Crowbone

by Robert Low

  There was a hoot of laughter, then another and Atli clapped Adalbert on the back, grinning. For a moment it made Crowbone as mad-angry as a smouldering bag of cats – but he suddenly saw it, how the wolves and bears that were Atli and Styr liked the spirit of this Adalbert. Even Murrough was grinning, thumping the butt of his axe on the floor. Mugron, he saw, was bow-headed, hands clasped in silent prayer; Notker was slumped on the floor, as if all his bones had deserted him, the hem of his robe mopping up the pools of blood.

  Still, Crowbone thought, slightly bewildered, Adalbert had argued badly. He was supposed to disprove the existence of his god and had done the opposite. He and Notker were the ones who should die. He said so, though his voice was weak with confusion – that last proof of Adalbert’s had had a barb to it. Still, the silence that followed was thick enough to grasp.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Adalbert said quietly into the middle of it. ‘No-one should die. For the proposition we had to put has lost – yet it is clear that your men have voted me to live. Under the terms you set for this game all of us have won.’

  Right there is why law-makers will rule the world, Crowbone thought – if they live long enough. The monk dazzled him, all the same, so much that he laughed with delight and stroked his coming beard with wry confusion; this was the game of kings, right enough, but played in a strange and excitingly different way.

  ‘Now I will make you a proposition,’ Adalbert declared. ‘Mugron will tell you the content of the letter and you will take it and leave quietly, harming no-one. But I will come with you.’

  Mugron’s head came up at that. Crowbone cocked his own and stared at the monk, who thought he resembled a curious bird.

  ‘Why would you?’ he asked softly and Adalbert smiled.

  ‘To bring you to God,’ answered the priest. ‘Probae etsi in segetem sunt deteriorem datae fruges, tamen ipsae suaptae enitent. A good seed, planted even in poor soil, will bear rich fruit by its own nature.’

  Crowbone laughed, the hackles on his neck stiff with the wyrd of it all. Was this the sign he looked for?

  ‘At the least, you can teach me this Latin tongue,’ he declared, ‘so that I know when Gjallandi lies to me.’

  The skald’s face was stone and Crowbone’s good-natured smile died away at the sight. Mugron unsteepled his fingers and looked up at Adalbert.

  ‘You do not need to make this sacrifice,’ he declared piously, but Adalbert’s returning gaze was cool, grey as an iced sea.

  ‘You did as much when Gudrod strung up your predecessor,’ he declared and there was iron in his voice. ‘I merely did it before an abbot died.’

  Mugron flinched and bowed his head.

  ‘Pulvis et umbra sumus,’ he said and, in unison, Adalbert and Gjallandi translated: ‘We are dust and shadow.’ They stopped and looked at each other, one cool, the other glaring.

  Crowbone laughed with delight as the abbot closed his eyes so that the letter was as clear as if it was before him. Then he started to speak.

  Later, when Murrough came up to the fire, Kaetilmund raised a questioning eyebrow.

  ‘Do not ask,’ Murrough said, shaking his head and the Swede was stunned by the elf-struck bleakness of Murrough’s eyes.

  Bay of Seals, Finnmark, some weeks later …

  THE WITCH-QUEEN’S CREW

  Men blew on their numbed fingers and huddled close to the snow-frosted ground, where the mist fingered them with icy talons. The sky was still blue, scudding with white clouds and the great rolling white expanse they had just come up folded away behind them. If Erling squinted, he could just make out the ships, slithered half up out of the grue of ice that wanted to be the Tana River.

  ‘Jiebmaluokta,’ Gunnhild said, her breath smoking out from under the veil she wore, a contrivance of silk that showed only her eyes, old as a whale’s. She turned her whole upper body, swathed in a white-furred cloak of grey-blue trimmed with red; another swaddled her legs so that only the sealskin toes of her boots peeped out and she had hands thrust in a great muff of white fox. The chair she sat in like a throne had poles thrust through it and the four men who carried her now knelt at each one, panting like dogs.

  ‘What?’ her son replied, distracted. This place was already cold and the guide, a Sami supposedly friendly, had disappeared. Gudrod did not like that much.

  ‘Bay of Seals,’ Gunnhild answered dreamily, ‘in the tongue of the Sami.’

  Erling, vicious with hate for her and afraid she might know, thought bitterly that she was the only one enjoying all this. Well, apart from Od, who crouched like an adoring hound, staring up into the veiled face, wrapped in a wolfskin she had given him. Erling did not like the way the boy fawned on her.

  Gudrod did not much care what this place was called. When they had heaved six ships into Gjesvaer, old Kol Hallson had welcomed them well enough, but pleaded to go lightly on his stores.

  ‘Haakon Jarl’s men have already eaten me out of half the winter,’ he moaned. ‘Now there is you – what is so interesting here that brings both Gudrod Eiriksson and the king of Norway’s men to Finnmark so late in the year?’

  He had been warily respectful when Gunnhild was brought in to the fire all the same and did not stint on his stores after that, though it seemed to consist of whale and walrus and salmon. Gudrod learned that eight ships of the king of Norway had come to Gjesvaer two weeks ago, led by Haakon’s Chosen, Hromund Haraldson and including the king’s favourite, the thrall Tormod. There was also a Christ priest, Kol recalled, whom no-one liked the look of.

  ‘Is there to be war up here, then?’ he asked, alarmed. Gudrod soothed him, for though the steading was small, with almost no men and only three ships, it was the only decent shelter for days in any direction.

  Kol lent them Olet, a broad-faced Sami who traded seal and walrus with him. He had, he confessed, offered the man to Hromund and Tormod, but they had refused, because the Christ priest said so. The priest knew the way, Kol said, clearly curious to know where the priest and everyone else seemed to be going. It was clear to Gudrod that this Christ priest was the Drostan everyone had heard of, though he was puzzled why the letter had been written by a priest called Martin and sent to Jarl Orm of the Oathsworn.

  Another contender for the prize, Gudrod thought moodily and was not about to tell the Sami guide where they were headed before they left, which was two days later. He did not need Kol adding his interest to the crowd chasing the Bloodaxe.

  Kol and the Sami guide made it clear, however, that chasing anything in Finnmark was beyond foolish – it was late in the year for plootering about up the Tana; the long night was closing in and the day scarcely a flicker.

  Now Olet the Sami had vanished and Gudrod was hunched like a stunted tree among the rocks, two hundred men shivering around him and the mist trailing hag-hair over them. Somewhere ahead and heading for the prize was Haakon Jarl’s crew and the mad Christ priest, but Gunnhild was certain that they would not get the goddess to part with it. That needed her, she claimed, though Gudrod saw that no-one was happy hearing the word ‘goddess’; such magic did not sit well with them.

  There was a movement off to one side and men tensed, weapons up; Olet wraithed up, his gait odd, as if he was trying to avoid leaving anything like a mark and the odd furrows and holes he shuffled into existence in the snow seemed to lack any destiny and collapsed as soon as he had passed.

  He slid out like a tendril of the mist and moved through the knots of men to Gudrod’s side, where he took a knee and wiped his face, thick with bear grease against the cold.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Up ahead are some trees and a little hunting hut. There are reindeer everywhere, those big-horned ones, females fat against the winter. Someone will be watching over them.’

  Gudrod did not doubt it; he had felt eyes on him for some time and the place was not helpful – grey rock patched greenish red with lichen, cut with gullies and sudden drops where water was turning to porridge, studded with icing tarns, stuck with little wizened
trees like claws, clotted with early snow. He stood up and waved scouts ahead, to right and to left, then started forward, his presence dragging everyone else.

  Erling rose up, stiff and cold. If he had known what Gudrod was thinking, he would have agreed and added in the reindeer, which scared him shitless, since they could hardly be seen at all except at the last and stood and stared instead of running off like sensible beasts. The fact that he was afraid of them did not help his mood.

  After a toiling climb, they came to the hut, a low affair of stone, the roof a wither of old summer growth and branches. Beyond, a line of stunted grey trees hung with a witch-hair of frost-covered lichen, twisted themselves to the skyline; in the summer, Erling thought, they would be bright and there would be cloudberry bushes too …

  Gudrod grunted, as if the sight had slotted something into place and now the whole cunning tiling was clear. In fact, he was now thinking it was time to give this up for the day, for plootering about in the sleet and mist as the dark grew was not sensible. Yet the night already seemed interminable.

  ‘Did you see Hrapp? Kjallak?’ he asked, naming the leaders of the scouts he had sent out, but Olet shook his head.

  ‘Well,’ said Erling, looking at him. ‘There is the hut. At least we can shelter from the cold in it.’

  There were some two hundred men here; twenty under Hrapp scouted to the east, a similar group under Kjallak to the west, while Olet alone skulked out in front. There were more men back with the ships and Erling, turning to look, swore he could see the red flower of their fires and envied them.

  Gudrod did not like the hut, for the mist was closing in and they were going to be stuck there for the night, which was not a prospect with much flavour in it. He said as much, turning to his mother, and Gunnhild, snapping like an annoying dog at the men who were lurching her too much, glared embers through her veil and said: ‘Well, you are the man for the leading here – so lead.’

  He hated her and feared her, yet he had seen her power, knew it well. She wanted him a king and he had thought he had wanted that, too, like all his brothers – but all his brothers were dead.

  ‘I am after getting cold here,’ Erling said pointedly and Gudrod blinked out of the thinking and into his scowl, then nodded. He signalled; men moved forward.

  They were creeping-soft, as cautious as rats approaching that hut, along the length of the stream which slid past it, heavy with ice. It started to snow, fine as querned flour.

  ‘Look lads,’ said Ozur Rik, pointing with his spear. They followed it, shaking sweat and meltwater from their eyes to see the reindeer skins pegged out on a wooden frame. They were only half-frozen, newly flayed, a simple domestic task that showed the place had been occupied only recently – perhaps still was.

  ‘A proper cured one of those would be warm,’ a man growled.

  ‘The hut,’ Gudrod reminded them, more harsh than he had intended and men hunched hastily under his frown. From somewhere in the misted trees came a coughing bark; those who had heard it before knew it as one of the reindeer, but most thought it was a loose hound.

  ‘Hold the dog,’ a man called Myrkjartan shouted, which caused chuckles, for it was the traditional greeting you gave to announce to a hov that you were no threat, even though you were arriving as a stranger.

  Then all the animals of the stunted wood rose up on their hind legs and howled down on them out of the misted trees.

  The Borg, Moray, at the same time …

  CROWBONE’S CREW

  The snow lay clumped on the sand, packed and powdered where the water had not melted it away; pools crackled with ice, luminous in a world of eldritch moonlight almost clear as day. The world seemed filled with the flicker of alfar, those hidden beings at the edge of vision, so that folk spoke in low voices or even whispers, touching iron for warding as they banked up fires and made their shelters.

  To the left, Crowbone saw the bulk of the fort that gave the place its name, perched on a headland reached by a narrow neck. It had many names – Torridun, in the days when Sigurd of Orkney had come and pillaged it. Torfness, too, after the way the people who lived here cut up turves that burned like wood or coals.

  Borg – fortress – was the best name for it all the same, thought Crowbone. In the years between Sigurd and now, the place had recovered itself. Three walls now stretched across the narrow neck and a great semi-circle of rampart behind that, all oak and iron and stone, so that the Bull Kings who claimed Moray could strut and trade.

  Strange folk, for the most part, who spoke like the Irish and wore tunics and breeks woven in a pattern of squares – when they wore breeks at all – and with a fringing along the bottom. It kept the damp from sucking up from the hem, Bergliot said to those who marvelled at it, which was a sensible thing, especially for the long skirts of the women.

  Adalbert said the Old Romans had called them pictii, meaning Painted People and so called because they had skin-marked their faces in blue. They named them with reverence, all the same, for these pictii were one of the few folk the Old Romans failed to conquer – but that was then and this was now.

  They were sensible folk, Murrough thought, but they had had their day, the Bull Kings of the north, with their skin-markings and their strutting nobles and their endless chipping away on stones. Worse than the Norse, the Irisher thought to himself, for stone marks no-one but themselves could properly read and understand.

  Scores of those stones lined the road up to the gate of the place and Crowbone was aware of the effect, knew it for what it was – another piece in the game of kings. Look at us, the stones demanded. Look at us, see the power and time it took to make and raise us. Only a great people can do this. We are choosers of the slain.

  Yet three stones had started to lean drunkenly to one side, the foundations eroded, and Crowbone knew these people’s greatness was the same. Sooner rather than later, the Norse of Orkney would come and take the entire of Moray, if only to keep the Albans of the south from doing the same.

  Meanwhile, though, there were declarations of peaceful intent to be made and gifts to be given to appease the haughty nobles of the place with their silly, fringed, wool tunics and Irish shoes. Of course, the nobles were sensible enough to keep the scores of Norse outside their fortress, camped on the great curve of bay between the borg and the town. The town was prepared to sigh with relief that the Norse were not about to rampage through them – and, once they learned that the men had good weight silver about them, flocked out to invite them in.

  Crowbone was happy, all in all, as he sat down to feast with the nobles of Borg, for he had learned that Martin had been here and left for Norway and Haakon Jarl. The letter to Orm had been flat and cold, scarcely surprising since they were far from friends, yet it revealed what Martin wanted and where he was headed to get the Bloodaxe.

  Now Crowbone knew, though had turned all the words of it over in his head as if examining suspect coin and still could not work out whether Orm was playing him false or not. He could not be sure that Hoskuld had not been charged to tell him of the letter when the time was right – like a bairn at learning, Crowbone thought bitterly. Yet Hoskuld had tried to run from him – though Crowbone was nagged with the idea that he might have caused that himself with his harshness.

  Yet he was content. His men were in shelters on a cold beach, but they were used to colder still and he had handed them out buckets of silver, so that there was warmth and comfort to be had for a price in the town.

  The silver had come from Orkney and the glow of it, the sheer surprise of it, still made Crowbone smile.

  From Hy they had sailed for Orkney and come ashore at Sand Vik, storming through the creaming surf and forming up for a fight, Crowbone’s heart thundering as it never had before at the prospect of taking on the Witch-Queen, bane of his life – except that no enemy force appeared. Crowbone was confused by this, uncertain of whether to plough on to the hall and its huddle of buildings and did the worst thing possible – nothing at all. In the en
d, just as he cursed his uncertainty and made his mind up, Stick-Starer called out that riders were coming.

  A fistful of men stopped a long bowshot away and dismounted. A man held the little stiff-maned ponies and the rest trudged towards them, one holding up a white shield.

  ‘They want to talk,’ Mar declared, which was so obvious that Crowbone scoured him with a glance that made him flush. He called out Murrough and Kaetilmund, with the Stooping Hawk snapping out behind him as he walked. He indicated to Gjallandi to join them, because the man was a skald and he wanted this remembered – and the priest, Adalbert, still getting his land-legs back and whey-faced from bokking up his dinner as an offering to the goddess Ran.

  There were four Orkneymen in all, all ring-mailed and armed. One carried the raven banner – the hrafnsmerki – and Crowbone marked him; it was said that the banner had been made by Gunnhild, or one of her kind and that it made sure of victory, even as it guaranteed the death of the man who carried it.

  The man, stern and spade-bearded, met Crowbone’s gaze coolly enough, but had the flat, grey eyes of the hopeless; later, Murrough wondered what made a man take the pole of that banner in his hand and Kaetilmund said a woman was at the bottom of it, needing money and driving the fool to fame. Crowbone did not answer, but he knew the truth; the man’s jarl, to whom the banner-bearer had oathed away his own reason, had chosen him as the slain.

  One other was there to defend the banner and he held high the white shield of peace. The other two were chieftains, for sure, in their best war gear of brass-dagged long coats of rings and fancy silver-ended swords – one older and one young, built like a barrel of ale.

  ‘I am Arnfinn Thorfinsson,’ the older one said, peeling off his helmet to let the grey-streaked hair be ruffled by the sea breeze. ‘This is Sigurd, son of my brother Hlodvir and brought here for the learning in it.’

  Crowbone nodded. Sigurd was older than Crowbone by two or three years, no more, and one day would be a ruler of Orkney – if his father lived and his uncles let him. Crowbone searched the boy’s face for a sign, a mark, anything that revealed why he had been picked for greatness and not another. There was nothing but his red-flushed cheeks and a lopsided half-grin.