Crowbone (39 page)

Now, though, the Sami beast-warriors saw that she just seemed to be humming to herself, and kicking snow off the old hearth, talking life back into it, like a bitch mouths and licks the litter’s failing runt. The hunters sat silent and waiting.

The man came quiet out of the cleft, but the hunters knew and their beast-masked heads came up; others followed the man. The hunters glanced at their goddess, but she showed no alarm and they took the hint, lowered their weapons and waited.

She watched the group coming towards her – a litter on poles, with a man at each corner, another man hirpling painfully, and one with a bow, some more behind. The hirpling man had a robe which might have been any colour but now was mainly stain, dagged and torn round the hem where it straggled in strips. He carried a staff in one hand, had a face like a long stretch of bad road and one foot was bare. Twisted and crippled, that foot, but not so dead that it never felt the bite of stone or cold, but the eyes in him were even more dead than that and the dangling cross made her catch her breath.

A Christ priest. Here. Did he come to claim the axe? The thought stunned her, almost crushed her with the wyrd of it – then the litter was set down and she sensed the
seidr
from it, even before the figure was helped out, moved slowly towards her.

Old, she thought. An old power, this, and one to be feared. Still, she did as she was supposed to do. She nodded at the curved roots opposite and watched as her visitor sat down. The wind sighed and the fire hissed and the Old Power looked at the hunters and they looked back at her, hackles ruffed as dogs, for they sensed what she was. She looked round at the place, at the lack of snow, and the warmth compared with what was on the other side of the rock walls and nodded.

Then, finally, she turned and looked into the sere, ageless face of the woman opposite.

‘Goddess, is it?’ she said, in a voice made harsh by design. The woman nodded briefly, trying to look through the spiderweb-silk veil and seeing only the glitter of old ice eyes.

‘Aye, so they call you now. They have power, the Sami, but no common sense.’

She stopped, sucked in breath and muttered.

‘Still, no reason to be discourteous,’ Gunnhild added. ‘I have come for the Bloodaxe,’ Gunnhild said. ‘I had it before, when your … predecessor … was here, though I did not ask politely then. I had it then for my husband. Now I take it for my son.’

All her trepidation about old power vanished and the Sami goddess laughed with the sheer delight of this funny little veiled woman who thought the Sami had no common sense, yet came for the axe that had killed her husband and all her sons but one.

Finnmark …

CROWBONE’S CREW

The masked Sami would not stop. They were harried from rock to treeline, into clumped stands of pine and out on to the bare tumble of snow-draped rocks and still they would not go away. Crowbone wondered what hand guided them, for he knew there was a leader driving them. There seemed, to most, to be no sense in the losses they took, but Crowbone knew the game of kings well and the King Player’s best defence was to hurl his warriors at the enemy. The Orkneymen had died in winnowed droves and now Crowbone’s men did, too.

They found Mar spreadeagled on a rock, his insides laid out in some ritual. Gjallandi thought that a Sami wizard had done it, but the why remained a mystery. Crowbone sat back on his heels and looked at the iron-tangle of the man’s beard, the frosted eyes. Because he had broken that Oath he had taken so lightly? He looked to where Onund and Kaetilmund stood, accusing-grim, but they said nothing and, eventually, he broke their gaze.

‘We should give this axe foolishness up,’ growled Klaenger, a tall, rangy man with a nose red-raw with cold. ‘It is clear the folk here do not want us to have Odin’s Daughter.’

Crowbone knew that the man and Mar had been friends and saw a few agreeing nods from others. He looked up, to where the grey-green rocks piled ever higher, right up to the mountain fang where the white smoke plumed.

‘Look behind you,’ he said to Klaenger, who jumped and did so. When he saw nothing threatening, he turned back, scowling and wary.

‘Do you see the sea?’ Crowbone demanded. ‘Our ships?’

Klaenger’s lip drooped sullenly.

‘Look ahead,’ Crowbone offered and it was no longer for Klaenger, but for all the men. ‘There is the mountain where our quest ends. Which is easier to get to now?’

Men scuffed the ground with what was left of their boots and said nothing – the mountain was easy enough to navigate to, but no-one knew what terrors lay in it. But they went on. When the dog found Vandrad Sygni not long after, no-one even grunted.

It was clear that he was dead from the way his head lolled brokenly to one side. His eyes had been dug out with his own horn spoon, which had been left beside him. The strange, loose, sideways turn of his feet showed where he had been hamstrung; as a message it was as subtle as a slap on the forehead – your best tracker cannot see us, cannot move quietly enough, is no match for us.

They were attacked again not far ahead, a sudden rush as short and vicious as the day itself – a shower of black-shafted arrows and a howling of beast-masked men. Almost in a heartbeat it was over and, again, they left more dead than they caused.

Yet one of those they killed was Vigfuss Drosbo and another Thorgils, who had taken an arrow in the armpit, straight up the short sleeve of his ringmail. They are whittling us away, Crowbone thought, desperate and weary, like flakes from a lathed bowl.

It was then that Murrough, cleaning his axe beside a body, announced that he was sure he had killed this one the day before.

‘They all look the same,’ Kaetilmund growled in savage answer, trying to warn the Irisher off such a topic with his eyes. ‘Slit-eyed, flat-faced fucks with stolen weapons.’

No-one laughed, all the same and the idea persisted that they were killing the same men over and over again.

The next short day saw no sign of live men at all, but the yellow dog spoored out more dead, some from under fresh snow. One was a Sami and he had been burned with crosses and shot with a black-fletched arrow, then hung from a tree like a gralloched deer. That was clearly the work of Martin and Crowbone scowled and squinted at the snow glare, as if he could hook the monk to him with his odd eyes.

‘Perhaps not exactly in that order,’ Kaetilmund argued, frowning, ‘but all of those matters took place here.’

The other was a snow-buried norther and Gjallandi was sure this one was a Norwegian, though he could not be certain. He could be certain the man had died because an arrow had gone into his kidneys. Most of the rest did not care, one way or the other, for they had found the remains of a deer hanging in a nearby tree and there was a lot left on it, even if it was hard as stone.

Crowbone looked at the growing dark and felt the cold stone slide into his bowels; the days were so short, the nights long and fired by red and green lights, so that the mountain never seemed to get closer. They were danger-close to failing – yet he could feel the nearness of that axe, like heat.

Men started fires with old twigs and branches dug from under the snow, lichen plucked from rocks at the start of the day and dried out down boots or inside tunics. Stacked into small cones, sparked into life by flint, steel and gentling breath, fire budded, then blossomed.

The men thawed out the meat enough to cut, stuck it on strong twigs or even their knives, careless of the soot blacking the metal. Men on watch stamped and looked at the fires enviously, licked their lips as the white fat slowly began to broil and sputter; meat and smoke smells eddied up and away into the maw of the night.

Crowbone closed his eyes, swathed in the too-small white cloak, but those nearest him were never sure if he slept or not.

‘What are you after thinking?’ asked a voice and Bergliot swam into his waking vision, holding out a sharpened branch which speared meat. A rush of saliva drowned his reply and he held the stick with one hand, biting into the meat, then sliding his eating knife along to slice the mouthful free with a casual pass.

Crowbone never answered and she, thinking her attempt to mend fences had been spurned, did not ask again, merely huddled nearby and ached for the lee of his body. Crowbone never noticed; he was thinking that the dead Sami, whoever he had been, had been handled badly and that the Christ priest had done it. It was Martin, for sure – once before Crowbone had seen this cross-burning work of his, done on the back of the addled Short Eldgrim to try and get him to tell what he knew. That was when Crowbone had made a mistake and quit Orm in favour of Prince Vladimir.

He remembered it well enough, for Vladimir had been too young, not yet enough of a prince and matters got out of hand – Thorgunna’s first husband died and Thorgunna herself had been kicked in the belly, hard enough to ruin a child out of her. The same man who had done it to his mother, Crowbone remembered – Kveldulf, who had paid for it later.

For a moment Crowbone remembered the utter hopelessness, recalled his tears and snot as he huddled beside Thorgunna, stacked like a log in the boat Vladimir planned to use to sail down to the Black Sea and away from Orm and the Oathsworn.

He had wept like a cracked heart, for his mother, whose face he could not remember, for Thorgunna who had been like one to him and for himself, alone and abandoned and afraid. Poor Thorgunna, Crowbone thought, to have lost two men and two bairns.

Orm had stolen the boat and Thorgunna, dragged him out into the light and, Crowbone remembered, could have killed him but did not. He had taken him almost as a son. And married Thorgunna, too, later.

Yet Orm had been treacherous now, Crowbone was sure of it. The Oathsworn he had taken – Onund and Kaetilmund and the others – had not been been chosen by him, he remembered, but by Orm, sent to make sure Crowbone tripped all the traps Martin had made. Orm wants the prize, he thought bitterly, using me like some stupid young hunting dog.

Yet Orm does not know me, Crowbone thought. I will not be surrounded in this game; I am no fawning hound, to be sent out to spring snares.

As if it had heard, the yellow bitch nosed hopefully and he flung it the gristle of his meal, which it snapped up. Bergliot, smiling, tossed it some better chunks and men laughed. There was a murmur of soft talk.

As if they were not freezing on a bare mountain with all oaths in tatters, chasing a madness and fighting beast-men to do it, Kaetilmund thought. He murmured as much, quietly, to Onund, adding: ‘Perhaps Orm has not judged this well.’

Onund grunted his bear grunt, which could mean anything.

When the light struggled reluctantly back, they moved on, with mountains in every direction save the way they had come, which was a long, winding trail back down through the scree and pine and rocks. A river ran through it, frozen to milk-white, iced rills curling round and over the rocks and narrowing until it ended at the foot of a cliff.

Halfdan looked up, squinting at the white glare of it.

‘In summer,’ he said wistfully, ‘this would be a pleasant place of sounding water and wildflowers, birds and good air. A man could take some refuge from the heat of the sun in the pool here.’

It was a good vision, yet as forlorn as a flower in that place and he had back harshness for fetching it up.

‘Even in summer the water would be freezing,’ Onund pointed out, ‘while the insects would drive you out of your thought-cage entire. I have seen elk running off the top of cliffs because the insects plagued them to blind madness.’

‘You would not want to bathe in it now,’ Tuke added, lumbering past and cackling. Halfdan looked up and could only agree; the river was frozen like an immense hall hanging, stopped still in the middle of falling down the rocks and layered in folds like white stone. He turned as something black flitted and stared at a raven, the first bird he had seen for some time.

Crowbone stopped, too, the hackles on him stiff as hog bristle. It had gobbets of meat hanging red in its beak and shouldered into the depths of a dead, stunted pine at the foot of the falls, a tree now a splintered and frost-sparkled larder for the bird.

‘Steady,’ he said, low and soft. ‘That bird’s beak tells a whole saga.’

Kaetilmund saw it at once – fresh meat, unfrozen. A recent kill. He nodded and sent men on ahead; they began to climb the treacherously rimed trail alongside the waterfall, Crowbone, last to start up it, watching the raven as it watched him with its cold unwinking black eye. Only when it took its full beak into the depths of the tree did Crowbone blink back to the now of matters and start to climb; he was surprised to see the yellow dog at his heels.

At the top was a flat area through which the little stream flowed when it was not a ribbon of ice. There were hardly any rocks for a long way round, making it a good place to camp – which is why the men who had got there first had done so.

Crowbone arrived to find men panting hard, shoulder to shoulder and the breath rising from them like spray from a blowhole. Kaetilmund looked round, saw him and simply jerked his chin out in front. There were dead beast-men dotted here and there, stiff but not yet frozen; the raven’s feast. Beyond the scattered dead stood men, shields up and weapons ready.

They are iron-grim, these men, Crowbone thought. Faces like bruises, eyes red-rimmed and not looking at you so much as through you to somewhere distant, while the meltwater from their smoking breath ran off their helmets and refroze on their beards. They were stained and bloodied and coldly desperate, their hands on hilt and shaft flexing and clenching. Crowbone half turned, realising they were no different at all from the men at his own back.

‘How many of them, are you thinking?’ Onund asked, craning to see. A stone’s worth, said Gjallandi, though he was prepared to revise that upwards a few times, aiming it at men who tallied laboriously from one to twenty –
ein, tveir
,
þrír –
then took a stone from a pile and started again.

Crowbone heard a voice claim three stones’ worth, but that was from Tuke, who came from somewhere north of Jorvik and counted in some eldritch way –
yan, tan, tethera –
and did not do it well, even with his boots off.