Crowbone (35 page)

‘The King said that he would soon return to his own palace and that he wanted Hrolfr to play there at a feast. “Gladly,” said Hrolfr. “But where is it? And how do I get there?” The King laughed. “Why, under the sea, of course. You will find your way – but meanwhile, you need not wait for your reward.” The king dropped a large fish at Hrolfr’s feet. A fish with golden scales, which turned to solid gold as it stiffened and died.

‘Hrolfr was astounded, but the King waved a dismissive hand. “Say no more,” he said. “Music is worth far more than gold. If the world was fair, you would have your fill of riches and no rose would have thorns.” And with a splash, he sank in the river and was gone.’

‘Heya!’ bellowed a voice. ‘I am from Novgorod and all I ever got from the Volkhov was a chill.’

‘You cannot play as much as a bone flute, Wermund, so that is hardly a surprise,’ yelled a reply and people ordered them to whisht. Crowbone waited, then went on.

‘Hrolfr sold the golden fish to an astonished merchant, then left Novgorod that very day on a ship, down the Volkhov, across Lake Ladoga and into the Baltic Sea. As it sped above the deep water, he peered over the rail. “The sea is big enough to swallow whales,” he murmured. “How can I ever find the palace?” Just then, the ship shuddered to a halt. The wind filled the sails, yet the ship stood still, as if a giant hand had grasped it. The sailors grew afraid.’

‘I know these sailors,’ Adalbert interrupted. ‘
Illi robur et aes triplex circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci commisit pelago ratem primus
.’

‘No, no,’ Crowbone shouted as Adalbert opened his mouth to translate. ‘Let me. As hard as – something – wood, I think – and three bronzes once is … the heart of him who … who … who …’

‘Is there an owl in this story?’ demanded Stick-Starer.

‘Or does it go on in the tongue of Christ priests?’ added Kaetilmund. ‘If so, I will need help with it.’

‘Not bad,’ Adalbert admitted, ignoring them all, ‘but it should be:
As hard as oak and three times bronze was the heart of him who first committed a fragile vessel to the keeping of wild waves
. Horatius.’

‘Was this Horatius on the ship then?’ bawled Hrolfr. ‘What happened to me?’

Crowbone held up his hands and smiled. Adalbert sat, stunned by the speed at which the youth was mastering the Latin that had taken the monk years to perfect.

‘The sailors prayed for their lives,’ Crowbone went on. ‘“Do not be troubled,” called Hrolfr. “I know the one he seeks.” And clutching his
gusli
, he climbed the railing and, before any could lay hold of him, jumped into the waves.’

‘Not likely,’ Stick-Starer declared, outraged and men laughed. Crowbone, ignoring them, continued.

‘Down sank Hrolfr, down all the way to the sea floor, where he saw, in the dim light, a white stone borg, big as the one to our left. He passed through a coral gate, only now beginning to marvel at how he was alive and breathing like a fish. As he reached the huge wall doors, they swung open to reveal a giant hall. The elegant room was filled with guests and thralls, all of them from under the oceans. Herring and cod and sand eels and sea scorpions, crabs and lobsters, starfish and squid, giant sturgeon and a brace of whales.

‘Standing among the guests were dozens of maidens – river nymphs, the Sea King’s daughters. On a great High Seat at the end of the hall sat Aegir and his Queen, Ran, her hair green as wrack and waving in the eddies. “You’re just in time,” called the King. “Let the dance begin.”’

Crowbone paused and the listeners shifted and grunted in their eagerness for him to go on. He took a breath.

‘Soon the whole sea floor cavorted. The river maidens leaped and spun and the King himself joined the dance, robe swirling like rippling sand, his hair streaming like weed. Above, though Hrolfr did not know it, the waves lashed and broke on the shore; ships were whirled like wood chips. By the end of the night, Hrolfr’s fingers were raw and the King well pleased – so much so that he wanted to marry Hrolfr to one of his daughters and keep him beneath the sea. “Your Greatness,” said Hrolfr carefully. “This is not my home. I love my city of Novgorod.”’

‘Just as well,’ Wermund interrupted, nudging the real Hrolfr hard in the back. ‘Your ale would always be salty and watered down there, for sure.’

‘But the King insisted and the one he chose was the Princess Volkhova,’ Crowbone said, not even hearing Wermund. ‘She stepped forward, her eyes shining like river pearls. She had thrilled to the music Hrolfr had played on the shore, she announced, and now she had him as husband.’

‘Hrolfr marvelled at the beauty of the princess, but Queen Ran leaned over so that her wrack-green hair hung close to his cheek and said softly: “If you but once kiss or embrace her, you can never return to your city again.”

‘That night, Hrolfr lay beside his bride on a bed of seaweed and sand and fine-crushed pearls – and each time he thought of her loveliness, the Queen’s words came back to him and his arms lay frozen at his sides.’

‘Aye, there’s the lie of this tale, right there,’ growled Murrough from the back, his voice thick with bitter irony and yet no-one laughed, hanging on the lips of their young jarl.

‘When Hrolfr awoke the next morning,’ Crowbone said, ‘he felt sunlight on his face, opened his eyes and saw beside him … not the Princess but the River Volkhov. He was back in Lord Novgorod the Great. “My home,” said Hrolfr and he wept.’

Crowbone stopped, confused by the sudden rush of memories, of his mother’s voice, of the privy chain and Orm looking down on him on the day he had released him, standing in Klerkon’s winter-steading with the light dappling through the withy.

‘For joy at his return,’ he faltered. ‘Or sadness at his loss.’

‘Or both,’ said Bergliot, smiling.

She came to him later, of course, as he knew she would, silent and drifting as seaweed through the cold dark, while Hrolfr played cradlesongs for the men and heard the tale of himself repeated back and forth as if it had been true.

‘Will you wake by the Volkhov?’ she said, sliding the length of her body against his, hot as if it had come from the forge, the fork between her legs hotter still as she moulded it to his thigh.

‘Nei. Drowned in the deep,’ he said, reaching for her and she laughed, low in her throat.

Later, snugged in the harbour of his arms, she asked what had happened to the story-Hrolfr and Crowbone told her – he became a merchant, and in time, the richest man in Novgorod, married a fine young woman and had strong sons, at whose weddings he played the
gusli
.

He was happy, Crowbone told her, yet sometimes on a quiet evening he would walk out to the river and send his music over the water. Sometimes a lovely head would rise from the river to listen. Or perhaps it was just moonshadow on the Volkhov.

She slept, her cheek resting on his shoulder and he could feel her breathe like the sea on a shore, feel the suck and sigh of her and he stayed as still as possible all night, trying not to disturb her, trying to keep her close and afraid that he might succeed.

Finnmark, near Surman Suuhun, the Jul feast …

MARTIN

THE scouts came in as the snow thickened and started to swirl, cutting the iron-grey tumble of mountains to dim shadows. They had seen nothing, they said to Hromund, but had shot a reindeer. They pointedly tried not to speak directly to Tormod at all, for he was a thrall and Tormod, used to it, merely listened and spoke quietly to Hromund when they were standing apart from others.

‘Nothing?’ Tormod said in a voice that dripped bile. Hromund scrubbed his nit-cropped hair, which gave him his by-name, Bursta-Kollr – Bristle Scalp.

‘Eindride is a good man,’ he said stubbornly, while the good man himself laboured with others to string the buck up by the heel tendons. ‘A master bowman, too.’

‘I see he shoots well,’ Tormod answered patiently, ‘which must mean he has good eyes. Yet he has seen no sign of the enemy?’

‘Other than the one I shot earlier,’ growled a voice, so close to Tormod’s ear that he smelled the rank breath and saw the smoke of it, which made him spring back, startled. Eindride grinned out of the ice-spattered matting of his beard.

‘I meant no disrespect,’ Tormod declared and Eindride looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time.

‘If I thought that,’ he answered, ‘I would beat you, thrallborn.’

Tormod’s face flamed; he knew Eindride was a rich
bondi
in Óðinssalr in the Trondelag, probably the oldest farm in the world, yet the thrall did not like to be reminded of his true status for he was Haakon’s wisest advisor and opened his mouth to say so.

‘Has he spoken yet?’ Hromund demanded, before matters welled up. Eindride shrugged and looked over to where the Sami hung, like the buck from a frozen tree branch, by his heel tendons. Eindride had brought him into the shivering camp like a hunting prize from the last scout he had done.

‘Ask the Christ priest,’ he answered bitterly, then spat and swaggered away to oversee the butchering of the buck. Tormod watched them tie off the bowels, draw out the guts, belly, liver, spleen, gall, lungs and heart. Rumps and hams, ribs and loin were all neatly cut out and wrapped, yet there was still much left on the carcass. Men ate the cooling liver, chewing with relish and grinning with blood on their teeth. It was the Jul feast and they had been drinking
minni
toasts with the last of their strong ale.

The king’s thrall swallowed his anger. Nearby hung the Sami, swinging like the buck and yet able to see what was being done to it – which was, no doubt, part of the Christ priest’s plan.

Hromund, frowning, went over to where Martin hovered, hunched and hirpling back and forth from his crude sail shelter to a fire. A dark dwarf, the Chosen Man thought miserably. This was the place for such matters, for sure, a place of the
jötnar
,
those blood-thirsting giants who were enemies of Asgard’s gods and kept at bay only by the threat of Thor’s own Hammer.

Not for the first time, he wondered at the sense of this untimely journey through the high mountains in search of … what? A legend? Yet, he thought to himself, if it were true, if the Bloodaxe of Eirik was somewhere in these mountains, then the one who possessed it had power. You take Odin’s Daughter to wife and you got One-Eye as your in-law – Hromund shivered at that thought. He would make you king, as the saga told it, then one day turn the axe on you, laughing.

The Sami groaned and swung. There were raw festering marks on him, blackened at the edges – crosses, Hromund saw and he felt his mouth fill with saliva and spat it out.

Martin saw it as he returned the iron cross to the flames and curled his lip. Hromund, of course, was a heathen, like all of them in Norway, so he did not see the benefit of God. The Sami did and Martin smiled at what the man had already babbled – in Norse as Martin had surmised would be so when the man was brought in, shot through the thigh by Eindride. He had never seen the guide he had refused from old Jarl Kol, but he had known at once that this Sami was the one.

A hunter and trader, for sure, this Sami who wore good north wool and knew Norse well enough, even if he knew nothing about axes, which Martin had suspected when he had the man strung up. He had learned since that the man’s name was Olet and that he had been sent, as Martin had thought, by Jarl Kol with the men from Orkney – with the Witch-Queen Gunnhild, he said. She has power, he said, enough to face the goddess of the mountain. He also knew the place Martin sought and, in the end, confirmed it, whimpering.

Surman Suuhun.
Their heathen way of saying ‘the mouth of death’. Each time a holy cross was placed on his flesh, red-heated from the fire, fierce with the power of God, the man gasped out, screaming, ‘
Surman Suuhun.’

‘And the enemy?’ Hromund asked after Martin had explained all this, wiping his hands on the uneven, ragged dags of his robe.

‘What enemy?’ Martin retorted scathingly. ‘There are so many Norway men here that these mountain hunters are no threat. Gudrod and the Witch have got ahead of us, all the same – though all that means is that they do all the fighting.’

Hromund scowled at the implied slur on his leadership and was about to bark back when the Sami grunted. They both turned, astonished to see that he grinned bloodily, a horror made worse by his face being upside down.

‘She will take you all,’ he slurred through the blood of his own bitten lip. ‘Ajatar’s handmaiden.’

‘Who is Ajatar?’ Martin demanded at once, for he had never heard Gunnhild called that before. An arrow struck the Sami as he swung, took him in the back and came out through his front in a gout of blood, with heart meat snagged on it. He arched for the last time and screamed.

Hromund and Martin pitched to the snow-covered ground, yelling; men scattered like chickens and there was shouting; someone screamed. Then silence.

By the time men had gone out of the camp to look, Hromund knew it was pointless; no-one would be found, a fact which Tormod stated, his voice a sneer at Eindride, who flushed. The bowman knew he and his men had missed the hidden Sami and marvelled at that – even on this almost bare landscape of tumbled rock and lichen and gnarled, twisted trees, he had not seen them.

Yet he cut the arrow from the dead Olet and studied it, as if it would provide some clue, while the snow whirled in and around them like white bees. A slender shaft, blackened with pitch, fletched with owl feathers. A short arrow, so the bows were wood and sinew, not powerful, but enough, all the same, to kill a man with no protection – or even with if they were shot true.

Eindride had no doubt these bowmen could shoot true. He picked up the bow the dead Sami hunter had been using and saw that it could easily have shot this arrow, noted the soft fur puffs round the string below the bow tips to muffle the sound of the release. Pitch-blackened arrows used on a bow that shot them silently – night hunters, too, then.

‘They do not want us to get to where we want to go,’ Hromund said, as men went back to cooking and making what shelters they could against the snow. Martin, blinking flakes from his eyelashes, grinned his black grin.