by Robert Low
I twisted in the saddle once, to stare back at the settlement. On the earthwork walls I saw a figure and, though I could not clearly make it out, I knew it was Tien and felt his eyes on me long after he had vanished from sight.
The steppe spread out like a sea, like frozen waves. The sky was so big, the clouds in it rushing, whipped into strange shapes and sliding fast, like driven woodsmoke.
‘Only the wind saves us,’ Gyrth noted gloomily which, since it made life colder still, brought grunts and growls of disagreement.
‘Snow has a plan,’ Gyrth went on between gasps, his breath smoking and freezing his beard to spines. ‘It wants to cloak the world in white, purest white, like a bleached linen sheet – but the wind says no. We will have some more here than there, says the wind. Get it off that roof and on that tree, says the wind. The snow hates the wind but cannot stop it from blowing. Which is why, when it is a windless day in winter, you can hear the snow sigh, for it knows the wind will come and make a mess of all its work.’
Which was nearly good enough to laugh some warm into us, but not quite. Our fingers and toes ached and we bound them in wadmal and layered grass between, the fuzzed tops of the yellow steppe grass, which was the best barrier against the cold. It kept toes from turning black, but made our feet so fat they would not fit in the stirrups.
One day merged into the next, shadows of life. Horses died, one after the other and the men on them now staggered and stumbled on foot. One or two of the druzhina threw their armour away because the long skirts and the weight of it made walking twice as hard. The Oathsworn, used to walking, jeered at them – then Sigurd killed one of the druzhina as a warning and that ended all laughter and armour-throwing.
So we listened to the snow sigh.
Sixteen more men died in as many days, mostly the druzhina, though two of the Oathsworn had to be left, too stiff even to be laid out flat, arms broken so as to fold them on their breasts. Klepp Spaki, blowing on his fingers, tapped out the runes of their names on small squares of bone – Halli was one and the other was Throst Silfra. Both just lay down, patiently waiting for the sweet relief from the hunger and cold, the gentle frozen sleep as the white raven folded them in huge wings.
Throst’s closest oarmates, Tjorvir, Finnlaith and Ospak, threw some hacksilver into the shallow grave, then Finnlaith came to me, his wide face reddened with cold and buried in a tangled mass of cold-stiffened beard. His eyes were iced blue.
‘It seems to us three that Throst also knew of Thorkel’s treachery,’ he said, which was flat-out bold enough to make me blink. These were words for an Althing, where convention kept the speaker from being killed.
‘It is no surprise to us, then, that Odin took his luck,’ he went on levelly. ‘If more of those who came with Thorkel die, we want you to know, Jarl Orm, that it will be the wish of another god and not Odin’s curse on an oathbreaker.’
Then he nodded and stumped off, leaving it clear to me that, if I could trust no others, I could depend on those three at my back.
It was, I noted wryly to myself, good to know. There were fewer now who could truly be depended on, even among the Oathsworn. Bone, blood and steel were all brittle in the cold and even the binding fear of the wrath of Odin was cracking. They had taken enough and all of us, hugging our shivers to ourselves, wondered whether we would do the same as Throst, this day or the next, just lie down and let our heart stop and think ourselves winners of that bargain. Some, I knew, wondered whether to let matters get that far.
Then there was the sabre and the runes on it. I took to wearing it, wrapped in the bundle Martin had made of it, looped over my shoulder like a bow. Folk thought it was so it was handy for me to study the hilt, but the truth was that I just wanted it to look that way.
The truth was that the runes were useless, for we were coming down from the north and would have to reach Sarkel and track back to find Atil’s howe. It was a truth I did not want men who were dying to know.
We stuck Klepp’s runed squares on dead men’s tongues, in the hope that we would be able to identify them on the way back, for the wolves would dig them up from the shallow scrapings we rolled them into. There were a few who wondered if that was a waste of time and Klepp’s talents, sure we would never be back in the warm lap of summer to howe their bones up properly.
The wind won and the land changed, from glaring white to patched brown and then to limitless miles of dun-coloured earth, frozen solid and dusted with snow, thick in drifts here and there. Leafless trees, squatting in sullen clumps, brushed their skeletal fingers across an icicle sky and the wind rattled the frozen stalks of yellow grass like chattering teeth.
‘The whole world is ice,’ whimpered Jon Asanes that night, shivering close to anyone he could find – as we all did – and the dung fires. Anyone close scooped it up as the horses dropped it, sticking it inside their clothes to leach the warmth and stop it freezing too hard to burn later. But the fodder was running out; horses were eating less and shitting less. Those that were not dying.
‘This is nothing,’ answered Onund Hnufa. ‘I have hunted whales up where the ice forms mountains. I am an expert on ice.’
‘Aye,’ agreed Gizur, as if he had done the same, though he only wished he had.
‘It is a world of ice, up there in Bjarmaland,’ Onund went on, in a bass rumble like a mating seal. ‘Sea ice forms in autumn and early winter, out of the milk sea, which is thick with grit ground out of the land by the moving ice.
‘Fast ice is what we call ice that is anchored to land; it breaks up with tides in spring. Floes are large and flat bits of ice, like those tiles they make pictures with in the churches you spoke of, Trader. They are broken up by wind and wave and moved with the same.
‘Pack ice is formed from floes that herd like sheep and are crushed against each other. There is pack ice a hand’s breadth thick and more, yet which bends on waves, fitted to them like cloth.
‘Ice grows old, too, like people. You need to see that if you plan on taking a ship near it. Young ice is clear, a hand-width thick and brittle as stale bread – you can carve through that easily enough. First-year ice is as thick as a man is long and at two years it is thicker still, stands higher in the water, has small puddles and bare patches and is the colour of Olaf’s left eye. You sail far round that stuff if you are smart.’
Olaf smiled and winked his bluegreen eye to let everyone see what Onund meant. He had wandered over from Vladimir’s fire, attracted by the savoury smells from ours and offered a story for a bowl of what we had. He gulped and chewed it down even as it burned his lips.
‘Good,’ he said and then made the mistake of asking what it was.
‘Does it matter?’ Finn demanded with a grin, but the boy’s pinched face was unsmiling when he replied.
‘You have never been a thrall Finn Horsehead,’ he said, serious as plague. ‘It is never necessary to know what it is you are eating; it is, I have found, vital to know what it was.’
Grinning, Gyrth tossed him the frozen, bloodied paw of a deerhound. ‘That’s Other Dog,’ he said, rheum-throated with the cold. ‘Dog we ate yesterday.’
‘The oldest ice is thicker than two men, one standing on the other’s shoulders. It is sometimes as blue as the sky,’ Onund continued, in a voice heavy with heimthra, the longing for things that have been and are now lost, perhaps forever.
‘Enough ice talk,’ muttered Kvasir. ‘I am cold enough already.’
They called for Olaf’s story while I was marvelling at old humpbacked Onund, a man who had walked on a mountain of ice and saw that it had puddles and bare patches and was coloured bluegreen. Even the Great White did not bother him.
In the morning, after an hour of travel, the Khazar scouts came back, flogging their bone-thin horses into staggering runs towards us. They spoke urgently with Vladimir, who was perched on his horse like the white raven itself.
Later, warily, we came up on what the scouts had found; the remains of a couple of wadmal and felt tents, a
litter of snow-dusted debris; a saddle, brassware, a wooden bowl, a sword stuck in the earth and abandoned to rust, the hub of a wheel with a couple of spokes left in it. There were dead horses, thin steppe ponies sprawled on their sides, their legs stuck out straight like carved wooden toys that had fallen over.
And there were sharpened stakes, each with a head screaming frozen pain at us from rimed faces.
‘Anyone you know?’ asked Dobrynya, moving his horse to my side. There was no-one we recognized, though Gyrth hefted the sword and said: ‘This is a good north-made weapon, Jarl Orm.’
‘Lambisson’s men,’ Finn said, squinting at the signs of it. ‘This one has braids like Botolf – see. That’s the way the Svears and Slavs do them. It was said Lambisson had many Baltic Slavs with him.’
‘Horsemen took them by surprise, scattered them,’ added Avraham, pointing out the signs of it. ‘Probably they were in the rear of the column. Hard to say when this happened or where the rest of them went – the ground is too frozen. They were not after plunder, else that sword would not have been left.’
‘A day ago,’ Morut said, hunching himself into his furs. ‘Two, perhaps. The wolves have already been at these heads and the wounds are still raw, so were done when the flesh was unfrozen, which would be only a matter of hours, but there is no snow in the eye-sockets. There are three hoofprints showing the attackers went south. I could track them.’
‘Do so,’ ordered Dobrynya, then turned to Sigurd and me, while Avraham scowled at Morut for his cleverness.
‘Whoever attacked them may still be close,’ Dobrynya said. ‘We will close up and keep watch.’
The Man-Hater women, I wanted to say, but decided not to. I did not worry as much as he over it – those steppe ponies were proof that the women warriors were in as bad a condition as ourselves and, besides, Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter were so close now I could touch them if I shut my eyes and reached.
I shared this, quietly, with the rest of the Oathsworn, adding that the warrior-women might all be dead. I was thinking it would bring some cheer to the flames of the night’s fire as we kicked snow off the earth to let it breathe a little smoke and ash.
‘After all,’ I declared brightly, ‘if the buran didn’t kill them, then the trek to here would. They would have had less fodder for those ponies and I am thinking most of them are on foot, if they live at all.’
‘And a woman on foot,’ Gyrth Steinnbrodir beamed, ignoring the scowls from Thorgunna and her sister, ‘is an opportunity.’
Finn laughed, but you should never tempt the Norns. The next day, we stumbled over all our enemies at once.
TWELVE
We came upon a balka, one of those dried-out riverbeds that scar the steppe, but our eyes were fixed on the smoke. Wisps of it, scarring a milk-blue sky, marking a settlement and that meant warmth, shelter and food you did not have to carry under your armpit to be able to chew.
Avraham was out in front, on foot since he had woken to find his horse dead of cold and too frozen to be of use. He cursed the animal; if it had died during the day, when it could be seen, things would have been different.
Those nearest watched for such a moment, when all four legs buckled. Sometimes they would not even wait for a horse to die properly before they were on it, hacking out the warm meat and drinking the blood, flaying the hide off it before it froze. Even if the rider was one of the armoured druzhina he scrambled out of the way and quick, for people with knives – especially the likes of Thorgunna and Thordis – did not always see or care what they cut in their haste.
Morut was off tracking the Man-Haters and our only scout was now on foot, which is why we did not get enough warning. Not that it would have made much difference to us, with our minds dulled and what spark remained fixed on the smoke.
The riders whooped up and over the lip of the balka and whirred down on us like a flock of birds. I saw Skirla take an arrow and go down, shrieking, while the stunned druzhina guards were still trying to gather up reins and sort out weapons. Avraham knew better than to try to run and hunkered under his shield as they galloped past him and on to us.
They were women on horseback. They were the Man-Haters and that paralysed everyone as much as the cold and the surprise.
Howling, a strange wolf-yipping series of yowls, they cut daringly through the middle of us on their bony, half-staggering little steppe ponies. I hauled out my sword, cursed the fact that I had long ago packed my shield in a cart as being too much burden; a man without a sword is still a warrior, but one with no shield is just a target.
A druzhina warrior went backwards off his horse, which panicked and bolted, though it was too weak to run far. The arrow that skewered him through the middle of his face came from a shrieking Valkyrie, braids flying, tattoos writhing in the snarl of her long-skulled face as she kicked and turned her shaggy pony towards me, fishing another shaft out.
She was, I was sure, one who could nick the eye out of a gnat at four hundred paces from the back of a full galloping horse and I was a dead man.
Gyrth swept past me, his swathe of cloaks and wadmal wrappings flapping like some huge bird as he lumbered. He paused, swept up the fallen man’s big shield and took the woman’s arrow in it – the one aimed at me. The shunk of it hitting was a clap of thunder.
Then he ran at the horse. Straight at it, shield up and roaring, the boss smacking the animal on the left shoulder, the rim clattering it in the teeth as he bellowed and shoved.
The horse went over in a screaming flail of limbs and the woman, fast and agile, leaped free, rolled and came up, spitting and snarling like a cat. She whipped round to face Gyrth, who was rolling about like a loose barrel and trying to avoid the animal’s wildly flying hooves.
She went for him, but Finn was already there. She screamed and hacked and he brought the big heavy sword up, so that her little curved sabre spanged off it with a shower of sparks.
As Gyrth clambered heavily to his feet and the horse kicked itself back upright, snorting and rolling-eyed, Finn cut down, a chopping stroke that she met with the edge of her blade. It rang like a bell, even as it turned his stroke, but the shock of it ran back up her arm to her numbed fingers, tearing the sword from her grasp.
She howled then, all slaver and frustrated anger and even as I closed in on her I saw no fear in her at all. Then another shape loomed, sliding through the confusion and spraying snow, a dazzle to the eyes.
It was a golden horse. Not yellow. Metallic and sheened as if moulded from a single block of polished brass, it pranced between the warrior woman and us, made more splendid by the shaggy steppe ponies it moved through.
I gawped; the woman hurled herself up and back on to her own plunging steppe pony, while the big, gold-gleaming horse danced majestically between us, blowing twin streams out of its scarlet-edged nose. The rider was a silhouette above me, hair black and flying like snakes. I gawped. Something shone in an upraised hand and came down like a scythe of light; Finn yelled a warning.
I put up the big sword, felt the kick of it as it took the blow, heard the high ting of it shattering. The gold horse, high-stepping and snorting, swung sideways and its huge rump slammed into me, into the hand I put up feebly to stop it.
I went over backwards, arse over shoulders, a whirl of sky and snow with my only thought being that it had been warm. The gold horse had been warm and damp to the touch.
When I had sorted myself out, the golden horse was gone.
The women were gone. Only the moans and shouts they had caused were left.
‘Odin’s arse, Orm,’ Finn yelled, scrambling to my side. ‘I thought you were dead then, for sure.’
I got up, slowly. Finn looked at the splintered remains of my sword. He whistled admiringly.
‘Some blow to have broken that good blade,’ he muttered and I looked at it, the hilt in my hand. It did not seem to belong to me, neither the jagged stump of sword nor even the hand.
‘You are bleeding,’ Gyrth said, coming up on my left and I l
ooked, bewildered, at the watery smear of blood soaking my mittened palm.
‘Not mine,’ I remembered, as it rushed in like a mad tide on the turn. ‘The horse. The gold horse …’
‘Aye,’ gasped Jon Asanes, dashing up. ‘Did you see that beast? Gleaming as a gold dirham, right enough. Like an amulet on a thong.’
‘He saw it, right enough,’ replied Gyrth, heaving for breath and chuckling with the exultation that always comes when you find yourself alive at the end of a fight. ‘He almost had his head up its arse.’
We laughed, whooping and gasping, skeins of drool freezing the edges of our mouths. I stopped before they did, for I had remembered the rider, with her black hair like snakes writhing. And the sword, that scything sabre of light. My belly churned and I asked Finn if he had seen her.
He nodded, then held up one finger. ‘Do not say it, young Orm. Do not. It was just a woman on a fancy horse, no more. Hild is dead. Long dead. Do not bring her back to life. Not now.’
‘So this was just a woman?’ I demanded, my fear swelling the anger in me. ‘With a runesword like my own, that can shatter good northern steel?’
‘Fuck you, Orm,’ Finn said, furiously rubbing his face and beard with one hand, a sign that he was truly confused and angry. ‘Fuck your mother, too. It is not Hild. Hild is DEAD, Bear Slayer. Years since. You saw her die in Atil’s tomb.’
I said nothing, sick with a confusion of fear and possibility, my thoughts of gulls that shrieked and swooped and would not stay still to be looked at.
‘That was a horse,’ Avraham declared, appearing into the middle of this, all unknowing and uncaring. ‘A heavenly horse, no less. I never thought to see one.’
‘A what?’ demanded Ospak. Behind him, keening started as Hekja found the body of Skirla. They had been thralled together almost as babes, that pair and had been with Thorgunna and Thordis for as long.
‘A heavenly horse, from far to the east,’Avraham said, jerking me away from the wailing women. ‘They are sheened like metal when they sweat, yellow as brass and are so highly prized they are worth their weight in gold. Those steppe heathens say they sometimes sweat blood, too, which is the mark of what passes for their heaven.’
