Crowbone o-5

by Robert Low

  ‘I have problems enough with the men who follow me,’ he said. ‘They think my luck is flowing from me — they may be right. Now one they thought a comrade turns out to be a cuckoo in the nest.’

  ‘A cuckoo who saved your life,’ Thorgunna pointed out, but Bergliot saw the truculent flex of Crowbone’s jaw and the centre of her sagged.

  ‘Grima knew,’ she answered and left it perched there like a crow on a branch. She saw him work through it, his head tilted and thoughtful, as if he was a bird with a beakful of snail and a stone in front of it.

  ‘He did not touch you,’ he said slowly, weaving it as he spoke. ‘Made out that you were a boy of no worth …’

  ‘He stumbled on me during a raid,’ she replied flatly. ‘Just him alone. He thought I was someone else, then realised I was not.’

  ‘Still of worth,’ Crowbone mused. ‘Grima would have tupped you in an eyeblink and flung the remains of you to the others — save that you had value. Made you dress like a boy and keep the secret of it absolute, because he no longer trusted any of them.’

  ‘A bad matter,’ Thorgunna flung out, ‘when trust is shattered. Who is the betrayer then, little Olaf?’

  He looked sharply at her, then back to Bergliot.

  ‘You went over the side after him,’ he rasped. ‘Why?’

  ‘Balle would have killed me,’ she answered simply.

  ‘And who are you, then?’

  She shrugged and the tremble in her was obvious.

  ‘Bergliot. No more. Grima thought I was Geira, but I was only her handmaiden and he knew he had missed the greater prize. His men would have scorned his battleluck, he knew, and would take out their annoyance on me. But I was Geira’s friend, too, so that she would pay to have me back and Grima saw that.’

  ‘Geira?’ Crowbone asked and Thorgunna put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and drew her away.

  ‘Geira,’ she said. ‘Eldest daughter of Burisliev, King of Wendland, and a queen in her own right.’

  A queen’s close friend. Close enough, Crowbone thought, to be worth something, one way or another and he said as much later, when he went to the men waiting uneasily in the church outbuildings, taking Bergliot with him.

  They had already heard the tale of it; some could not look her in the eye as she stood there, wrapped in a warm, fur-trimmed cloak — another gift from Thorgunna, who had not, Crowbone thought wryly, left Hestreng too distraught to forget possessions entirely. Most of the old crew who had been with Grima would not even look this new Bergliot in the face. A few — the Oathsworn gifted from Orm, Crowbone noted — were easier about it.

  ‘This explains why you are not good with a pole lathe or an axe,’ Kaetilmund declared with a smile.

  ‘Just so,’ she answered with brittle brightness. ‘Does this mean you will stop calling me No-Toes?’

  Kaetilmund scrubbed his beard with wry embarrassment while Stick-Starer and Halfdan chuckled and nudged him. For a moment, she felt the old warmth, then saw the men’s faces as they looked at Crowbone. More was revealed there than the surprise she had presented them with.

  Crowbone saw it also, the blank stones of their stares, and had to heave himself up against the crush of it. Well, he thought to himself, if they cannot be made to love me, they can be made to fear, which is the way princes and kings must think.

  ‘Where are the prisoners?’ he asked and Mar stepped forward, his helmet dangling from his beltline and a spear in his hand. Behind came Kaup and Murrough shepherding a shuffling group whose sorrow and fear came off them like stink and, behind that, he saw Congalach, bound hand cradled in the crook of the other and his eyes wet with pain and misery.

  Eight of them, Crowbone saw — Halk was there, sorrowed as a whipped dog, pleading with every look, though he knew there was no hope. And Fridrek, all sullen and twisted mouth.

  He looked them over for as long as it took for Oengusso to come up, his arm across his son’s shoulder, then he turned to the lector.

  ‘What would you do with them?’ he asked. ‘Since it was you they offended last.’

  ‘Sure I would hang them,’ Oengusso said and there was a stir among the men.

  ‘No Christ mercy, then?’ Crowbone demanded harshly. ‘Some of them are Christ baptised.’

  Oengusso laced his hands together, while his snub-nosed piglet of a son gazed adoringly up at him.

  ‘A mind prepared for red martyrdom, a mind prepared for white martyrdom,’ he said sonorously. ‘Rules Eight and Nine. Fervour in singing the office for the dead, as if every faithful dead was a particular friend of thine — Rule Twelve.’

  ‘That is not what the blessed Columba had in mind when he made the Rules,’ Mar declared bitterly. ‘I am sure of that.’

  ‘They broke the oath,’ Crowbone pointed out and Kaetilmund studied him for a moment, trying to work out if the odd-eyed boy spoke of the Oathsworn’s oath or the oath he knew others had sworn personally to the prince. He was still no wiser when Kaup started dragging the men away.

  Halk babbled and pleaded, but Fridrek, half-stumbling, flung curses back at them over his shoulder and men who had known him a long time shifted and shuffled.

  ‘If you have a mind to allow it,’ Crowbone said, ‘I would like that dove flag you have.’

  Oengusso blinked, then smiled and nodded, sending his son scampering to get it, then went off on his own; not long after they heard his great bell of a voice and the singing chants of the monks. They waited in the dripping day, while the bast ropes creaked and scoured the tree branches, hauling their kicking burdens high into the air.

  When the dead had stopped swaying, Crowbone said his farewells to Thorgunna, who stood like a cloaked shadow in the shelter of the church, the great tower hunching itself into the sky over her shoulder.

  ‘What would you have me tell Orm if I meet him?’ Crowbone asked and she flicked a little smile on her cheeks, made old and withered in the harsh daylight, he saw suddenly, like the last winter apple in the barrel.

  ‘That you are sorry you did not hold to the Oath,’ she answered and the slap of that made him take a step back.

  ‘I meant about yourself,’ he answered, which was as good as admitting the truth of what she said, though he only realised this much later. ‘Shall I tell him where you are?’

  ‘You will or you won’t,’ she answered sadly, which left him no wiser. Then she dragged her woollens tighter round her and looked up at the sky.

  ‘I am leaving,’ she said, shivering a little, as if a wind had kissed her neck. Crowbone did not know whether she meant now, or this place entirely.

  ‘I am gone,’ she whispered, her eyes black as an iced sea and turned away; the bleakness she left was more of a desert than before.

  As he marched out of the place, conscious of the men filtering along behind him, sullen as rainclouds, Crowbone turned to the woman he had known as Berto and held out the blue flag.

  ‘Here,’ he said, vicious as a slap. ‘You are a woman now. Sew this in the way I tell you.’

  Teamhair, the Hill of Tara, some weeks later …

  Crowbone’s Crew

  There were horns blaring and the great reek of warriors, giving off so much heat that the air above the armies wavered like water. Irishers trotted past near Crowbone, one of them fumbling to try and fasten his rolled cloak over his right shoulder to leave his arms free; he had a leather helmet half-tilted over one eye and a long spear that smacked the shoulder of the man behind, who cursed him in a long spit of Irish.

  ‘Here — I have sewn it.’

  She held out the tall spear, the furled cloth held tight to it with her fist, then let it go and flutter free; someone made a noise between jeer and cheer and Crowbone glanced up at it. A cloud-blue square with a white eagle on it, though there were those who thought the wings were strange. Not surprising, since it started life as a dove.

  ‘You have sewn it well,’ he said, which was the truth — the silly twig was unpicked and the thread saved had been used to curve
the beak and add some talons. It was not, as Onund said pointedly, the Oathsworn banner, which was Odin’s valknut, but Crowbone merely asked Onund if he could sew one in a hurry and, if not, then this one would do, for Prince Olaf needed a banner.

  ‘Can I carry it?’ Bergliot asked, her face tilted and defiant.

  She had done it well, as he had to admit. Now she stood there, in the middle of a stinking, bustling, roaring army about to dive headfirst into blood and slaughter, holding it on a long spear and asking her question. Men paused in what they were doing to hear the answer.

  ‘No,’ Crowbone said, though he could not help the leap in him at her courage. ‘You cannot carry the banner. That is work for a man, which you are not. Now take off those breeks and pull your dress down — we are at war here.’

  Kaetilmund laughed at the scowl on her face, then plucked the banner from her hand and raised it high; the shouts were half-hearted at best and Crowbone saw Congalach striding up, his Irishmen at his back and Maelan trotting at his side in his own little fitted suit of ringmail.

  ‘I hope they fight better than they cheer, Norseman,’ he growled at Crowbone, then went off laughing to the side of Gilla Mo, raising his sword high so that his own men burst their throats with his name — Congalach, son of Flann, lord of Gaileanga.

  ‘Thinks well of himself, that one,’ said someone close — Bryti his name was and Crowbone was pleased to have remembered it.

  ‘So he should,’ Murrough said, slapping Bryti hard on the back, so that the rain spurted out of the wool cloak, ‘for he is a prince of the Ui Neill and so worth ten of you.’

  ‘Princes,’ snapped Onund and then spat pointedly, so that Kaetilmund chuckled. Crowbone said nothing, pretending that this was just the way of all Icelanders, but he burned inside, so that his belly hurt and the battered side of his head felt like ice.

  ‘Well,’ Halfdan declared, rolling his own cloak round his shoulders like a ruff, giving him better protection there and freeing up both arms, ‘he is a dead prince of the Ui Neill. He should have listened to his da — everyone else did.’

  Folk laughed. The argument between Congalach and his old father Flann had been loud; the old man had wanted Congalach to stay out of things because the arrow wound meant he had no proper grip in his sword hand. He did not want his grandson in it, either, claiming the boy was too young at twelve.

  Congalach had all but whined that neither would be left out of this, a great battle and the only one they might ever be involved in. Now he was striding off with his sword lashed tight in his fist and his son dogging his heels like a small shadow.

  ‘Things are moving,’ Murrough said and looked inquiringly at Crowbone, who took a breath and then ordered everyone to form up, sliding the wet helmet on as he did so. It felt strange, with the old fitted comfort of it battered out and where it now touched, the new bruising seemed colder than before, as if there was ice there.

  They went into a two-rank line in the rear of Gilla Mo’s Chosen — at least it was that, Crowbone thought sourly, and not in the back of a bunch of horny-handed Irish farmers. The Irishers turned half round and muttered about having northmen at their back; one looked up at the flag and squinted a bit, then laughed and said something to his neighbour.

  Murrough growled and spat Irish back at them, then turned to Crowbone, beaming.

  ‘That dung-smeared cow’s hole there said our flag looked more like a shot pigeon than an eagle, so I told him it was no eagle at all, but a stooping hawk.’

  A Stooping Hawk. Crowbone liked the idea and resolved to tell Gjallandi of it when this stushie was done with — there was no point in looking for the skald in this, for he took care to keep away from such events, being no fighter of any note or inclination.

  Horns made farting sounds close by. The men nearest to Crowbone rolled their neck muscles, fitted helmets more snugly, touched amulets, crossed themselves; a few glanced at him, their faces pebbled with rain and one even smiled. Crowbone wondered if they would fight for him.

  ‘Rain is an amusement when it is hissing from the gutters and you are in the dry and warm looking out,’ Halfdan said moodily and folk laughed, saying he was going soft. Kaetilmund called out that Halfdan was thinking he wanted to be back in the warm with Bergliot. The name and the memory of her — of him, who was now her — brought a silence that the rain lisped through while they moved, half-stumbling over tussocks and ruts. Crowbone did not know where they were when they eventually stopped, panting like blown bulls. Horns blared again.

  Apart from Murrough, not even the grimmest of them could smile into a rain that came down like stones, stung the face, sluiced down ringmail and seeped through to wool and neck. Crowbone’s boots were sodden with it, his braids dripping and he wondered blackly if Ireland had any other weather.

  ‘Call this rain?’ Murrough demanded, grinning and happy as a hog in a wallow.

  ‘Only you and him do not seem to care,’ Halfdan answered and jerked water off his beard indicating the stone figure nearby. ‘Who are you thinking it is, eh, Crowbone?’

  Crowbone did not know. It was weathered and bird-splashed stone, half the height of a true man, a youth with a scabbed dog caught by the ruff in one hand and the other arm raised, holding a dripping slather of slimed weed from the stump of a wrist. The face, worn and speckled, had an expression of bewilderment, not helped by the lack of nose.

  ‘Ask Murrough,’ he grunted, but the big man only grinned and shrugged, blowing rain off his nose.

  ‘Who knows? Cuchulain maybe. This is Teamhair — the place is thick with this sort of stuff.’

  Teamhair, Hill of Tara, High Seat of Kings. The place where Ireland’s overlord was hailed by all the lesser kings, Crowbone had been told. A place of pillars and monuments, of course — and known to both sides. An easy place to arrange to meet in battle without all the tedious business of marching about seeking one another out.

  A good place to play the game of kings, the true choosers of the slain.

  ‘Archers!’

  The warning came from the front and shields went up as shoulders went down. There was a pattering, as if the rain had hardened. Something whumped into the chewed grass near Crowbone’s foot, but it was no arrow — a stone, Crowbone thought. No, a smooth lump of lead.

  ‘Slings,’ Murrough spat. ‘By The Dagda, but I hate them folk worse than I hate archers.’

  There was a loud whanging sound and everyone jerked their necks in, then peered round. Bryti, his hand shaking, pulled off his helmet and looked at the dent in it.

  ‘By the gods of all Ireland,’ Murrough said into the man’s dazed look of wonder. ‘You have enough luck there to be Ui Neill.’

  Bryti fingered the place where the lead shot had struck and looked up, grinning. The next stone took him in the jaw with a wet smack that tumbled him backwards, spewing blood and teeth. Murrough frowned, watching him choke and die, quivering like a terrified rabbit.

  ‘Well — perhaps not Ui Neill after all,’ he said, glancing at the straw-doll tangle of limbs. ‘Keep your shields up lads.’

  ‘Remind me again,’ Mar said grimly and he did so to be heard by Crowbone above all, ‘why we are here, good men of the north fighting Norsemen for the Irish?’

  ‘Something concerning an axe,’ roared a voice Crowbone did not know and the rage bokked up in him, so that the struck side of his head throbbed and he bellowed the cords of his throat raw.

  ‘Because it is my wyrd. I am Olaf, Prince of Norway who will one day be king and if you are wise you will all remember that.’

  Then he slung his shield on his back and took a spear in either hand as they moved forward. Kaetilmund fell in on his right, the banner in one hand and a sword in the other, while Rovald fell in on the left, the only one with a shield up and charged with, somehow, protecting them both.

  It had stopped raining, but the ground was churning under so many feet and the sharp smell of turned earth and torn wet grass was enough to make the heart leap, for it was the smel
l of life and death.

  Horns bayed like staghounds and men stumbled over the rough ground, up to where the Chosen of Gilla Mo swarmed into a copse of trees and stood beneath the branches; Crowbone and his men joined them, feeling the drips spatter.

  Crowbone looked at Kaetilmund, saw the drawn-back snarl of his lips and knew, if he looked to the other side, he would see Rovald the same. His own skin felt tight and the corners of his mouth gummy; his head ached and where the helmet touched still felt as if an icicle had been slid into his skull.

  A brown bird whirred in to land on a branch above his head. It was exhausted from having been beaten from cover to bush by thousands of tramping feet, the swish of long grass on calves, the leather creaks and frantic shouts. Crowbone watched it closely as it perched on a branch and looked back at him with a bright black eye; he shivered at the wyrd of it.

  Somewhere ahead there was a huge shout and a great thundering crack, as if a giant door had been slammed shut — the shieldwalls coming together. Now there was a stirring and the faint shrieks and bellows where the lines struggled in a ruck, but Crowbone could see nothing at all.

  There was a deep roaring from the left, where the Leinster men forged forward, roaring out that they had come to free their king, held hostage by Olaf Cuarans in Dyfflin: they were determined to let him hear them from his prison.

  Suddenly, Crowbone saw Gilla Mo’s banner raise up and go down — once, twice, three times.

  ‘Move — fight in pairs. Keep together …’

  If the Chosen Men were going in forward it either meant the battle was already won, or in the balance. Crowbone loped along, peering ahead as the solid ranks melted apart in front of him — a chase then, the battle won on this part of the field at least.

  Others sensed it, heads went back and the great wolf howl of the Oathsworn rolled out, followed by the shouting of their name. The blue banner cracked in the wind and men started to tumble over bodies, seeing the backs of fleeing men and fevered by the sight, as cats are with running mice.