by Robert Low
‘What of Thorgunna?’ I asked and the little tracker nodded miserably.
‘They left his body on the steppe,’ he said, ‘and Kveldulf took the eyes and put them in a pouch on his belt, saying he would add Finn’s remaining ear to them in time and that, if Thor permitted, he would perhaps make a whole new person out of pieces of the Oathsworn of Orm Bear Slayer.’
He stopped and considered me carefully, then added: ‘He said the final piece of it would be your head.’
‘What of Thorgunna?’ I persisted, only vaguely aware of the Night Wolf’s boasting.
Morut paused, looking round at the glittering eyes feeding on his words, clearly wondering if he was digging his own grave as he spoke.
‘We had been at the river bank for no more than a few hours,’ he said, ‘arranging for boats and had started in to loading them when Thorgunna came up. We knew her at once, of course, and she went straight to Vladimir and knelt before him and asked for her husband’s eyes, so it was clear she had found her man and seen what had been done to him. The prince did not look happy and said he was sorry for what had been done, for killing an Oathsworn had not been part of the weft of matters. Thorgunna simply repeated her request and the little prince looked like a dog on the point of being whipped, for he could not deliver the items without commanding Kveldulf – which he did. Kveldulf was not happy at being so commanded, but could do nothing else but hand over the pouch, which he did with ill-grace.’
Morut stopped then and glanced round at all the faces, pale, harsh as moons in the growing twilight.
‘Go on,’ I ordered.
Morut shook his head sadly. ‘Perhaps it would be best if …’
‘Say it out!’ Finn’s voice was a face-slap and Morut jerked, then nodded.
‘Thorgunna looked at Kveldulf with no fear at all, the pouch in her hand. Then she leaned closer to him and said something I did not catch – but he went wide-eyed with anger and hit her in the face.’
Now there was movement, frantic dashes; Gyrth swung his long-axe and slashed the frozen snow, cursing. But Finn stayed silent and only glanced over once, like a blind man, to where Thordis was weeping.
‘She fell to the ground and he kicked her in the belly before Sigurd dragged him off and flung him away. I saw Jon Asanes go to her, to help her up and she said something to him that made him go white and stop dead and shrink, as if he had been lashed. She got to her feet on her own, but then doubled up and fell down again; there was blood and she went limp and did not speak.’
‘Is she dead?’ demanded Bjaelfi.
Morut shook his head, frowning. ‘No. They carried her to shelter on a landed boat. Little Crowbone is sure she has lost her child, all the same. He was crying, for he had seen this before with his mother, he said, and was sure it was the same man who had done it.’
There was silence after that, while the darkness seeped round us and we sat like numbed stones, unable even to think. Morut eventually made a fire and the soft, red flicker of it brought us all blinking back to the Now, as if we had been asleep.
There was no need to ask what we would do next; the cold rage sat on us like some haar from Hel, so that even the fire guttered in the chill. It was Thordis who said what we had all been thinking.
‘Odin’s gift,’ she spat. ‘What made us think we could escape the curse of Fafnir’s silver?’
‘We will kill them all,’ howled Hlenni, his face twisted. Red Njal laid a hand along his arm, stilling him.
‘You do not have to put out a fire when all is ash,’ he said. Then added, softly: ‘As my granny used to say.’
All I could think of was my dream, where Odin had told me that One Eye would force a sacrifice from me and it would be something I held dear. Like all that shape-twisting god’s promises, it was never what it seemed; the One Eye had not been Odin, but Kvasir and the sacrifice had been himself.
Until that moment, I had not realized how much I hated AllFather Odin. I hated him, cold and harsh, as we stamped out Morut’s fire and moved off, hurrying like loping wolves across the mocking steppe, which glittered like riches under the silver-coin moon. I hated him when, led by Morut, we came up to the stiff shape, wrapped tenderly in Thorgunna’s blood-frozen cloak.
I could not – dared not – look on the eyeless face of my friend; we wrapped and roped him and dragged him after us across the ice and frozen earth like a pack of old furs and no-one complained of the burden, for we would not leave him behind for the wolves.
As the dawn slid up, all haar-mist and pale shimmer, we knelt in a stand of brush and trees at the Ditch Bridge, the black dog of Kvasir’s loss at our heels. Beyond the ditch was the dark sprawl of yurt and brick-built hovs and enclosures. Little points of light danced here and there, the low growl of noise was split by a barking dog, the plaintive bleat of a goat.
To our right were the great bulked walls of Biela Viezha, red blossoms marking the night fires of the sentries.
I sent Morut in; I needed to know where Thorgunna was and where the boats were.
‘You have, no doubt, a cunning plan,’ Gizur said. Finn grunted, fishing out his nail from his boot, for he knew the cunning plan and, when I laid it out, Gizur scrubbed the tangled burr of his beard and frowned. After he and a few others had hoiked up their offerings on the matter, it became clear that my plan, cunning or not, was the only one.
So we waited and the dawn struggled, thick as cream, trying to make a new day and foiled by ice mist on the river. There was little talk and that in grunts; men fixed straps and eased mail; everything else they owned had gone with Vladimir, so all they had was what they stood in and held in their hands.
It was all they needed and, when Morut came back, I had everything I needed, too and turned to them, looking for words to say and finding nothing but the choke in my throat. So I looked at the wrapped bundle and the two men who would haul it, so that every eye turned to look at it, then turned to look back to me, bright and fierce as hawks.
‘Heya,’ Finn growled softly and slipped his nail between his jaws. Then we rose in a pack and wolfed into the crawling haar and across the ditch, silent, fast and vengeful.
It was, as Morut said when he listened to it, not much of a plan – we attack, fast and loose because we would come up through the enclosures and tents, which would give us cover, but prevent any shield wall. We kill everything in front of us, grab Thorgunna and a boat and row like frothing madmen downriver, towards the tangle of channels that led to the Azov.
‘Simple, brutal and with no great plan in it at all,’ Morut added, shaking his head.
‘I like it,’ countered Finn truculently.
‘Which only makes my point firmer,’ replied Morut.
We came up through the buildings, leaping the low fences of withies, scattering horses, hacking out at the odd goat, plootering through the hoof-chewed dark mess of soil and shit.
The fortress of Sarkel, the White Castle, was a pale blur, like some great berg looming out of a dark sea. Around it sprawled yurts and some brick-built hovs, drunken fence enclosures and the framed tents of wintering shipmen. Somewhere by the river Vladimir shivered with his men, waiting for daylight to load boats and be away, before the garrison made up its mind what to do about him.
We were wolves, slithering in a hunting pack, but not down on chickens. We were showing our fangs to the hounds.
I was too busy watching Thordis with Short Eldgrim, making sure she kept him going in the right direction and avoided the fighting, so that I found myself in a herd of skittish horses, shoving them aside to keep Thordis and Short Eldgrim in sight.
Then I was hit by the rump of one swirling, excited pony and slammed into a yurt. I heard the trellis bones of it crack and the commotion inside. Light flared as the door-curtain was flung back and someone hammered out shrill, angry words, a dark shadow against the light. I snarled and the woman spat at me; I showed her a fistful of sharp metal and she yelped and vanished back inside, shrieking.
I had lost the ot
hers. Blinking, my night vision shattered, I moved on before any other yurt-dwellers reappeared with weapons. There was a wolf-howl up ahead, a sound I knew well; Finn had found his enemies.
I came up on the nearest fire, where Vladimir’s men had been huddled. A dark hump lay in the shadows beyond and I saw, as jog-trotted up, that it was one of the druzhina, a luckless sentry, fully-armoured and very dead.
Shadows grunted and struggled; sparks flew, men cursed and slashed. A figure lunged away from the howling pack and ran towards me, though whether he came to attack or was unlucky to find me as he fled I did not know, nor care.
I hit him as he came within arm’s reach, a vicious backhand upswing that took the axe blade into his groin and launched him headlong, screaming. Then I knelt to look at him as he writhed and his heels drummed; no-one I knew, so one of the enemy. I heaved a sigh of relief at that and hacked his throat open, vowing to pay more attention.
I turned back the fight round the fire and heard Ref Steinsson yell: ‘Watch out for the big one …’
Now I was paying attention and I saw him, a tall, muscular Slav with the face of a young boy scarcely bearded, who came leaping out of the firelight and straight at me, sword up and screaming as loud as he could, exactly as his best mate had probably taught him.
His best mate, I was thinking, was lying at my feet with a second, bloody smile under his chin – but if he had been there to advise, he would have told this giant Slav boy to hold his sword lower and not to swing so wildly.
I stepped out of the way of the downward crash of that fat blade, spun on one foot and hit him with the axe on the lower back, so hard that I heard the crack of his backbone breaking and lost my balance, even as he arched once and went down with a scream. I scrambled up, frantic that someone else was coming up on me, spun round, axe slathering blood into the air in a ribbon of droplets.
‘It’s me, Finn – watch what you are doing with that wood-chopper, Orm.’
He had a grin like a bear-trap, but his eyes were wary. I straightened from my fighting crouch and acknowledged him with a wave of the axe.
‘You are safe enough. Get to the boats.’
‘Too late,’ growled Finn. ‘They have fallen back and are between us and the boats.’
A score of paces further on, the Oathsworn, panting and circling like dogs, waved weapons and taunts in the faces of Vladimir’s men, who were shadows and pale blobs of faces in the dark. Behind them was the river and the boats we needed to escape – but we had neither found Thorgunna, or a way of getting to those boats.
‘We are finished,’ someone said grimly.
‘Stow that,’ Finn bellowed and spun his iron nail. ‘We are not done yet.’
It was not a convincing statement, for it would be moments only before Dobrynya recovered the courage of his men and made them realize there were only a handful facing them. Then they would come at us, Oathsworn fame or not; I saw men plant themselves more firmly, rolling their shoulders and touching amulets, for it was more than likely that they would die here.
Then Gizur came up, huffing, with Gyrth lumbering like a dancing bear behind him.
‘We have found Thorgunna,’ Gizur yelled and pointed.
On the lip of the long, iced slope that ran down to the river, no more than a long jogtrot from us, a strug perched on wooden sledge-runners, staked to the ground for safety. Stacks and bundles showed where the gear waited to be loaded, so that it was light for the final, careful slither down the slope to the water. The crew had wisely made themselves scarce when armed men turned up and Vladimir had thought it a good place to use to shelter the sick wife of Kvasir.
It was as strange as a fish on a horse, that boat stuck on a hill, but we ran for it, stumbling and sliding over the iced snow; beyond were the snow-frozen stacks of rolling logs for ship-hauling between Volga and Don in the summer and, beyond that, the fortress, that brooding ghost shifting noisily awake with light and clanging alarms.
The men swarmed aboard, careless of the creaks and the tremble of the over-straining ropes.
‘Thorgunna?’ I yelled and a chorus of voices answered me. I leaped up and scrambled aboard the strug and Gizur led me to where she lay, wrapped and pale. Her eyes were open and she managed a smile, though one pearled tear fluttered on her eyelash, bright silver in the moonglow. Thordis fell on her knees beside her and both of them shook with grief and happiness in equal measure, it seemed to me.
‘We brought him with us,’ I said awkwardly into the storm of tears, even as men struggled aboard with the stiff, blood-marked bundle that had been Kvasir. ‘We are going home.’
‘What about the silver?’ demanded Gizur and his stiff beard quivered, so that he looked like a man caught halfway eating a hedgepig.
‘We must go back for it, surely, after all this,’ thundered Hauk.
‘Back for it,’ echoed Short Eldgrim, then shook his head. ‘Back for what? Who are we fighting now?’
Beyond the humped dead and the fire there were shouts; lights flared and there was the unmistakeable sound of chains and creaking hinges as a heavy gate opened in the fortress wall.
‘There is no silver, nor tomb,’ I said. ‘Only a vengeful boy-prince and a frightened garrison. With luck they will fight each other and let us escape with our lives.’
‘We will never manhandle this boat to the river in time,’ muttered Gizur, as men sprang to the frozen ropes.
‘Time I was gone,’ Morut called from below and I sprang off the boat to stand beside him.
‘Come with us,’ I said, for I liked the little man and his knowledge of horses. He shook his head, grinning. ‘What? Spend my life hauling ships across the steppe from river to river? Besides, that great fool Avraham may decide to come up with these folk from the keep and I do not want to have to fight him. If you have to, try not to kill him.’
‘Anyway – how can I leave that marvellous horse of mine behind?’ he added, ‘I must get back to where I tethered him before some Khazar ben shel elef zona finds him. You know what these people are like.’
I smiled, then fished out the armring I had taken from Kvasir before we had wrapped him.
‘As I promised,’ I said, ‘in case that son of a thousand whores has indeed stolen your scrubby little pony. I will find a richer mark of favour to bury with Kvasir.’
Morut caught it deftly and touched it briefly to his heart before making it vanish inside his tunic.
‘Good journey,’ I said and he waved once, then was gone into the shadows. He had barely vanished when the horsemen came on us out of the dark of the fortress.
‘Cut the ropes!’ yelled Finn and the men trying to knock out iced tether-pegs stopped and then fumbled out blades. ‘Cut them, fuck your mothers!’
They hacked and swore; and one of them – I could not see who it was – turned with a shrieking gurgle as an arrow took him in the throat.
At the same moment a horseman surged forward out of the dark, kicking his unwilling mount. Hauk, flailing furiously at the tether with a too-blunt sword, spun round, dipping as he did so, taking the horse in the forelegs, which snapped like twigs. It fell, kicking a blizzard of snow and screaming, the rider’s own cries of pain lost in that skin-crawling horse-squeal. Trapped, the rider struggled, wide-eyed, until Hauk’s blunt sword crashed on his face and ruined it.
The strug lurched and, panicking, men flung themselves aboard with the job only half-done. There was a crashing sound as Gyrth dropped over the side and ran at us; Hauk turned as another horseman roared out of the dark and I saw they were all round us now.
‘Get aboard,’ I yelled at Hauk and brandished the axe to show what I intended. He hesitated only briefly, then leaped up for the side of the strug and caught it with his one free hand as others pulled him over.
Gyrth looked at me, his yellow teeth bared; he must have known when he flung himself back over the side, that he would never get back aboard – it had taken four men to haul him up the first time. He turned in a whirl of flailing fur and roa
red himself to the darkness, head back and arms out, the great axe in one fist.
‘Orm!’ Finn bellowed, but I hacked at the rope and it parted in two strokes; the strug lurched again and shifted slightly sideways, swinging on the tether of one remaining rope; I saw the linden bast of it tremble, spitting out little shards of ice.
An arrow hissed like a snake over my boots, skittering through the snow; another plunked at my feet, I felt the wind of a third on my cheek and turned to start hacking at the last rope.
A horse stumbled out of the dark and the noise, wild eyes white, nostrils wide. The rider on him gave a high shriek of triumph and slashed down with a curved sword, but I had already flung myself flat and sideways and hacked out with the axe.
With a dagger scream the horse spun on its hocks, one front leg shattered; the rider spilled from the saddle and landed in a great whoof of driven air and spattering snow. I drove at him, the axe up and coming down, so that it took all I had to twist my wrist at the last, burying the blade so close to the fear-white familiar face that one brow braid was sheared.
‘For Morut,’ I growled into the cod-mouthed stare of Avraham, then tore the axe blade free, showering him with diamond chips of ice to remind him of how close he had come. Then I whacked him between the eyes with the butt end.
‘Orm!’
The bull-bellow from Finn was almost too late; the horsemen were crashing on us and I turned into Gyrth’s big, lopsided grin.
‘Heya!’ he yelled, swung up the long-axe and smashed it down on the rope, which parted in a shower of little ice shards. I was half up on one knee when the strug groaned, shifted and started to move, a great bulked beast on its cradle of wooden runners; ice spat and cracked as its own weight started to tear it loose down the slope.
Gyrth’s face was suddenly close to mine, close enough to have the rank breath of him on me and the great wild of his eyes staring into mine.
