Crowbone

by Robert Low

  This was said loud enough for others to hear and they growled out agreements; those who had not seen it were told of their young prince’s hand skill while they poked among the dead. Crowbone spoke soft to Murrough, not wanting to ruin what he had made, but pointing out their own dead and silently sending him to find out the tally for this day.

  He was back soon enough – Hrolfr was dead, as well as a Jutlander called Lief and a Saxlander called Taks. Mar and Vandrad Sygni were missing. Crowbone did not know much about Lief save that he played ’tafl well but Taks did good leatherwork and everyone would miss his shoe repairs. Hrolfr, though, was a loss that brought something sharp into Crowbone’s throat, remembering the skill of the man’s playing. Vandrad and Mar were more of a worry, all the same – they were two of the three best trackers and the third had four legs.

  ‘Aye, well,’ said Kaetilmund moodily, scrubbing the rain off his face. ‘They ran – I think Mar went off and Vandrad went after him in anger. Odin’s bones, though, matters could have been worse.’

  ‘Just so,’ agreed Murrough, lumbering past. ‘It might have been snowing as well – for the love of all the gods, man, will you just die and give us all peace.’

  This last was spat to the choker still struggling to breathe and Murrough’s big Dal Cais axe rose and fell, cutting the last breath out of the man.

  ‘What now?’ demanded Kaetilmund.

  Crowbone told him – hunt for Gudrod and Gunnhild. Search the bodies for a big man with the look of a fancy jarl about him and an old woman, he told them and they pawed their way through the corpses while Bergliot, her dress looped up through her belt and breeks on for the warmth, helped others prepare a fire from the little that was available to burn, grinning at Crowbone until he answered it.

  Later, the men sat with bellies full trying to ignore the stiffening dead nearby, nudging each other when they saw Bergliot clump up on her too-big turnshoes and throw herself next to Crowbone, forcing him to offer her the shelter of his cloak. Crowbone, aware of the scowls and nudges, tried to ignore them; the dog came up, muzzle bloody, tongue lolling and permitted itself to be patted warily.

  ‘I cannot keep calling this animal Yellow,’ he said to Bergliot. ‘I will call her Vigi – Stronghold – instead.’

  ‘No matter what you call her,’ she replied sternly, ‘she will answer only to me.’

  It was the truth, but Crowbone did not like to hear it and decided, as the cold dark drifted down on them, to put matters on the straight between them. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Listen,’ he began. ‘I have no home to give you, nor time to find you safety. I am awaited beyond the mountains and the truth is that I don’t know but that it is my death waiting. The best I can do for you is ask Murrough, or Kaetilmund or the priest to make sure you get to safety – though there is no surety of anyone living through this. Is there anywhere you could go before the winter sets in hard?’

  He felt her stiffen beside him, turn from warmth and limpid length to a log.

  ‘There is nowhere I can go, not before, not after winter. What would you have me do, prince? Would you have me a bed slave and no more?’

  Crowbone looked at the fire until his eyeballs seared. She was, he realised, the first woman to come to him willingly and that was what was colouring matters here, so that he could not simply up and walk away. That and the fact that there was nowhere for her to go that did not mean her death.

  ‘There is nowhere I can go. I shall be here, or dead,’ she said, as if reading his mind, which snapped his head up to look at her.

  ‘Woman, listen to me,’ he said. ‘I am a prince who intends to be king in Norway. I do not need a wife and if I did …’

  He stopped, seeing the mire he was plootering into the middle of, but it was too late. She pushed herself away from him.

  ‘If you did,’ she said slowly, ‘it would not be the likes of me. The princess, not her friend, is that the fact of it?’

  It was so completely the fact of it that Crowbone could not answer and, eventually, she stood up and looked down at him.

  ‘Prince,’ she said, soft and gentle and all the more scathing because of it. ‘King who would be – yet not kingly enough to be kind and even offer to take me home.’

  She turned and started to walk away, paused and looked back.

  ‘A boy,’ she said. ‘I see only a boy, who cannot even find it in him to thank me for saving his life.’

  It was the truth, but he did not like to hear it from her and watched as she went to the other side of the fire and sat, so that her image wavered through the flames. He was aware of men silently watching this and his anger seemed to flare with the sputtering fire.

  ‘Once,’ he said suddenly, ‘Thor had two sons on a mortal woman. Two young thunder-gods who grew to red-headed manhood in the way boys do, then fell violently in love with the same woman, as boys do. Said one of them to the other, in a joking way: “I will become a flea, so as to be able to hop into her bosom.” Said the other: “I will become a louse, so as to be able to stay always in her fud.”’

  ‘It is only your lice that let you know you still live,’ Adalbert interrupted, seeing the glares between Crowbone and Bergliot. Crowbone ignored the priest.

  ‘Thor heard this and fumed,’ he went on. ‘And he roared: “Are those your wishes? You shall be taken at your word. Be slaves to a woman all your lives, then.” He turned them into flea and louse, which is why we have them today and why, whenever there is a thunderstorm, fleas jump out of all sorts of places where there were none to be seen before and your crotch lice itch more than they usually do.’

  Men chuckled but most realised why the story had been told in the first place and stitched their lips shut until the silence was broken only by the whine of wind and the stutter of flame. Then Kaetilmund reported that they had searched all the dead, but there was no man or woman like the ones they sought.

  ‘Now,’ Crowbone told him, ‘we go on.’

  When the dawn came up, whey-faced and chill, they sorted themselves out, bound up cuts and ground on into a long, cold climb, carrying their dead and leaving the Sami and the old Orkney dead, though Adalbert grimmed about that.

  No-one else did, for they did not want to each be burdened with a cold-stiffed stranger, though there were no mutters about stumbling along weighed with their own comrades; no-one wanted to be left as one of those blue-white corpses when their turn came and everyone agreed they would burn their own men when they had got far enough away from that killing ground and into some decent trees.

  They did, though it took most of the long night, thawing out enough stunted, twisted pine, which popped and spat out ice in three great dead-fires. Even they could not keep the dour away from the dark beyond the flames, shrouded by trees that seemed to close on them. Crowbone sat by himself now, for the yellow dog lay with Bergliot and though both were only across the width of a mean fire, it might have been the other side of the world itself.

  Adalbert muttered prayers, which brought one or two glances from the good Odin and Thor men, so Gjallandi intoned prayers to Odin in his sonorous voice, so that all heads turned. At the end, knowing he had done well, he smiled a triumphant, knowing smile with his great lips and inclined his head in a gracious bow.

  ‘One of my many accomplishments,’ he declared. ‘Together with reading and writing runes, at which I am a master as much as I am at the drápa and flokkr. At the first, I can delight with the dróttkvæði and the Lausavísur. With the second, I am able to make tears with my nidvisur.’

  ‘I have heard weeping when you speak, for sure,’ Halfdan interrupted savagely, ‘but the only time I heard people listen intently was when you gave us a mansongr.’

  That raised a weak chuckle despite the mood, for Gjallandi’s boasts about courtly verse in its various forms and his ability to make decent nidvisur – flytings of scorn – were all true enough, but his mansongr, the filthy verses he made for the delight of hard men, were best of all.

  Crowbo
ne turned to Adalbert then and said suddenly: ‘Illi robur et aes triplex circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci commisit pelago ratem primus.’

  Those who remembered the priest saying this on the beach at Torfness ages since nudged each other at this feat of memory and the priest himself acknowledged it with a murmur of praise and no corrections. Crowbone beamed.

  ‘Now,’ said a man unseen in the shadows. ‘If you could pluck this axe up as easily as you learn the Christ tongue, we would all be thankful – do we know where it lies?’

  ‘As to that,’ Gjallandi declared, before Crowbone could snap back, ‘you should have paid more attention to those Sami at Kol’s steading. They speak of this axe and say it might be the Sampo, hidden in a mountain.’

  ‘Now I know this,’ Onund declared, ‘I know even less than before – what is a Sampo, then? You are rich in seidr, Crowbone – I have seen and felt it – do you know?’

  Crowbone was pleased at the reference to his powers, but he had never heard of a Sampo and admitted it, then looked expectantly at Gjallandi. The skald sat and composed himself neatly by the ice-grumbling fire; folk sighed, seeing the preliminaries of a performance.

  It was long and involved, as good sagas are, but the gist of it seemed to be that some Sami smith of note was forced to make a Sampo, a great work of magic, in return for a bride. Then a sorceress stole it and, in the struggle to get it back, this Sampo was lost.

  ‘But what is it?’ Halfdan demanded and he was only the first of a clamour. Gjallandi shrugged.

  ‘No-one knows,’ he answered. ‘Some say it was the World Tree itself, which is obvious nonsense. Others say it was the ever-grinding quernstone that made flour, salt or gold from thin air. Others have it that it was a strange device that the Greeks call horoscopium for reading what the Norns will weave in the actions of stars. I have heard also that it is a Bloodaxe – Odin’s Daughter – from the time when the young AllFather still had both his eyes.’

  There was silence for a time, while eyes glittered in the half-dark bright with new interest.

  ‘I like the gold-milling one best,’ said Tuke, who was small and round, with a beard as bristled as a badger’s arse, so that folk called him Duergar, meaning Black Dwarf.

  ‘I am standing beside you there,’ agreed Murrough.

  ‘I favour the axe,’ Halfdan added, ‘for I am hoping it is the one which makes our Crowbone into a king and lets us all become rich.’

  Folk laughed. Adalbert cleared his throat.

  ‘Cornucopia,’ he said and eyes turned to him until he felt the scorn in them and raised his head into the heat of it.

  ‘A Greek horn from the Godless times,’ he said, ‘which poured out whatever your heart desired and never grew less for it. Seems to me this Sampo is whatever folk wish it to be – and that is the work of the Devil, who tried to persuade Christ himself to all the world’s power.’

  ‘And was refused,’ declared one of the Christmenn passionately, then crossed himself; Crowbone was surprised to see that it was Wermund, one of the Kiev Slavs. There was a pause, split by the crackle and roar of the fire; somewhere, snow loosened by the heat slithered from the trees and men glanced round, to make sure the sentries were alert.

  ‘He turned down all the power of the world?’ Crowbone demanded and then shrugged into Adalbert’s stern nod.

  ‘He had a lot to learn about the game of kings, then.’

  ‘There is no game,’ Adalbert answered flatly, ‘for God spake that the world should be governed by kings and princes.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Crowbone said, staring levelly at the priest with his odd eyes. ‘So was it your God that appointed who rules the Northlands? To stand against Haakon is to stand against the White Christ?’

  Adalbert frowned a little and folded his hands in his sleeves.

  ‘Just so – and not so. Haakon is a heathen. Those unanointed who stand against an anointed king are not on the side of good Christians, only of the Aesir,’ he decreed. ‘All the baptised kings and princes will shun such a man – will join in war against him.’

  Crowbone’s eyes narrowed, but Adalbert did not flinch.

  ‘You are brave, priest,’ he answered slowly, ‘but not invulnerable.’

  Adalbert waved a dismissive hand. ‘We can sit here calling each other names until Heimdall blows his horn, as you people say, but it will not change matters.You want to be king in Norway, but that will never be until you embrace Christ. Look at Haakon – he is a heathen and the world lines up to topple him.’

  ‘Haakon is still king in Norway,’ Crowbone responded. ‘He threw your kind into the sea.’

  ‘Is he the true king, then?’ answered Adalbert. ‘Or are you, as you claim? Christ will decide, not the gods of the Aesir. Nor any cursed axe.’

  Finnmark, the mountain of Surman Suuhun …

  MARTIN

  No-one wanted to go in that smoking cleft in the dripping grey stones. There was a hot wind from it that seemed to pause every now and then before whining out of the cleft in a gout of white smoke and the stink of rotten eggs.

  ‘Surtr,’ muttered one of the men and Hromund glanced uneasily round, then up, blinking in the snow which had been falling steadily all night and into the short, leaden day. The rest of the peak hunched over them, capped with snow, misted in a sinister shroud. He did not like to admit it, but the man had the right of it here – this was a place of Surtr, the fire jötunn, and all his kin spawned from Ymir’s armpit. No place for men; he shivered.

  Martin saw it, knew it was not the cold and curled his lip back on his black stumps; this was where the axe was and he had expected no help. This was where Sueno had known it would be, hissing it out as he clutched Drostan’s rough wool sleeve, demanding promises that the astonished and frightened monk agreed to.

  Afterwards, Martin had sternly told the trembling, bewildered Drostan that he had placed his soul in peril by listening to such heathen blasphemy at all, never mind making promises. And, when the monk knelt, eyes squeezed shut to receive absolution from Martin, the clerk regular, Martin had given him it, with a stone. He had absolved Drostan so fiercely that he had crushed one of his own fingers, but he scarcely felt that among so many of the pains he bore.

  The reek swirled round him, stinging his eyes and he saw the faces of the Norway men waver and blur, as if under water, then looked at the cleft in the rock, so like the unclean part of a woman’s body. Such a pagan, blasphemous item – what else would it be but in one of the entrances to Hell itself, reeking with the stink of the Pit?

  ‘Who will come?’ he demanded, knowing none of them would, for they were followers of false gods and their hearts knew it even if their heads did not. They did not have the power of God to keep Satan’s imps away – Martin did not doubt for a moment that he would meet the denizens of hell and slaves of the Fallen Angel inside that hole in the mountain.

  The wind sighed out of the gash and men backed away from it, crouching down. Hromund looked round and saw that none of them would go; he wanted to say that he would, but had persuasive arguments with himself that his place was outside, with his men.

  Eindride saw the scornful look on the priest’s face and felt anger surge in him, stoked it with more indignation that this twisted, hirpling follower of a coward’s godlet would dare the place while good northers squatted and looked at the ice and rocks rather than each other.

  As good as courage, it welled up and burned the words out of him.

  ‘I will go.’

  Men offered up ‘heya’ to the courage of the archer – then blinked in astonishment as Tormod shouldered through them.

  ‘You have a wee son at home – I will go instead.’

  He and Eindride looked at each other and the archer smiled at what had not been said – a thrall would not be much missed, even a king’s favourite. He turned to Hromund.

  ‘If things go badly,’ he said, ‘you will see that my wife and son are safe?’

  Hromund nodded and Eindride split his ice-clott
ed beard with a grin that burst blood on to his cold-chapped lips, then clapped Tormod on the back.

  ‘Together, then,’ he said.

  Two men, not about to be outdone by a thrall, king’s favourite or not, sprang up and announced their names – Kjartan and Arnkel – and their intention not to be shamed. The rest, too afraid even to worry about the shame, offered up no sound at all.

  Martin, staff in his cold gnarled hands, shuffled towards the dark opening; the more practical Tormod organised torches, food and water.

  ‘Gloria Patri, et Fili, et Spiritui Sancto,’ Martin intoned at the entrance, raising the staff up as if to strike down an enemy. ‘Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saeccula saeculorum, Amén.’

  Eindride gave a sound, half way between cough and grunt, then pushed the priest scornfully to one side and strode into the maw of the place, one hand clutching the Thor amulet at his throat. Martin hirpled after him. Kjartan licked spit on to his lips, Arnkel took a deep breath and they both ducked after Martin, as if plunging under freezing water. At the entrance, Tormod turned once and met Hromund’s eyes, smiled wryly and then was gone.

  Hromund and the men sat for a moment, as if waiting for something cataclysmic, but nothing happened at all. The smoke stopped pouring from the hole, the wind in it moaned a little, there was a pause, then it began again. From somewhere came a distant rumble, as if a storm brewed and Hromund shifted.

  ‘Make fires and a camp,’ he ordered, cramped and stiff with cold. ‘We will wait here.’

  He did not say how long they would wait and the scores of rimed men did not want to ask. They did not have long, as it turned out, for the short day was sliding to death when Gudrod’s men wolfed out of the shadows, led by a Tyr-howling boy.

  Not far inside, pausing to tie cloths round their mouths to help them breathe in the foul reek of the place, Martin and the others heard the shrieks and crouched. Kjartan whimpered, sure that the Sami animal-men were coming; Tormod snarled him to silence and they waited, blinking in the guttering light of the torch, the sweat stinging their eyes. Nothing changed.