The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

‘The shepherd said the fox was no nephew to him but asked him what he desired and the fox answered: “Not much, only a bite out of your leg. That will be enough for me.”’

  ‘Ha – even that seems tasty to me,’ shouted a black-browed Slav and those of us who had known oarmates to have done such a thing once shifted uncomfortably and said nothing at all.

  ‘The shepherd stretched out his leg,’ Olaf went on. ‘Just as the fox was about to sink his teeth into it, the shepherd barked. The fox jumped back, asking: “Who made that noise?” The shepherd shrugged: “What do you care? Take your bite and be done with it.” The fox cocked his head cunningly. “Oh, no. I will not come near you before you tell me who made that noise.”

  ‘The shepherd sighed. “In that case, I will tell you. This winter in the village we had nothing to eat. And then my sheepdog had two puppies. Well … I was so hungry, I ate them. Now the pups have grown up in my stomach. I am thinking they smell you and want to get at you, so they are barking.”

  ‘The fox got even more frightened but he would not show it. He said with dignity: “I would have no trouble handling your pups. But I must run and see the wolf on some urgent business. Hold back your sheepdogs for a while. When I come back, I will teach them such a lesson that they will never attack foxes again.”

  ‘The shepherd smiled. “Be quick,” he said.

  ‘And the fox went streaking off into the woods, happy to get away with his life. After he caught his breath, he set out to look for the wolf and said to him: “Well, cousin – I saved your life when you were frightened of the shepherd and you made a promise.”

  ‘The wolf howled, a long howl. “What promise?” he growled. “I am no cousin to you. I am the jarl-king of these woods. Who dares to say that I was frightened?” He raised his paw to strike the fox down – who ran off before such a thing could happen, thinking to himself: “There is no gratitude in this world.”

  ‘Then the fox slunk into his hole to teach his children to stay away from men and wolves both.’

  ‘Aye, true enough,’ Red Njal agreed. ‘The cod who swims with sharks is swiftly eaten, as my granny said.’

  ‘Heya,’ muttered Gizur, ‘I hope you are friendly enough with men and wolves to get away with that insulting saga, little Prince Olaf.’

  ‘And gods,’ added Onund Hnufa meaningfully.

  ‘With shepherds only,’ answered Crowbone and some laughed, though it was forced. They still did not know how to read the runes of this boy.

  Into the gentle warmth of this stepped a large, dark figure – Kveldulf, his bearded jaw thrust out challengingly and a scowl between his brows.

  ‘I am the last of Klerkon’s men,’ he declared, glancing at little Crowbone. ‘I am known as Kveldulf and noted as a shapechanging berserker. It comes to me that you are short-handed and could use a good man.’

  This was right enough, but I did not like or trust Kveldulf and did not want him in the Oathsworn. Crowbone’s face was stiff and not all of it was cold; his eyes glittered, one ice, the other dark fire. I remembered that Kveldulf had been Klerkon’s man and wondered what had passed between them when Crowbone was a thrall there.

  ‘True enough,’ I said, ‘but we are the Oathsworn. You may have heard of us and the oath we take. Can you take it and keep it?’

  ‘I am known all over Smalland as a man of my word,’ he replied, angry at the hard sneer from me.

  Crowbone cleared the choke from his throat, which turned all heads.

  ‘Just so,’ he said, in a voice thin as an axe edge. ‘You promised me I would never see my mother again, the second time I ran off. True enough, I never have.’

  The wind hissed into the silence that followed that, until I forced myself to speak.

  ‘What skills have you that we might need?’ I asked Kveldulf.

  He blinked at that. ‘I have said. I am known as a shapechanger and berserker. A killer am I. A serious jarl would welcome me.’

  That was insulting and I felt the burn of anger. It was a surprise, that feeling, for it made me realize how much the cold had seeped in to the centre of me and numbed a great deal.

  ‘Not known to me,’ I said careless of insulting this man’s fame, which was a dangerous business. ‘Nor have I seen you bite a shield, for all the fighting we have done so far.’

  ‘I was not well during the fight at the village,’ he admitted, at which Finn gave a snort of laughter. Kveldulf curled a lip at him.

  ‘I am well enough now to show those with no respect some manners. I have heard that the way into the Oathsworn is to fight one already in it.’

  I felt Finn bristle and wanted none of this – wanted none of Kveldulf.

  ‘Times are harsh and we are fewer,’ I said. ‘I have chosen a new way.’

  Men leaned forward, curious now and not having heard of this. It would have been hard, since I had just thought of it and I blame the cold and the weight of events for making me savagely reckless.

  I held up my left hand, swathed in a leather glove, which was still stiffened with rime. If I had not been at the fire there would have been a mitten over it.

  ‘How many fingers do you see?’

  He blinked, then grinned, clearly thinking this was a formality and no more.

  ‘Five, of course.’

  I bent the stiff, empty sockets of the glove and those who knew I only had two fingers and a thumb on that hand chuckled. Kveldulf’s scowl returned, more thunderous than ever.

  Kvasir laughed, loud and hard.

  ‘There are stones with more clever in them,’ he said. ‘Jarl Orm should get one of them to swear to the Oathsworn.’

  ‘Heya,’ rumbled Gyrth, smiling. I felt only the hot rush of shame, for it had not been right to smack Kveldulf so hard with words, him who blinked with the effort of understanding.

  Kveldulf, trembling like water on the brink of spilling, finally spun round and lumbered into the dark, Finn’s savage chuckles goading him. Slowly, conversation resumed but I sat silent, aware of disapproval across the fire.

  Eventually, Thorgunna gave a snort. ‘The hasty tongue sings its own mishap if it be not bridled in,’ she intoned.

  ‘You sound like Red Njal’s granny,’ I answered, trying to make light of it. ‘Or my foster-mother.’

  ‘You never had same, it seems to me,’ she replied tartly, ‘for she would surely have taught you to be kinder.’

  Which was a tongue-cut too deep and Kvasir put a hand on her elbow to still her.

  ‘Look where we all are, Jarl Orm,’ Thordis interrupted, leaning forward so that the fire glittered her eyes. ‘Here, in this place. Following you to an uncertain doom. If your wyrd is upon you, it is right we should speak. There are more lives at risk here than you know.’

  That smacked up memories of Einar, too harsh for me to take easily and the hackles rose on me.

  ‘Do you want Kveldulf? Take him and welcome – but I do not want him at my back …’

  Then it struck me, what she had said and I stopped, gaping. I looked from her to Finn and back. Finn looked stricken and Thordis chuckled at his dismay.

  ‘Not me, Horsehead … not yet.’

  Thorgunna, swaddled in a cloak, raised her head. ‘I am not alone.’

  It was the way we announced it in the north and Kvasir had clearly known of his wife’s condition for some time, since he did not even stir at this. I did, more than a few times. Jon Asanes laughed; Red Njal and others swapped the news, which sprang from head to head like a spark whirling from a fire.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  It was a question a rock would have asked and her sheep-dropping eyes raked me with silent scorn.

  ‘Even with the cold and the lack of food I can tell when life quickens in me, Jarl Orm,’ she snapped. ‘Anyway, I slept with an egg and lopped off the far end next morning. By the yolk, it will be a boy.’

  I sat back a little, looking from her to Kvasir, feeling that, somehow, they had conspired against me. One of the big Slavs – the same who had sworn he co
uld eat someone’s leg – growled, ‘An egg,’ in a tone that wanted to know where she had got such a prize.

  ‘So you see, Trader,’ Thordis went on, ignoring all this, ‘why we are concerned.’

  I did and felt twice as ashamed as before, had to shake my head to clear it.

  ‘The words were hasty,’ I admitted, ‘the reason was sound. What’s done is done. The unwise man is awake all night and ponders everything over; when morning comes he is weary in mind and all is a burden as ever.’

  ‘As your foster-mother used to say,’ added Red Njal. ‘She knew my granny, I am thinking.’

  This last was greeted with chuckles; talk resumed, low and soft round the fire. But I could not take my eyes from Thorgunna, kept flicking back to her, wondering about the life there, marvelling at it happening at all in this place, fearing it at the same time.

  I had women and youths enough to crush me with the worrying. Now the unborn were weighing my shoulders, even before they sucked in their first breath.

  FIFTEEN

  I stood on the back of a dun-coloured whale breaching a frozen sea and stared into the maw of its blowhole, listening to Finn and Kvasir and the others scoffing at me for having failed to recognize the place when I had seen it from the edge of the frozen lake.

  We came to it down a slick of cold tragedy, each rimed droplet a huddle of stiff, jutting limbs and fleeing scavengers.

  Little Morut led the way, waiting patiently for us now and then, stopping to feed his rib-thin horse on chopped straw mixed with animal fat. I admired the little Khazar, in the same way I had admired the Bedu who tracked so easily over the Serkland deserts and for the same reasons. Even Finn offered a nod to the little man while Avraham, that noble Khazar Jew, had scorn and relief chasing each other across his face like fox and chicken.

  It was Morut who pointed out the splendid golden horse, no longer glowing, its limbs stuck out like a wooden carving and that glorious coat now sheened with ice. Wolves slunk from it when we came up, red-muzzled and thin, though they did not go far. They dropped to their bellies on the frozen, stiff-grassed steppe and waited, paws crossed, for us to go away. Patient as stones, Odin’s hounds, for they had put in a lot of work on the beasts and men littering the area; there were no soft parts to start gnawing on an ice-bound corpse.

  ‘A waste,’ mourned Avraham and those coming staggering and shuffling up in time to hear his words, nodded and grunted agreement – except that the Khazar was not talking of the dead men, but of the golden horse.

  Morut merely grunted scornfully, which gained him a withering look from Avraham. Curious, little Vladimir asked the tracker what he meant by it.

  The tracker indicated the once-splendid horse and then looked as his own rag-maned, shaggy mount. ‘They are the same,’ he said with a grin. ‘Turkmen horses. But the Blood-Sweating Horse is too fine for this place, while my little one is trained for it.’

  ‘Can you train a horse for this?’ asked Thorgunna, who was eyeing the rimed litter with a look I knew well. She and Thordis could teach wolves about scavenging.

  Morut nodded as men moved among the bodies, though they gave up trying to plunder them when it became clear they were were frozen to the steppe, or each other.

  ‘It will kill two out of five who undergo it,’ he admitted and, horsebreeder that I was, I reckoned at once this was only possible with the possession of an unlimited number of animals costing next to nothing to keep.

  ‘Pick out a likely one, rising seven or eight,’ Morut said, feeding another handful of fat and chopped straw to his mount. ‘Before that age no horse should be selected for such training, which is for war and raiding, after all.

  ‘You load a saddle with a sack of earth or sand, at first only the weight of a rider but gradually increased for eight days, until the horse carries the weight of two steppe riders – about one of you big northers with your mail and all your weapons to hand. As the weight grows, the horse’s ration of food and water is lessened. He is trotted and walked six or seven miles daily.

  ‘After the first eight days you gradually make him lighter over another eight days – still, however, decreasing the food. When the load has gone completely, you give him two or three days of absolutely nothing at all, simply tightening the girth at intervals.’

  ‘By which time,’ growled Avraham, poking a foot under a corpse and trying to wrench it from the ice, ‘you have killed him.’

  ‘One like that Heavenly Horse, yes,’ agreed Morut. ‘And those you rode for the great Bek’s army. But not this one.’

  ‘What do you call your marvellous horse?’ asked Crowbone in a thin piping query from the crowd – then held up one hand and waved the answers away before the scorn crashed on him. You did not give a name to something you might have to eat.

  ‘I should be grateful, then,’ he muttered, ‘that I have a name.’

  Morut, still grinning, went on talking while we moved among the litter of gear and wreckage and dead, his voice like soothing balm on that bruise of horror.

  ‘About the twentieth day you work him until he sweats, unsaddle him and pour buckets of ice-cold water all over him, from head to tail. Stake him, all wet, to a peg on the open steppe, allow him to graze, giving him, every day, a little more rope for seven or eight days, after which you turn him loose to run with the herd as usual.

  ‘A horse that has undergone this discipline is a valuable animal and a fortune to a man, being able to travel almost continuously for four or five days together, with only a handful of fodder once in every half-day and a drink of water once in a long day.’

  He stroked the whiskered muzzle of the unassuming beast. I vowed then to have Morut and his horse-skills back in Hestreng.

  ‘Perhaps these men should have undergone something of the same,’ growled Hlenni Brimill, jutting his chin at the dead as he stamped his feet against the cold.

  ‘No dead Man-Haters here,’ noted Ref. ‘Either they suffered no loss, or carried their dead away.’

  ‘No plunder taken, either,’ growled Gyrth and we all stared at the men, still in their helms and their mail, all white with ice.

  ‘Perhaps these amazonia did not have the stomach for it, being only women,’ Jon Asanes noted and Kveldulf’s hawk and spit answer to that made the boy flush with anger. No-one spoke up for him, all the same, for Kveldulf had the right of it; it wasn’t stomach the women lacked, but strength to waste. For the same reason, we left those dead untouched and unburied, but not because we were squeamish about breaking limbs to straighten them for burial – what was that to the dead?

  It was the strength we grudged. As Onund pointed out to Jon as we shuffled away, a man can make himself a shelter and sleep out a three-day blizzard provided he has not exhausted himself beforehand. It is exhaustion that turns such a snow-wrapped, snug sleep into death. What would be the point of struggling to gain plunder we could not carry, or waste energy digging a shallow grave that the wolves would scratch out an hour after we had vanished over the milk-white horizon?

  So we kept our strength to stumble down the frozen scree of a slope to the great bowl in the earth which held a frozen lake and an island in the middle. An island so shaped that it looked like the back of a whale breaching a sea. An island with a huddle of six carts and a hole on it.

  It took me a while to work it out, as we staggered down to where the survivors of Lambisson’s party had chipped out the lip of the iced lake’s bank down to a level where they could struggle carts over it to the island.

  Here was where Finn and Short Eldgrim had hauled me out of the brown, roiling water that first time. Down there, locked somewhere in the ice, lay the bones of Wryneck, Long Eldgrim, Sighvat and the others. This was the place, right enough – we had just come up on it from another direction, in another season, and seven years difference. It came to me then that I had no need of the runed sabre.

  The weight of that was crushing; we had slid and staggered across half Serkland in pursuit of this sabre. Men had died and gone ma
d to hunt down this weapon and the only reason for it was the secret I had marked on it. Yet, now, it seemed, I could have spun myself in a circle nine times nine out on the Great White and still walked to this place with my eyes closed, dragged by Odin, or the fetch of Hild. Or both.

  I looked at Finn and he looked back at me, grinning from his cold-split lips. If he thought of the uselessness of the sabre on my back, he did not show or say it, merely wiped the blood from his cracked mouth and said:

  ‘Here we are again, then, young Orm.’

  I shuffled across the stippled, snowdrifted ice, the others following me, then stepped on to ironiced land, up to where the hole lay.

  For, of course, this was no island.

  It was the roof of Attila’s tomb.

  We found Hrolf Ericsson, called Fiskr lying in one of the carts and the last of Lambisson’s men left alive on the island. He was called Fiskr – Fish – because he had once swum ashore in a storm with a line in his teeth and fastened his ship to the land, so saving everyone in the crew. Many of us knew him well and were happy enough to find him alive, even if he was on the wrong side.

  ‘I should have stayed on the land,’ he moaned to Bjaelfi, as the healer rooted among the salves and balms he had secreted all about him. ‘Getting back on a boat only took me to Birka and trouble.’

  ‘You should have kept off the land,’ Bjaelfi offered grimly, ‘that way, you would not be looking at losing most of your toes and a bit of your nose from the cold rot.’

  ‘At least you have a rich bed,’ Sigurd noted. ‘And a nose is nothing much to mourn over.’

  Hrolf Fiskr laughed, for he lay wrapped in ragged wool cloaks and furs on a huddle of silver, looted from the tomb. Three carts were loaded with the stuff and the men whooped and scrabbled, plucking age-blackened ewers and bashed bowls and litters of coins until Sigurd and Dobrynya had to roar and bellow at them to leave it alone.

  Lambisson, said Hrolf Fiskr, was down in the tomb and had been, perhaps for days – it was hard to know for sure, since Fiskr admitted he had been sleeping for a time, until the fever he had broke. There had been others with Lambisson down in the howe, loading silver in a bucket and hauling it up through the hole, but that had stopped three days ago and nothing had been heard since. Everyone had come up but Lambisson.