The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  Einar decided to rest for a while in one and wait for Steinthor and Bagnose to come back in. Sheltered from the wind, with water and some kindling, we got a couple of fires going and those with the skill for it boiled up meat into a gruel and made flatbread on a griddle.

  Bagnose came in, loping like a weary dog, laid his bow and quiver down and took a swig from a horn that was offered. Then he made a face and spat. ‘Water, you arses!’

  The men chuckled; Bagnose was a lift to the spirits, the one man who really did thumb his nose at the gods and never questioned that what he was doing was the way things should be. The whale road was as natural to him – and Steinthor – as if they were a pair of the great beasts it was named after.

  He grabbed a bowl, hauled out a horn spoon from inside his tunic and sucked gruel into his mouth, chewing gobbets of tough gristle, spitting sideways. We all waited until he had finished, then Einar asked, ‘Well, Geir Bagnose?’

  Bagnose wiped his glistening beard, stuffed flatbread in, washed it down with another swig of water and sighed, then belched. ‘Twenty, perhaps thirty horsemen, those little ones on little ponies. Moving north to east, circling us.’

  ‘Enemy?’ asked a voice and Bagnose snorted.

  ‘Arse! Every horseman is our enemy now.’

  ‘Those turds on their dog-horses are not fighters,’ said Flosi with a sneer and a spit. ‘You can fight them off armed with a bladder on a stick.’

  Bagnose shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Tell me more when they shoot you full of arrows from a distance,’ he growled. ‘They’ll make you look like a hedgepig, then cut off your little bladder on a stick and shove it in your flapping mouth.’

  More chuckles and Flosi acknowledged that they were, it had to be said, nasty with their little bows. But all of us had begged, stolen, bought – or, in my case, inherited – the thick underkirtle for mail. It made movement even harder, but kept the arrows off unless the little nithings got to close range, or you had Loki luck. I wore my father close to my skin and there was some comfort in that.

  ‘Steinthor in yet?’ asked Bagnose. Ketil Crow shook his head and Bagnose frowned, then shrugged and held out his wooden bowl for a refill. ‘Have you heard this one, lads? Stop me if you have. I flee the deep earth, there is no place for me on the ground, nor any part of the poles …’

  His voice covered me like a blanket and I drifted off to it before I heard the answer – but I knew it already and it was apt enough. I lay watching the clouds scud in the wind until my eyes closed and I dozed until kicked awake. We moved out.

  Two miles further on we found Steinthor. His head, at least, stuck on a short spear, straggled hair and beard matted with blood. A great black bird hopped off it, wiping its beak with quick sideways flicks and completely unconcerned.

  Illugi Godi made a quick, chanting prayer, but Sighvat, whom we called Deep-minded and whose mother had been the same, gave a snort of scorn.

  ‘That’s a crow, a big hoodie,’ he said. ‘Any minute it will fly off, widdershins, not sunwise.’

  As if in response, the bird flapped off to the left, sluggish with Steinthor’s eyes.

  Sighvat felt our stares and looked at us, bemused. ‘What? All crows are lefthanded.’

  ‘Crows don’t have hands,’ Ketil Crow replied, staring at Steinthor’s flesh-flaked head.

  ‘Nothing to do with these,’ snapped Sighvat, holding up his hands. ‘It’s all here,’ he went on and tapped his head. ‘Why do you think you are called Ketil Crow?’

  And that was true enough. Ketil Crow was corrie-fisted, a lefthander and a fearsomely difficult man to fight.

  Bagnose, however, said nothing at all, just stood by that head looking wildly round for the rest of the body. We all spread out and looked, too, but found nothing and it was my thought that he had been killed elsewhere and the head carried to where we could not fail to find it, as a warning.

  Illugi Godi and Bagnose lifted the grisly thing off the spear and put it in a hole we dug. We mounded earth over it but, like the bigger mound we’d left far behind, I had a notion that scavengers would dig it up before we’d gone too far.

  It was a poor thing for the likes of Steinthor and, for days afterwards, I kept hearing his voice telling the story of finding me with the white bear, in that other world where I had once been a boy whose biggest adventure was finding a gull’s nest with four eggs.

  That done, we moved on, reaching the river as darkness fell, but Bagnose was not asked to go scouting again. That night, as we huddled round the small fire, eaten by the crushing dark, we knew there would be no more riddles or saga tales from the dark, hunched figure who sat and stared, not at the flames, but into the darkness.

  Even whales die on the whale road.

  The endless rolling steppe affects your mind, paring away thoughts until there is little more left than the desire to put one foot in front of the other. At one point I had the sick, dizzying feeling that I wasn’t walking forward at all, but that the whole steppe was moving backwards.

  I even stopped, to see if it carried me backwards and, when it seemed to do just that, as everyone kept on moving, I cried out with fear and dropped to my knees. It was Wryneck, coming up behind me, who grabbed me by the back of my mail and hauled me upright. As my feet stumbled forward I snapped out of it and turned to gasp my thanks.

  The flicker of movement silenced everyone, making all heads turn. Hild, in one strange, fluid movement, stood, the red cloak falling from her. She leaped from the cart and strode forward in her bruise-blue dress, long dark hair whipping in that endless, soughing wind.

  We all stared. She strode forward for another dozen paces, then stopped. One arm rose slowly and pointed. ‘There,’ she said. And we looked. And saw only the endless steppe.

  ‘A magic, invisible mountain, is it?’ growled Flosi. No one else spoke, but we moved forward to where Hild stood – giving her a wide berth, I noticed, as if she smelled bad.

  And we gaped, the shock of realisation coming to us as the steppe fell away into another balka, a big one, dust-dry and spilling out in a steep-sided canyon. Not a mountain. A pit. They had dug a pit into the steppe, a vast thing, big as a city, then mounded the middle of it back up in the shape of a great steppe lord’s tent, but still below the original ground level.

  ‘They diverted the stream,’ Einar marvelled after we had moved down further. ‘To hide the entrance, they turned a river across it. This was once … a lake, a great pool, with water flowing in there’ – he pointed – ‘and running out there to the Don.’

  Everyone marvelled, save Illugi. The godi had not said much of anything other than muttered chants. Once, in the night, I had seen him by the fire casting his rune bones and muttering to himself and thought then that he was growing as dark as Hild in some ways.

  ‘Atil’s howe,’ breathed Valknut.

  ‘If this one is to be believed,’ growled Ketil Crow, moving past him to where Hild squatted. She smiled beautifully up at him and he scowled. ‘Cunt to jawline,’ he reminded her and moved on.

  Einar took us in a scramble down the balka, where it led like a road straight to a cleft in the brooding mound.

  Hild, silent and hugged to herself, raised one pale hand and pointed at the stones on either side of it, fat stones as tall as a man, ones you would not be ashamed to rune and set up on a hill in memory. But these, though pocked and scarred, were unmarked; however, Illugi looked at them suspiciously.

  ‘The door,’ declared Einar with his wolf-grin, his crow-hair flapping in the breeze. ‘We can set up camp here and start digging at first light.’

  Men found fresh energy, unloaded gear and supplies and rubbed their hands with glee. Round the fire that night there was banter and talk of what they would do with all that silver. There was no doubting it now, for we had all seen the marvel of it.

  Ketil Crow and Einar said nothing at all, but sat with their own dreams whirling in their heads. I doubted if they shared the same ones, though.

  Atil’s ho
we. A mountain of treasure. She had known after all, it seemed, and the realisation of that made me shiver – for how could she have led us so unerringly to this unmarked, unknown place? How could anyone have done that and still be like the rest of us?

  I watched her sitting upright in front of those two stones and that cleft, which was like the dark invite of a woman’s body. Her hair floated in the wind, a dark snake-crown, and, even with her back to us all, she exuded something that made the fear rise in you like old mead fumes. She sat there all night, was still there in the morning, she had not moved.

  Did not move, until the horsemen swept on us.

  Einar had split us, sensibly enough. There were those to guard and we wore all our gear, while those digging had stripped to the waist and were hacking away at the earth. A cart was being broken up, so that the wood could be used as shoring, for we had no clear idea of how much we’d have to dig to break in.

  The drumming of hooves brought all heads up. The diggers ran for the cover of the carts; those on guard hefted their weapons. Of the twenty, about half knew how to use a bow and were nocking arrows. But they also had mail and fat padded arms, all of which made drawing and loosing accurately a nightmare.

  The horsemen swept down the balka in a cloud of dust, without any shouts or cries. They skidded at full tilt down the slopes we had taken ages to traverse, shooting arrows as they came.

  I heard them thud into the earth around me. One hissed over my head. Another smacked my shield boss with a clang and dropped to the ground.

  They were true steppe warriors, these, all sheepskins and wool hats and active as cats on those horses. They didn’t so much ride them as climb all over them, shooting their little arrows until they got close, then whipping out their light swords, darting them like snake-tongues at us from the other side of the horse, and swooping away before we could strike.

  They swirled and whooped and vanished and appeared again in the dust until we were dizzy with it, whirling our heavy swords and axes at nothing.

  A figure stepped out of our ranks into the dust.

  ‘Hold!’ yelled Einar. ‘Don’t let them drag you out into their killing ground.’

  But it was Bagnose and he was past caring. He nocked, took aim, shot and a man pitched off. Walking forward, he nocked, took aim, shot and another horseman shrieked.

  They saw him then and the arrows hissed. He took two full in the chest, staggering him. But he walked forward, nocked, took aim …

  He had no mail, no padding, for he was an archer who took pride in it and never missed, wanted nothing to tangle his flights or string.

  But Bagnose was already dead, though his legs and heart didn’t know it and he was still roaring something when he fell.

  We ignored Einar and went after him, of course – it was Bagnose, after all – charging into the dust, screaming. But by then the horsemen had thundered off and all we could do was drag back the corpse, studded with arrows.

  ‘Like a hedgepig,’ said Flosi mournfully. Out on the slope of the balka, though, six corpses lay, each killed with a single shot.

  ‘What was he shouting?’ asked Valknut, who had been one of the diggers.

  ‘He wasn’t shouting,’ answered Einar softly. ‘He was making verses. On his own death. A good song, but only he knows it.’

  ‘Odin’s balls,’ Valknut growled, shaking his head. ‘The cost of seeing them off was high.’

  ‘A test?’ Ketil Crow hazarded, wiping his streaming face. ‘To see how good we are?’

  ‘Now they know,’ spat Wryneck with a brief twitch. ‘Six for one.’

  ‘Let’s hope the price is too high for them,’ I offered.

  Of course, it wasn’t. But they waited until the next day to try to wipe us out.

  We dug feverishly, well into the night, taking it in turns to stand guard or swing a pick, so that no one got any real rest. Valknut and Illugi Godi did their own digging, another boatgrave for the animals to dig up, while Hild sat and watched us, perched on a wagon-trace with her knees at her chin. She reminded everyone of a carrion crow.

  It was Valknut who speared the first of the treasure, with the very last hack of a mattock, dragging earth back out of the hole we had made between the stones.

  He held up what he had found, scraping the dirt off and, in the red glow of a torch, something gleamed. He spat, polished it and the flash of silver shone. We all gawped.

  Einar took it from him, turning it this way and that. ‘A bowl,’ he hazarded. ‘Or a plate, flattened and bent. Good workmanship, though.’

  ‘It’s silver, right enough,’ breathed Valknut and would have gone back in, save that the stretch he had cleared out needed roof supports and it was too dark to see properly to put them in. The tunnel we had dug was six foot long, three high and leaking loose dirt like water because we were using wood sparingly; we needed all the carts to carry our haul away in.

  All night long the men turned that bent semi-circle of age-black silver to and fro, cleaned it, marvelled at it, discovered the delicate border of leaves and fruit, birds in flight and even bees, all embossed in the silver in perfect little portraits.

  Sighvat studied it with interest and said, ‘Those are the dreams of birds.’

  ‘You and your birds,’ growled Valknut. ‘What do they dream of?’

  ‘Songs, mostly,’ Sighvat replied seriously, then wagged a finger at Valknut. ‘If we scorn the wisdom of birds and beasts, we fool only ourselves.’

  ‘What wisdom?’ asked Wryneck, curious now, while he smoothed the notched edge of his sword back to sharpness in a comforting, rhythmic rasp of whetstone.

  ‘Well,’ said Sighvat, considering. ‘Bees know when fire is coming and will swarm. Hornets and wasps know the very tree that Thor will hurl his hammer at. And a frog is better at being a frog than a man.’

  We chuckled at that, but Sighvat merely shrugged and said, ‘Could you live naked in a pool all winter and survive?’

  ‘What else?’ demanded Wryneck, for this was decent compensation for the sad lack of Bagnose’s wit.

  ‘My mother could speak with birds and some beasts,’ said Sighvat, ‘but never could teach it to me. She told me hedgepigs and wasps will not spy for anyone, but woodpeckers and starlings can be persuaded to tell what they know. And most hawks hate autumn.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Einar, suddenly interested. ‘I have hunted a hawk in autumn, but it never does well and I have always wondered why that is.’

  ‘You should have had someone like my old mum ask it,’ Sighvat replied. ‘But it is simple enough. Here is a bird that hangs in the air, looking for the least little movement on the ground, which is its supper. And there are thousands of blowing leaves.’

  Einar stroked his moustaches thoughtfully and nodded.

  Valknut waved a dismissive hand, adding: ‘That’s just … sense.’

  ‘You did not know it,’ Sivhgat pointed out and Valknut fumed, having no answer to that.

  ‘And,’ I said, half dreamily, ‘you never see a cat on a battlefield.’

  There was amazed silence for a moment, then Sighvat grinned. ‘Exactly – you know a thing or two, young Orm.’

  ‘All I know is that this’ – Valknut held up the battered silver – ‘is a sign that riches lie in that hill.’

  ‘Just so,’ declared Einar with a slight smile, ‘and here’s something for you to think on. Riches are like horse shit.’

  We looked at each other. Some shrugged; no one could understand it and more than a few, never having heard him do it before, were not sure if Einar was making a joke.

  Einar grinned. ‘They stink when they are in a heap in someone else’s patch, but make everything fruitful when spread about.’

  And we laughed and felt almost like the old brotherhood, sitting by the fire, fretting for light so we could get back to digging.

  But when morning did come, we had hardly blown life back into the fire embers, barely had time for a stretch and a fart, before the horsemen appeared on the stepp
e above the balka and everyone sprinted for weapons and armour.

  FIFTEEN

  This time, they were heavy horse, men in armour, with spears held low or overarm, with maces and cased bows and curved swords. They carried silver discs on poles that told us they were Khazars.

  There was a pause then as we struggled into padding and mail, nocked arrows, hefted swords. Up on the lip of the steppe, two men talked … argued, in fact, waving arms. Wryneck chuckled. ‘They don’t like it one bit,’ he said. ‘The light horse can get down fast and hard, but we can see them off and even shelter from their arrows. Those big men aren’t so happy, for they will not have as easy a time coming down as we did.’

  ‘You have the right of it, old one,’ agreed Einar. ‘No speed, no shock – and charging into all this guddle underfoot.’ He waved one hand at the carts and gear and earth spill and I moved closer to it.

  So it proved. The big men left their big horses and came down at us on foot, slithering unsteadily in their great, ankle-lapping armour of little plates like metal leaves, with round hide-covered shields and sabres and maces. Some snapped off their great lances to use as spears on foot.

  No shieldwall. This time it was hack and slash and survive.

  Illugi, his godi staff discarded in favour of a shield and axe, took a rushing charge at the stand and locked himself in a fierce grapple with the first of these armoured oxen to hit us. Einar and Ketil Crow moved fluidly as a killing pair; metal clanged on metal, curses and blood sprayed.

  One came at me, eyes dark and fierce under his helmet rim, his teeth startling white in the bush of a black beard. He stabbed at my thigh and I blocked it, knocking the weapon sideways with my shield. He reversed the stroke with incredible speed, lunging at my head and I had to throw myself back as the point flicked like a snake tongue almost in my eye.

  He darted in again. I half dropped, slashed, felt my sword bite and recoil from that armour. His point flicked out again; I blocked and hacked again to no purpose other than chipping metal leaves off him.