The White Raven o-3

by Robert Low

  'But there especially?'

  Avraham shifted a little. 'No,' he admitted, then thrust his chin out belligerently. 'What sane man would go where there is often no water for flocks in summer, nor reason to be there in the depths of winter? Anyway, it is. . cursed.'

  He looked half-ashamed, half-defiant, but it was clear he believed it and it came to me then that where Atil's tomb lay would be thought a cursed place, even if no-one knew it was there. So many deaths to build it, stock it, carry him to it; the steppe here was crowded with moaning fetches every time the wind blew.

  'So,' said Jon Asanes sadly, 'you cannot guide us then, if we choose that route.'

  Avraham bristled. 'I am Khazar and this is my land — I can guide you anywhere. For a reasonable price.'

  'Ha!' growled Finn. 'This is not your land now, though, you prick-cut thief. The Rus rule here.'

  'What price?' I asked, seeing Avraham's face darken. He remained staring into Finn's glare for a moment longer — which was brave of him, I had to admit — then quoted the cost of a small farm.

  Finn roared before I could even speak. 'You can have the rust off my balls, you arse.'

  Avraham smeared a sneer on his face.

  'Balls of poor iron — that explains the clinking I heard, for I knew a man such as yourself could not have a purse so rich.'

  'My balls were smelted in northern forges, little man,' Finn replied with a broad grin, 'in such a heat where the likes of you would smoulder like an eider duck's tail. They were quenched in cold that makes this seem like a balmy day.'

  'I suspect we are speaking in the singular,' Avraham answered. 'I had heard the Norse had to share a pair between two.'

  'You heard wrong. Gulls use my prick as a perch, thinking it a mast. When I shit over the side of a racing drakkar, my turds choke whales. I piss fire and fart thunder. And that which you call a howling wilderness is just another little sea to me.'

  Others were gathering, hugely enjoying this. It drove away the cold and misery and I was grateful for that. Better still, the chances of them coming to serious blows had slipped away.

  'You spout a deal of empty nothing like a whale does, that much I have seen,' Avraham replied and those nearest gave approving noises that made Finn scowl.

  'That which we have called the Great White,' Avraham went on, 'is merely those who know being kind to you. The real Great White is a few wheel turns from here, directly south. You will see it from a long way off, because it is a dazzle of ice. After that, if you should survive, you will just have time to make peace with your heathen gods before your famous perch freezes and snaps like a twig. If you ever find this silver hoard it will be because some wolf, tired of gnawing your arse-bone, drops it nearby.'

  Finn made a dismissive gesture into admiring 'heyas' of those who thought this a good flyting.

  'You are like all who have not had the benefit of being born in Skane, when faced with open space, whether sea or land,' he declared expansively. 'You fear to lose sight of safety. No open space frightens us from Skane and a horizon is an invitation, not a limit. Odin and Vili and Ve fixed the stars for us to find our way and, with them, I know where I am in this world to the length of a sparrow's fart.'

  He cocked his head and closed one eye reflectively, blowing out his ice-hung moustaches.

  'Anyway,' he added, 'you have never seen a blowing whale, you land-fastened nithing.'

  There were appreciative hooms and nods at this, though everyone knew Finn could not find his arse with both hands when it came to navigating a ship and had never seen any live whales himself.

  'The steppe respects no-one,' Avraham declared haughtily and I thought this had gone on long enough and said so.

  'If the steppe respects no-one, then a guide such as yourself would be useless,' I added and everyone cheered at that — even Finn. Avraham acknowledged defeat with a rueful smile, which he lost when I asked if he could, in fact, guide us.

  He looked from me to Finn's challenging grin, to Gyrth and Jon Asanes and then back to me. Then he shook his head and would not meet anyone's eye.

  Gizur shifted a little and thumbed snot out of his nose.

  'Well,' he declared challengingly, 'I admit it with now shame — the Great White is not known to me and none of my skills will take you safe across it. Best we follow the rivet'

  'Ah — who needs this Khazar,' Kvasir bellowed. 'Cross the Great White. It will not be a hard trail to find, I am thinking, Just follow the ruin of Lambisson.'

  That thought threw ice into all our veins, though none admitted it as we set off across the Great White. In the end, Avraham came with us, since he had the choice of doing that or staying by the river to die, but it could not be said he guided us anywhere after that.

  The Great White swallowed us. The snow drove down in small, slanted flakes, persistent as gnats, piling high round camping places and kept at bay only by the heat of fires and our own bodies. We woke every morning, moving carefully within tents and shelters so as not to shake down the frost which had formed on the inside. We chipped the horse tethers out of the frozen earth, made fires, cooked porridge and, after three hours, were usually ready to move off.

  The cold rot turned more noses and toes black; Bjaelfi, Thorgunna and Thordis kept little knives sharp for paring off the spoiled flesh and, at first, we seemed aimless as ants on a sheepskin. Then, as Kvasir had said, matters grew simple; we followed the ruin of Lambisson, while the snow sifted out of the pewter sky, trailed along the land like smoke, stung like thrown gravel in our faces.

  It was a trail of tears a blind man could track, from splintered wagon to dead horse to blue-white corpses, little knots of tragedy in an ice-rope that most thought would hang us all. At each one, sick with apprehension, I searched for the familiar face of Short-Eldgrim.

  Then, on a day where the sky was the colour of Odin's one bright eye, I was moving carefully to a private spot — but not out of sight — to risk a shit and saw little Olaf standing wrapped in his once-white cloak like a pillar of dirty snow on the dark earth, watching black birds wheel.

  They were waiting for us to quit the latest wolf-chewed remains, followed us, hungry and hopeful as gulls on a fishing boat and, like them, a handful of wary men trailed little Crowbone, seeking scraps of wisdom.

  'So — you are saying that if one more bird joins them from the west something terrible will happen?'

  Red Njal's voice was suspicious, but the thickness of disbelief in it was like the ice on the Don — broken and uncertain.

  'Mind your words, too, boy,' he added, 'for there is naught so vile as a fickle tongue, as my granny used to say.'

  Olaf said nothing at all, merely nodded, watching intently.

  Treyja's arse,' growled Klepp Spaki, his voice muffled. No more than his eyes could be seen in the swaddle of hood and wadmal round his head. 'What makes that happen? How do you know? What runes do you use?'

  'The birds are their own runes,' answered Olaf.

  'How?' demanded Onund Hnufa, lumbering up and towering over Crowbone, who did not even glance up at the terrible hunch-shouldered effigy hanging over him like a mountain. 'By what rules? What signs?'

  'Here,' said Olaf and touched his head, then his heart. He hunched himself back in the cloak as Red Njal grunted scornfully.

  'Thor's red balls, boy — I was the same when I was your age. Running about making black dwarves and trolls appear and fighting them with a wooden sword.'

  We all chuckled, for all of us had done the same. Olaf boke his gaze from the birds to turn his odd eyes on Red Njal's cold-roughed face. The seidr, it seemed to me rolled off him like heat haze, so that I had to blink to steady my eyes.

  'No offence,' muttered Red Njal hastily. 'Be never the first to break the bonds of friendship, as my granny used to say.'

  A bird fluttered in and landed. 'Aha,' said Crowbone. 'Today, something bad will happen.'

  'This is all shite. A boy's will is the will of the wind, my granny said,' declared Red Njal when Olaf
had trudged out of earshot. He turned and looked at me, his eyes like small animals in the ice-crusted hair of his face.

  'Is it not shite, Trader?'

  'I saw and was silent, pondered and listened to the speech of men,' I offered, remembering the old saying; his frown chewed that until I thought his forehead would crack.

  'Shite,' I clarified and he cracked the ice of his face with a smile, then left me to my own awkward business.

  An hour later, at the lip of a great scar of balka, the axle pin on a cart snapped and the wheel came off. Ref Steinsson took an axe and the handle of another and fashioned a new pin with delicate, skilled strokes, while men heaved and strained to unload the cart then lift it and put the wheel on again.

  Red Njal, crimson with effort, looked up at me, then to where Olaf stood, a quiet smile on his face.

  'Shite,' said Red Njal, bitterly accusing and I shrugged. If this was as bad as it got. .

  'Heya, Trader — look at that.'

  Hauk Fast-Sailor, arms full of bundle from the unloaded cart, nodded across the steppe with his chin.

  'The djinn, Trader — remember them?'

  I remembered them, and the little Bedu tribesman Aliabu telling us of the invisible demons who could never touch the earth, whose passing was marked by the swirl of dust and sand. For a moment, the memory of Serkland heat was glorious.

  The snow swirled up in an ice crystal dance. Those who had never fared farther from home than this — most of these new Oathsworn, it came to me — gawped both at the dance of it and at Hauk and me, realizing now just how far-travelled we were, to have seen djinn in the Serkland desert.

  'I did not know the djinn were here, too,' Hauk said, grunting with the effort of moving the bundles. 'Lots of them, it seems.'

  I did not like it and did not know why. Snow curled in little eddies and rose in the air, dragging my eyes up to a pewter sky and the figure flogging a staggering horse towards us and yelling something we could not hear.

  Work stopped; the wheel was on, but the pin still had to be hammered in and all eyes turned on the horse and rider, the frantic fever of them soaking unease into us.

  It was Morut the tracker, shouting as he came up, his voice suddenly whipped towards us by the wind.

  'The buran is here!'

  We had just enough time to find shelter. Just enough before it pounced on us, hard as the lash of a whip, a scour of ice that shrieked like frustrated Valkyries.

  We unhitched the ponies and dragged and pushed them down the V-shaped balka, taller than three men and so steep that most of us went down it on our arses. Those too slow were moaning in agony at the barbs of flying ice; horses screamed, flanks bloodied by it. We huddled, people and beasts together, while the world screamed in white fury.

  Light danced like laughter on the water, the sea creamed round the skerries and d drakkar bustled with life on the edge of a curve of beach. I watched the boy stand in the lee of the ship, up to his calves in cold water, clutching a bundle and his uncertainty tight to himself, his shoes round his neck.

  Someone leaned from the boat, yelled angrily at him. Someone else thrust out a helping hand and he took it, was pulled aboard. The drakkar oars came out, dipped and sparkled; the dragon walked down the fjord.

  Me. It was me, leaving Bjornshafen with Einar the Black and the Oathsworn on board the Fjord Elk. I was young. .

  'Fifteen,' said the one-eyed man. He was tall and under the blue, night-dark cloak he exuded a strength that spoke of challenges mastered. Little of his body showed, other than a hand, gloved and clutching a staff.

  His single eye, peering like a rat from the smoked curl of hair framing his face, shaded by the brim of the broad hat he wore, was blue as a cloudless sky and piercing. I knew him.

  'All Father,' I said and he chuckled. One Eye, Greybeard, the Destroyer, The Furious One. Frenzy.

  Odin.

  'Part of him and all of that,' he answered. He nodded at the scene, which wavered and swirled as if the sudden wind ruffled it, like the reflection in a pool.

  'The White Christ priest with Gudleif,' he said and I saw the head on a pole, a head which had once been Gudleif, the man who had raised me as a fostri. Caomh, the Irisher thrall who had once been a priest — always a priest, he used to say — stood beside the horror Einar had created and watched us row away.

  'Bjornshafen was woven together after Gudleirs sons died and the White Christ priest did it, so that they are all. followers of the One God now.'

  He said it bitterly, this Father of the Aesir. Why did he permit this White Christ, this Jesus from the soft south? He was Odin, after all. .?

  'We wear what the Norns weave, even gods,' he answered. 'The old Sisters grow weary, want to lay down their loom, perhaps, and can only do that when the line of the Yngling kings is ended.'

  It was a long line. Crowbone, great-grandson for Harald Fairhair, was part of it. Did the Norns seek to kill him, too?

  One-Eye said nothing, which annoyed me. You would think a god would know something about such matters, about such a rival as the Christ.

  He grunted with annoyance. 'I know enough to know that enough is not yet enough. I know enough to know what I may not do and that is true wisdom.'

  Something rumbled, thunder deep and a grey wedge pushedforwardfrom shadows. Amber in stone, the eyes looked me over and the steam from its grey muzzle flickered as the wolf licked the god's gloved hand.

  'See, Freki,' said One Eye, 'she is coming back.'

  In the wind, a shredded blackness fought forward, descending in starts andjumps until it thumped on his shoulder. The black, unwinking eye regarded me briefly, then it bent and nibbled One Eye's ear, while he nodded.

  Munin, who flies the world and remembers everything inside that tiny feathered skull, returning to the ear of All Father Odin with a beak like a carving of ebony, whispering of slights and wrongs and warriors for Valholl still unslain. Ifelt no fear, which was strange enough to make me realize this was the dreamworld of the Other.

  'So it is,' answered One Eye, as if I had spoken. 'Andyou want to know what will happen. That, of course, is in the hands of the Norns.'

  'Silver,' I said and, though there was a whole babble of words, of questions that should have come from me, that seemed to be enough and he nodded.

  'Silver,' he replied. 'They can weave even that, the Sisters, but they weave blind and in the dark, which helps me. The silver has to be cursed, of course, otherwise it will not work for this weaving.'

  I understood nothing.

  'Ask this, Orm Gunnarsson — what is silver worth?' rumbled the voice.

  Farms and ships, warriors and women. . everything.

  'More,' agreed One Eye. 'And that Volsung hoard, the one they gave to Atil is a king's gift. A cursed gift. My gift.'

  And what does the god want in return? What could a god possibly want that did not already have? Warriors for the final battle? If so, all he had to do was kill us.

  One Eye chuckled. 'There are more wars than you know and the battles in them last a long time. This one I have been fighting since before the days of Hild's mother's grandmother's grandmother, back to the first one of that line. Remember this, when all seems darkest, Orm Trader — the gift I give is the one I get. What you are, I am also.'

  I did not understand that and did not need to say so — but he had spoken of Hild. The one eye glittered as he looked at me, amused and knowing.

  'The first of her line was the spear thrown over the head of the White Christ priests to tell them a fight was on,' he said and left me none the wiser. He chuckled, a turning millwheel in his throat, and added: 'You have to hang nine nights on the World Tree for wisdom, boy.'

  The raven, Munin, spread tattered wings and launched itself into the air. We watched it go, then One Eye grunted, as if his back bothered him, or he needed his supper.

  'He goes to find his white brother and bring him home — Fimbulwinter is not on us yet and he has shaken enough pin feathers.'

  The blu
e eye turned to the amber of a wolf even as I watched it and I felt no fear at it, only curiosity to see All Father shapechange, for that was his nature, to be neither one thing nor the other and never to be trusted fully because of it.

  'That is one knowing you take from this place back to the world,' he rumbled, his voice deepening. 'The second is that One Eye will force a sacrifice from you and it will be something you hold dear.'

  The wind shrieked and the snow drove in like white oblivion, stinging my eyes and driving me to my knees. But I was not afraid, for this was not Fimbulwinter. .

  'That's a fucking comfort right enough, Trader,' said the voice in my ear, 'but not to those still buried to their oxters in snow.'

  Hands hauled me upright, shook me until my eyes rattled and opened. Light streamed in. Light and the sear of cold air, as if I had stopped breathing entirely. Onund Hnufa, a great lumbering walrus, peered into my face from his iced-over tangle of moustache and gave a satisfied grunt.

  'Good. You will live — now help the others and stop babbling about Fimbulwinter.'

  We kicked and dug them out. Snow mounds shifted and broke apart; people growled and gasped their way back into the living light of day.

  Fifteen were dead, ten of them thralls, among them Hekja. Thorgunna and Thordis, pinch-faced and blue, clung to each other and made sure the tears did not freeze their eyes shut.

  Three of the druzhina were also dead and two of Klerkon's men, which left one alive, the large snub-nosed Smallander Kveldulf, Night Wolf, dark and feral under a dusting of ice. He and Crowbone glared at each other and I saw, in that moment, that Kveldulf was more afraid than the boy.

  'That was a harsh wind,' noted Hauk Fast-Sailor.

  'If it had not been for the timely warning, it would have been harsher still,' growled Gyrth, slogging heavily up through the snow which lay hock-deep in the V of the balka. His tattered furs trailed behind him like tails.

  'Worth an armring,' I said, turning to Morut, who was grinning into the tangle of lines his journey had ploughed into his face. 'Which I promise when I can get it off my arm in the warm.'