Crowbone (17 page)

Old, am I, he thought savagely and hefted the whip. He wondered if this trader had, as he claimed, told all he knew. A limping priest and a written message held by the monks – he glanced sideways at the document he’d had fetched from the monastery. The monks had squealed a bit at that, he had heard. The original had been sealed and marked for a Jarl Orm, as the trader had said – so that was real enough but might be anything, since Ogmund could not read it. He did not know of any jarl called Orm.

‘You have more to say,’ he crooned to the bloody dangle that was Hoskuld and took a deep breath as he raised the whip, wincing at the stitch in his side. ‘I will have it.’

There was a clattering on the stairs and he turned with annoyance; he wanted no-one around when the trader vomited up all he knew.

‘Murchadh, I told you …’

It was not Murchadh. It was the Witch-Queen’s son, with the terrible, beautiful youth behind him.

He had time only to discover how old and slow he truly was before the angelic youth blurred the life from him with a handful of bright steel, cold and silvered as a winter dawn.

North and west of Mann, not long afterwards …

CROWBONE’S CREW

The sea Mann sits in is a black-souled, scawmy water that can turn vicious out of a clear blue sky. Like a woman with a smile, Stick-Starer said, who has one hand behind her back with an iron skillet in it and a deal of stored-up argument.

The two ships had tacked and twisted a painful way south from Hvitrann – Crowbone did not want to row the Shadow off and leave the
knarr
behind again – a long muscle-ache of hauling the sail up and down until the palm-welts burst. Men did not complain, all the same, for they were aware that they had burned out a borg and slain a Galgeddil lord; putting distance between them and the bodies on the shingle was well worth some blisters and ache.

‘I wish we had Finn’s weather hat,’ Kaetilmund roared out when the first wind squalled out on them, hard on the berthing side, swirling like the tongue of a lip-licking cat, so that the Shadow heeled and
staggered with it.

Those who knew about Finn’s reputedly magical headgear laughed, but Crowbone stayed grim; he did not like the white-faced, fork-tailed Ran-sparrows he had seen earlier, whipping through the wave spume, low and fast as arrows.

‘St Peter’s birds,’ Gorm declared, seeing Crowbone watch them.

‘Because they seem to walk on water, like Christ as witnessed by that holy man once,’ he explained. Crowbone did not care what the Christ-followers called them; he only knew the Ran birds spoke of storm. Besides, he did not want to speak to Gorm, or the others now – he had what he wanted from Halk, the Orkney steersman, who made it clear he was too new to Hoskuld’s crew to care about them much.

‘Hoskuld had three gold coins from this priest he met in Holmtun,’ Halk told Crowbone, the wind that took them from under the smoke of Hvitrann whipping the hair away from his round, thick face. ‘One took the priest and ship to Olaf in Dyfflin, as you know. A second took him to Sand Vik, where they found me to steer for them.’

He broke off and grinned ruefully.

‘If I had known …’ he began and Crowbone’s stare silenced him as surely as if he had clapped a hand across his mouth. It was clear the prince did not care much what Halk thought, clearer still that he cared less for the regret Halk felt. The steersman wondered if he had made a mistake in allying himself to this prince, for he felt the eyes of Gorm and the others on him from the far end of the boat and the blue-brown gimlets of Crowbone from this end; now he knew how the iron felt between hammer and anvil.

‘The third,’ he went on, feeling the spit dry in his mouth under the odd-eyed stare, ‘took the priest across to Torridun, where he was left. We then went back to Mann where Hoskuld took the writing for Orm. Then on to the Baltic, charged with finding Orm Bear-Slayer and telling him of matters.’

‘Torridun?’ demanded Crowbone and had the answer – the last old fortress-town of the Painted Folk who had once been strong in the north, before the
vik
-raiders from Norway ended them and let the kings of Alba reduce them further. Torfness, some knew it as, because the folk there found grass sods that burned like wood. Why would a monk be plootering in the ruins of that place?

He asked Halk, who shrugged.

‘Not ruined entirely – traders from Norway still go there. Besides, he is a priest,’ he corrected. ‘Not a monk.’

‘They are all the same,’ Crowbone declared, waving a dismissive hand and Halk, politely enough, Crowbone noted, put the matter to rights. A priest was more of a Christ-follower than a monk. Anyone could become a monk, but a priest was trained by others of his kind to talk to their god personally.

‘He was a hard man, this Drostan,’ Halk ended. ‘A skelf has more meat, yet he was wiry for all that – and the foot must have pained him a great deal, judging by the limp he had, but he never made a sound on matters. Not that you could have understood it much, between his lack of teeth and his way of speaking. Saxlander, Gorm said. From Hammaburg.’

The hackles rose on Crowbone’s neck.

‘We have to run with the wind,’ Stick-Starer yelled, whirling Crowbone to the sound of his voice. The wind keened and he saw the rain sheet between him and the
knarr
; he fretted like the spume-ragged tops of the waves, wanting to keep the
knarr
in sight.

He was vaguely aware of it, as if, like the
alfar
, it was truly visible only out of the corner of the eye. His mind was back on the winter steppe, the Great White, where he huddled in the lee of Orm’s armpit under an upturned cart as the howling wind scoured snow over the enemies who had kidnapped them. They had been led by a priest from Hammaburg called Martin, a man with a mouthful of ruined teeth, who had lost his shoe trying to kick out at Orm before vanishing into the shrieking whiteness, staggering towards Kiev, four days away.

Much later, Crowbone had heard how this Martin had been picked up and carted to Kiev. In return for them saving his life, he had told the ruler there, Yaropolk, all he knew of Orm and the men out on the steppe hunting all the silver of the world. He had lived, too, Crowbone had heard – though it had cost him a foot and he limped badly.

Martin. Orm’s bane. The one who had set the Oathsworn on the path of silver riches, in the days when Einar was jarl.

The dark grew; things sparked in it and Thor rumbled out a laugh.

‘Third reef,’ bellowed Stick-Starer and men sprang to the walrus-hide ropes. Mar blinked rain from his lashes and saw the grim jut of Crowbone’s jaw; the
knarr
could no longer be seen, yet the boy, shaven face pebbled with water, stared stubbornly at where it had been, as if he could reel it in with the force of his odd eyes.

Nothing, Mar thought, would surprise me about this prince – yet the world was reduced to grey and black, as if it sat on them like a gull on eggs. Then the searing light split it with a flash that left the jagged print of it on the back of his eyeballs and the stone in Mar’s belly sank, cold and deep.

‘Not even Finn’s Weatherhat will find a safe harbour now,’ Onund roared and even through the tearing wind the bitterness in his voice was gall to Crowbone. The waves had no rhyme to them, torn and ragged by the wind before they could take shape or order. They hurtled at the Shadow and a sheet of water creamed down the length of her, the spray horizontal as braced spears.

Yet they all saw Crowbone, still as the prow beast, standing with one hand on a line and the wind whipping his braids on either side of his face, staring straight ahead as the Shadow plunged into the long dark, the scowl on him darker yet.

They thought he was raging at being separated from the
knarr
, or furious at the storm itself. They were wrong. Crowbone’s head was full of a name which told him almost everything he needed to know.

Martin.

Run with the wind, Thorgeir had said, for that is what the Shadow will do. Bergfinn had no better option, so that is what they did. It was a good
knarr
, even laden as it was, coursing up the great glassy swells, cutting through the white spume-mane, planing down the far side. It was built for this, after all, more so than a
drakkar
.

After a while, with the sail reefed to the last knot, enough only to keep them steering, men curled their bodies a little less; they would ride the storm out and, with the luck of whatever gods they followed, perhaps meet the Shadow when the last clouds blew themselves to rags.

Thorgeir began to ease the thought that had padded blackly after him since he and Bergfinn had been sent back to this
knarr
– that the boat was their doom, a wyrd woven in wood by the Norns. He looked to where the wrapped body of Fastarr Skumr rolled in the wet, waiting a decent burning; next to it, Kari Ragnvaldrsson hugged his shattered hand and his misery, facing nothing better than a purse of hacksilver and an uncertain future no matter where they reached.

Cripples and the dead, Thorgeir brooded. Not the best crew, but fitting for such a ship as this.

The wyrd of it cracked open not long after when the steering oar collar snapped for the second time.

Torvold, a fair smith in his day, could do nothing with his forge-built muscle. He should have let the steerboard go, but without it they were all doomed, so he dared not and the weight of it dragged him over the side even as men, their screams torn away by the howl of wind, sprang too late to help him.

The Swift-Gliding balked, whirled like a stung stallion, no more use than a wood chip in a flood. Bergfinn had time to look at Thorgeir, to see his answering, flat-eyed gaze, all hope sucked from it as he watched the Norn curse come at them, woven now in water.

Then the great black-glass curl of sea fell on them like a cliff.

Later …

Vigfuss Drosbo looked, but could not see Crowbone in the deck huddle; he wondered if the prince was looking for birds to guide them, then realised that, sensibly, they were all on shore with a head under one wing. He saw Kaup, clinging to the mast with one hand, his mask of a face twisted with terror; he did not like a sea storm, it seemed. No sane man did, though the way of it, as Vigfuss said to the Burned Man, was to keep bailing and not think hard on anything.

It was day, Stick-Starer said, though you would be hard put to know it, but Mar and Kaetilmund staggered down the length of the deck, handing out a rising-meal of wet bread with most of the mould removed. There were some of the old crab claws too, so that Rovald, grinning and dripping, declared that he would at least get to eat them before their kin ate him.

Crowbone blinked out of his head, where a storm raged almost as bad as the one sweeping the Shadow.

Martin was the Drostan Orm had told him of, that was clear. If there had been a real Drostan to begin with, that one was dead and gone. Martin was a venom-spider and Crowbone remembered him, remembered the way the Saxlander priest had slit the throat of Bleikr, the beautiful dog Vladimir had given him. It would not, Crowbone thought, be much of a step to slitting the throat of an innocent monk called Drostan.

That whirling wind of possibilities, lashed with the confused sleet of what Martin was plotting, was bad enough. What was worse, what was the shrieking tempest of it all, was the matter of Orm in it. What had he been told? Had he told Crowbone all he knew?

And the great crushing wave of it – could Orm be trusted? It had come to him that he had, perhaps, misjudged Orm, dismissed him as a little jarl. It had come to him that this might not be the truth of matters, that Orm had ambitions and silver enough to raise men and ships – and use the Bloodaxe for his own ends. His hackles rose as his stomach fell away at the thought of Orm standing against him.

Yet all that had happened pointed to it like a good hound scaring up game; Orm had sent him with Oathsworn, supposedly to guard and help him, but probably to spy as he tripped all the traps set by Martin for those chasing the secret of this Bloodaxe. Then Orm would snatch it at the last, was perhaps close by even now. The thought turned him left and right to search, burned him with the treachery in it.

The worst of the real storm was gone, Crowbone realised when he surfaced from all this, and he said as much as he eased the stiff wet of himself. Nearby, Berto sat and stared at the deck with unseeing eyes, while the yellow bitch lay, head on paws and eyes pools of wet misery as deep as the ones that sluiced the length of her and down the rest of the boat. Stick-Starer glanced at the sky while the wind tried to tear his beard out by the roots, then shook his head.

‘We are in the mouth of it,’ he said. ‘We are running hard with the wind and it will get much worse than this before we see the last of this weather.’

‘There is cheer for you,’ grunted Murrough and Onund, coming from checking the mast and steerboard and how much water was shipped, looked at Gjallandi and said: ‘A tale would be good while we throw water out of the ship.’

‘Not one about the sea, all the same,’ added Murrough, scooping water over the side with his eating bowl. He nudged Berto, who seemed to wake from a dream and took another bowl up listlessly.

‘Or dogs,’ added Vandrad Sygni, as the yellow bitch, staggering in the swells, shook water out of itself all over him.

‘You can stop a dog from barking and howling by turning one of your shoes upside down,’ declared Murrough and then stared, a crab claw almost at his mouth, when he felt eyes on him.

‘What?’ he said.

‘When did you know so much about dogs?’ demanded Kaetilmund, shaking a cask to see how much drinking water was left in it.

‘We of the Ui Neill know everything about good hounds,’ the big Irishman boasted. ‘The health of childer will always be better if you allow them to play with dogs. If you see a dog rolling in the grass, you should expect good luck or news.’

‘Or expect it to be covered in its own shit,’ Kaetilmund countered.

‘Good news?’ demanded Vigfuss Drosbo, looking at the yellow bitch. ‘Does it work if the beast rolls on ship planking?’