Crowbone

by Robert Low

  ‘Son, there is danger …’ Gunnhild began and Gudrod rolled his head and shoulders and bellowed incoherently until she was quiet, glowering in the dark, seeing his blood-suffused cheeks and feeling the threads slipping away from her.

  ‘After I beat you,’ Gudrod said slowly to Crowbone, ‘if you have played half well, I shall keep you for the amusement of it. The others I will kill.’

  ‘When I win,’ Crowbone countered, ‘I may stay the winter with you, for the amusement of it. The others will go free, the priest with Orm and Finn.’

  Gudrod paused for a moment, then shoved the board forward slightly, pushing the axe into the spear so that, for a moment, they nestled together.

  ‘Choose,’ he said.

  Orm watched. He had played hnefatafl, as most northmen of worth did but he was middling fair at it and saw that Crowbone had opted to be the attacker. That gave him sixteen dark counters – taeflor, or table-men – surrounding Gudrod’s eight white-bone pieces, plus the hnefi, the King piece.

  The object was simple – surround the King and capture him before he was escorted to safety in any corner, using moves up and down, left and right only. The safety-corner was the Norwegian way of playing, for most folk settled for escape to the table-edge on small boards, allowing the more difficult corner escape for larger boards with more pieces.

  At first sight, then, it seemed to onlookers that Crowbone had all the advantages – twice as many men and no easy escape for the hnefi. Yet that was the deception of the game of kings – the King’s men need only arrange for their Lord to escape the board, so the King player must try to capture as many attackers as possible to clear an escape route, while not trying too hard to protect his own men since they, too, can block the King’s escape. He was the chooser of the slain and it did not matter to him how many died, only that the King got away.

  The attacker had not only to prevent the King’s escape, but also capture him, which was not as simple as it seemed. The best way was actually to avoid taking any pieces early in the game, instead scattering the attackers so that they got in the way and also blocked possible escape routes.

  They played in silence, until Gudrod, hovering over a piece, hesitated and smiled.

  ‘You play well,’ he said. ‘I am pleased.’

  ‘You should drink less,’ hissed his mother from the dark, where she gnawed her knuckles and tried to make spells. Crowbone saw her and laughed aloud, making Gudrod turn, scowling.

  ‘Enough of that, mother,’ he said lightly. ‘He is good and I shall keep him – but I am better and will win without your help.’

  ‘She has no power over me,’ Crowbone chuckled, hoping it was true. A move later, he stroked his thickening beard and smiled ruefully.

  ‘Perhaps we should have played brandubh instead,’ he said and Gudrod laughed, hugely enjoying himself. Brandubh was the same game, but played by the Irish using dice; every norther knew that the true game of skill was played without those marked cubes.

  Yet the next move, Crowbone announced, as the game bound him to do: ‘Watch your King’, meaning he had the capture of it in the very next move. Frowning, Gudrod managed to avoid the trap and Finn let out his breath and shifted in his seat.

  They played in silence for the next few moves. Crowbone looked over to where Orm and Finn sat, tense as birds on a washing line. The plan had been spelled out beforehand, but it now seemed less obvious; he wriggled his toes in his boot, where the dagger nestled. He knew Finn’s nail was down his and that the guards had missed it, too. Three guards only – and Crowbone knew that, no matter what shouts and noise happened here, no-one was coming to Gudrod’s aid in this hall.

  How quickly could he pull out the dagger? It did not seem to Crowbone that he would get it out of the boot before the guards saw him and even without them, Gudrod seemed a big, powerful man, which Crowbone had not expected. The idea of pulling a knife on a man that size seemed suddenly ludicrous and Crowbone’s mouth went dry, while the sheath-straps burned round his ankle. Then he saw the shadowed planes of Gunnhild’s cheekbones, the eyes fixed on him, feral as a mad cat and he was sure she was trying to read his thoughts.

  ‘Passage,’ Gudrod declared triumphantly. ‘Doubled.’

  Which meant he had two ways to freedom and Crowbone saw at once that he could block only one. Gudrod watched Crowbone’s face, looking for the moment hope left it and was surprised to be denied that. To provoke it, he added: ‘The King has escaped you.’

  Crowbone slumped a little, as if dejected, his hands dropping beneath the table. Then he raised his head.

  ‘There is more than one way to play the game of kings,’ he said and the knife came out of his boot.

  Too slow, too fumbled – and it was the saving of them all. If he had managed it properly and slashed the throat of Gudrod, the guards would have hacked them all to pieces – instead, Gudrod came roaring out of his seat and backhanded Crowbone off the bench to the floor, then pounced on him.

  ‘You dare,’ he bellowed. ‘You dare this?’

  Instead of hacking and slashing, his guards sprang forward to help him; one found himself shrieking and dying with a nail in his eye; half-turning, the other was confused, caught between leaping on Crowbone, or fighting Orm and Finn. He hesitated too long and was piled over by the pair of them.

  The third guard sprang from behind Gudrod’s chair to help wrestle the knife away from Crowbone – but a small, wizened figure leaped into his path, not even looking at him, one hand clawing for the table and the spear that lay on it. Cursing, the guard stumbled over him and the pair of them crashed to the ground, while Gunnhild shrieked for help in her cracked bell of a voice.

  Gudrod held both Crowbone’s wrists, knife hand and free hand, trying to lurch the weight of himself to pin the struggling youth down. Crowbone, for his part, snarled and writhed and kicked, so that Gudrod freed one hand to try and punch the youth senseless.

  Instead, he found himself turned, felt a sharp blow in his cods and yelped as he lost control of Crowbone’s knife hand. In desperation, he saw the blood staining the youth’s shoulder, saw an old wound and an opportunity and smashed at it, making Crowbone howl and roll away, knife spilling free.

  Blind and blurry, with fireflies dancing at the edge of his vision, Crowbone saw Gudrod snatch up the knife, just as the third guard tore himself free from the tangle that was Martin. Orm sprang forward and he and the guard clashed like rutting stags, straining and grunting, sliding and scrabbling for purchase on the floor and getting in Gudrod’s way.

  Finn rose up from where he had broken the neck of the second guard, into the mad shrieks and shrills of Gunnhild, screaming for help that never came; he gave a growl as he stepped for her. She waved her hands frantically at him, yelling: ‘Blunt, blunt,’ but Finn, lumbering and grinning like a bear woken too early, shook his head.

  ‘That old spell worked on me once when I fought another witch like you,’ he snarled. ‘Now I do not bother with edged steel.’

  His fist took her on the point of her jaw, breaking it, shattering the mask of her face to shards of powder and artifice, snapping her head back and cutting off her howls. Gudrod saw it as he weaved to his feet at last, panting, the knife in his hand and ready for Crowbone’s throat. Instead, he saw his mother slumped, blood trickling from her nose and he howled like a trapped wolf and started toward Finn.

  Crowbone leaped up, a salmon leap as good as any he had ever done before. He hit the table and scattered the board and the pieces into the shoulder and face of Gudrod, who reared back, his mouth opening with horror at what he saw.

  The Bloodaxe, snatched up by Crowbone, coming down on him, all glitter and dark shaft, the edge growing bigger and bigger until it was the whole world crashing on Gudrod’s forehead and splitting him to the chin.

  Finn was leaping to the aid of Orm even before the black blood and gleet had washed down Gudrod’s falling chest. Before he hit the floor, Finn had broken the neck of the last guard – and there was stillness, sudd
enly, where the rasp of their breathing was loud and ugly, the iron stink of blood cloying their throats. The King piece rolled backwards and forwards and finally toppled off the table, landing with a sticky little slap of sound in Gudrod’s blood.

  ‘Game to me,’ Crowbone said and his own voice sounded like a stranger far off.

  Finn got off his knees, canting his head sideways to where Crowbone still stood on the table, arms dropped to his side, staring at the body of Gudrod with the axe buried deep in what remained of his skull.

  ‘You were ever handy with an axe and a skull,’ Finn declared climbing wearily to his feet and wiping his hands down his breeks. ‘I thank the gods for it now, of course.’

  Crowbone barely heard it. The death of Gudrod, the axe that had done it, sent a thrill through him from soles to crown; the side of his head, where it had been smacked, seemed suddenly to have an ice spear thrust into it.

  Here was a sign. The axe had betrayed Gudrod, who was clearly not worthy and the weapon had sprung almost unbidden into Crowbone’s own hand to prove that he clearly was. And yet …

  He blinked away from the corpse of Gudrod to the slumped figure on the High Seat.

  Her. It was her. He peered across at her, no more than four steps away. Gunnhild, the Witch-Queen, who had ordered the death of his father – and, next to her, Gudrod, the son who had carried out the deed. Because of her, that bundle of rags there, everything that the Norns had woven for Crowbone’s life had been unpicked then re-woven in suffering and the death of his mother; Crowbone could not move for breathing.

  When he did, he slid from the table into the sticky mess of Gudrod’s blood and plootered through it to the figure on the chair, her head lolling, the veil fluttering free to show her ancient, ravaged face and open, dead eyes. The gnarled fingers which had worked her last spell curled like a cold-killed spider.

  She was dead, for sure, though Crowbone, feeling the fresh burn in his shoulder, had to reach out and touch the cheek, snake-scaled with age and marbling into cold death; when he brought his fingers back they were wet. A tear? Yet the thin lips were drawn slightly back, fretted all round with lines like a badly-fired clay pot and revealing teeth yellow as walrus tusks, a last snarl of defiance.

  Here she was, then, the Mother of Kings, his enemy from the moment he drew his first breath – from before even that. Crowbone stood, feeling the insistent heartbeat agony of his shoulder, blinking with the pain and trying to feel as if something had ended, that his father was close by nodding approval, his mother’s presence draping him with love and thanks.

  But there was only an old dead woman, with a mouth dropped open to make her look foolish and eyes turning to dull ice.

  A grunt and a whimper broke him from the moment and he turned, to where Martin levered himself upright to the table and reached out one clawed hand to grasp the spear. In one swift movement, Crowbone snatched it up, just as men spilled into the hall.

  Orm and Finn were poised like dogs spotting wolves, but Crowbone merely glanced up at Arnfinn and his Orkneymen, smiling. He nodded towards Gudrod and Gunnhild.

  ‘Done and done,’ he declared and Arnfinn, after the briefest of glances, stared back at him.

  ‘It were best if you were gone swiftly from here,’ he said and Crowbone nodded. This, too, had been part of his plan, for Crowbone knew how to play the game of kings in life and he had surrounded the King piece before he had even sat down with Gudrod.

  ‘Mine,’ Martin managed out of the crazed ruin of his mouth and Crowbone looked at him, then at the spear in his hand.

  ‘There was a dog,’ Crowbone said and Martin scowled.

  ‘No more tales,’ he mushed. ‘I have heard enough of your tales.’

  For an eyeblink, Crowbone was back on the steppe, huddled with Orm round a mean fire, with Martin and the men he had persuaded to kidnap them. He had told a story then, though he could not remember it – but he remembered Martin’s fury at it. Next day, in a raging blizzard the warrior women of the steppe had attacked and killed everyone save Orm, Martin and himself. That had been his last sight of Martin, Crowbone thought, scuttling into the snow like a wraith, clutching his holy stick and wearing only one shoe.

  Crowbone glanced at Orm and saw that he, too, had remembered. Finn’s grin was wolfen.

  ‘The dog had stolen meat. “What a good time I shall have eating this meat when I get home,” thought the dog as it started to cross a stream of water,’ Crowbone went on. ‘Then he looked down at his own shadow in the water and saw a dog with a large piece of meat in its jaws. “That dog has a larger piece of meat than mine,” he thought. “I want it. I will have it!” He growled, but the dog in the water did not move, nor did he drop his piece of meat. He snapped at the dog in the water. The meat he carried slipped from his mouth and sank to the bottom of the stream – and the dog in the water lost his meat at the same time.’

  ‘You have your axe,’ Martin mumbled. ‘Give me my spear.’

  Crowbone looked at the axe, slanting blackly up from the body of Gudrod. He smiled.

  ‘Odin’s Daughter does not look so attractive in this light. I do not believe I wish to marry her this day, or the next – though I will in time. I have no need of this cursed axe to cut a path to the High Seat of Norway. It is only a hunn in the game of kings – besides, it may not be Christian enough if what Adalbert says holds true.’

  A hunn, a ‘lump’, was the slang word for all other pieces on the board, easily sacrificed for the victory of the King. Orm and Finn looked at each other. Arnfinn tilted his head slightly and stared at the axe in Gudrod’s head.

  ‘Heya,’ Finn sighed, ‘I wish you had realised all this before we came to this hall. Before you set off on the entire Thing of it.’

  ‘Just so,’ Orm said, then shrugged. ‘It seems wise to me, mark you. Perhaps you will be a great king after all.’

  Martin shrieked then, a long howl of anguish and utter rage. He did it until he coughed and spat more blood up, then collapsed on the ground, panting. Orm stared at him, remembering the years – gods, the long years – since he had first set eyes on the priest, neatly tonsured, smoothly robed, with a smile that had white, even teeth in it and eyes that welcomed him and Einar to the warmth of Birka’s borg.

  Now the crippled mouth spewed curses, the eyes were wild little beasts leaping in the matted forest of his hair and beard. Martin sank to his knees, babbling curses and prayers to his god, beat the ground with his fists; even Finn, Orm saw, was beginning to feel some sorrow.

  ‘The lance, the lance,’ Martin babbled and Crowbone, halfway to the door of the long hall, turned and held the spear up. Martin’s cries stopped at once, like a bairn handed honeycakes; he seemed to freeze on the spot, fixed on the sight like a hound on a spoor.

  ‘This stick?’ Crowbone said and raised it. He had never seen it closely before, now felt the heft of it, the fattened end, weighted to bring more power when the spear reached the falling point. The long iron end had gone, of course, but there was a nub of black metal left, a half-thumb of it in the tapered sleeve of the shaft.

  A good spear in its day, Crowbone thought and I should know spears. He tested it; it was awkward, for the metal was missing, but he found the balance point, bounced it once or twice, then drew back and hurled it.

  ‘Take it, then, since you want it so badly,’ he said quietly. It slid through the air, revolving along its length, a perfect, curving throw and Martin rose to meet it, held out his hands as if to catch and cradle it, his face bright, his eyes exultant.

  It went through his fingers and into his breastbone, which it cracked like a pry-bar on a ship plank. There was so much force in it that it buried itself deep in him, the last nub end of black metal splitting his heart as if it were a skin bag, slicing through the entire of him and out the far side.

  Martin was thrown back by it. The lance came out of his back, to the left of his spine and went into the beaten earth floor, softened to mud by Gudrod’s blood, so that the priest hung on i
t, his hands grasping at the air, his face turned to the sky and his mouth working.

  ‘Iesu,’ Martin wheezed, his hands scrabbling bloodily on the shaft, his voice fading to dust and moth wings as he gasped.

  ‘Dimitte nobis debita nostra, libera nos ab igne inferni.’

  ‘What’s he say?’ demanded Finn hoarsely, staring fixedly at the choking, dying Martin. Arnfinn and his men had all taken a step or two back from the impaled monk and they made frantic cross-signs.

  ‘A prayer to keep himself from Hel’s hall,’ Orm replied, then looked dully at Crowbone, stunned by the sudden death of the bane of his life.

  He was gone. Sixteen years, Orm realised suddenly, since the Norns had woven Orm and Martin’s threads into the weave of life and the rushing flood of images that broke on Orm’s mind almost drowned him. Martin, lean and smooth and urbane in the polished hall of Birka; hanging upside down on the mast of The Fjord Elk while Einar’s Truth Knife whicked his little finger off; burned by the Serkland sun; sitting beside the blood-eagled ruin that had been Starkad in an old church of the Constantinople Romans; hobbling off into the snows of the steppe; sly and black-toothed in the main square of Kiev.

  Gone. All his plans and viciousness, gone like smoke. Orm shivered and shook himself back into the Now, stared astonished at the youth who had done it, easy as throwing.

  Crowbone shrugged, then looked at the stunned Orm and Finn, took a breath and puffed out his cheeks.

  ‘You should have done that years since,’ he declared. ‘If you ever planned to play the game of kings.’

  EPILOGUE

  Sand Vik, Orkney, the next day …

  THE three of them stood on the sighing shingle watching their men load the ships. They had just been to see Martin kisted up in a stone-lined grave, the spear lying on his breast; only the three of them and Adalbert had witnessed it and, after mumbling what words were necessary, he had started asking Crowbone about the spear. Orm wondered how long the grave would lie undisturbed.