Crowbone (42 page)

‘Clear long before then,’ Crowbone spat back. ‘Hoskuld had carted Martin everywhere laying a trail of enemies to this prize. Hoskuld did not think fit to tell me of it – did he tell you?’

‘No,’ Orm admitted, ‘though I was after thinking something of the same. You should have had patience, Olaf, for Hoskuld would have told you in the end. He did not trust you altogether. Thought you had much to learn.’

‘I taught him a lesson or two,’ Crowbone growled and Orm’s sad eyes rested on him – worse, thought Crowbone, than if he had struck me.

‘You hanged his crew, I hear,’ he said and shook his head sorrowfully. ‘They were good men; I knew them for a long time. What of Hoskuld?’

Crowbone pushed against the sudden shame he felt at the hangings and harshed out a grunt, waving one hand dismissively.

‘Ask Gudrod. He lifted Hoskuld from Mann, but the trader was never heard from again.’

Orm sighed and scrubbed his beard. ‘That was ill done.’

‘It was all ill done,’ Crowbone said, rasped with misery. ‘You should not have used me like some thrall, to run ahead and take the blows.’

Orm’s eyes narrowed and he straightened a little.

‘I did not use you at all. I turned you loose and gave you what I could, so that you might make your own wyrd. I hoped you would stay true to the Oath you swore, hoped you were more of a man and less of a prince. I was wrong everywhere, it seems.’

Crowbone felt the spinning whirl of that, as if the earth had dropped away underneath him. There was a moment when he panicked from the fear of it, of being alone, like a boat cut away from the shore. Then it passed and the world settled.

‘Here we are, then,’ he said, staring Orm in the face. ‘Do we go on together in this?’

The loss was sharp, as if someone had actually died. Orm met the odd-eyed, half defiant stare of him and nodded.

‘Aye,’ he declared, ‘for you found Thorgunna for me, you tell me, and Odin’s hand was in that, for sure. The least I can do now is hold up your sky, which I have done before. But quickly, as your birds in it tell us.’

He stopped and scrubbed his beard, thinking.

‘Erling said Gunnhild and Gudrod had claimed the axe,’ he mused and Finn growled at Crowbone.

‘He might have said a little more on the subject,’ he said, barbed as a hunting arrow, ‘but finds it difficult to speak with an axe above his eyebrows.’

Crowbone admitted the fault with a brief flap of both hands, then squinted at the looming, smoking mountain.

‘Well,’ he growled, ‘he may have gone off with it, or Erling might have thought so, or been told to say as much. We will only learn the truth by going to this mountain.’

He broke off as Bergliot came up, curious to see this legend that was Orm and trying to look at least a little alluring, while swaddled in as many clothes as she could put on.

‘You Norse call this
Mörsugur
,’ she said to Orm. ‘I am told this means “the time that sucks the fat”. It is a good name.’

Crowbone felt her hand on his arm and shook it off, irritated, feeling her stiffen.

‘Together,’ he agreed looking at Orm, though both of them knew that was only until matters declared themselves.

‘I have lost interest in the working of birds,’ he added. ‘I do not fear the Mother of Kings as much as I did.’

‘
Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet
,’ said Adalbert from nearby. Orm turned, saw the raw-boned priest, hands shoved deep in his sleeves, cowl up and the beginnings of a good beard. Adalbert smiled.

‘He has done …’ he began.

‘He has done half, who has begun,’ Orm interrupted. ‘I know that one, priest.

‘You keep strange company these days,’ he added softly to Crowbone, who frowned back at him, sullen as slush.

‘Adalbert,’ he declared. ‘He came with me from Hy. To save my soul – “
probae etsi in segetem sunt deteriorem datae fruges, tamen ipsae suaptae eniten
”. Was that not what you said, priest?’

‘Very good, young prince,’ Adalbert murmured. Orm grinned.

‘At least you will learn the Latin,’ he declared, then looked at Bergliot.

There was a pause, long and awkward.

‘Bergliot,’ she said stiffly, when it became apparent that Crowbone would not introduce her. ‘I am from Wendland.’

‘A thrall,’ added Crowbone, then looked pointedly at her. ‘To a princess.’

Orm did not say anything, though he was sure this Bergliot thought herself more than that and certainly much more than that to Crowbone. He merely nodded and turned away, his heart leaden; he was grown, was Crowbone, but still had much to learn, about love as much as friendships and the power of an oath.

They went on, shedding men like slug slime. The Oathsworn were fittest, almost untouched by the fighting – because, Crowbone thought bitterly, it has all been done for them.

Yet the cold and the bad food did for them all and men were staggering with the shite freezing down their legs, some falling down and begging to be carried even as others begged for death rather than be left to the Sami. Yet others simply vanished, dropped out unseen and unheard.

The ties that bound them all now were a snake-knot tangle of oaths and fear and hope. It kept men from each other’s throats, but did not dispel unease or mistrust – the snow-buried dead braided the tension on them and the last, panting climb to the smoking gash in the mountain twisted fear out of them like water from a tight rope.

It was grim and grey as a hag’s head, with the almost sheer wall of a cliff where they wanted to go and a tumbled ruin of snow behind where rocks breached like the backs of whales, all the way to the faint line of dripping, mist-shrouded pines where the beast-men skulked. No birds sang here and only the dark gash with its pall of rotten-egg stink offered a way ahead. Finn alone took delight in it because it was warm.

‘Warm enough to have vanished away all that fallen snow,’ he pointed out, almost cheerfully, as if that was somehow a good matter. Everyone had noted the warmth that blew fetid from the mouth of the gash in the mountain; it did nothing to make them easier in their minds about entering the place, as Svenke Klak declared.

‘I mean,’ he argued, ‘if the creature laired in it breathes warm enough to turn snow to water for yards, chances are it is not a hare hole we are looking at.’

‘Melts my bowels to water, for sure,’ growled Kaetilmund, then glared at Crowbone. ‘Those oath-breakers without the protection of Odin should be trembling.’

Crowbone soured him with a withering stare. His shoulder throbbed and burned and his head felt light as a ball of air.

‘I did not come here to tremble on the edge,’ he growled. ‘I will go – but if it will make folk easier, then I will go alone and take a first look ahead.’

He had courage, Orm saw – but he had always known that about the boy. It was the rest Orm did not like, all he had learned from Onund and Kaetilmund and the others. He had hoped Crowbone would understand about the Oath, keep to it, use the strength of it, but it was clear that he was too much of an Yngling prince for that. He was not Oathsworn, that was sure – but what he is becoming, Orm thought, is less clear.

‘Best not, prince,’ he advised. ‘That dog can talk and we will need you here, I am thinking. Send someone else.’

The yellow hound was ruffed and stiffly pointing off into the snow haze; men shifted uneasily and started thinking about shields and weapons.

Crowbone moved to the entrance, where the walls rose up on either side and no more than three men could stand abreast – the yellow bitch whined and moaned as loudly as the wind, so that Bergliot reached down and patted her.

‘By the Hammer,’ Finn growled, looking round him at the smoking ground. ‘I hope this is no goddess fud I have crawled into, though it reminds me of a woman I knew.’

‘I was married to such a one once,’ muttered Murrough, which brought crow-laughter from throats dry from fear and twisted with attempts to breathe. Even Bergliot managed a smile, bright-eyed with fear.

Crowbone turned his odd eyes on Klaenger, who groaned a little. Freyja’s tits, he thought to himself, is mine the only face he sees? Yet he had seen the fight with Od and had more respect than ever for this young prince, was sure he was braided for greatness; it only remained to hope that his greatness was not threaded round Klaenger’s doom. Then he put his head down, as if walking into a downpour and plunged into the reeking smoke ahead.

The tension seemed to hiss away then and the men left outside turned away from the cleft, putting backs to the shroud of white and the sick heat of dragon breath, to face the sort of enemy who was almost a comfort now – the dark little Sami with their reindeer skins and beast masks and the desperation of those who have already lost.

They all knew the men were coming now, for even the blind could have seen them flit between the misted trees lower down, had caught clear sight of knots of them skulking cautiously towards them over the open white slide of new snow, so that they did not need the yellow bitch’s fresh warning growls.

There were not as many as before and a lot of them had no masks now, but they still had their little bows and vicious black-shafted, owl-feathered arrows.

‘They will have to come at us here,’ Orm shouted out to the backs of the men forming up, battered, scarred shields ready. ‘Up Finn’s woman’s fud, which he has clearly not ploughed enough, for it is very narrow.’

They snarled out laughter and their backs straightened. The ones in front, The Lost, hunkered their ring-mailed bodies behind shields and the spearmen closed up a little to force their hedge of points through to the front.

Finn folded up the brim of his hat and clapped his helmet over it, then stuck his iron nail between his teeth. Folk chuckled at the sight and Murrough shook his head.

‘I do not see why you bother with that hat, Finn Horsehead,’ he declared, ‘for it has never once nailed the weather the way we want it, so it has not.’

Finn frowned. The battered, rag-brimmed hat was spoil from the
rann-sack
of Ivar’s steading, him who had been by-named Weatherhat, for his headgear was reputed to ease storms. It was this that Finn had taken and, in all the years he had worn it, he had never, as he confessed, mastered the way of working it. Yet he would not part with it and said so.

‘You should at least tie that helmet under your chin,’ Murrough noted, for Finn simply clapped the dented effort on his head.

Finn snorted. ‘I have broken the neck of many a man using his own helmet,’ he pointed out, ‘and throttled a few more besides.’

Men tying their own helmet-thongs nearby looked stricken and paused. Crowbone almost smiled, but could not bring himself over the edge of it, for he wished his own men were as snarling grim and sure of themselves, of each other, as the Oathsworn.

He looked at his men, cat-nervous and still strangers, yet he took comfort from the fact that they stood, looking to him, oathed to him. He swelled himself up a notch; he was Prince Olaf, son of Tryggve, an Yngling and a chooser of the slain.

‘Do not listen to Finn,’ he bellowed. ‘To break a neck as Finn describes has to be done from behind and so it is rare, for all his boasts. Finn kills from the front and it is that iron nail you want to watch at work.’

Finn gave a huge burst of laughter and acknowledged Crowbone with a wave. Men yelled out and smacked weapons on their shields, taunting the creeping Sami. There was a shout from the front and men hunkered down, shields up, almost without thinking; the air flickered and arrows shunked into scarred wood, or skittered off the rocks. Knots of Sami ran to within range and hurled little throwing spears which clattered and bounced; folk jeered and yelled, while Crowbone pounced on the shafts and, one in either hand, hurled them both at once back over the heads of his men, shouting: ‘Idu na vy!’

The Slavs knew that one – the great Prince Sviatoslav’s war-yell to his enemies. I am coming against you. Orm raised his sword in salute hoping, even as the ranks roared at the expertise of the young Crowbone, that few remembered how Sviatoslav was now part of a Pecheneg war chief’s drinking cup.

‘That’s a fine skill,’ Svenke Klak said to Crowbone. ‘Is it as hard to learn as that snatching in mid-air trick?’

Crowbone grinned and shook his head.

‘You cannot learn it,’ he announced loudly. ‘It is a gift of the gods.’

Men who knew him, though, shook their heads, half-admiring, half-amazed at the truth of it. They had seen him practise such throwing daily, while his sea-rotten ringmail showed where he swam in it; they knew he had his face set on being a saga-hero.

Crowbone was about to tell Svenke more about how only some men had his hand luck, but the next flurry of missiles came, a mix of short spears and arrows, zipping and clattering dangerously. Svenke had half-turned to listen, his mouth open and a grin lopsided on it when the spear spanged off the black rock wall, splintered and broke, the point spinning harmless away and the broken shaft hitting him in the throat, just above the leather-thonged rim of his beloved ringmail, with the sound of a spade striking wet dung.

He staggered back, looked amazed at the lump of wood which had somehow just sprouted from him and turned his bewildered face to Crowbone, who half reached out as if to pluck the words Svenke’s mouth worked to form – but all that came out was a gout of black-scarlet and he fell backwards with a clatter.

He was dead by the time Crowbone reached him, which was a mercy, for he could never have lived long with such a wound. Murrough cursed and saw Crowbone’s face take on a pinched look – Halfdan moved steadily down the thick-ranked Oathsworn, telling those who craned to see who had been hit to watch their front and keep their shields up.

The stink of the place, the swirling misted smoke, the rattling rain of missiles and a thin, high shrieking wind ate at courage like worm on a keel, so that Finn and Orm had to move into the ranks, slapping shoulders and telling folk to stand, for they were starting to shuffle backwards. After a pause, Crowbone straightened from Svenke Klak’s body and did the same. He shoved the man’s death in the black sea-chest deep inside him and clashed the lid shut on it. Just another lost counter in the game of kings …