A brass sun seeped through the dull lead of the sky and the stands of birch, no higher than a man on a horse and clumped like a bad beard on the face of the world. They were grim, clawed affairs, these trees, as black as if they had sucked their own shadows back up. Snow lay clotted on a brown heave of land and the air was still and raw.
The carts lurched and rumbled to a halt, ponies standing splay-legged, heads bowed. We had fitted the wheels since there was more earth than snow, but that had been a mistake – the ground was hard frozen and the carts banged and slapped in every iron-forged rut, so that even the tired and sick got out and trudged with everyone else rather than suffer the lurch and bruise of it.
Gizur and I stood at the stirrup of Vladimir’s big black, all rib and bone hips, while he looked at the trees. We all looked at the trees and the opaque ribbon they fringed – the Don.
‘See,’ said Gizur, his breath freezing in his beard as he spoke. ‘The middle is darker, where the water is only just starting to form hard.’
‘A thaw is coming,’ Dobyrynya declared, but Gizur knew the ways of water and shook his head, hard enough to rattle the ice points of his moustache.
‘No. The ice was broken recently. Less than an hour – look, you can see where the grue of it reformed from a time before that, too.’
‘There is traffic on the river,’ Sigurd grunted, wiping the icicles from the bottom of his silver nose, where they clogged the hole that let him breath.
‘Just so,’ Gizur beamed. ‘Boats are breaking their way up and down to Sarkel and regularly enough to stop the centre channel freezing hard.’
We all knew that we were on the Don, where it turned east into a great curve that went south, then slithered west to the Maeotian Lake, which the Khazars call Azov, meaning ‘low’ for it is so shallow. Following that great curve would bring us to Sarkel and take weeks.
Gizur was beaming, because he had navigated us from a point four days east of Kiev to here as if we had been the ocean – give or take a tack here and there, as Avraham declared later, sullen and mournful over the loss of Morut. Yet now we had to choose, either the short way, a plunge straight across the Great White, or follow the Don’s long, cold curl to Sarkel.
‘A long way still,’ Dobrynya said ‘with no respite at Biela Viezha.’
No-one had to ask why; the Prince of Novgorod, arriving with a tattered band like us, miles from his own domain and firmly at the far frontiers of his brother’s lands, would excite more than a little attention. If his brother’s name still held sway at Sarkel – called Biela Viezha, the White Castle, by the Slavs – now that Sviatoslav was gone.
All eyes were on me. Somewhere in that bleak ice waste was what we sought and I had to steer them all to richness with the hilt runes on my sabre. The smile I gave them back was, I hoped, as bright and sure as sunrise.
We turned back to the line of carts and people, where only a few of the druzhina were now horsed and everyone else so swathed in shapeless bundles that it was hard to tell man from woman, or warrior from thrall. They huddled into their clothes and stamped feet made fat in braided straw overshoes, which the horses kept trying to eat.
‘What now, Trader?’ demanded Kvasir, wiping the weep from his good eye. Thorgunna made to help and he slapped her hand away, irritated. She scowled in return.
‘It needs proper attention.’
‘I am doing so. Go and weave something.’
Thorgunna fixed him with her sheep-dropping eyes. ‘It is time I died,’ she declared firmly. ‘Time I was dropped in my grave, for I have nothing left, it seems, to offer this life or the man I have in it.’
‘You may live or die as you see fit,’ growled Kvasir, sullenly, ‘providing you decide without poking my eye. Whatever your decision, we will all have to live with the consequences.’
Finn, hunched up like a seal in clothes and swaddled cloak, offered up a cracked bell of a laugh as Thorgunna threw up one hand in annoyance and left Kvasir and his eye.
‘We should cut across the Great White, south to Sarkel,’ Finn added. Avraham, hearing this, gave a short, sharp bark of laughter, while Gizur frowned and crushed the ice out of his beard, for the Great White was one sea he could not navigate.
‘Did you bleat?’ Finn asked, sour-faced.
‘What has been crossed so far is as nothing compared to what lies out there,’ Avraham said, waving a hand in the general direction of the east. ‘That is a howling wilderness, which offers nothing to men, summer or winter.’
‘You have been there?’ Gyrth interrupted and Avraham cocked a haughty eyebrow.
‘I am Khazar. I have been everywhere.’
‘But there especially?’
Avraham shifted a little. ‘No,’ he admitted, then thrust his chin out belligerently. ‘What sane man would go where there is often no water for flocks in summer, nor reason to be there in the depths of winter? Anyway, it is … cursed.’
He looked half-ashamed, half-defiant, but it was clear he believed it and it came to me then that where Atil’s tomb lay would be thought a cursed place, even if no-one knew it was there. So many deaths to build it, stock it, carry him to it; the steppe here was crowded with moaning fetches every time the wind blew.
‘So,’ said Jon Asanes sadly, ‘you cannot guide us then, if we choose that route.’
Avraham bristled. ‘I am Khazar and this is my land – I can guide you anywhere. For a reasonable price.’
‘Ha!’ growled Finn. ‘This is not your land now, though, you prick-cut thief. The Rus rule here.’
‘What price?’ I asked, seeing Avraham’s face darken. He remained staring into Finn’s glare for a moment longer – which was brave of him, I had to admit – then quoted the cost of a small farm.
Finn roared before I could even speak. ‘You can have the rust off my balls, you arse.’
Avraham smeared a sneer on his face.
‘Balls of poor iron – that explains the clinking I heard, for I knew a man such as yourself could not have a purse so rich.’
‘My balls were smelted in northern forges, little man,’ Finn replied with a broad grin, ‘in such a heat where the likes of you would smoulder like an eider duck’s tail. They were quenched in cold that makes this seem like a balmy day.’
‘I suspect we are speaking in the singular,’ Avraham answered. ‘I had heard the Norse had to share a pair between two.’
‘You heard wrong. Gulls use my prick as a perch, thinking it a mast. When I shit over the side of a racing drakkar, my turds choke whales. I piss fire and fart thunder. And that which you call a howling wilderness is just another little sea to me.’
Others were gathering, hugely enjoying this. It drove away the cold and misery and I was grateful for that. Better still, the chances of them coming to serious blows had slipped away.
‘You spout a deal of empty nothing like a whale does, that much I have seen,’ Avraham replied and those nearest gave approving noises that made Finn scowl.
‘That which we have called the Great White,’ Avraham went on, ‘is merely those who know being kind to you. The real Great White is a few wheel turns from here, directly south. You will see it from a long way off, because it is a dazzle of ice. After that, if you should survive, you will just have time to make peace with your heathen gods before your famous perch freezes and snaps like a twig. If you ever find this silver hoard it will be because some wolf, tired of gnawing your arse-bone, drops it nearby.’
Finn made a dismissive gesture into admiring ‘heyas’ of those who thought this a good flyting.
‘You are like all who have not had the benefit of being born in Skane, when faced with open space, whether sea or land,’ he declared expansively. ‘You fear to lose sight of safety. No open space frightens us from Skane and a horizon is an invitation, not a limit. Odin and Vili and Ve fixed the stars for us to find our way and, with them, I know where I am in this world to the length of a sparrow’s fart.’
He cocked his head and closed one eye reflectively, blowing out his ice-hung moustaches.
‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘you have never seen a blowing whale, you land-fastened nithing.’
There were appreciative hooms and nods at this, though everyone knew Finn could not find his arse with both hands when it came to navigating a ship and had never seen any live whales himself.
‘The steppe respects no-one,’ Avraham declared haughtily and I thought this had gone on long enough and said so.
‘If the steppe respects no-one, then a guide such as yourself would be useless,’ I added and everyone cheered at that – even Finn. Avraham acknowledged defeat with a rueful smile, which he lost when I asked if he could, in fact, guide us.
He looked from me to Finn’s challenging grin, to Gyrth and Jon Asanes and then back to me. Then he shook his head and would not meet anyone’s eye.
Gizur shifted a little and thumbed snot out of his nose.
‘Well,’ he declared challengingly, ‘I admit it with now shame – the Great White is not known to me and none of my skills will take you safe across it. Best we follow the river.’
‘Ah – who needs this Khazar,’ Kvasir bellowed. ‘Cross the Great White. It will not be a hard trail to find, I am thinking, Just follow the ruin of Lambisson.’
That thought threw ice into all our veins, though none admitted it as we set off across the Great White. In the end, Avraham came with us, since he had the choice of doing that or staying by the river to die, but it could not be said he guided us anywhere after that.
The Great White swallowed us. The snow drove down in small, slanted flakes, persistent as gnats, piling high round camping places and kept at bay only by the heat of fires and our own bodies. We woke every morning, moving carefully within tents and shelters so as not to shake down the frost which had formed on the inside. We chipped the horse tethers out of the frozen earth, made fires, cooked porridge and, after three hours, were usually ready to move off.
The cold rot turned more noses and toes black; Bjaelfi, Thorgunna and Thordis kept little knives sharp for paring off the spoiled flesh and, at first, we seemed aimless as ants on a sheepskin. Then, as Kvasir had said, matters grew simple; we followed the ruin of Lambisson, while the snow sifted out of the pewter sky, trailed along the land like smoke, stung like thrown gravel in our faces.
It was a trail of tears a blind man could track, from splintered wagon to dead horse to blue-white corpses, little knots of tragedy in an ice-rope that most thought would hang us all. At each one, sick with apprehension, I searched for the familiar face of Short-Eldgrim.
Then, on a day where the sky was the colour of Odin’s one bright eye, I was moving carefully to a private spot – but not out of sight – to risk a shit and saw little Olaf standing wrapped in his once-white cloak like a pillar of dirty snow on the dark earth, watching black birds wheel.
They were waiting for us to quit the latest wolf-chewed remains, followed us, hungry and hopeful as gulls on a fishing boat and, like them, a handful of wary men trailed little Crowbone, seeking scraps of wisdom.
‘So – you are saying that if one more bird joins them from the west something terrible will happen?’
Red Njal’s voice was suspicious, but the thickness of disbelief in it was like the ice on the Don – broken and uncertain.
‘Mind your words, too, boy,’ he added, ‘for there is naught so vile as a fickle tongue, as my granny used to say.’
Olaf said nothing at all, merely nodded, watching intently.
‘Freyja’s arse,’ growled Klepp Spaki, his voice muffled. No more than his eyes could be seen in the swaddle of hood and wadmal round his head. ‘What makes that happen? How do you know? What runes do you use?’
‘The birds are their own runes,’ answered Olaf.
‘How?’ demanded Onund Hnufa, lumbering up and towering over Crowbone, who did not even glance up at the terrible hunch-shouldered effigy hanging over him like a mountain. ‘By what rules? What signs?’
‘Here,’ said Olaf and touched his head, then his heart. He hunched himself back in the cloak as Red Njal grunted scornfully.
‘Thor’s red balls, boy – I was the same when I was your age. Running about making black dwarves and trolls appear and fighting them with a wooden sword.’
We all chuckled, for all of us had done the same. Olaf broke his gaze from the birds to turn his odd eyes on Red Njal’s cold-roughed face. The seidr, it seemed to me rolled off him like heat haze, so that I had to blink to steady my eyes.
‘No offence,’ muttered Red Njal hastily. ‘Be never the first to break the bonds of friendship, as my granny used to say.’
A bird fluttered in and landed. ‘Aha,’ said Crowbone. ‘Today, something bad will happen.’
‘This is all shite. A boy’s will is the will of the wind, my granny said,’ declared Red Njal when Olaf had trudged out of earshot. He turned and looked at me, his eyes like small animals in the ice-crusted hair of his face.
‘Is it not shite, Trader?’
‘I saw and was silent, pondered and listened to the speech of men,’ I offered, remembering the old saying; his frown chewed that until I thought his forehead would crack.
‘Shite,’ I clarified and he cracked the ice of his face with a smile, then left me to my own awkward business.
An hour later, at the lip of a great scar of balka, the axle pin on a cart snapped and the wheel came off. Ref Steinsson took an axe and the handle of another and fashioned a new pin with delicate, skilled strokes, while men heaved and strained to unload the cart then lift it and put the wheel on again.
Red Njal, crimson with effort, looked up at me, then to where Olaf stood, a quiet smile on his face.
‘Shite,’ said Red Njal, bitterly accusing and I shrugged. If this was as bad as it got …
‘Heya, Trader – look at that.’
Hauk Fast-Sailor, arms full of bundle from the unloaded cart, nodded across the steppe with his chin.
‘The djinn, Trader – remember them?’
I remembered them, and the little Bedu tribesman Aliabu telling us of the invisible demons who could never touch the earth, whose passing was marked by the swirl of dust and sand. For a moment, the memory of Serkland heat was glorious.
The snow swirled up in an ice crystal dance. Those who had never fared farther from home than this – most of these new Oathsworn, it came to me – gawped both at the dance of it and at Hauk and me, realizing now just how far-travelled we were, to have seen djinn in the Serkland desert
‘I did not know the djinn were here, too,’ Hauk said, grunting with the effort of moving the bundles. ‘Lots of them, it seems.’
I did not like it and did not know why. Snow curled in little eddies and rose in the air, dragging my eyes up to a pewter sky and the figure flogging a staggering horse towards us and yelling something we could not hear.
Work stopped; the wheel was on, but the pin still had to be hammered in and all eyes turned on the horse and rider, the frantic fever of them soaking unease into us.
It was Morut the tracker, shouting as he came up, his voice suddenly whipped towards us by the wind.
‘The buran is here!’
We had just enough time to find shelter. Just enough before it pounced on us, hard as the lash of a whip, a scour of ice that shrieked like frustrated Valkyries.
We unhitched the ponies and dragged and pushed them down the V-shaped balka, taller than three men and so steep that most of us went down it on our arses. Those too slow were moaning in agony at the barbs of flying ice; horses screamed, flanks bloodied by it. We huddled, people and beasts together, while the world screamed in white fury.
Light danced like laughter on the water, the sea creamed round the skerries and a drakkar bustled with life on the edge of a curve of beach. I watched the boy stand in the lee of the ship, up to his calves in cold water, clutching a bundle and his uncertainty tight to himself, his shoes round his neck.
Someone leaned from the boat, yelled angrily at him. Someone else thrust out a helping hand and he took it, was pulled aboard. The drakkar oars came out, dipped and sparkled; the dragon walked down the fjord.
Me. It was me, leaving Bjornshafen with Einar the Black and the Oathsworn on board the Fjord Elk. I was young …
‘Fifteen,’ said the one-eyed man. He was tall and under the blue, night-dark cloak he exuded a strength that spoke of challenges mastered. Little of his body showed, other than a hand, gloved and clutching a staff.
His single eye, peering like a rat from the smoked curl of hair framing his face, shaded by the brim of the broad hat he wore, was blue as a cloudless sky and piercing. I knew him.
‘All Father,’ I said and he chuckled. One Eye, Greybeard, the Destroyer, The Furious One. Frenzy.
Odin.
‘Part of him and all of that,’ he answered. He nodded at the scene, which wavered and swirled as if the sudden wind ruffled it, like the reflection in a pool.
‘The White Christ priest with Gudleif,’ he said and I saw the head on a pole, a head which had once been Gudleif, the man who had raised me as a fostri. Caomh, the Irisher thrall who had once been a priest – always a priest, he used to say – stood beside the horror Einar had created and watched us row away.
‘Bjornshafen was woven together after Gudleif’s sons died and the White Christ priest did it, so that they are all followers of the One God now.’
He said it bitterly, this Father of the Aesir. Why did he permit this White Christ, this Jesus from the soft south? He was Odin, after all …?
‘We wear what the Norns weave, even gods,’ he answered. ‘The old Sisters grow weary, want to lay down their loom, perhaps, and can only do that when the line of the Yngling kings is ended.’
It was a long line. Crowbone, great-grandson for Harald Fairhair, was part of it. Did the Norns seek to kill him, too?
One-Eye said nothing, which annoyed me. You would think a god would know something about such matters, about such a rival as the Christ.
He grunted with annoyance. ‘I know enough to know that enough is not yet enough. I know enough to know what I may not do and that is true wisdom.’
Something rumbled, thunder deep and a grey wedge pushed forward from shadows. Amber in stone, the eyes looked me over and the steam from its grey muzzle flickered as the wolf licked the god’s gloved hand.
‘See, Freki,’ said One Eye, ‘she is coming back.’
In the wind, a shredded blackness fought forward, descending in starts and jumps until it thumped on his shoulder. The black, unwinking eye regarded me briefly, then it bent and nibbled One Eye’s ear, while he nodded.
Munin, who flies the world and remembers everything inside that tiny feathered skull, returning to the ear of All Father Odin with a beak like a carving of ebony, whispering of slights and wrongs and warriors for Valholl still unslain. I felt no fear, which was strange enough to make me realize this was the dreamworld of the Other.
‘So it is,’ answered One Eye, as if I had spoken. ‘And you want to know what will happen. That, of course, is in the hands of the Norns.’
‘Silver,’ I said and, though there was a whole babble of words, of questions that should have come from me, that seemed to be enough and he nodded.
‘Silver,’ he replied. ‘They can weave even that, the Sisters, but they weave blind and in the dark, which helps me. The silver has to be cursed, of course, otherwise it will not work for this weaving.’
I understood nothing.
‘Ask this, Orm Gunnarsson – what is silver worth?’ rumbled the voice.
Farms and ships, warriors and women … everything.
‘More,’ agreed One Eye. ‘And that Volsung hoard, the one they gave to Atil is a king’s gift. A cursed gift. My gift.’
And what does the god want in return? What could a god possibly want that did not already have? Warriors for the final battle? If so, all he had to do was kill us.
One Eye chuckled. ‘There are more wars than you know and the battles in them last a long time. This one I have been fighting since before the days of Hild’s mother’s grandmother’s grandmother, back to the first one of that line. Remember this, when all seems darkest, Orm Trader – the gift I give is the one I get. What you are, I am also.’
I did not understand that and did not need to say so – but he had spoken of Hild. The one eye glittered as he looked at me, amused and knowing.
‘The first of her line was the spear thrown over the head of the White Christ priests to tell them a fight was on,’ he said and left me none the wiser. He chuckled, a turning millwheel in his throat, and added: ‘You have to hang nine nights on the World Tree for wisdom, boy.’
The raven, Munin, spread tattered wings and launched itself into the air. We watched it go, then One Eye grunted, as if his back bothered him, or he needed his supper.
‘He goes to find his white brother and bring him home – Fimbulwinter is not on us yet and he has shaken enough pinfeathers.’
The blue eye turned to the amber of a wolf even as I watched it and I felt no fear at it, only curiosity to see All Father shapechange, for that was his nature, to be neither one thing nor the other and never to he trusted fully because of it.
‘That is one knowing you take from this place back to the world,’ he rumbled, his voice deepening. ‘The second is that One Eye will force a sacrifice from you and it will be something you hold dear.’
The wind shrieked and the snow drove in like white oblivion, stinging my eyes and driving me to my knees.
But I was not afraid, for this was not Fimbulwinter …
‘That’s a fucking comfort right enough, Trader,’ said the voice in my ear, ‘but not to those still buried to their oxters in snow.’
Hands hauled me upright, shook me until my eyes rattled and opened. Light streamed in. Light and the sear of cold air, as if I had stopped breathing entirely. Onund Hnufa, a great lumbering walrus, peered into my face from his iced-over tangle of moustache and gave a satisfied grunt.
‘Good. You will live – now help the others and stop babbling about Fimbulwinter.’
We kicked and dug them out. Snow mounds shifted and broke apart; people growled and gasped their way back into the living light of day.
Fifteen were dead, ten of them thralls, among them Hekja. Thorgunna and Thordis, pinch-faced and blue, clung to each other and made sure the tears did not freeze their eyes shut.
Three of the druzhina were also dead and two of Klerkon’s men, which left one alive, the large snub-nosed Smallander Kveldulf, Night Wolf, dark and feral under a dusting of ice. He and Crowbone glared at each other and I saw, in that moment, that Kveldulf was more afraid than the boy.
‘That was a harsh wind,’ noted Hauk Fast-Sailor.
‘If it had not been for the timely warning, it would have been harsher still,’ growled Gyrth, slogging heavily up through the snow which lay hock-deep in the V of the balka. His tattered furs trailed behind him like tails.
‘Worth an armring,’ I said, turning to Morut, who was grinning into the tangle of lines his journey had ploughed into his face. ‘Which I promise when I can get it off my arm in the warm.’
He acknowledged it with a bow and then turned his grin on the scowling Avraham.
‘See? I have returned, as I said I would,’ he declared. ‘The steppe cannot kill me and I hear you have been seeking a way across the Great White, you who could not find your prick with both hands.’
Avraham, eyes ringed in violet in a face blue-white, had not the strength to answer, nor hide his relief that Morut was back.
Led by the little tracker, we hauled the horses down the balka to where it shallowed and opened out into a great expanse of opaque ice, tufted with rimed grass and across which the new snow of the buran drifted in a hissing wind. This let us backtrack to where the carts were, but so many horses were dead that a score of carts were abandoned and anything that could be was left with them.
No horses remained for the druzhina and even little Vladimir was on foot now. Cleverest of us all were Thorgunna and Thordis, who had the frozen horse carcasses chopped up and loaded on to a cart, with the smashed-up wood from several others. Now we had food and wood to cook it with, even if Finn said he was hard put to decide which of the two items would be more tasty.
‘I thought you could make anything tasty,’ Thorgunna chided, her wind-scoured cheeks like apples as she smiled and Finn humphed with mock annoyance, staring with a rheumy eye at one stiff, hacked off pony haunch.
‘You boil it in a good cauldron with one of its own horseshoes,’ he growled. ‘It will be tasty when the shoe is soft.’
The rest of the carts we burned that night, making camp there and hauling out the large cooking kettles to boil more meat in, as much as we could. Horseshoe or not, we had heat and full bellies that night, enough to stitch us together again. We, who seemed set to die this day or the next, even started to talk about what lay ahead.
‘Another storm like that will end us,’ growled Red Njal and little Prince Vladimir scowled at his elbow, for we were all one sorry band now, leaching the same heat from the same fire.
‘We will succeed,’ he piped and no-one spoke until Morut fell to telling us of his journey.
He had tracked the Man-Haters a long way, down a balka filled with ice to a big frozen lake with an island. All the way, he had come upon ruined carts, dead horses and dead men; those of Lambisson. He had seen no women, though – but the brass-coloured horse, he said, was dead of cold and hunger, as were others that were clearly steppe ponies. Avraham groaned at the loss of the heavenly horse.
That, I offered up, was a good sign, for surely now it meant all the Man-Haters had died. Save one, I thought to myself, for you cannot kill the fetch who owned that sheened horse, or swung the twin of my sabre. I had not planned to say anything, but reached up one hand to touch the rag-wrapped bundle of the sabre on my back and caught Finn’s knowing eye across the fire.
He growled and would have spat his disgust, save that he was nestling Thordis in the crook of his arm and thought better of it.
‘There’s no Hild-fetch, Trader,’ he said. ‘That bitch-tick is long dead.’
He knew I did not believe him and I looked for Kvasir to take my shieldless side in this argument, but he was wrapped in the arms of Thorgunna and asleep.
‘Well, at least I know it isn’t Fimbulwinter,’ I offered them. Then I told them of my dream. A few, Gyrth among them, simply shrugged; they wanted to say that it was only a dream brought on by a dunt on the head, but kept their chapped lips together out of politeness to me. Others, though, were stronger in their belief.
‘A witching form often brings the wise,’ Red Njal declared, ‘as my granny used to say. It seems to me that Trader Orm has just made a good deal with Odin.’
He beamed, but Finn had the look of man more concerned that his jarl talked with gods in his dreams, while Klepp Spaki was interested in the riddle, but added that thinking it out was like trying to row into a headwind.
‘A sea-farer at last, are we?’ growled Hauk, though he grinned when he said it. Klepp, who had discovered he had no legs or stomach for the sea, acknowledged his lack with a rueful smile.
Finn eventually growled that there was nothing much about my visit with All-Father and I did not know whether to be relieved or angry at that.
‘After all,’ he went on, ‘it has told nothing more than we know already – even that part about a sacrifice of something held dear. Odin always wants something expensive draining lifeblood on an altar. It might even be me, since I took the valknut sign after the vow I made in the pit prison in Novgorod.’
‘In return for what?’ asked Sigurd, his silver nose gleaming in the firelight. Finn shifted uncomfortably, looking at little Prince Vladimir; what he had wished for was the death of that little prince and thought he had got it, too, when we heard the bells ring out.
Of course, it was the boy’s father who had died and Finn simply put that difference down to not being specific with a shapechanger such as Odin – but we had still been got out of the prison. The memory let me save Finn’s face.
‘To be free of the prison,’ I offered up, smooth as new silk. Finn nodded eagerly and thanked me with his eyes. Vladimir frowned, considering the answer; he had an unhealthy interest in comparing the advantages of different gods.
‘I am thinking,’ piped up a voice, ‘that the reason men give offerings to Thor is because he is less likely to betray them than All-Father Odin.’
All heads swung to Crowbone, sitting hunched in his cloak and blooded by firelight.
‘What do you know of the betrayal of gods?’ asked Gyrth curiously and those who knew Crowbone’s early life stirred and wished he had never voiced the question.
Little Olaf favoured Gyrth with his lopsided look and cleared his throat.
‘I know the treachery of gods and men both,’ he said and brought one hand out of his cloak to take a twig and poke the fire so that sparks flew and the flames licked up. Few men wanted to back away from it, all the same, even though their hair was scorching, for we all knew we would be a long time cold after this.
‘There once was a shepherd,’ he said and there was a whisper like sparks round the fire, the relish and apprehension of a tale from Olaf.
‘It was at the end of a deep and dark winter, almost as bad as this one. He brought his sheep into the field to find some grazing and sat down under a tree to rest. Suddenly a wolf came out of the woods. A lord of wolves, it was, with a ruff as white as emperor salt and a winter-hunger that had his chops dripping.’
‘I know that hunger well,’ interrupted a voice and was shushed to silence.
‘The shepherd picked up his spear and jumped up,’ Crowbone went on. ‘The wolf was just about to spring at the man when he saw the spear and thought better of it, for it had a fine, silver head and he did not like the idea of a shepherd with so clever a weapon. They stared at each other and neither dared to make the first move.
‘At that moment, a fox came running by. He saw that the wolf and the shepherd were afraid of each other and decided to turn the situation to his own advantage. He ran up to the wolf and said: “Cousin, there is no reason to be afraid of a man. Jump on him, get him down and have a good meal.”
‘The wolf eyed him with an amber stare and said: “You are cunning, right enough, but you have no brains. Look at him – he has a silver spear, which is surely magical. He will stab me and that will be the end of me. Be off with your stupid advice.”
‘The fox thought for a moment, then said: “Well, if that is the way of it, I will go and ask him not to stab you. What will you give me if I save you?”
‘The wolf told him he could have anything he asked for, so the fox ran to the shepherd and said: “Uncle shepherd, why are you standing here? The wolf wants to make a meal of you. I just persuaded him to wait a while. What will you give me if I save you?”
‘And the shepherd promised: “Anything you ask.” The fox ran to the wolf and said: “Cousin, you will have a long life and sire many cubs – I have persuaded the shepherd not to stab you. Hurry up and run now before he changes his mind. I will see you later.”
‘The wolf turned and leaped away as fast as he could – which, in truth, he could have done at any time but for his fear. The fox came back to the shepherd, saying: “Uncle shepherd, you did not forget your promise?”
‘The shepherd said the fox was no nephew to him but asked him what he desired and the fox answered: “Not much, only a bite out of your leg. That will be enough for me.”’
‘Ha – even that seems tasty to me,’ shouted a black-browed Slav and those of us who had known oarmates to have done such a thing once shifted uncomfortably and said nothing at all.
‘The shepherd stretched out his leg,’ Olaf went on. ‘Just as the fox was about to sink his teeth into it, the shepherd barked. The fox jumped back, asking: “Who made that noise?” The shepherd shrugged: “What do you care? Take your bite and be done with it.” The fox cocked his head cunningly. “Oh, no. I will not come near you before you tell me who made that noise.”
‘The shepherd sighed. “In that case, I will tell you. This winter in the village we had nothing to eat. And then my sheepdog had two puppies. Well … I was so hungry, I ate them. Now the pups have grown up in my stomach. I am thinking they smell you and want to get at you, so they are barking.”
‘The fox got even more frightened but he would not show it. He said with dignity: “I would have no trouble handling your pups. But I must run and see the wolf on some urgent business. Hold back your sheepdogs for a while. When I come back, I will teach them such a lesson that they will never attack foxes again.”
‘The shepherd smiled. “Be quick,” he said.
‘And the fox went streaking off into the woods, happy to get away with his life. After he caught his breath, he set out to look for the wolf and said to him: “Well, cousin – I saved your life when you were frightened of the shepherd and you made a promise.”
‘The wolf howled, a long howl. “What promise?” he growled. “I am no cousin to you. I am the jarl-king of these woods. Who dares to say that I was frightened?” He raised his paw to strike the fox down – who ran off before such a thing could happen, thinking to himself: “There is no gratitude in this world.”
‘Then the fox slunk into his hole to teach his children to stay away from men and wolves both.’
‘Aye, true enough,’ Red Njal agreed. ‘The cod who swims with sharks is swiftly eaten, as my granny said.’
‘Heya,’ muttered Gizur, ‘I hope you are friendly enough with men and wolves to get away with that insulting saga, little Prince Olaf.’
‘And gods,’ added Onund Hnufa meaningfully.
‘With shepherds only,’ answered Crowbone and some laughed, though it was forced. They still did not know how to read the runes of this boy.
Into the gentle warmth of this stepped a large, dark figure – Kveldulf, his bearded jaw thrust out challengingly and a scowl between his brows.
‘I am the last of Klerkon’s men,’ he declared, glancing at little Crowbone. ‘I am known as Kveldulf and noted as a shapechanging berserker. It comes to me that you are short-handed and could use a good man.’
This was right enough, but I did not like or trust Kveldulf and did not want him in the Oathsworn. Crowbone’s face was stiff and not all of it was cold; his eyes glittered, one ice, the other dark fire. I remembered that Kveldulf had been Klerkon’s man and wondered what had passed between them when Crowbone was a thrall there.
‘True enough,’ I said, ‘but we are the Oathsworn. You may have heard of us and the oath we take. Can you take it and keep it?’
‘I am known all over Smalland as a man of my word,’ he replied, angry at the hard sneer from me.
Crowbone cleared the choke from his throat, which turned all heads.
‘Just so,’ he said, in a voice thin as an axe edge. ‘You promised me I would never see my mother again, the second time I ran off. True enough, I never have.’
The wind hissed into the silence that followed that, until I forced myself to speak.
‘What skills have you that we might need?’ I asked Kveldulf.
He blinked at that. ‘I have said. I am known as a shapechanger and berserker. A killer am I. A serious jarl would welcome me.’
That was insulting and I felt the burn of anger. It was a surprise, that feeling, for it made me realize how much the cold had seeped in to the centre of me and numbed a great deal.
‘Not known to me,’ I said careless of insulting this man’s fame, which was a dangerous business. ‘Nor have I seen you bite a shield, for all the fighting we have done so far.’
‘I was not well during the fight at the village,’ he admitted, at which Finn gave a snort of laughter. Kveldulf curled a lip at him.
‘I am well enough now to show those with no respect some manners. I have heard that the way into the Oathsworn is to fight one already in it.’
I felt Finn bristle and wanted none of this – wanted none of Kveldulf.
‘Times are harsh and we are fewer,’ I said. ‘I have chosen a new way.’
Men leaned forward, curious now and not having heard of this. It would have been hard, since I had just thought of it and I blame the cold and the weight of events for making me savagely reckless.
I held up my left hand, swathed in a leather glove, which was still stiffened with rime. If I had not been at the fire there would have been a mitten over it.
‘How many fingers do you see?’
He blinked, then grinned, clearly thinking this was a formality and no more.
‘Five, of course.’
I bent the stiff, empty sockets of the glove and those who knew I only had two fingers and a thumb on that hand chuckled. Kveldulf’s scowl returned, more thunderous than ever.
Kvasir laughed, loud and hard.
‘There are stones with more clever in them,’ he said. ‘Jarl Orm should get one of them to swear to the Oathsworn.’
‘Heya,’ rumbled Gyrth, smiling. I felt only the hot rush of shame, for it had not been right to smack Kveldulf so hard with words, him who blinked with the effort of understanding.
Kveldulf, trembling like water on the brink of spilling, finally spun round and lumbered into the dark, Finn’s savage chuckles goading him. Slowly, conversation resumed but I sat silent, aware of disapproval across the fire.
Eventually, Thorgunna gave a snort. ‘The hasty tongue sings its own mishap if it be not bridled in,’ she intoned.
‘You sound like Red Njal’s granny,’ I answered, trying to make light of it. ‘Or my foster-mother.’
‘You never had same, it seems to me,’ she replied tartly, ‘for she would surely have taught you to be kinder.’
Which was a tongue-cut too deep and Kvasir put a hand on her elbow to still her.
‘Look where we all are, Jarl Orm,’ Thordis interrupted, leaning forward so that the fire glittered her eyes. ‘Here, in this place. Following you to an uncertain doom. If your wyrd is upon you, it is right we should speak. There are more lives at risk here than you know.’
That smacked up memories of Einar, too harsh for me to take easily and the hackles rose on me.
‘Do you want Kveldulf? Take him and welcome – but I do not want him at my back …’
Then it struck me, what she had said and I stopped, gaping. I looked from her to Finn and back. Finn looked stricken and Thordis chuckled at his dismay.
‘Not me, Horsehead … not yet.’
Thorgunna, swaddled in a cloak, raised her head. ‘I am not alone.’
It was the way we announced it in the north and Kvasir had clearly known of his wife’s condition for some time, since he did not even stir at this. I did, more than a few times. Jon Asanes laughed; Red Njal and others swapped the news, which sprang from head to head like a spark whirling from a fire.
‘Are you sure?’
It was a question a rock would have asked and her sheep-dropping eyes raked me with silent scorn.
‘Even with the cold and the lack of food I can tell when life quickens in me, Jarl Orm,’ she snapped. ‘Anyway, I slept with an egg and lopped off the far end next morning. By the yolk, it will be a boy.’
I sat back a little, looking from her to Kvasir, feeling that, somehow, they had conspired against me. One of the big Slavs – the same who had sworn he could eat someone’s leg – growled, ‘An egg,’ in a tone that wanted to know where she had got such a prize.
‘So you see, Trader,’ Thordis went on, ignoring all this, ‘why we are concerned.’
I did and felt twice as ashamed as before, had to shake my head to clear it.
‘The words were hasty,’ I admitted, ‘the reason was sound. What’s done is done. The unwise man is awake all night and ponders everything over; when morning comes he is weary in mind and all is a burden as ever.’
‘As your foster-mother used to say,’ added Red Njal. ‘She knew my granny, I am thinking.’
This last was greeted with chuckles; talk resumed, low and soft round the fire. But I could not take my eyes from Thorgunna, kept flicking back to her, wondering about the life there, marvelling at it happening at all in this place, fearing it at the same time.
I had women and youths enough to crush me with the worrying. Now the unborn were weighing my shoulders, even before they sucked in their first breath.