The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  It was all meant to make them look like some steppe tribe come to town, but when one came into the Dolphin and asked for Orm the Trader, he was almost weeping with rage and frustration at the hoots and jeers of men who had fought the real thing.

  We all went out, for the others were anxious to see what a spadone, a man with no balls, looked like, but were in for a disappointment, since he looked like us, only cleaner and better groomed. He was swathed in a thick cloak, drawn up over his head so that he looked like an old Roman statue, and he inclined his head graciously in the direction of the gawping mob of pirates who confronted him.

  ‘Greetings from Architos Choniates,’ he said in Greek. ‘My name is Niketas. My master bids me tell you that he will see you tomorrow. Someone will come and bring you to him.’

  He paused, looking round at us all. I had followed his talk well enough, as had Brother John, but the others knew just enough Greek to get their faces slapped and order another drink, so they were engaged in peering at him. Finn Horsehead was practically on his knees, trying to squint into the carrying-chair, and I could see he was set on lifting clothing to get a better look at what wasn’t there.

  ‘We will be ready,’ I said, cuffing Finn’s ear. ‘Convey my thanks to your master.’

  He nodded at me politely, then hesitated. Finn, scowling and rubbing his ear, was glaring at one of the smirking thugs who formed the bodyguard.

  ‘You may bring no more than three others,’ Niketas said as they left. ‘Suitably comported.’

  ‘“Suitably comported”,’ chuckled Brother John as we watched them go. ‘How are we to do that at all?’

  In the end, I decided Sighvat and Brother John were best and left it at that, ignoring Finn’s demands to be included.

  ‘He may just decide to lift it,’ he argued. ‘Or send men to ambush you on the way.’

  ‘He is a merchant,’ I said wearily. ‘He depends on his reputation. He won’t get far by waving a blade and robbing everyone.’

  How wrong that turned out to be.

  The next day we were escorted by another of Choniates’ household to the expensive end of the city and were greeted by Niketas in the immaculate atrium of a large house. He eyed us with one brow raised, taking in our stained, worn clothes, flapping soles and long beards and hair. I felt like a grease stain in this marbled hov.

  Sighvat, who took considerable pride in his appearance – we all did, for we were Norsemen and, compared to others in the world, a byword for cleanliness – scowled back at Niketas and hissed, ‘If you had balls left, I would tear them off.’

  Niketas, who must have heard it all before, simply bowed politely and then left. It may be that Choniates was then busy for two hours, or that Niketas was vengeful.

  But it gave us a chance to watch and learn in a part of the city where life seemed careless. People came and went in Choniates’ lavish hall with no apparent purpose other than to lean against polished balustrades and laugh and talk and bask in the perfect sun of their lives, warmed, on this chilly, damp day, by heat that came under the floor.

  They drank wine from bowls, spilled it, laughingly daring, as an offering to older gods and chided each other for getting it on their expensive sleeves, patting their clothes with sticky-ringed hands. Sighvat and I spent some time wondering if you could get those sticky rings off without cutting their fingers and even more wondering how the heat came up from the floor without the place burning down.

  Choniates, when we were finally ushered into his presence, was tall, dressed in gold and white and with perfect silver hair. He conducted affairs in a chair at first, surrounded by men who softened his face with hot cloths, slathered him with cream and then, to our amazement, started painting it with cosmetics, like a woman. They even used brown ash on his eyelids.

  He was offhand, dismissive – I was a badly dressed varangii boy, after all, clutching a bundle wrapped in rags, accompanied by a big, hairy, fox-faced man and a tiny, bead-eyed heretic monk who spoke Latin and Greek with a thick accent.

  After he had seen the coins, though, he grew thoughtful and that did not surprise me. They were Volsung-minted and the only ones in the world not in Atil’s dark tomb were the ones he turned over and over in his fat, manicured fingers. He knew their worth in silver – and, more than that, he knew what they meant and that the rumours about the Oathsworn were true.

  He asked to see the sword and, made bold and anxious to please, I unwrapped that bundle and everything changed. He could scarcely bring himself to touch it, knew then who this Orm was and saw the beauty and the worth of that sabrecurve, even if he did not know what the runes meant, on hilt or blade.

  ‘Will you sell this, too?’ he asked and I shook my head and wrapped it up again. I saw in his eyes the look I was fast getting used to: the greed-sick, calculating stare of those wondering how to find out if the rumours of a marvellous silver hoard were true and, if so, where it was. The sword, as it was bundled up again, was like the dying sun to a flower as Choniates stood and watched it vanish into filthy wrappings. I knew then that showing it to him had been a mistake, that he would try something.

  The barbers and prinkers were waved away; he offered wine and I accepted and sipped it – it was unwatered and I laughed aloud at his presumption. By the end of a long afternoon, Choniates reluctantly discovered that he would get no bargain for the coins, nor any clue as to other treasures.

  He bought the coins and trinkets, paying some cash then, the bulk by promise – and extra for trying a cheap trick like getting me drunk.

  ‘That went well,’ beamed Brother John when we were out on the rain-glistening street.

  ‘Best we watch our backs,’ muttered Sighvat who had seen the same signs as I had.

  Then, as we turned for a last look at the marble hov, we both saw Starkad, quiet and unfussed, hirpling through the gate like an old friend, not exactly fox-sleekit about it, but looking this way and that quickly, to see if he was observed. Even without the limp, which Einar had given him, both Sighvat and I knew this old enemy when we saw him – but, just then, the Watch tramped round a corner and we slid away before they spotted us and started asking awkward questions.

  That had been weeks ago and Choniates, it had to be said, had been patient and cunning, waiting just long enough for us – me – to relax a little, to grow careless.

  Oh, aye. We knew who had the runesword, right enough, but that only made things worse.

  Finn grew redder and finally hacked the pigeon he had been plucking into bloody shreds and flying feathers until his rage went and he sat down with a thump. Radoslav, clearly impressed, picked some feathers from his own bowl and carried on eating slowly, spitting out the smaller bones. No one spoke and the gloom sidled up to the fire and curled there like a dog.

  Brother John winked at me from that round face with its fringe of silly beard and jingled a handful of silver in one fist. ‘I have enough here for at least one mug of what passes for drink in the Dolphin,’ he announced. ‘To take away the taste of Finn’s stew.’

  Finn scowled. ‘When you find more of that silver, you dwarf, perhaps we can afford better than those rats with wings that I catch. Get used to it. Unless we get that blade back, we will eat worse.’

  Everyone chuckled, though the loss of the runesword drove the mirth from it. The pigeons in the city were fat and bold as sea-raiders, but easily lured with a pinch of bread, though no one liked eating them much. So the thought of drink cheered everyone except me, who had to ask where he had got a fistful of silver. Brother John shrugged.

  ‘The church, lad. God provides.’

  ‘What church?’

  The little priest waved a hand vaguely in the general direction of Iceland. ‘It was a well-established place,’ he added, ‘well patronised. By the well-off. A well of infinite substance …’

  ‘You’ve been cutting purses again, holy man,’ growled Kvasir.

  Brother John caught my eye and shrugged. ‘One only. A truly upholstered worshipper, who could a
fford it. Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas, after all.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop chewing in that Latin,’ growled Kvasir, ‘as if we all knew what you say. Orm, what’s he say?’

  ‘He says sense,’ I said. ‘Love of money is the root of all evil.’

  Kvasir grunted, shaking his head disapprovingly, but smiling all the same. Brother John had no mirth in him at all when he met my eyes.

  ‘We need it, lad,’ he said quietly and I felt the annoyance and anger drain from me. He was right: warmth and drink and a chance to plan, that was what we needed, but cutting purses was bad enough without doing it in a church. And him being a heretic to the Great City’s Christmen was buttering the stockfish too thick all round. All of which I mentioned in passing as we headed for the Dolphin.

  ‘It isn’t a church to me, Orm lad,’ he chuckled, his curls plastered to his forehead. ‘It’s an eggshell of stone, no more, a fragile thing built to look strong. There is no hinge of the Lord here. God will sweep it away in His own good time but, until then, per scelus semper tutum est sceleribus iter.’

  Crime’s safest course is through more crime. I laughed, for all the sick bitterness in me. He reminded me of Illugi, the Oathsworn’s Odin godi, but that Aesir priest had gone mad and died in Atil’s howe along with Einar and others, leaving me as jarl and godi both, with neither wit nor wisdom for either.

  But, because of Brother John, we were all declared Christmen now, dipped in holy water and sworn such – prime-signed, as they say – though the crucifixes hung round our necks all looked like Thor hammers and I did not feel that the power of our Odin-oath had diminished any, which had been my reasoning for embracing the Christ in the first place.

  The Dolphin nestled in the lee of Septimus Severus’s wall and looked as old. It had a floor of tiles, fine as any palace, but the walls were roughly plastered and the smoking iron lanterns hung so low you had to duck between them.

  It was noisy and dim with fug and crowded with people, rank with sweat and grease and cooking and, just for one blade-bright moment, I was back in Bjornshafen, hugging the hearthfire’s red-gold warmth, listening to the wind whistle its way into the Snaefel forests, pausing only to judder the beams and flap the partition hangings, so that they sounded like wings in the dark.

  Heimthra, the longing for home, for the way things had been.

  But this was a hall where strangers did not rise to greet you, as was proper and polite, but carried on eating and ignoring you. This was a hall where folk ate reclining and sitting upright at a bench marked you at once as inferior, yet another strangeness in a city full of wonders, like the ornate basins which existed for no other reason than to throw water into the air for the spectator’s enjoyment.

  The reason I liked the taberna was because it was full of familiar voices: Greeks and Slavs and traders from further north all talking in a maelstrom of different tongues, all with one subject: how the river trade was a dangerous business now that Sviatoslav, Great Prince of the Rus, had decided to fight both the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars.

  It seemed that the Prince of the Rus had gone mad after the fall of the Khazar city of Sarkel, down on the Dark Sea – which event the Oathsworn had attended, after a fashion. He was now headed off to the Khazar capital, Itil on the Caspian, to finish them off, but hadn’t even waited for that before sending men further north to annoy the Volga Bulgars.

  ‘He’s like a drunk in a hall, stumbling over feet and wanting to fight all those he falls on. What was he thinking?’ demanded Drozd, a Slav trader we knew slightly and a man fitted perfectly to his name – Thrush – being beady-eyed and quick in his head movements.

  ‘He wasn’t thinking at all, it seems to me,’ another said. ‘Next you know, he will think he can take on the Great City.’

  ‘Pity on him if he does, right enough,’ Radoslav agreed, ‘for that means hard war and the Miklagard Handshake.’

  That I had never heard of and said as much. Radoslav’s mouth widened in a grin like a steel trap and he laughed, causing his brow-braid to dip in his leather mug.

  ‘They offer a wrist-grasp of peace, but that is only to hold you close, by the sword-arm,’ he told us, sucking ale off the wet end of his hair. ‘The dagger is in the other.’

  ‘Let’s hope he does and dies for his foolishness. Maybe then we can go back north,’ Finn said, blowing froth off his straggling moustache.

  I said nothing. The truth was that we could never go north, even if Sviatoslav turned his face to the wall tomorrow. He had three sons who would squabble over their inheritance and we had annoyed them all in the hunt for Attila’s hoard out on the steppe – the secret of which now lurked under Starkad’s fingertips.

  He did not know, I was sure. Almost sure. He took the sword from me because Choniates the merchant had valued it and had probably offered highly for it. Even Choniates did not know what the scratches on the handle meant, but he knew how fine the blade was and where it had come from. Even if Starkad read runes well, he would make no sense of the ones on the sword’s grip.

  Perhaps they even thought the rune serpent, carved into the steel when it was made, held the secret of the way to Atil’s tomb – and perhaps it did, for no one could read that spell in full, not even Illugi Godi when he was alive and he was a man who knew his runes. I had my own idea about what those runes did, all the same, and felt a chill of fear at not having the sword. Would all my hurts and ills come back in a rush now, no longer held at bay by that snake-knot spell?

  Finn only nodded when I whispered all this out, eyeing me scornfully when I came to the last part, for he and Kvasir were the only ones I had shared this with and neither of them believed my good health and wound-luck was anything other than youth and Odin’s favour.

  For a while Finn sat moodily stroking the beard he had plaited into what looked like black leather straps, trying to ignore the woman yelling at him from the other side of the hall.

  ‘She wants you, does Elli,’ Kvasir pointed out. ‘The gods know why – sorry, Brother John, God knows why.’

  ‘You’ll be well in there, with no silver changing hands at all,’ Sighvat added moodily.

  Finn stirred uncomfortably. ‘I know. I have no joy in me for it this night.’

  ‘It’s the name,’ declared Sighvat and that, together with Finn’s half-ashamed scowl, managed a laugh from us. Elli, according to the old saga tales – and we had no reason to disbelieve them, Christ-sworn or no – was the giant crone who had wrestled with Thor, the one who was really Old Age.

  I could see where that could be … diminishing to a man of sensitive nature. I said as much and Finn drained his mug, slapped it angrily on the table and lurched off to the whore, looking to soak his black rage in the white light of sweaty humping.

  I sat back, easing. Brother John was right; we had all needed this. Now … it was clear Starkad was working for Architos Choniates, the merchant. We needed to—

  Then, of course, Odin’s curse kicked in the door.

  Well, Short Eldgrim did, slamming through in a hiss of damp wind and curses from those nearest as it washed them, swirling the lantern smoke. He spotted me, bustled his way through and sat, breathing heavily, the network of scars on his face made whiter by its weather-red. ‘Starkad,’ he growled. ‘He’s coming up the street with men at his back.’

  ‘That’s useful,’ muttered Kvasir. ‘I want to see his face when he finds out he has picked the last drinking place in the world he wants to be in.’

  ‘One!’ roared the crowd behind us. Elli was showing how many silver coins she could stick on the sweat of her bared breasts. Kvasir grinned. ‘She cheats – she uses honey. I tasted it once.’

  ‘Pass the word,’ I said softly. Odin’s hand, for sure – I knew One Eye would not let that sword fly from us so lightly, that he had walked the thief right into our clutches.

  ‘Three!’ Elli was doing well behind us.

  Short Eldgrim nodded and slid away. Behind us, a coin slid from Elli’s ample, sweaty char
ms and the crowd roared. Brother John swallowed ale and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘A dangerous place to confront him,’ he said, looking round at the crowd.

  ‘Odin chooses,’ I said flatly and he glanced at me, who was now, supposedly, a prime-signed Christ-follower.

  ‘Amare et sapere vix deo conciditur’ he said wryly and I had felt my face flush. Even a god finds it hard to love and be wise at the same time; I wondered, after, if our little Christ priest had the power of scrying.

  ‘I hope that is Roman for “kill them all and let Christ Jesus sort them out”, little man,’ Finn growled, for he hated folk talking in tongues he did not understand. Since he did not understand any other than west Norse, he was frequently red in the face. Someone bumped him and he rounded savagely, slamming the man with an elbow. For a moment, it looked like trouble, but the man saw who it was and backed off, hands held up, aghast at having offended the Oathsworn. Skythians, they called us, or Franks – those who knew a little more used Varangi – and they knew if you took on one, you took on all.

  Then the man himself came in, shoving through the door, pausing in a way that let me know, at once, that it was no accident, his arrival in the Dolphin. Heads turned to look; conversation died and silence drifted in with the cold rainwind at the sight of him and the two behind him, openly armed, wearing mail and helms. That only revealed that Starkad and his crew had a powerful new friend in the Great City.

  ‘Starkad,’ I said and it was like the slap of a blade on the table. Silence fell, voices ceased one by one when they heard their own echo and heads turned as people sensed the hackle-rise tension that had crept into the fug and lantern smoke. Finn’s scowl threatened to split his brow and he growled. Radoslav looked quizzically from one to the other and, even in that moment, I saw the merchant in him, setting us in scales and balancing our enemies on the other pan to see who was worth more.