The Whale Road o-1

by Robert Low

  À fire-arrow took him in the neck,' agreed Wryneck. 'I saw him get it, but he ran off before anyone could help.'

  `We have to recover our dead,' I said and others growled. Einar nodded, looked round us all, then squinted at the dust. No one mentioned wounded. By now there would be no wounded, for anyone who couldn't make it back off that field would have had their throats cut by looters. From our own side, most likely.

  `Wait for this to settle, else you will be blundering around achieving nothing,' Einar said. 'Food and water will arrive for us. Rest, regain strength and then honour the dead.'

  It made too much sense to oppose, so that's what we did, all through the settling haze of that golden day, while the great engines thumped and the sick and injured moaned and screamed.

  The rations arrived, were prepared by women, some of whom were genuinely weeping for men who were lost. For once, we had more than enough to eat, since they had given rations for more than a hundred and there were, by Illugi's final tally, forty-three of us fit enough to eat.

  The dust never quite went away, but cleared enough for us to see the sun begin to die in streaks of gold and purple on a distant horizon, so we went out, naked to the waist in the shimmering heat, shoving the cart that rations had come in.

  Until it became too dark to see, we loaded the bodies of those we recognised on to the cart and trundled them back to a place by the river, where the women keened and cleaned them as best they could, even though the entire Don was tinged pink and the twilight insects came in stinging clouds.

  I found Rurik, untouched by the hordes of plundering boys, no longer after arrows but out to rob the dead.

  Skarti, however, had been stripped, his body white under the soft golden layer of dust.

  We prised him from a crusted pool of his own blood, thick with gorged insects, and the arrow in his throat came out with a soft suck of sound and a gobbet of red. The one in his thigh wouldn't come out at all, so I had to saw the shaft short, an awkward job with my bound hand.

  All the while I could feel the eyes on me from the cart, the dead eyes of the man I had known as my father, and the storm in me rolled and swelled, for I was angry at him for having kept the secret so long, so that I did not even have my real father. Sad as a wolf-howl for him, too, that he had borne it all this long.

  Skarti's pox-ravaged head lolled sideways as I closed his eyes, hearing his voice say: `But you never see a cat on a battlefield,' and we placed him on the cart, too.

  We also laid out Eindridi—well, we were reasonably sure it was him, from the shield and weapons he bore, but even his own mother would not have known the blackened, peeling thing that had been his face.

  We found Hrut, who knew more riddles than Bagnose, and Kol Otryggsson, who could carve out delicate, swirling patterns in leather with an awl, and Isleif from Aldeigjuborg and Rorik, the half-Slav from Kiev, who had come up to Holmgard for the season and joined us there, had hardly been with us long enough for anything to be known about him.

  Then there was Ranvaik Sleekstone-eye, one of the old Oathsworn, his odd-coloured eyes closed for ever, the centre of his face punched bloody by one of those lead pebbles.

  And more, each ragdoll body a new keening for the women, another stone in the heart of us all.

  Einar and Valknut looked at Ranvaik's corpse, blank-faced and wordless. Ketil Crow, almost tenderly, wiped the crusted mess from the dead face. There were, I knew, no more than a handful of the original Oathsworn left, the ones who had once sailed from where the bergs calved off in floating mountains to the lands where sand was drifted by the wind into a parody of the ocean.

  Flosi came back for the cart eventually, eyeing with distaste the smear of fluids streaking it, for our bread and meat had to be piled there. Grumbling, he headed down to the river to clean it out, muttering that he wished he had known all this before he had taken that binding oath.

  And, on the way, he flung back carelessly at Einar: 'A new lot have arrived from up north, well-mailed and

  -armed Danes. Maybe you can tempt fresh men from them. Their leader is talking to Sviatoslay. Walks with a bad limp, calls himself Starkad.'

  14 A wind snaked out of the north and drove a thin spray of grit and dust against me, whipping my cloak so hard I stumbled sideways. It was driving against our shield side and a few had decided to walk with the things up as shelter.

  My arm was too sore for that, the pain throbbing out from the missing fingers all the way up to my elbow, so I had hauled up the cloak round my head and hunched into it, wondering whether my ankle hurt more than my hand, or if I had miasmic rot in the stumps of my fingers. I remembered the bee-keeper from Uppsala and his arm, blackening as he raved into the long night.

  Up ahead strode Einar, alongside the jolting cart where Hild sat, cross-legged, swathed and veiled in his fine red cloak.

  When he had heard Flosi's news, Einar had stopped in his tracks and the matted yellow dust on his face had not hidden how he had paled. Ketil Crow had hawked and spat and said, 'Loki's hairy arse.' Illugi had just looked sick with weariness.

  Then Einar shook himself—physically, like a dog, so that the dust came off him like water—and growled,

  'Time for us to go, then, I am thinking.'

  `Do we have enough dead yet?' I snarled back at him and he whirled, taking a step towards me. I think he expected me to back from him, remembering the steel of his fingers round my neck, but I was savage for it, wanted it more than my life, even though the thought flashed through me that I was dead.

  Ènough for what?' asked a bemused Wryneck, with his tic-twitch.

  Einar stopped, forced a grin and shrugged. Òur Bear Slayer has lost his father,' he declared, for all to hear, 'and it is not surprising a little of his mind has gone with him.' He turned to Wryneck. 'Look after him, old one, while I arrange for the proper rites for our fallen.'

  Then he looked round the rest of us, raising his voice so all could hear. 'Wash. Dress in your finest, for these are your oath-brothers and deserve it.'

  So we all straggled out, searching for our scattered belongings from where the horsemen had dragged them, then went down to the river and cleaned ourselves and our clothes, as much as we could in that pink-tinged, mud-tainted flow.

  But the Don was wide here and swallowed all our filth. By the time Ketil Crow and Einar came back, with thralls leading a dozen carts, each with two solid wheels and a stringy pony, we were, if not shining, more fitting than we had been before.

  But I did it only for Rurik. I wanted to spit in Einar's eye.

  We took the bodies north into the steppe as the twilight grew, far out from where the city smouldered, until the fires of our own camp were distant enough for some to be uneasy about getting back. Of course, I knew we weren't going back.

  In the half-dark, thralls dug out a great boat-shaped pit in the black earth and placed the bodies in it, for there wasn't enough wood left for a pyre after all the great burnings we'd already had.

  It was a dark and silent affair, of hissing wind and the grunts of the thralls as they dug the earth with chopping sounds. Nearby, like a great storm crow, Hild squatted in her dark dress, knees up at her ears, hands clasped in her lap, presiding over it like some idol.

  I folded Rurik's hands on his chest over the hilt of his sword and silently asked the All-Father to guide him. Then the thralls filled the pit in with furious, nervous energy, as the dark came down and they grew ever more fearful.

  They were right to be afraid. Maybe one or two suspected, but most were scared of the wrong people for, after they had unloaded the head-sized white stones we had begged or stolen from the Greek engineers and placed them as a border round the grave, Ketil Crow had them all seized.

  Illugi Godi led the chanting prayers as, one by one, their throats were slit and they were laid out in a circle, head towards the mound, feet away. Hild stirred then, as the iron stink of blood swirled on the steppe wind and unfolded herself.

  Àre we done here?' she rasped and he
ads turned angrily to her, only to be silenced by the cold stare they had in return.

  It was a hasty excuse, half-ashamed in the dark, for a proper burial in the old way, with fire and dignity, but I made my own peace with Rurik then, for I thought it unlikely I would be back here—or that the scavengers would leave much. But all were safely across Bifrost, the rainbow bridge.

  Afterwards, Einar told them what he planned: to strike out north and east, round the city, then back to the river beyond it and on down to the greatest wealth of silver they had ever seen.

  Thirty agreed at once and eight thereafter, reluctant and muttering about every hand being against them.

  `Did you think such a prize was to be had lightly?' Einar demanded, as much to all of us as to them.

  `No,' answered one of those who still refused—baptised Christ-followers to a man, I noted. 'I did not think to have to pay my soul as the price.'

  `Your soul?' snarled Ketil Crow. 'What is this? The afterlife in Christ-Valholl? If so, it seems a poor place, full of poor people and gods who scorn a hard arm.'

  The man, a Dane from Hedeby called Aslaf, was not fazed by Ketil Crow and merely shrugged, since he had no goldbrowed argument and Christ hung on him like a new tunic, still creased and scratchy here and there.

  For all that, he and his three oarmates would not give in and stood their ground, shuffling their feet and keeping a wary eye and a hand on a hilt.

  `You swore an oath,' Illugi reminded them and Aslaf glanced at him, uneasy now that this door had opened. But he had courage, this Dane, and pushed it a little wider.

  `Not made to the One God we follow,' he countered defiantly, then licked his lips and stared hard at Einar. 'Anyway, I am not the first to break that old oath. I will not follow a madwoman into the Grass Sea in search of a tale for children.'

  The words hung in the air with the flutter and whine of insects and the gutter of new torches in the rising wind.

  'Nithing turds,' Ketil Crow growled, waving a dismissive hand. 'I hate fucking Christ-men; they are not even worth killing.'

  Hild laughed, high and crazed and cracked like a bell, and half of those who had already agreed to go almost changed their minds there and then, I saw. I was one.

  For a moment I thought Aslaf would ruin it all, for his eyes narrowed and I could feel him flush from where I stood. If he fought, he would die, that was certain.

  Then he relaxed, took two or three steps backwards, insultingly, until he was beyond range of a backstab, whirled and trotted into the night, back to the sprawling fires of the camp. With a brief wild look at each other, the other three did the same.

  Ìf Yaropolk doesn't kill him,' Einar growled to the uneasy stirrings around him, 'then Sviatoslav will. If Starkad doesn't get to them first, that is.'

  The men round him growled with bare-toothed, savage delight at that, the fate these oath-breakers deserved. But it was the wolf-grin of the desperate.

  There wasn't much left now to bind us. Not oath, certainly—like a badly built hov, the roofbeams of which were splitting. For some, the lure of the hoard was still enough. For most it was the sick realisation that, unsteady as it was, the shrinking band of Oathsworn was the safest place to be for the moment.

  And for me? There was only one reason I was going now. A son cannot leave his murdered father without taking revenge.

  We moved out through the darkness, keeping the fires to our back until they disappeared. Then we turned east, with Steinthor questing ahead and Bagnose to our shield side.

  Now the men knew of the plan, a few were cursing that they had left this or that behind, thinking they'd return. Short Eldgrim and Kvasir were the most loud and furious, since they'd bought a concubine between them and spent almost all they had on her only to have left her behind.

  Most were as varjazi always had been. They wore all they possessed, carrying wealth in boot or under armpit. If you could not leave something behind in an eyeblink, you were a fool.

  By dawn, the wind had risen to a snake-hiss and we trundled across short grass peeking from between stones, over endless, rolling hills, cut with steep-gulleyed streams, some dust-dry, some trickling with water and almost choked with eager growth.

  It was well named, this Grass Sea, a great, undulating vastness unmarked as an ocean. When the city had shrunk behind us to a scab on the distant horizon, Einar put the wind at our back and headed us to the river.

  Now and then he spoke softly with Hild, but she made not a sound and no one wanted to go near her, not even me, for the Other rose off her like a sweat-stink and made the hairs on your arms stand up.

  We spotted the first dust, whipped away like smoke on a sighing wind, as we tramped tiredly up to another of the steep gulleys, which those Novgorod Slavs among us called balkas. They were annoying, for the shelter let scrub and stunted trees spring up and the carts had to be manhandled over them. Even the tough little ponies were tiring.

  Einar decided to rest for a while in one and wait for Steinthor and Bagnose to come back in. Sheltered from the wind, with water and some kindling, we got a couple of fires going and those with the skill for it boiled up meat into a gruel and made flatbread on a griddle.

  Bagnose came in, loping like a weary dog, laid his bow and quiver down and took a swig from a horn that was offered. Then he made a face and spat. 'Water, you arses!'

  The men chuckled; Bagnose was a lift to the spirits, the one man who really did thumb his nose at the gods and never questioned that what he was doing was the way things should be. The whale road was as natural to him—and Steinthor—as if they were a pair of the great beasts it was named after.

  He grabbed a bowl, hauled out a horn spoon from inside his tunic and sucked gruel into his mouth, chewing gobbets of tough gristle, spitting sideways. We all waited until he had finished, then Einar asked,

  'Well, Geir Bagnose?'

  Bagnose wiped his glistening beard, stuffed flatbread in, washed it down with another swig of water and sighed, then belched. 'Twenty, perhaps thirty horsemen, those little ones on little ponies. Moving north to east, circling us.'

  Ènemy?' asked a voice and Bagnose snorted.

  Àrse! Every horseman is our enemy now.'

  `Those turds on their dog-horses are not fighters,' said Flosi with a sneer and a spit. `You can fight them off armed with a bladder on a stick.'

  Bagnose shook his head sorrowfully. 'Tell me more when they shoot you full of arrows from a distance,'

  he growled. 'They'll make you look like a hedgepig, then cut off your little bladder on a stick and shove it in your flapping mouth.'

  More chuckles and Flosi acknowledged that they were, it had to be said, nasty with their little bows. But all of us had begged, stolen, bought—or, in my case, inherited—the thick underkirtle for mail. It made movement even harder, but kept the arrows off unless the little nithings got to close range, or you had Loki luck. I wore my father close to my skin and there was some comfort in that.

  `Steinthor in yet?' asked Bagnose. Ketil Crow shook his head and Bagnose frowned, then shrugged and held out his wooden bowl for a refill. 'Have you heard this one, lads? Stop me if you have. I flee the deep earth, there is no place for me on the ground, nor any part of the poles . . .'

  His voice covered me like a blanket and I drifted off to it before I heard the answer—but I knew it already and it was apt enough. I lay watching the clouds scud in the wind until my eyes closed and I dozed until kicked awake. We moved out.

  Two miles further on we found Steinthor. His head, at least, stuck on a short spear, straggled hair and beard matted with blood. A great black bird hopped off it, wiping its beak with quick sideways flicks and completely unconcerned.

  Illugi Godi made a quick, chanting prayer, but Sighvat, whom we called Deep-minded and whose mother had been the same, gave a snort of scorn.

  `That's a crow, a big hoodie,' he said. 'Any minute it will fly off, widdershins, not sunwise.'

  As if in response, the bird flapped off to the left,
sluggish with Steinthor's eyes.

  Sighvat felt our stares and looked at us, bemused. 'What? All crows are left-handed.'

  `Crows don't have hands,' Ketil Crow replied, staring at Steinthor's flesh-flaked head.

  `Nothing to do with these,' snapped Sigh-vat, holding up his hands. 'It's all here,' he went on and tapped his head. 'Why do you think you are called Ketil Crow?'

  And that was true enough. Ketil Crow was corrie-fisted, a left-hander and a fearsomely difficult man to fight.

  Bagnose, however, said nothing at all, just stood by that head looking wildly round for the rest of the body. We all spread out and looked, too, but found nothing and it was my thought that he had been killed elsewhere and the head carried to where we could not fail to find it, as a warning.

  Illugi Godi and Bagnose lifted the grisly thing off the spear and put it in a hole we dug. We mounded earth over it but, like the bigger mound we'd left far behind, I had a notion that scavengers would dig it up before we'd gone too far.

  It was a poor thing for the likes of Steinthor and, for days afterwards, I kept hearing his voice telling the story of finding me with the white bear, in that other world where I had once been a boy whose biggest adventure was finding a gull's nest with four eggs.

  That done, we moved on, reaching the river as darkness fell, but Bagnose was not asked to go scouting again. That night, as we huddled round the small fire, eaten by the crushing dark, we knew there would be no more riddles or saga tales from the dark, hunched figure who sat and stared, not at the flames, but into the darkness.

  Even whales die on the whale road.

  The endless rolling steppe affects your mind, paring away thoughts until there is little more left than the desire to put one foot in front of the other. At one point I had the sick, dizzying feeling that I wasn't walking forward at all, but that the whole steppe was moving backwards.

  I even stopped, to see if it carried me backwards and, when it seemed to do just that, as everyone kept on moving, I cried out with fear and dropped to my knees. It was Wryneck, coming up behind me, who grabbed me by the back of my mail and hauled me upright. As my feet stumbled forward I snapped out of it and turned to gasp my thanks.