Crowbone o-5

by Robert Low

  The Witch-Queen’s Crew

  The wind hissed out of the dark, thick with sea-salt and fear, for it was a raider’s wind, one that could drive dragon-ships straight down the throat of the town and folk huddled, seeing them out there in the dark. The three men moved closer to the flattening flames of the brazier; the youngest stared over his shoulder at the comfort of the gate they guarded.

  ‘A raw night,’ said a voice and men turned to stare at the cloaked man who limped up. The nearest to the visitor was an old man whose hair wisped like white smoke in the dark and he half-lowered the point of his suspicious spear a little. Next to him, a man with a timber leg struggled to get off the log he squatted on. The boy, his face bright with firelight, squinted at the newcomer, who was no more than a dark figure, blooded here and there by the flames.

  Erling came up, slow and easy, then flourished a leather flask out from under the cloak and unstoppered it.

  ‘As well you have me, then, to take the chill off,’ he grunted and passed it over. ‘Thought you lot could use it. Done this meself an’ no-one cares, do they?’

  The old man hesitated, then laid the spear down and took the flask, tilted it and swallowed.

  ‘You have the right of it friend,’ he said, hoarse with the spirit’s grip on his throat. He passed it to the timber-leg, who raised it in a grinning salute to Erling before swallowing.

  ‘You with the masons, then?’ asked the youth and Erling nodded.

  ‘If your lot would fix the yett,’ the old man grumbled, ‘we would be in the dry and warm.’

  He got the flask back and held it a longer time at his lips before handing it back to Erling. He hefted it for a grinning moment, then handed it to the boy.

  ‘Your ma will flay you,’ the old man declared and the boy bristled.

  ‘Old enough to stand here with my arse frozen,’ he said, trying to be gruff. ‘Old enough to hold a spear.’

  ‘Aye, right enough,’ Timber-Leg added bitterly. ‘If the raiders come, old enough to die at this gate, too — so old enough to drink.’

  ‘They say the Witch-Queen’s son is out there,’ the old man added softly.

  ‘With some sort of shapechanger,’ the boy added, eyes moist and bright with drink that choked him and which he would not admit did just that. The course of it in his blood added to the raw thrill of stories brought back by Ogmund’s men.

  ‘They say he can kill in an eyeblink. Maelle saw it happen when Ulf died.’

  Timber-Leg snorted.

  ‘Shapechanger my arse,’ he spat bitterly. ‘Not that one is needed here — all the good men are gone to Olaf’s army at Dyfflin, save for Ogmund. Him and a handful in a fortress with a broken gate. And us. Old, crippled and over-young — what are we likely to do against sea-raiders?’

  ‘Not much for your part,’ answered the boy scornfully, ‘but I have two good legs and can use a spear.’

  ‘Enough,’ snapped the old man angrily. ‘Ghile-beg here has seen fighting which you have not. It is more than likely that if the raiders come, you will not be dancing this time next year.’

  He turned to Erling and seemed surprised to find the flask still in his hand. He raised it in toast and drank, then smacked his lips and scowled back at the boy.

  ‘No more for you. You are already at the moment when rudeness seems wit.’

  Erling laughed and shook his head in mock sorrow.

  ‘If the Witch-Queen comes, with her son and the shapechanger,’ he declared, ‘it might be better to be gone away. But that is unlikely. After all — what would bring them to Holmtun that is worth the taking?’

  The old man spat angrily in the flames.

  ‘Some prisoner,’ he declared. ‘Dragged into the borg to be put to the question by Ogmund.’

  ‘He should have taken him to Olaf in Dyfflin,’ Timber-Leg declared, ‘but wants to wave answers at the king and the jarl, to show his cleverness.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Erling, stretching a little so that the cloak slackened round his body. A shadow flitted like an owl in flight and only he noticed it. ‘This is as I had heard it and so it is a sore struggle of task you have, lads, and no mistake. You seem brave boys, all the same, and we have shared drink this night, so it is all a right pity.’

  The old man held the flask up to his lips and realised it was empty as he lowered it.

  ‘Pity?’ he demanded owlishly, handing the empty flask back to Erling. ‘What is a pity — other than that this fine flask is empty?’

  He handed the empty flask back to Erling, who took it with one hand and came up with the other full of bright, winking steel.

  ‘This is,’ he said and gave three quick, sharp blows into the old man’s ribs, catching the body close to him so that the shocked eyes, rheum-bright and bewildered stared into his own. The last breath tickled the hairs in Erling’s nose.

  ‘And he is,’ he added with a nod to Timber-Leg, holding the old man in the crook of one arm before letting him slide to the cobbles. Timber-Leg whirled as the dark figure spirited out of the blackness behind them; he had time to see an angel’s face, bloody with firelight, before a great scythe of light stole his sight forever.

  The boy whimpered and backed away, the horror robbing his throat of sound. Od came out of the darkness towards him, his head cocked to one side like a bird studying a beetle. He waved the sword to make the boy twitch and dance.

  ‘Do not play with him,’ Erling ordered sharply and Od gave a little shrug and struck like an adder.

  Erling whistled and now the dark spilled out men, Gudrod striding at their head over the unguarded raising-bridge, through the broken yett and over the three bodies and blood, into the borg of Holmtun.

  In the deep of the place, Ogmund stood slick with sweat before the hanging figure of Hoskuld, the trader’s naked body dark with streaks of blood and shit. Ogmund was thinking he should have called Murchadh down to do the heavy work with the whip and hot iron. He did not like the burning feeling he had down one arm, nor the rasp when he tried to breathe — but the lure of winning for himself the information everyone sought was too strong. It was an advantage to have this place empty of fighting men save for his own ship’s crew.

  Old, am I, he thought savagely and hefted the whip. He wondered if this trader had, as he claimed, told all he knew. A limping priest and a written message held by the monks — he glanced sideways at the document he’d had fetched from the monastery. The monks had squealed a bit at that, he had heard. The original had been sealed and marked for a Jarl Orm, as the trader had said — so that was real enough but might be anything, since Ogmund could not read it. He did not know of any jarl called Orm.

  ‘You have more to say,’ he crooned to the bloody dangle that was Hoskuld and took a deep breath as he raised the whip, wincing at the stitch in his side. ‘I will have it.’

  There was a clattering on the stairs and he turned with annoyance; he wanted no-one around when the trader vomited up all he knew.

  ‘Murchadh, I told you …’

  It was not Murchadh. It was the Witch-Queen’s son, with the terrible, beautiful youth behind him.

  He had time only to discover how old and slow he truly was before the angelic youth blurred the life from him with a handful of bright steel, cold and silvered as a winter dawn.

  North and west of Mann, not long afterwards …

  Crowbone’s Crew

  The sea Mann sits in is a black-souled, scawmy water that can turn vicious out of a clear blue sky. Like a woman with a smile, Stick-Starer said, who has one hand behind her back with an iron skillet in it and a deal of stored-up argument.

  The two ships had tacked and twisted a painful way south from Hvitrann — Crowbone did not want to row the Shadow off and leave the knarr behind again — a long muscle-ache of hauling the sail up and down until the palm-welts burst. Men did not complain, all the same, for they were aware that they had burned out a borg and slain a Galgeddil lord; putting distance between them and the bodies on the shingle was well worth
some blisters and ache.

  ‘I wish we had Finn’s weather hat,’ Kaetilmund roared out when the first wind squalled out on them, hard on the berthing side, swirling like the tongue of a lip-licking cat, so that the Shadow heeled and staggered with it.

  Those who knew about Finn’s reputedly magical headgear laughed, but Crowbone stayed grim; he did not like the white-faced, fork-tailed Ran-sparrows he had seen earlier, whipping through the wave spume, low and fast as arrows.

  ‘St Peter’s birds,’ Gorm declared, seeing Crowbone watch them.

  ‘Because they seem to walk on water, like Christ as witnessed by that holy man once,’ he explained. Crowbone did not care what the Christ-followers called them; he only knew the Ran birds spoke of storm. Besides, he did not want to speak to Gorm, or the others now — he had what he wanted from Halk, the Orkney steersman, who made it clear he was too new to Hoskuld’s crew to care about them much.

  ‘Hoskuld had three gold coins from this priest he met in Holmtun,’ Halk told Crowbone, the wind that took them from under the smoke of Hvitrann whipping the hair away from his round, thick face. ‘One took the priest and ship to Olaf in Dyfflin, as you know. A second took him to Sand Vik, where they found me to steer for them.’

  He broke off and grinned ruefully.

  ‘If I had known …’ he began and Crowbone’s stare silenced him as surely as if he had clapped a hand across his mouth. It was clear the prince did not care much what Halk thought, clearer still that he cared less for the regret Halk felt. The steersman wondered if he had made a mistake in allying himself to this prince, for he felt the eyes of Gorm and the others on him from the far end of the boat and the blue-brown gimlets of Crowbone from this end; now he knew how the iron felt between hammer and anvil.

  ‘The third,’ he went on, feeling the spit dry in his mouth under the odd-eyed stare, ‘took the priest across to Torridun, where he was left. We then went back to Mann where Hoskuld took the writing for Orm. Then on to the Baltic, charged with finding Orm Bear-Slayer and telling him of matters.’

  ‘Torridun?’ demanded Crowbone and had the answer — the last old fortress-town of the Painted Folk who had once been strong in the north, before the vik-raiders from Norway ended them and let the kings of Alba reduce them further. Torfness, some knew it as, because the folk there found grass sods that burned like wood. Why would a monk be plootering in the ruins of that place?

  He asked Halk, who shrugged.

  ‘Not ruined entirely — traders from Norway still go there. Besides, he is a priest,’ he corrected. ‘Not a monk.’

  ‘They are all the same,’ Crowbone declared, waving a dismissive hand and Halk, politely enough, Crowbone noted, put the matter to rights. A priest was more of a Christ-follower than a monk. Anyone could become a monk, but a priest was trained by others of his kind to talk to their god personally.

  ‘He was a hard man, this Drostan,’ Halk ended. ‘A skelf has more meat, yet he was wiry for all that — and the foot must have pained him a great deal, judging by the limp he had, but he never made a sound on matters. Not that you could have understood it much, between his lack of teeth and his way of speaking. Saxlander, Gorm said. From Hammaburg.’

  The hackles rose on Crowbone’s neck.

  ‘We have to run with the wind,’ Stick-Starer yelled, whirling Crowbone to the sound of his voice. The wind keened and he saw the rain sheet between him and the knarr; he fretted like the spume-ragged tops of the waves, wanting to keep the knarr in sight.

  He was vaguely aware of it, as if, like the alfar, it was truly visible only out of the corner of the eye. His mind was back on the winter steppe, the Great White, where he huddled in the lee of Orm’s armpit under an upturned cart as the howling wind scoured snow over the enemies who had kidnapped them. They had been led by a priest from Hammaburg called Martin, a man with a mouthful of ruined teeth, who had lost his shoe trying to kick out at Orm before vanishing into the shrieking whiteness, staggering towards Kiev, four days away.

  Much later, Crowbone had heard how this Martin had been picked up and carted to Kiev. In return for them saving his life, he had told the ruler there, Yaropolk, all he knew of Orm and the men out on the steppe hunting all the silver of the world. He had lived, too, Crowbone had heard — though it had cost him a foot and he limped badly.

  Martin. Orm’s bane. The one who had set the Oathsworn on the path of silver riches, in the days when Einar was jarl.

  The dark grew; things sparked in it and Thor rumbled out a laugh.

  ‘Third reef,’ bellowed Stick-Starer and men sprang to the walrus-hide ropes. Mar blinked rain from his lashes and saw the grim jut of Crowbone’s jaw; the knarr could no longer be seen, yet the boy, shaven face pebbled with water, stared stubbornly at where it had been, as if he could reel it in with the force of his odd eyes.

  Nothing, Mar thought, would surprise me about this prince — yet the world was reduced to grey and black, as if it sat on them like a gull on eggs. Then the searing light split it with a flash that left the jagged print of it on the back of his eyeballs and the stone in Mar’s belly sank, cold and deep.

  ‘Not even Finn’s Weatherhat will find a safe harbour now,’ Onund roared and even through the tearing wind the bitterness in his voice was gall to Crowbone. The waves had no rhyme to them, torn and ragged by the wind before they could take shape or order. They hurtled at the Shadow and a sheet of water creamed down the length of her, the spray horizontal as braced spears.

  Yet they all saw Crowbone, still as the prow beast, standing with one hand on a line and the wind whipping his braids on either side of his face, staring straight ahead as the Shadow plunged into the long dark, the scowl on him darker yet.

  They thought he was raging at being separated from the knarr, or furious at the storm itself. They were wrong. Crowbone’s head was full of a name which told him almost everything he needed to know.

  Martin.

  Run with the wind, Thorgeir had said, for that is what the Shadow will do. Bergfinn had no better option, so that is what they did. It was a good knarr, even laden as it was, coursing up the great glassy swells, cutting through the white spume-mane, planing down the far side. It was built for this, after all, more so than a drakkar.

  After a while, with the sail reefed to the last knot, enough only to keep them steering, men curled their bodies a little less; they would ride the storm out and, with the luck of whatever gods they followed, perhaps meet the Shadow when the last clouds blew themselves to rags.

  Thorgeir began to ease the thought that had padded blackly after him since he and Bergfinn had been sent back to this knarr — that the boat was their doom, a wyrd woven in wood by the Norns. He looked to where the wrapped body of Fastarr Skumr rolled in the wet, waiting a decent burning; next to it, Kari Ragnvaldrsson hugged his shattered hand and his misery, facing nothing better than a purse of hacksilver and an uncertain future no matter where they reached.

  Cripples and the dead, Thorgeir brooded. Not the best crew, but fitting for such a ship as this.

  The wyrd of it cracked open not long after when the steering oar collar snapped for the second time.

  Torvold, a fair smith in his day, could do nothing with his forge-built muscle. He should have let the steerboard go, but without it they were all doomed, so he dared not and the weight of it dragged him over the side even as men, their screams torn away by the howl of wind, sprang too late to help him.

  The Swift-Gliding balked, whirled like a stung stallion, no more use than a wood chip in a flood. Bergfinn had time to look at Thorgeir, to see his answering, flat-eyed gaze, all hope sucked from it as he watched the Norn curse come at them, woven now in water.

  Then the great black-glass curl of sea fell on them like a cliff.

  Later …

  Vigfuss Drosbo looked, but could not see Crowbone in the deck huddle; he wondered if the prince was looking for birds to guide them, then realised that, sensibly, they were all on shore with a head under one wing. He saw Kaup, c
linging to the mast with one hand, his mask of a face twisted with terror; he did not like a sea storm, it seemed. No sane man did, though the way of it, as Vigfuss said to the Burned Man, was to keep bailing and not think hard on anything.

  It was day, Stick-Starer said, though you would be hard put to know it, but Mar and Kaetilmund staggered down the length of the deck, handing out a rising-meal of wet bread with most of the mould removed. There were some of the old crab claws too, so that Rovald, grinning and dripping, declared that he would at least get to eat them before their kin ate him.

  Crowbone blinked out of his head, where a storm raged almost as bad as the one sweeping the Shadow.

  Martin was the Drostan Orm had told him of, that was clear. If there had been a real Drostan to begin with, that one was dead and gone. Martin was a venom-spider and Crowbone remembered him, remembered the way the Saxlander priest had slit the throat of Bleikr, the beautiful dog Vladimir had given him. It would not, Crowbone thought, be much of a step to slitting the throat of an innocent monk called Drostan.

  That whirling wind of possibilities, lashed with the confused sleet of what Martin was plotting, was bad enough. What was worse, what was the shrieking tempest of it all, was the matter of Orm in it. What had he been told? Had he told Crowbone all he knew?

  And the great crushing wave of it — could Orm be trusted? It had come to him that he had, perhaps, misjudged Orm, dismissed him as a little jarl. It had come to him that this might not be the truth of matters, that Orm had ambitions and silver enough to raise men and ships — and use the Bloodaxe for his own ends. His hackles rose as his stomach fell away at the thought of Orm standing against him.

  Yet all that had happened pointed to it like a good hound scaring up game; Orm had sent him with Oathsworn, supposedly to guard and help him, but probably to spy as he tripped all the traps set by Martin for those chasing the secret of this Bloodaxe. Then Orm would snatch it at the last, was perhaps close by even now. The thought turned him left and right to search, burned him with the treachery in it.