Crowbone (21 page)

‘
Fater unser, thu thar bist in himile, si geheilagot thin namo
…’ the abbot panted, the drool running up his own nose. Erling sighed; it did not appear to him that this one was about to do as was demanded of him and he said as much. Gudrod’s eyebrows braided and he backhanded the abbot twice, then glared at him, sucking his knuckles as the Christmann swung like a bad bell.

‘Do you play
hnefatafl
?’ he asked suddenly and the abbot, swaying and bleeding, only moaned. Gudrod sighed.

‘I thought not. If you did, you would have known that the king is surrounded in this game and it would be as well to give in.’

The abbot started a gasping call for God to visit plagues on the pagan and died so suddenly, when Gudrod’s temper snapped, that even the monks were surprised. The abbot’s throat was opened by a seax in mid-rant, the priest’s last curse a hiss of blood-mist that Gudrod had to wipe off the writing.

‘Well,’ muttered Erling with pointed sarcasm, ‘do I pick another and find out if he can read?’

Gudrod, well aware that he had acted hastily, bent and wiped the seax clean on the abbot’s robes while the blood pooled out under the man’s head like a black, spreading shadow in the lamp light.

‘No need,’ said a voice and a figure stepped into the light and stood to let Gudrod and Erling look him up and down.

Indistinguishable in his dress from any of the other priests, he was as different from them in bearing as donkey from stallion; tall, hair neatly cropped and tonsured, eyes clear and unafraid. Lips, Gudrod thought to himself, thin and bloodless as wires and an arrogant tilt to the chin.

‘Who?’ he demanded.

‘Mugron,’ the man declared.

Proud, Gudrod thought. Knows his worth. Here is a man who wants to be the next abbot of Hy. Better still, here was a priest who spoke decent Norse and could read the Latin.

He thrust the parchment at him.

‘In return for this, a peaceful departure in the morning – you will have shelter and food for the night,’ Mugron said. ‘No-one else killed, nothing burned, nothing taken.’

Gudrod’s smile was twisted.

‘Do you play
hnefatafl
?’ he asked and the priest frowned.

‘Possibly. I play
skáktafl
which I learned in Rome.’

Gudrod had heard of
skáktafl,
the Shah’s Table, an invention of Musselmen and a game with more pieces and lined up like opposing armies – but Shah was just the Serklander’s name for a king, and any game of kings was one Gudrod wanted to play. So he smiled.

‘You have the word of a Christian on matters,’ he answered, while the blood of the abbot patted in large, wet drops to the stones. There was the briefest of hesitations, then the priest started to read.

Cnobha (Knowth), Kingdom of Brega in Ireland,
days later …

CROWBONE’S CREW

They skliffed over worn stone slabs, clack-clacking in salt-stained boots, skidding in the scowl-dark of the place, which was all tall shadows broken by the dazzle of torchlight so that Crowbone could not get a true impression of it.

They walked through skeins of men in the long hundreds, sorting themselves out so that the whole of that fortress writhed like a cut snake. Then, suddenly, they were at a door and the men in the lead, swathed in shoulder-fastened cloaks of muted check, stood to one side to let their king go through.

The king half turned then, to where Crowbone and Gjallandi and Murrough followed, rearing to a stop with the surprise of facing him. His eyebrows, like snow on lintels, had closed to make one iced line and his long moustaches, the colour of old walrus teeth, trembled almost as much as his belly when he spoke.

‘Watch your words,’ he growled. ‘This is Mael Sechnaill himself in here and he is judge. I have offered my hand to you on the strength of this Ui Neill man here and would not like to find I had misplaced it.’

He paused, then hitched up the great gold pin that fastened his cloak to the bulk of him.

‘Prince,’ he added, in such a scathing way that Crowbone took a step forward until Gjallandi’s hand gripped his forearm and stopped him. The anger in him burned his belly, all the same, as he stepped after the king of Brega, Gilla Mo Chonna. Gjallandi caught Murrough’s eye as the Irisher stepped up and was not made easier by the wild grin he got back.

They moved into the bright of the place, blazed with torches. Crowbone was surprised to see a floor of stone slabs that bounced the light back, so that the place seemed like the inside of a great bowl of red gold; he became aware of the salt streaks on his clothes, the tarnish on his pin and neckring.

He half-turned once to the other two, convinced the three of them were griming a trail on the floor, like slugs on a gold plate – then his laugh, half-shamed, died on his lips at the sight of the guards he had forgotten were behind them like pillars, long ring-coats jingling and dragging round their calves, faces blanked by helmet metal. It reminded him that his men were snugged up in the warm, but not part of the feast and kept away from the High King’s army until matters were resolved.

The dark gable of the place soared above Crowbone and the noise and smell of food was a blow to the senses. Ahead on the High Seat sat a figure, his dark hair bound back by a braided thong of gold threads, his face wreathed in smoky torchlight as he spoke from one side of him to the other with all the lesser kings – Mael Sechnaill, High King of the Irishers.

He turned as Gilla Mo stepped up and, smiling, waved the king of Brega to the seat beside him. This was Gilla Mo’s hall and that was his High Seat, but he acknowledged Mael Sechnaill as his better and bowed, then sat – on his left, Crowbone noted, not at his right hand, which was reserved for what seemed to be a blind man.

In a moment, though, Gilla Mo had his white hair close to the High King’s ear, while Crowbone stood, aware of the looks and the muttered questions, the faces turning like hog snouts to see who was coming to share the trough.

Crowbone could guess some of what the fat king of Brega told – how a band of Norse claiming to be part of the famed Oathsworn and led by a self-styled Prince of Norway had wrecked themselves on the shore near Ath Na Gassan, the Ford of Paths. On how they claimed to be Christians and one of them had announced himself as an Ui Neill called Murrough macMael, so Brega had offered them hospitality and brought them to the High King.

A fair walk it had been, too, Crowbone thought bitterly – they rode and we tramped. After a few hours of forested hills, humping their own sea-chests on their backs, Crowbone had refused to go further until this was resolved. In the end, reluctantly, Congalach had relented and the sea-chests had been taken on the front of the ponies; it had gone some way to quelling the black scowls directed at Crowbone from his own men, who thought his luck was poor.

On the way, Murrough had tried to find out more about these men of Brega and what they did, but beyond the mention of Mael Sechnaill’s army being at Cnobha, Murrough found out nothing much.

‘He is mannered enough,’ he whispered to Crowbone one rest-halt, ‘but this Congalach speaks a lot and tells nothing. I only know that the army goes to Tara and his men took seven years to train for war.’

‘I know that we are prisoners, for all we have our weapons,’ muttered Kaetilmund and grim faces growled agreement to that. Crowbone laughed as easily as he could make it.

‘As long as we have edge and hand, we are not prisoners,’ he told them. ‘We are war, waiting to be woven.’

Standing in front of the High King, all the same, Crowbone did not doubt that he had his feet firmly planted in a kennel of dogs who eyed him like a strayed wolf, so he pretended to ignore the stares and squints, looking instead at the richness of the hall.

There were wall hangings – a winged youth or a woman, in blue and green; a bearded man who seemed to be dead or sleeping and others, their colour faded by dark and smoke but some with the gold head-circles that Christ figures had. Real gold wire, too, Crowbone noted.

‘Murrough macMael.’

The voice cut through the noise and stilled it at once. The High King raised a hand and flapped it at them to come forward and Murrough, grinning, swaggered out. Gjallandi and Crowbone hesitated a moment and felt the body heat of the guards closing in behind them, forcing them forward. Congalach strode out in front and to one side.

‘Kneel!’ he ordered and both Murrough and Gjallandi went down on one knee.

‘Kneel before the Ard Ri,’ Congalach bellowed. ‘And the king of Brega. And all the kings of Ireland.’

Crowbone saw the cat’s arse purse to the Brega king’s mouth then and thought – aha, here is a man who does not like being an afterthought on the left hand of a High King. Then he felt the hard wolf eyes of all that other nobility raking him, so that he clenched hard on the bowels that threatened to turn to water and tilted his chin.

‘Never bow the knee, me,’ he declared and Congalach moved, two clacking steps, with one hand poised to grip Crowbone’s shoulder and force him down; then the odd eyes turned on him and he felt himself stop in mid-stride.

‘Lay that on me, Irisher, and suffer for it,’ Crowbone declared, then raked the assembly with a single sweeping glance. ‘Know this – you think we are prisoned here with you, but it is you who are trapped with us.’

‘In the name of Christ’s heaven,’ cracked out a voice and you could taste the dark scowl in it. ‘What does it matter? The man is a prince of Norway, after all, who does not need to bow even to the High King of Ireland. If we find that to be less than true, all the same, we will take his measure anew. If only to allow for the length of his burial hole.’

Congalach swallowed and the muscles in his jaw worked before he drew back. Mael Sechnaill rose, moved to the edge of the High Seat dais and stepped confidently off it. Suddenly, there was a stir at the back of him as men parted to let a figure through; it was the blind man from Mael Sechnaill’s right-hand seat and Crowbone stared at him.

He was old, with a face seamed and soft-skinned as an old purse, his eyes blind-white as boiled eggs. He was wearing a long kirtle of check and Irisher-laced shoes, with a blue cloak fastened round his waist and thrown over one shoulder, fastened with a pin which winked silver.

‘This is Meartach, my
Ollumh
,’ the High King said with a smile. ‘He has no eyes but he sees a great deal.’

Crowbone heard Gjallandi move slightly at the announcement and remembered that an
Ollumh
was some sort of superior skald for the Irish; small wonder our own skald is concerned, Crowbone thought, since he might have to prove his worth in front of an expert.

Meartach came shuffling up, close enough for Crowbone to see the napped white hair, fine as a dusting of snow on his pink scalp, the lines and grooves of the man’s face. The
Ollumh
reached out both hands and Crowbone drew back from him, which made the old man laugh like the rattle of old bones.

‘Have no fear, Prince of Norway. What can an old man do?’

‘Odin seems an old man,’ Crowbone answered uneasily, letting fingers trace his face; they were warm and dry as lizard skin, smelled of meat and old dust. ‘One-Eye, however, is dangerous to let close to you, even as a friend. And a king may do what he pleases in his own hall.’

This brought a chuckle.

‘Is he your god, this Odin?’ Meartach asked, moving on to pass his fingers over the grim smile that was Murrough, trembling like a horse at the start of a fight.

‘Not in this place,’ Crowbone answered and the High King laughed.

‘I thought Christ had reached the ears of the Oathsworn,’ he said.

‘The White Christ is everywhere,’ Crowbone admitted and had back a nod and wry twist of grin, while Meartach hovered around Gjallandi, making noises in the back of his throat, something between a cat purr and an expression of surprise.

Then he shuffled back to the platform and sat on the right of the High Seat, which Crowbone saw made the Brega king scowl.

‘A prince he is, for sure,’ Meartach announced, which brought a brief murmur, a moth-wing of sound racing round the smoky hall. ‘There is more there, but it is shrouded and I cannot tell of it.’

Mael Sechnaill seemed surprised and impressed, stroked his chin and then went back to sit down.

‘The others?’

‘A warrior, the big man,’ Meartach declared. ‘The other has song in him, but not as much as he would like.’

There were laughs at this and the scowl of pride it brought to the bristling Gjallandi. Crowbone was impressed, but it was tempered with the thought that the
Ollumh
had not said anything that could not have been gleaned from matters already known.

It was, all the same, enough. The High King waved one generous hand at the benches opposite him.

‘In which case, Prince Olaf – welcome to this hall. You also, skald – and you, Murrough macMael.’

They climbed onto benches and food arrived – salmon and other fish, coal-roasted pork and fine venison in great slabs on a platter of flatbread. Women brought ale and Crowbone felt the heat of their bodies as they poured for him; it had been a time since he had taken a woman.

‘I was hoping you would not claim kinship, Murrough macMael,’ the High King said with a smile, ‘since I am over young to have sired something the size of you and not known it.’

Folk laughed and Murrough grinned, meat juice running down his beard.

‘The Mael I am sired from is as far from your High Seat as the worm from the moon – a simple farming man from down
Inis Sibhtonn
way.’

This brought mutterings, for that was in the lands of the Dal Cais and, though they were also Ui Neill, Crowbone knew the rivalry between south and north was considerable.

‘I should have known from that axe,’ Gilla Mo chimed and then had to explain it all to the High King. Crowbone chewed meat and bread and watched the level of his ale cup closely.

‘Do you not bless your meat?’

The speaker was small-mouthed, long-fingered and had hair the colour of faded red gold, rippled the way sand does when the tide goes out. He looked truculent as a rooting pig as he stared at Crowbone, who matched it as cool as he could manage.