by Robert Low
I know you, Kvasir, and you, Finn Horsehead. You also, boy Bear Slayer. I will find out the truth of what you say. If you spoke me false here, or if you get in my way, I will make you all unwind your guts round a pole until you die.'
He backed out of the door while I was still blinking at the picture he had placed in my head with that last one, for I had heard of this cruel trick.
There was a surge, like a wave breaking on a skerry, and I hammered the table to bring the Oathsworn up short, while the others in the tavern scrambled to be out and away. Finn hurled one luckless chariot-racing fan sideways, then stopped, sullen as winter haar.
`We have to kill Starkad,' he growled, sitting. 'Slowly.'
Is this sword so valuable, then?' asked Radoslay. 'And who is this priest?'
I told him.
`What holy icon?' demanded Brother John when he heard my brief tale of Martin and his spear.
A spear, like Odin's Gungnir, only a Roman one,' I answered. 'The one they stuck in the Christ when he hung on the cross. Only the metal end is missing from it.'
Brother John's mouth hung open like the hood of a cloak, so I did not mention that the metal end had been used in the making of the runed sabre Starkad had stolen to feed the greed-fire of Architos Choniates. I did not understand why Starkad had the sword, all the same.
Another Holy Lance?' Brother John was a flail of scorn. `The Greeks-who-are-Romans here swear they have one, tucked up in a special palace with Christ's bed linen and sandals.'
I shrugged. Brother John snorted his disgust and added, scornfully, `Mundus vult decipi.'
The world wants to be deceived. . I wasn't sure if it was a judgement on Martin's desires or on just how genuine the spear was. But Brother John was silent after that, deep in thought.
`Concerning this sword. .' Radoslav began, but the Watch piled in then and the tavern-owner went off into an arm-wave of Greek. There were looks at us, then back again, then at us.
Eventually, the Watch commander, black-bearded and banded in leather, peeled off his dripping helmet, tucked it in the crook of his arm, sighed and came towards us. His men eyed us warily, their iron-tipped staffs ready.
`Who leads?' he asked, which let me know he was no stranger to our kind. When I stood up, he blinked a bit, for he had been looking expectantly at Finn, who now showed him a deal of sarcastic teeth.
`Right,' said the Watch commander and jerked a thumb back at the tavern-owner. 'Not your fault, Ziphas says, but he still thinks you brought armed men to his place. Scared off his custom. Neither am I happy with the idea of you lot blood-feuding on my patch. So beat it. Consider it lucky you have no weapons yourselves, else I would have you in the Stinking Dark.'
We knew of that prison and it was as bad as it sounded. Finn growled but the Watch commander was grizzled enough to have seen it all and simply shook his head wearily and wandered off, wiping the rain from his face. Ziphas, the tavern-owner, still smearing his hands on his apron, finally left it alone and spread them, shrugging.
`Maybe a week, eh?' he said apologetically. 'Let folk forget. If they see you here tomorrow, they will not stay — and you don't spend enough to make up the difference.'
We left, meek as lambs, though Finn was growling about how shaming it was for a good man from the North to be sent packing by a Greek in an apron.
`We should follow Starkad now,' Short Eldgrim growled. `Take him.'
Finn Horsehead growled his agreement, but Kvasir, as we shrugged and shook the rain off back in our warehouse, pointed out the obvious.
I am thinking Starkad's crew are now hired men and so permitted weapons,' he observed. `Choniates will stand surety for them here like a jarl.'
Radoslav cleared his throat, cautious about adding his weight to what was, after all, not much of his business. 'You should be aware that this Starkad, if he is Choniates' hired man, has the right of it under law.
We will have warriors from the city on us, too, if blood is shed and not just the Watch with their sticks. Real soldiers.'
`We?' I asked and he grinned that bear-trap grin.
It is a mark of my clan that when you save a man's life you are bound to keep helping him,' he declared.
'Anyway, I want to see this wonderful sword called Rune Serpent.'
I thought to correct him, then shrugged. It was as good a name for that marked sabre as any — and it was how we got it back that mattered.
`Which brings up another question,' said Gizur Gydasson. `What was all that cow guff about the monk going to Serkland? Has he really gone there?'
That hung in the air like a waiting hawk.
If force will not do it, then cunning must,' Brother John said before I could answer, and I saw he had worked it out. `Magister artis ingeniique largitor venter.'
`Dofni bacraut,' Finn growled. 'What does that mean?'
It means, you ignorant sow's ear, that ingenuity triumphs in the face of adversity.'
Finn grinned. 'Why didn't you say that, then?'
`Because I am a man of learning,' Brother John gave back amiably. 'And if you call me a stupid arsehole again — in any language — I will make your head ring.'
Everyone laughed as Finn scowled at the fierce little Christ priest, but no one was much the wiser until I turned to Short Eldgrim and told him to find Starkad and watch him. Then I turned to Radoslav and asked him about his ship. Eyes brightened and shoulders went back, for then they saw it: Starkad would set off after Martin and we would follow, trusting in skill and the gods, as we had done so many times before.
Anything can happen on the whale road.
2
After Starkad's visit to the Dolphin, we moved to Radoslav's knarr, the Volchok, partly to keep out of the way of the Watch, partly to be ready when Short Eldgrim warned us that Starkad was away.
There was a deal to be done with the Volchok to make it seaworthy. Radoslav was a half-Slav on his mother's side, but his father was a Gotland trader, which should have given him some wit about handling a trading knarr the length of ten men. Instead, it was snugged up in the Julian harbour with no crew and costing him more than he could afford in berthing fees — until he had heard that a famous band of varjazi were shipless and, as he put it when we handseled the deal, we were wyrded for each other.
But he was no deep-water sailor and every time he made some lofty observation about boats, Sighvat would grin and say: 'Tell us again how you came to have such a sweet sail as the Volchok and no crew.'
Radoslav, no doubt wishing he had never told the tale in the first place, would then recount how he had fallen foul of his Christ-worshipping crew, by drinking blood-tainted water in the heat of a hard fight and refusing, as a good Perun man, to be suitably cleansed by monks.
`The Volchok means "little wolf", or "wolf cub" in the Slav tongue,' he would add. 'It is rightly named, for it can bite when needs be. My name, schchuka, means "pike" for I am like that fish and once my teeth are in, you have to cut my head off to get me to let go.'
Then he would sigh and shake his head sorrowfully, adding: `But those Christ-loving Greeks loosened my teeth and left me stranded.'
That would set the Oathsworn roaring and slapping their legs, sweetening the back-breaking work of shifting ballast stones to adjust the trim on his little wolf of a boat.
Trim. The knarr depends on it to sail directly, for it is no sleek fjord-slider, easily rowed when the wind drops. Trim is the key to a knarr as any sailing-master of one will tell you. They are as gripped by it as any dwarf is with gold and the secret of trim is held as a magical thing that every sailing-master swears he alone possesses. They paw the round, smooth ballast stones as if they were gems.
Knowing how to sail is easy, but reading hen-scratch Greek is easier than trying to fathom the language of shipmasters and I was glad when Brother John tore me from a scowling Gizur, while we waited for Short Eldgrim.
The little Irisher monk was also the one man I seemed able to talk to about the wyrd-doom of the whole thing, who und
erstood why I almost wished we had no ship. Because a Thor-man had drunk blood and offended Christ-men, I had a gift, almost as if the Thunderer himself had reached down and made it happen.
And Thor was Odin's son.
Brother John nodded, though he had a different idea on it. `Strange, the ways of the Lord, right enough,'
he declared thoughtfully, nodding at Radoslav as that man moved back and forth with ballast stones. 'A man commits a sin and another is granted a miracle by it.'
I smiled at him. I liked the little priest, so I said what was on my mind. 'You took no oath with us, Brother John. You need not make this journey.'
He cocked his head to one side and grinned. 'And how would you be after making things work without me?' he demanded. Am I not known as a traveller, a Jorsalafari? I have pilgrimed in Serkland before and still want to get to the Holy City, to stand where Christ was crucified. You will need my knowledge.'
I was pleased, it has to be said, for he would be useful in more ways, this little Irski-mann and I was almost happy, even if he would not celebrate jul with us, but went off in search of a Christ ceremony, the one they call Mass.
Still — blood in the water. Not the best wyrd to carry on to the whale road chasing a serpent of runes.
Nor were the three ravens Sighvat brought on board, with the best of intent — to check for land when none was in sight — and the sight of them perched all over him was unnerving.
We tried to celebrate jul in our own way, but it was a poor echo of ones we had known and, into the middle of it, like a mouse tumbling from rafter into ale horn, came Short Eldgrim, sloping out of the shadows to say that two Greek knarr were quitting the Julian, heading south, filled with Starkad's war-dogs and the man himself in the biggest and fastest of them.
We hauled Brother John off his worshipping knees, scrambled for ropes and canvas and, as we hauled out of the harbour, I was thinking bitterly that Odin could not have picked a better night for this chase — it was the night he whipped up the Wild Hunt hounds and started out with the restless dead for the remainder of the year.
Yet nothing moved in the dark before dawn and a mist clung to the wharves and warehouses, drifting like smoke on the greasy water, like the remnants of a dream. The city slept in the still of what they called Christ's Mass Day and no-one saw or heard us as the sail went up and we edged slowly out of the harbour, on to a grey chop of water.
Wolf sea, we called it, where the water was grizzled-grey and fanged with white, awkward, slapping waves that made rowing hard and even the strongest stomachs rebel. Only the desperate put out on such a sea.
But we were Norse and had Gizur, the sailing-master. While there were stars to be seen, he stood by the rail with a length of knotted string in his teeth attached to a small square of walrus ivory and set course by it.
He also had the way of reading water and winds and, when he strode to the bow, chin jutting like a scenting hound, turning his head this way and that to find the wind with wettened cheeks, everyone was eased and cheerful.
Him it was who had spotted the knarr ahead, not long after we had quit the Great City, on a morning when the frost had crackled in our beards. For two days we kept it in sight, just far enough behind to keep it in view. Only one, all the same — and, if we saw it, it could see us.
`What do think, Orm Ruriksson?' he asked me. 'I say she knows we are tracking her wake, but then I am well known for being a man who looks over one shoulder going up a dark alley.'
Then a haar came down and we lost her — or so we thought. Finn was on watch while the rest of us hunkered down to keep warm. The sail was practically on the spar and yet we swirled along, for we were caught in the gout that spilled through the narrow way the Greeks call Hellespont and only us and fish dared run it in the dark. I had resigned myself to casting runes to find Starkad when Finn suddenly bawled out at the top of his voice, bringing us all leaping to our feet.
By the time I reached the side, there was only a grey shape sliding away into the fog. Finn, scowling, rubbed the crackling ice from his beard.
It was a knarr, right enough — we nearly ran up the steer-board of it, but when I hailed it, it sheered off and vanished south.'
As would I have done,' Brother John chuckled, 'if you had hailed me in your heathen tongue. Did you try Greek at all?'
Finn admitted he had not mainly because, as he said loudly and at length, he could not speak more than a few words as Brother John knew well and if he had forgotten he, Finn, would be glad to jog his memory with a good kick up the arse.
`Next time, try your few words first,' advised Brother John. "Et tremulo metui pavidum junxere timorem" as the Old Roman skald has it. "And I feared to add dreadful alarm to a trembling man" — bear it in mind.'
Everyone chuckled at a shipload of Greeks being scared off by a single Norse voice, while Finn, spilling ale down his beard and trying to stuff bread in his mouth as he drank, grumbled back at them.
Sighvat pointed out that if Finn did hail another ship as Brother John wished, it would turn round and vanish as well, for who wants to hear someone wanting to know how much it costs to have your balls licked?
Either that,' added Kvasir, 'or they will be confused by a demand for two more ales and a dish of mutton.'
But Radoslav looked at me and both of us knew, because we were more traders than the others, that the ship had held Starkad, or at least some of his men. Traders thrived on gossip: what cargo was going where, what prices for what goods in what ports. They sucked it up like mother's milk and, to get it, they talked to every other trader they saw coming up against them or sailing down a route with them. Unless you looked like a warship, or a sleek hafskip, which could be more wolf than sheep, you hailed them all for news; you didn't sheer away like a nervous maiden goosed behind her mother's back.
Nor, if you were anyone but the Norse, did you run the Hellespont at night.
But it had vanished south and we followed. In the morning, Sighvat cast his bone runes on the wet aft-deck and tried to make sense of it, Short Eldgrim peering over his shoulder. In the end, Sighvat made his pronouncement and Gizur leaned on the steering oar as the sail cranked up; I saw we were taking the most likely trade route and wondered if that course had truly been god-picked or was Sighvat's common sense.
What nagged me more was where the second boatload was — and if the one we had seen had had Starkad in it. For days I wondered where either had gone and whether we had passed them.
As always, Odin showed the truth, with a finger-nail trace of smoke against the sky.
The smoking boat was a Greek knarr, listing and down at the stern. It had been on fire, but the waves had soaked out the flames, leaving a smouldering hulk. Two bodies rolled and bobbed among the ash and spars nearby, reluctant to leave even in death.
Up in our bow, Arnor used his harpoon to gaff one of the bodies and drag it closer. He was an Icelander and everyone had mocked at him for seeking out a whaling harpoon instead of a spear — but Arnor knew the weapon and it had certainly been of use now
The bodies were gashed and torn, bled white so that the wounds were now pale, lipless mouths. They had been stripped of everything and made a sorry sight on the deck of the Volchok, leaking into the bilges.
`Stabbed and cut,' remarked Brother John, examining them. `That's an arrow wound, for sure, but they recovered it. Barbed, too — look where it hooked out heart-meat when it was pulled.'
I know this one,' said Finn suddenly.
`Which one?' I asked.
`That one with the heart-wound and the squint. He was in the Dolphin guarding Starkad's back. I remember thinking that he was an ugly troll and that if I had the chance I would knock his eyes straight for him.'
Anything can happen on the whale road. .
I had that proved as the knarr gurgled and sank. Brother John fell to his knees and offered up prayers to his god and the Christ, which seemed a little harsh to me, for he was congratulating this Jesus on having led these men to this d
oom rather than us. I had not thought the Christ, white-livered godlet of peace, was so harsh — but I had much to learn; as Finn said, even as he followed me, the horn-moss was barely rubbed off me.
Of course, the rest of us joined in piously and those, like me, who thought no harm in getting all the help we could offered silent thanks to Odin, whose hand was in this for sure.
Now we knew.
We sat and worked out what had happened as the remains of the knarr hissed away to nothing, leaving only the stink of wet char. A ship, perhaps more than one, had come on it and there had been a fight, though Finn reckoned the attackers had sat back and shot arrows until the defenders had given in.
It seemed to him that the others had been taken, probably as slaves, because there were only two bodies, but the defenders had given in when the ship had been fired. This showed that the attackers were skilled, not just for having fire aboard for arrows, but because they would have to have worked swiftly to secure cargo and prisoners in little time before the ship burned and sank.
It is a blade path we are on and no mistake,' Sighvat offered mournfully, which got him some hard looks; a blade path was what steersmen call a hard pull into a gale, where the only progress was by the oarblade.
It also meant the road walked by those who had died as oathbreakers, a trail studded with sharp edges, so that those who cared enough howed such wyrd-doomed up with thick-soled ox-hide shoes, to help them walk their way to Hers hall.
While they were shaking their heads and making warding signs, I considered matters. It seemed to me that these Arabs would not go far from home, though that was the arrogance of being Norse and believing that only we dared the far seas. I learned later that the Arabs are good seamen — but I had the right of here, for these Arabs were bandits with a boat, no more.
Radoslav fished out a square of fine sealskin from his purse and unfolded it to reveal another of walrus hide; we all peered curiously, mainly because it was clear he did not like revealing it. Gizur growled when he saw it, for it was a fair chart that he could have used.
