by Robert Low
An hour later, at the lip of a great scar of balka, the axle pin on a cart snapped and the wheel came off. Ref Steinsson took an axe and the handle of another and fashioned a new pin with delicate, skilled strokes, while men heaved and strained to unload the cart then lift it and put the wheel on again.
Red Njal, crimson with effort, looked up at me, then to where Olaf stood, a quiet smile on his face.
‘Shite,’ said Red Njal, bitterly accusing and I shrugged. If this was as bad as it got …
‘Heya, Trader – look at that.’
Hauk Fast-Sailor, arms full of bundle from the unloaded cart, nodded across the steppe with his chin.
‘The djinn, Trader – remember them?’
I remembered them, and the little Bedu tribesman Aliabu telling us of the invisible demons who could never touch the earth, whose passing was marked by the swirl of dust and sand. For a moment, the memory of Serkland heat was glorious.
The snow swirled up in an ice crystal dance. Those who had never fared farther from home than this – most of these new Oathsworn, it came to me – gawped both at the dance of it and at Hauk and me, realizing now just how far-travelled we were, to have seen djinn in the Serkland desert
‘I did not know the djinn were here, too,’ Hauk said, grunting with the effort of moving the bundles. ‘Lots of them, it seems.’
I did not like it and did not know why. Snow curled in little eddies and rose in the air, dragging my eyes up to a pewter sky and the figure flogging a staggering horse towards us and yelling something we could not hear.
Work stopped; the wheel was on, but the pin still had to be hammered in and all eyes turned on the horse and rider, the frantic fever of them soaking unease into us.
It was Morut the tracker, shouting as he came up, his voice suddenly whipped towards us by the wind.
‘The buran is here!’
We had just enough time to find shelter. Just enough before it pounced on us, hard as the lash of a whip, a scour of ice that shrieked like frustrated Valkyries.
We unhitched the ponies and dragged and pushed them down the V-shaped balka, taller than three men and so steep that most of us went down it on our arses. Those too slow were moaning in agony at the barbs of flying ice; horses screamed, flanks bloodied by it. We huddled, people and beasts together, while the world screamed in white fury.
Light danced like laughter on the water, the sea creamed round the skerries and a drakkar bustled with life on the edge of a curve of beach. I watched the boy stand in the lee of the ship, up to his calves in cold water, clutching a bundle and his uncertainty tight to himself, his shoes round his neck.
Someone leaned from the boat, yelled angrily at him. Someone else thrust out a helping hand and he took it, was pulled aboard. The drakkar oars came out, dipped and sparkled; the dragon walked down the fjord.
Me. It was me, leaving Bjornshafen with Einar the Black and the Oathsworn on board the Fjord Elk. I was young …
‘Fifteen,’ said the one-eyed man. He was tall and under the blue, night-dark cloak he exuded a strength that spoke of challenges mastered. Little of his body showed, other than a hand, gloved and clutching a staff.
His single eye, peering like a rat from the smoked curl of hair framing his face, shaded by the brim of the broad hat he wore, was blue as a cloudless sky and piercing. I knew him.
‘All Father,’ I said and he chuckled. One Eye, Greybeard, the Destroyer, The Furious One. Frenzy.
Odin.
‘Part of him and all of that,’ he answered. He nodded at the scene, which wavered and swirled as if the sudden wind ruffled it, like the reflection in a pool.
‘The White Christ priest with Gudleif,’ he said and I saw the head on a pole, a head which had once been Gudleif, the man who had raised me as a fostri. Caomh, the Irisher thrall who had once been a priest – always a priest, he used to say – stood beside the horror Einar had created and watched us row away.
‘Bjornshafen was woven together after Gudleif’s sons died and the White Christ priest did it, so that they are all followers of the One God now.’
He said it bitterly, this Father of the Aesir. Why did he permit this White Christ, this Jesus from the soft south? He was Odin, after all …?
‘We wear what the Norns weave, even gods,’ he answered. ‘The old Sisters grow weary, want to lay down their loom, perhaps, and can only do that when the line of the Yngling kings is ended.’
It was a long line. Crowbone, great-grandson for Harald Fairhair, was part of it. Did the Norns seek to kill him, too?
One-Eye said nothing, which annoyed me. You would think a god would know something about such matters, about such a rival as the Christ.
He grunted with annoyance. ‘I know enough to know that enough is not yet enough. I know enough to know what I may not do and that is true wisdom.’
Something rumbled, thunder deep and a grey wedge pushed forward from shadows. Amber in stone, the eyes looked me over and the steam from its grey muzzle flickered as the wolf licked the god’s gloved hand.
‘See, Freki,’ said One Eye, ‘she is coming back.’
In the wind, a shredded blackness fought forward, descending in starts and jumps until it thumped on his shoulder. The black, unwinking eye regarded me briefly, then it bent and nibbled One Eye’s ear, while he nodded.
Munin, who flies the world and remembers everything inside that tiny feathered skull, returning to the ear of All Father Odin with a beak like a carving of ebony, whispering of slights and wrongs and warriors for Valholl still unslain. I felt no fear, which was strange enough to make me realize this was the dreamworld of the Other.
‘So it is,’ answered One Eye, as if I had spoken. ‘And you want to know what will happen. That, of course, is in the hands of the Norns.’
‘Silver,’ I said and, though there was a whole babble of words, of questions that should have come from me, that seemed to be enough and he nodded.
‘Silver,’ he replied. ‘They can weave even that, the Sisters, but they weave blind and in the dark, which helps me. The silver has to be cursed, of course, otherwise it will not work for this weaving.’
I understood nothing.
‘Ask this, Orm Gunnarsson – what is silver worth?’ rumbled the voice.
Farms and ships, warriors and women … everything.
‘More,’ agreed One Eye. ‘And that Volsung hoard, the one they gave to Atil is a king’s gift. A cursed gift. My gift.’
And what does the god want in return? What could a god possibly want that did not already have? Warriors for the final battle? If so, all he had to do was kill us.
One Eye chuckled. ‘There are more wars than you know and the battles in them last a long time. This one I have been fighting since before the days of Hild’s mother’s grandmother’s grandmother, back to the first one of that line. Remember this, when all seems darkest, Orm Trader – the gift I give is the one I get. What you are, I am also.’
I did not understand that and did not need to say so – but he had spoken of Hild. The one eye glittered as he looked at me, amused and knowing.
‘The first of her line was the spear thrown over the head of the White Christ priests to tell them a fight was on,’ he said and left me none the wiser. He chuckled, a turning millwheel in his throat, and added: ‘You have to hang nine nights on the World Tree for wisdom, boy.’
The raven, Munin, spread tattered wings and launched itself into the air. We watched it go, then One Eye grunted, as if his back bothered him, or he needed his supper.
‘He goes to find his white brother and bring him home – Fimbulwinter is not on us yet and he has shaken enough pinfeathers.’
The blue eye turned to the amber of a wolf even as I watched it and I felt no fear at it, only curiosity to see All Father shapechange, for that was his nature, to be neither one thing nor the other and never to he trusted fully because of it.
‘That is one knowing you take from this place back to the world,’ he rumbled, his voice deepe
ning. ‘The second is that One Eye will force a sacrifice from you and it will be something you hold dear.’
The wind shrieked and the snow drove in like white oblivion, stinging my eyes and driving me to my knees.
But I was not afraid, for this was not Fimbulwinter …
‘That’s a fucking comfort right enough, Trader,’ said the voice in my ear, ‘but not to those still buried to their oxters in snow.’
Hands hauled me upright, shook me until my eyes rattled and opened. Light streamed in. Light and the sear of cold air, as if I had stopped breathing entirely. Onund Hnufa, a great lumbering walrus, peered into my face from his iced-over tangle of moustache and gave a satisfied grunt.
‘Good. You will live – now help the others and stop babbling about Fimbulwinter.’
We kicked and dug them out. Snow mounds shifted and broke apart; people growled and gasped their way back into the living light of day.
Fifteen were dead, ten of them thralls, among them Hekja. Thorgunna and Thordis, pinch-faced and blue, clung to each other and made sure the tears did not freeze their eyes shut.
Three of the druzhina were also dead and two of Klerkon’s men, which left one alive, the large snub-nosed Smallander Kveldulf, Night Wolf, dark and feral under a dusting of ice. He and Crowbone glared at each other and I saw, in that moment, that Kveldulf was more afraid than the boy.
‘That was a harsh wind,’ noted Hauk Fast-Sailor.
‘If it had not been for the timely warning, it would have been harsher still,’ growled Gyrth, slogging heavily up through the snow which lay hock-deep in the V of the balka. His tattered furs trailed behind him like tails.
‘Worth an armring,’ I said, turning to Morut, who was grinning into the tangle of lines his journey had ploughed into his face. ‘Which I promise when I can get it off my arm in the warm.’
He acknowledged it with a bow and then turned his grin on the scowling Avraham.
‘See? I have returned, as I said I would,’ he declared. ‘The steppe cannot kill me and I hear you have been seeking a way across the Great White, you who could not find your prick with both hands.’
Avraham, eyes ringed in violet in a face blue-white, had not the strength to answer, nor hide his relief that Morut was back.
Led by the little tracker, we hauled the horses down the balka to where it shallowed and opened out into a great expanse of opaque ice, tufted with rimed grass and across which the new snow of the buran drifted in a hissing wind. This let us backtrack to where the carts were, but so many horses were dead that a score of carts were abandoned and anything that could be was left with them.
No horses remained for the druzhina and even little Vladimir was on foot now. Cleverest of us all were Thorgunna and Thordis, who had the frozen horse carcasses chopped up and loaded on to a cart, with the smashed-up wood from several others. Now we had food and wood to cook it with, even if Finn said he was hard put to decide which of the two items would be more tasty.
‘I thought you could make anything tasty,’ Thorgunna chided, her wind-scoured cheeks like apples as she smiled and Finn humphed with mock annoyance, staring with a rheumy eye at one stiff, hacked off pony haunch.
‘You boil it in a good cauldron with one of its own horseshoes,’ he growled. ‘It will be tasty when the shoe is soft.’
The rest of the carts we burned that night, making camp there and hauling out the large cooking kettles to boil more meat in, as much as we could. Horseshoe or not, we had heat and full bellies that night, enough to stitch us together again. We, who seemed set to die this day or the next, even started to talk about what lay ahead.
‘Another storm like that will end us,’ growled Red Njal and little Prince Vladimir scowled at his elbow, for we were all one sorry band now, leaching the same heat from the same fire.
‘We will succeed,’ he piped and no-one spoke until Morut fell to telling us of his journey.
He had tracked the Man-Haters a long way, down a balka filled with ice to a big frozen lake with an island. All the way, he had come upon ruined carts, dead horses and dead men; those of Lambisson. He had seen no women, though – but the brass-coloured horse, he said, was dead of cold and hunger, as were others that were clearly steppe ponies. Avraham groaned at the loss of the heavenly horse.
That, I offered up, was a good sign, for surely now it meant all the Man-Haters had died. Save one, I thought to myself, for you cannot kill the fetch who owned that sheened horse, or swung the twin of my sabre. I had not planned to say anything, but reached up one hand to touch the rag-wrapped bundle of the sabre on my back and caught Finn’s knowing eye across the fire.
He growled and would have spat his disgust, save that he was nestling Thordis in the crook of his arm and thought better of it.
‘There’s no Hild-fetch, Trader,’ he said. ‘That bitch-tick is long dead.’
He knew I did not believe him and I looked for Kvasir to take my shieldless side in this argument, but he was wrapped in the arms of Thorgunna and asleep.
‘Well, at least I know it isn’t Fimbulwinter,’ I offered them. Then I told them of my dream. A few, Gyrth among them, simply shrugged; they wanted to say that it was only a dream brought on by a dunt on the head, but kept their chapped lips together out of politeness to me. Others, though, were stronger in their belief.
‘A witching form often brings the wise,’ Red Njal declared, ‘as my granny used to say. It seems to me that Trader Orm has just made a good deal with Odin.’
He beamed, but Finn had the look of man more concerned that his jarl talked with gods in his dreams, while Klepp Spaki was interested in the riddle, but added that thinking it out was like trying to row into a headwind.
‘A sea-farer at last, are we?’ growled Hauk, though he grinned when he said it. Klepp, who had discovered he had no legs or stomach for the sea, acknowledged his lack with a rueful smile.
Finn eventually growled that there was nothing much about my visit with AllFather and I did not know whether to be relieved or angry at that.
‘After all,’ he went on, ‘it has told nothing more than we know already – even that part about a sacrifice of something held dear. Odin always wants something expensive draining lifeblood on an altar. It might even be me, since I took the valknut sign after the vow I made in the pit prison in Novgorod.’
‘In return for what?’ asked Sigurd, his silver nose gleaming in the firelight. Finn shifted uncomfortably, looking at little Prince Vladimir; what he had wished for was the death of that little prince and thought he had got it, too, when we heard the bells ring out.
Of course, it was the boy’s father who had died and Finn simply put that difference down to not being specific with a shapechanger such as Odin – but we had still been got out of the prison. The memory let me save Finn’s face.
‘To be free of the prison,’ I offered up, smooth as new silk. Finn nodded eagerly and thanked me with his eyes. Vladimir frowned, considering the answer; he had an unhealthy interest in comparing the advantages of different gods.
‘I am thinking,’ piped up a voice, ‘that the reason men give offerings to Thor is because he is less likely to betray them than AllFather Odin.’
All heads swung to Crowbone, sitting hunched in his cloak and blooded by firelight.
‘What do you know of the betrayal of gods?’ asked Gyrth curiously and those who knew Crowbone’s early life stirred and wished he had never voiced the question.
Little Olaf favoured Gyrth with his lopsided look and cleared his throat.
‘I know the treachery of gods and men both,’ he said and brought one hand out of his cloak to take a twig and poke the fire so that sparks flew and the flames licked up. Few men wanted to back away from it, all the same, even though their hair was scorching, for we all knew we would be a long time cold after this.
‘There once was a shepherd,’ he said and there was a whisper like sparks round the fire, the relish and apprehension of a tale from Olaf.
‘It was at the end
of a deep and dark winter, almost as bad as this one. He brought his sheep into the field to find some grazing and sat down under a tree to rest. Suddenly a wolf came out of the woods. A lord of wolves, it was, with a ruff as white as emperor salt and a winter-hunger that had his chops dripping.’
‘I know that hunger well,’ interrupted a voice and was shushed to silence.
‘The shepherd picked up his spear and jumped up,’ Crowbone went on. ‘The wolf was just about to spring at the man when he saw the spear and thought better of it, for it had a fine, silver head and he did not like the idea of a shepherd with so clever a weapon. They stared at each other and neither dared to make the first move.
‘At that moment, a fox came running by. He saw that the wolf and the shepherd were afraid of each other and decided to turn the situation to his own advantage. He ran up to the wolf and said: “Cousin, there is no reason to be afraid of a man. Jump on him, get him down and have a good meal.”
‘The wolf eyed him with an amber stare and said: “You are cunning, right enough, but you have no brains. Look at him – he has a silver spear, which is surely magical. He will stab me and that will be the end of me. Be off with your stupid advice.”
‘The fox thought for a moment, then said: “Well, if that is the way of it, I will go and ask him not to stab you. What will you give me if I save you?”
‘The wolf told him he could have anything he asked for, so the fox ran to the shepherd and said: “Uncle shepherd, why are you standing here? The wolf wants to make a meal of you. I just persuaded him to wait a while. What will you give me if I save you?”
‘And the shepherd promised: “Anything you ask.” The fox ran to the wolf and said: “Cousin, you will have a long life and sire many cubs – I have persuaded the shepherd not to stab you. Hurry up and run now before he changes his mind. I will see you later.”
‘The wolf turned and leaped away as fast as he could – which, in truth, he could have done at any time but for his fear. The fox came back to the shepherd, saying: “Uncle shepherd, you did not forget your promise?”
