laughed at the term, which meant ‘chain-dog’ and could be directed at both the thrall and the yellow bitch equally. Then Onund turned to Murrough and the others.
‘Leather,’ he said and they remembered why they had come and went off to hunt some out. Kaetilmund stayed and went slowly up to the cage and cracked it open with a sharp blow that made the dog squeeze out a bark. Murrough hauled out the man, gently enough, and the thrall knelt by his head. When Crowbone moved up, the thrall fixed him with summer-sky eyes dulled with misery.
‘My thanks,’ the grey-hair said to Crowbone. ‘This is Berto. He is from the Wend lands. I am called Grima, from Bjarmaland.’
‘A long way from home,’ Crowbone noted and Grima chuckled, a moth-wing of sound. His wrapped hands soaked some fresh blood on to the old stains of his tunic. There was gold thread in that tunic, Crowbone noted.
‘Need help with those fingers, old yin?’ Kaetilmund asked. ‘We have a skald who knows some healing runes.’
Grima smiled and raised both blood-swaddled hands.
‘Hrodfolc’s joke,’ he said. ‘He fed me bowls of good stew with meat in, but cut a finger off and never let me know which stew it was in. Where is he, by the way?’
Crowbone told him and Grima’s grin was sharp and yellow.
‘Good. Nithing Frisian fud — he thought I would not eat for fear of swallowing my own flesh,’ Grima said and then laughed. ‘He knew better when I asked him to cook it longer — my own meat is a little too aged to be tender.’
Crowbone and Kaetilmund smiled at this, a defiance they appreciated.
‘Balle did this to me, the whore’s by-blow,’ Grima wheezed.
His eyes closed while pain washed through him, keen enough for Crowbone to feel it as well.
‘This flatness is no place for a man from the north mountains to die,’ he added. ‘Who are you, then, who is here to witness it?’
Crowbone told him, adding that the death was still a way off — then Kaetilmund finished unwrapping the first of the hands and Crowbone saw the ugly black and red and pus yellow of it. He realised the b
right glitter of Grima’s eyes was fever.
‘Good,’ said Grima. ‘Now all truths are almost unveiled. The gods are kind, for I know your fame. With your help I will leave this cursed place and die where I belong. But I have little time, so listen, Olaf, son of Tryggve, now of the Oathsworn. I am Grima. Once I was known as you are known, for I led the Raudanbrodrum — do you know of them?’
The Red Brothers. Crowbone had heard of this varjazi band and their leader’s name, which meant ‘a full helm’ in the honest tongue of the north and was usually given to a man whose face was hard and set as iron, so that only his eyes gave anything away. He had not heard these names for some years and said so; Grima nodded weakly.
‘This is the last you see here. We are rule-bound — though not as fiercely oathed as you — and most of us did not do well faring out in the east, along the Silk Road, so we came down on to the decent waters of the Baltic and raided the Wend lands, where I thought they would be fat and lazy, since it had not seen rann-sack for some years. Well, here I am, dying for lack of luck — the raiding was poor and all we had was Berto here, which a certain Balle did not think enough. He is wrong — Berto is worth a deal as you may discover when the matter is ripe. I hear you were luckier — all the silver of the world, eh?’
‘Yet we are here, in the same flat shit-hole,’ Kaetilmund pointed out, hoping to take Grima’s mind off the second unwrapping, for the bindings were matted to the stumps and Grima hissed blood on to his teeth from his bitten lip.
‘You still fare better than me, I am thinking,’ he answered wryly, when he could speak, ‘since most of your fingers are still on the end of your hands and your life is not unravelled yet. Now here is the way of it. Balle was my Chosen Man, but he grew tired of waiting and did not want to challenge in the usual way, the white-livered tick. He killed all the men who were loyal to me — not many, the years had thinned them, but I realised that too late — and threw me over the side of my own ship. I would have been red-murdered then if Berto had not leaped after and towed me to shore. The gods clearly turned their back on me all the same — for this Hrodfolc took us both.’
Kaetilmund gave Berto an admiring grin.
‘Well, No-Toes,’ he declared. ‘You may have no skill with an axe or a lathe, but it seems you are more fish than chain-dog.’
Crowbone simply wondered why the thrall had done it, for there seemed little reason for it. Grima saw the look and knew it for what it was. When he spoke Crowbone jerked, as he always did when he suspected folk were reading the whirl of his thought-cage.
‘Perhaps because I did not kill him and he was no better than a thrall when I took him anyway,’ Grima said. ‘Nothing much changed for him except he breathed sea air. I am in his debt. I have nothing to give to him but what I can make happen in the short time left me, with my last breaths. He has eighteen summers on him and will prove valuable to you. Trust me in this and free him, in return for what I can give.’
Crowbone smiled.
‘What makes you think you have anything I need?’ he pointed out and Grima grinned; sweat rolled off him. Gjallandi had come up in time to see and make tutting sounds as he inspected the ruin of the old warrior’s hands.
‘You are a prince with no princely ship crew I can see,’ Grima grunted. ‘Unless you have more hidden away. Which means you have no princely ship, either. I am jarl of the Red Brothers, who are a crew with a ship and in need of a prince. Free Berto and I will lead you to them. Kill this Balle and those who follow him and make me jarl again — then I will hand crew and ship to you, for I have no use for them where I am going.’
Crowbone considered it and was thinking the old man might not last long enough for all this. He was set to scowling when Grima chuckled.
‘I will live long enough to watch Balle’s face when I arrive full in it with a prince and a fistful of the famed Oathsworn,’ he growled and Crowbone sat still for a time, put out at the idea of the old man reading his thoughts — or, worse, his own face being so blatant that anyone could see what went on inside his head.
Then he nodded and spoke the words aloud, so there would be no going back. The thrall blinked a little from the bland round of his face and Kaetilmund, grinning, cracked the links of the chain, so that the freed thrall could unravel himself.
‘There you have it, No-Toes,’ he said. ‘Fetch that axehead back and fix it on properly, for you can carry it like a man now. You had better thank Prince Olaf here, for now you are a warrior.’
‘I am Berto. I am thanking.’
The voice was high and thick with accent, for the Wend knew Norse only as spoken by Frisians and his own sort, which was as like the true sounds of men as dogs barking. Crowbone held the flat gaze of the Wend with his own odd eyes, seeing the deep blue eyes and round olive face of a youth not yet even into beard. He had seen Wends before, travelling up the Odra River with Orm. He had not thought much of them, so he was surprised to find himself being studied carefully and there was something both attractive and disturbing about that; not much of a thrall in his own lands, this one, he thought, that he can keep his head up and his eyes bold. He found he had muttered as much aloud.
‘No doubt a prince at home,’ Onund grunted, hearing it as he passed. ‘As all thralls are who are raided from others.’
He went away laughing, with others who knew how Crowbone had been rescued by Orm — and claimed his princely rank with his first words — joining in. Crowbone, remembering the slaughter that had come after, could not find a smile and turned to the old man instead, cocking his head in a question.
‘We have a sto?var,’ Grima said. ‘An old seasonal place where we lie up. The crew will be there, for Balle has all the clever of a rock and thinks me dead and gone.’
Berto the Wend bent his head over the old man while the yellow dog whined and tried to shove its scarred ears under an oxter. It was, Kaetilmund thought, a powerful, wedge-headed bitch and as ugly an animal as ever disgraced the earth. A strange friend for a thrall, he thought — but the Norns had woven them a deal of luck and you had to take such matters into account.
Berto cradled the old man’s head and waved away the greedy flies as Gjallandi marked out fresh runes on clean wrappings and rebound the blackening stumps. The metallic stink of blood was strong and the sweat ran stinging in Crowbone’s eyes.
‘This is Prince Olaf,’ Grima said to Berto, his eyes closed. ‘He will one day be a king and, if your life-luck holds as firm as it has done, you may profit each other yet, for all that he is of the Oathsworn and you follow the Christ.’
Crowbone looked at Berto and saw the fierceness in his round, large-eyed, sharp-nosed face, so that he looked, for a moment, like a hunting owl. He nodded. Grima spasmed with pain as Hoskuld’s men picked him up and half-carried, half-dragged him back to the ship.
Onund Hnufa lumbered up as the harsh stink of smoke wafted to Crowbone’s nose. The same wind brought distant sobbing and the crackle of burning and Crowbone turned moodily away as the terp started to flare and burn, spilling smoke to stain the sky.
Onund lumbered alongside, happily clutching their entire treasure — a stiff, thick square of half-cured leather the size of his chest.
Holmtun, Isle of Mann, some time later …
Olaf Irish-Shoes
Jarl Godred perched on a bench in his own hall while Olaf lolled in his High Seat draped in a winter wolf pelt that ran like a river of milk down on to his shoulders. Under the fur coddling them his shoulders were still wide, despite his hair and the winter wolf pelt being the same colour. The matching white beard was twisted in three long braids weighted with rust-spotted iron rings. Above it, out of a knob-cheeked face, the eyes, feral as hunting cats, glittered like blue ice.
Godred saw that what could be a smile was hacked out of the Jarl of the Dyfflin’s lumpy face as he deviously questioned Ogmund about the raiders. Not only was the old war-dog spoiling for another bash at the Ui Neill — a war Godred had always thought beyond foolish — now he was showing an
unhealthy interest in monks.
Olaf’s royal belly strained the tunic, which had been delicate green trimmed with red knotwork once but was now mainly food stains; standing close to him, Ogmund thought it might be possible to trace the whole life of Olaf Irish-Shoes in those stains, meal by meal, like reading runes on a raised stone.
‘This son of Gunnhild said he sought the monk Drostan?’ the Jarl of Dyfflin asked, the smile still like a cleft in rock.
Ogmund wished the lord of Dyfflin would not smile, for it was as off-putting as wolf-breath on the back of your neck. So was the look of his own Jarl Godred and he knew Hardmouth was less than happy with the entire business — especially the arrival of Olaf Irish-Shoes, stamping his authority.
‘Not in all those words,’ he answered, ‘but it was clear that was what he did when you tally matters up.’
He glanced at Godred, who sat next to Sitric, Olaf’s younger son. The twig does not fall far from the tree, Ogmund thought, for Sitric, still dark-haired, was round-faced and stocky. One day he and his da would be as alike as two gobs of spit — the eldest boy was a third gob of the same spit and limped so that no-one these days called him anything but Jarnkne — Iron Knee.
There was another son, Raghnall, back in Dyfflin and Ogmund had seen him, too. Tall and cream-haired, from a different mother, he was Olaf’s favourite. He liked his women, did Olaf — currently he was thundering himself into the thighs of an Irish beauty called Gormflaeth and showing little sign that his belly got in the way of matters.
‘We know Ulf found two dead monks in a keill up in the hills,’ Sitric growled, shaking his head. ‘One looked to have had his head beaten in, but the rats had eaten well on the pair of them, it was hard to tell. Two monks, all the same. This Drostan is dead.’
‘Then who was with Hoskuld the Trader?’ demanded Olaf, leaning back on the High Seat and spreading his feet to the fire — sensibly shod feet, Ogmund noted with surprise but then, the name ‘cuarans’, Irish Shoes, was only given by Norwegians and Danes as a sneer against the Dyfflin Norse, who were all thought to be half-Irish of lesser worth because they had forgotten how to be true people and taken to wearing Irisher sandals.