It was the heart of ice, that dread tomb. So cold it froze flame, as Finn had once promised and even he now saw the raw, gleaming power of it as he slid down the knotted rope with his nail in his teeth and one hand clutching a guttering torch.
I held its twin, clutched the rune sword in my other hand – I would not have gone down into the maw of that hole without that blade – and waited for him. The flicker of torchlight turned the rime-slathered place into a bounce of sparkles, like the sun on moving sea, as we turned, half-crouched and prepared for anything.
I had been in this place once before, but Finn never had and I saw his jaw slacken so that the slavered Roman nail fell from it, hitting the frosted floor. It should have clattered out echoes, but that place sucked sound in and he only noticed it was gone from his mouth when he breathed, ragged and gasping.
The rope trembled when he let it go, a thin hope that led back to the patch of pale light and the world of the living. Here, though, there was only death, grinning from the huge, silver throne, leprous with cold; I could hardly bring myself to look at it.
When I did, I saw the faded brocade of once rich robes, laid neatly on the throne as a cushion for bones, including the skull that smiled welcome. Atil’s skull.
‘Einar?’ Finn managed at last from lips that trembled and not from the cold of the place.
I shook my head. There was a scatter of bones in front of that great ice-slathered throne and some of them belonged to Ildico, the princess who had killed Atilla – one forlorn wrist and forearm, five centuries yellowed, hung still from the shackles that had fastened her forever to Atil’s last seat.
The others belonged mostly to Einar; I saw a skull, still with long straggles of black wisping it, all that remained of his crow-wing hair, and pointed to it it. Swallowing, Finn made a warding sign and fumbled to pick up his Roman nail.
‘Heya, old jarl,’ he whispered, as if afraid to speak aloud. ‘We have come back, as you see. Treat us kindly.’
I did not think he would, much. I had left Einar sitting on that throne, skewered by me but dying even as I finished him. Atil’s remains, swaddled in those rich robes, had been torn from the seat by Hild in her frantic eagerness to seize one of his two rune swords.
Yet now they were back, neatly placed and Einar had been scattered like a dead dog at Atil’s feet. I peered and poked warily, found and rolled other skulls into the light of the torch – Ketil-Crow, Sigtrygg, Illugi, who had all died here.
I said their names, the sound of my voice falling like snow off a roof, dull and soft.
‘And her, Bear Slayer?’ Finn asked, tucking the nail down one boot, recovering a measure of his old swagger. ‘This one looks a little small to be any head I remember. Perhaps this is Hild.’
Ildico, I was thinking, as he held up the yellow grin and empty sockets of her, whose arm was still fastened to the throne. I did not think we would find Hild, for I did not think she was dead. Someone had restored Atil to his throne and made a clear gesture with the bones of intruders. I did not think Lambisson had done it and said so.
That made Finn frown and think and not like what he came up with. He held the torch up higher, shifting the light on the dark paths between tall cliffs of bulked blackness. I saw his face the moment the truth hit him, knew that he was about to ask where all the silver was hidden, when he saw it.
He gasped aloud and sank to his knees with the sheer scale of it. All that bulked blackness WAS the silver, age-dark and heaped up like old lumber. Bowls, ewers, wine pitchers, statues, plates, cups, most of them decorated with embedded gems, half buried in seas of coins and armrings, fastened together by age and ice.
There were shields, too, spearheads, blades, even bits of armour, crushed together with great platters fixed with mother-of-pearl, silver statues of animals with gold fangs, dancing girls poised on alabaster bases, gleaming, cold-frozen birds with amber eyes and ivory wings.
Under our feet was a massive auroch horn, banded in silver and jasper, a necklace of silver with porphyry stones, a great two-handed silver cup studded with deep-green serpentine, the mask from an ancient helmet, fixed with staring amethyst eyes.
Finn lifted each one, letting them fall from fingers numb with wonder and cold, then unearthed a half-bent silver plate, big as a wheel, crowded and leaping with ornamental life – palm leaves and lilies and grapes, silvered birds clinging and fluttering among branches, all twined together into an endless network of gleaming buds and plumes. Coins spilled from it like water, a ringing chime of riches.
He knelt, this man who never bowed the knee and his head and his shoulders shook as he wept at the sheer immensity, at the fact that, after everything that had happened and all who had died, the wild hunt of the Oathsworn ended here, now.
I was not sure whether he wept for those who had died, or what we had found, or that we had found it at all after all our trouble. Nor did he. It was a sky-cracking moment, seeing Finn shed tears.
Eventually, he laid the great wheel of silver plate reverently down and fumbled The Godi out its sheath, stood it point down on the silver-litter and clasped his hands on the hilt, head bowed.
‘All Father, one of your own gives thanks this night,’ he said. ‘Warrior he, faithful he, with companions you know and who walk with you already and who died here. To them I say: “Not now, but soon.” To you, I give our thanks and your names.’
Then he started to recite them, grim and cold names, one by one. As godi, I should have been more reverent, but I had experienced One Eye before and did not think he deserved all this for bringing us here – we had already paid dearly and were not finished, I was sure of that. Distracted, I looked round and saw, from the corner of my eye, a balk of wood and moved to it across an ice-slither of floor.
It was the collapsed mouth of our old tunnel, the one we had dug into the side of the howe when first we had arrived here with Einar leading us. I remembered Illugi, slamming the butt of his staff into the ground a step away from here, calling on the gods – who were deaf to him by then – to aid us all against the black fetch that was Hild. It had splashed, I remembered, for the howe was flooding …
It had not flooded, all the same. The timber sticking from the wall was from the cart-planks we had used to shore up the tunnel and I remembered floundering in the sucking mud, felt the crushing panic of it while Hild sliced through the supports with the scything rune sword she wielded in her desperate, savage, snarling desire to get to me. The water had been flooding in then, pouring down the balka as it always did when it rained on the steppe, making a lake here, save in the drought of really high summer.
I laid a palm on the cold, slick freeze of that timber. In there, she was. Her efforts had brought the tunnel down, sealed the howe and left only a slick of water inside it in the end. If she had died, she lay only a few feet away, perhaps only inches, still grasping the other sword; I touched the wall, but it was iced as tempered steel, too hard to dig out the truth of it.
‘Vafud, Hropta-Tyr, Gaut, Veratyr,’ intoned Finn, then finished, unclasping his hands from The Godi’s hilt and climbing to his feet like an old man.
‘By the Hammer, Orm boy,’ he kept saying, shaking his head. ‘Just look at it.’
I blew on my numbed fingers and laid the other hand, lamb-gentle, on one shoulder; he blinked once or twice, then took up his torch and sword and puffed out his cheeks.
‘Well, I have stood here and seen it for myself,’ he said and his eyes were bright when I met them. ‘All the silver of the world. Now I know. Now I know, boy.’
We moved down between the frowning balkas of riches, guttering torchlight throwing eldritch shadows and bouncing diamond-sharp darts back from the hanging icicles that made a silver hall for a warlord’s hoard.
From his mouldering brocade cushion, Atil grinned and watched us go with his dark, dead eyes.
We found Lambisson a little way down one of the rat-nest passages – or, rather, he found us, for he was crouched in the dark and we came up in the red glare of torches. He was sitting on a pile of scraped-together spoil, all the lighter stuff such as coins and neckrings, little items you could put in a bucket. He looked like a mad frog on a stone.
‘Brondolf,’ I said to him, companionably and stopped well short of him, beyond blade reach, for he was just a shadow against the dark to me and I did not know what he had in his hands, or where Short Eldgrim was.
‘You must be Orm Bear Slayer,’ came the voice, a whisper of a thing, faint as a Norn thread in that place. Finn moved closer, held up the torch and we saw him more clearly.
Lambisson was all but gone. The white raven had made a wasteland of his dreams, turned his mind to silver-white while tearing his face to a raw sore and he was so thin his fine tunic hung on him like a drying net on a beach. Hunger and sickness had leached his life away and he no longer resembled the Brondolf Lambisson I had seen, seal-sleek and confident in his fancy mail and helm on a hillside long before. That man was dead; this one surely would be soon enough.
Yet he had a steel handful that gleamed sharp in the twilight between us and could still summon up a laugh, like moth wings, as he shifted his eyes away from the glare of Finn’s light.
‘I do not remember your face and we scarcely met,’ he sighed out to me. ‘I remember Einar, but not you. Yet the Norns wove us together more fixed than brothers. Is that not strange, Orm Bear Slayer? I know you better than any woman I ever had.’
The laugh fluttered out again and was lost in the dark. Finn moved sideways and I squatted.
‘Not so strange,’ I answered. ‘The Norns weave and we can only wear what they make.’
‘This is a poisoned serk, right enough,’ he whispered back – then flung some iron into his voice. ‘It would be better, I am thinking, if your companion stayed still.’
Finn stopped at once, waved an acknowledging hand and squatted, as if by a friendly fire.
‘I am Finn Bardisson from Skane,’ he said easily. ‘I can kill you if I want to, Brondolf Lambisson, whether you have blade or not. It is better you know this from the start.’
‘I want Short Eldgrim,’ I added. ‘There need be no killing here. Frey witness it, there has been enough of that. All I want is Eldgrim.’
He stirred and I saw the head droop, but the steel-holding hand was steady enough.
‘You speak as a friend,’ he hissed. ‘We can never be that.’
‘No, but we need not be enemies.’
There was silence for a heart-beat or two, then he said: ‘Do you like my new fortress, Bear Slayer? Fine, is it not. Rich.’
The chuckle that came with it was the hiss of a corpse’s last breath. ‘Rich enough to save Birka, I had thought – but that place is dead.’
‘Keep it,’ I replied flatly. ‘I want Eldgrim. Then you can fill your boots and go away with no fighting at all.’
He leaned forward, that ice-sore face even bloodier in the light of my torch, patched by the black of cold rot eating his cheeks. He shook his head, his eyes glittering like rime; blood oozed from the cracked remains of his blackened lips.
‘I did not think so,’ I sighed. ‘Well, here is my last offer. Finn and I will go back to the hole in the roof and climb out. You send out Short Eldgrim. Then you can stay or go, as you please.’
‘And you will walk away, leaving all this?’
‘All what?’ I countered. ‘You can eat none of it, Brondolf, nor suck warmth from it. You are cold, sick and starving to death down here. I do not …’
He moved, so fast that I only realized how tricked I had been when he flowed like darkness itself across the space between us, his blade already hissing. Not as sick as he had made it seem.
I had a flash, like a moment seen in lightning, of Ketil-Crow, stumbling over heaps of tinkling silver with the blue coil of his entrails tangling his ankles, with the same flowing darkness after him. Only then it had been Hild and her rune sword.
That memory almost did for me, for I hesitated with the vision of it. He had strength enough for this one mad rush and the sword hissed round, so that I lurched backwards and my own rune blade, laid handily across my knees, reared up – and blocked the cut.
It sounded like a hammer on an anvil. I heard a cracked-bell sound, knew it to be his sword breaking on mine and then he hit me, raving and slavering, following the ruin of his sword, half-turning as he smashed into me like a mad bull with just a hilt and a jagged nub end in his hand.
We went over in a rush of panting breath and crushing bone and whirling stars. There was a grunt and a scream and a moment of mad thrashing, which ended with a wet smack of sound.
A hand grabbed my forearm and I came up into Finn’s embrace, wet with Brondolf’s blood and brains. He lay face down, a diamond-shaped hole in the back of his head and blood spreading thickly under him.
‘All we wanted was Short Eldgrim,’ panted Finn, as The Godi dripped gleet and blood. ‘He did not have to take the hard way to it.’
He did, all the same, for he had no Short Eldgrim to trade. We skulked and slithered around and over the gleam and the dark of that place and found no trace of him. Then we came back to where Lambisson lay and turned him over into the grue of his own blood, for it was said the truth lay fixed in a dead man’s eyes.
His raw sore of a face was sucked in with hunger and collapsed and already blue-white, his dead eyes glittering with reflected ice, sharp and bright as silver. So the truth was there, right enough. Just not what we needed.
Finn looked round, at the great piles of silver and the shimmering walls, then peeled off the valknut amulet and looped it round the stiffening, dead fingers. I was astonished; the amulet was mine, for a start and I would not give the skin off my shit for Lambisson. I said as much and Finn nodded as if he understood.
‘It is not for him,’ he rasped. ‘This is the end of it, Orm, and that cursed little monk had it right – all the struggle to get to it and for what? We would have to live here to make sure of keeping it all and fight everyone and his mother every day. I would give twice the amount to have Pinleg and Harelip and Skapti and all the others waiting at the top of that rope. Aye, even Einar, though you would not agree, I am sure.’
He shook his head and climbed to his feet, while his words crashed on me like a fall of snow. He had the right of it, for sure – we could fill our boots and carts and make sacks out of our tunics and cloaks and still would hardly dent the treasure heap of this place. After us would come a ravening horde of others, friends of Morut and Avraham and friends of their friends and brothers and the relations of every man in the druzhina and Oathsworn, all ripping the heart out of Atil’s last resting place. There was no secret now.
Odin’s gift. It had not been worth it, as I suspected all along and I said so. Finn agreed with a nod and then made a gesture so surprising I almost dropped my sword. He laid a hand on my forearm and said, straight into my face and serious as a fall of rock: ‘You had the right of it, not wanting to return here. We should have listened to you.’
Then I felt the hot wash of shame. Oh, aye, I had railed against it, scorned it, dug in my feet like the point man in a heaving boar snout – but who was it had scratched those runes on the hilt of the sword, knowing full well he would need them, sooner or later, knowing he could not resist coming back?
We were climbing stiffly to our feet when the voice drifted like cold mist down through the dark heaps and round the rat passages. A high, thin, voice. Female. Calling my name, so that it wrapped chill round my heart.
Hild.
I looked at Finn and he at me and, for once, I saw no scorning scowl, only the flick of his tongue on dry lips.
‘By Odin’s eye, boy,’ said Finn in a hoarse whisper.
‘F-i-nnn.’
‘Did you hear that?’ I asked and had back a suitable curl of lip.
‘Even with my one ear, I can hear that,’ he growled, then hefted The Godi in one hand and the torch in the other and rolled his neck muscles. ‘Well, if it is that dead bitch, I am coming for her.’
Finn was noted for being afraid of nothing at all, but the fear was an unseen force that I had to push against, step by step round one gully of age-dark riches, half-way round another, to where a torch flickered and the pale light spilled from the hole in the roof. No more than a score of steps, it was the longest walk I ever took.
A figure stood there, dark and menacing, holding the torch high and peering like some hound from Hel.
‘Here I am, bitch!’ yelled Finn and even if his voice cracked a little at the end, I admired him, for my throat had so much dry spear rammed in it I could make no sound at all.
‘Is that you there, Finn Bardisson? Step to where I can see you – and, if it is you, stop calling me names.’
We blinked, looked at each other and then Finn grunted as if he had been slapped. ‘Thordis. It is Thordis, by Odin’s hairy arse.’
If she wondered about us charging out and all but raining kisses on the upturned petal of her sweet face, she was too agitated and fearing to comment on it.
‘Get off! Get off me,’ she panted, cuffing us like dogs.
‘Aye, but you are a sight, right enough,’ chuckled Finn, trying to grab her again. The Godi whirled round her ears and she winced back, so that he fell to apologizing and trying to grab her and sheath it at the same time.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked, feeling a coiled tendril of new chill unfold in my bowels.
‘Right enough,’ huffed Thordis, tugging her linen kerchief back over her hair, one braid unfastened and dropped almost to her belt. She blew a stray wisp off her chapped cheeks and wriggled herself together. ‘I would have said before, but for this … this …’
‘Tell it now.’
She told it and set us frantic, scrabbling to the knotted rope and calling up for help.
Vladimir and his company had taken the silver and gone. Our men had grumbled about it, but I had told Kvasir not to do anything rash, so he kept them from the druzhina’s throats and the Oathsworn let themselves be herded on to the island and disarmed under the bows of the big Slav warriors. Their weapons were left a little way off and, as soon as the treacherous little rat prince was beyond bowshot range, the Oathsworn lumbered out and got them back.
Then Kvasir went after them, on foot, for we had no horses. Gizur was left in charge and – I cursed him to the nine worlds and back for it – Thorgunna had stayed behind when everyone trekked back to the tomb with their weapons. Then she had set off after Kvasir. Once back at Atil’s tomb, Gizur sent Thordis down to find us – and the fact that he had sent a woman into that place should have told me all that was needful, but I was too red-raged to see it.
‘What possessed Kvasir?’ roared Finn, levering himself out of the hole.
Below, Thordis yelled back: ‘Jon Asanes is missing – Kvasir went after the boy.’
‘And Thorgunna?’ I demanded, putting both hands on her backside and shoving her up the rope.
‘She went after Kvasir’ she answered, panting with the effort of climbing. ‘And watch your hands, Jarl Orm, otherwise we will have to wed me for the liberties.’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered and followed her up.
At the top, Gizur waited and we were ringed with backs as all the Oathsworn formed a shielded circle round the hole, facing outwards. Nearby sat Fish, with Hauk Fast-Sailor’s bow and his last six arrows.
‘What made her go after Kvasir?’ I wanted to know, raging, half-turning to Gizur. ‘And why did you fall in with her plan, you gowk?’
‘He is her man,’ Thordis answered. ‘The sight is going in his remaining eye and he can barely see at all and soon will be blind entire – for all that, he has clearer vision than yourself, Jarl Orm, for that has been staring you in the face for months.’
I gawped; Finn scrubbed his beard with embarrassment and it was clear he had known. Gizur, too. Everyone, I suddenly realized, but me. Yet the truth of it was there now and I saw it, in every axe stroke Kvasir had missed, in that bird-cock of his head to focus better, the ragged linen strip against the light.
The despair stripped away the anger – briefly. Gizur cleared his throat and I sprang on him, fresh prey for my abuse.
‘You should have stopped her,’ I yelled. ‘Stopped him, too, you cow hole. Have you sent men after them?’
He staggered under the wind of it a little, righted himself and came about, grim and quiet.
‘Kvasir commanded, so what he said I did,’ he replied evenly. ‘Allowing Thorgunna to go after him was the best I could do under the circumstances, Jarl Orm.’
‘What fucking circumstances?’ I bawled, red-lit with anger now.
He pointed, out beyond the shoulders of the Oathsworn – all of them weaponed and mailed and with their shields up – at the snow-whirled steppe.
The anger hissed from me like the last breath of a dead man. In a ring, on both sides of the steep-banked frozen lake, the woman warriors sat on their little steppe ponies, silent as trees. Hundreds of them – three hundred, at least I saw, with that part of my mind that still worked – waiting like wolves in a circle round the tiny wall of shields on the island of Atil’s tomb.
There were twenty of us, no more than that, the last Oathsworn in the world, each one worn as a whetstone, a dark snarl of beard where ice glistened like tears, cheeks sunk, eyes rimmed red, noses dripping. The men who called me jarl hunched under rust-spotted helmets, knees no more than lumps of bone above ragged garters or shredded boots, feet two lumps of frozen flesh and knuckles purpled with sores that itched and bled.
Yet they had shields up and spears greased and blades that gleamed with edge, reflecting in the eyes that watched the ring of horsed women. They parted those frozen beards and grinned the same old fanged grin, of men with cliffs before them and wolves behind and not one of them with the thought to run or throw down their weapons – not even Fish, who was not oathed.
I loved them then, none more so than Finn, who put out a voice for them all, blowing out his cheeks and grinning until his lips bled.
‘Odin luck for us, then,’ he beamed, ‘that we got our weapons back in time. Now we have these Man-Haters where we want them – they will not get away from us this time.’
The others roared at that and banged on their shields. The riders stirred and then threw back their heads and started up a shrilling, that yipping-dog sound that so chilled us every time we heard it; from three hundred throats it swamped our bellows.
Fish, hirpling painfully on the wrapped ruins of his feet, forced his way to where he could shoot, drew back and let fly. Whether he meant it or not, the shaft zipped true and the arrow he had picked had a making-flaw in the head, a small hole that fluted the wind. It shrieked, loud and shrill, all the way into the trembling throat of one rider, cutting her dead in mid-yip and tumbling her backwards off her pony.
As if he had shot them all in the throat, they stopped. There was such a silence after it that we could hear the stricken rider choking, drowning in her own blood while her horse snorted at the iron-stink of it.
‘Fuck,’ said Hauk Fast-Sailor admiringly. ‘I never got a shot like that out of that old bow.’
‘First time I saw a Fish hook a catch,’ added Gyrth and there were chuckles. Men banged on their shields again and grinned at one another, as if they had won a battle.
‘I think,’ groaned Klepp Spaki, ‘you have annoyed them just a little.’
They were nocking arrows and my mouth went dry at that. We had barely enough men to form a tight circle as it was and none to spare for a rank to make a roof of shields; three hundred arcing arrows, from every direction, would nail us all to the frozen ground.
I saw riders moving, heard angry shouts. Finn thumbed snot from his nose and squinted at them.
‘Women,’ he sneered. ‘Argue about everything, even the way to kill us.’
The whack on his helmet was loud and some heads turned. Thordis, flat of the blade she held up and ready for another attack on Finn’s dented helm, scowled blackly and men chuckled. Finn, though, grinned admiringly at her.
‘Here they come,’ bawled Fish and stepped back to allow the two mailed shoulders on either side of him to clash together like a wall.
It was just one rider, edging out on to the ice, her pony stepping uneasily, sliding and slithering. I had a salmon-leap of hope, then, that they would be madwomen to the end and try and charge us across the lake ice. In the chaos of that we had, perhaps, the sliver of a chance.
She came on, black cloak billowing, hair snaking in dark braids around her sloped brow. I swallowed; she held up an arm and in it was a scythe of light – the rune sword. Hild’s sword.
The voice floated across, slathering my bowels with ice.
‘Orm, who is called Bear Slayer.’
It was in good Greek, but even those who did not know the tongue could recognize the name – even Finn, who knew just enough Greek to get his face slapped – and he looked at me as I stood, stricken. He knew what I was thinking … Hild.
‘Your girl wants you,’ he said into the air around us, tense as creaking bowstrings, but the chuckles were forced.
‘Let him speak soft words and offer wealth, who longs for a woman’s love,’ Red Njal intoned as I shouldered to the front, my legs trembling. I could not feel my feet, but tested the sharp of my tongue on him.
‘One day, Red Njal, you must tell me how this marvellous annoying relative of yours lived so long in the close company of other folk,’ I snarled.
He grinned at me with chapped lips. ‘True, my da’s ma was given a place of her own and rarely visited – but there was wisdom in her, all the same.’
Then he nodded out to the ring of horse.
‘Do not keep her fretting there, Bear Slayer,’ he said wryly.
I saw the woman nudge her pony on and all the bows dropped a little, though the arrows stayed nocked. I moved forward; she moved forward, off the ice and on to the lip of the island, where the pony had more purchase. She swung a leg over its neck – no small feat in her lamellar coat and thigh-greaves – and dropped lightly, the cloak floating down like hair.
It was not Hild. I thought she wore a Serkland veil until I stepped closer and saw it was a whirl of skin-marks covering her chin, nose and cheeks, a blue-black knot of some steppe magic marred by the deep scores of old scars, three on each cheek. Her head sloped backwards, too, in that long, eldritch way – but I did not care what she looked like, for it was not Hild.
She lifted the sabre, the twin of the one I held, wary and watching – then she slammed it into the earth and moved to one side, an arm’s length from the hilt and squatted.
Dry-mouthed, I moved forward, careful to stay beyond sword reach of her, out of politeness. Then I did the same as she had done and took a knee, Norse-style.
We faced each other, the width of a man apart, no more, and studied each other in silence, while the wind sighed, lifting little djinn of snow over the stippled ice of the lake.
She was nail-thin and wasted, but had all her finery on, from golden beads in her braids to necklets of silver animals and fine bangles. Her armour was polished bone leaves pared from the hooves of horses and she wore baggy breeks worked with gold threads. But what glittered most brightly on her were her polished jet eyes.
The silence stretched until I could stand it no longer, so I nodded politely at her and said: ‘Skjaldmeyjar.’
She cocked her head like a quizzical bird and, in good Greek, answered me with a smile. ‘I hope that is friendly in your tongue.’
I told her what it meant – shieldmaiden – though she seemed more like someone who could be called valmeyjar, which most ignorant people who are not from the fjords translate as shield-maiden, or battle-maiden. Really, that word means corpse-maiden, chooser of the slain and is a name to hand out to a woman who looks like a wolf’s grandmother two weeks dead. I did not tell her this.
‘You know my name,’ I added and left that hanging like a waiting hawk.
‘Amacyn, they call me,’ she answered. ‘Which is the name given to me as leader of the tupate and the name given to all such leaders, who then forsake all other family ties. It means Mother of the People, but the foolish Greeks once thought it stood as name for us all and so called us amazonoi.’
‘Who are the tupate?’ I asked, my mind whirling already. She spread her hands to encompass all the riders. ‘We are. In Greek it would be tabiti. It is hard to translate correctly, but the nearest would be – oathsworn.’
I sat back on one heel at that. Oathsworn. Like us. I said so and she made a little head gesture, as if to say perhaps yes, perhaps no.
‘You have a sword,’ I said in Greek. ‘Like mine. Hild had it last.’
She smiled, covering her face with her hand, which was custom, I learned. ‘Hild. Is that the name you gave her, then? The one in the tomb of the Master of the World?’
‘That is the name she gave herself,’ I answered, breathing heavily, for I felt on the edge of a cliff with a mad desire to fly. ‘How did you come by the sword?’
‘Hild,’ she repeated, then laughed, a surprising sound of lightness. ‘Ildico. Yes, that would be part of her penance. Or a twisted joke.’
I did not understand any of this and she saw it, nodded seriously and adjusted her squat more comfortably, so that her knees came up round her chin, long, thin hands clasped in front of her.
‘Long ago,’ she said, ‘when the Volsungs brought their treasure and a new wife called Ildico to Atil, Master of the World, we were the Chosen Ones, charged with making sure of our Lord’s undisturbed afterlife.’
She waved a hand, slim, pale and languid as a dragonfly in summer heat and talked as if she had been there herself, as if it had been yesterday, or the day before.
‘This place,’ she added. ‘We made sure those who laboured on it could not reveal the secret of it, every one, from those who dug, to those who planned, to those who brought the treasure to place in it.’
She paused and looked at me with those black eyes, so that my heart clenched. I could almost believe she had been there herself, dealing out the slaughter.
‘The steppe ran with blood for days,’ she said, ‘so that, in the end, only the Chosen Ones and the flies knew where the tomb lay and if the flies passed it on, mother to daughter, generation to generation, I never knew of it. But that is what the Chosen Ones did.’
There was a long, wind-sighing pause while she fiddled with the thongs of her soft boots and gathered her thoughts. Mine were of all the shrieking fetches who drifted in this place and if this woman was one, for she spoke so knowingly of five centuries before. No wonder the rest of the steppe kept clear.
‘We did not expect the Master of the World to occupy it for some time, of course,’ she went on, ‘but the Volsungs came, with their gift of silver and swords and Ildico, the new bride. They did not stay for the wedding – did not dare, of course, since Ildico planned red murder – and when they left, one of us went with them.’
‘One of … you?’ I asked, uncertainly. ‘A Chosen One?’
She nodded and shifted. ‘Her name, as far as any Volsung knew, was my name – Amacyn. She was then leader of the tupate but forgot her oath for love of the smith, the one called Regin. She went back with him to the north and by the time it was discovered, it was too late. The Master of the World wanted her death, to keep the secret of his tomb, but we were told to wait until after his wedding.’
By which time it was too late, for Ildico killed him on the wedding night. I licked dry lips, thinking on all the years between then and now and what that love had cost.
‘The oathbreaker was not hunted down, then,’ I said, the mosaic of it filling in for me even as I spoke.
The woman shrugged. ‘The tupate had lost face and the one who favoured us was dead,’ she said. ‘The sons of the Master of the World did not care for us as much – but we had sworn to guard his tomb and so we did, as best as we were able. The last task of that tupate was to carry the Lord of the World to this place – then slay everyone who was not one of us.
‘After that, the Chosen Ones went home – but daughters were trained in war, given the secret and served, as best as could be done, down the long years. Faithful to the last task – to keep the secret of the tomb. The oath would not let us do less.’
I knew that oath and how it bound. Who it bound. Hild. The woman nodded.
‘The oathbreaking Amacyn could not live with what she had done in the end, so it became known,’ she went on softly. ‘She birthed a daughter and did what we all do – passed on the secret of the tomb. My mother did so to me, which is how I know that the oathbreaking Amacyn then went into Regin’s forge and would not come out, sealed it so that it could never be used again. Regin the smith died and some say his heart snapped because of both his loves were gone, woman and forge. All this was found out, piece by piece, over the years.’
I saw the weft of it then, a harsh-woven cloak of misery visited on the innocent daughters of that forge village. All the ones who came after would not break that chain, waited until a girl was born – or chosen, even – and reached the full of their womanhood, then passed on the secret of Atil’s tomb, an echo of what Regin’s woman had once been. Then they went into the forge mountain, for the shame of what had been done. Probably those who thought twice about it were forced in; it became a god-ritual for the people who lived by the forge and they would be afraid to break it.
The woman sat quietly and said nothing while I stammered all this out, hammering it straight as I said it.
‘Except for Hild,’ I said, seeing it clearly, the sad, untangled knot of it. She had been stolen from that little Karelian village because Martin the priest thought he had found a secret and hired a man called Skartsmadr Mikill, Quite The Dandy, to get it. When he could not find it he and his crew of Danes tried to force the knowledge from the villagers by taking what they clearly valued – the young, bewildered Hild, still raw with the whispered secret, still weeping from the loss of her mother, gone into the forge.
In the end, Quite The Dandy found out how much she was valued; the villagers attacked them with such ferocity that those hard Danes had run for it, dragging Hild with them as their only prize. By the time she was delivered to Martin of Hammaburg they had taken out their anger and frustration on her so badly that her mind was cracking.
I laid out the tale of Hild for this latest Amacyn – poor demented Hild, rescued by us, burdened with a secret and a centuries-old sin, burning for revenge on those who had used her and prepared to lead us all to Atil’s tomb in return for the death of Skartsmadr Mikill and all his men.
We had done that and Hild had fulfilled her part of the bargain – at the cost of her mind. Had she been made mad by the goddess of the steppe, or the fetch of Ildico, or the guilt of knowing she betrayed the long line of those who had died and kept the secret?
‘Perhaps all of them,’ agreed Amacyn, uncoiling slowly to her feet. ‘It does not matter – the secret was revealed. She broke her oath.’
And all who break such an oath end up dead. That I knew well enough.
‘After you quit this place,’ Amacyn continued, ‘those few of us who survived came here, but war was raging on the steppe and it took some time for us all to assemble, so we missed you.’
I swallowed at that. If they had caught us then, staggering raggedly down to the Azov and the Sea of Darkness …
‘Afterwards,’ she went on, ‘the Khazar fist had gone, so the last of us came here in force. We had to dig through the roof to find out what had been done. There we saw a strange dead man on the throne and the Master of the World cast down and other strangers dead, including a woman. She had one of the Lord’s swords; we realized then that one of those who had survived had the other.’
My cracked lips were glued, now. Hild was dead; Finn had been right all along. Then I realized what this woman wanted.
‘Yes,’ she said, though I had not spoken. Then she sighed and rubbed the sores on her hands; I realized, suddenly, that she was in as bad a state as I was – as we all were, out on that frozen waste.
‘We are the last of our kind,’ she went on, ‘It falls to me to be the Amacyn in whose time his tomb is no longer a secret. We knew you would be back and listened for word that northmen were moving on the Grass Sea. It cost us much to come out on the steppe and kill them – but we did not expect another band and certainly not a prince from Novgorod. Then we knew it was all finished for us.’
She stopped, stiff as the yellow stalks of frozen-dead grass; her eyes burned.
‘We are few and growing fewer,’ she said, in a voice like a djinn of wind. ‘Man-Haters, you call us, but that is not true. We have fathers and brothers and some of those here have men and children that they value. Too many have already died. We have failed to keep the secret and this fight on the steppe has ended us. We are passing from the world. We will go home to men, stop binding the foreheads of our girl children and cutting their cheeks, so that they feel the endurance of wounds before the nourishment of milk. But there is one last service we can perform for the Master of the World.’
The words beat on me like raven wings. Passing from the world. Perhaps all Oathsworn are passing from the world, I was thinking, even as I saw, too, that she had ridden out to find a way to resolve matters other than with blood. I understood that only too well.
Once before, this way had saved the Oathsworn at Atil’s tomb and I did not think it would fail us now. I looked at the sabre, then at the woman who wanted it more than the world itself. I knew now how she knew my name and what she thought we would want, but I asked, for form’s sake.
‘What do you have to trade?’