Varanger

by Cecelia Holland

“What about Pavo?”

  “Pavo won’t interfere, outside the wall. That’s why you have to watch out for Magnus.”

  “All right.” Conn set out his far right pawn. “We’ll go.”

  “Good. Janka knows where to go, and he, can handle the team. We cut wood last summer, it’s just waiting on the riverside to split and haul.” Thorfinn picked up a pawn and turned it back and forth in his fingers, looking at the board. “That’s an odd opening.”

  “I’ve got to try something,” Conn said.

  Janka was the short brown slave, sullen, with tilted eyes and not much dansker. Conn stood watching him hitch up the horses to the sledge, harnessing them in pairs and then leading each of the three pairs up to the cart tree, while Thorfinn gave everybody needless orders.

  “You should take Einar and Helgi,” he said, again. “In case.” His gaze went off down the river shore, where some other people were leading up teams and dragging the flat two-runnered sledges out onto the ice. There was no sign of Magnus Redbeard.

  “Raef and I can do it,” Conn said.

  “You’re cocksure. I hope you know what you’re doing. Bring home a good load of wood, is all.” Thorfinn leaned his hand on Conn’s shoulder again, as he often did. “Get going.”

  Janka drove the sledge, using a long limber stick for a whip. Shod with caulks, the horses pulled the empty sledge easily enough over the ice, sometimes even breaking into a trot. Conn and Raef sat on the seat in front beside Janka, and the other slaves sat in the flatbed behind. One of them had brought a jug and they passed it.

  The river stretched away from them into the white distance. It was hard to tell where the banks were, the river blending imperceptibly into the snowy reaches on either side. Janka steered them northward along the western edge, where the wind had blown away most of the snow. The ice glittered in the low sun. Ahead the forest grew down closer to the river, like a wall on either side of winter-deadened trees.

  The sledge stuck on a patch of rough and broken ice; Conn got down with a maul and cleared out the sledge runners, bashing the path smoother and wider. Behind them he could see the other sledges lumbering along in his wake. This pleased him obscurely, and he went along ahead of the sledge, making sure the way was clear for all these followers. He wondered if one was Magnus’s sledge.

  Around a bend of the river they came on a broad meadow, maybe a frozen marsh, piled up with cut trees and logs and branches like a range of small hills, all capped with snow. Beyond the clutter of wood, the forest hemmed the meadow’s edge, dark and deep. Janka drove the sledge up onto the flat land, to the edge of the heaped wood, and the slaves all got off and began to throw in whatever wood they could lay hands on.

  Conn bellowed at them and smacked a few of them, sending two to find good wood and leaving two to stack it properly on the flatbed, and taking the maul and a wedge he began to split big oak logs, which would make the best fires. Janka unhitched the horses and let them browse, and came to help. Raef had gone wandering off toward the forest as soon as the sledge stopped.

  One by one the other sledges pulled up, and each time Conn looked sharply over, to see if it was Magnus’s men, but they never appeared. The newcomers drew their sledges in on the flat ground and gathered some loose wood into a bonfire, and stood around the flames talking and drinking. Conn bent his back to the work of the maul and the wedge, his sledge already half full. Somebody yelled at him, from the fire, to come join them, and he waved back, and stayed at his work. Magnus wasn’t coming, he realized. The hard waiting had backed up into his muscles; he felt clogged, stalled, frustrated. He smashed the maul into the wedge, splitting the log half its length in one stroke, and the wood gave up a squeal like an animal.

  Raef walked through the forest, under old elm trees far apart, whose long straight trunks raised their leafless outstretched heads high over him; on the ground beneath the spread of their branches snow covered everything like a treacherous white plain. Every few steps his feet broke through to black frozen clumps of bracken. Sometimes what seemed level ground was a gorge filled with snow. Under the trees the light seemed watery, dim, blue in the shadows. Tall and straight, the trees ruled it all, rising from the castles of their gnarled boles into the soaring pale sky. No bird sang. The wind howled through the tops of the trees and stirred them wild, as if some great army passed by overhead. Underneath, as under water, only a little moved.

  He looked eastward, searching through the trees, his eyes striving to see farther, as if somewhere out there lay the answer to whatever the question was. All he ever saw was more trees. He wondered if this was the edge of the world.

  Away from the river, the elms yielded to stands of massive oaks and dense pines clumped together in thickets. He walked along the thick icy crust on the snow; once the crust broke under his foot and he fell in up to his waist. The struggle up out of the hole exhausted him, clawing through crumbling snow, his fingers and his feet going numb and his lungs gasping.

  He went on, moving to keep from freezing. In the snow, paths of tracks wound, the signs of huge deer, mice and foxes, and smaller things with foxlike feet. He began to feel as if someone were watching him, but he thought it might be only the tall, overarching trees, aware of him in their ancientness like a passing wind.

  From the edge of the trees he looked over and saw the bonfire blazing, and the men standing thick around it; beyond them, Conn was hard at work, and in no trouble.

  Raef went back into the trees, circling the other way. Halfway to the riverbank again he glimpsed something moving ahead of him, a flicker of motion between the upright trunks, gone in an instant.

  He knew at once it was no deer, no wild creature. He ran recklessly across the snow to where he had seen it, found the deep tracks of a horse plunging down a trail like a breath through the trees.

  His heart bounded. The trail went eastward. There was something, then, beyond the trees. On the other side of the question. Something to find out. He stood staring along the blue-white line of broken snow, his heart galloping to match the horse.

  Then behind him a shrill whistle sounded. He wheeled, and went to the edge of the woods and saw Conn there, with the sledge full, calling him in. Quickly he trotted back across the frozen meadow.

  “We’ll get back before sundown, this way,” Conn said. Braced on the driver’s seat, he was eating the last of the bread and cheese. Beside him the slave Janka hunched down over his reins and his withy whip. The load was stacked high behind them, over Conn’s head; they had all had to put their shoulders to the sledge to get it moving, but now the horses were drawing it steadily along, leaning into their collars, their heads bobbing. The wind was behind them, and their own stable was ahead and they went along eagerly. The road they had cut on the frozen river wound southward around the bend, the scoured ice gleaming like dull metal in the late daylight.

  Raef said, “Somebody was out there watching us. In the forest.” He handed Conn the jug. “That’s the last of it.”

  “You should get a bow from Thorfinn Was it Magnus?”

  Raef shook his head. “Somebody from east of here.”

  On Conn’s other side Janka muttered something, his flat brown face aimed forward. They slid and scraped along; Conn was cold and tired and the motion of the sledge made him sleepy. Then Raef said, under his breath, “You know, I don’t like the feel of this,” and even as he spoke, a horse neighed, in the woods up ahead.

  Conn jerked awake. They were rounding the bend in the river, halfway back to Holmgard; here the trees grew down almost to the road along the ice. He saw nothing but he knew to trust his cousin’s foresight. He reached down under the seat, where the maul was, and to Raef said, “Go out—go around behind. Can you?” Raef slid off the sledge like water off a rock.

  Janka said, taut, “What I do?”

  “Keep driving,” Conn said. He threw off his cloak, and pulled the maul up into his hands, standing up behind the seat; the sledge was creeping around the tip of the bend, and then abruptly
men streamed out of the trees toward him.

  Six of them. Eight of them. He stepped up onto the seat, the maul in his hands, and they circled around the sledge and stopped the horses.

  One of them bellowed, “Well, there, worker boy, ready to fell another tree?” and everybody laughed, as if this were some huge joke.

  Conn looked hard at this man, his bushy beard and barrel chest, thinking he had seen him before; out of his memory came a whiff of onions, and he smiled. He had beaten this man already once. He said, “You want some more of, the last time, hah, Big Nose? Get out of my way, or I will hew you down.”

  Magnus’s men let out a roar, all around him, and Big Nose sneered.

  “You know what? We’ll just take this wood. You can walk home, worker boy, if you get down and start now and don’t bother us.” He smiled, showing a few scattered teeth. “You’re alone, you know. Your brother’s not here, I see, and these slaves won’t fight for you.” The slaves who had been sitting on the back end of the sledge were already getting down and walking away. Janka sat unmoving on the driver’s seat, his shoulders hunched.

  “You can try,” Conn said. “I’ve been splitting wood all day, a few more knotheads won’t stop me.”

  A ringing neigh sounded over his words; he swiveled around to look toward the trees. Shrilling and kicking out, a horse plunged out of the woods toward the river. A burning branch, tied to its long flowing tail, bounced along behind, spitting sparks. The horse bounded onto the river and its hind legs went out from under it and it skidded twenty feet across the ice on its rump and propped forelegs.

  A yell went up from Magnus’s men. Behind the horse with the flaming tail half a dozen others burst from the trees, their legs milling at a dead gallop; before they reached the river, the first horse was up and running again, straight down the river toward Holmgard, and the rest went all pounding after. The sledge team surged forward in their harnesses, trying to go after them.

  For a moment Magnus’s men stood motionless, gawking after their horses, and Conn gave a whoop of laugh. “I think it’s you who’ll be walking home, Big Nose!” He reached back into the sledge for a chunk of wood and hurled it at Big Nose, below him, and knocked him flat.

  The rest came at him from all sides. He swung the maul around, the heavy head whistling through the air. They had to scramble up the stacked wood, and that slowed them, so he got the first of them right away with a great broad sideways swing and swept him off the sledge. Behind that one two more men lunged toward him, trying to scale the shifting woodpile.

  “Drive!” he screamed at Janka. “Drive!” He scrambled up over the back of the seat onto the very top of the stacked wood; a log rolled under his foot, and off-balance he drove an awkward blow at the men coming at him.

  That was a mistake. One grabbed the maul handle, and the other dodged under Conn’s outstretched arm, a knife in his fist.

  Janka screamed something. Conn, wrestling for the maul, kicked out at the man with the knife. His foot hit flesh and bone. The woodpile moved under him again and he went down, and in a tumble of falling logs the man with the knife went rolling down off the sledge. The other man, still clinging to the maul, had lost his footing also, and Conn wrenched the handle out of his grip and knocked him down again and leapt up and kicked him in the head and fell again into the unsteady mass of wood.

  “Help!” Janka was shrieking over, and over, and Conn wheeled around, and saw the slave standing in the sledge seat, beating with his whip at a man trying to scale up the woodpile behind him. Conn was to his knees in the wood, and when he tried to climb up the wood shifted underneath him. He waded through it, slipping and falling with each step, but he kept the maul swinging in great swishing rounds, and Magnus’s man jumped free just ahead of it.

  “Drive! Get us moving—” He wheeled around to take on another rush of men clambering up the back of the sledge.

  “No move,” Janka cried. He was thrashing at the horses with his whip; they were straining into the harness, their hoofs slipping helplessly on the ice. “It no move—”

  Conn flung the maul into the face of the first man coming across the pile at him. That one staggered back, his face exploding in a gush of blood, but behind him another man cocked up his arm to throw a knife.

  The sledge jerked forward suddenly. The knife thrower wobbled off balance, his arms flailing out, and suddenly Raef reared up behind him. He caught Magnus’s man by the hair and flung him backward off the sledge.

  Conn straightened, his chest heaving, a chunk of wood in one hand. The sledge was sliding briskly off down the ice road again. All Magnus’s men were gone. Half the wood was gone, too; Raef as he struggled up through it toward him was grabbing logs and sticks to save them from falling off. “Stop throwing the wood away!” The rest of the slaves came running after them, wailing, and scrambled up onto the back of the sledge.

  Conn lifted his gaze up, looking back along the ice road, scattered with chunks of split wood and with men, some sitting, one sprawled out flat on his back, none of them still trying to fight. Without horses they would have a long walk home before the cold night set down, especially if anybody was badly hurt. Probably the other sledges, coming later, would pick them up. He wiped his sleeve across his face, realized he was still holding the chunk of wood, and dropped it onto the pile.

  “Stop,” he said. “Let’s get the wood.”

  “Crazy,” Janka said, on the sledge seat, and the four slaves on the back of the sledge lifted up a chorus of agreement.

  “Stop,” Raef said.

  The sledge stopped and Conn shouted the slaves off to gather up whatever wood they could reach. Magnus’s men stood in a clump, their heads down, talking. The maul lay out there on the ice, closer to them than to the sledge. Conn got down off the sledge and paced back along the track toward the maul. The men stood where they were, watching him, not moving. He stared at them, looked each one in the face. He reached the maul and picked it up, and slinging it up on his shoulder he turned his back on them. His shoulder blades tightened but he kept his gaze forward and his back straight as an elm. When he reached the sledge he let his breath out in a little whoosh. With the slaves he pushed the sledge into motion again.

  The slaves got on the back; he jogged up to the front and climbed onto the driver’s seat. Raef was already sitting there, wrapped in his cloak, on Janka’s far side. “I hope they freeze,” he said.

  Conn sat down on the seat next to Janka, and banged his arm into the slave’s. “Thanks,” he said, remembering. The slave had gotten them through that, he thought. Magnus’s men would have overwhelmed him, coming from all sides.

  Janka grunted at him. He held the reins threaded through the fingers of his gloves; with a flip of his wrists, he slapped the leathers on the horses’ rumps. “He say I no fight.” His eyes gleamed.

  Raef laughed. The whole left side of his face was bruising up, and Conn said, “What happened to you?”

  “There was somebody with the horses.” Raef put his hand up over his face. Twisting, he looked back. “We lost a lot of the wood, damn them.”

  They got to Holmgard again just as the sun was sinking down into the trees. A small crowd waited on the shore, among them Thorfinn; when they drove the sledge up, with the slaves all suddenly shouting and cheering, he came up beside Conn, and said, “What happened? A mess of horses came down here, just now, not a rider with them. And half of Magnus’s crew left at noontide.” He looked back into the sledge. “You can pile the sledge a lot higher than that, you know.”

  Conn snarled at him. “Magnus didn’t get any.” The slaves were all leaping off the sledge, shouting to anybody within earshot of a great battle on the ice which they, somehow, had won. He glowered at Thorfinn. “Next time, you come along and load it yourself.”

  “I told you to take Einar and Helgi,” Thorfinn shouted.

  “I had enough trouble as it was,” Conn said. “Janka helped us more than Einar would have.” He tramped up the shore toward the boardwal
k, suddenly dead tired, and aching all over, and very cold. Behind him, he heard Raef laugh. At the edge of the boardwalk he brushed past Einar and Helgi without looking at them and went on toward Thorlinn’s red sun door.

  C H A P T E R F O U R

  Conn said, “I want to get Magnus back.”

  Raef leaned against the wall behind them. Thorfinn had given them a little more money and they had come down to a house in the city that sold wotka by the cup. The house was smelly and small and crowded so they had come outside into the icy sunlight.

  “He didn’t win,” Raef said. “Why push it?”

  Conn grunted at him, angry. “You are an old woma.

  Raef took a gulp of the fiery liquor. “I’ve known a few old women who would make you bend your stupid neck.”

  “You want to try?”

  “You just want to fight.”

  “I want to get Magnus.” Conn emptied the cup. “How much money do we have left?”

  Raef shook out his purse; besides the little gold piece, he had some clips and farthings, and he gave them over to Conn. The gold coin he kept in his hand. Conn went inside and came back with another cup.

  “Remember about Pavo,” Raef said. “You mix with Magnus, here, you mix with Pavo.”

  “You think I can’t beat him.”

  “I don’t think you can beat everybody at once.”

  Conn looked away, brooding. Raef looked down at the gold coin in his hand, turning it over and over, the face on one side with the crown, the face on the other side with the halo.

  In front of him, someone with a strange accent said, “We call that a basileus, where I come from.”

  Raef looked up, startled. Before him stood the man with the white cloth on his head, whom he had seen twice with Dobrynya. Closer up, he was even more odd. He wore a heavy fur cloak, the hood lined with some soft red shiny stuff; his smile was white against skin dark as old wood, and his curly black beard was trimmed and combed to a point just below his chin.