The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  ‘I will go, if you will have me,’ said Morut and I nodded at once, for his tracking skills would be good to have.

  ‘And I,’ added Avraham, ‘for I have never seen the like of this before on my steppe and would know more of it.’

  ‘Your steppe …’ scoffed Morut.

  ‘As much mine as yours,’ Avraham snarled back defiantly. They fell into the familiar chaffer of it, as comforting to them as a pitfire and thick-walled hov is to a man from the north.

  Crowbone wanted to go too, which was brave of him, but Sigurd told him – more abruptly than he had done in previous times – to stow his tongue in the chest of his head and stay where he was. Crowbone, cowed for once, obeyed without comment.

  We left them milling round the drinking pool, gathering sticks to make a fire and not at all eager to even be there. They would not go near the stiffening body of the creature, though they hauled Gesilo off to where they could bury him.

  ‘I said he would not care for Crowbone’s tale and I was right,’ Avraham noted with grim amusement, though the smile died on his face when he saw the scowls of the rest of the druzhina. He hurried to catch up with Morut, tracking ahead.

  An hour later, the sun was up over the edge of the world, but not this rock. In the lee of it, the mist clung, cold as the white raven’s eye, threading between the gnarled trees and patched thick as eiderdown here and there.

  It was from one of these duck-feather mists that we were attacked. Morut led the way, following signs only he could read, from fresh-turned stone to barely visible broken twig. At a bend between rocks, he knelt to study the ground and a spear hissed over his shoulder, skittering across the frozen earth and almost across my toes.

  ‘Form!’ I yelled out of habit and, out of habit, Kvasir and Finn slid to me, shields up. From the rocks bounded three figures, much as before, though one carried a shield and another wore clothing and had a skin cap and no sign of scale.

  Morut, caught on the knee, rolled sideways and scrabbled away. Avraham, with a yelp, sprang forward and took a blow meant for the little tracker – from a shovel. The shaft smacking Avraham’s armoured forearm hard enough to make him grunt; he struck back and the scaled creature shrieked, carved under the ribs.

  The one with the fur cap came louping at me, a great curved pick held above his head and relying on speed and power to crash through my shield. His mouth was red and open in a russet-bearded face and his eyes were wild.

  Just at the moment he reached me, was about to bring his pick down, I stepped sideways, away from Kvasir and the man ploughed between us; it was moot which of our blades killed him, but both carved steaks off him and he fell, skidding on his face along the rocks.

  The last, more powerful than the others, had hurled his spear and had no other weapons. He bounded forward and hurled himself, shrieking and snarling, at Finn, who took this rush on his shield and went over backwards, the creature clawing and biting the edge of it, his scaled, eye-bulged frog-face foaming with spittle and inches from Finn’s own.

  They fell backwards, in a clatter like someone beating iron on an anvil, broke and rolled. The creature came up, cat fast and spitting, while Finn was slower in his mail. Two powerful blows smacked him, one on the shield and the other under his ribs, so that he grunted. I saw mail rings flying and started in to help – but Kvasir laid a hand across my chest, as if to say that it was Finn’s fight. A valknut fight.

  It was then that a shape flew from the top of a head-height rock and crashed into Kvasir, so that he went over with a sharp yelp and a crash. I whirled and struck, fast as an adder’s tongue and, in that same instant, tried to stop the blade.

  It would not be halted, ripped through the ragged wool and the thin flesh and the small, knobbed backbone of the wild-haired boy, whose screeches of hate and fear turned to a great wailing whimper and then to nothing as he hit the ground, cut almost in half.

  The scaled creature fighting Finn saw the boy dying in a scream of blood and drumming heels and wailed, high and anguished. Finn, grunting and winded, hurled his shield and the troll batted it away – but Finn was across the distance between them and The Godi swung, changed direction and hissed right into the path the creature took to avoid the feint.

  The blade cut halfway through the thing’s body, just above the hip and it fell away with a screech and writhed, scrabbling like a crab. Finn finished it with two more blows and then leaned on the hilt of his sword, holding one side and panting.

  We straightened ourselves out and took stock. Finn’s mail was torn – torn, by the gods, and only with the taloned claws of the creature, which was now twitching in a congealing pool of black blood. His aketon padding leaked wisps of cotton and the linen tunic beneath was shredded almost to the skin, which was marked with a solid red thump, though unbroken. The edge of his shield was shredded and three deep scores ran down the triangles of the valknut symbol.

  We looked at what he had killed; powerful, muscled, hair like tree-moss on an old branch and a faded yellow – but human, for all that. He was big and clearly the leader – perhaps father, from his attitude to the dead boy – and might have been a fine, tall man save that he was scaled, frog-faced and wet-lipped as a slug; like the others, the creases of him were raw.

  The scaled man Avraham had killed was already stiff, the one Kvasir and I had chopped was cold and looked normal, a dark young Slav with no visible sign of scales. No-one wanted to touch him, so we did not find out what lurked beneath his clothing.

  Then there was the wild-haired boy, a fine black-haired boy no older than Crowbone, his face dirty and scraped raw where he had fallen on rocks, his teeth bloody and smashed. Not that he would have felt any of that pain after my stroke had all but ripped his backbone out; he lay, shapeless as an empty wineskin.

  I felt the bile in my throat and spat it out; these were, apart from the one Finn had killed, no warriors. Clearly not invisible. For certain-sure they could not cross a marsh, a palisade, evade guards and all the rest without magic and if they had any, they would have used it here. I said as much, the words spilling bitterly off my lips.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Kvasir, rubbing the breath-ice off his beard. ‘Something smells like bad cod here.’

  Morut took the offered wrist and was heaved back to his feet by Avraham. They exchanged silent glances that said everything about what had just happened and grinned at each other.

  ‘Mizpah,’ Morut said, which I learned later was a prayer about their God watching out for each of them when they were absent from one another.

  ‘While we are at it,’ replied Avraham, wiping the blood off his sabre, ‘I thank you, Lord of Israel, for not making me a slave, a Gentile, a woman – or one of these creatures. Hakadosh baruch hu.’

  Grinning still, Morut moved cautiously forward and we followed, stepping as though the ground could open. We had gone no more than a few hundred yards before Morut said: ‘There is a hov.’

  It was a good hov in a little curve of clearing in the rocks, well built and much like what the Finns call a gamma, though they make them of turf. This one, thirty foot long and bowed at the ends like a boat from the weight of its own roof, was dry-stane, the spaces caulked with mosses and mud and the whole of it to the roof came up only to my shoulders. There was one way in, a low doorway, the wooden door stout and barred.

  Finn smacked it with the hilt of The Godi. Someone – something – wailed.

  ‘Well, they are home,’ he grinned, wolvish as a pack on a hunt. ‘Though they are mean with their hospitality.’

  He leaned on the door with one shoulder, bounced against it to test, then drew back, took a breath and crashed forward. The door splintered. He kicked it with one foot and it burst inward. There were louder wails and whimpers.

  He made to duck inside, but I laid my blade across the entrance, stopping him, though it took all I had in me to do it.

  ‘This is why I do not fetch wood,’ I said and he grinned and offered me a go-before-me bow.

  Inside, it
had been dug out down to the rock and there was headroom to spare. I ducked through the dark door, blade up, shield up. The floor was stone rather than the hard-packed earth of a hov in the vik, the light dim and woodsmoked and I was blinking, ready for anything.

  Anything but the soft, gentle, pleading voice that said: ‘Spare us.’

  I made out four of them, all women. One was old, roughened by hard work and use, hands twisting in her ragged clothing. A younger woman was propped up in a box bed alcove, her quiet weeping drifting through the mirk. Another young one was still blonde and pretty under the filth, then I saw she had bold eyes and forearms as muscled as my own. These arms she was holding protectively round her stomach.

  The fourth was a young girl crouched by the near-dead embers of the pitfire, naked. She was frog-faced, bulbous-eyed, scaled and afraid. ‘Spare us,’ she said in thick east Norse.

  The older woman started to weep and the blonde came forward, hands outstretched and it came to me that these ones were, perhaps, some of those supposedly taken from the village. I had a moment of panic, remembering the tales of rusalka – but these were not the exquisite, green-haired temptresses with magic combs that Crowbone had described.

  ‘Are you from the village?’ I asked and the one coming towards me stopped, more at the tone of my voice than my speech. I didn’t speak her Polianian tongue.

  ‘Malkyiv,’ I said, recalling the name. The woman nodded her corn-coloured head and her head drooped a little. She sighed.

  ‘Spare us,’ said the scaled girl, still crouching by the dead pitfire. One tiny robin-egg breast, I noticed was half-white and ruby-tipped. It was clearly all the Norse she knew and I wondered how she even knew that.

  The others crowded in; the women wailed. I had Avraham and Morut take the two older ones out, while the scaled girl scuttled into a corner. The one in the boxbed, obviously younger, did not move, only cried as if her heart would break.

  ‘Come,’ I said, as gentle as I would to a nervous foal and holding out one hand.

  ‘My baby,’ she said – I did not understand the words, but the gesture and the pain in her was enough There was a crib next to her and something moved and mewed, a cat sound, strange and disturbing. I peered in.

  It was a newborn changeling horror. Sickly pale, the face was tightened and stretched into the same frog shape as the others, but the eyes in its head bulged out, blind, red and wet as raw liver. The lips were fat, slug-wet strips of weeping sores and the skin seemed like hard plates, with every crease a stripe of vicious redness, so that the little pale body was a mosaic of pain. It mewed.

  I fell back from it and the woman – the mother, I realized – wailed and thrashed her head in despair, for she wanted to pick it up and comfort it but it was clear that her very touch was agony to this mite.

  Finn and Kvasir saw it and backed away, swallowing.

  ‘Take the woman,’ I said to Kvasir, my voice harsh and echoing under my helm. He hesitated, then bundled her out of the bed, carried her, thrashing weakly and shrieking about her baby, out of the hov. The others scuttled after, all save the scaled girl, who tried to make herself smaller in a corner.

  I looked at Finn and he at me.

  ‘Spare us,’ said the scaled girl.

  We never spoke of it after, Finn and I, neither to each other nor to any of those who later demanded the sagatale of how Orm and his two companions had taken on a nest of were-dragons and cut those beasts down.

  All the long way back to the druzhina, with the smoke from the burning hov curling like a wolf tail over the dark rock, while the questions rang and the women wept and wailed, we said nothing other than that the task was done.

  Sigurd rubbed his silver nose and tugged his beard with frustration. Crowbone stared at the rescued women with interest, but, like everyone else, did not see why they wailed, since they had been freed from monsters. I knew. I saw the anguish at the loss of their menfolk and a newborn babe and the scaled girl who begged for mercy.

  In the end, Sigurd and the others gave up asking and the only sound the rest of that way back to the village was our ragged breathing and the women weeping and the ring of hooves on the ice of the marsh.

  I did not know what they were, those creatures, or what had made them – but snakes will protect their young, I reasoned, so it is better to kill them when you see them, rather than wait for them to bite you.

  Yet they had fought as a family, those afflicted and those not, and had done it brave as Baldurs; the bile rose in me every time I thought of the wild-haired boy and the red-eyed babe – and especially the girl who pleaded.

  We came back to the village and were swept into the joy of the people there, now freed from fear of the creatures. The rescued women, no tears left and silent as tombs, sat like stones in this stream of triumph and said nothing.

  I also said nothing to Kovach, just stared into his pale eyes and held out my hand so that he could see what I had discovered. To anyone else, it would be a stone, no more. But he knew and took it from me and, as I walked away, I felt his eyes on my back like arrows.

  Shovels and picks and a spoil heap, that’s what I had found. Behind the hov, a narrow cleft, dug out and shored up and, nearby, a neat, hidden heap of good iron ore which these … creatures … had traded to the sword-forgers of Malkyiv.

  In the end, the price, perhaps, became too high – from good livestock, to spare women to keep the little marsh clan going, despite whatever god had inflicted fishskin on them.

  Then there was the granddaughter, with forearms muscled from forge work. In the north, we did not have women at the forge, but we were no strangers to it and some fine blades were crafted by women.

  Once Kovach had to part with his skilled granddaughter to get the all-important iron-ore, that was the end of it for the miners in the marsh. Kovach had, indeed, sent men – but it was to wipe out the marsh-miners and take over. Nor did it surprise me that the marsh and the miners had done for them all.

  Well, we had done for the little marsh clan and brought Kovach’s granddaughter back, blonde and weeping; the cunning old man wept his thanks to the gods, then told the villagers to bring out the hidden supplies and declared a celebratory feast.

  Now they had what they needed, Kovach and his village; they would get the rescued women to guide them back through the marsh and work the ore for themselves, which they had gained at no loss.

  I wished them well of it, though I thought they would never be free of what they had done – nor would I. I would have it in my dreams forever, while Kovach’s own doom lay under that blonde head he caressed; once, she caught my eye and the misery in it was plain, as was the plea. I had seen her, protecting her belly with those muscled forearms as I came stumbling into the hov, all metal and edge.

  I did not know what she would give birth to – and neither did she – but I suspected Kovach would not be caressing her this time next year, blade-working skill or no.

  I told some of it to Vladimir and Dobrynya, quietly, while Sigurd and Crowbone listened and it was clear they were there to make sure I told it true. I left out what we had burned and what might still appear with the spring.

  In the end, little Vladimir nodded, smiling and generous as a prince should be. ‘Good work, Orm Bear Slayer. Skalds will sing of this for a long time and the saga of it will be told round fires for ages yet to come. Eh, Olaf?’

  ‘I will tell it myself,’ agreed Crowbone, ‘especially since I am in it.’

  They smiled, bright little suns to each other. Vladimir and Olaf were the coming men and showing all the signs of being rulers you did not want to be anywhere near when they grew into the full of their lives.

  I left them, avoiding the mad joy gracing the village. The night was washed with moonglow so that the land glittered blue-white; I tried to get enough clean, cold air in me to wash away the sickness I felt. I watched from the shadows as Crowbone went off, whistling vainly for Bleikr.

  Cooking smells drifted, meat rich and mouth watering. Somew
here, Thorgunna would be seasoning what was in our pot, the others clashing cups and ale horns, grease-faced and grinning and making verses on the bravery of Orm Bear Slayer, Finn Horsehead and Kvasir Spittle. The number of creatures would grow in the telling, the hero-work swell and all of it, like the bear that had given me my name, was a lie.

  I knew, though, that Finn and Kvasir would be quiet in a corner, saying nothing, thinking – like me – of the well-built hov, now ashes and smoulder and what we had burned in it and at the cold-hearted people who had engineered it.

  A dog barked, then howled, a sound I did not like much. Someone called my name and I trudged down to where I thought it came from, near the frozen river, thinking one of my men had spotted wolf and wanting to be sure the pack was not lured by desperate hunger into going after our horses. I wanted to lose my thoughts in simple tasks. In the distance behind me, music suddenly squealed out, a tendril lure that made me half turn.

  I stumbled and went down on one knee, came up cursing and wet. The obstacle was almost invisible against the drifted snow, but it was a dog. A white elkhound. And my hands and knees were too wet just for snow.

  Just as I saw the blood, I saw the shapes and started to turn. The blow was a hard dunt, a star-whirler that knocked me flat but not out. For all that, I could only see the raging fire of the pain and the sickness that rose up, so that someone cursed as I bokked it up on his shoes.

  I thought of Short Eldgrim and panicked at the idea of waking with my mind smoothed out like a sea after a storm, empty and blue and featureless.

  ‘Struggle and you will get another one,’ snarled a voice I did not know.

  ‘Enough,’ snapped another. ‘Sack him up and bring him with the boy. Fast now …’

  That voice I knew, even as my head flared and roared and darkness fell with the grain sack they bundled over my face to keep me from shouting.

  Martin.

  TEN

  Someone took the sack off when the day came up and they thought themselves far enough away. I blinked into the glare until my watering eyes made out the shape of Olaf, sitting next to me in one of the sledge-carts, bundled in his white fur cloak. There was blood on it.