Crowbone o-5

by Robert Low

  Crowbone looked to where Hoskuld’s crew hugged themselves in wet misery — Halk was apart from them now — and looked pointedly at Gorm.

  ‘How good are your trading skills?’ he asked and had back a wary stare. ‘Let us suppose they are great and we manage to persuade the people of this place that we mean no harm. Let us suppose that, if they had not run off, you might have helped in this and that, as a result, they generously agree to providing a good eating horse in exchange for, say, four new slaves. Seems a shame to wait for all this to work itself out, so we shall take the horse now.’

  ‘I am no thrall, to be bought and sold,’ Gorm exclaimed. ‘It is against the law to sell a decent freeman as a thrall, never mind a Christian.’

  Crowbone cocked his head to one side and curled his lip, having waited for this moment to let Gorm and the others of Hoskuld’s crew know where they stood.

  ‘I am the law,’ he answered. ‘And no decent Christian, as you pointed out before. You are thralls now, whatever you were before.’

  Kaetilmund, on his way back to the stables with two others and a throat-slitting knife, laughed at the look on Gorm’s face — but the Christians, Mar noted, kept their eyes on the floor.

  They spit-roasted the best of the pony and had shelter, food and warmth in a storm, which was enough for everyone to feel content. Lolling in the steading, with a good hearthfire and watchers posted in case folk crept up, they listened to the storm whine and shriek, so that it was generally agreed only madmen would come to a war in this. The only fighting was between those jostling for drying space or the last of the horse and, apart from growls and scowls, nothing much came of it.

  The wind heightened during the night and only the yellow dog slept soundly, for strong winds made men restless, as did the lurking possibility of armed men arriving. So men checked edges and helmet thonging in preference to sleep.

  Gjallandi came to Crowbone after a little while, squatting beside him and nodding to where Berto sat, shivering a little and staring into the flames.

  ‘I am thinking death sits hard on that boy,’ he said softly. ‘It occurs to me that the man he killed in Hvitrann was his first.’

  Crowbone looked, then nodded and Gjallandi moved away. After a moment, Crowbone moved quietly to the side of the little Wend, who jerked from the flames as if stung.

  ‘It is a hard matter to kill a man,’ Crowbone said and Berto’s deep brown eyes seemed luminous as moonlit pools when he looked in them. He remembered his first killing; Klerkon, the raider who had taken him and his mother and his foster-father. His mother and foster-father dead, Crowbone had been freed from his privy-shackling by Orm who, though he did not know who Crowbone was, had treated him kindly. More than kindly — in Novgorod, he had sent him off with Thorgunna to buy clothes and other necessities, part of which had been a little axe, for the nine-year-old Crowbone had argued that he was a warrior and so needed a weapon.

  In the main square of Novgorod, he had seen Klerkon with Orm and Finn and the others — Martin had been there, too. Crowbone did not even see them clearly, did not know then that they had been arguing about momentous events. He simply saw Klerkon.

  He remembered the feelings then — a sudden, savage exultation that had taken him across the square with a hop and a skip, for he was too small to reach high, that took him up into the face of Klerkon, burying the axe in the man’s forehead.

  It had gone in like a knife on an egg, he remembered as he told this to Berto. He did not tell how that feeling had come back to him night after night for a long time, bringing a strange sick itch to the palm of the hand that had held the axe. He did not need to, for Berto saw it all in the clouded eyes and, suddenly, laid a hand along Crowbone’s wrist.

  That stirred the prince from his darkness and he shivered a little, then rheumed some gruff into his voice, for he was supposed to be consoling Berto, not the other way round.

  ‘Later,’ he added, ‘I killed Kveldulf, the man who killed my mother, in much the same way, but I did not have dreams about him.’

  Berto had eyes like the yellow dog when Crowbone glanced at him and it made him uncomfortable — reminded him, in fact, of the Khazar girl he had first lain with and he said so, trying to change the subject. Berto’s cheeks flamed and his eyes grew round.

  ‘You have had many women?’ he asked and Crowbone considered the matter.

  ‘The first was the Khazar girl. Vladimir and I called her Bench because she always did it on her hands and knees.’

  Those nearest laughed and Berto’s eyes grew even larger and rounder, so it was clear to all of them there that the Wend youth had never humped in his life.

  ‘I was eleven,’ Crowbone went on, ‘which folk tell me was late in starting.’

  ‘You made up for it,’ Kaetilmund growled morosely. ‘There was the Dane girl we took in a raid and you would not share.’

  ‘Sigrid,’ Crowbone said slowly, remembering. ‘She died of the flux not long after, so no-one had much joy of her.’

  ‘Then there was the famous twenty,’ Kaetilmund declared. ‘Last year, when we went to Polotsk to get Vladimir the bride who spurned him.’

  Crowbone stayed silent, for the memories of that brief and bloody little campaign were locked in the black sea-chest inside his head and he did not want to drag them out.

  ‘The Prince of Polotsk,’ Kaetilmund explained to a droop-mouthed Berto, ‘objected to his daughter marrying Prince Vladimir — so we all went to his fortress, killed him and took her. We took twenty Polotsk girls, too and little Olaf here had them all before we sold them. It is a wonder he could stand up, never mind find the strength to whack Vladimir’s brother between the eyes with an axe.’

  Men roared with laughter and Crowbone shifted, feeling Berto’s eyes on him and not liking to look, for he felt hot and uncomfortable under the gaze and did not know why. So he grew serious as a reef, talked about shieldwalls and large battles.

  ‘You have never been in any battles,’ he said to Berto, ‘nor have we had much chance to show how we form Burh and shieldwalls for practice, then we fend off Murrough’s pretend berserk lunges and Kaetilmund’s shield kicks.’

  ‘Have you been in battles, then?’ asked Berto and Crowbone wondered if the boy was as innocent as his eyes said he was, for the question had only made Crowbone aware of what he did not know.

  ‘One or two,’ he said, then rubbed his beard ruefully. ‘Not big ones,’ he admitted.

  ‘I have,’ growled Murrough, passing by and hearing this. He squatted without asking, which made Crowbone scowl, but Murrough only grinned at him, then turned to Berto.

  ‘You have a bow, I see. Learn to use it, for it is easier to kill a man at distance than when you are looking into his eyes,’ he said. ‘If you have ringmail you will stand in the front line — The Lost. That’s the place of honour, where the best warriors belong. Others, usually the called-out men, the fyrd, fall in behind them with their spears and leather jerkins and old war hats.’

  Lifting a piece of horse on a stick and blowing on it he went on, ‘You saw us do that against that Galgeddil horse lord.’ He tested the horse for heat, then tasted it, smacking his lips. ‘Oh, for some of that limon Finn got out of Serkland,’ he said, dreamy with remembering. Then he became aware of Berto, patiently waiting. He sighed.

  ‘Well, here there is no fyrd, for we are all Chosen Men — the Oathsworn,’ he went on, beaming. ‘Our fame is great and jarls want us on their side when they fear even their own house warriors will flee. The fyrd, of course, are men who take up arms when their families or land is threatened. They are farmers first and fighting men second, unlike us.’

  He sucked the meat while the fire swirled a little in a draught, the reek catching his eyes and making him curse. Crowbone still scowling at this intrusion said nothing, was acutely conscious of Berto’s hand still on his wrist. Berto was patient and still as old stone, though there was a tremble in the underneath of him that Crowbone could feel, like a fly-twitched horse.
<
br />   ‘For all that, it is necessary to have second and even third ranks, spear-armed,’ Murrough went on. ‘In the front rank all you have to do is stand and not get killed — harder than it sounds. You cannot do much fighting, for there is hardly room to lift an elbow and all you are there to do is protect the men behind you, whose spears will be stabbing past your ears and doing the real work.’

  ‘No fighting?’ Rovald said, leaning forward to get meat and then having to slap the ends of his burning hair. ‘It is The Lost who win such battles.’

  ‘In the end, of course,’ admitted Murrough and took up his axe, which was rarely far from a hand, ‘for there is only one way to find room to fight — you push into them, step by step until they break apart. Then you fight them to ruin. In pairs, which is why we practise that, too.’

  Mar, who had been paired with Murrough, nodded and grinned across at his partner, who raised his beard-bladed axe to him. Berto already knew that Murrough used it to hook shields to one side, while Mar did the killing of the exposed man.

  ‘This axe trick is used by the Irishers,’ Murrough went, grinning and looking the hook-bitted weapon over like a man does a willing girl. ‘The Dal Cais of this Brian Boru fellow perfected it, and much as it pains me to admit it, folk call these axes after them.’

  ‘Mark you, that trick is fine when you are moving forward,’ added Halfdan. ‘The hardest matter is to step back a pace or two and still keep the line.’

  ‘Aye,’ admitted Murrough. ‘It is bad enough being in The Lost with no-one else in front of you and the enemy howling down — the second and third ranks seem pleasant places then. But stepping back is hard.’

  ‘Why would you?’ Berto demanded and those who knew chuckled. Because war is hard work, he learned from a dozen throats. An hour of struggling and sliding and yelling and stabbing seems like a whole day and actual edge-swinging leaves you on your knees and gasping in half of that.

  Murrough’s understanding was that men whose world is war will last the pace — farmers with spears and axes will not, but even fame-laden warriors such as the Oathsworn would need to step back and take a breath or two eventually. It was possible to feed fresh men into the fight, exchanging one rank for another, but few had the Roman skill of this and did not use it much for fear of the chaos it caused.

  All this talk did nothing to send men to sleep and Berto eventually got up and went into the dark looking for the yellow bitch, leaving Crowbone feeling the heat of his touch on his wrist and confused by the loss of it. Halfdan joked that the Wend was jealous of the brindle hound, now vanished.

  ‘I wonder how the knarr is faring,’ Onund muttered and Crowbone saw Gorm’s head come up at that.

  ‘Sunk entire,’ Stick-Starer declared moodily. ‘We will find them strewn all over the shingle come morning.’

  ‘You are a hard man, Stick-Starer,’ Kaetilmund answered, shaking his head. ‘That is no wish to put on sailors.’

  ‘Go down to the shore and hail them if you are so concerned,’ Crowbone told him and Kaetilmund waggled his head from side to side in a non-commital way. Vigfuss Drosbo stuck his bluff, square face into the conversation and announced he would go if Stick-Starer would, since he had left his own porridge pot on board the knarr and was missing it now. They talked round it until they wore the subject to a nub, but did not go all the same.

  ‘Aye, it is hard life at sea,’ Murrough declared, stretching languidly in the fire heat. He farted and took the rough edge of tongues from those nearest him as his due for it.

  ‘What would you know of it?’ scoffed Stick-Starer. ‘You Irishers plooter in the shallows in a skin bowl, so you do.’

  ‘I have sailed,’ Murrough spat back indignantly. ‘I have seen the smoke-spray where the sea pours off the edge of the world.’

  ‘The world is round, you oaf,’ Onund rumbled. ‘As any sailing man will tell you.’

  ‘And how do you know this?’ demanded Halfdan — and a few others, Crowbone noted, stirring interestedly from half-sleep. ‘Are there not duergar at the four corners of the world, holding up the sky? Four corners, note. Of a square. Even I know this of our gods and I am not a learned man.’

  ‘It is a disc,’ said Stick-Starer. ‘Surrounding the World Tree. That ocean you see is the one that separates us from Utgard, the void of all matters.’

  ‘The world is curved like a round ball — how else do you account for the masts of ships showing over the horizon before the hull?’ answered Onund, sitting like a lopsided hill by the fire.

  ‘Sailing uphill now are we?’ jeered Halfdan and Onund, who could not quite find an answer to that, hunched and said nothing. Stick-Starer simply spat a hiss into the fire.

  ‘The world is round,’ Gjallandi told them sonorously, ‘for Odin and the gods of Asgard decreed it so to spoil the desires of High Kings. No matter how far they go in conquering, they will only end up staring at the dungheap in their own back yard.’

  There was laughter at that, contented and easy; someone broke up a bench for firewood and the wind shouldered the steading so that the rafter-bones of it groaned; draughts fluttered the flames and, if Crowbone shut his eyes, longing painted the inside of his eyelids with Vladimir’s fortress in Novgorod when he was fourteen years old and clasped with the comfort of being warm and safe while the world raged.

  Novgorod, he noted to himself. Not Orm’s hall at Hestreng, where he had also spent storm-lashed nights in warm comfort. He did not like to admit to himself, but was aware of this being because of the revelation that the monk they sought was Martin.

  Martin, who had sent word to Orm. Now Crowbone had to consider the possibility that Orm had not told all he knew of the matter for good reasons of gain and felt sick at that thought. The closest Crowbone had come to a father had not been Uncle Sigurd when he had been alive — it had been Orm, with his tales of when he was a boy, with nothing more worrying than having his fringe cut or his ears washed. Crowbone, who had never had any similar experiences, hugged Orm’s childhood to himself, from scaling slick, wet-black cliffs for gull eggs, to perching on the muscled rump of the fierce stud stallion in its stall.

  For all that, Crowbone did not want to become Orm. He looked round at the growling, snoring, whispering, farting men, all beards and grim fierceness; he was still in Orm’s hall and here Orm’s family. This is not for me, Crowbone thought. Men are weapons and tools, to be used to make kingdoms. Then that serpent-thought coiled in on him again — perhaps Orm has also worked this out and, like me, realised that fame alone lasts only as long as the last stone with your name carved on it.

  He thought of Grima of the Red Brothers, fameless under his lonely pile of stones on a strange shore, and shivered.

  SEVEN

  The coast of Ireland, a day later …

  Crowbone’s Crew

  Crowbone woke to find Berto cradled in the hook of one arm, a warmth that was welcome and a strange, disturbing softness that was not, that made him unlatch himself and move away, pretending to check on the weather.

  The wind had backed, was blowing inshore and had been for some time, for the whole place was palled in spindrift, sucked off the creaming shore and flung landward like quivering snow. But the storm was gone, no more than hollow puffs and sighs and the dull rumour of it in the sea.

  There was no sign of the knarr.

  Vigfuss Drosbo and Svenke Klak found this out when they left together into the pewter of the day, the one anxious for his porridge pot, the other frantic with the remembering of his ringmail, rolled in sheepskin and stowed under the corpse of Skumr.

  Now they came back, stumbling up, wild-haired and wild-eyed, with the news that there was a hole in the world where all their plunder should be.

  ‘Sunk entire,’ Stick-Starer declared, with some relish, as though he had seen it and told everyone just that.

  ‘There is no wreckage,’ Svenke answered hopefully, sick with the knowledge that his ringmail was probably gone forever. That and the view of the Shadow in daylight m
ade men hunch into the spattering rain, gloomy as the grey day itself.

  Crowbone saw that the Shadow was done and did not need Onund to look at him and shake a mournful head — the straked planks along one side of the prow were splintered in a great gash the length of a man and as wide as a forearm.

  They would have to carry their gear and Crowbone’s resolve on not raiding this place, wherever it was, now vanished; they needed ponies and carts if there were any and he sent men scurrying for them, while Onund and Kaetilmund wrestled the prow beast off and started to fasten it on a spear; on or off the ship, the power of the prow could still battle the spirits of the land.

  Drosbo sat with his chins drooped at the thought of his missing pot and Svenke stood with the look of a ram which has just butted a wall. Folk patted his shoulder, for ringmail was as fabulous as a dragon egg and as hard to come by — especially for the likes of Svenke, whose by-name, Klak, meant peg and had been handed to him because he was so broad across the shoulder and narrow in the hip that he looked like one.

  ‘Borrow the prince’s,’ Rovald said daringly and everyone laughed; Crowbone acknowledged them with a wry wave of one hand, then hauled out the offending ringmail. It had been boiled in whale oil, which made it almost black and helped proof it against the rot — but it hung like a shed snakeskin, streaked red and with rings dropping from it. Which was the result of Crowbone training himself to swim in the sea with it and men who prized the craft and work of it as much as the expense, shook their heads at the ruin. Svenke Klak’s gaze was bitter on a man who could treat ringmail so badly.

  ‘Perhaps we will find a smith who can move a few links in one we take as a prize,’ Kaetilmund soothed and Svenke nodded miserably.

  ‘He may get the chance soon,’ panted Halfdan, coming up at a hard trot. ‘Riders are coming — lots of them.’

  It was not the place Crowbone would have chosen for a fight, this shingle beach slathered in sea foam, but men came spilling up in knots, half-dressed for war and aware that all their sea-chest possessions were still in the steading.