The Wolf Sea

The church of the tomb of Aaron was a huddle of white buildings on a high plateau reached by a winding path from barren tablelands and sparse vegetation. I stood and brooded over the land, as if I were adrift in a hostile sea where something dark and intent shark-slid under the surface.

The sun was heavy as Thor’s hammer, fields were dusty plantings and ragged fences leaned drunkenly, broken teeth in the raw red gums of the earth. The world was a pool of despair, collected among the scattered bricks of this place.

Finn and Kvasir appeared, flanking a robed figure, his hands stuck inside his sleeves, even in this heat. He was a tonsured monk and what was left of his hair was the colour of a wolf pelt, but his eyes were keen and gentle and his name, he said, was Abbot Dudo.

‘Well,’ said Finn, ‘that’s Brother John delivered up then, Trader. I am sorry to see this day.’

‘He was a stone in the shoe,’ agreed Kvasir, nodding sorrowfully, ‘but he was our stone in the shoe.’

‘I am sorrowed to hear of your loss,’ Dudo said. ‘Doubly so, since it was a brother in Christ and so cruelly slain.’

He spoke Norse with a strange lilting accent, for he was from Bayeux in Valland and had once gone with William Longsword’s son when the boy had been sent to Bayeux from Rouen to learn the language of his ancestors, for even then the Norse of that place – they called it Normannsland these days – were growing less Norse and more Frank.

Still, in the thirty years since, Dudo had held on to the donsk tunga well and only stumbled a little with it, like a drunk leaving his bench for a piss.

‘Slain by one of our own,’ Finn growled. ‘And in the back. And weaponless. Do you need extra candles lit to get him to his god’s hall for having died such a straw death?’

Dudo smiled and shook his head. ‘There are no straw deaths in the sight of the Lord,’ he said and managed not to make it pious. ‘After all, this is the church of Aaron, who was stripped of his priestly regalia by his own brother, Moses, on orders from God and died of shame and sorrow for it. Even so, he was gathered into the bosom of Christ.’

I didn’t know whether the brother of Moses was really howed up here or not and it did not matter much. We had come here for two reasons, the first being that Brother John would not rest easy in any Greek church of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and, apart from mean little Nestorian and Jacobite places, there wasn’t a decent Christ temple to howe him up in that city.

The second was Ibn al-Bakilani al-Dauda, governor of the city of Jersualem in the name of the Ikshid, Muhammad ibn Tugh, ruler of Egypt, Syria and Palestine – or so he claimed.

I knew enough of al-Dauda’s position to know it was precarious, for he had not enough troops and his Ikshid was too busy fighting a losing war against the Fatimids of al-Muizz. Not to mention all the other little jarl-dreaming dynasties that were springing up like maggots on the sickening body of the Abbasid empire.

We had been ringed by guards in our hov in the Foreign Quarter, men with studded armour and spears and helmets with mail that covered all of their face but for their eyes. They were there as much to keep the rest of the street from tearing us to bits as arrest us.

They had swept up Hookeye and me, all the same, and kept us in separate stone rooms in one of the towers of the Jaffa Gate.

Towards dawn, as I shivered in the dank chill of that place, hearing the straw rustle with vermin, I was hauled out and, blinking in the light, stumbled up spiralling stairs to a similar room at the top of the tower, though this one had rugs on a polished wooden floor and rich wall hangings.

There was a man there, a figure in green and white clothes that flowed like water, with a jewel-hilted dagger thrust through the braided cord round his waist and a soft, folded cloth hat with a green stone in it which, if it really was an emerald, was the price of a farm in the Vik.

Abdul-Hassan ibn al-Bakilani al-Dauda, as he introduced himself in flawless Greek.

Not the best of openings, I was thinking, remembering Jarl Brand’s remarks about ending up roasting with a stake up my arse. Sensibly, I kept my teeth touching and waited as he flipped open a small box on the table with his ringed hand and drew out my Thor hammer, one finger hooked distastefully in the sweat-dark leather of the thong.

‘You are not, it seems, followers of Jesus,’ he said, bringing the amulet up to eye level and studying it as it swung. ‘Yet you travel with a Christian priest – and not a Roman one from Constantinople. One from the uttermost west. Such monks are rare in these parts in these times.’

‘We are Christ-men,’ I answered carefully, ‘dipped in holy water, as is the custom. That is a Christ sign you hold.’

‘I often think,’ he replied flatly, ‘that we True Believers deny ourselves much grace and pleasure by not allowing artisans to form figures. This, for example, is a masterpiece of ambiguity. If this little mannikin is your god, then the Christian Jesus seems to have lost his cross and gained some sort of hammer.’

‘Thor,’ I answered, giving in. ‘God of Thunder, son of Odin and guardian of men.’

‘As I thought. You are not People of the Book, though this little jinni seems more powerful than the Christian god,’ replied al-Dauda, dropping the amulet distastefully into the palm of my hand. ‘He spared you, whereas the infidel priest’s god seems to have failed him.’

His face never flickered, but he cocked his head to one side with interest that I should know the name of his own god. ‘She was an Armenian, a whore and was as much an infidel as you or the Christians. Obviously the defiling goddess she worshipped failed her, as all false deities will,’ he answered crisply. ‘What I am more interested in is why she and the priest died at the hands of one of your own followers.’

He sighed at that, lacing his ringed hands. His eyes were chips of jet. ‘I have two dead infidels and several injured followers of the True Faith, not to mention property damaged. There was almost a riot. You have not been more than a few hours in the city and came across the desert, or down from Damascus. I ask again: why was the priest killed?’

Sweat trickled down my back, for his tone was steel-cold now. I spread my hands and smiled. ‘You must ask him. His name is Halfred and, until I saw his face after chasing him over the roofs and – unfortunately – into the street traders, I did not even know it was him. Until then, I also thought him a friend.’

His gaze was dark, stooping like a hawk. ‘He has been asked. At length. He does not deny culpability, but I can make no sense of his reasons for it. Something about a Greek, by name Balantes.’

Even though he made mush of the name, there was enough in it to bring my head up and he saw it.

I nodded. ‘A Roman lord who doesn’t like me. He has, I am thinking, used this Halfred for his own ends and the first arrow was meant for me. Brother John simply got in the way. The woman, I believe, was paid to lure me to where Halfred could shoot. He killed her to silence her tongue.’

He nodded, his bearded mouth pursed like a cat’s arse. ‘More or less as he says it and I had deduced,’ he replied evenly. ‘Which makes you a victim rather than a suspect.’

‘Scarcely that,’ he replied flatly, with no sign of amusement. ‘I want no more trouble and so the sooner you leave the city the happier I will be for it. You will be returned to your men and then escorted from the city when it is dark. The body of the priest will be returned to you, so you may deal with it decently as you see fit. A useful gesture would be to contribute to the damage caused – I suggest the price of two of those camels you have.’

I bowed. Bloodprice I knew – the Norse were no strangers to it and we were lucky to have got off so lightly – but the sick loss of Brother John robbed me of any sense of triumph, lay coiled round my heart like Nidhogg in the roots of the World Tree.

I could not have been more surprised if he had suddenly lifted his robes and danced a jig. At first I thought I had misheard him and simply opened and closed my mouth like a stranded fish, which cracked the first smile on him that I had seen. Having seen it, I did not wish for a repeat.

‘Out in the desert are a band of brigands,’ he said. ‘At first I thought you were part of them. But these have been described to me as Greeks and runaway slaves from one of the mines further north and you look neither like slaves, nor runaways, nor Greeks.’

‘I thought also that you were these Mamluks that the Abbasid unbelievers are so fond of, for they are no decent men but Turks and Slavs and worse. But they have embraced Allah, albeit on the wrong path, which you clearly have not.’

‘Good Odinsmenn, all of us,’ I agreed, swallowing. ‘In a Christly fashion, of course.’

‘So,’ he said. ‘You are those rusiyyah I have heard of, swords for hire – is that not so?’

‘Well,’ I began, caught his look and drifted off into eloquent silence and a weak, ingratiating smile.

‘So, I will give you provisions and letters, which will state you to be in my employ, as retainers. You will seek out and destroy these brigands for me. I need my soldiers in the city.’ He paused and stroked his beard with the price of a good farm in rings on his fingers. ‘When I have heard – and I will – that they are scattered or dead and their leader dealt with, you may return to me for reward. Should you decide otherwise, I will, reluctantly, be forced to deal with you as with them. Since this will cause me considerable trouble and expense, you need not look for mercy at the end of it.’

I thought about it. No fee had been mentioned and, when I looked at him, I realised none would be and if anything came by way of reward, I would take it and back out from his presence, my arse in the air and my life in his hands.

But that letter would be useful in the lands south of Jorsalir. He knew I had seen that, too, and nodded. ‘Good. It is settled.’

He looked surprised that I had even asked. ‘He is guilty of murder. We will hang him in a cage from the walls for all the People of the Book to stone him until he dies. So justice is seen to be done, by the will of Allah.’

They let me see Halfred before they turned me out of the tower, escorting me to a small, heat-drenched room where he lay on a cot, rolling with sweat yet in no real discomfort, for they had expertly treated his broken leg and even given him something for the pain – after they had inflicted enough for him to tell all he knew.

‘So,’ I said to him as he turned his face, pallid beneath the wind-blast and tan, the eyes flat and grey as a summer sea, one still looking over my shoulder while the other looked at my face.

‘Indeed so,’ he answered and sighed. ‘It seems my luck has flowed away from me. Loki luck, mine. I had hopes of going home with something to show.’

‘What did Balantes promise you and why?’ I asked, hunkering down beside him, for there was no other furniture in that place.

‘A hundred ounces of silver,’ he answered. About the price of thirty milch cows. He saw the look on my face and rasped a bitter chuckle. ‘I know, not much to think on now. But then I had just spent five years in a stone quarry, so it seemed a good price for killing someone. Anyway, it was only to be done when you showed that you would double-deal the Greeks and steal that leather pouch rather than deliver it as arranged.’

An age away. I remembered us on the beach, backing under cover of shields towards the Elk and the arrows smacking my shield from behind. Now I knew where they had come from and shivered at how close he had come to succeeding. Odin, it seems, prized me still, if only to keep around to taunt.

He shrugged. ‘I tried once or twice,’ he grunted with a twisted smile and I remembered him at Kato Lefkara, his bow strung, arrow nocked and a look on his face like a boy caught in the winter store with honey round his mouth.

‘Once we had escaped Balantes I actually thought it a good thing and that you would lead us all to this treasure hoard we heard about,’ he went on. ‘So I decided to let you live.’

He ignored it and went on. ‘I was even prepared to stick by you in that fight we had near Aleppo. I did quite well out of it, though that Saracen woman was either not the princess claimed, or one who had less than regal habits, for my balls itched ever afterwards.’

We both grinned at the memory, though my throat was gripped with the waste of it all.

‘Then it was clear you were not going after treasure and it seemed to me we were all wyrded to die in this oven of a country,’ he sighed. ‘People in Red Boots’s camp wanted you dead, even after you had handed back that leather container. I agreed that it was a good idea, but even so … the tales of all that silver were good ones. In the end, though, I thought them just that: tales. I was to go back to Cyprus and Balantes for payment once you were dead and thought that a much better arrangement.’

More than likely, I thought to myself, you’d have ended up back in the stone quarry, but blind this time. It came to me also that to do all this would have taken more than him alone but when I put it to him, he shook his head.

‘You will,’ I answered, more bitter than I had intended to show, ‘for I can’t help you. Are there any at home you wish to know of your death?’

He shook his head. ‘If this is my wyrd, that’s what the Norns weave, but it is not a good saga to leave to loved ones,’ he replied. ‘I am sorry about the priest though.’

I nodded, feeling a wave of desperate sympathy, remembering all the better times. Then he scattered that to the winds with his next words.

‘Not because I liked the little arse,’ he said moodily, ‘but I have broken my oath to Odin and suspect the only gold I will see will be the coating on the Gjallar bridge on my way to Helheim. Since I have also killed this priest, I won’t get into the Christ halls, either.’

That was too much and I got up and stepped away from him in disgust. ‘I shall remind the jarl of this place to put your head on your thigh, then,’ I answered harshly from the door. ‘He isn’t going to want your fetch hanging round like a bad smell any more than I want it hagging me until I quit this country.’

‘You should have shut that squint eye when aiming,’ I said and left him – but the black dog of it followed after me all the way back to the others: the dark despair of knowing he had broken his oath and that others with him had done the same, and the emptiness where Brother John had been.

Now the Oathsworn were fractured and what was left no more real than a painting of marble done on wood.

That same black dog padded out of the gate in the south wall of Jerusalem with us, the one they call the Dung Gate since it is where they cart out the city’s shit and the joke wasn’t lost on us and fed the dog more bile.

It slouched along with us for two days, to this huddle of white buildings served by a handful of priests, who took the ripe body of Brother John with reverence.

Now Abbot Dudo, his homilies spent, moved quietly off and left Finn and Kvasir and me to move into the shade and squat. Our one camel and the couple of mules I had bought were listlessly chewing fodder, standing hipshot under an awning. Even the flies were quiet, slow and lazy, hardly bothering Kvasir as he ate a fruit the monks called golden apples, putting the peel in his helmet.

Like me, he had never tasted one until yesterday and now he could not get enough of them. According to Dudo, the Old Romans believed they were brought to Italy by the daughter of a god called Atlas, who crossed the sea from the land of the Blue Men in a giant shell.

Another strange thing in this strange land. From where I sat, I could see over the long white scar of the road across the wash of green and gold fields south of Jorsalir to the ochre and tan wastes where, it seemed, we would have to go. Kvasir finished peeling the fruit and stuffed a section into his beard, where only he knew his mouth lurked.

‘They want a Thing of it,’ Finn said, stirring the dust with one finger. ‘For the Hookeye matter.’

‘Who wants a Thing of it?’ I demanded sullenly. ‘The ones who shared the secret with him?’

‘It is only right, after all,’ he said. ‘Short Eldgrim thinks so. And Thorstein Blaserk – he is one of our lot, Orm, and he thinks so.’

‘Thorstein Blue Shirt is a droop-lipped coal-eater,’ observed Kvasir and we all nodded at that. Not the sharpest seax in the sheath was Thorstein.

I sighed, for there was no going back from what happened. The Oathsworn were shattered. Those who weren’t being eaten or gelded were lurching along with oarmates they could no longer trust because they had broken their oaths and were too nithing to admit it.

Inside, I was feeling a rising excitement that perhaps, at last, Odin had broken us and, tired of the affair, had gone off to annoy the new dead, or taunt bound Loki. All that remained was to survive.

Sighvat came over to us, having been in deep conversation with the priests. I had thought he was trying to find ways of avoiding his wyrd by using the Christ, for he had been braiding his eyebrows over the matter for long enough.

Now he loped over the sun-seared earth between the white buildings and squatted in the shade next to us. Finn offered him a grubby slice of fruit and he took it, which was an encouraging sign, for he had been listless over his feed of late.

‘Martin the monk was here and gone, only four days ago,’ Sighvat said. ‘Starkad came with about fifteen men. Dudo remembers him well, says our Starkad was deeply troubled and cannot sleep at night for dreams. He left here two days ago heading south after Martin. No one knows where the monk is going, but even Dudo was impressed by our Martin and says he has the look of a very holy man, probably destined to be a hermit, or a pole-sitter.’

No one said anything, for the way south stretched like a Muspell nightmare and I knew we all thought the same thing: who would follow me down that road from here?

The sun wheeled on. Birds flared up, flashing black and white, from the complicated network of irrigation canals, hunting insects before night fell. The air seemed brittle and thin, oddness flickered at the edge of my vision, half-seen whorls of dust and half-heard voices from the empty spaces of the desert.

The Oathsworn came, lighting torches for the bigger insects to sizzle into, gathering silently and slowly like the grim dead round the pitfire Finn had made. It was chill on top of this hill, but the fire seemed excessive to me and I wondered what he thought he was going to cook on it. We were eating boiled vegetables and gritty flatbread and unlikely to get meat from these lean monks.

It turned out to be Kleggi and Hrolf the Dane carpenter who had something to say, urged forward by Kvasir to stand in front of me, twisting the ends of their belts like boys caught with tunics full of stolen apples.

‘It is this way,’ said Kleggi, apologetically. ‘Halfred Hookeye was kin, you see, and we are thinking that compensation is in order.’

Hrolf looked at Kleggi and then at me. ‘Well, he is surely dead, because you left him with the Sarakenoi to be hung in a cage and stoned, which is a straw death and so twice as bad.’

‘He killed Brother John,’ I pointed out, astonished at this. ‘And a woman. And wanted to kill me.’

‘Murder, as it was,’ Finn pointed out, ‘since it was dark and unannounced. Nor did he cover the body.’

There was general agreement over this, but Kleggi and Hrolf were still unwilling to let it go, arguing that there was no proof Hookeye had done it, even if I had chased him off the roof, where he might have been innocently taking the night air, or chasing the real culprit. And anyway, the woman was a whore, probably a thrall, and so did not count. They wanted to say that Brother John was only a Christ priest and so did not count either, but even they knew how the old Oathsworn had revered the priest and did not dare go that far.

Most of the others shifted uncomfortably at what they did say, which was a step too far for most – even Kvasir who, it was clear to me, was unhappy that Hookeye had been left with the Sarakenoi, though he seemed to think it was their fault and not mine.

‘So you think it was not murder? If a thing looks like a duck, makes a noise like a duck and walks like a duck, chances are it is not a chicken,’ I told them. ‘Besides, he confessed it.’

I looked them over hard as I told them this and that he had planned to return to Balantes on Cyprus and what he had been promised for it all. ‘Nor was he alone in this,’ I ended and watched the alarm crawl over their faces.

I had an idea they were the ones Hookeye had dragged into his scheme, but thought it unlikely he had told them much about what he would do, so that these events were a nasty shock to them. Now they heard the ice they walked on creaking.

‘This means that he and those he spoke with broke their oath,’ I pointed out and they now stood there feeling the lance-eyes of all the others, who sat behind them.

Then I shrugged. ‘If he has kin who will not see it this way, I would rather have the matter settled, but we have no Law Speaker or summoning days or jury panel here, so it is a rough Thing at best. However, if you will allow Sighvat to justify on this, we can fix it all this night.’

Trapped, they could only nod, for Sighvat, everyone agreed later, was a deep-thinking choice, not only because he was clearly a full-cunning man, a volva of some strength, but his doom was on him, so there was no point in him grinding any new axes, as they say.

I had reasoned all this out and thought myself double-clever for it. As they say: if you want to hear the sound of gods laughing, all you need do is tell them your plans.

‘Having reduced himself to a nithing by killing a Christ priest and breaking an Odin-oath,’ Sighvat said, ‘then Hookeye is worth no more than a new thrall, it seems to me. I set his death at twelve ounces of silver.’

Twelve ounces: the weight of a jarl torc. I wondered if there was more in that than there seemed, but faces were bland when I studied them.

The price was even better than I’d hoped, for Kleggi and Hrolf were too aware of what continued refusal would signify to the others – that they had been in the plot with Hookeye. I had no idea whether they were or not, but if it healed this widening breach I’d be happy. That way, I was thinking, we could all part, if not as friends, at least not as enemies.

‘Just so,’ added Sighvat. ‘This must now be ratified and sanctioned by the gods, so a sacrifice must be made to Odin by Orm, who is godi here. I say a mule, which is as close to a good horse as we will get here.’

I bit my lip at that, for we needed the mule, but I nodded. So did Kleggi and Hrolf.

‘Then we can all swear our Oath anew,’ Sighvat said cheerfully, ‘in case Orm is right and Hookeye managed to induce others to tempt Odin’s anger.’

Then I saw Short Eldgrim, Finn and Kvasir nodding and smiling and suddenly realised why the long firepit had been dug and what they had planned to cook on it.

They had conspired this on their own and it was cunning, right enough. As Finn said later, mild as summer, I would have done it myself had I not been grieving for Brother John. That made me ashamed, for I was not grieving – I was blinded by the lamb-leaping idea that, at last, the Oath was broken and I was free of them all.

Now I had to sit and smile while Finn winked at me and rubbed his hands with glee at how their little scheme had saved the day.

The mule was duly dragged out and I, as godi, said suitable dedication words. The monks were outraged and started to demand that we quit the place but a few growls and waved weapons sent them scurrying. Finn had the mule’s head off, neat as snipping an ear of corn, and, in the red-glowed dark, with the stink of fresh blood in our nostrils, we all intoned the Odin-oath once again.

We swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel. On Gungnir, Odin’s spear, we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.

Hedin Flayer butchered the beast and Finn started to cook it while the rest of us trooped over, in packs and singly, to the church. The torchlight flickered on the little coloured tiles that made a picture of some robed, winged man with a bright sword and one of those gold circles round his head and I marvelled at all that work for something you walked on.

We let Dudo intone the Christ words, while Brother John lay on a stone table, wrapped in linen strips so that he was just a bundle with candles at his head and feet. At the end of it, when Dudo made the cross-sign in the air and said, ‘Pax vobiscum,’ I heard a sob and found the Goat Boy, wiping tears into a damp sleeve.

‘He is in heaven now,’ he hiccuped. I hoped so, but it was the pax vobiscum that had crashed the whole thing on me. Somehow, the thought of never hearing Brother John spout Latin made him more dead than before. Botolf laid one of his ham-hock hands on the boy’s head and patted it with surprising gentleness.

What with that and the weight of the rune serpents – both round my jarl torc and down that cursed sabre – curling tight on my throat and twice as heavy, it seemed, to me, I could not choke much of the mule down. I was surprised to see others were as off their feed as I was; the death of Brother John had affected us all more than anyone had thought it would.

In the end, we passed platters of it to the monks and, for all they wrinkled their noses at the ‘pagan rites’, they were too drool-mouthed to turn down meat after a long diet of boiled vegetables. They had a long discussion about whether a mule was a horse or not and the smell made them vote in favour of not, so they fell on it as the insects whined and fluttered.

But Kvasir kept the mule’s head and spent the night huddled with Short Eldgrim, who knew his runes, carving great serpent skeins of them on a spear-shaft, winding from spearhead to butt, squinting into the fading embers of the pitfire. I watched him uneasily until my eyes slowly drooped to sleep.

In a charcoal land split by a ribbon of water blacker than old iron, black as a blind man’s eyes, I saw the dust of that place whirl like a jinni of raven feathers and there was no noise to it. I stood while the river flowed without sound and, on the other side, gathering silent as a murder of crows, came dark figures with pale faces: all the dead I had known.

There was Eyvind and Einar and Skapti Halftroll, still with his mouthful of spear. There was Pinleg and I felt a pang at that for we had always said that, because we did not actually see him die, perhaps he had not been hacked down, surrounded and outnumbered and berserking.

Then Hookeye appeared at my side, climbing into a boat which had not been there before. He looked at me, his head canted to one side so that I could see the great blue bruise round his neck. I knew – and didn’t know how I knew – that he had shoved his head between the bars of his cage and broken his own neck.

‘Did it hurt?’ I asked.

‘Not as much as it will,’ he answered, sitting down in the boat. It moved off, spray rising from it and soaking my face, blinding me as if with tears, so that I could not be sure I saw someone limp to the front of that throng on the other side of the river and stare at me with a face I knew.

A pale face on a pale man with pale hair. And no runesword.

I woke to see the Goat Boy and Botolf standing over me, the boy with one hand still dripping from where he had sprinkled me with water.

‘You were dreaming of Starkad,’ Botolf growled. ‘Still, makes a change from that Hild creature.’

I struggled up, feeling the sweat cool on me. Odin’s balls, did everyone know my dreams? Did they form above my head, then, like reflections in a still pool?

‘That would be interesting,’ chuckled Kvasir when I grumbled this out, ‘but the truth is simpler: dream silently.’

It was dark, with a moon too like one of those pale faces from the dream for my comfort and a great wheel of stars, so vast a frosting that it shrank everyone beneath it.

‘If that should fall …’ Kvasir mused, looking up from where he was wrapping the head of the mule in sacking. I knew what he meant; it was like crawling through a tunnel and feeling the weight of the rock press on you. After the dream, the whole world seemed skittish and hair-raising with strangeness.

The one camel and the last mule were packed, the latter uneasy with the smell of blood from its late partner, whose wrapped head Kvasir swung over his shoulder, though I thought at the time it would be poor eating. We filed down from the Church of Aaron’s Tomb and, at the foot of the hill, the men assembled.

I looked at them, stepping back a little in my head, that ability Einar had prized so much.

They were built like huge oxen, with muscled shoulders and broad chests, giants in a land of small men. They had a wild tangle of bleached hair, beards that hung halfway to their chests and faces and forearms reddened by the sun. Their boots flapped, their tunics were ragged and almost all the same colour now, and their shields were scarred and battered – but they held axes and spears with sweat-oiled shafts and sharpened edges, their ring-coats were carefully rolled and stowed and helmets swung from tunic belts on firm leather fastenings.

They were grim as an edge, with eyes like pale stone in the blue dark before morning.

I knew what to say. I pointed south, beyond the dusty, moon-washed fields and the huddled town and told them how that was the way home. I reminded them of what Starkad had done to us and to our comrades. I reminded them of the reward for disposing of the dead-eating brigands and hinted that even more plunder might be had there. I reminded them we were here to fulfil our oath to our oarmates, even if most of us had never seen them.

After all that, into the silence of their indifference, I spoke with Einar’s voice. ‘We are sworn one to another,’ I said. ‘There are other varjazi and we have heard recent saga tales of the men from Wolin, whom they call Jomsvikings and who are bright with fame. They say these live all together in one house and no women are allowed.’ I let that drift like an insect in the night air, then shrugged. ‘Well, that’s a fame I could do without myself. If they take turns on the ninth night to be used as a woman that’s their own affair.’

There were heyas and some sharp intakes at this, for this was strong stuff; that particular insult, to accuse a man of behaving like a woman every ninth night, was so bad it was forbidden by law in Iceland and other parts. I had heard it from old Wryneck once, who had died at Atil’s howe, and thanked him for it now.

‘Our fame will be brighter still after this,’ I said. ‘In winter halls from now until Ragnarok, they will sing of Botolf’s hair, Finn Horsehead and the mighty Godi, the gold-browed wit of Kleggi.’

‘And Kvasir One Eye’s shame pole,’ Kvasir said into the pause I took. He unwrapped the mule head and stuck it on the spear with the runemarked shaft, then drove the whole thing into a cleft in the rocks, turning the head to point towards Jerusalem. I said nothing, for only something momentous would have forced Kvasir to interrupt his jarl in mid-speech.

‘I set up this shame pole and turn this shame against Jorsaland and the guardian spirits who inhabit this land, so that they shall go astray, unable to detect or discover their dwellings, showering discord on this land until every person in it comes to the true gods of the Aesir and Vanir.’

He raised both hands and spread them. ‘I say further and now that, though I was prime-signed a Christ-follower by Brother John, it was a mistake on my part, for if the Christ-god refuses even to save his own priests, what use is he to me? I say here that I am of the gods of the Aesir and the Vanir, and that I will honour the Disir, my hearth-gods, from now until my end and will not be turned from them again. Now I promise that I owe them many sacrifice-deaths in payment for my lapse and shall fulfil my bargain.’

This was powerful stuff and, taken with all else, ran a stir through the rest of the Oathsworn, like a breeze ruffling dust. Shoulders went back, heads came up, hands went to hilts and, like a pack of wolves scenting blood, they growled in the backs of their throats.

They wanted riches, fame and the favour of the gods – as we all did – and I knew I had them with me then, though the way of it left me sickening. This jarl business was, in the end, like sucking silver – it seems as if something so prized would be sweeter, but it is always just a foul taste of metal in the mouth. The same taste as blood.

FOURTEEN