The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  Sitting on one of the many fat cushions, hawk-faced and dark-eyed, his skin a spiderweb stretched over his face, was Martin the monk. His eyes had a secret, secluded look, like a turf house seen between trees.

  ‘He was caught by the Sarakenoi making for Jorsalir, which fact he let slip in the joy of his rescue by Botolf here,’ Brother John said. ‘Since he is an escaped slave, they were not planning to be lenient or merciful.’

  Someone burst through the flap of the door and Botolf whirled and snarled at him like a dog. The figure yelped and backed out.

  ‘Some of your hounds can still be leashed, it seems,’ Martin said in that dry rasp.

  ‘Be grateful for it,’ I said. ‘If Starkad comes, things will be different, I am thinking.’

  Martin blinked a little and the harsh little lines round his mouth tightened so hard it looked like a cat’s arse. ‘So, is my life any happier in your hands, Orm Ruriksson?’

  I sighed and picked up one of the drinking vessels, but it was empty. Botolf shoved an almost-flat waterskin at me and I drank the tepid stuff, straining the worst of what was in it through my teeth.

  ‘I have no quarrel with you this day, monk,’ I said. ‘The world is washed in blood and I command no one, as you see. Tell me of my men, the ones who were with you, while we wait until this pack have looted and humped themselves to sleep.’

  ‘Your men?’ answered Martin, adding a twist of a smile. He massaged the manacle sores on his wrists. ‘I hardly think that, Orm Bear Slayer. Their leader is Valgard Skafhogg and all of them take their lead from him and believe their gods have betrayed them.’

  ‘Are they together still? Bound for the same place, this mine?’

  Martin nodded. ‘Yes. I escaped. Two men, good Christians, went with me. They were killed and I was taken.’

  I did not wonder at this, for Martin had many talents, his best being the skill to wriggle like an eel out of any trouble. The other was convincing men that the White Christ could save them.

  ‘What of the spear?’ demanded Brother John and Martin, sensing the eagerness in his voice, twisted out a smile.

  ‘That I still have to get. I will, do not fear. You have an interest?’

  Brother John’s hackles rose at the implication of greed. ‘Don’t presume to judge me, priest. The Great City also has a Holy Lance. For all I know what you have is a lump of wood and iron, no more.’

  ‘But if it is not that?’

  Martin’s question hung in the air, unanswered. In the end, Brother John uncurled from the floor and ducked out of the tent.

  I looked at the monk, remembering the blow I had given him once, turning blade to the flat and sparing his life at the last, which I had come to regret. Here he was again and once more I would let him live, for I was sick to my stomach of death this day.

  I raised a hand to bring Botolf over from where he had been standing at the entrance. Martin saw it, saw my missing fingers and chuckled, raising his own, the one lacking the little finger. That had been lopped off by Einar, while Martin hung upside down from the Elk’s mast and told all he knew about everything, screaming and pissing himself. You could tell by the look in his eye that the memory was bright in him and would always be.

  He looked at my own maimed hand, two fingers less than it should be, legacy of the fight with the man – gods, the boy – who had killed Rurik, the man I’d thought my father.

  ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a finger …’

  He stopped when he saw my face and he was right to do so, for I was trembling with the idea of killing him, remembering how he had put that boy and his brother on our trail, an event which had ended in the death of Rurik, his own two nephews and the loss of my fingers. The memory of how I had come by those lost fingers came back to Martin and he blanched and clamped his lips shut, feral as a wildcat.

  ‘Watch him,’ I said to Botolf. ‘Keep him unharmed, but keep him.’

  Martin smiled and inclined his head as if accepting some gracious donation. ‘A gift for a gift,’ he said. ‘Hurry to the rescue of your men, Bear Slayer. I escaped when I did because I know what will happen when your men reach the mine and, though I have foresworn the pleasures of the flesh on God’s behalf, I still prefer not to pass water down a straw.’

  Then I was outside in the howl and horror, with fear rising like morning haar off a fjord and a flood of anger that he should have thrown that at me. I wanted to kill him, but needed him close; Starkad would come for him and we would be waiting.

  For now, the men I was supposed to command, that rune-serpent torc round my neck, bayed and snarled like wolves. No one would hear that it was Hookeye who humped a Hamdanid princess to ruin, or that Kvasir cut the fingers from sixteen men and women for their rings, or that Finn poked bloody fingers in the bellies of the dead he had gutted open to find their swallowed wealth.

  Instead, everyone would hear that these and all the other things done that day were done by the Oathsworn of Orm Bear Slayer, for my name was their name and theirs mine.

  It was dawn before they could be rounded up, wincing in the molten light of day, a few of them sorry for what they had done, the rest sorry for what they felt and all of them so foundered by the event that they could only haul away the lightest part of the stuff they had plundered, stuffed down their boots and inside tunics. Furious and scowling, they could only watch others come up to steal what they had gained.

  I marched them back to where the army had been, across a corpse-strewn field where the kites and crows rose in flocks and the flies in clouds. Entrails skeined a ground slippery with fluids, wounds gaped like lips and eyes, pecked sightless, implored us still for help. Though we looked for it, I could not find Amund’s body. He was our only casualty and we could not even find him.

  We had won, as it turned out – or so Red Boots claimed, though it was doubtful. The mad charge of the Norse had dragged most of the scutatoi with it, for all their boasted discipline. Once they had stopped hacking down the Dailami, were puking and gasping, open-mouthed and on their knees, the enemy’s ghulam horsemen in their fishscale armour and lopsided maces had splintered them apart and ridden down the screamers who fled.

  It was only when the Oven Wearers were released that Red Boots saved the day and claimed a victory – but he quit the field and took the army back to Antioch all the same and we straggled to the Orontes, where the air was thick with grief and funeral smoke and wailing women.

  Jarl Brand’s men were grim and licking wounds, but at least they had managed to bring back both their dead and wounded. Skarpheddin’s men had fled and those who had made it back now had to return to that field of scavenging birds, cursed by the women who were hunting for their men. A battle drawn is worse than one lost, for it promises that it all has to be done again the next day.

  We arrived at our own wadmal-tent camp dusty, bloody and sick at heart, the worst affected puking froth and snot down their beards by this time. Some of the Hares thought they had found a perfect billet, which almost came as a welcome release. Finn, blowing on his skinned knuckles and bellowing as they ran off, eventually threw himself down, too exhausted even to start a fire. Botolf flung down the monk who was leashed to him and sat in sullen, weary silence.

  There, within an hour of us squatting, heads hanging and souls cut by the keening grief and the clouds of insects and the sick despair, came Gizur with Odin’s latest twist to our beard.

  ‘The Goat Boy is gone and Radoslav with him,’ he said. ‘That skald of Skarpheddin, Harek, came to tell us. The seidr women have them at some place called the Sumerian palace, north of the city.’

  TEN

  The sky began to lighten and we all waited in the narrow mouth between cliffs, where pillars of splintered stone, worn by weather into tall, thin mushrooms, stabbed a charcoal sky. There were men all around me, I knew, but it seemed as if I was as alone as I would ever be, standing in what could have been a pillared hov, where sand sparkled faintly as the moon rose. A Freyja dawn, a night as light
as day.

  The silver light cast crawling shadows on the jagged rocks, fingered into corners and slid into cracks, then swept over us, turning us all into blue fetch shadows and washing the riverbed with glow. Sighvat’s raven fluttered silently from his shoulder and whirred away, playing hide and seek with the moon.

  It was a trap, of course, but we had all known that. It was how you sprung it and got away that mattered, as Hedin Flayer said. Since he was our expert on traps, having been a wolf-hunter in his time, we listened politely, though all he had to offer that was useful involved how bad a trap it was.

  ‘Too big,’ he frowned. ‘Like using a bear trap to catch a wolf because you don’t care what happens to the pelt.’

  We all nodded, for we knew what he meant. You hunted wolf with meat and a small sliver of green wood, sharpened at both ends and no longer than your finger. Tied with gut into a circle and placed in the heart of the meat, it would be gulped down and, when the gut eventually parted, the sliver would spring apart and, sooner or later, rip the wolf’s innards to bloody shreds. You could track it by the bloody vomit and it would die sooner rather than later, with no damage at all to a valuable pelt.

  That was deep thinking, but the seidr women’s plot was not.

  ‘If they sought the way to the hoard of Attila,’ Finn growled, ‘why could they not find it in the Other? Did they not go into the seidr trance and seek it, then?’

  ‘If they did, they failed, which shows they are not very good,’ answered Sighvat.

  I remembered Svala’s voice telling me of seeing Hild and it came to me then that they had done what seidr women do and found Hild there guarding that road, as terrible in death as she had been in life. I said as much and the ones who remembered her nodded.

  Svala and Skarpheddin’s mother were bad enough, though seidr was a subtle magic and a good edge, strongly swung, was a ward against all of it in the end. But there was Skarpheddin and his dreng, those men who clung to him by oath and gifted rings. His men had been torn to shreds in the battle and women were cleaning and burying them still, but he had these last thirty or so grim blades and the desperation of a man seeing his luck flow away from him.

  So I went to Jarl Brand and laid it all out at his feet, even what it was Skarpheddin thought to get from me. Jarl Brand, like an old bone in the flickering torchlight, stroked his icicle moustaches and looked at me warily, while the light flung away from the silver on his arms.

  ‘And can you tell him of this treasure hoard?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘Lord,’ I answered, feeling the sweat trickle down my backbone. ‘Of course not.’ Which was no lie without the rune-serpent sword. ‘Once, we followed the trail of it, but it led to death and despair in the Grass Sea,’ I added, which was also true.

  ‘So you say,’ Brand answered, then grinned. ‘I, too, had heard of Einar’s hoard. A good saga tale. I took him for someone as crazed as a bag of frothing dogs and it seems I was right, for I heard he and most of his men died.’

  I smiled, almost sagging with relief. Let him think so, Odin. Just this once, you one-eyed raven of treachery …

  ‘I will help you,’ Brand went on, ‘but you must help me.’

  A trade. Now trading I understood …

  ‘I will help you root out Skarpheddin, for the sake of his people if nothing else,’ he went on mildly. ‘I am going back to claim my lands and help fight for a throne soon and will take them with me when he is dead.’

  I blinked at that, for he delivered it with the same flat calm as if he announced he was taking Skarpheddin’s old ox drinking horn. The truth was, of course, that Skarpheddin had finished himself in that battle and now Jarl Brand would step in and take everything the old man had, including the high regard of the Great City.

  ‘I will also give your men the pick of battle-gear stripped from the dead, which you will need if you go in search of Starkad and lost comrades,’ Brand added and then nodded sombrely. ‘Worthy though I think that is, I am also thinking that your arse will end up roasting on a stake, but that is your affair.’

  ‘Just so,’ I offered, weak at the image he had made for me. If it had just been seeking out my comrades, I might have thought twice about it then – but, of course, I could not tell him I sought out the sabre and the secret of the path back to Atil’s treasure.

  ‘What you must do for me is hunt Starkad. Kill him. Bring me proof of it – his head, unless it stinks too much by then. His jarl torc otherwise. He has offended me and no man does that.’

  ‘He is Harald Bluetooth’s man,’ I offered weakly, thinking it only fair to bring him visions of serious bloodprice, but he shrugged.

  ‘Bluetooth knows when to cut his losses. Two drakkar and a couple of fistfuls of his chosen men and their battle-gear are enough, I am thinking, for I hear he has trouble with the Saxlanders of Otto now. He will not worry overly much about the loss of a chosen man two years missing.’

  I left, swallowing my own sick fear, knowing that Jarl Brand was bound for greatness, for the gold rune serpent he wore round his neck hardly weighed on him at all. His men bynamed him Ofegh and some of the Greeks had picked it up, thinking this was his proper name and were told it meant ‘long-lived’. But ofegh is more subtle than that; it means ‘one who has no doom on him’ and no one was better named than Jarl Brand Ofegh.

  He sent his own dreng battle captain, Ljot, a man as dark as his jarl was white and he brought sixty men with him, which was too many when we tried to flit moth-silent up this riverbed.

  At the end of this crack between cliffs sat the palace, which wasn’t a palace at all but a tomb to some old king of a people called Sumerians, long dusted to eternity. Still, what they had left was worrying enough in the blue moonlight: lion-headed lumps of stone, worn and twisted by age and weather into something that so much resembled trolls that it made us all grunt and grip our slippery hilts the harder.

  They flanked a set of steps, leading down to darkness, and Finn looked at me, licking his lips. Kvasir, squinting his one eye into the darkness, squatted on one knee, as if to begin a Thing on the matter, but Botolf, growling, pushed on to the head of the steps, Sighvat with him. The raven had returned to his shoulder and said, in his voice: ‘Odin.’

  ‘A fine bird,’ said Skarpheddin’s skald, Harek, ‘but I wish it was a tongueless breed.’

  The skald’s nickname was Gjallandi, so it was enough to raise a chuckle when a man called Boomer started wishing for silence. I was still wondering where his allegiance lay; though he had brought the message to us, as instructed by his lord, it seemed he was in no hurry to go back to Skarpheddin’s side. Still, I had set Brother John to watch him.

  Ljot pushed up, looked round us all, then at me. ‘Well?’

  I thought about it, frowning, then decided to sneak down with Short Eldgrim, Finn, Sighvat, Kvasir and big Botolf. I would take the skald and Brother John, too, to keep that versemaker close. When we came to the need for blades, I would call on Ljot who should then, as I pointed out firmly to him, come at the run.

  Which was a lot more calmly said than done, as I took the lead and moved down the steps into that maw of darkness. Perhaps it was the cold stone closing around me in a desert night chill, but I had to clamp my teeth hard to stop them chattering. When I turned to make sure I was not doing this alone, though, I saw Finn grinding froth round his Roman nail.

  I fumbled down the steps, then froze at the sight of a faint yellow-red glow, enough for me to see that it was light bouncing off a wall. The steps led to a landing and a turn to the right led to more steps, where the light revealed two more lion-headed stones and a chamber.

  The air was cold and smelled of old dust. The floor was littered with rubble and, as I came down the last steps, there was a slither of sound and shadows bounced on the walls as men took up arms round flickering torches.

  Thorhalla stood with Skarpheddin and his men, while Svala held the Goat Boy, his face tight, his whole body clenched and trembling. The wink of light on the blade at h
is throat was blood-red.

  Behind them, a great block rose from the floor and on it stood a statue of a powerful, haughty man. Once it had been painted with gold, and the empty eye-sockets perhaps held gems, but that was long ago. It was now just the shape of a man and even the ancient carvings on it were worn to nothing.

  ‘I said, I said,’ Thorhalla cackled. ‘I said he would. He comes, my son.’

  ‘You did say,’ Skarpheddin rumbled.

  The others crept in, shields and weapons up. Skarpheddin’s men stirred and the barrel-bellied jarl cleared his throat.

  ‘Best if we lose the hard edges, I am thinking,’ he said and jerked a head at the Goat Boy, sucked into Svala’s embrace, the knife steady at a throat that wavered like a bird’s heart. I caught her eye and she smiled, but only with her mouth.

  ‘Drop them,’ Skarpheddin said harshly.

  I had seen Svala now; I knew where her heart lay. I signalled and the clatter of metal was loud and echoing. There was a sound like the desert wind – Skarpheddin’s dreng letting out their held breath.

  ‘Tell us,’ Thorhalla said, shifting forward so that her face was half shrouded. It looked like something long dead and freshly dug up.

  ‘Let the boy go,’ I countered, knowing they would not.

  ‘When you tell us where the hoard is that you found last year,’ Skarpheddin answered, hitching thumbs in his straining belt.

  ‘Tell,’ cackled Thorhalla. ‘Tell.’

  I opened my mouth – and closed it again. I don’t know why. I thought the Goat Boy a fair trade for a fortune in drowned, cursed silver and might have made up a lie easily enough. For a seidr moment, though, I saw that any answer would end the same way and the Goat Boy would die.

  A voice curled into the silence, soft and reasonable and gentle as a liar’s kiss. ‘The boy is not precious enough for him,’ said Radoslav, pushing from behind the dreng ranks. ‘He is just a boy. I told you that already. Good enough to get him here, not good enough for him to give up a king-gift for.’