The Oathsworn were lined up in a parody of the prince’s druzhina but only half-mocking. Anything the dour folk of Novgorod could do, good men from the vik could do better they had decided.
Vladimir rode out to look his own men over. He was all gleaming with gold and silver, wearing a little sabre and perched like an acorn on a too-large black horse – so I had to wear my own finery and that cursed sabre and stride out to look the Oathsworn over.
The good people of Novgorod cheered and the carts creaked and the horses and ponies stamped in the cold, dropping cairns of steaming dung on to the freshly-swept oak walkways. I felt, at that moment, closer to being a jarl than I had ever felt.
They did not look too bad, the Oathsworn, for all that they had drunk through most of the money they had won from raiding Klerkon and rattled every whore in the city until her teeth loosened. Some had even thought to squander money on sensible gear fit for a winter steppe.
There was Kvasir, wearing a new coat padded and sewn like a quilt and stuffed with cotton. We called it aketon, which was as close as any norther could get to mouthing al-qutn, the Serkland word for cotton.
We knew the benefits of having padding under mail, but three wool tunics were usually enough, until we had found the soldiers of the Great City wearing these Turk garments. Not only did they keep off arrows but dulled a hard dunt that might otherwise break your ribs – and kept you warm in weather like this, too.
On the other hand, there was Lambi Pai, the Peacock, barely old enough to grow a wisp of beard and shivering in his new, fat silk breeks striped in red and white, with a silly hat fringed with long-haired goat. Which was still not as silly as the one Finn wore, which was Ivar’s weather hat with a strip of wadmal tied round it and over his ears – but at least Finn’s would keep him warm.
They were all grinning back at me, stamping feet and blowing out smoke-breath and stuffing their fingers inside cloaks and tunics to keep them warm; Klepp Spaki, Onund Hnufa, Finnlaith the Irisher, Bjaelfi – whom we called Laeknir, Healer, because he had some skills there – Gyrth, wrapped in sensible furs so that he looked like a dancing bear and all the others. Well – all grinning save Jon Asanes, who looked sour as turned milk and stared blankly back at me.
I saw Gizur and Red Njal and nodded acknowledgment of Hauk Fast Sailor’s wave. Beyond them all, wrapped up like bundles in the carts, Thorgunna and Thordis watched me, while the deerhounds alone seemed immune to the chill on a day of blue skies and a blood sun with no heat left in it.
I wanted to tell them it was foolishness, of how many had already died on this quest, but I knew they had heard all that already from those who had survived the first time. It did not matter now – the silver hook was sunk deep and Odin reeled us all in. Bone, blood and steel – that oath would haul us all out on to the cold-wasted steppe.
So we trooped out through the gate, a long, winding column of sledge-carts and horses, men and boys, thralls and women and one reluctant Christ priest.
The little princes rode together, surrounded by the hulking shapes of Sigurd and Dobrynya and picked men of the druzhina in full mail and helmets and lances with forked pennants fluttering, forcing the thralls and drovers to scamper or be ridden over. I saw that a lot of the drovers were Klerkon’s crewmen, reduced to hiring on as paid labour and lured to this demeaning thrall-work by the gleam of distant silver.
I vowed to watch them, in case any were holding grudges for Klerkon’s death – though I did not think the man attracted such loyalty, I remembered what we had done on Svartey.
I forgot my vow, of course, a week later, when the winter steppe closed its icy jaws and gnawed even reasoning out of us.
There was snow, night and day and yet again, then it eased but only to give the snell wind a chance to catch up. Then it snowed again, small-flaked and dry, piling round the camp in high circles where the fires kept it at bay.
It fell, fine as flour from a quern, from a lead-dulled sky, sifted like smoke along the land, stinging the face and piling up, all the time piling up so that, finally, you could not get your feet above it and had to plough through it. Yet, when I turned, once, to get the sting out of my face and free my lashes from ice, there was not a mark; all smoothed and smothered, the snow left not even the voice of it to show where we had been.
The Great White, Tien called it and he should know, being a Bulgar from the Itil River, which Slavs call Volga. Vladimir had brought him, along with some Khazars as guides and his name, he told us with a grin, meant nothing. It was a good joke for it was true – tien was the name of a small coin, a trifle in the language of his tribe, the Eksel.
‘I will trade you my fine name,’ moaned Pai when he heard this, ‘for your hat and coat.’
Tien laughed with fine, strong teeth. He wore a cone-shaped fur hat with flaps right down over his ears, a long sable coat belted at the waist with a sash and long fur boots, all of which were eyed enviously. In the sash, though, Tien had a curved dagger in a sheath and his hand was never far from it – particularly when the Khazars were close.
Sviatoslav had broken the power of the Khazars before he died and the tribes of the Bulgars, once dominated by the Khazars, were now free – nothing marked this more than Tien, who had gone back to the old ways of the Eksel, even to calculating the seasons and the years. It was a deliberate heathen insult to the Khazar Jews.
‘This is the Time Of Small Frosts, in the second year of the Hedgepig,’ he told us on the last night of our first week in the steppe, the oval of his face flickered by firelight. The camp was so sunk that no-one wanted to go far from it for private business, for you could not see it a hundred steps away, save for blue smoke in the last hour of evening – at night, even the red glow vanished.
‘Small frosts?’ grunted Gyrth. ‘Any larger and Finn’s other ear will drop off.’
Finn, who did not like mention of his missing ear, scowled and there were chuckles at Gyrth getting the better of him for once – but not many and not for long. The cold seeped into bones, even round the fire, so that your face and toes were warm but your back was numbed. It sucked away even the desire to laugh.
Tien shrugged. ‘It has been colder,’ he said and looked across to where the Khazars sat, stolidly listening and saying nothing.
He graciously accepted a refill from Kvasir’s horn – green wine, I knew, cold as a whore’s heart and which burned satisfyingly in your belly – and smacked his lips. Finn gave a sharp grunt of annoyance as Kvasir’s shivering spilled some while pouring, for he loved that green wine and there was precious little of it with us.
‘There was a time,’ Tien went on, ‘when we fought the Khazars, even as we were part of the Khazar nation and even when no-one else dared.’
The Khazars stayed quiet, though their eyes were chips of blue ice in the firelight. Red haired and blue eyed were the Khazar Jews, while the little Eksel Bulgar was dark as an underground dwarf – which he may well have been, as Jon pointed out, for he knew more than any other Greek about the Old Norse.
‘Alas,’ said Tien, ‘we were forced to flee, for I was a boy then and, clearly if I had been a full fighting man, we would have won. We went north and more north still and winter came.’
He swallowed and we waited. He smacked his lips and grinned, his eyes drink-bright in the firelight. ‘That was when the green wine poured like honey, thick and slow,’ he said, almost dreamily, ‘so cold it was. When trees exploded with a crack and shot blue fire when they fell. When first I saw the whisper of stars.’
‘What?’ we demanded.
‘The whisper of stars,’ he repeated and blew out his breath in a long stream of vanishing grey. ‘When you speak, the very breath in your body turns the words to ice and they fall to the ground with the sound of a whisper,’ he explained.
There was silence, then a snort from Avraham, one of the Khazars, a big man with a bigger scowl and the haughtiness of a man who thought well of himself.
‘Your stories are like your name, little man,’ he said. ‘But, as you say, you fled there having been beaten by us, so perhaps grief and shame clouded your boyish memories.’
‘Once Kiev paid you scat, of a sword and a squirrel skin for every home,’ Tien answered smartly, ‘but Kiev came and destroyed you, which is clearly the will of Senmerv, Mother Goddess. Nothing will cloud my memory of Itil burning.’
Avraham half-raised himself, but was stopped by the smaller one, Morut. ‘Bolgary, too, if I remember,’ he said softly and Tien acknowledged, with a slight nod, that Sviatoslav had torched his people’s capital city as well.
Avraham waved a deprecating hand and added: ‘Which is what comes from worshipping a woman. The maker of heaven and earth must, of his nature, be male, otherwise the creator would be female. Which is absurd since, all over the world we know, the female is subject to the male. How, then, can it be different in heaven?’
There was a derisive snort from the other side of the fire and some, recognizing Thorgunna, chuckled.
‘Oior pata,’ said Tien and both the Khazar Jews stiffened.
‘We do not speak of them,’ Avraham replied flatly.
‘What is it?’ demanded Jon Asanes curiously. ‘Is it the name of a Jewish goddess?’
Avraham grunted and glared back at Jon, with little courtesy. ‘If I thought you genuinely sought the truth, I would enlighten you,’ he declared. ‘Yet, afterwards, you will still worship those evil, heathen spirits of the North, unconvinced.’
‘I am a Christian,’ Jon answered indignantly, but Avraham curled a lip.
‘Only the Jews, the Chosen People of God, have been granted the true insight into the nature of the creator,’ he said stiffly.
‘That did not help you much against Sviatoslav and the gods of the Slavs,’ growled Finn and the Khazar scowled.
‘We are the people of exile,’ he commented bitterly. ‘The world lines up to scatter us every time we gain a country of our own, paying scat to no man. They envy us for being the Chosen of God.’
‘More likely they wanted to be rid of paying scat of their own,’ I offered him back. ‘The Romans, for one, will help one people one day and another against you the next.’
‘They are Christian,’ Avraham noted with a scowl, shooting a glance at Jon. ‘They hate us.’
‘What does he mean?’ Finn wanted to know and Jon shrugged.
‘The Jews killed Jesus,’ he answered. ‘Everyone knows that.’
‘Truly?’ enthused Finn, turning to Avraham. ‘You killed this White Christ? You are the torturers of the Tortured God?’
‘No,’ replied Avraham, defiantly sullen. ‘The Romans did, but now they follow the Christ ways and blame us for it.’
Finn sat back, his delight at what he had learned tempered. He shook his head, sorrowful and bemused.
‘Even dead this white-livered Christ certainly knows how to cause trouble in an empty room,’ he declared and Jon shot him an angry look.
‘Still – it was no Christ-follower who warred on the Khazar and Bulgar,’ I offered and there was silence at that as folk remembered Sviatoslav, great Prince of Kiev.
‘Idu na vy,’ said Tien sadly and everyone fell silent. Idu na vy – I am coming against you – was what Sviatoslav had sent as his last message to those he planned to conquer. Now he, too, was gone and the steppe was unleashed. Avraham scowled at the memory.
‘Will they fight each other?’ Jon asked softly and I shrugged. Tien said nothing for a moment, while we all watched with interest – it was nothing to us if they snarled at each other like dungheap dogs.
‘We will see how cold it gets,’ the little Bulgar said at last in his halting, thick-accented Norse. ‘I can read the signs. If we stay this far north in the Great White you will see the green wine turn to syrup.’
‘Well,’ grunted Gyrth, looking like a mangy bear woken too early from winter-sleep, ‘we had better drink it all then before such a tragedy happens.’
Finn toasted him, then thrust his drinking horn at Thordis, who looked at him steadily, then accepted it and drank.
‘Move closer,’ Finn ordered her, ‘and find warmth.’
‘That’s an old trick,’ Thordis replied flatly.
‘No trick,’ said Finn. ‘You are cold. I am cold. I owe you heat, at least, as weregild.’
Her eyes widened, for it was the first time that such had been mentioned, though the fact of it had hung between us all like a blade – her husband had died because raiders came looking for the Oathsworn, after all, yet the same Oathsworn had risked their lives to rescue her from slavery. It would take a lot of waggling grey beards to law-speak that one out at a Ting.
Thorgunna nudged her sister pointedly and she moved up the fire a way and into the lee of Finn’s body. He grunted, satisfied.
‘Well,’ declared Kvasir, beaming round, ‘here we all are, warm and fed and heading for riches. Life could be worse.’
‘As the swallow said,’ answered a familiar, lilting voice from the darkness. Olaf stepped in, the elkhound padding after him to the fire, while all the eyes watched him and only Thorgunna’s were warm.
‘What swallow?’ demanded Jon and Crowbone, so pale his lips and cheeks were blood-red, gathered the great swathe of fur-trimmed white wool round him and sat down at Thorgunna’s feet, while she dreamily took off his white wool cap and began to comb his lengthening yellow hair.
‘There was a swallow who ignored winter,’ Olaf said and everyone grunted and shifted to be more comfortable, for though he unnerved them, they liked his stories.
‘Let’s call it Kvasir,’ he added and people chuckled. Kvasir raised his wooden cup across the fire to the little prince.
‘So Kvasir-Swallow dipped and swooped and enjoyed himself all summer and well into the russet days, when all his friends and brothers and sisters told him they were leaving to be warm elsewhere, before the snows came.
‘But Kvasir-Swallow was having too much fun and ignored them, so they left without him. And he continued to swoop and dip, though it grew colder and he caught less to eat with his swooping.
‘Then, one day, it was so cold he knew he had made a mistake. “I must fly hard and fast and catch up with my brothers and sisters and friends,” he said to himself. So he did, but it was too late. Blizzards came and howled down on him, flinging him this way and that and far, far off course …’
‘Sounds like every journey in the Elk,’ growled Klepp Spaki, who had discovered he hated the sea. People shushed him and Olaf went on.
‘Half freezing, he flew on and on, then the snowstorms blew harder than ever until his wings froze entire and he tumbled, beak over tail, down from the sky.’
He paused, for he had a feel for such things – he was never nine, that boy.
‘What happened?’ demanded an impatient Jon, leaning forward.
‘He died, of course,’ growled Finn, which brought some belly laughs, for that was an old tale-telling trick.
Olaf, grinning, said: ‘He would have – but he fell into the biggest, fattest, freshest heap of dung just shat by a grain-fed milk cow in the farm that lay under his flight. The heat of it thawed him. In fact, it made him realize what a narrow escape he had just had, so he fluttered about and sang loudly about how lucky he was – at which point the farm dog heard it, came out, sniffed and ate him in one gulp.’
There was silence and into it, looking round the stunned faces, Olaf smiled.
‘So it is clear,’ he said slowly. ‘If you end up in the shite and are warm, happy and safe – keep your beak shut and stay quiet, for worse will happen.’
We laughed long at that one, for it was a fine tale, well told and made us forget the keen edge of winter for those moments. Though, as Kvasir said when he had stopped laughing, it was no good omen to hear your name spoken in such a way. Olaf merely smiled, as if he knew more he was not saying and moved quietly to me when we were alone.
‘There are men to be watched,’ he said, unblinking serious. ‘Klerkon’s old crew – especially the one called Kveldulf.’
I knew Crowbone had some reason for hating this Kveldulf but, even so, his warnings made sense – the men from the Dragon Wings kept to their own fires and, more often than not, Martin sat with them. This had suited me, since his company was not one I cared for, but now Crowbone’s warning made me uneasy.
Yet, I was thinking, what could they do? Out in this cold, we lived or died by what we did together; no-one would survive long alone.
This was proved the next morning, when we found two good horses dead from that cold, solid as stones, their eyes open and frosted and their hides too hard even to flay off them for the leather.
We trudged on, slithering and sliding across frozen grass, the snow blown into drifts and frozen-crusted on top, cloud soft beneath. One day followed the next and more horses died, all the ones too fine for the steppe and mostly ridden by the druzhina warriors. Then it was the turn of people to suffer.
Four of the hunter-scouts Vladimir had hired – all Klerkon’s men – came to Bjaelfi Healer after being out on the steppe on their own, showing him their blackened toes and one the tip of his nose.
Onund Hnufa knew what it was at once and told them. ‘The cold rots the flesh. When it turns black it is dead and such will spread. The only cure is to have it lopped off and quick.’
The least hurt was the big, strong, dangerous Kveldulf, who submitted to having the ends of three toes nipped. Two of the others, however, died of the cure the next day, for Bjaelfi had to take a foot from one of them and most of all the toes from another. Before he died, the toeless one revealed that he had seen the smoke of fires, no more than a day’s journey to the west – for a man with two good legs, he added mournfully.
The last one, with most of his nose removed – and part of the tip of an ear – told us nothing at all, but moaned and wept about his plight.
Onund was hard on him. ‘You should have spent more on fur and less on fucking,’ he growled. ‘At least you had the sense of a pair of good wool socks. Those others had bare feet in their boots.’
‘You should have spent Orm’s money wisely,’ Gyrth added, stamping his warmly-booted feet. The others of Klerkon’s crew looked grimly and pointedly at one another and I marked it – though the village we came on next day was such a welcome sight that it made me forget. Again.
The Rus called them goradichtches and I thought it was the name of the place at first, but it turned out only to be their name for villages. In summer, it would have been a pretty place, snuggled up to the banks of a river, which flowed quietly and dreamily between two rows of gently sloping hills, clumped with lush, tall willows. Now the trees were skeletal and the river marked only as a glittering ribbon between the faint snow-blown squares of fields and meadows.
On the far side of the river was a vast flat plain that glittered, studded with the tufted spears that told us this was marsh in summer. In the distance, a faint haze of blue hinted at ground higher than the rolling steppe.
There were no fences, only rows of willows to mark boundaries around this place and the snow piled deep at the base of a sea of those trees, which sheltered the fields. In summer, they would be orchards, fields of hemp and sunflowers, grain and, in the fringes of the marsh, thick-growing sedge. Now they were just clumps of stiffened tawny grass across which the snow blew.
The village was an earthwork circle with a huddle of houses, hunched low to the ground to fool the winter snow and the summer heat. The gaps between the houses were lined with tall willows that seemed to have been planted there on purpose, but the big Khazar said they were willow fence poles which had taken root, for this was the rich lands of the south, where you could stick a stripped pole in the ground and it would sprout.
A high tower dripped with ice and held a bell and there was a brewhouse and a brace of forges, for these Polianians were noted for sword-making and made most of their trade in blades. The place had been well fortified against the Khazars when they were a power and now there were new and uncertain dangers with the death of the Great Prince of Kiev.
As we rode up, the bell rang out and the place seethed. Women shrieked and children burst into tears because their mothers were crying and their fathers were shouting.
Sigurd rode forward and called out to them, which was not, perhaps, the cleverest move with his silver nose. Where it touched his face, the cold had turned the flesh as purple as an emperor’s robe and if it had been me I would have kept the gates shut on him, for he looked blue-black as a dead man.
But they were Polianians and knew of Sigurd Axebitten, so eventually, the gates opened and we rode in – though the wailing had not stopped and the headman, his face as blank as the white steppe, stood with his hat in his hands as we slid misery through his gates.
He was old, lean and tall, with a pale, worn-out face, a long greyish moustache and eyes sorrowed as a whipped dog. Deep furrows scarred his cheeks and forehead, his rough hands and the wrinkled back of his neck. The skin on his fingers and palms was cracked and creased as if burned by fire. There were thralls who looked better than he did.
Kovach he called himself and Malkyiv he called the place – Little Fortress, I worked it out as, though I could have been wrong – and he had a right to look sorrowful, for a Prince had arrived with too many men and even more animals and that was worse than steppe raiders. Those he could have fought, at least, before they burst in to demand the winter stores.
Our men were quartered under every roof, elbowing for floor space, shoving aside livestock and considering themselves lucky to be in such warmth. The Oathsworn had two storehouses – conspicuously empty – and piled in, dumping gear and setting fires while the stolid-faced locals came and offered what service they could.
As they did so, I stumped across to the headman’s own hut, where the prince had naturally taken himself and as many of his retinue as could be crammed in.
‘Four days from Kiev,’ Dobrynya said softly, pointing to the chart as he and Vladimir and Sigurd and myself huddled together at one end of the hut to plan what to do next. Which, as Vladimir would have it, was simple enough and he laid it out for us, pointing at the chart with his little bone-handled dagger – we go on, swiftly.
‘We should stay here,’ Sigurd argued, which was sense. Getting this far had taken three times as long as it would have in summer, floating downriver to Kiev. But, of course, we could not go to Kiev; even four days east was too close to Vladimir’s smart brother, Jaropolk and the two men I least wanted to meet – Sveinald and his face-ruined son.
‘We will gather what fodder and supplies we can take from here,’ the little prince said in his piping voice, ‘and head to the Don. Tomorrow, or the day after, but no later than that.’
‘What of the villagers, my prince?’ Dobrynya said and Vladimir frowned, knowing that to take what they had would condemn them.
‘Pay them,’ said Olaf and he and Vladimir looked at each other and nodded. Vladimir then turned and stared straight back into his uncle’s eyes until Dobrynya lowered his and nodded. Everyone knew full well what he had ordered; the villagers could hardly eat hacksilver.
The headman, Kovach, knew it, too. He came into the presence of the little prince, greasy fur cap in hand and head lowered as was proper. For all his deference, he was like the willow, bending in the wind yet rooted and immovable. There was food and it was hidden and he would not tell where it was, nor would searching do much good, for there were too many floors to be dug up, too many roof-spaces.
‘Do you know who this is, old one?’ demanded Dobrynya sternly, pointing to the whey-faced, tight-lipped Vladimir, but Kovach had endured shrieking winter and broiling summer and red war, so the likes of Dobrynya and a pouting boy was not going to cow him. Even Sigurd’s silver nose only made him blink his rheumy pale-blue eyes.
‘I thought it was my prince,’ he answered levelly, ‘the young Jaropolk, come in answer to my pleas, but I see this boy is too young.’
‘This is his brother,Vladimir, prince of Novgorod,’ Sigurd growled. The headman nodded and the ploughed furrows on his forehead grew deeper.
‘Is that the right of it? Well, well … but if you did not come in answer to my pleas, it puzzles me why you are on the steppe at this time of year.’
‘No matter of yours,’ Dobrynya snapped. ‘All you need to know is that we are here and you must tell us what we want to know.’
‘Ah well,’ answered Kovach, ‘as to that, I am thinking that the prince of Novgorod, fine boy though he may be, is asking for what belongs to his brother. I am wondering if his brother knows.’
I chuckled, for there was a fox look in those pale eyes, which then flicked to me, interested. Little Vladimir flushed and his lips tightened.
‘It is not your place to think,’ he snapped, though his voice broke on it, robbing it of much of its sting.
This was pointless. Kovach was not about to break, even if I strung him, his daughter and all his relatives up by the heels and carved away the lies from them with the Truth Knife nestled in the small of my back. This was a stone of a man, like all his sort and there was much to be admired in how he could endure.
Beside – these were not Vladimir’s lands and he could not do as he liked without raising the ire of his brother, Prince Jaropolk.
‘What pleas?’ I asked and heads turned. Kovach raised his eyebrows as he looked at me questioningly, mild as milk. Oh, he would have been a terror in Miklagard’s marbled halls of intrigue, that old bondi.
‘Orm,’ I told him, as pleasantly as I could, for it does no harm to start politely, offering names and smiles.
‘A Norse,’ said Kovach, rasping a gnarled hand across his stubble. ‘I know some of that tongue. Your name is … serpent?’
‘Wyrm,’ I said lightly, then leaned forward. ‘It would be better to speak, old one. We are hungry as serpents and you know what hungry serpents are like.’
He blinked and nodded, then smiled, more gap than grin.
‘My pleas,’ he said and, remembering I had asked, I nodded. Dobrynya cleared his throat pointedly, but we ignored him.
‘Vodoniye,’ he said and there was a hiss of breath from Dobrynya and Sigurd. Little Vladimir went pale. I had no idea what he meant and said so.
‘Creatures,’ muttered Dobrynya. ‘They feast on the souls of the drowned.’
‘Child’s tales,’ added Sigurd, but he did not sound convinced.
‘They live in the high ground in the middle of the swamp,’ Kovach went on, his voice flat and level and bitter as wormwood. ‘There are forty-eight families in this village and all of them have suffered.’
‘Suffered how?’ demanded Dobrynya.
‘They come, these vodoniye, to steal our women and make them into rusalka. For years, once, perhaps twice every year.
They came in the autumn this year and took another. My grand-daughter.’
He fell silent and I felt a chill in this warm, stove-heated hut that had nothing to do with winter draughts.
‘Yet you have done nothing,’ piped Vladimir and Kovach cocked one spider-legged eyebrow in his direction.
‘We sent men into the swamp at first,’ he said. ‘Six died the first time and we did it again and lost four and they were all good forgemen. We did not send any more, for we need men to make blades and work fields and can fight most things, but not this. So we built up our defences instead and each year we send to Kiev for help and each year it never comes.’
‘Your defences are not good, old man, if they keep stealing from you,’ I said.
‘Magic, one supposes,’ Kovach said matter-of-factly, though his eyes were cunning slits. ‘They come at night and from the marshes. I saw one, once – scaled like a serpent, running through the streets in the moonlight, making no sound. Now you have come. Perhaps Perun has sent us a warrior called Wyrm to bring an end to these Scaled Ones, who are clearly hatched from a serpent’s egg. The god has, after all, sent this cold, which has frozen the impassable marsh; I cannot remember the marsh ever having frozen.’
From the looks on the faces of those who knew him, I guessed it was the most that old Kovach had said in one place at any time and the silence after it was longer and more still as a result. It was broken only by the sudden pop of a log bursting in the fire; sparks flared and flames dyed everyone red.
‘So – if we end this menace, you will share your hidden food, is that it, cunning old man?’ growled Sigurd. He greeted the nod of reply with a sharp snort of disapproval.
‘Hung from your stringy thumbs,’ he added, ‘you will tell us soon enough.’
‘Hung from thumbs,’ Dobrynya said into the silence that followed, ‘any one of your charges would tell us. Do you want us to do that? I can bring, say, the mother of your granddaughter.’
Kovach blinked and his head went down; when all was said and done, he was a poor man, with no say in the storms that lashed him – but there had been so many storms in his life they had honed him; he had less fear than Finn, I was thinking.
Dobrynya and I exchanged glances, all the same. Dealing harshly with these nithing farmers and smiths was a privilege that belonged to Vladimir’s brother and abusing them could provoke the very conflict Novgorod did not want.
‘A small trek across some frozen marsh,’ Dobrynya said finally, shrugging and and looking at me. ‘Little enough.’
‘Then let him take it,’ growled Finn bitterly when I shared this out in the place the Oathsworn had been bundled into and proudly called a hall. ‘What the fuck is a voy-ded-oy, or the other thing?’
‘Vodoniye,’ answered Crowbone brightly. ‘Water draugr. It is said they take young girls and make them into rusalka, spirits of the marshes and water’s edge. These rusalka are beautiful, pale-skinned and with long green hair that is always damp – if their hair ever dries out, they die, and thus they always carry combs with them, combs which can cause floods when pulled through their tresses. They are said to be able to turn into waterbirds and have webbed feet …’
He tailed off when he realized we were all staring at him.
‘I know a tale about them,’ he added, defiantly.
‘Then keep it behind your teeth,’ rasped Finn, furious with frustration. ‘This old fuck of a headman has a thought-cage twisted by the cold. Does he seriously believe all this?’
‘If he is touched,’ Thorgunna declared, ‘then others are, too – there is a woman and her man mourning for the loss of a daughter in this very house.’
She was Kovach’s own daughter, who stood with wooden spoons in each hand, stirring life back into some old ale as she told us – between sobs – of seeing a shadow in their house, hearing a muffled scream. Her round face was chap-cheeked, brown eyes red-rimmed and mournful; I did not tell her how things could have been worse for her, strung up by the thumbs and questioned by Sigurd and Dobrynya. She sounded scared enough, all the same and her tears were real.
Her husband claimed to have tackled the creature with a hand-scythe and I looked him over as he dragged out the tale of it. He had a broad, flat face, where the cheeks and nose stuck like galls on an oak and the wind had ploughed out wrinkles in it until tree bark looked softer. His hair was braided and had never been cut, only burned, so that the ends were crumbled.
He did not look like a man easily cowed and had arms hard with work-muscle, skin-marked roughly with the outline of a horse.
‘Scaled like a chicken’s leg,’ he confirmed, but his eyes kept shifting and I wondered why.
The creature had run off with their daughter, fourteen summers old and corn-hair pretty, according to her ma and others I spoke to. There were other stories, some of daughters stolen, others of livestock taken and, because they were who they were, it seemed the grief-loss was equal to these people. Yet there was something rank as lutefiske about the affair.
Later, in the lumpen, shifting shadows, surrounded by murmur and the laughter of those with full bellies and warm feet, I sat and breathed in the smell of ale and unwashed bodies, while a small girl, one eye blind-white as a boiled egg, played fox-and-hens with the men and made them laugh when she won with considerable skill.
Huddled in a corner, faces murked by the uneasy glow of the fire, me and Finn, Kvasir and some others talked round this matter we had clearly been tasked with, quiet as the smoke which swirled round a sooted kettle.
None of us liked the idea of scaled creatures who could scamper silently over a deadly marsh, cross a stream, then a palisade and evade all the guards, both in and out, laden with struggling women or bawling calves.
By the time our tongues hurt, it came down to the same as it had been at the start; we would have to go to this place in the marsh and see for ourselves.
‘We will find only some ragged-arse outlaws,’ Kvasir declared. ‘Mark me. Runaways, living badly out on the steppe and stealing what they need – including a decent hump.’
‘Invisible outlaws I do not need either,’ I growled back and that left them, like me, chewing on whether Kovach and the villagers were being entirely truthful.
In the end, Red Njal broke his silence, heaving himself up and sighing.
‘Well, there is no way but to do it,’ he growled. ‘Steady and careful. The sun rises little by little, but it crosses all the world in a day, as my granny told me.’
‘I wish it was your granny who was going and not me,’ Finn grunted back.
In the morning, it had been decided that myself, Kvasir and Finn would go, with Sigurd and a dozen of his men, all suitably mailed and armed, as well as Morut and Avraham. Jon Asanes was sulky, because I had said he could not come with us for, as he admitted himself, he was no great fighter.
‘Olaf is going,’ he pouted back bitterly. Crowbone was going because his Uncle Sigurd was going and I had no say in that, but it did not help Jon’s sulk. Crowbone teased him about wanting the princely gift of a smile from Vladimir, which made Jon flush to his ears and stamp off.
Blowing and stamping, we came out to our horses. We all had horses, which Finn looked at dubiously, for he hated riding; it did not help to see me easy in the saddle and smiling down into his scowl.
‘Take care,’ Thorgunna said to Kvasir, tugging his cloak tighter round his neck. ‘There are bannocks and cheese and the last of our meat in a bag on the saddle horn. Oh, and a skin of ale is hooked there. I don’t expect you home before dark, so wrap warm this night.’
‘Don’t fuss, woman,’ he said, though it was lightly done. Finn heaved himself up into the saddle, black-browed at all this. He aimed a storm-scowl at Crowbone and rumbled: ‘We are not having that silly dog.’
Crowbone agreed with a nod, for I had already made it plain that the elkhound was staying behind. He was tied up and yowling as we left through the main gate, circling round to the opaque ribbon of the river, watched by cold-pinched, anxious faces and one of the village curs, who had routed out a bird frozen in the eaves of a house and fallen to the rutted path.
The river was iced and drifted with powdered snow, so we crossed it where there would have been a shallow ford and never as much as cracked it. In a moment we were into the tussocked, snow-scoured marsh and the palisade of the village shrank to a line behind us as we moved away from it, towards the faint scar at the edge of the sky.
The marsh glistened and, when it was full thawed, would be a formidable place of bog and sink holes – impassable, as Crowbone pointed out, if you did not know the secret way of it, as these creatures surely did.
‘Outlaws,’ Kvasir corrected, rubbing his weeping eye and we hugged that hope to us with our cloaks as we slithered through the stiff-spiked sedges, towards the scab of rock that grew even darker as we came up on it.
The sun hovered like a blood-drop on the edge of the world and our shadows grew eldritch, thin and long in front of us, while that black rock seemed more ominous with every mile. There was something about it that lined the heart with chill.
Trees sprouted, grew stark claws and thickened in clumps as we came up on the dark-cragged gall on the steppe, which was choked with them. In summer, it would be a mass of green and the rock would be softer and more rounded – but now it looked as if Jormundgand, the world dragon, had brushed a coil through the crust of the earth and left a single scale behind.
‘A real outlaw lair,’ Kvasir remarked, chewing on some thick bran bread and spitting out little pieces of grit.
Closer still, we heard strange sounds, like bells would make if they were made of water. The hairs on my neck were up and we all put hands on weapons and went slower, peering this way and that through the scatter of bare, twisted trees; Finn climbed off the horse, for he would not fight on it and had been complaining about his sore buttocks for so long now that I knew more about his arse than his own breeks.
Morut found the source of the sounds soon after; in one taloned tree hung the whitened skull of a cow, with other bones dangled from it, fastened by tail hair. In the wind, they turned and chimed against each other and the big, bold, bearded men of the druzhina shifted uneasily and made warding signs until Sigurd snarled at them to stop being women.
‘Outlaw signs,’ Finn growled sarcastically. Kvasir said nothing, but glanced back to where the sun trembled on the edge of the world. His look was enough; the idea of being in this place when it got dark was turning my bowels to gruel.
There was no choice, all the same and at least we had wood for a fire – though it was not only the chill that made us bank it high. We perched round it warily, under a millstone moon and a blaze of stars, so many, when the clouds flitted clear of them, that they made a man hunch his neck into his shoulders, as if ducking under a low arch.
‘There was once a band of men,’ Crowbone said, staring into the fire, ‘up in the Finnmark, who thought they would hunt out troll treasure.’
I wished he would not tell one of his tales; they had a nasty way of stinging you. I said as much and he merely blinked his two-coloured eyes and hunched himself under his now dirty white cloak.
‘Let the boy speak,’ growled one of the Slavs, a big slab-faced scowl of a man called Gesilo. His comrades in the druzhina nicknamed him Bezdrug, which meant ‘friendless’ and you could see why.
‘You will not like it,’ Avraham growled back, but Gesilo only grunted. Crowbone cleared his throat.
‘There were three of them and they knew the rock trolls in that part of the world were always gathering gold and silver to them and they thought it would be a fine thing to get some of it. One – we shall call him Gesilo – said that it would be easy, for rock trolls became boulders in daylight and only came alive at night. It would be a little matter only to rob them when they were stone and be gone by nightfall.’
‘A smart plan,’ agreed Gesilo. ‘This man has a good name, for it is a plan I would have come up with myself.’
He nudged his neighbours, who did not laugh.
‘The three friends travelled high up into the Dovrefell,’ Crowbone went on. ‘They saw many a boulder like a stone-fixed troll, but none with any sign of treasure and it was growing harder and harder to find a night-camp where there were no such stones at all.
‘The other two were wanting to go home after a few nights of this, but Gesilo pointed to a great hill, a lump of rock that stood high above the Fell and was shrouded with trees like the claws of birds. He was sure there would be troll treasure there.’
The listeners shifted and it was not hard to see why, since Crowbone had just described the very place we sat under. I wanted to tell the little cow’s hole to clip his teeth to his lips, but I could not do it. Like a man in a longship heading off the edge of the world, I could not turn the steerboard one way or the other for wanting to see what lay through the mirr of falling water.
‘The three friends took all day to travel to the place,’ Crowbone went on in his bone-chiming little voice. ‘It was growing dark when they came up on it, a great hump of black rock thick with bare-branched trees and surrounded by crops of rocks and boulders, many of which could easily be sunfastened trolls. The other two said that there would be trouble, for there was no shelter and as soon as it grew dark the trolls would come out, stamping and angry.
‘But Gesilo started up the steep sides of the rock, shouting out that there was a cave half-way up and it was too small for any of these boulder-sized perhaps-trolls to get in if they did come alive.
‘That settled it; the other two followed on and soon reached the cave, which was as Gesilo described. It was too dark to see how far back it went, though it narrowed considerably, so could not be a bear den. It was just tall enough for them to sit in and light a fire, which they did. Darkness fell, but everyone was cheerful, because they seemed safe and had a big roaring fire going.’
Kvasir threw a stick on our own, which caused the sparks and flames to flare up and some of the listeners to shift. Grinning, rueful and half-ashamed, they sank down as Crowbone tugged his dirty-white cloak round him and went on.
‘Eventually, they ran out of wood and drew lots to see who would brave the dark and fetch some time. One – we shall call him Orm – drew the shortest twig and reluctantly left the safety and fireglow for the dark of the hill.’
‘Now there’s the lie of it, right there,’ grunted Kvasir. ‘For I cannot remember Orm ever having fetched wood. Or water. Or …’
‘I am the jarl, you dog turd,’ I gave back, looking for a bit of flyting to put an end to this Olaf-saga – but Crowbone’s tales were like the magic salt-mill that tainted the seas; once started, there was no stopping.
‘Orm went out,’ Crowbone continued. ‘The trees seemed to reach for him like claws, so he resolved to gather what fallen wood he could, as swiftly as he could and return to the cave, which was now a welcome glow above and behind him.
‘Then he heard a noise. A grinding-grim sort of a noise. When he turned, there was a rock troll, tall as a house, made up of stones in the shape of a man, like a well-made dyke. When it spoke, it had a voice like a turning quern and demanded to know what Orm was doing in this place and why he had annoyed his old grandfather.
‘Orm, puzzled, decided it would be a bad idea to speak of treasure, so he answered that he was collecting sticks for a fire and surely there was no harm in that and how could gathering a few sticks annoy this large troll’s grandfather?
‘The large stone troll raised his large stone fists and it was clear he was going to smash Orm into the ground. Orm, unable to get away and facing his doom, demanded again to know how gathering sticks for a fire should have annoyed the troll’s old grandfather.
‘There was screaming and the light of the fire went out above Orm’s head, then the screaming of his friends was cut off. The big stone fists were raised to smash Orm to pulp and the big stone head smiled like a cleft in a cliff.
‘“You should not have lit your fire in his mouth,” answered the troll.’
There was silence and those with the great dark rock behind them hunched down a little, as if feeling breath on the back of their necks. Everyone was now remembering how much like the top of a head it had looked, sticking up through the glistening marsh, thin-furred with trees like the nap on a thrall’s skull.
Avraham chuckled at Gesilo’s stricken face. ‘I said you would not like it.’
Gesilo – and the rest of them – liked it even less the next morning, when the light crept up and turned the trees into shadowed hands. It slid, honey slow, like the milk mist that tendriled the scarred slopes of that dark place, looping in chilled coils round our knees. No-one was happy.
The rock was no higher than a few hundred paces, but in that flat, white nothing, seemed big as a mountain, cut and slashed as if one of Crowbone’s trolls had taken a frenzied flint axe to it. It made us all move quiet and speak soft.
Crowbone stood, wrapped in his white cloak as usual, head cocked to one side as if listening, while men moved around like wraiths, upset if a horse stamped too loudly or snorted. Naturally, someone had to ask him.
‘What do you hear?’
Crowbone turned his coloured eyes on the speaker, a vast-bearded giant called Rulav, who was standing at the head of his big horse.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not a sound.’
Which was only the truth, but the way he said it made us all suddenly discover the utter silence of the place. No wind sighed, no bird fluttered or sang. Men made warding signs and muttered.
‘White-livered bunch,’ growled Sigurd blackly, though he saved some dark looks to shoot at his nephew. Morut laughed and slithered on to his shaggy steppe pony. He moved out into the mists, faded, then vanished and the shaggy-bearded giants in their long, leather-backed ring-coats watched him go and wished for his courage.
I laid a hand on Crowbone’s shoulder as we sorted ourselves out.
‘Time you learned the value of such a silence as you have found here,’ I said to him and he nodded, now as pale and afraid as any nine-year-old.
The druzhina were more unhappy than ever, once they discovered that they had to leave their horses behind and go on foot towards this dark rock. Finn and I and Kvasir, on the other hand, were pleased and, when we shrugged into our light ring-mail coats, caught the envious stare of the big Slavs, encumbered with their own weighty garments, split to the crotch for riding and dangling heavily down to their ankles.
We waited; Morut ghosted back to us, wiping the pearls of mirr from his dripping face where the freezing mist had melted.
‘There is a pool, the ice fresh cracked, not far ahead and just where the steep slopes begin,’ he said. ‘It is where they get water, for sure – recently, too. A trail leads up into the rocks.’
‘Any green-haired beauties there?’ demanded Finn scornfully. ‘Combing their tresses, perhaps?’
Morut chuckled while the big Slavs sucked in the reference to slope and rocks. Not the words the great, trudging, drip-bearded warriors wanted to hear, but Sigurd adjusted his silver nose and whistled scorn down it at them. They shipped shields on their backs, took the peace-strings off their swords and stumbled on, those mailed coats flapping at their feet. Those left to guard the horses were no happier, a few men on their own and looking right and left.
The pool was just as Morut had described – opaque, stippled ice with black in the middle where it had been chopped to the water. If there was a trail away from it, all the same, I could not see it – but it was hardly necessary. A boy raced away from it, bounding like a hare, leather bucket flapping in one hand, pointing the way up the slope as clearly as a blazed sign.
With a whoop and a roar the druzhina lumbered after him, despite Sigurd’s furious bellows and Finn stopped, blew drops off the straggle of his moustache and shook his head.
‘Can bulls catch a hare like that? My bet is on the boy.’
He won, but only just. The boy half-turned on the run to look at the roarers who waddled after him – and went straight into a tree, flying backwards on to his arse, the bucket bouncing back down the slope. One of the Slavs gave it a kick in passing and a triumphant bellow.
The boy was caught, for sure – he was up and reeling, but the breath had been driven out of him and you could see his little chest heave. Dark, wild hair, I saw and skins over ragged wool and scraps of fur. Barefoot. Doomed.
The first one to him was Gesilo, reaching out one hand to grab him, the other heavy with a big, straight blade.
‘Take him alive,’ roared Sigurd, but who knows what Gesilo might have done. Not that he had a chance; his horny, broken fingernails barely brushed the boy’s skin-covered shoulders and something broke from the snow-splattered rocks nearby with a throaty roar and a spear that drove straight into the Slav’s face.
He howled and went over backwards with his jaw flapping loose and blood flying. A hand grabbed the boy and shoved him further up the slope. I say a hand, but it was more of a claw. What stood in front of the boy, spread-legged and speararmed and snarling protectively, brought all the roaring Slavs to a skittering stop. Everybody gawped.
It was the shape of a man, but the face was warped, as if the bones had been squeezed and the skin tightened, so that it looked like a wide-mouthed frog. The eyes bulged, hair patched in a parody of a beard and straggled in wisps across the skull and it was naked, save for a skin wrapped round the loins.
And scaled. Every visible inch of it. Scaled as a chicken leg, just as we had been told, from thick-nailed feet to that wisp-haired skull. The hands that gripped the spear – a well-made weapon, I saw – were yellow-horned with nails long as talons.
There was silence, save for the scrabble of the boy vanishing up the trail into the rocks of the slope and the harsh panting of the Scaled Troll standing guard as he did so. Then Finn gave a rheum-thick growl, hefted The Godi and charged, howling out Odin’s name and elbowing aside the startled, rooted Slavs.
Cursing that valknut-sign he wore, I went after him and, a step behind me on my shieldless side, was Kvasir.
As Finn came up, the Scaled Troll braced, stepped back, reversed the spear and dropped low, scything it in a tripping arc. A lesser man would have been ankle-felled, but Finn leaped up and over it and the Scaled Troll was open for a downward cut – except that Finn’s foot slipped on the iced rocks and he fell flat on his face.
With a howl, the Scaled Troll stepped back, spun the spear back to the point and stabbed. I got my shield there a second before; the spear thunked into it, wrenched it out of my grip and spun it down the slope like a wheel.
Kvasir, an eyeblink later, brought his wave-sword glittering down on the Troll’s neck where it joined his left shoulder, carving deep so that blood and collarbone flew up. He – it – died with a howl and a series of skin-crawling mews, slushing blood in streams down the rocks while Finn and I hauled each other up, wrist to wrist.
‘Good stroke,’ Finn grunted, blowing blood from where his nose had battered the stones. Then half his face twisted in a grin at Kvasir. ‘Outlaws,’ he added. ‘My arse.’
Kvasir did not grin. He stood and stared at what he had killed, while the scaled heels drummed and an arm twitched once or twice. The druzhina Slavs came up, cautious as cats and touching amulets and little magic bags.
Later, when we had recovered our courage, we examined the Scaled Troll more closely and discovered that it was a man after all, though barely old enough to be called one. The scales were like callouses all over the creature, flowed together, thick as fingernails, though here and there, the creases seemed cracked and red-raw.
‘A disease, perhaps,’ Sigurd said, using his sword to unravel the skin loincloth. ‘Look – he has a prick like a man and that isn’t scaled.’
‘Yet,’ growled Finn, unimpressed. ‘It is a youngling.’
Sigurd, whistling through his silver nose, plunged his sword into the snow to wipe it clean and even then stared at it as if wondering whether to keep it or not.
There were other parts of the dead boy that were free of scale – a hip, a patch behind one knee, most of a buttock – and the skin here was as normal as any slain man’s, turning blue-white with death and cold.
‘The other boy was not like this one,’ Morut pointed out, looking up the slope to where the wild-haired little boy had run.
‘That you could see,’ Kvasir pointed out.
‘This one protected him, died for him,’ Avraham pointed out. ‘Hardly the act of a monster.’
Finn spat. ‘Wolves will fight for the pack,’ he answered. ‘Does that make them men?’
It made these creatures monsters to the Slavs, were-wyrms, or scaled trolls or worse. That and the threat of some strange disease made them grumble and mutter among themselves and, in the end, Sigurd came across to me and admitted, furious with the shame of it, that they believed these scaled creatures to be offspring of Chernobog, black god of death. It would be difficult, he thought, to get his men to go on.
‘How difficult?’ I demanded, angry myself and not anxious to unhook him from his shame easily. He glared back at me, the skin white round his silver nose, which was answer enough.
‘Then we will go on without you,’ I said, hoping it sounded bold enough for a Norseman and wishing I was Slav right then. Finn added a ‘heya’ of approval; his bad foot-luck had annoyed him and he was anxious to prove, to himself and Odin, that these scaled Grendels were no match for him and The Godi.
‘I will go, if you will have me,’ said Morut and I nodded at once, for his tracking skills would be good to have.
‘And I,’ added Avraham, ‘for I have never seen the like of this before on my steppe and would know more of it.’
‘Your steppe …’ scoffed Morut.
‘As much mine as yours,’ Avraham snarled back defiantly. They fell into the familiar chaffer of it, as comforting to them as a pitfire and thick-walled hov is to a man from the north.
Crowbone wanted to go too, which was brave of him, but Sigurd told him – more abruptly than he had done in previous times – to stow his tongue in the chest of his head and stay where he was. Crowbone, cowed for once, obeyed without comment.
We left them milling round the drinking pool, gathering sticks to make a fire and not at all eager to even be there. They would not go near the stiffening body of the creature, though they hauled Gesilo off to where they could bury him.
‘I said he would not care for Crowbone’s tale and I was right,’ Avraham noted with grim amusement, though the smile died on his face when he saw the scowls of the rest of the druzhina. He hurried to catch up with Morut, tracking ahead.
An hour later, the sun was up over the edge of the world, but not this rock. In the lee of it, the mist clung, cold as the white raven’s eye, threading between the gnarled trees and patched thick as eiderdown here and there.
It was from one of these duck-feather mists that we were attacked. Morut led the way, following signs only he could read, from fresh-turned stone to barely visible broken twig. At a bend between rocks, he knelt to study the ground and a spear hissed over his shoulder, skittering across the frozen earth and almost across my toes.
‘Form!’ I yelled out of habit and, out of habit, Kvasir and Finn slid to me, shields up. From the rocks bounded three figures, much as before, though one carried a shield and another wore clothing and had a skin cap and no sign of scale.
Morut, caught on the knee, rolled sideways and scrabbled away. Avraham, with a yelp, sprang forward and took a blow meant for the little tracker – from a shovel. The shaft smacking Avraham’s armoured forearm hard enough to make him grunt; he struck back and the scaled creature shrieked, carved under the ribs.
The one with the fur cap came louping at me, a great curved pick held above his head and relying on speed and power to crash through my shield. His mouth was red and open in a russet-bearded face and his eyes were wild.
Just at the moment he reached me, was about to bring his pick down, I stepped sideways, away from Kvasir and the man ploughed between us; it was moot which of our blades killed him, but both carved steaks off him and he fell, skidding on his face along the rocks.
The last, more powerful than the others, had hurled his spear and had no other weapons. He bounded forward and hurled himself, shrieking and snarling, at Finn, who took this rush on his shield and went over backwards, the creature clawing and biting the edge of it, his scaled, eye-bulged frog-face foaming with spittle and inches from Finn’s own.
They fell backwards, in a clatter like someone beating iron on an anvil, broke and rolled. The creature came up, cat fast and spitting, while Finn was slower in his mail. Two powerful blows smacked him, one on the shield and the other under his ribs, so that he grunted. I saw mail rings flying and started in to help – but Kvasir laid a hand across my chest, as if to say that it was Finn’s fight. A valknut fight.
It was then that a shape flew from the top of a head-height rock and crashed into Kvasir, so that he went over with a sharp yelp and a crash. I whirled and struck, fast as an adder’s tongue and, in that same instant, tried to stop the blade.
It would not be halted, ripped through the ragged wool and the thin flesh and the small, knobbed backbone of the wild-haired boy, whose screeches of hate and fear turned to a great wailing whimper and then to nothing as he hit the ground, cut almost in half.
The scaled creature fighting Finn saw the boy dying in a scream of blood and drumming heels and wailed, high and anguished. Finn, grunting and winded, hurled his shield and the troll batted it away – but Finn was across the distance between them and The Godi swung, changed direction and hissed right into the path the creature took to avoid the feint.
The blade cut half-way through the thing’s body, just above the hip and it fell away with a screech and writhed, scrabbling like a crab. Finn finished it with two more blows and then leaned on the hilt of his sword, holding one side and panting.
We straightened ourselves out and took stock. Finn’s mail was torn – torn, by the gods, and only with the taloned claws of the creature, which was now twitching in a congealing pool of black blood. His aketon padding leaked wisps of cotton and the linen tunic beneath was shredded almost to the skin, which was marked with a solid red thump, though unbroken. The edge of his shield was shredded and three deep scores ran down the triangles of the valknut symbol.
We looked at what he had killed; powerful, muscled, hair like tree-moss on an old branch and a faded yellow – but human, for all that. He was big and clearly the leader – perhaps father, from his attitude to the dead boy – and might have been a fine, tall man save that he was scaled, frog-faced and wet-lipped as a slug; like the others, the creases of him were raw.
The scaled man Avraham had killed was already stiff, the one Kvasir and I had chopped was cold and looked normal, a dark young Slav with no visible sign of scales. No-one wanted to touch him, so we did not find out what lurked beneath his clothing.
Then there was the wild-haired boy, a fine black-haired boy no older than Crowbone, his face dirty and scraped raw where he had fallen on rocks, his teeth bloody and smashed. Not that he would have felt any of that pain after my stroke had all but ripped his backbone out; he lay, shapeless as an empty wineskin.
I felt the bile in my throat and spat it out; these were, apart from the one Finn had killed, no warriors. Clearly not invisible. For certain-sure they could not cross a marsh, a palisade, evade guards and all the rest without magic and if they had any, they would have used it here. I said as much, the words spilling bitterly off my lips.
‘Aye,’ agreed Kvasir, rubbing the breath-ice off his beard. ‘Something smells like bad cod here.’
Morut took the offered wrist and was heaved back to his feet by Avraham. They exchanged silent glances that said everything about what had just happened and grinned at each other.
‘Mizpah,’ Morut said, which I learned later was a prayer about their God watching out for each of them when they were absent from one another.
‘While we are at it,’ replied Avraham, wiping the blood off his sabre, ‘I thank you, Lord of Israel, for not making me a slave, a Gentile, a woman – or one of these creatures. Hakadosh baruch hu.’
Grinning still, Morut moved cautiously forward and we followed, stepping as though the ground could open. We had gone no more than a few hundred yards before Morut said: ‘There is a hov.’
It was a good hov in a little curve of clearing in the rocks, well built and much like what the Finns call a gamma, though they make them of turf. This one, thirty foot long and bowed at the ends like a boat from the weight of its own roof, was dry-stane, the spaces caulked with mosses and mud and the whole of it to the roof came up only to my shoulders. There was one way in, a low doorway, the wooden door stout and barred.
Finn smacked it with the hilt of The Godi. Someone – something – wailed.
‘Well, they are home,’ he grinned, wolvish as a pack on a hunt. ‘Though they are mean with their hospitality.’
He leaned on the door with one shoulder, bounced against it to test, then drew back, took a breath and crashed forward. The door splintered. He kicked it with one foot and it burst inward. There were louder wails and whimpers.
He made to duck inside, but I laid my blade across the entrance, stopping him, though it took all I had in me to do it.
‘This is why I do not fetch wood,’ I said and he grinned and offered me a go-before-me bow.
Inside, it had been dug out down to the rock and there was headroom to spare. I ducked through the dark door, blade up, shield up. The floor was stone rather than the hard-packed earth of a hov in the vik, the light dim and woodsmoked and I was blinking, ready for anything.
Anything but the soft, gentle, pleading voice that said: ‘Spare us.’
I made out four of them, all women. One was old, roughened by hard work and use, hands twisting in her ragged clothing. A younger woman was propped up in a box bed alcove, her quiet weeping drifting through the mirk. Another young one was still blonde and pretty under the filth, then I saw she had bold eyes and forearms as muscled as my own. These arms she was holding protectively round her stomach.
The fourth was a young girl crouched by the near-dead embers of the pitfire, naked. She was frog-faced, bulbous-eyed, scaled and afraid. ‘Spare us,’ she said in thick east Norse.
The older woman started to weep and the blonde came forward, hands outstretched and it came to me that these ones were, perhaps, some of those supposedly taken from the village. I had a moment of panic, remembering the tales of rusalka – but these were not the exquisite, green-haired temptresses with magic combs that Crowbone had described.
‘Are you from the village?’ I asked and the one coming towards me stopped, more at the tone of my voice than my speech. I didn’t speak her Polianian tongue.
‘Malkyiv,’ I said, recalling the name. The woman nodded her corn-coloured head and her head drooped a little. She sighed.
‘Spare us,’ said the scaled girl, still crouching by the dead pitfire. One tiny robin-egg breast, I noticed was half-white and ruby-tipped. It was clearly all the Norse she knew and I wondered how she even knew that.
The others crowded in; the women wailed. I had Avraham and Morut take the two older ones out, while the scaled girl scuttled into a corner. The one in the boxbed, obviously younger, did not move, only cried as if her heart would break.
‘Come,’ I said, as gentle as I would to a nervous foal and holding out one hand.
‘My baby,’ she said – I did not understand the words, but the gesture and the pain in her was enough There was a crib next to her and something moved and mewed, a cat sound, strange and disturbing. I peered in.
It was a new-born changeling horror. Sickly pale, the face was tightened and stretched into the same frog shape as the others, but the eyes in its head bulged out, blind, red and wet as raw liver. The lips were fat, slug-wet strips of weeping sores and the skin seemed like hard plates, with every crease a stripe of vicious redness, so that the little pale body was a mosaic of pain. It mewed.
I fell back from it and the woman – the mother, I realized – wailed and thrashed her head in despair, for she wanted to pick it up and comfort it but it was clear that her very touch was agony to this mite.
Finn and Kvasir saw it and backed away, swallowing.
‘Take the woman,’ I said to Kvasir, my voice harsh and echoing under my helm. He hesitated, then bundled her out of the bed, carried her, thrashing weakly and shrieking about her baby, out of the hov. The others scuttled after, all save the scaled girl, who tried to make herself smaller in a corner.
I looked at Finn and he at me.
‘Spare us,’ said the scaled girl.
We never spoke of it after, Finn and I, neither to each other nor to any of those who later demanded the saga-tale of how Orm and his two companions had taken on a nest of were-dragons and cut those beasts down.
All the long way back to the druzhina, with the smoke from the burning hov curling like a wolf tail over the dark rock, while the questions rang and the women wept and wailed, we said nothing other than that the task was done.
Sigurd rubbed his silver nose and tugged his beard with frustration. Crowbone stared at the rescued women with interest, but, like everyone else, did not see why they wailed, since they had been freed from monsters. I knew. I saw the anguish at the loss of their menfolk and a newborn babe and the scaled girl who begged for mercy.
In the end, Sigurd and the others gave up asking and the only sound the rest of that way back to the village was our ragged breathing and the women weeping and the ring of hooves on the ice of the marsh.
I did not know what they were, those creatures, or what had made them – but snakes will protect their young, I reasoned, so it is better to kill them when you see them, rather than wait for them to bite you.
Yet they had fought as a family, those afflicted and those not, and had done it brave as Baldurs; the bile rose in me every time I thought of the wild-haired boy and the red-eyed babe – and especially the girl who pleaded.
We came back to the village and were swept into the joy of the people there, now freed from fear of the creatures. The rescued women, no tears left and silent as tombs, sat like stones in this stream of triumph and said nothing.
I also said nothing to Kovach, just stared into his pale eyes and held out my hand so that he could see what I had discovered. To anyone else, it would be a stone, no more. But he knew and took it from me and, as I walked away, I felt his eyes on my back like arrows.
Shovels and picks and a spoil heap, that’s what I had found. Behind the hov, a narrow cleft, dug out and shored up and, nearby, a neat, hidden heap of good iron ore which these … creatures … had traded to the sword-forgers of Malkyiv.
In the end, the price, perhaps, became too high – from good livestock, to spare women to keep the little marsh clan going, despite whatever god had inflicted fish-skin on them.
Then there was the grand-daughter, with forearms muscled from forge work. In the north, we did not have women at the forge, but we were no strangers to it and some fine blades were crafted by women.
Once Kovach had to part with his skilled grand-daughter to get the all-important iron-ore, that was the end of it for the miners in the marsh. Kovach had, indeed, sent men – but it was to wipe out the marsh-miners and take over. Nor did it surprise me that the marsh and the miners had done for them all.
Well, we had done for the little marsh clan and brought Kovach’s grand-daughter back, blonde and weeping; the cunning old man wept his thanks to the gods, then told the villagers to bring out the hidden supplies and declared a celebratory feast.
Now they had what they needed, Kovach and his village; they would get the rescued women to guide them back through the marsh and work the ore for themselves, which they had gained at no loss.
I wished them well of it, though I thought they would never be free of what they had done – nor would I. I would have it in my dreams forever, while Kovach’s own doom lay under that blonde head he caressed; once, she caught my eye and the misery in it was plain, as was the plea. I had seen her, protecting her belly with those muscled forearms as I came stumbling into the hov, all metal and edge.
I did not know what she would give birth to – and neither did she – but I suspected Kovach would not be caressing her this time next year, blade-working skill or no.
I told some of it to Vladimir and Dobrynya, quietly, while Sigurd and Crowbone listened and it was clear they were there to make sure I told it true. I left out what we had burned and what might still appear with the spring.
In the end, little Vladimir nodded, smiling and generous as a prince should be. ‘Good work, Orm Bear Slayer. Skalds will sing of this for a long time and the saga of it will be told round fires for ages yet to come. Eh, Olaf?’
‘I will tell it myself,’ agreed Crowbone, ‘especially since I am in it.’
They smiled, bright little suns to each other. Vladimir and Olaf were the coming men and showing all the signs of being rulers you did not want to be anywhere near when they grew into the full of their lives.
I left them, avoiding the mad joy gracing the village. The night was washed with moonglow so that the land glittered blue-white; I tried to get enough clean, cold air in me to wash away the sickness I felt. I watched from the shadows as Crowbone went off, whistling vainly for Bleikr.
Cooking smells drifted, meat rich and mouth watering. Somewhere, Thorgunna would be seasoning what was in our pot, the others clashing cups and ale horns, grease-faced and grinning and making verses on the bravery of Orm Bear Slayer, Finn Horsehead and Kvasir Spittle. The number of creatures would grow in the telling, the hero-work swell and all of it, like the bear that had given me my name, was a lie.
I knew, though, that Finn and Kvasir would be quiet in a corner, saying nothing, thinking – like me – of the well-built hov, now ashes and smoulder and what we had burned in it and at the cold-hearted people who had engineered it.
A dog barked, then howled, a sound I did not like much. Someone called my name and I trudged down to where I thought it came from, near the frozen river, thinking one of my men had spotted wolf and wanting to be sure the pack was not lured by desperate hunger into going after our horses. I wanted to lose my thoughts in simple tasks. In the distance behind me, music suddenly squealed out, a tendril lure that made me half turn.
I stumbled and went down on one knee, came up cursing and wet. The obstacle was almost invisible against the drifted snow, but it was a dog. A white elkhound. And my hands and knees were too wet just for snow.
Just as I saw the blood, I saw the shapes and started to turn. The blow was a hard dunt, a star-whirler that knocked me flat but not out. For all that, I could only see the raging fire of the pain and the sickness that rose up, so that someone cursed as I bokked it up on his shoes.
I thought of Short Eldgrim and panicked at the idea of waking with my mind smoothed out like a sea after a storm, empty and blue and featureless.
‘Struggle and you will get another one,’ snarled a voice I did not know.
‘Enough,’ snapped another. ‘Sack him up and bring him with the boy. Fast now …’
That voice I knew, even as my head flared and roared and darkness fell with the grain sack they bundled over my face to keep me from shouting.
Martin.