Crowbone (33 page)

Gjallandi scowled, but Atli glowered right back.

‘He said,’ Gjallandi offered, before things forged up to melting, ‘that sometimes even good Homer sleeps.’

‘Who the fuck is this Homer and what has he to do with any of this?’ growled Styr, scrubbing his head.

‘A better way of saying it is “you cannot win every time”. I am thinking the priest is losing,’ Gjallandi explained.

‘Why not say that, then?’ grumbled Atli. ‘Not that it is a secret, as anyone can see.’

He then glared at Adalbert. ‘What does this Aristotle Homer have to say on cutting your own throat? You are supposed to be arguing that your god does not exist. Good arguments you have – but you are charging the wrong way.’

Even Crowbone laughed and Adalbert inclined his head as Mugron declared desperately, breaking from Latin to Irish in his passion, about how Adalbert would die a martyr.

‘The very existence, the utter conception of evil requires the existence and the concept of good, likewise the freedom of the individual will to choose between the two,’ Adalbert went on, seemingly unmoved. ‘Only God could confer such freedom on us, his creations – otherwise we should be bound by the necessity of being, like the sheep or the ox. The fact that we know we have such choice, such free will, thus shows not only a divine presence but also that a spark of His divinity lives in us, in our immortal souls.’

‘My head hurts with this,’ moaned Styr.

‘You are a dead man,’ Crowbone declared, puzzled, ‘unless your third argument is good enough to undo all that you have said so far.’

Adalbert held up his third finger. There was a silence, save for the wheeze of Olaf’s breathing; even Notker and Mugron held their breath.

‘If there is no God,’ Adalbert said, voice like a bell, ‘then you, Prince of Norway, would not have to be struggling so much against Him.’

There was a hoot of laughter, then another and Atli clapped Adalbert on the back, grinning. For a moment it made Crowbone as mad-angry as a smouldering bag of cats – but he suddenly saw it, how the wolves and bears that were Atli and Styr liked the spirit of this Adalbert. Even Murrough was grinning, thumping the butt of his axe on the floor. Mugron, he saw, was bow-headed, hands clasped in silent prayer; Notker was slumped on the floor, as if all his bones had deserted him, the hem of his robe mopping up the pools of blood.

Still, Crowbone thought, slightly bewildered, Adalbert had argued badly. He was supposed to disprove the existence of his god and had done the opposite. He and Notker were the ones who should die. He said so, though his voice was weak with confusion – that last proof of Adalbert’s had had a barb to it. Still, the silence that followed was thick enough to grasp.

‘On the contrary,’ Adalbert said quietly into the middle of it. ‘No-one should die. For the proposition we had to put has lost – yet it is clear that your men have voted me to live. Under the terms you set for this game all of us have won.’

Right there is why law-makers will rule the world, Crowbone thought – if they live long enough. The monk dazzled him, all the same, so much that he laughed with delight and stroked his coming beard with wry confusion; this was the game of kings, right enough, but played in a strange and excitingly different way.

‘Now I will make you a proposition,’ Adalbert declared. ‘Mugron will tell you the content of the letter and you will take it and leave quietly, harming no-one. But I will come with you.’

Mugron’s head came up at that. Crowbone cocked his own and stared at the monk, who thought he resembled a curious bird.

‘Why would you?’ he asked softly and Adalbert smiled.

‘To bring you to God,’ answered the priest. ‘
Probae etsi in segetem sunt deteriorem datae fruges, tamen ipsae suaptae enitent
. A good seed, planted even in poor soil, will bear rich fruit by its own nature.’

Crowbone laughed, the hackles on his neck stiff with the wyrd of it all. Was this the sign he looked for?

‘At the least, you can teach me this Latin tongue,’ he declared, ‘so that I know when Gjallandi lies to me.’

The skald’s face was stone and Crowbone’s good-natured smile died away at the sight. Mugron unsteepled his fingers and looked up at Adalbert.

‘You do not need to make this sacrifice,’ he declared piously, but Adalbert’s returning gaze was cool, grey as an iced sea.

‘You did as much when Gudrod strung up your predecessor,’ he declared and there was iron in his voice. ‘I merely did it before an abbot died.’

Mugron flinched and bowed his head.

‘
Pulvis et umbra sumus
,’ he said and, in unison, Adalbert and Gjallandi translated: ‘We are dust and shadow.’ They stopped and looked at each other, one cool, the other glaring.

Crowbone laughed with delight as the abbot closed his eyes so that the letter was as clear as if it was before him. Then he started to speak.

Later, when Murrough came up to the fire, Kaetilmund raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘Do not ask,’ Murrough said, shaking his head and the Swede was stunned by the elf-struck bleakness of Murrough’s eyes.

Bay of Seals, Finnmark, some weeks later …

THE WITCH-QUEEN’S CREW

Men blew on their numbed fingers and huddled close to the snow-frosted ground, where the mist fingered them with icy talons. The sky was still blue, scudding with white clouds and the great rolling white expanse they had just come up folded away behind them. If Erling squinted, he could just make out the ships, slithered half up out of the grue of ice that wanted to be the Tana River.

‘Jiebmaluokta,’ Gunnhild said, her breath smoking out from under the veil she wore, a contrivance of silk that showed only her eyes, old as a whale’s. She turned her whole upper body, swathed in a white-furred cloak of grey-blue trimmed with red; another swaddled her legs so that only the sealskin toes of her boots peeped out and she had hands thrust in a great muff of white fox. The chair she sat in like a throne had poles thrust through it and the four men who carried her now knelt at each one, panting like dogs.

‘What?’ her son replied, distracted. This place was already cold and the guide, a Sami supposedly friendly, had disappeared. Gudrod did not like that much.

‘Bay of Seals,’ Gunnhild answered dreamily, ‘in the tongue of the Sami.’

Erling, vicious with hate for her and afraid she might know, thought bitterly that she was the only one enjoying all this. Well, apart from Od, who crouched like an adoring hound, staring up into the veiled face, wrapped in a wolfskin she had given him. Erling did not like the way the boy fawned on her.

Gudrod did not much care what this place was called. When they had heaved six ships into Gjesvaer, old Kol Hallson had welcomed them well enough, but pleaded to go lightly on his stores.

‘Haakon Jarl’s men have already eaten me out of half the winter,’ he moaned. ‘Now there is you – what is so interesting here that brings both Gudrod Eiriksson and the king of Norway’s men to Finnmark so late in the year?’

He had been warily respectful when Gunnhild was brought in to the fire all the same and did not stint on his stores after that, though it seemed to consist of whale and walrus and salmon. Gudrod learned that eight ships of the king of Norway had come to Gjesvaer two weeks ago, led by Haakon’s Chosen, Hromund Haraldson and including the king’s favourite, the thrall Tormod. There was also a Christ priest, Kol recalled, whom no-one liked the look of.

‘Is there to be war up here, then?’ he asked, alarmed. Gudrod soothed him, for though the steading was small, with almost no men and only three ships, it was the only decent shelter for days in any direction.

Kol lent them Olet, a broad-faced Sami who traded seal and walrus with him. He had, he confessed, offered the man to Hromund and Tormod, but they had refused, because the Christ priest said so. The priest knew the way, Kol said, clearly curious to know where the priest and everyone else seemed to be going. It was clear to Gudrod that this Christ priest was the Drostan everyone had heard of, though he was puzzled why the letter had been written by a priest called Martin and sent to Jarl Orm of the Oathsworn.

Another contender for the prize, Gudrod thought moodily and was not about to tell the Sami guide where they were headed before they left, which was two days later. He did not need Kol adding his interest to the crowd chasing the Bloodaxe.

Kol and the Sami guide made it clear, however, that chasing anything in Finnmark was beyond foolish – it was late in the year for plootering about up the Tana; the long night was closing in and the day scarcely a flicker.

Now Olet the Sami had vanished and Gudrod was hunched like a stunted tree among the rocks, two hundred men shivering around him and the mist trailing hag-hair over them. Somewhere ahead and heading for the prize was Haakon Jarl’s crew and the mad Christ priest, but Gunnhild was certain that they would not get the goddess to part with it. That needed her, she claimed, though Gudrod saw that no-one was happy hearing the word ‘goddess’; such magic did not sit well with them.

There was a movement off to one side and men tensed, weapons up; Olet wraithed up, his gait odd, as if he was trying to avoid leaving anything like a mark and the odd furrows and holes he shuffled into existence in the snow seemed to lack any destiny and collapsed as soon as he had passed.

He slid out like a tendril of the mist and moved through the knots of men to Gudrod’s side, where he took a knee and wiped his face, thick with bear grease against the cold.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Up ahead are some trees and a little hunting hut. There are reindeer everywhere, those big-horned ones, females fat against the winter. Someone will be watching over them.’

Gudrod did not doubt it; he had felt eyes on him for some time and the place was not helpful – grey rock patched greenish red with lichen, cut with gullies and sudden drops where water was turning to porridge, studded with icing tarns, stuck with little wizened trees like claws, clotted with early snow. He stood up and waved scouts ahead, to right and to left, then started forward, his presence dragging everyone else.

Erling rose up, stiff and cold. If he had known what Gudrod was thinking, he would have agreed and added in the reindeer, which scared him shitless, since they could hardly be seen at all except at the last and stood and stared instead of running off like sensible beasts. The fact that he was afraid of them did not help his mood.

After a toiling climb, they came to the hut, a low affair of stone, the roof a wither of old summer growth and branches. Beyond, a line of stunted grey trees hung with a witch-hair of frost-covered lichen, twisted themselves to the skyline; in the summer, Erling thought, they would be bright and there would be cloudberry bushes too …

Gudrod grunted, as if the sight had slotted something into place and now the whole cunning tiling was clear. In fact, he was now thinking it was time to give this up for the day, for plootering about in the sleet and mist as the dark grew was not sensible. Yet the night already seemed interminable.

‘Did you see Hrapp? Kjallak?’ he asked, naming the leaders of the scouts he had sent out, but Olet shook his head.

‘Well,’ said Erling, looking at him. ‘There is the hut. At least we can shelter from the cold in it.’

There were some two hundred men here; twenty under Hrapp scouted to the east, a similar group under Kjallak to the west, while Olet alone skulked out in front. There were more men back with the ships and Erling, turning to look, swore he could see the red flower of their fires and envied them.

Gudrod did not like the hut, for the mist was closing in and they were going to be stuck there for the night, which was not a prospect with much flavour in it. He said as much, turning to his mother, and Gunnhild, snapping like an annoying dog at the men who were lurching her too much, glared embers through her veil and said: ‘Well, you are the man for the leading here – so lead.’

He hated her and feared her, yet he had seen her power, knew it well. She wanted him a king and he had thought he had wanted that, too, like all his brothers – but all his brothers were dead.

‘I am after getting cold here,’ Erling said pointedly and Gudrod blinked out of the thinking and into his scowl, then nodded. He signalled; men moved forward.

They were creeping-soft, as cautious as rats approaching that hut, along the length of the stream which slid past it, heavy with ice. It started to snow, fine as querned flour.

‘Look lads,’ said Ozur Rik, pointing with his spear. They followed it, shaking sweat and meltwater from their eyes to see the reindeer skins pegged out on a wooden frame. They were only half-frozen, newly flayed, a simple domestic task that showed the place had been occupied only recently – perhaps still was.

‘A proper cured one of those would be warm,’ a man growled.

‘The hut,’ Gudrod reminded them, more harsh than he had intended and men hunched hastily under his frown. From somewhere in the misted trees came a coughing bark; those who had heard it before knew it as one of the reindeer, but most thought it was a loose hound.

‘Hold the dog,’ a man called Myrkjartan shouted, which caused chuckles, for it was the traditional greeting you gave to announce to a hov that you were no threat, even though you were arriving as a stranger.

Then all the animals of the stunted wood rose up on their hind legs and howled down on them out of the misted trees.

The Borg, Moray, at the same time …

CROWBONE’S CREW

The snow lay clumped on the sand, packed and powdered where the water had not melted it away; pools crackled with ice, luminous in a world of eldritch moonlight almost clear as day. The world seemed filled with the flicker of
alfar
, those hidden beings at the edge of vision, so that folk spoke in low voices or even whispers, touching iron for warding as they banked up fires and made their shelters.

To the left, Crowbone saw the bulk of the fort that gave the place its name, perched on a headland reached by a narrow neck. It had many names – Torridun, in the days when Sigurd of Orkney had come and pillaged it. Torfness, too, after the way the people who lived here cut up turves that burned like wood or coals.