Crowbone

by Robert Low

  Not for the first time, he wondered at the sense of this untimely journey through the high mountains in search of … what? A legend? Yet, he thought to himself, if it were true, if the Bloodaxe of Eirik was somewhere in these mountains, then the one who possessed it had power. You take Odin’s Daughter to wife and you got One-Eye as your in-law – Hromund shivered at that thought. He would make you king, as the saga told it, then one day turn the axe on you, laughing.

  The Sami groaned and swung. There were raw festering marks on him, blackened at the edges – crosses, Hromund saw and he felt his mouth fill with saliva and spat it out.

  Martin saw it as he returned the iron cross to the flames and curled his lip. Hromund, of course, was a heathen, like all of them in Norway, so he did not see the benefit of God. The Sami did and Martin smiled at what the man had already babbled – in Norse as Martin had surmised would be so when the man was brought in, shot through the thigh by Eindride. He had never seen the guide he had refused from old Jarl Kol, but he had known at once that this Sami was the one.

  A hunter and trader, for sure, this Sami who wore good north wool and knew Norse well enough, even if he knew nothing about axes, which Martin had suspected when he had the man strung up. He had learned since that the man’s name was Olet and that he had been sent, as Martin had thought, by Jarl Kol with the men from Orkney – with the Witch-Queen Gunnhild, he said. She has power, he said, enough to face the goddess of the mountain. He also knew the place Martin sought and, in the end, confirmed it, whimpering.

  Surman Suuhun. Their heathen way of saying ‘the mouth of death’. Each time a holy cross was placed on his flesh, red-heated from the fire, fierce with the power of God, the man gasped out, screaming, ‘Surman Suuhun.’

  ‘And the enemy?’ Hromund asked after Martin had explained all this, wiping his hands on the uneven, ragged dags of his robe.

  ‘What enemy?’ Martin retorted scathingly. ‘There are so many Norway men here that these mountain hunters are no threat. Gudrod and the Witch have got ahead of us, all the same – though all that means is that they do all the fighting.’

  Hromund scowled at the implied slur on his leadership and was about to bark back when the Sami grunted. They both turned, astonished to see that he grinned bloodily, a horror made worse by his face being upside down.

  ‘She will take you all,’ he slurred through the blood of his own bitten lip. ‘Ajatar’s handmaiden.’

  ‘Who is Ajatar?’ Martin demanded at once, for he had never heard Gunnhild called that before. An arrow struck the Sami as he swung, took him in the back and came out through his front in a gout of blood, with heart meat snagged on it. He arched for the last time and screamed.

  Hromund and Martin pitched to the snow-covered ground, yelling; men scattered like chickens and there was shouting; someone screamed. Then silence.

  By the time men had gone out of the camp to look, Hromund knew it was pointless; no-one would be found, a fact which Tormod stated, his voice a sneer at Eindride, who flushed. The bowman knew he and his men had missed the hidden Sami and marvelled at that – even on this almost bare landscape of tumbled rock and lichen and gnarled, twisted trees, he had not seen them.

  Yet he cut the arrow from the dead Olet and studied it, as if it would provide some clue, while the snow whirled in and around them like white bees. A slender shaft, blackened with pitch, fletched with owl feathers. A short arrow, so the bows were wood and sinew, not powerful, but enough, all the same, to kill a man with no protection – or even with if they were shot true.

  Eindride had no doubt these bowmen could shoot true. He picked up the bow the dead Sami hunter had been using and saw that it could easily have shot this arrow, noted the soft fur puffs round the string below the bow tips to muffle the sound of the release. Pitch-blackened arrows used on a bow that shot them silently – night hunters, too, then.

  ‘They do not want us to get to where we want to go,’ Hromund said, as men went back to cooking and making what shelters they could against the snow. Martin, blinking flakes from his eyelashes, grinned his black grin.

  ‘Up is where we go,’ he said and pointed to the tallest of the mountains, now no more than a shade in the white whirl. ‘Up and fast, to get there just as the Witch finds out that God will not let her have the prize.’

  Hromund knew where he pointed, for they had been seeing it for days, the great grim fang of it. He shivered and not just with the cold; the smell of cooking deer mingled with the charred stink of the cross-burned Sami and, suddenly, Haakon’s Chosen Man had no appetite. Worse than that, the mountain they were heading for smoked, a plume curling from the side of it like the tail of a snow wolf.

  The drum started to sound like a distant woodpecker, insistent as a racing heartbeat. When the juoiggus chanting came with it, he felt sick and more afraid than he had ever been in his life.

  Finnmark, the same day …

  CROWBONE’S CREW

  The snow eased, started to fall in smaller and smaller flakes, until it was fine as emperor salt, sifting through the short day into long cold nights dark as raven wings save for the faint flickers of green moving like skeins of yarn far to the north.

  Fox fires, Svenke Klak declared and those who had been in the high north before agreed. They heralded plague and pest some said, though Onund grunted like a rutting deer at that.

  ‘All it means,’ he said, ‘is that a cold is coming that will freeze fire. I had that from Finn Horsehead, who fears nothing.’

  Kaetilmund had heard Finn say that once, but it was no comfort, as he whispered to Murrough when they were close together, drip-nosed by fires that never seemed to get them warm.

  ‘We have little provision for this,’ he muttered, which was only the truth and men knew it, giving the prince harsh glances when they thought he could not see – yet marvelling at how he sat, seemingly unaware of the cold, wrapped in a dirty-white cloak that was too small for him, with a furred collar patched and mangy.

  Those who knew told them the cloak had been his first present from Vladimir of Kiev and he had been nine, so it was old, yet precious. He had had it when he, Vladimir, Orm and all the rest of the Oathsworn went into the Great White, the winter steppe, to hunt out Atil’s treasure. Small wonder the youth did not feel the cold, after that.

  Crowbone was freezing, but would not show it, not even to Bergliot. He had not wanted to bring her further than Gjesvaer, but she would not be left and Crowbone did not trust Kol Hallson. The old jarl had had more than enough of visitors and Crowbone had come late to the feast, it seemed, for Haakon Jarl’s men, followed by Gunnhild and Gudrod, had all chewed their way through his winter stores.

  ‘Now there is you,’ he declared and was surly because, though he had heard of Crowbone and the Oathsworn even this far north, he thought the youth arrogant and with no claim to the title of prince at all. Worse than all that was the thought of what was happening in the Sami lands to have brought all these folk and whether there was profit in it that he was missing out on.

  ‘I have nothing left to give you,’ he said and Crowbone, who had been polite in the hope that Bergliot could be left, lost his temper with the old man, sitting on his High Seat with his great moustaches and his belly and his bowl-cut hair. He looked like a walrus with a bird’s nest upturned on its head, Crowbone thought and made the mistake of saying so.

  It had not been entirely wise, as Stick-Starer and Onund and Kaetilmund and all the others had pointed out when they were forced back to their ships empty-handed – Mar simply scowled – until Crowbone bellowed at them to leave him be.

  So they did, in a sullen, cold silence, all the way here – which was not even the best harbour for ships. That was taken by many longships belonging to Haakon Jarl and they had scudded past them like a rat looking for a drain, then approached the next seeming safe berth with caution, half-expecting to find the Witch-Queen’s crew. Crowbone did not know whether to be happy that they were nowhere to be seen, or unhappy to think of them lur
king a short sail down the coast.

  Stick-Starer and a handful were left with the ships and the rest went on towards the mountains; the only one who kept close to Crowbone now was Bergliot, which did not help for it was clear what was going on between him and the woman and men denied the same sweetness and warmth drew their brows down and muttered together with Mar.

  ‘Not, mind you,’ Mar was forced to admit, bringing bitter laughs from the growlers, ‘that I think I could water my colt there, for I remember her too much as Berto and that has a diminishing effect.’

  They struggled into the mountains and came upon spoor almost at once – a snapped boot toggle, a broken horn spoon – that told them they were on the right trail, following northmen, though they did not know who. Others had questions on the subject.

  ‘Following them to where?’ Mar demanded as they huddled into the long night. ‘For what? For an axe? There is no plunder in this for us – only for this prince we have tied ourselves to.’

  He said this to the men from Ireland, all the same, not to his former Red Brothers, or to the old Oathsworn, for he could not be sure that they would listen kindly to him.

  Then Vandrad Sygni loped in through the snow with an arrow in one hand and a tunic in the other, neither of them his. The tunic was old and patched and had been blue once, but it was clotted with frozen blood now. The arrow was strange, black and fletched with owl feathers. Crowbone, sitting with the yellow dog and grateful as much for the friendship as the heat, looked at the archer’s face and silently followed him back to where he had found these treasures.

  He led them to a small clearing in the tumble of rocks, patched with snow and lichen. Men gathered round, looking nervously right and left when they could tear their eyes from what had been done.

  ‘Killed by arrows,’ Kaetilmund said. ‘Howed up in rocks, as was proper – then some whoresons dug them up.’

  ‘For the weapons,’ said a man called Thorgils, one of the old Red Brothers. ‘They did that out in the Khazar lands, too, so that we had to break spears and swords and burn the bodies.’

  There were twenty bodies and all of them blue-white and bloodless, gashes like lipless mouths, frozen with hands on their breasts, though the fingers had been broken to prise good blades from them.

  ‘Who are they?’ Crowbone asked and a voice answered, thick and savagely bitter: ‘Norsemen. Like us.’

  Crowbone knew it was Mar and ignored it; soon enough, he would have to deal with Iron Beard, but this was not the place.

  Onund straightened stiffly from one body and held out his hand; folk craned to see. It was a little ship with a dragon-prow, a neck ornament moulded from pewter and torn from its leather thong. Those who knew the style nodded.

  ‘Orkney made,’ Onund confirmed and Crowbone stroked his hoar-frosted beard. So Gunnhild and her last son had run into trouble – the thought was warming, though he kept the smile to himself.

  It grew colder when they came on more of the same. By the time they had tallied past a hundred, men were working saliva into dry mouths and wondering why they were ploughing on along the same bloody furrow.

  The last in this rimed knot of tragedy consisted of thirty-two dead and none of them had been howed up, just left to lie along either bank of a frozen stream, fringed with dwarven, snow-laden pines. Men hauled out weapons and crouched a little, like dogs expecting a kick – unburied bodies meant the survivors, if any, had fled and left them, which meant the attackers were still about.

  Then, sudden as a hand-clap, the demons of the mountains came howling out at them in a shower of arrows and throwing spears and a mad, leaping charge. One minute men were turning this way and that, looking at the snow-shrouded tree line, the next, the world was full of shrieking horror.

  ‘Form! Form!’ bawled Kaetilmund, but some men broke and ran, yelling, sliding, tumbling over and over and cracking themselves on the iced rocks. Those left turned to fight, hard-eyed and snarling, grim as cliffs, sliding towards Crowbone and Kaetilmund like filings to a lodestone.

  They took the first rush of spears and arrows clattering on their shields, then lifted their hoared eyebrows and saw the furred faces, ears and whiskers and fanged muzzles. Lesser men would have had trouble – the ones who ran, or wallowed in confusion, died for it – but even the ones who kept facing to the front felt their bowels opening. Dry-mouthed, they had to force themselves to stay rooted at the sight of animals risen on their hindlegs and snarling.

  It was Bergliot who ended it. She nocked and shot as the howlers started moving down on the huddled band. The arrow took one of the beasts in the face and there was a yelp of pain; the beast muzzle seemed to come apart and the body fell the other way, a tangle of limbs with a flat face, bloodied and unbearded and undeniably Sami.

  ‘They are men!’ roared Murrough and, even those whose minds were numbed by the surprise and shock of it were so honed with war that their limbs knew what to do. Arms brought shields and edges up; legs moved and men slid so swiftly together that shoulders were bruised in the clash. Others, too slow to reach the shieldwall, stumbled into fighting pairs.

  They are men. The roar went up, a fire that leaped from head to head. They are men and so could die.

  There was a skidding moment or two, then, as the enemy felt the new resistance. They were not beasts, as Bergliot had revealed, but men in furs and masks made from the heads and muzzles of animals – wolf and fox and bear, the snarling jowled heads fitted over their own, the little ears sticking up, the withered muzzles bared with loosened fangs; from inside, he saw white eyes gleam.

  A few black arrows flew, shot by unseen archers from behind the others; one shaft whirred over the front rank and hit the helmet of a man next to Onund with a clang that rattled him sideways, then it spun off, skittering dangerously over the iced rocks. The beast-men roared up enough courage to hurl themselves on the shieldwall.

  Crowbone had his shield on his back, which he realised was foolish, but it was too late to swing it free. He dragged out his sword as the Sami crashed like a wave on the wall of linden shields, then washed round the flanks, shrieking and screaming; a northman spun backwards and landed on his arse, most of his face punched in with a spear – Hrolfr, the gusli player, Crowbone saw dully.

  The one who did it gave a fighting roar out of the depths of his bobbing bear mask, a great black and brown affair with puckered eye pits. He hefted the bloody spear – then hurled it through the gap at Crowbone.

  No shield – I look like an easy mark, Crowbone thought with snow-crisp clarity as the spear came at him, flexing and spinning, the gore spuming off the iron tip, which grew larger and larger. He saw the pitted head of it, the notched edge as he twisted sideways to let it half pass him. He watched his hand come up, though it looked like it belonged to someone else – then he snatched the spear in a fist, reversed it and hurled it back, all in an eyeblink.

  A bad throw, he thought as the spear spun from his hand; I must work on that left, it is weaker than the right. It carved to the right of the bear mask and the man howled with surprise and fear, his eyes following the spear as it clattered to the ground, as if it was a snake about to coil and spring at him.

  The real danger stepped in close to him, close enough to see the weathered yellow fangs and old leather lips of the bear jaw, to see the Sami’s sweat and charcoal streaked face deep in the maw of it, the eyes wide and white. Then Crowbone stuck him under the right ribs with the sword, once, twice, three times, hard enough for the round, blunt point to rip him off his feet, on the last blow the beast-man falling away, groaning.

  Another turned this way and that, wild and uncertain, so Crowbone closed with him quickly, before he could gather courage and sense round him like a cloak on a cold day. He was larger than the rest of them, Crowbone noted, though still a half-head shorter than any of us. He had the mask of a fox, with the russet ears perked up on his head – more immediately, Crowbone saw that the man carried a good Norse sword and an axe, but by the time Foxmask had work
ed out what was happening and which one to use, Crowbone had slashed a second mouth for him.

  The man fell backwards on his arse, making guh-guh sounds and the blood slicked the haft of the sword, so that it slithered out of Crowbone’s hand as he spun, looking for another to fight.

  Weaponless, he crouched and looked wildly around – the yellow dog sped past him, boring in hard and snarling on another of the masked Sami, barging him off his feet and scrabbling to get at the man’s throat. Eventually, Svenke killed the man and stopped him screaming, which was a relief for everyone; by then the Sami’s forearms were shredded by the yellow bitch’s fangs.

  They had no belly for it, these little mountain men. A shower of spears and arrows and the sight of them in their beast masks and furs had always worked before, sending Gunnhild’s Orkneymen running and shrieking to be easily cut down.

  We are different, Crowbone exulted and howled it out until the cords of his neck hurt, as different from what the Sami had faced before as lambs to wolves.

  ‘You are Olaf’s men,’ he screamed and the warriors bellowed agreement, slashed and carved their beast-masked enemy until they fled, yelping, back up into the misted treeline. Those chasing them stopped, panting and retching, hands on knees and sweating in the iced air; breath and steam smoked as if the place burned.

  Crowbone stumbled over to collect his sword, half-dazedly wiping it clean with snow, while the man whose throat he had slit choked on his own blood, his hands empty of Norse-forged weapons now, grasping like claws as if trying to swim to the surface of water.

  ‘You have blood on you,’ Murrough noted.

  ‘His,’ Crowbone answered, jerking his chin at the gargler.

  ‘That was a wee dunt,’ Murrough said cheerfully, looking round. ‘Now these creatures know who they fight – that was a fine trick with the spear, all the same. Is it hard to learn?’