ROBERT LOW

The White Raven

To my beautiful wife Kate, who navigates

us through the stormiest of waters to let

me write in peace.

Contents

Title Page Dedication Map Novgorod Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Historical Note Acknowledgements Also By Robert Low Copyright About the Publisher

NOVGOROD, Winter, 972 A.D.

On a crisp day with a grey sky and only a blinding white smear to show where the sun lurked, the prince’s executioners cut a good pine pole slightly taller than the height of a man, thin at one end, thick at the other.

The thin end they sharpened and greased, then they took the legs of the face-down woman and roped them by the ankles, pulling them wide apart. A man took a saddle-cloth, placed it on her back then sat on it to keep her still, while another bound each of her wrists with leather thongs, then tied them to two stakes, also wide apart. She screamed blood on to her teeth.

‘On this day, in the eighth year of the lordship of Prince Vladimir,’ intoned the crier, ‘this Metcherak woman was found guilty…’ and so on and so on.

‘Danica,’ muttered Thordis, soft enough so only we heard it. ‘Her name is Danica.’

Morning Star, it meant in the tongue of her Slav tribe. There would be no more morning stars for her. The stake was driven up into her while the executioners ignored her shrieks but made sure her white buttocks were decently covered as they hammered and pushed, to preserve her dignity from the droolers in the crowd. The white shift she wore was soon clinging provocatively to her all the same, soaked with her blood.

Impalement is not simple savagery; there is art to it and Vladimir’s executioners knew their work.

The sharpened stake was pushed, slowly and with skill up the woman’s body. It was, in a Loki joke, a healer’s art they used, for they knew how to avoid all the serious soft organs, the lungs and the heart and liver, despite her jerks and screams. There were frequent stops for adjustment, brief panting instructions and advice, one expert to another, as obscenely intimate as if they were all lovers. They stopped only once, to scatter wood shavings on the bloody snow and prevent them slipping in the slush of it.

One slash with a knife helped the point of the stake out through the skin of the upper back on the right side of the spine, proving that the stake had missed her heart; the crowd roared and the dignified, well-dressed worthies of Novgorod’s veche nodded their beards in approval as Danica was skewered like an ox on a spit. Still alive, as was proper.

They unroped her, then re-tied her legs together to the foot of the stake to avoid slippage when they raised it – gently, so as not to jolt the body – into a hole, which they packed with earth. It began to feather with new snow as the pole was then strutted with supports – and that was that, everything done according to the law and the rights of the veche.

Her bound feet offered no support and slowly, agonizingly, her own body-weight dragged her down the pole. It would take three days for the moaning, bleeding woman to die, while the snow turned crimson at her feet.

There was skill there and much to be admired in it as a statement of justice that made even the hardest balk at committing crimes in a city whose people called it Lord Novgorod the Great.

All the same, it was difficult to appreciate the full merit of this justice, since I was next in the queue – but I wondered if it was possible to find a price that would make the rulers of Novgorod keep that stake from my own puckering hole. Would a burial mound with all the silver of the world be enough?

ONE

HESTRENG, Ostergotland, early autumn, 972AD

The day before we were due to bring the horses down, it rained. I stuck my head out the door and, from the way the wind drove it, hissing like snakes from the sea, I knew it would rain for days.

Inside, Thorgunna fed the fire, stirring a cauldron already on it. Elfin-faced and breasted like a fine ship, that was Thorgunna. Dark haired and, as Kvasir put it ‘a prow-built woman’, she had a way of arching an eyebrow and staring at you with eyes black as old sheep droppings that made most of us wither. Everyone had marvelled at Kvasir marrying her – as Finn said, drunk at the wedding: ‘Too long at sea. What does the like of Kvasir Spittle want with a wife? Six months wintering with one of those and you will be begging to be back behind the prow beast.’

Beside her, Ingrid chopped kale, as blonde and slim as Thorgunna was not, her braids bobbing as she shot what she thought were sly looks for Botolf. She was already pupped by him and promised in public.

From Gunnarsgard, the next toft over, Thorgunna was sister to Thordis, who had married Tor Iron-Hand. The sisters had half-shares in Gunnarsgard – an unnatural way to treat a good steading, which should always go to the eldest – and their cousin, Ingrid, lived with them.

Tor had had a good life of it, some said, with three women under his roof. Those who knew better pointed out how that meant three times the trouble. He had wanted to marry Thorgunna as well and so gain the other half of the steading until Kvasir spoke up and brought her to Hestreng, with Ingrid in tow, not long after fetching up here with the rest of us.

‘What does it look like out there?’ Thorgunna asked me.

‘The yard’s a lake,’ I reported, hunkering down by the fire. ‘Throw something special in that pot – everyone will need cheering.’

She snorted. ‘No doubt. And no work done for it on a day like this.’

Which was unfair, for there was always work, even indoors. There were two looms that had never been still for weeks as a brace of thrall women wove the panels of wadmal into a striped sail for the Elk. Everyone had sewing, or binding, or leather, or wood to work, even the children.

Still, they circled big Botolf in the pewter dark, demanding stories. There were three older ones, all boys and bairned on the thrall women by the previous owners and two new babes by my own Oathsworn – and one cuckoo from Jarl Brand. The hall rang with the sound of them as the men straggled in for their day meal, grey shapes in a grey day, blowing rain off their noses and shaking out cloaks.

I moved to the high seat, where I wouldn’t be bothered, while the hall filled with chatter and the smell of wet wool. The Irisher thrall woman, Aoife, was trying to put her son’s chubby arms in a wool tunic and he kept throwing it off again. In the end, she managed it, just as Thorgunna smacked her shoulder and told her to fetch mussels from the store. She left, throwing anxious glances as her boy – Cormac, she called him – crawled towards the deerhounds in the corner.

I sat, hunched in wool and brooding like a black dog, the rune sword curving down from my hands to the earth floor while I stared at the hilt of it and the scratches on it. I had made them, with Short Eldgrim’s help, as we staggered back from Attila’s howe and the great hoard of silver hidden there; for all I was not good with runes, they were enough for me to find my way back to that secret place.

The deaths and the horror there had resolved me never to go back, yet I had made these marks, as if planning to do just that. Odin’s hand, for sure.

I had thrashed and wriggled on the hook of that and found good reason and salted it with plunder to keep the Oathsworn from forcing me back to Atil’s howe. Even so, I had always known I would have to lead Kvasir and the others to that cursed place – or give Kvasir the secret of it and let him go alone. I could not do that, either, for we were Oathsworn and my fear of breaking that vow was almost as great as facing the dark of the howe again.

That oath.

We swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel, on Gungnir, Odin’s spear we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.

It bound us in chains of god-fear, drove us coldwards and stormwards, goaded us to acts that skalds would sing of – and others best hidden under a stone in the night for the shame of it. Yet, when we stood with our backs to each other and facing all those who were not us, we knew each shoulder that rubbed our own belonged to a man who would die rather than step away from your side.

It lifted me from nithing boy to the high seat of my own hall – yet even the seat itself had not been my own, taken as spoil from the last gasp of fighting for Jarl Brand and the new king, Eirik. I lifted it from the hall of Ivar Weatherhat, whose headwear was reputed to raise storms and he should have waved it at us as we rowed into his bay, for by the time we sailed off on a calm sea, he was burned out and emptied of everything, even his chair.

After that raid, we had all sailed here. Hard men, raiding men, here to this hall which reeked of wet wool and dogs, loud with children and nagging women. I had spent all the time since trying to make those hard, raiding men fit in it and had thought I was succeeding, so much so that I had decided on a stone for us, to root us all here like trees.

There are only a handful of master rune-carvers in the whole world who can cut the warp and weft of a man’s life into stone so perfectly that those who come after can read it for a thousand years. We want everyone to know how bravely we struggled, how passionately we loved. Anyone who can magic that up is given the best place at a bench in any hall.

The stone for the Oathsworn would be skeined with serpent runes, tip-tapped out with a tool delicate as a bird’s beak by the runemaster Klepp Spaki, who says he learned from a man who learned from a man who learned from Varinn. The same Varinn who carved out the fame of his lost son and did it so well that the steading nearby was called Rauk – Stone – ever after.

The first time I ran my fingers down the snake-knot grooves of the one Klepp made for us they were fresh-cut, still gritted and uncoloured. I came to rune-reading late and never mastered the Odin-magic of its numbers, the secret of its form – or even where to start, unless it was pointed out to me.

You read with your fingers as much as your eyes. It is supposed to be difficult – after all, the very word means ‘whisper’ and Odin himself had to hang nine nights on the World Tree and stab himself with his own spear to uncover the mystery.

Klepp runed the Oathsworn stone with my life as part of it and I know that well enough, even as age and weather smooth the stone and line me. I could, for instance, find and trace the gallop of the horse called Hrafn, bought from a dealer called Bardi the Fat.

He was black that horse, with not one white hair on him and his name – Raven – sat on him easier than any rider ever would. He was not for riding. He was for fucking and fighting. He was for making dynasties and turning the Oathsworn from raiders to breeders of fine fighting horses on the pastures Jarl Brand of Oestergotland had given us in the land of the Svears and Geats, which was being crafted into Greater Sweden by Eirik Victorious.

Hrafn. I should have been warned by the very name of the beast, but I was trying too hard to live in peace on this prime land, trying too hard not to lead the Oathsworn back into the lands of the east chasing a cursed hoard of silver. So a horse called Raven was a good omen, I thought.

As was the name of our steading: Hestreng, Meadow of Stallions. Rolling gently along the edge of one of the better inlets, it was good land, with good hayfields and better grazing.

Yet it stood on the edge of Austrvegrfjord, the East Way Fjord. It was called that not because of where it lay, but because it was the waterway all the ships left to go raiding and trading eastwards into the Baltic.

The Oathsworn, for all they tried to ignore it, felt the whale road call of that fjord every waking day, stood on the shingle with the water lapping their boots and their hair blowing round their faces as they watched the sails vanish to where they wanted to go. They knew where all the silver of the world lay buried and no norther who went on the vik could ignore the bright call of that. Not even me.

I watched the women bustle round the fire, thought of the stone that would root itself and hoped I had settled them all to steading life – but all they were doing was waiting for the new Elk to be built.

I had that made clear to me one day when Kvasir and I went up to the valley where our horses pastured out their summer and he kept looking over his shoulder at the sea. Because he only had the one eye, he had to squirm round on the little mare he rode to stare back at the fringe of trees, all wind-bowed towards him as if they offered homage, and so I noticed it more.

You could not see the hayfields or grassland beyond, or the ridge beyond that, which offered shelter to fields and steading from the slate grey sea and the hissing wind. But you could taste the sea, the salt of it, rich on the tongue and when Kvasir faced front again and saw me looking, he tilted a wry head and rubbed under the patch at the old ruin of his dead eye.

‘Well,’ he gruffed. ‘I like the sea.’

‘You have a woman now,’ I pointed out. ‘Learn to like the land.’

‘She will, I am thinking, perhaps have to learn to like the sea,’ he growled and then scowled at my laugh… before he joined in. Thorgunna was not one who perhaps had to learn anything unless she wanted to.

We had ridden in broody silence after that, into that valley with the hills marching on either side, rising into thick green forests, shouldering them aside and offering their bare, grey heads to the sky and the snow. It was a green jewel, perfect summer pasture that never got too dry. The hills at the end of it sloped up into pine and fir; fog roofed the tall peaks.

There was a hut in this snake-slither of a valley, almost unseen save by a thread of smoke, where Kalk and his son, the horse-herders, lived all summer. As we came up, Kalk appeared, wearing what thralls always wore – a kjafal, which had a hood at the top, was open on the sides, had no sleeves and fastened between the legs with a loop and a bone toggle. It was all he ever wore, summer or winter, save for some battered ox-hide shoes when the snow was bad.

He greeted us both with a nod of his cropped head and waited, rubbing the grizzled tangle of his chin while we sat our ponies.

‘Where is the boy?’ I asked and he cleared his throat a little, thought to spit and remembered that this was his jarl. It was, I was thinking, hard for him to believe that such a youngster was his master and that came as little surprise to me; I needed no brass reflection or fancy-glass to know what I looked like.

Thin faced, crop-bearded, blue eyed, hair the colour of autumn bracken braided several times and fastened back, reaching down to shoulders that had too much muscle on them for a youth with barely twenty-one years on him.

These shoulders and a breadth of chest told tales of oar and sword work. Even without the telltale scars on the knuckles that spoke of shield and blade, you could see this youth was a hard man.

Rich, too and travelled, with a necklet of silver coins from Serkland, punched and threaded on a thong and finished off with a fine silver Odin charm – the three locked triangles of the valknut, which was a dangerous sign. Those who wore it had a tendency to end up dead at the whim of the One-Eyed God.

There was a fine sword and several good arm rings of silver, too. And the great braided rope of a silver torc, the rune- serpent mark of a jarl, the dragon-headed ends snarling at each other on the chest of a coloured tunic.

I knew well enough what I looked like, what that made Kalk think and took it as my due when he dropped his eyes and swallowed his spit and came up grinning and bobbing and eager to please.

Jarl Brand’s return, complete with mailed men with hard eyes, had sent more than a few scurrying off his lands and the farms they left behind made fat prizes for chosen men like me. For the likes of Kalk and his son, the change made little difference – thralls were chattels, whoever sat in the high seat of the steading.

He told us it was time to bring the horses down from the high pasture, that one had a split hoof and of how Tor Ironhand was still turning his own mares loose in the valley, which he considered his own.

We said we would be back the next day and then rode back to the hall, towing the limping colt behind us.

‘Is this Tor’s valley, do you think?’ Kvasir asked eventually.

I shrugged. ‘I hope not. Thorgunna says it belongs to her, as her share of the steading. I use it because I am your jarl and the pair of you live under my roof – but both you and she can tell me to get out of it if you choose. Why do you ask?’

Kvasir hawked and spat and shook his head. ‘Seems as if you would know a thing like that. Owning a whole valley, like a pair of boots, or a seax.’

‘What? Should the land roll over and ask you to tickle its grass belly when you ride over it? Offer you a grin of rocks and congratulate you for being its owner?’

Kvasir grunted moodily and we rode in silence again, slowly so that the lamed grey could limp comfortably. We did not speak again that day, though I felt the brooding of him on me like an itch I could not scratch.

The next day he moved to my side, squatting by the high seat as I watched Aoife’s Cormac put his fat little arms round the neck of one of the deerhounds, which licked his face until he laughed. He was so pale-headed he might have been bairned on Aoife by the white-haired Jarl Brand himself, which we suspected, since he had been given that comfort as an honoured guest. No-one knew, least of all Aoife for, as she said, ‘It was dark and he had mead.’

Which did not narrow the search much, as we all admitted when we tried to work out who the father was.

‘What will you do about Thorkel?’ Kvasir asked eventually and I shrugged, mainly because I didn’t know. Thorkel was another problem I hoped would just go away.

He had arrived on Hoskuld’s trading knarr, which carried bolts of cloth and fine threads and needles that set all the women to yowling with delight. Stepping off the boat, pushing through the women, he had stared at me with his sea-grey eyes and grinned a rueful grin.

I had last seen his grin on a beach in that bit of Bretland the Scots called the Kingdom of Strathclyde. That was where he had stepped aside and let me into the Oathsworn without having to fight, having arranged it all beforehand. I had been fifteen and raw as a saddle-sore, but Einar the Black, who led us then, had gone along with the deception with good grace and jarl cunning.

Thorkel had gone to be with a woman in Dyfflin. Now he sat in my hall drinking ale and telling everyone how he had failed at farming, how the woman had died and how he had failed at selling leather and a few other things besides.

He sat in my hall, having heard that the story of the hoard of Atil silver was true, the tale he had scoffed at and the reason he had wanted to leave the Oathsworn in the first place.

‘We should call you Lucky,’ Finn grunted, hearing all this. Thorkel laughed, too hearty and trying to be polite, for what he wanted was back into the Oathsworn and a chance at the mound of treasure he had so easily dismissed.

‘Ever since he came back,’ Kvasir mused pitching straw chips into the pitfire, ‘all our men have been leaning to the left a little more.’

I did not understand him and said so.

‘As if they had axes or swords weighing their belts,’ he answered flatly. He shifted sideways to allow a deerhound to put its chin on my knee and gaze mournfully up at me.

‘Eventually, a man has to choose,’ he went on. ‘We came up the Rus rivers of Gardariki with Jarl Brand almost five years ago, Orm. Five.’

‘We agreed to serve him every year,’ I pointed out, feeling – as I always did when I fought this battle – that the earth was shifting under my feet. ‘I am remembering that you, like the rest, enjoyed the pay from it.’

‘Aye,’ Kvasir admitted. ‘The first year and the next were good for us, though we lost as much as we gained, for so it is with men such as we – it comes hard and goes easy. Those were the times we thought you had a plan to get us outfitted and so return to the Grass Sea to find Atil’s silver tomb again. Then you took land from the jarl.’

‘We had no ship of our own until we built one,’ I protested, feeling my cheeks and the back of my neck start to prickle and flame at the lie of it. ‘We need a…’ The word ‘home’ leaped up in me, but I could not say it to these, whose home was the shifting sea.

‘Anyway,’ I ploughed on stubbornly, ‘while there was red war we were welcome in any hov that esteemed Jarl Brand; when red war is done with, no-one cares for the likes of us. Why – there are probably not two halls along the whole coastline here glad to see a boatload of hard men like us sail into their happy lives. Would you prefer sleeping in the snow? Eating sheep shite?’

‘The third year of war was hard,’ admitted Kvasir, ‘and made a man think on it, so that we were glad, then, of a hall of our own.’

That third year of red war against the enemies of Jarl Brand had spilled a lot of blood, right enough, but I had not known the likes of Kvasir had thoughts such as he admitted to now. I gave him a sharp look, but he matched me, even with one eye less.

‘Last year made it clear you were finding reasons not to go where we all thought you should,’ he declared. ‘And while we spent, you hoarded, which we all thought strange in a young jarl such as yourself.’

‘Because you spent I hoarded,’ I replied hotly. ‘A jarl gives and armrings are expensive.’

‘Aye, right enough,’ replied Kvasir, ‘and you are a byword for the giving out, for sure. But this year, when Eirik became rig-jarl of all, you had to be made to start the Elk building and thought more of trade and horses.’

‘A ship like the Elk costs money,’ I bridled back at him. ‘Good crewmen need purse-money and keep – or had you planned to go silver-hunting with what remains of the Oathsworn only? There are a dozen left in all the world and two of them are in Hedeby, one caring for the addled other. Hardly enough to crew a knarr, never mind go raiding.’

Kvasir rode out the storm of my scorn, then thumbed snot from his nose and shrugged. He took to looking at me with some sadness, I was thinking, which did not make my temper any cooler.

‘You have tried to make those left into herders of neet and horses, with a hayfield to plough and a scatter of hens scratching at the door,’ he growled.

‘Shows what you know,’ I snapped back, sulky as a child, digging the point of the sabre into the beaten earth at my feet and gouging out a hole. ‘We coop our hens – had you not noticed?’

He wiped his fingers on his breeks.

‘No. Nor want to, when it comes to it,’ he replied levelly. ‘I am thinking none of the others know much about hens, or hay, or horses either. They know ships, though – that’s why all of them are cutting and hauling timber for Gizur every day, building the new Fjord Elk. That’s why they stay – and I would not be concerned at gaining a crew, Orm; Thorkel, I am thinking, is only the first to arrive looking for a place at an oar. Even after five years the silver in that hoard is bright.’

‘You have a wife,’ I pointed out, desperate now, for he was right and I knew it. ‘I was thinking you meant it when you hand-fasted to her – is she as easy to leave as the chickens?’

Kvasir made a wry face. ‘As I said – she will have to learn to like the sea.’

I was astonished. Was he telling me he would take her with us, all the way to the lands of the Slavs and the wild empty of the Grass Sea?

‘Just so,’ he answered and that left me speechless and numbed. If he was so determined, then I had failed – the tap- tap of the adze and axes drifting faintly from the shore was almost a mockery. It was nearly done, this new Fjord Elk, the latest in a long line. When it was finished…

‘When it is finished,’ Kvasir said, as if reading my thoughts, ‘you will have to decide, Orm. The oath keeps us patient – well, all but Finn – but it won’t keep us that way forever. You will have to decide.’

I was spared the need to reply as the door was flung wide and Gizur trooped in with Onund Hnufa, followed by Finn and Runolf Harelip. Botolf and Ingrid had moved to each other, murmuring softly.

‘If you plane the front strakes any thinner,’ Gizur was saying to Onund, who was shipwrighting the Elk, ‘it will leak like a sieve.’

The hunchbacked Onund climbed out of the great sealskin coat that made him look like a sea-monster and said nothing, for he was a tight-lipped Icelander at the best of times and especially when it came to explaining what he was doing with ship wood. He sat silently, his hump-shoulder towering over one ear like a mountain.

They all jostled, looking for places to hang cloaks so that they would not drip on someone else and yet be close enough to the fire to dry. The door banged open again, bringing in a blast of cold, wet air and Red Njal, stamping mud off his boots and suffering withering scorn for it from Thorgunna.

‘The worst of wounds come from a woman’s lips, as my granny used to say,’ he growled, shouldering into her black look.

Ingrid unlocked herself from Botolf to slam it shut. Botolf, grinning, stumped to the fire and sat, while the children swarmed him, demanding stories and he protesting feebly, swamped by them.

‘I would give in,’ Red Njal said cheerfully. ‘Little wolves can bring down the biggest bear, as my granny used to say.’

‘Pretty scene,’ growled a voice in my ear. Finn hunkered down at my elbow in the smoke-pearled dimness of the hall. ‘As like what you see in a still fjord on a sunny day, eh, Orm? All that seems real, written on water.’

I glanced from him to Kvasir and back. Like twin prows on either side of my high seat, I thought blackly. Like ravens on my shoulders. I stared, unseeing, at the hilt of the sabre as I turned it in my fingers, the point cutting the hole at my feet even deeper.

Finn stroked the head of the blissful deerhound and kept looking at this pretty scene, so that I saw only part of his face, red-gleamed by the fire. His beard, I saw, threw back some silver lights in the tar-black of it; where his left ear should have been was only a puckered red scar. He had lost it in Serkland, on that gods-cursed mountain where we had fought our own, those who had broken their Oath and worse.

There were few left of those I had sailed off with from Bjornshafen six years ago. As I had said to Kvasir – hardly enough to crew a knarr.

‘Keep looking,’ I said sourly to Finn. ‘Raise your hopes and eyes a little – written on water below, real enough above.’

‘Real as dreams, Orm,’ he said, waving a hand to the throng round the pitfire. ‘You are over-young to be looking for a hearthfire and partitioning a hall. Anyway – I know how much you had and how much you have laid out and your purse is wind-thin now, I am thinking. This dream feeds on silver.’

‘Perhaps – but this steading will make all our fortunes in the end if you let it. And the silver itch is not on me,’ I answered, annoyed at this reference to my dwindling fortunes and to dividing my hall up into private places, rather than an open feasting space for raiding men.

He looked at me at last, his eyes all white in the dark of his face, refusing to be put aside. I saw that look and knew it well; Finn only had one way of wresting silver from the world and he measured it by looking down the length of a blade. In that he was not alone – truth was that I was the one out of step with the Oathsworn.

‘But the sea itch is on you. I have seen you look out at it, same as the rest of us,’ he answered and I was growing irritated by this now. The closer the new Elk got to being finished the worse it became and I did not want to think of the sea at all and said so.

‘Afraid, Bear Slayer?’ Finn said and there was more taunt in it than I think even he had intended. Or perhaps that was my own shame, for the name Bear Slayer had come to me falsely, for something I had not done. No-one knew that, though, save the white bear and a witch-woman called Freydis and they were both dead.

I was afraid, all the same. Afraid of the sea, of the tug of it, like an ebbing tide. There was a longing that came on me when I heard the break of waves on the shoreline, sharp and pulling as a drunk to an ale barrel. Once on the whale road again, I feared I would never come back. I told him so and he nodded, as if he had known that all along.

‘That’s the call of the prow beast. There’s too much Gunnar Raudi in you for sitting here, scratching with hens,’ he said. He was one of the two – the other was Kvasir – who knew I was not Orm Ruriksson, but Orm Gunnarsson. Gunnar. My true father, dead and cold these long years.

Finn’s stare ground out my eyeballs, then he flicked it to the hilt of that rune blade as I turned it slowly.

‘Strange how you can scratch into the hilt, yet that rune serpent spell is supposed to keep it and you safe from harm,’ he murmured.

His voice was low and scathing, for he did not believe that my health and lack of wounds came from any runes on a sword and both he and Kvasir – the only ones I had shared this thought with – spent long hours trying to persuade me otherwise.

‘The spell is on the blade,’ I answered, having thought this through myself, long since. Hilts and trappings could be replaced; it was the blade itself that mattered in a sword.

‘Aye, perhaps so, for it never gets sea-rot or dull-edged,’ he admitted, then added a sharp little dismissive laugh. ‘The truth of it is that the power of that blade is in the hand of the one who wields it.’

‘If that was true,’ I answered, ‘then you and I would be worm food.’

There was a pause, while both of us remembered the dying and the heat and the struggle to get back this sword after it had been stolen. Remembered Short Eldgrim, who had lost the inside of his head and was looked after now by Cod-Biter who hirpled from side to side when he walked. Remembered Botolf losing a leg to the curve of this same sword whose hilt now rested under my palm, heavy with the secret of all the silver in the world. Remembered all those who had chased the mystery of Atil’s silvered tomb and fallen on the road.

Then Finn shifted, rising to his feet.

‘Just so,’ he grunted heavily. ‘Oarmates have died under wave and edge and fire from the waters of the North Sea to the sands of Serkland in order to be worthy of Odin’s gift of all the silver of the world. I can hear the Oathsworn dead growl that they did not suffer all that to watch us sit here growing old and wondering about what might have been. I hear better with just the one ear than you do with both, it seems.’

There it was, that oath. ‘Odin’s gift is always a curse,’ I answered dully, knowing he was right. Every feast brought the inevitable bragafull – the toasts drunk and wild promises made – followed later, when the drink had made us mournful, by the minni, the horns raised in remembrance. It grew harder, in the harsh, sober light, to ignore either of them.

This hov had double-thickness walls, was sunk deep into the soil, windproof and waterproof and sitting in it made you feel as solid and fixed as the runestone I planned to have carved. Yet a fierce wind was blowing us all away and I felt the scent of it in the air, with the wrack and flying salt spume that leaped the ridgeline and hunted round the roofs. It was the breath of the prow beast, snorting and fretting at anchor and wanting to be free.

We sat for a while in the swirling smoke, listening to the wind fingering the door and rapping to get in, while Botolf, more belly and less muscle on him these days, stretched out his carved timber foot to ease the stump and told stories to the children.

He told them of Geirrod the Giant and Thor’s Journey to Utgard and the Theft of Idun’s Apples and Otter’s Ransom. This last was told deliberately, I thought, for it touched on the dragon Fafnir, Regin the Smith and a hoard of cursed silver, the very one sent to Attila, the one buried with him – the one we had found.

Into the silence that followed came Thorgunna and Ingrid, doling out bowls of stew and it was so good everyone forgot Otter’s Ransom. She had taken me at my word and made good cheer in a cauldron; there was mutton, hare, duck, eel, prawns, mussels, barley, onions and root vegetables in that stew. I tasted kale and seaweeds and watercress and the lees of red wine.

‘By Thor’s balls, Thorgunna,’ growled Red Njal, ‘the sea is the test of a man as the cauldron is of a woman, as my granny once said. Jarl Brand doesn’t eat as well as this.’

‘He does,’ Thorgunna answered, ‘but he adds cinnamon to his, I have heard. And watch your tongue.’

‘Cinnamon,’ muttered Gizur. ‘There’s fancy for you. I cannot think that it would add much to the taste of this, all the same.’

‘We had buckets of the stuff once,’ Hauk Fast-Sailor said as I elbowed him aside to get a place on a bench nearer the fire. The high seat was my right, but too far from a good heat.

‘Remember, Orm?’ he said, nudging me so that stew slopped over my knuckles. ‘On that island where we fought the Serkland pirates? We used the dead Dane for a battering ram on the door to their stronghold.’

‘That was later,’ Kvasir growled, wiping ale from his beard. ‘The island where we got the cinnamon was where we found some of Starkad’s men who had been taken prisoner and had their balls and tozzles cut off by the camel-humping Arabs. They had killed themselves in their shame. The last ran himself at his prison wall until his head broke open.’

‘I have missed some moments, it seems,’ Thorkel said into the silence that followed. I ignored him as much as I could, though I felt his eyes on me as I spooned my stew.

The smoke eddied, dragging itself to the eavesholes and out into the rain and wind while I listened to Red Njal and Harelip arguing about where other enemies and old oarmates had died. All gone, pale-faced fetches sailing my dreams as dark shapes on a charcoal sea.

Thorgunna came softly up behind me, dragged the hair back over my shoulders and began to tie it off.

‘Don’t get your hair in your food,’ she said softly. ‘And those stories are not ones for children.’

Finn clattered his bowl angrily to the ground and rose, while the deerhounds came in among us, licking platters and fingers and wolfing scraps. Cormac came with them, scrabbling and laughing.

‘Perhaps we should set this one to routing out a stag or two before winter comes,’ chuckled Botolf, sweeping the gurgling boy up. Aoife grinned and Ingrid fired arrows at her from her eyes.

Finn looked at them, then at me, then shook his head and banged out in a blast of rain-cold wind.

‘Why does Finn have a face like a goat chewing a wasp?’ demanded Botolf as Ingrid glared at Aoife and hung on Botolf’s big arm.

‘He thinks we are living in a dream and going soft,’ Kvasir said, wiping bread round his platter and tossing it into the snapping maw of a deerhound. He looked softly at his wife. ‘Being chided for how we speak and needing our hair cut. He thinks we should be off on a hunt for silver.’

Botolf, who knew what he meant, grunted thoughtfully. Thorgunna, who simply thought it was warriors being restless, snorted.

‘Go raiding then – though it is no pastime for honest men if you ask me. At least you will be putting in some effort for the food in your bowl. Seems to me Jarl Orm is overly tolerant of every lazy one of you.’

She scooped up bowls with meaningful noise and shot me one of her looks as she went. No-one spoke for a moment or two, for it is a well-known saying that there are only two ways of arguing with a woman and neither work.

There was moody silence after this.

‘Play music instead,’ I said to Botolf, ‘in the event you find yourself attracted to the story of Otter again.’

Botolf, grinning ruefully, fetched his hand-drum and Hauk fished out his pipes and they tootled and banged away while the children danced and sang and even the thrall women joined in, sheathed in drab grey wadmal cloth, linen kerchiefs tied around brows and braids. For a while they stopped being chattels worn threadbare to the elbows – the power of drum and piping whistle has never ceased to amaze me.

A heathen thing that scene these days, thanks to the White Christ priests. The hand-drum is banned for being pagan and fine children all stained with bastardy, where no such mark was when Odin smiled on us and every child was as good as the next.

That day, while the wind wrecked itself against the hall and the rain battered in from the sea, it was as warming a heartscene as any sailor could dream of on a rolling, wet deck – but somewhere, I was sure of it, Odin had persuaded the Norns to weave in blood scarlet for us.

The thought worried me like a dog on a rat’s neck, made me get up and go out into a night smelling of rain and sea, to where the horses were stabled. They stirred and stamped, unused to being so prisoned, swirling up the warmth and sweet smell of hay and bedding. In the dark, the air was thick and suddenly crowded, as if a host of unseen people were there, circling me.

I felt them, the hidden dead of the Oathsworn, wondering what they had given their lives for and my belly contracted. I thought someone laughed and the dark seemed odd, somehow glowing.

It came from outside, in the sky, where faint strokes of green and red light danced in the north. I had seen this before, so it held no real terrors, but the mystery of the fox fires always raised my hackles.

‘Others’, too. Thorkel stepped out of the darkness and stood beside me.

‘Troll fires,’ he said, wonderingly. ‘Some hold that the red in those fires marks battle, where the warriors fight in Valholl.’

‘I had heard it marks where dragons fight and bodes ill,’ I replied. ‘Pest and war omens.’

‘All it means,’ said a voice, a blade cutting through the hushed reverence of our voices, ‘is that winter comes early and it will freeze the flames in a fire.’

Turning, we saw Finn come up, swathed in a thick green cloak against the cold, his breath smoking into ours as he joined us.

‘The sea will be cold when we sail,’ he added and left that dangling there, like the lights flaring in the sky.

TWO

Odin started to turn my world to his bidding not long after, on a day when I was woken by Aoife rolling away from me, out of the closed box space which was my right and off to see to Cormac. It was cold in the hall, where everyone slept as close to the fire embers as they could get or were allowed. It was colder still after Aoife had left my side.

Thorgunna and Ingrid were up, the one barrelling towards me, the other coaxing flames back into the fire and kicking thralls awake to fetch wood and water. I groaned. It was too early for Thorgunna.

She stopped, hands on hips and looked down at me, one eyebrow crooked. ‘You look like a sack of dirt.’

‘Lord.’

‘What?’

‘You look like a sack of dirt, Lord. I am the jarl here.’

She snorted. ‘It is an hour past rismal by the sun, which is scorching eyes out. Lord. And it is because you are jarl that I am here to give you a clean tunic and make sure your hair is combed. Lord. Men are here; they came with Hoskuld Trader, looking for you and Thorkel. They say they know Thorkel.’

I groaned louder still, for I had an idea who they were and why they were here. Thorkel would have spread the word and here they came, the next ones wanting an oar on the finished Elk.

‘Let Finn deal with it,’ I attemped. ‘I don’t believe you about the sun, either.’

‘Finn has already gone plank-hunting with Heg, as you ordered,’ Thorgunna answered briskly, throwing a blue tunic at me. It smelled of summer flowers and clean salt air. ‘But I will give you the part about the sun. It is there, though, somewhere in the rain clouds over the mountains.’

There was nothing else for it. I rolled out of bed, shivering and then had to splash water on myself before Thorgunna would let me into the clean tunic and warm breeks.

‘If you had not rutted with that Aoife all night you would not stink so much,’ she declared as I fastened my way into stiff shoes.

‘Keep you awake, did we?’ I growled back at her. ‘I seem to remember you and Kvasir making so much noise when first you arrived in this hall that I thought to build you a place of your own, just so I could get to sleep.’

There was a hint of colour in her cheeks as she snorted her derision and turned me round to braid up my hair as though she was my mother, though I was younger only by a half-fist of years. When I turned back, she was smiling and it was not a smile you could resist.

I lost the grin stepping out into the muddy yard, where Thorkel and four men waited patiently, in the lee of the log store. They sat picking at a rismal – a rising meal – of bread and salt fish on a platter, fat wooden ale beakers in their hands. Thorgunna would not let them into a hall of sleepers, but had offered them fair hospitality, even so.

It was cold, a day when the last leaves whirled in russet eddies and the trees spitted a pearled sky. Thorkel nodded in friendly fashion, twisting his stained wool hat nervously in his hands, indicating the men.

‘This is Finnlaith from Dyfflin, Ospak, Tjorvir and Throst Silfra. They are all wondering if you need good crewmen. As am I.’

I looked them over. Hard men, all of them. Finnlaith was clearly a half-Irisher, the other three were Svears and all had the rough-red knuckles you get from rubbing on the inside of a shield. I knew they had cuts on the backs of their other hands and calloused palms from sword and axe work, even though I could not see them. They had probably been fighting us only recently, but that was all over and a king over both Svears and Geats was being crowned in Uppsala this very year.

‘Silfra,’ I said to the one called Throst. ‘Why do you need me, then?’

His by-name – Silver Owner – was a joke, he explained in his thick accent. He never owned any for long, for he enjoyed dice too much. He needed me, he added with a twisted smile, because he had heard from Thorkel and elsewhere that I had a mountain of it. Thorkel had the wit to shrug and look ashamed for a moment when I shot him a look.

‘Find Kvasir inside,’ I said. ‘Thorkel will show you who he is. Do what Kvasir tells you and enjoy the hospitality of my hall. There is a ship being built which may need a crew and then again, it may not.’

Even as I said it I felt the heart of me sink like stone. The word was out, leaping from head to head like nits – Orm the White Bear Slayer, the Odin-favoured who held the secret of a mountain of silver, was preparing a ship. That attracted hard men, sword and axe men, from near and far, as Kvasir had pointed out.

That day was the beginning of it. Every day for the next few weeks they arrived, by land and sea, in ones and twos and little groups, all wanting a berth on the Elk. The hall filled with them and their noise and Thorgunna grew less inclined to smile and more inclined to bang kitchen stuff together and cuff thralls round the ears.

Then came the moment I had dreaded, when Gizur and Botolf came up, beaming, to announce that the carved prow- head had been placed and the Fjord Elk was finished.

I remembered the first of that name, the one I had been hauled up the side of at fifteen, plucked from a life at Bjornshafen into the maelstrom of sea-raiding, stripped from a life of field and sea into one of blade and shield. There was, it seemed to my sinking soul, no way back – and the hulk of all those steading dreams was wrecked beyond repair by my own heart-leap of joy at the sight of what Onund and Gizur had crafted. I had paid it scant attention before, not wanting to see it grow, not wanting to feel the power of the prow beast, dragging me from the land. Now the sight of it struck me like Thor’s own hammer.

It was sleek and new, smelling of pine and tar and salt, rocking easily at the wharf we had built, while men flaked the new sail on the spar, a red and white striped expanse which had occupied two years of loom work. I had paid Hoskuld in silver and promises for that sail; this new Elk had sucked the last of what little fortune I had away.

There was carved scrollwork on the sides and on the steering board; the weathervane was silvered. The meginhufr, that extra thick plank fitted just beneath the waterline on both sides of the hull, was gilded and, even now, the thralls’ hands were stained blue and yellow from the painting they had done. That also had cost me a fortune – lapis and copper for the blue, ochre and orpiment for the yellow and all mixed with expensive oil.

No wonder Hoskuld’s grin was as wide as the one splitting Gizur’s face – the trader could live idle for two seasons on what I had paid him for bits of this ship. The joy was on Gizur over what had been made, but it was rightly Onund’s work, though the hunchback gave no more sign of contentment than the odd grunt, like a scratching bear.

Thorgunna admitted it was a fine-looking ship, even if she sniffed at what it cost and the uselessness of it compared with a new knarr, or some decent fishing craft. And the hours it took good men to build, when they should have been mucking out stables, or spreading seaweed on fields.

But no-one listened to her, for this was the Fjord Elk, with its antlered prow-beast and wave-sleekness.

Gizur looked at me pointedly. My heart scudded with the wind on the wave. The moment was here and I knew what was needed – a blot ceremony, with a pair of fighting horses, the victor’s sacrifice and an oath-swearing. The old Oath that bound some of us still.

We swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel, on Gungnir, Odin’s spear we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.

A hard Oath, that. Once taken, it was for life, or until someone replaced you, which happened by agreement, or by challenge from a hopeful. I had not thought Odin done with us only that he dozed a little – but I should have known better; the One-Eyed All-Father never sleeps and when he does, one eye is always open.

So I sighed and said to them that it would be done, when I had decided – with Finn and Kvasir – just where we should raid.

In fact, I hoped the weather would change, from the watered-sun days which spat rain from a milk and iron sky to something harsher, with the wind lashing the pine forests like the breath of Thor and the sea rearing up, all froth and whipping mane. That would put a stop to the whole thing, at least for this season, I was hoping, for if Jarl Brand heard how men were raiding out of his lands – on top of neighbour-feuding – things would not go well with us in Hestreng.

I had forgotten that, while Thor hurls his Hammer from storm-clouds, Odin prefers his strike to come out of a calm sky.

We had one the day we took the Fjord Elk out to test it, a silver and pewter day, with the sea grey green and the gulls whirling. A good day to find out if it was a sweet sail, as Gizur pointed out, with more than enough wind to make oar- work almost an afterthought.

The men lugged their sea-chests up to bench them by a rowlock. The Irishers, only half Danes for the most part, were not shipmen of any note and craned their necks this way and that at the sight of shields and spears.

‘Are we raiding, then?’ demanded Ospak. Red Njal, lumbering past him to plooter into the shallows with his boots round his neck, gave a sharp bark of a laugh. Other old hands joined in, knowing no sensible man of our kind goes even as far as the privy without an edge on him somewhere.

‘A smile blocks most cuts,’ Red Njal shouted over his shoulder as he slung a shield up to the thwarts, ‘but best to have a blade for those who scowl, as my granny used to say.’

The wind whipped my braids on either side of my face and the new, splendid sail bellied and strained above me. The prow beast went up a long wave and skidded down the other side and I heard Onund and Gizur cry out with the delight of it, while I stole a look at Finn, who was muttering and clutching his battered, broad-brimmed hat.

He caught me at it and scowled.

‘There is a bag of winds in this hat, for sure,’ he growled. ‘I am thinking we should seek out old Ivar and have him tell the secret of it.’

Old Ivar, less his famous weather-hat and almost everything else he possessed, was fled to Gotland and unlikely to feel disposed to share any secrets with the likes of us, but I did not even have to voice that aloud to Finn. We stood for a while, he turning the hat this way and that and muttering runespells Klepp had taught him, me feeling the skin of my face stiffen and stretch with the salt in the air.

We ran with the wind until Gizur and Hauk decided they had found all the faults with beitass and rakki lines and all the other ship-stuff that bothered them, then we turned round into the wind, flaking the great striped sail back to the mast. Sighing, men took to their benches and started to pull back to the land.

Crew light as we were and running into an off-shore wind, the Fjord Elk danced on the water while men offered ‘heyas’ of admiration to Onund for making such a fine vessel. For his part, he hunched into his furs and watched the amount of water swilling down between the rowers’ feet with a critical scowl.

I stood in the prow, glad not to be pulling on an oar. I stared out across the grey-green glass of stippled water to the dusted blue of the land, one foot on the thwart, one hand on a bracing line.

‘It is the still and silent sea that drowns a man,’ said a voice, like the doom of an unseen reef, right in my ear. I leaped, startled and stared into the apologetic face of Red Njal who had left his oar to piss.

‘As my granny used to say,’ he added, directing a hot stream over the side.

‘Point that away, you thrallborn whelp,’ roared Finnlaith from beneath him, ‘for if you wet me it will be this silent sea that drowns you.’

‘Thrallborn!’ Red Njal spat back indignantly, half-turning towards Finnlaith as he spoke; men cursed him and he hastily pointed himself back to the sea, yelling his apologies and curses at Finnlaith for insulting him.

‘Do not despise thralls,’ Onund growled blackly at Red Njal. ‘The best man I knew was a thrall, the reason I left Iceland.’ The panting rowers lifted their heads like hounds on a spoor, for Onund rarely spoke of anything and never of why he had left Iceland. They kept their eyes on the man in front, all the same, to keep the rhythm of the rowing.

Onund went on, ‘I was with Gisli, the one they call Soursop, from Geirthiofsfirth, in Thorsnes, who was declared outlaw there some years ago. He had a thrall called Thord Hareheart, for he was not a brave man, but a fast runner.’

There were chuckles between the pulling-grunts; a good by-name was as fine as good verse. Finn moved down the ranks, offering water from a skin, feeding it to men who kept pulling as they sucked it greedily.

‘Outlawed or not, Gisli was not about to quit Thorsnes,’ Onund told us. ‘So men hunted him. He took his spear, formed from a blade-magic sword called Graysteel, which he had stolen and not returned, though it worked out badly for him – but that’s another story.’

Men grinned as they pulled, for the winter seemed to promise some good Iceland tales round the fire. Finn left off with his watering and came closer to listen.

Onund grunted and went on. ‘He also took Thord and as they were heading towards the steading, in the dark and cautious, he suddenly handed Thord his favourite blue cloak. For friendship he said, against the cold. Then they were attacked by three men and Thord ran, as he always did – but the attackers saw the cloak and thought it was Gisli.

‘They hurled their spears and one went through Thord’s back and out the other side. Then Gisli, who had spotted the men lying in wait for him, came out of hiding and killed them all, now that they had only seaxes.’

‘Seems like a fair fight to me,’ Finn growled and Onund shrugged, which was a fearsome sight.

‘So others say,’ he replied, ‘but I thought it a mean trick on a helpless and faithful nithing, and one which brought no honour to Gisli, who was already lacking in that richness for many other reasons, not least his easy Christ-signing. So I left his boat unfinished and came here.’

‘Others have signed to the White Christ,’ Finn argued and Onund, who knew well that Finn, among others of the Oathsworn, had done that once, nodded, considering.

‘I know it. The Englisc and others west of Jutland are nearly all Christ-followers now and will not trade with those who are not,’ he growled. ‘For all that, it is no honourable thing to throw off your gods, even for a little time, just for silver.’

‘To be without silver is better than to be without honour,’ Red Njal agreed sombrely, tucking himself back into his breeks and moving back to his bench. Finn, mired in an argument he felt he was losing, glared at him.

‘Before you mention her,’ he snarled, ‘let me just say that your old granny should have remembered the oldest saw of all – a tongue cut out seldom gossips.’

Red Njal pursed his lips with sorrow, shaking his head. ‘There is only mingled friendship when a man can utter his whole mind to another,’ he countered. ‘You have my granny to thank for that and my forbearance.’

‘Never trust the words of a woman,’ Finn intoned, ‘for their hearts were shaped on a wheel.’

‘With his ears let him listen, with his eyes let him look – so a wise man spies out the way,’ Red Njal spat back.

‘Shut up, the pair of you,’ shouted Kvasir, which brought a brief spasm of throaty chuckles.

It was there, basking in that glow of being on a fine, new ship with the only true family I knew and aware that I was enjoying it, that I felt the breath of Odin, a sharp chill that shuddered me, made me turn to where the antlered prow beast snarled.

The grey-green sea was the same and the gloomed blue of the land – but now there was a dark stain on part of it and the evil wink of a single red eye.

I stared, trying to make sense of it, until Finn shoved his spray-dusted beard inches from my cheek and did it for me.

‘Smoke and fire,’ he said. ‘Hestreng.’

I was still grasping at the swirling leaves of my thoughts when he turned back to where the men bent and pulled.

‘Row, fuck your mothers!’ he roared. ‘Our hall is burning.’

We hauled hard, creaming the Fjord Elk up and over the waves, pounding her into the shore, while those not rowing fixed helmets, checked thonging and studied the edge of blades for sharpness.

The panic in me was a spur that kept me pacing like a caged dog from mastfish to prow beast and back, until Kvasir smacked the flat of his blade on my helmet, hard enough to ring some sense into me.

He did not have to speak at all, but I met him eye to eye and nodded my thanks. His grin was hard-eyed and I remembered, with a start, about his wife, Thorgunna, as well as Botolf, Ingrid and Aoife and all the others. Like a fret of swirling wind, the thoughts circled in me. Who? Who would dare?

There was no answer to it. We had more enemies than friends, like all sea-raiders and the curse of it was that I made us vulnerable by giving those enemies a place to attack, a sure place where they knew we could be found.

Gizur howled at the rowers, who grunted and sweated and hauled until the last moment, then clattered in the oars while the keel drove hard and grinding up the shingle and men spilled out.

I scrambled to the thwarts and hurled on to the shells and pebbles, stumbled a few steps and saw men ahead, fired by fear of what they might have lost, churning up the stones and coarse sand towards Hestreng.

‘Finn…’ I yelled and he saw it and bellowed like a bull in heat, bringing most of them to a stop.

‘Wait, you dirty swords,’ Kvasir added at the top of his voice, as men swilled like foam. ‘We go together. The Oathsworn. As a crew.’

They roared and clattered blades on shields at that, but the truth was that most of them had sworn no oath yet; even as they trotted after me, panting like hounds, I had to hope they would fight, if only to protect their own wee bits and pieces littering my hall.

It was clear, when we came up over the rise that sheltered Hestreng from the sea, that it was not my hall that burned, or any part of it – I felt a dizzying wave of relief, followed at once by an equal wash of guilt at those who had been unlucky.

‘Gunnarsgard,’ Kvasir said, squinting to the feathered smoke and the red stain beneath it. ‘Tor’s steading has gone up.’

No real friend to us, but a neighbour for all that and I was on the point of stepping out towards the place when Kvasir bulled off towards Hestreng’s hall, dragging Finnlaith and others in his wake. Heading, of course, for his wife; shamed, I followed on.

I heard the clatter of iron on wood and the high, thin bell of steel on steel. By the time I had caught up with Kvasir and the knot of Oathsworn grunting their way round the privy to the yard beyond, I could hear individual panting and roars.

When I spilled into the yard, Finnlaith and Ospak were already screaming ‘Ui Neill’ and charging at a knot of men held at bay by the great, sweat-soaked figure of Botolf, timber foot firmly rooted in the lower slope of the dung heap and a great long axe circling and scything in his hands. Kvasir, ignoring all of them, charged on towards the hall.

A man, all dirty fleece and snarl, heaved a spear at me, which took me by surprise so that I barely got my shield in the way and had it torn from my finger-short grasp by the smack of it.

There was nothing in me but stoked anger, blood-red and driving. I did not even have my own blade out of the sheath, but placed one booted foot on the shield and wrenched the spear from the linden. Then I came at the man, who had a seax and the red-mawed look of a man who knew how to use it.

I remember using the butt of the spear in a half circle, catching the short blade of his seax and whirling it sideways, bringing the blade of the spear down in a cut that made him jerk his face away. It tore down his fleece and he gave a yelp, but it was all too late for him.

I drove the point into his belly, just below the breastbone and kept moving, so that he jerked like a gaffed fish and shrieked, his legs milling uselessly as I shoved him back and back and back until he hit the side of the brewhouse, where I impaled him on the sagging wattle wall.

Finn dragged me away from him, eventually. Later he told me I had crushed the man into the wall and looked to be bringing the whole brewhouse down, screaming for him to tell me who he was, who had dared attack the Oathsworn.

The rest of the crew came panting up and those arrived too late kicked the dead in their disappointment – and all the men were dead, I saw. Six of them.

Botolf, panting and red-faced, stumped towards me, grinning.

‘Nithing whoresons,’ he said and spat on the nearest. ‘A strandhogg, I was thinking, come to steal chickens and horses. Thorgunna saw them in the meadow, rounding up mares with no great skill and knew them for what they were at once.’

Thorgunna… my head came up, ashamed and guilty at having forgotten her, but Botolf broadened his grin.

‘A woman, that,’ he said admiringly and, just then, Kvasir appeared, Thorgunna with him, Ingrid behind her. Following on came Aoife, with Cormac on her hip and the thralls, Drumba and Heg.

‘They had barred the hall door,’ Kvasir said.

‘That was sound,’ Finn offered, beaming and Thorgunna huffed and folded her arms under her ample breasts.

‘That was only sense,’ she spat back, ‘when such friends as yours come to call.’

‘No friends of mine,’ Finn answered grimly and turned a body with his toe. ‘Yet, mind you, this one looks familiar.’

‘Parted at birth, I am sure,’ Ingrid muttered bitterly and, for all they seemed more angry than afraid, I saw the fluster and tremble in them.

‘My sister,’ Thorgunna said flatly and I blinked at that, having forgotten that Thordis was at Gunnarsgard, wife to Tor.

‘Finn – choose some good men,’ I said swiftly, seeing the path clearly for the first time since the smoke had stained my world. ‘Botolf – guard the women here. Kvasir – stay with your wife and command the men I leave.’

‘Guard the women,’ muttered Botolf moodily. ‘Guard the women…’

‘And your tongue,’ Ingrid snapped and then, to her horror, burst into tears. Thorgunna gathered her up and turned away.

‘They came looking for you,’ she said to me suddenly. ‘Yelled out your name, as if they knew you.’

‘Shot arrows into Hrafn, all the same,’ Botolf added grimly, ‘when he came at them for stealing his mares. The beast is limping about like a hedgepig, if he is standing at all.’

Finn and I looked at each other and he looked down at the lolled body of the man he thought he knew.

‘Old friends,’ he grunted.

THREE

It was a shock seeing him at his ease beside Tor’s hearthfire, feet up on a bench, picking the remains of one of my mares out of his teeth with a bone needle and grinning, for he knew he had caused me as much stir as if I had found a turd at the bottom of my soup bowl.

Klerkon. He had a good Svear name somewhere, but the dwarves guarded it as carefully as they protected the sound of cat’s paws, the breath of a fish and all the other things the world had forgotten. Klerkon they called him, after his father, who had been a klerkr. In the Svear tongue, that simply meant someone who had learned Latin, though it was more often given to a Northman who had become a Christ priest.

‘A surprise for you,’ he said, chuckling out of his button- nosed, bright-eyed face, the curl of grey hair framing it like smoke.

He had a face like a statue I had seen once in the Great City, one long broken in pieces so that only the head remained. It had sly eyes, tiny horns and tight-curled hair and Brother John, who was with me at the time, said it was a little Greek god called Pan. He had had goat legs and played pipes and fucked anything that moved, said Brother John.

That Pan could have fathered this Klerkon, who shoved a stool towards me and indicated I should sit, as if the hall was his own. In the shadows behind him, as I searched for Tor or Thordis, I saw shapes, the grinning faces fireglowed briefly and then gone, the gleam of metal. I knew the rasp of hard men’s breathing well enough and the rich smell of my own livestock cooking reeked through the hall.

When I strode out for the smoke of Tor’s steading, sick and furious, a dozen men followed. First we saw that only outbuildings burned – a byre and a bakehouse. Not long after, we found Flann, Tor’s thrall and, guddling about for plunder in Flann’s blood, a stranger with sea-rotted ringmail and tatters of wool and weave hung about him. He looked like something long dead risen from the grave and climbed slowly to his feet at the sight of us, wiping his palms down the front of his breeks.

‘Are you Jarl Orm?’ he asked in a voice thick with Finn accent.

‘Who wants to know?’ I countered and he shrugged.

‘I am Stoor and serve someone who wishes you well,’ he replied, sonorous as if he was a real herald. ‘He bids you come to the hall ahead, in safety. I was left here to guide you.’

‘Fuck you,’ Finn growled and would have said more, about traps and stupidity had I not stilled him with one hand. I looked at him and he at me. Then I followed Stoor, alone.

It was a wolf den now, Tor’s comfortable hov; the idea of it drove a dry spear into my throat and clenched my balls up into my belly.

‘There is pleasure in renewing old friendships,’ Klerkon went on easily. ‘A pity about the misunderstanding earlier, but such things happen on a strandhogg. Men get excited chasing chickens, you know how it goes. No slight was intended and little harm done.’

His voice made it clear that what I had lost in the way of livestock was well offset by the death of six of his men. Then he called for ale, which Thordis brought. She did not look at me when she laid the wooden cup at my elbow, but her whole body was hugged tight to her and there was a straggled lock of dark hair escaped from one coiled braid, which she would never usually have allowed.

‘Tor,’ I said to her and she blinked once or twice. Klerkon gave a little laugh and men shifted out of the darkness, grating a bench into the light. Tor swayed on it, his face a bruise, his lips fat and raw as burst blood puddings. His feet, I saw, hung unnaturally sideways; hamstrung so that he would never walk again.

‘I did not think you would object over-much to having an awkward neighbour put at a disadvantage,’ Klerkon said. ‘We needed some bread and cheese and the men needed to dip their beaks a little, so this place seemed good enough.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ I said to Tor and his single working eye flicked open.

‘Your fault,’ he managed to puff through his broken mouth. ‘Your kind. Your friends. You brought them here.’

Men laughed at that. I stared at the bald patch on top of Tor’s slumped head and felt sick. They were no friends to me, but he had it right – my fault, for sure. For bringing hard raiding men as neighbours to a peaceful bondi farmer. For thinking I could get away with it.

Not now, all the same, for Jarl Brand would see it, too. Once this mess was fixed, he would sigh and have to admit that he had no use for us now that the fighting was done. He would be sorrowful, but point out that he could not have swords such as us waving about on his lands, frightening decent folk, inviting bad cess on them.

Bad cess sat opposite, smiling his Pan-smile and sliding his platter across to me, the meat-grease cooling. I ignored it.

‘Not hungry?’ he asked and men chuckled. ‘Pity – that was a tasty horse.’

‘I hope you have silver left from other raids,’ I managed to answer him. ‘That meat you are enjoying will cost you. Jarl Brand will scour every wavelet for you after this. So will I. It will take a fat blood-price to still our hands.’

He leaned back and waved a languid hand.

‘A risk worth taking,’ he answered, narrow-eyed. ‘I am betting-sure that you can afford a horse and more besides. I hear you have a mountain of silver to draw on.’

Well, there it was. The circling rumours that had brought hard men flocking to join me had whispered in his ear and brought him. I knew Klerkon of old, had sailed with him on many a strandhogg, a supply raid, when we had both fought for Jarl Brand. Even among hard and vicious men like us, Klerkon was shunned as something sick.

‘Now you know more, so you know something,’ I answered. ‘I did not take you for a man who followed bairn’s tales.’

‘Just so,’ said Klerkon, watching me like a cat with a mouse, daring it to move. ‘I am not. But just as priests parted us on bad terms, one brings us together, as friends. As partners.’

My left knee was twitching and I could not stop it. The air was thick with rank breath, meat smells and the acrid stink of men sweating fear and he saw me struggle with the bewilderment and curiousity his words had forged. I had crossed him once, over a pair of Christ priests he had captured and I had grown tired of his bloody attempts to shake their faith by having them hold red-hot iron and the like. Klerkon was twisted when it came to Christ priests and some folk who claimed they knew said it was because one had been his father and abandoned him as a boy.

‘Priests?’ I managed.

‘Aye. You knew one, once, I understand. Tame Christ-dog of Brondolf Lambisson, who ruled Birka.’

‘Birka is gone,’ I harshed back at him. ‘Lambisson and the priest with it.’

Klerkon nodded, still smiling the fixed smile that never reached those slitted, feral eyes.

‘True, it was diminished the last time we paid a visit. Hardly anything worth taking and the borg had been burned. But we burned it again anyway.’

He slid his feet off the stool and sat forward.

‘Lambisson is alive, if not entirely well. The priest also and he is even less good to look on.’

He sat back while the wave of this crashed on me and his smile was a twist of evil.

‘I know this because Lambisson paid me to bring the priest to him,’ he said. ‘In Aldeigjuborg, last year it was. I plucked the priest – Martin, his name is – from Gotland, where he was easy to find, since he was asking after Jarl Orm and the Oathsworn. Why is that, do you think?’

I knew, felt a rising sickness at what Klerkon might still have to reveal. Lambisson and the priest Martin had set us off on this cursed search for Atil’s tomb years before, when I joined the Oathsworn under Einar the Black.

The priest had used Lambisson’s resources to ferret out something for himself, the Holy Lance of the Christ-followers and used the Oathsworn to get it. Now I had it, snugged up in my sea-chest alongside the curved sabre it had made and Martin would walk across the flames of Muspell to seek me out and get that Christ stick back. What Lambisson wanted with Martin was less clear – revenge, perhaps.

Klerkon saw some of that chase its own tail across my face and his smile grew more twisted.

‘Well,’ he went on, his voice griming softly through my ears, ‘perhaps this priest wanted his share of Atil’s silver and so sought you out. The rumours say you found it, Bear Slayer.’

‘If so, only I know how to reach it,’ I said, feeling that pointing out that fact at this time might prevent him from growing white around his mouth and a red mist in his eyes.

This time there was no smile in the wrench that took his lips.

‘Not the only one,’ he said. ‘Before the priest, Lambisson gave me another task – to fetch two from Hedeby. I knew they were Oathsworn. Only later did I find out that they knew the way to this treasure of Atil, but I had given them to Lambisson by then.’

Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter. Their names thundered in my head and I was on my feet before I knew it; benches went over with a clatter.

Klerkon leaped to his feet, too, but held out his empty hands.

‘Soft, soft – Lambisson wanted them hale and hearty,’ he said. ‘It was only recently that it came to me there might be more in this than wild tales for bairns or coal-eating fire- starers. It would seem I had the right of it – all the same, Brondolf Lambisson has a head start on us.’

‘Us?’ I managed to grim out, husky and crow-voiced.

‘Together we can take him on,’ Klerkon said, as if he soothed a snarling dog in a yard. ‘He has gathered a wheen of men round him – too many for me, too many for you. Together…’

‘Together is not a word that sits between you and me,’ I told him, sick with thought of what might have been done to Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter. Neither of them knew enough – Eldgrim, perhaps, who had helped me cut the runes into the hilt of the sword, but the inside of his head was as jumbled as a woman’s sewing box.

‘This is an invitation you would be wise not to turn down,’ Klerkon replied and I could see the effort it took to keep his smile in place.

‘There are frothing dogs I would rather walk with,’ I said, which was true, though this was hardly the time or place to be telling it. Steel rasped. Someone smeared out an ugly laugh. Klerkon snapped the eye contact with me, straightened a little and sighed.

‘Perhaps a trade partnership was too much to expect,’ he said softly and the smile was already a fading memory. ‘If we cannot join, then I have it more in the way of you telling me all you know and me sparing those you hold in regard.’

‘You are crew light for a task like that,’ I told him, seeing it for the truth – otherwise he would not have offered any deal. ‘I do not think I will tell you anything today.’

‘By the time I am done with you,’ Klerkon said, whitening round the eyes and mouth, ‘you will beg to tell me every little secret you hold.’

I hauled out my blade and the sound of his own echoed it. The sucking whispers of other blades being drawn in the darkness was the soft hiss of a snake slithering in on a fear- stunned mouse.

Then the door hurled open with a crash and daylight flared in, catching us so that we froze, as if caught fondling each other.

‘Your watchmen are shite,’ growled a familiar voice and Finn bulked out the light. ‘So I have done you a favour.’

Something flew through the air and smacked wetly on the table, hitting the edge of the platter, which sprayed horse meat and half-congealed grease everywhere. The object bounced up, rolled and dropped neatly into Klerkon’s lap.

He jerked back from it, so that it crunched to the floor. The eyes were the only recognizable things in the smashed, bloody ruin of a face. Stoor. Watery blood leaked from the raw mess where his neck had been parted from the rest of him. Somewhere a woman shrieked; Thordis, of course, one hand to her mouth and her hair awry.

‘Thordis,’ I said and held out one hand. She looked at me, then at Tor and I knew, with a lurch of sick fear, that she would not leave him – and that we could not carry a hamstrung man.

There was a moment where I thought to take her round the waist and cart her off – but it was an eyeblink only. If we failed, Klerkon would know she was sister to Kvasir’s wife and would use that to lever the secret he wanted out of me. Finn knew it, too, knew that she was safer if Klerkon stayed ignorant. He laid a free, gentling hand on my forearm; it left bloody smears.

‘Time to be going, I am thinking, Jarl Orm,’ he said and I moved to the door as the light from it slid down the bright, gleaming blade he called The Godi – Priest. He pointed it at Klerkon and the snarlers behind him, a warning as we backed out of the hall and ran for the waiting comfort of our own armed men.

Even as we sprinted out in a spray of mud and feverish elation, howling at each other with the sheer relief of having cheated our way to safety, there was the bitter taste of it all in the back of my throat, thick and metalled.

The wolf packs were gathering for the feast of Atil’s tomb. Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter were prisoners of one, Thordis was prisoner of another.

I set men to watch and we held an Althing of it round the hearthfire as Thorgunna doled out the night-meal. No-one felt much like eating, though and our weapons were within hand’s reach.

Botolf was all for taking all the newly sworn crew in an attack in the dark to finish it all. Kvasir spoke up for blocking Klerkon from leaving and sending to Jarl Brand for help. Thorgunna wanted to know what we were going to do about her sister. Ingrid wept.

Finn stayed silent until everyone else had talked themselves exhausted. He went out once – to check on the guards, I thought, which was sensible. When he returned, he sat in the shadows and said nothing.

Then he came and hunkered by the fire, while I slumped in the carved chair and tried to think up a way out.

Attacking was no answer – it would be a sore battle and one of the first things they would do would be to kill their prisoners, who would be hand-bound only and able to run if not watched.

Running to Jarl Brand might help, but no matter how goldbrowed my words were to him, all the same, it came out as too many sea-raiders running around his lands, frightening folk with their swords and I did not think he would take kindly to me having kept the secret of Atil’s tomb from him all these years. Worse, I had barefaced lied to him about the tale being true.

There was a deep sick feeling in me that I might, after all, have to trade with Klerkon.

‘We should beware the night,’ Botolf declared. ‘Klerkon is a fox for cunning and he has that Kveldulf with him, too.’

Kveldulf – Night Wolf – was a man rumoured to be other than a man when the moon came up. Finn grunted and picked some choice morsels out of the pot and Botolf tilted his head questioningly, just as Ingrid told him to pull his wooden foot back from the fire, for it was charring.

‘You do not agree, Finn Horsehead?’ Botolf said mildly, though he was annoyed, both at his own foot-carelessness and Finn’s casual dismissal of his plan.

Finn, wiping gravy from his beard, chewed and shook his head.

‘You have all gone soft and forgotten about what we truly are,’ he said, harsh as crow-song, his face blooded by the fire. ‘What would we do in Klerkon’s sea boots?’

There was silence. Botolf looked at Kvasir, who looked at me, cocking his head like a bird, the way he had taken to doing recently. The certainty of it struck us all, so that we almost leaped up at the same time. Thralls squeaked; Thorgunna, alarmed, demanded to know what was happening, grabbing up the long roasting fork.

‘It has already happened,’ Finn declared as we headed for the door. ‘I went outside to see for myself.’

‘And said nothing?’ I roared, sick with the surety that, even knowing, I could have done nothing. Kvasir ducked out the door and Thorgunna shushed the squealing thralls and demanded to know what was happening. Cormac bawled, red-faced.

Kvasir came back in, the rain-scented night swirling in with him, rank with woodsmoke. He nodded to me.

‘What is happening?’ demanded Thorgunna with a roar. ‘Are we attacked?’

We were not, nor would we be. Klerkon had done what any sensible sea-raider would do, given that his enterprise had not woven itself as tight as he would have liked. He had made the best of matters.

As Kvasir explained it, soothing and soft and patting to Thorgunna, I opened the door and stepped out to where the wind soughed, driving a mist of cloud over the moon, heavy with smell of wet earth and rain. But that could not hide the sharp tang of smoke and the horizon glowed where Tor’s steading burned.

In the smeared-silver dawn, I rode over with Kvasir, Finn and Thorgunna to where the raven feathers of smoke stained the sky, but there was nothing left of Gunnarsgard other than charred timbers. Flann’s body was where it had been and crows flapped heavily off it as we came up, but they had taken Stoor, body and head both. There was only one other corpse and that was a shrivelled horror perched on a bench in the black ruin of the hov.

Thorgunna slithered off the back of her pony, her dress caught up between her legs and looped over her belt in front for riding, so that it looked as if she wore fat breeks. Her strong calves flexed as she stumped to where the hall smoked damply and stood, legs slightly apart, rocking backwards and forwards for a long moment, staring at the grisly mess.

‘Tor,’ she said eventually and I nodded. It made sense – Klerkon dealt in profit and had killed the useless, hamstrung Tor, then taken his thralls and his woman and everything he could, down to the very chickens.

Thorgunna bent, picked something up, turned and walked back, looking up at where I sat on the pony.

She placed one hand on my knee and I felt it tremble like a nested bird. In her dirt-calloused palm was a snapped thong and a bone slice threaded on it. Tor Owns Me, said the runes on it; one of the tokens Tor tied on the neck of his thralls in case any thought of running. Klerkon had herded them to Dragon Wings and a new market – and not just the thralls.

He had taken what profit he could and gone off to brood and chew his nails on what to do next to prise the secret of treasure from me and it was clear he did not yet know Thordis could be used for it. If he found out…

‘We will go after my sister,’ Thorgunna said. I looked at Kvasir, who peered at me sideways and nodded. I looked at Thorgunna; it was clear this was not a question.

So I nodded.

‘Heya,’ said Finn and I could have sworn there was joy in his voice.

FOUR

The sea was the colour of wet slate, the spray coming off the tops of the chop like the manes of white horses. Somewhere, at that almost invisible point where the grey-black of sky and sea smeared, lay the land of the Vods and Ests.

Two days. Three days. Who knows? A day’s sail from a shipmaster is how far a good ship takes to travel some thirty ship-miles – but it could take you two sunrises to do it. Gizur kept saying we were three days from the Vod coast, looking for a range of mountain peaks like the teeth of a dog, but we never seemed to get closer.

Everyone was boat-clenched, which is what happens when the weather closes in. You sink deeper inside, like a bear in winter, sucking into the cave of yourself where you hunch up and endure.

The sail was racked midway down on the mast, we were driving east and a little south with a good wind and the oars were stowed inboard, so most of us had nothing to do but huddle in our sealskin sleeping bags. Everyone was busy, in silence, trying to keep dry and warm, while the lines hummed and the rain slashed in.

Thorgunna and the thrall women and the deerhounds huddled beside me under the little awning which was my right as jarl. Not that it gave much more than the illusion of shelter, but there was the warmth of shared bodies and the added, strange enjoyment of them being women.

I had done Botolf little favour appointing him steward in my absence – though Ingrid took the store keys from Thorgunna with a triumphant smile, which made Kvasir’s wife scowl. It was bad enough what Thorgunna was leaving behind – her chest of heavy oak with its massive iron lock, filled with fine-wrought wool and bedlinen stitched by her grandmother’s hands – without handing over her status in my hall to another woman who was not my first-wife. Not even my wife.

I then had to promise to get those keys back for her when we returned.

‘Stay quiet, do nothing,’ I advised Botolf, who was unhappy at being left behind and thought it more to do with his missing leg than anything else. I needed a level head and a brave heart, for Tor had friends in the region and there was no telling who they would blame or what they might do. Ingrid would supply the first and Botolf the second.

‘I plan to deal with Klerkon, get Thorgunna’s sister back, then go to Gardariki lands and find Short Eldgrim and Cod- Biter,’ I explained. He nodded as if he understood, but the truth was there was as much clever in Botolf as in a bull’s behind. Now and then, though, he surprised me.

‘Jarl Brand will have much to say on this and none of it good,’ he declared. ‘You should find a way of telling him how matters stand, before he takes it into his head to make you outlaw.’

Then he grinned at my astonishment.

‘You should sell Hestreng to me for an acorn, or a chicken,’ he added. ‘Then I can sell it back when you return. That way…’

‘That way,’ I finished for him, ‘Jarl Brand would spit blood at me selling that which I only hold from his hand.’

He stared for a moment, then astonished me further.

‘If you want Hestreng and the love of Jarl Brand,’ he grunted, ‘then you will have to put a rare weight in the pan to counter what he is thinking – that you lied to him about Atil’s treasure and are running about frightening decent farming folk with your sea-raider ways.’

His eyes went flat, like a sea where the wind has died to nothing.

‘It comes to me that you will need to travel all the way to Atil’s tomb and take all the silver you can,’ he added, his voice bitter-bleak because he knew he would not be part of that. Then he forced a smile and stuck out his hand.

‘I expect my share, all the same,’ he ended and, mazed at all this, I clasped him, wrist to wrist, more sure now that I had left matters in Hestreng in good hands. Then I stole the smile from him.

I told him we would be taking Drumba and Heg and three thrall women as well, because we had Thorgunna with us. This was a hard dunt for Botolf; two thralls had died in the winter before and losing five more was bad enough without also waving goodbye to Thorgunna, who was a pillar of Hestreng. I did not want her with us, but Kvasir did and Thorgunna was determined to chase after her sister, so there it was. I pointed this out patiently to a scowling Botolf.

‘We are oar-short on the Elk,’ I added, ‘but at least all those hard men with big bellies will be going with me, so you won’t have the expense of feeding them.’

There were twenty fighting men, bench-light for a drakkar like the Fjord Elk, which properly needed two watches of thirty oarsmen apiece – we barely had enough to sail her, as Gizur pointed out at the oath-swearing.

Hrafn provided the blood for it, as expensive and sad a blot offering as Odin would ever have. We found him, flanks heaving for breath, streaming blood and sweat, lying in the meadow shot full of arrows, as Botolf had said. Now his head reared accusingly on a shame-pole of carved runes, streaming out bad cess at Klerkon’s steading on Svartey, the Black Island, hidden miles beyond the grey mist and sea. Unlike us, Klerkon had no hall, but this was a winter-place he used and it was likely he was heading there.

‘We will pick up more men,’ I told Gizur and the new Oathsworn, more firmly than I believed. It was more than likely we would – but not from the land of the Livs and Vods and Ests. We would get no decent ship men until we reached Aldeigjuburg, which the Slavs call Staraja Ladoga and so would be raiding the steading of Klerkon with about half the men he had.

Finn pointed this out, too, when everyone was huddled in the hall out of the sleet, fishing chunks of Hrafn out of the pot, blowing on their fingers and trying to forget the hard oath they had just sworn.

‘Well,’ I said to him, uneasy and angry because he was right, ‘you were the one who wanted to go raiding. You were the one never still-tongued about Atil’s silver hoard, so that men would come to Hestreng and force me back to the tomb. Pity you did not think that the likes of Klerkon would hear you, too.’

Which was unfair, for he had saved my life in Tor’s hov, but all of this had smashed whatever shackles bound me to the land and the thought that Finn had had a hand in it nagged me. There was more cunning in it than he had ever shown before, so I could not be sure – but I was watching men eat my prize stallion and so was in no mood for him at that moment. He saw it and had the sense to go away.

Kvasir came to me while men shouted and fought good-naturedly in the ale-feast that followed the oath-swearing. He hunkered down at my knee as I sat, glowering and spider- black over the fun raging up and down the hall, and took his time about speaking, as if he had to pay for the words in hacksilver and was thin in the purse.

‘You were hard with Finn, I hear,’ he said eventually, not looking at me.

‘Is he aggrieved of it?’ I asked moodily.

‘No,’ answered Kvasir cheerfully, ‘for he knows you have other things to think on. Like me, he believes the sea air will clear your head.’

Well, Finn had the right of that, at least, though I did not know it myself at the time – or even when I was in the joy of it.

But when it happened, Finn came and stood with me in the prow, while the wind lashed our cheeks with our own braids and sluiced us with manes of foam.

The spray fanned up as the Elk planed and sliced down the great heave of wave, moving and groaning beneath us like the great beast of the forest itself. Those waves we swept over would not be stopped save by the skerries and the cliffs we had left behind. Only the whales and us dared to match skill and strength with those waves – but only the whales had no fear.

I was filled with the cold and storm, threw back my head, face pebbled with the salt dash of the waves and roared out the sheer delight of being in that moment. When I turned, Finn was roaring and grinning with me, while Thorgunna and the thralls watched us, sour and disapproving, hunched with misery and the deerhounds under a dripping awning that flapped like a mad bird’s wing.

‘You look a sight,’ Finn said, blowing rain off his nose. Which was hard to take from a man wearing a hat whose broad brim had melted down his head in the rain and was kept on his head by a length of tablet-woven braid fastened under his chin.

I said so and he peeled the sodden thing off looking at the ruin of it.

‘Ivar’s weather hat,’ he declared, ruefully. ‘There must be a cunning trick to it, for I cannot get it to work.’

‘Keep trying,’ urged Klepp Spaki, peering miserably out from under his cloak, ‘for if you can get the sea to stop heaving my innards up and down, I would be grateful.’

Others nearby chuckled and I wondered, once again, about the wisdom of bringing Klepp along at all. He had turned up at the hall with the rest of some hopefuls and I had taken him for just another looking for an oar on the Elk, though he did not look like the usual cut of hard men. When he had announced he was Klepp Spaki, I groaned, for I had forgotten I had put the word out for a rune-carver and now I had no time – nor silver – for his service.

However, he had looked delighted at the news we were off on a raid and said he would do the stone for free if he could take the oath and come with us, for he had never done such a thing and did not feel himself a true man of the vik.

Now he sat under his drenched cloak, hoiking up his guts into the bilges, feeling exactly like a true man of the vik and no doubt wishing he was back in the best place by the fire, which was his due as a runemaster of note. It was a joke on his name, this journey – Spaki meant Wise.

Later, I woke suddenly, jerking out of some dream that spumed away from me as my eyes opened. The deck was wet, but no water washed over the planks and the air was thick with chill, grey and misted with haar that jewelled everyone’s beards and hair. Breath smoked.

Thorgunna squatted on the bucket, only her hem-sodden skirts providing some privacy and I saw the thrall women passing out dried fish and wet bread to those on the oars, who were steaming as they pulled, eyes fixed to the lead oar for the timing. No thumping drums here, like they did on Roman ships; we were raiders and never wanted to let folk know we were coming up on them.

Gizur rolled up, blinking pearls from his eyelashes and grinning, the squat mis-shape of Onund hunched in behind him like some tame dancing bear.

‘Rain, wind, sleet, haar, flat calm – we have had every season in a few hours,’ he said. ‘But the Elk is sound. No more than cupful has shipped through the planks.’

‘More than can be said for my breeks,’ grumbled Hauk, picking his way down the deck. Gizur laughed, clapping Onund on his good shoulder so that the water spurted up from the wool. Onund grunted and lumbered, swaying alarmingly, to examine the bilges and ballast stones.

Gizur glanced over at the water. He could read it like a good hunter does a trail and I watched him pitch a wood chip over the side and study it, judging speed as it slid away down the side of the boat. Two hours later, the haar-mist smoked off the black water and Lambi Ketilsson, whom we called Pai for his peacock ways, stood up in the prow, yelling and pointing.

Black peaks like dog’s teeth. Gizur beamed; everyone cheered.

‘Now comes the hard part,’ Finn reminded everyone loudly and that stuck a sharp blade in the laughter.

Not long after, it started to snow.

The dawn was silver milk over Svartey, the Black Island. We were huddled in a stand of wet-claw trees above Klerkon’s camp, where the smoke wisped freshly and figures moved, sluggish as grazing sheep and just woken.

I watched two thralls stumble to the fringe of trees and squat; another fetched wood. The camp stretched and farted itself into a new day and we had been there an hour at least and had seen no-one who could fairly be called a man, only women and thralls. I had seen that Klerkon had built himself a wattle hall, while other ramshackle buildings clustered round it, all easily abandoned come Spring.

I looked across at Finn, who grinned over the great Roman nail he had clenched sideways in his teeth to stop himself howling out like a wolf, which is what he did when he was going to fight. Slaver dripped and his eyes were wild.

We had talked this through while the Fjord Elk slid through grey, snow-drifting mist on black water slick and sluggish as gruel.

‘It wants to be ice, that water,’ grunted Onund and Gizur shushed him, for he was leaning out, head cocked and listening for the sound of shoals, of water breaking on skerries. Now and then he would screech out a short, shrill whistle and listen for it echoing back off stone cliffs. The oars dipped, slow and wary.

‘We should talk to Klerkon,’ I argued with Finn. ‘If we can get Thordis back with no blood shed, all the better.’

Finn grunted. ‘We should hit them hard and fast, for he will have more men than us and we must come on them like Mjollnir. If we talk, we give up that and they will laugh in our faces and carve us up.’

‘Klerkon may just kill Thordis even if we do strike like Thor’s Hammer,’ Kvasir pointed out and I waved a hand to quiet his voice for, though we sat with our heads touching, it was not a large boat and Thorgunna was not far away.

‘No,’ said Finn. ‘I am thinking he will keep her to bargain with if it goes badly for him. He wants the secret of Atil’s treasure, so she is worth more to him alive.’

It was more likely to go badly with us, for if we could have taken Klerkon surely, I would have done it at Gunnarsgard. Neither of us had had enough men for certain victory then – but, in his own place, Klerkon probably had more. I did not say this, for it was no help; we had not sailed all this way to gather shells on Klerkon’s beach.

There was a flurry of movement, some hissed commands and then, with a crunch and a lurch, the Elk slid an oak keel scar up the shingle beach of Svartey, the Black Island of Klerkon.

The thralls and women stayed behind, for they were useless in a fight. Gizur and Onund stayed, too, for they were too valuable to the ship to be risked. The rest of us hauled out weapons, checked shield straps, slithered into mail if it was there to be worn.

In the dim before dawn they were grim and glittering with hoar, bearded, tangle-haired under their helmets and grinning the savage grin of wolves on a kill. Hauk Fast Sailor had a bow, which he preferred. So did Finnlaith, who was a hunter of skill and I had marked that. The rest had good blades, axe or spear. Few swords. All the blades were dull with sheep grease against the sea-rot.

They were hard men, wild men, rough-dressed and tattered, but their battle gear and blades were cared for as women care for bairns and no matter what they had done before, they had put the words in their own mouths and were bound to each other now, blade-brothers of the Oathsworn.

I reminded them of this at the same time as telling them to leave off the loot and women until we were sure all the fighters were dead. They growled and grunted in the dark, teeth and eyes gleaming.

Then Finn stepped up, a battle leader as was Kvasir. But Kvasir said little at these moments and had seemed even more preoccupied than usual. I took it to be because he had Thorgunna with him; a woman is always a worry.

‘It is as Jarl Orm says,’ Finn growled. ‘Obey him. Obey me and Kvasir Spittle here, too, for we are his right and left hands. You are no strangers to red war, so I will not give you the usual talk, of Hewers of Men and Feeders of Eagles.’

He paused, hauled out his long Roman nail and grinned.

‘Just remember – this is Jarl Orm, who slew the White Bear. Jarl Orm, who has stood in the tomb of Atil, Lord of the Huns and has seen more silver in a glance than any of you will see in a thousand lifetimes. Jarl Orm, who has fought with the Romans against the Serklanders. Jarl Orm, who is called friend by the Emperor of the Great City.’

I winced at all this, only some of which was true – but Finn’s audience would have howled and set up a din of shield- clanging if we had not been looking for stealth.

As we moved off, I saw Thorkel grin at me and raise his axe in salute and I realized that a lot of those things had been done by me right enough. I was now in my twenty-first year in the world, no longer the boy Thorkel had let into the Oathsworn on a shingle beach like this one, on a night much like this one, six years ago. I touched the dragon-ended silver torc round my neck, that great curve that snarled at itself and marked me as a man men followed.

No-one challenged us as we watched and waited above Klerkon’s holding, looking to count hard men and seeing none. The trees dripped. A bird fluttered in, was shocked and whirred out again, cackling. I did not like this and said so.

‘We had better move fast,’ said Kvasir, his mouth fish-breath close to my face. ‘Sooner or later we will give ourselves away and the lighter it gets…’

The sky was all silver, dulling to lead beyond the huddle of wattle huts. I half-rose and hauled out my sword – not the sabre this time, but a good, solid weapon given to me by King Eirik himself, with little silver inserts hammered into the cross- guard and a fat silver oathing ring in the pommel. I had a shield, but it was mostly for show, since I only had two fingers and a thumb on that hand to grip it with and any sound blow would wrench it away.

Grunting, red-faced, teeth grinding on his nail, Finn slid down through the trees, letting the rest of us follow. He had The Godi, his big sword, in one hand and carried no shield. The free hand was for that nail.

Then, just as he was seen by the two thralls squatting to shit, he ripped the nail from his mouth, threw back his head and let out a howl that raised the hairs on my arms.

The Oathsworn wolfed down on the camp, skilled and savage and sliding together like ship planks. The first thralls, gawping in terror and surprise with their kjafal flapping round their knees, vanished in a red flurry of blows and it was clear, from the start, that there were no warriors here.

Well, there was, but not much of one. He barrelled out of a doorway with only his breeks on, mouth red and wet and screaming in his mad-bearded face and a great shieldbreaker sword swinging.

Finn and Kvasir, like two wolves on a kill, swung right and left and, while Mad Beard was turning his shaggy head, deciding which one to go for first, Finn darted in with his Roman nail and Kvasir snarled from the other side with his axe, though he missed by a foot with his first swing. It did not matter much, though, for there were two of them and only one defender.

When they broke apart, panting, tongues lolling like dogs, I saw that the man they had been hacking to bloody pats of flesh was Amundi, who was called Brawl. We had all shared ale and laughed round the same fire three summers before.

‘So much for him, then,’ growled Finn, giving the ruined thing a kick. He shot Kvasir a hard look and added accusingly, ‘You need more practice with that axe.’

I had done nothing much in the fight save snarl and wave a menacing blade at a couple of thralls armed with snatched- up wood axes, who thought better of it and dropped them, whimpering. Now I watched these hard men, the new Oathsworn, do what they did best, standing back and weighing them up, for this was a new crew to me for the most part. It was also an old crew, let loose like a pack of hunting dogs too-long kennelled.

Hlenni Brimill and Red Njal and Hauk Fast-Sailor were old Oathsworn, yet they raved through that place, mad with the lust of it, so that the terror in faces only made them worse. Others, too, showed that they were no strangers to raiding and, for all that I had done this before, this time seemed too bloody and harsh, full of screaming women, dying bairns and revenge.

I saw Klepp Spaki, bent over with hands on his thighs, retching up at the sight of Brawl’s bloody mess. Now he knew the truth of the bold runes he carved for brave raiders who would never come home.

I saw Thorkel and Finnlaith laughing and slithering in the mud trying to round up a couple of pigs, which was foolish. We wanted no livestock on this raid – we had provision enough for where we were going.

It was the others who brought red war and ruin to that place. Women and thralls died there, right away or later, after they had been used. Weans died, too.

In the dim, blue-smoked hall, men overturned benches, flung aside hangings, cursed and slapped thralls, looking for loot. When they saw me, they fell silent and went still. Ospak, Tjorvir and Throst Silfra, like three bairns caught in the larder with stolen apples, dropped their thieving when they saw me. It was a half-naked, weeping thrall woman they had stripped between them – but they only dropped her because I had told them to leave the women until we were sure all the fighting men were dead.

Finn lost himself in it – him most of all. Like a drunk kept from ale, he dived headfirst into the barrel and tried to drown himself, losing his sense so much that I had to save him from the boy who was trying to avenge his mother. Since Finn had killed her before he flung her down on a dead ox in the yard and started humping her, it was futile, but I had to kill the boy anyway, for he had a seax at Finn’s exposed back.

A few kept their heads. Runolf Harelip spilled into the red light of the rann-sack in the hall, dragging a struggling thrall- boy with him, cuffing the child round the head, hard enough to throw him at my feet and almost into the hearthfire. I looked down as the boy looked up and a jolt went through me, as if I had been slapped.

A sensible man crops the hair of a thrall – it keeps the nits down and reminds them of their place – but this boy had been shaved and badly, so that hair stuck in odd dirty-straw tufts between scabs. He wore an iron collar with a ring on it and I knew there would be runes that told how he was the property of Klerkon.

None of the other thralls, I noted, had as much as a thong and bone slice, for Klerkon’s steading was an island with no place for a thrall to run – but this one had tried. More than once, I suspected, for Klerkon to collar him; Harelip had noted that, too, and thought it strange enough to bring him to me rather than kill him.

‘Chained up outside the privy,’ Harelip grunted, confirming my thoughts. Fastened like a mad dog, dumped near filth for more punishment.

The boy continued to stare at me. Like a cat, that stare, out of the muck and bruises of his face. Unwavering and strange – then I saw, with a shock, that he had one eye blue- green and one yellow-brown and that was what was strangest in that gaze.

‘Klerkon is not here,’ offered Ospak, stepping away from the weeping woman, though not without a brief look of regret. Light speared through the badly-daubed walls of the rough hall, dappling the stamped-earth of the floor.

‘That much I had worked out,’ I answered, glad of the excuse to break away from the boy’s eyes and angry at being made so twitched by him. I stepped towards what was Klerkon’s private space in the hall, throwing back the curtain of it.

Furs, purest white fox. A cloak with bright-green trim. The frame of a proper box-bed, planked over and thick with good pelts. No chest. No money. No Thordis.

‘I am a Northman,’ the boy said. A West Norse tongue, stumbling through the Slav he had been forced to speak, stiff with the old misuse of defiant silences.

I turned back into those eyes. He stood, chin up and challenging and, for a moment, reminded me of the Goat Boy as he had been when we found him on Cyprus. About the same age as the Goat Boy was then, I noted. Of course, we had stopped calling him the Goat Boy when he had grown into resenting it – Jon Asanes he was now, being schooled by a trader I knew in Holmgard, which the Slavs call Novgorod.

‘I am from Norway and a prince,’ the boy added. Throst Silfra gave a loud laugh and those strange eyes swung on him, eagle fierce. I saw Throst quail in an eyeblink, then recover as quickly, also angered at having been so disconcerted by a thrall boy. He moved, lip curled.

‘Stay,’ I warned and, for a moment, he glowered at me, then lowered his hand and stepped back.

‘I AM a prince,’ the boy insisted.

‘Aye, just so,’ thundered Finn, ducking into the middle of all this. ‘Wipe the muck off every thrall and they will swear they were pure gold in their own country.’

‘A prince of where?’ I asked.

The boy stirred uncomfortably. ‘Somewhere,’ he said, hesitantly. Then, more firmly: ‘But my mother was a Princess. She died. So did my fostri. Klerkon killed them both.’

‘There isn’t so much as a bead in this place,’ Finn growled, ignoring the boy. ‘Klerkon did not return here with his loot, so he must have sailed straight to Aldeigjuborg.’

‘The storerooms are full,’ Kvasir added, coming in to the hall. ‘Winter feed. Honey in pots, seal and deer hides, fox pelts, feathers for pillows, sacks of acorns…’

‘Feathers,’ sneered Finn. ‘Fucking acorns…’

‘Take it, load it,’ I said and Kvasir nodded. ‘When you have everything, burn this place to the ground. Leave the thralls – they take up too much room and they are not what we came for.’

Kvasir ducked out of the hall, bawling for people to help him; Red Njal came in and glanced at me, then looked away. His knees and hands were clotted with gore where he had knelt to plunder a woman and the bairns he had killed; I had stepped in on him and being watched had shamed him away from the small bodies.

‘Is it wise to burn it?’ Finn asked.

‘Wise?’

‘You know Klerkon,’ Finn offered. ‘Unless we finish him, he will have his revenge. He has already torched Gunnarsgard and half of it was mine – he may decide to kill all the thralls and Thordis with them, out of fury.’

He was right and this was reason enough, as Finn often pointed out, for not owning anything you could not stuff into a sea chest. Yet, outside, I could hear what we had brought to this place, in the screams and the harsh laughter. Humping a dead woman on the flank of a dead ox in the yard was the least of it. I said that, too and we glared at each other.

‘Fear the reckoning of those you have wronged,’ Red Njal said mournfully and I shot him a savage glance; he, above all, had much to fear, for I suspected the bairns whose blood he had been paddling about in were Klerkon’s own.

He saw my look and stiffened, then shrugged.

‘The shame you cannot lift you had better let lie, as my granny used to say,’ he muttered darkly.

‘Happy woman who never saw you guddling in the blood of bairns for what you could steal,’ I spat at him and he winced away from it. It was unfair, for others had done worse and none of us were snow-pure.

‘I know where Klerkon’s gold is,’ the boy said. ‘I will tell you if you do not fire the steading.’

‘If I tickle you with a hot blade you will tell us anyway,’ Throst Silfra growled, but the boy’s double-coloured eyes never left mine.

‘I would have thought you would warm yourself at such a fire,’ I said, flicking the iron collar. He flinched.

‘The thralls you leave will die without shelter,’ he replied. ‘It is enough that you take their food. They are not able to run, are not to blame and some are my friends here.’

‘Other princes?’ chuckled Finn scornfully.

The boy grinned. ‘No. But some have been kinder than kings. The free folk here are another matter and I have my own thoughts on that.’

Was he the age he looked? Nine, I had reckoned – but he spoke like someone ten times as old.

‘So it is agreed,’ I said. ‘Show us Klerkon’s secret.’

‘Lend me your axe,’ demanded the boy and Kvasir, after a moment’s narrow-eyed pause, handed it over. The boy weighed it with little bounces of his thin arm, then stepped to the boxbed and swung it, hard. Chips flew.

He swung it again and part of the frame cracked. A coin flew out and smacked on the beaten earth of the floor. Kvasir picked it up, turned it over, bit it. ‘Gold, by Odin’s arse,’ he said. ‘A Serkland dinar in gold, no less.’

The boy swung again and more chips flew.

‘Here, give me that – you need more muscle,’ said Runolf Harelip with a grin. The boy handed him the axe and stepped back. Harelip split the bed in two blows and Kvasir, Tjorvir, Throst and the others scrambled to gather the coins that spilled from the hollow frame.

In the end, they filled a sack the size of a the thrall boy’s head, all gold coins, most of them Serkland dinar with their squiggly markings, each worth, I reckoned it up in my head, about twenty silver dirham each. It was as great a loss for Klerkon as it was a gain for us.

The boy stood, unsmiling and straight. I saw that the iron collar was rubbing his skin raw and looked at Kvasir, who had also seen it.

‘Ref Steinsson has tools,’ he said, ‘that can strike that off.’

‘Just so,’ I said, then turned to the boy, feeling that heart- leap as our eyes met. ‘Do you have a name, then, or will we simply call you Prince?’

‘Olaf,’ said the boy with a frown. ‘But Klerkon called me Craccoben.’

There was silence. The name squatted in the hall like a raven in a tree. It was a name you gave to a full-cunning man, rich in Odin’s rune magic and one who, like him, could sit at the feet of hanged men to hear the whispered secrets of the dead.

Not a name you took or gave lightly and I wondered what had made Klerkon hand it out to this thrall boy.

Crowbone.

FIVE

We came up the coast, running before a freezing wind until we had found the narrow mouth of the river we sought and had to drop sail or risk running aground.

We all groaned, for we would have to row upriver now and crew light at that. It was a heavy, lumbering beast of a ship when there were not even enough men on benches for one oar shift, never mind two.

I sweated with the others, which at least took my mind off the boy, who had been cooed over by Thorgunna the minute she had set eyes on him. Ref had deftly struck off the iron collar and Thorgunna had at once started to wash and salve the sores it had made on his neck – not to mention the ones on his head, which showed where he had been shaved by ungentle hands. Old, white scars showed that such a razoring had not been his first and she tutted and crooned at him.

Finn, grinning and happy now that he was raiding and getting money out of it rather than feathers and acorns, gave Kvasir a nudge where he sat, in front of Finn and pulling hard to the stroke.

‘You have been hung up like old breeks, Spittle,’ he chuckled, nodding to where Thorgunna was wrapping the boy in a warm cloak and patting him. I wondered if she would croon quite so softly when she found out the whole story of what he had done, what he had urged hard men to do back there in Svartey.

The wind hissed, the skin of the river crinkled and the thrall women huddled, blowing into chapped, cupped hands, but none of that was as cold as the dead we rowed away from.

‘It seems,’ Kvasir agreed, grunting the words out between pulls, ‘that I brought back a treasure greater than my share of those dinar coins, which I plan to make into a necklace for her.’

‘She’s broody as an old hen. You will have to bairn that one and soon,’ agreed Finn, which left Kvasir silent and moody.

There was a flash behind my eyes of the fat limbs and round little belly, fish-white and so small it made Thorkel’s blood-smeared hand look massive. The bud-mouth and wide, outraged blue eyes crinkling in bawls in a red face while, somewhere off to the right and pinioned, the mother screamed.

Crowbone had glared at her with savage triumph, then looked back to Thorkel and nodded; Thorkel hurled the bairn against a stone and the bawling ended in a wet slap and the mother’s even louder screams. And I watched, doing nothing, saying less.

What had she done to Crowbone? He would not say, save that she was one of Randr Sterki’s women, so the bairn was his and hers. Most probably she had been less than kind to him – perhaps even the one who shaved him so cruelly. There was no point in trying to stop the shrieking, bloody mess he had fermented, so that the mother’s death soon after was almost a mercy.

Aye, he was a strange one, that boy. Afterwards, men could scarce look each other in the eye for what they had done, though they were no strangers to hard raiding and red war. Yet there had been something slimed about what he had driven them to do that left even these ashamed.

If it was not unmanly seidr he had unleashed, it was a close cousin and further proof of his powers came when we ran up to the river mouth, slashing through the ice-grue water, Gizur looking this way and that, cupping the sides of his eyes with his cold-split red hands, looking for the signs that would tell us where land lay in the mist.

Then the boy had stood up and pointed. ‘That way,’ he said.

There were chuckles and a few good-natured jibes at Gizur. Then Pai, the lookout, shouted out that there was smoke.

‘No,’ said the boy, certain as sunrise. ‘It is not smoke. Those are birds.’

So it was, a great wheeling mass of them. Terns, said the boy, before even sharp-eyed Pai could spot whether they were terns or gannet.

‘How do you know that?’ demanded Hauk Fast-Sailor.

‘You can hear them,’ said the boy. ‘They are calling each other to the feast, shouting with delight. Herring are there, too, if you want to fish.’

He was right – terns were diving and feeding furiously and it was easy to follow them to where Gizur picked up the marks for steering to the mouth of the Neva and into Lake Ladoga, where we turned south on the Volkhov river.

By that time, of course, the men were silent and grim around a boy who could hear birds and knew what they said and was called Crowbone. He reminded me of Sighvat and when I mentioned it, Finn and Kvasir agreed.

‘Perhaps he is Sighvat’s son,’ Finn offered and we fell silent, remembering our old oarmate and his talk of what birds and bees did. Remembering, too, him lying in the dusty street of a filthy Serkland village with the gaping red smile of his cut throat attracting the flies.

By the time the dark rushed us on our first day’s pull upriver to Aldeigjuborg, we were still too far away to risk going on, so headed to the bank. Cookfires were lit and the awning stretched on deck, so that we ate ashore and slept aboard.

Kvasir, Finn and I, sitting together as usual, talked about the boy and wondered. Kvasir said Thorgunna was good at finding things out and would listen while she and the boy talked.

All of us agreed, half-laughing at ourselves, that little Prince Olaf was a strange child. Finn half-joked that it was just as well we had kept to our bargain and left the thralls alive, for he looked like a dangerous child to cross.

I did not think it a laughing moment, for we had killed all the freeborn there, wives and weans – even the dogs – of Klerkon and his crew. That little nine-year-old boy had taken his revenge on everyone who had done him wrong, so that he was red-dyed to the elbows with his hate, even if others had done the slaughter.

Thorgunna bustled up not long after, looking for the same strange child and fretting about him being alone in the dark on an unknown shore, so we all had to turn out and look for him.

He turned up after an hour, sauntering out of the shadows so silently that Thorkel nearly burned his own hair off jumping with fright with a torch in his hand.

‘Where were you?’ demanded Thorgunna and those two-coloured eyes, both reddening in the torch glow, turned on her.

‘Listening to the owls talk about the hunting,’ he said.

‘Was it good for them?’ chuckled Finn and the boy shook his head, serious as a stone pillar.

‘Too cold,’ he said and walked to the fire, leaving us trailing in his wake, stunned and thoughtful.

‘Here,’ said Thorgunna sharply, thrusting something at him. ‘Play this and stay by the fire. It will keep you out of mischief.’

It was a tafl board and some polished stones for it in a bag. Men chuckled, but the boy took the wooden board politely enough and laid it beside him.

‘It is too dark to play,’ he said, ‘but I know a story about a tafl board, which I will tell.’

Men blinked and rubbed their beards. This was new – a boy of nine was going to tell all of us full-grown a story; Kvasir laughed out loud at the delight of it.

The boy cleared his throat and began, in a strong, clear, piping little voice. And all those hard axe men leaned forward to listen.

‘Once a man in a steading in Vestfold carved a beautiful tafl board for his son,’ the boy began. ‘He made it from oak, which is Thor wood. When he was finished he showed his son how to play games upon it. The boy was very glad to have such a beautiful thing and in the morning, when he went out with the sheep up to the tree-bare hills where they grazed, he took his tafl board along, for he could always get stones as counters for it.’

The boy paused and the men leaned forward further. He had them now, better than any skop. I marvelled at the seidr spell he wove round the fire, even as I was wary of it. How did he know this story? It was certain Klerkon never tucked him in at night with such tales and his foster-father had died when he was young. Maybe his mother had, before she turned her head to the wall.

‘Everywhere he went he carried his board under his arm,’ the boy went on. ‘Then, one day, he met some men from the next village up, making charcoal around a small fire. “Where in this country of yours can a man get wood?” the charcoal burners asked. “Why, here is wood,” the boy said. And he gave them the fine tafl board, which they put into the fire. As it went up in flames, the boy began to cry. “Do not make such fash,” the charcoal burners said, and they gave him a fine new seax in place of the game board.’

‘That was a good trade,’ growled Red Njal from out of the shadows. ‘A boy will get more use from a good seax than a tafl board. That and the forest is the best teacher for a boy, as my granny used to say.’

They shushed him and Olaf shifted to be more comfortable.

‘The boy took the knife and went away with his sheep,’ he went on. ‘As he wandered he came to a place where a man was digging a big stone out of his field, so that he could plough it. “The ground is hard,” the man said. “Lend me your seax to dig with.” The boy gave the man the seax, but the man dug so vigorously with it that it broke. “Ah, what has become of my knife?” the boy wailed. “Quiet yourself,” the man said. “Take this spear in its place.” And he gave the boy a beautiful spear, trimmed with silver and copper.’

A few chuckled, seeing where the story was going and others asked where a farmer who could not afford a decent shovel got a silver-trimmed spear – but they were quickly silenced by the others.

‘The boy went away with his sheep and his spear,’ little Olaf continued. ‘He met a party of hunters. When they saw him one of them said: “Lend me your spear, so that we may kill the deer we are trailing.” So the boy did.’

‘Piss poor hunters,’ muttered Kvasir, ‘without a spear between them.’

Thorgunna glared her worst glare at him.

‘Oho,’ chuckled Finn. ‘There’s a look to sink ships. This is why you should not take a wife out on the vik.’

Kvasir scowled. Olaf waited patiently, until they subsided, then cleared his throat again. In the dark, his one pale eye caught the fire and flashed like pearl.

‘The boy gave them the spear and the hunters went out and killed the deer. But in the hunt the shaft of the spear was splintered. “See what you’ve done with my spear!” the boy cried. “Don’t fuss about it,” the hunter said. “Here is a horse for you in place of your spear.”

‘The hunter gave him a horse with fine leather trappings and he started back toward the village. On the way he came to where some farmers were keeping crows off their rye, running at them and waving sheets. This made the horse frightened and it ran away.’

‘This sounds like the story of my life,’ growled Thorkel from across the fire and everyone laughed, for they had heard of his lack of luck.

Finn bellowed at them to shut up and listen. ‘For I want to hear this. This sheep-herding boy seems much like a trader I know.’

There were some chuckles at my expense, then the story went on.

‘The horse had gone for good,’ Olaf said. ‘But the farmers told the boy not to worry. They gave the boy an old wood axe and he took it and went on towards his home. He came to a woodcutter who said: “Lend me your large axe for this tree. Mine is too small.” So the boy did and the woodcutter chopped with it and broke it.’

‘He should have quit and gone home when he had the horse,’ shouted someone.

Olaf smiled. ‘Perhaps so, for the woodcutter gave him the limb of a tree, which he then had to load on his back and carry. When he came near the village a woman said: “Where did you find the wood? I need it for my fire.”

‘The boy gave it to her, and she put it in the fire. As it went up in flames he said: “Now where is my wood?” The woman looked around, then gave him a fine tafl board, which he took home with the sheep.

‘As he entered his house his mother smiled with satisfaction and said: “What is better than a tafl board to keep a small boy out of trouble?”’

The roars and leg-slapping went on a long time, especially when Olaf, with a courtly little bow, handed the tafl board and bag of counters back to Thorgunna, who took it, beaming with as much delight as if she was mother to this princeling.

Into the middle of this, his breath smoking with cold and reeking of porridge and fish as he leaned closer to my ear, Kvasir hissed: ‘That boy is not nine years old.’

I stepped off a strug, one of those blocky riverboats the Slavs love so much, on to the wooden wharf of Novgorod, which we call Holmgard. I had been here before, so it felt almost like a home.

We had taken the strug from Aldeigjuborg, since it had been a hard enough task to work the Elk along the river to that place, never mind to Novgorod. My lungs had burned in the cold with the effort and, for days afterwards, my shoulders felt as if someone had shoved a red-hot bar from one side to the other. I was, I admitted ruefully to myself, no longer used to pulling on an oar.

The weather did not help. Gizur, when the Elk had edged painfully into the mouth of the river on which Aldeigjuborg stood, heaved the slop bucket over the side and hauled it in. He looked briefly, then shoved it at me. Ice rolled.

‘I did not need that to tell me how cold it is,’ I said, blowing on my hands. He nodded and emptied the water, then set the bucket in its place with red-blue hands, already studded with sores. Everyone had them, split from the cold and the rowing. Noses were scarlet; breath smoked and the air was sharp enough to sting your throat.

‘Too early for such ice,’ Gizur growled. ‘By a month at least. The river is freezing and this close to the sea, too. The sea will freeze for a good way out this winter, mark me.’

That thought had floated with us all the way to the berth, bringing little cheer. No sooner had we lashed ourselves to the land than Finn and Kvasir, swathed in cloaks and wrapped to the ears in wadmal and hats, came up and nodded in the direction of another drakkar, snugged up to the bank and with it’s mast off, the sail tented up across the deck, which spoke of an over-wintering. Klerkon’s ship, Dragon Wings. Two men all wild hair and silver arm rings watchfully tended a box-brazier of charcoals on the mid-ballast stones.

‘Small crew only,’ Kvasir reported after a brief open-handed saunter in their direction. They had seen us and were guarded after events in Gunnarsgard, though it was not a sensible thing to start swinging swords in someone else’s realm. What would happen when they learned what we had done on Svartey was another matter entirely.

‘Klerkon has gone south to Konugard,’ he added, cocking his head in that bird way he had these days.

‘He will have taken his captives,’ Finn said, almost cheerfully. ‘They will sell better in that place.’

I scowled at him, while Kvasir said nothing. I knew why Finn was so joyous – he was out on the raid and expected to winter in Novgorod and then head off in the spring to find the mountain of silver he thought we had left alone too long.

I was hoping that it would be a long winter and that, at the end of it, Sviatoslav, Prince of the Rus, would renew his mad fight against the Great City and make it too dangerous to travel south of Konugard, which the locals called Kiev. I was hoping those events had trapped Lambisson with Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter.

I also knew I was Odin-cursed with this mountain of silver. It was like being in a thorn patch – the harder you struggled, the worse you were caught. Sooner or later, I was thinking day after day, I would have to go back to Atil’s howe and every time the thought came to me it was like swallowing a stone.

But first there was Thordis to get back and Eldgrim and Cod-Biter to rescue.

We stayed long enough in Aldeigjuborg to find that Lambisson, if he had been there at all, was long gone. We stayed a little longer, to stand by the Oathsworn Stone which Einar had raised to those we had lost getting this far on the original journey down to seek Atil’s treasure.

Six years since and now the survivors of that time stood round it, a mere handful and a half – Hauk, Gizur, Finn, Kvasir, Hlenni Brimill, Runolf Harelip, Red Njal and me. Thorkel stood with us, for he had known Pinleg and Skapti Halftroll and the others the stone remembered but he had not been with us at the time. Crippled Cod-Biter and the addled Short Eldgrim were two more and we remembered on their behalf.

‘Someone has been,’ Kvasir noted, nodding at the garland of withered oak leaves fluttering on the stone’s crown.

Not for a long time. Yet the names were there and, though the paint had faded, the grooves were etched deep on the stone and the story was there still. We made our prayers and small offerings and left.

Finn thought the garland might have been left by Pinleg’s woman, who had stayed in the town with her son and daughter. When we went to where they had been, those who had known them told us they had left for the south long since. I remembered, then, that Pinleg’s wife had been a Slav, his children half-Norse Rus.

Only the stone was left, where the wind traced the grooves of all their names.

The Elk stayed in Aldeigjuborg with everybody on it save me, Finn, Kvasir and Thorgunna – and Crowbone, who trembled and scowled and stared at Dragon Wings and the men he saw there. I did not want him starting trouble and hoped Gizur had enough men to keep the Elk safe, but it would be a dangerous time, even berthed as far from Dragon Wings as we could get and both sides leashed by what would happen if we started in to killing each other in Sviatoslav’s kingdom.

I had thought of taking the Elk down to Novgorod but was glad I had not as we were poled along the cold river, through the dripping fir and pine forests where people still struggled to work the hacked-out clearings using their strange little three-toothed ploughs. The Volkhov seemed even more swirling and treacherous with currents than I remembered from sailing it with Einar.

It seemed all marsh and fish to me this time, an ugly place when the trees were stripped to claws. Further south was where the good black steppe earth was, the stuff the Slavs call chernoziom and so rich you need plough it just the once and, after letting it fallow for a few years, harvest wheat a number of times without tillage.

‘Aye, poor land, this,’ decided Red Njal. ‘And what are they doing boiling water in those huge pans?’

‘Salt,’ grunted Kvasir. ‘There is water here from springs and it is salt as the sea.’

‘Not a bad trick at all,’ noted Ospak. ‘Selling people boiled sea water.’

It was his first visit and everything was new.

‘Just so,’ chuckled Finn. ‘So you see we are richer aboard the Elk even than Kvasir Spittle here, for we are always floating in the stuff.’

Everyone laughed, while Kvasir ignored them, punching careful holes in his share of the gold dinar coins, making his necklace for Thorgunna. For her part, she still sat fussing over Crowbone, who now had a tow fuzz under the healing scabs. It was also clear that we could hardly treat him as a thrall, no matter what he was, so I went to him as we climbed aboard the strug.

‘Prince you may be, or you may not,’ I said, while a knowing Thorgunna beamed, ‘but free you can be, for sure.’

I held out my hand. He blinked those marvellous eyes at me, then grinned and took my wrist in his own small grip.

Later, when we were sliding between the green banks, poled by chanting Krivichi rivermen, Kvasir came to me with what he and Thorgunna had coaxed from this little Prince.

‘He says,’ Kvasir told me, speaking low, ‘that he was with his mother and staying with his grandfather and his foster- father, whom he knew as Old Thorolf. He was hunted by men, that much he knows, for his mother warned him always of it. They were hiding in this place, which he cannot remember the name of, for he was three when they fled it, heading, he says, for Novgorod. He has an uncle here, or so his mother told him, but does not know his name. They were coming to this uncle when they ran out of luck.’

I thought on it, rolling it over and over like a new coin in my head while Kvasir looked at me, his one good eye dulled as a dying fish in the growing twilight.

‘Klerkon took him? Or bought him from someone else?’ Kvasir frowned, getting the story straight.

‘Took him. Killed the foster-father right off. The boy remembers him doing it, saying Thorolf was too old and pitching him into the sea to drown.’

‘The mother?’

Kvasir shrugged. ‘I think she died later. He knows more but either will not or cannot say more. Only that she died on Svartey.’

Probably under Klerkon, I thought moodily.

‘Anything else?’

Kvasir shrugged. ‘He knows the names of his mother, father and grandfather, but he will not say them. I think his mother made him swear it. Which is not a surprise if men are hunting you – a closed mouth keeps you hidden.’

There was something here half-buried. I felt like someone who finds a ring in the dirt and knows if he gives it a hard enough tug it will unearth the whole glorious oathing-sword whose hilt it is attached to.

We were silent again, then Kvasir shook his head, bemused.

‘We are in a saga here,’ he declared. ‘A hunted prince, captured by raiders. Sold to slavery and rescued by the Bear Slayer and the Oathsworn – if that boy doesn’t end up a great man, then I am no reader of the Norn’s weave.’

‘Read less of his Norn-weave and more of our own,’ I answered. ‘Let’s hope there is not a thread in it that winds his greatness round our doom.’

That thought occupied both of us all the way to where the strug tied up to the wharf at Novgorod. Then the Norns showed us what they had weaved so far and Odin’s laughter was louder still.

SIX

The great walled fortress of Novgorod, with its central keep – the Slavs call them kreml and detinets – was a formidable affair even in those early days, before it was rebuilt in stone. All sharpened wood and earthworks, it glowered above the town like a stern father.

Inside, it was then and is now, as snug as a turf-roofed Iceland hall, with fine hangings and sable furs and such – but it also has a stinking pit prison, all filth and sweating rock walls and meant for the likes of the ragged-arse Krivichi, Goliads and Slovenes, not decent Norse like us.

The druzhina guards didn’t see it that way at all when they pitched us in, jeering and pointing out that no-one climbed out who was not destined either to be nailed upside down or staked.

We were all there – me, Finn, Kvasir, Jon Asanes, Thorgunna, Thordis, two thrall women who gabbled in some strange tribe tongue and Olaf who, for all his defiant chin, was trembling, both at what might happen and at the fact he had killed his first man.

In the dark, chill and crushing as a tomb, our ragged breathing was all that told me anyone was there at all and yet it seemed to me that there were shapes, blacker shadows in the dark, shifting and moving. I felt them, as I had felt them the night of the fox-fires back in the stables in Hestreng; the restless dead, come to look and leach the last warmth of life from someone about to join them. Aye, and gloat, too, perhaps.

The day started well enough, when we had made our way over the great split-log walkways, greasy with soft mirr and age, to the Gotland quarter where the Norse trading houses sat. I was seeking Jon Asanes, known to us as The Goat Boy.

Eventually we found Tvorimir, into whose care we had handed The Goat Boy to be taught how to trade, deal with sharp men and read and write birch-bark accounts. Tvorimir, it was generally agreed, was the best for this, since he was nicknamed Soroka – Magpie – for his attraction to anything even vaguely sheened.

His house, of the better sort called an izba, was like a steading hall dropped into a town, arranged on three sides around a courtyard, with stables, storage for hay and grain and one of the bath houses they liked so much. Instead of a pitfire, it had a clay oven in one corner, which was a fine thing.

He looked less like a magpie than a fat fussing hen, a man built, as Kvasir noted, in a pile of circles, from the ones which made his fat legs, to the one that made his belly and the little red one framed with a puff of white hair that made his head.

After we had been hugged and backslapped, been given bread and salt and ale from the cellar, he puffed himself to a wooden bench near the big clay oven and shook his head at the mention of Jon Asanes.

‘Quick and clever that one,’ he told me. ‘Works well, too – when he can be fastened to it. Has taken to writing, but not for accounts.’

He paused, shut one eye and laid a finger along his nose. ‘Love verse,’ he said and laughed, an alarming effect of wheeze and wobble. He rolled his eyes heavenward and intoned: ‘What fire in my heart and my body and my soul for you and your body and your person, let it set fire to your heart and your body and your soul for me and for my body and for my person.’

‘Tyr’s bones,’ breathed Finn, half admiring, half disgusted.

‘We have arrived just in time, it seems,’ Kvasir declared.

‘You should write such for me,’ declared Thorgunna, nudging Kvasir, who looked shocked at the very idea, then grinned.

‘Happily, I am unable to read or write, save a bit of rune here and there. And now that I am down to one eye, I will not risk straining it on such.’

‘Then whisper me such things instead,’ countered Thorgunna, while Tvorimir closed one eye reflectively and said nothing. He was well-travelled was Magpie, but he was more Slav than Swede and, like all of them, knew women had their place. As all Slavs will tell you, a chicken is not a bird, as a woman is not a person – but they do not say it around a prow-built woman from the vik.

‘Where is Jon Asanes?’ I asked and Tvorimir arranged his blackened teeth into a smile.

‘At the Yuriev Monastery,’ he declared and did his wobble and wheeze laugh again at our faces.

‘It used to be a salt-maker’s yard,’ he added, ‘until some Bulgar monks arrived from a place called Ohrid with their White Christ and Greek ways. The young Prince Vladimir is interested in such things. It is useful, for they owe me and I can get the boy taught to write Latin and Greek.’

It made good sense, for Jon Asanes was a Christ-follower from the island of Cyprus, where his mother still lived – if she still lived – and of the Greek style, too. He had done us a service on Cyprus and we had brought him away with us but, for all we had become his family, the gods of Asgard had made no headway in him.

‘He spends all his time with the Greeks there – priests and lay brothers, mainly, as well as merchants from the Great City,’ Tvorimir continued. ‘He learns a deal, but it has to be said that he prefers their ways to ours. He is pestering me to send him to the Great City, which he insists on calling Constantinople and tells me I am a barbarian for saying it is Miklagard, or even just the Great City.’

‘Ach – young Pai is just the same,’ Thorgunna offered. ‘Young men coming to manhood are always fretting with opinions on this and that.’

Which was true enough and seemed an end of the matter. I should have paid it more attention, but had more to think about, so we sat and talked, of Jon’s health – good, considering he was olive-skinned and practically a Serklander, none of whom cared for the ice and snow – and trade and Sviatoslav’s mad war with the Great City that made it impossible.

Tvorimir asked if we wanted to use his bath house, at which Kvasir choked on his ale and Finn gave the Slav merchant a look to strip the gilding off his house’s fancy carvings. We were good Norsemen and, unlike the filth of the Franks and Saxlanders and Livs and Ests, were not against washing most weeks – though, in winter, you tend to be sensible about such things.

Rus bathing was another matter altogether. I have seen these people at their baths, which they heat fiercely, then go into naked and pour some sort of oil over themselves, then beat themselves with young twigs until they stagger out, half dead.

After that, they pour cold water over themselves. They do this every day, without being forced, in order to bathe and not as any strange personal torment. Even the Greek-Romans of the Great City are not as vicious at getting clean.

Instead, we idled round the clay oven, picking salt out of the elegantly-carved little throne of a salt holder, sprinkling it on good bread and drinking. We talked of people we knew and what fish were plentiful in the Ilmen and, because it led to it from there, argued about how many rivers flowed into that lake – fifty-two, we counted in the end, though only one, the Volkhov, flowed out and down to Kiev.

It was pleasant talk and easily turned to the trade in slaves and who was doing it and whether they had any new ones.

Frowning, Tvorimir said: ‘Late in the year for it. The Ilmen is freezing early and soon you will not get a boat out the mouth of the Volkhov south. If your slaves are from the north, you will be looking to go south. The only dealer still in Novgorod who is still planning to go south is Takoub.’

Finn grunted and we all shifted a little. Takoub we knew well, because he was the one who had bought our oarmates as slaves some years before, when we had thought them snugged up in Novgorod while Einar led the rest of us in search of Atil’s secret tomb and the silver in it.

We had annoyed Sviatoslav doing it and he had seized our men and sold them to Takoub, who had sold them to an emir in Serkland. Those of us left after Einar had died had the unpleasant task of going after them, among other matters and it had been on that journey we had found the Goat Boy.

We were still in the memory of it when the lad himself arrived, blasting in the cold air and a smile that warmed us all. He glowed and beamed and was wrapped in bearhugs by Kvasir and buried in Finn’s beard, both at the same time, until all three broke apart, faces twisted.

‘Fauugh, you stink.’

‘Is that perfume, boy?’

They looked at each other and all of us burst out laughing. Of course Jon Asanes would be clean, washed and perfumed, for he was Greek and had been three years away from the honest sweaty wool and fish smell of us from the north. So far away it wrinkled his nose now, even as Finn wrinkled his nose at the sweet-smelling boy.

All the same, we clasped forearms as old friends and I felt the leap of my heart at that – him, too, I fancied, from the look in his eyes. He had grown from the skinny boy with only a dozen years on him and his tangled black curls were combed and oiled and fell to the shoulders of the white shirt he wore over sea-green breeks.

‘Is that a beard?’ demanded Finn and Jon Asanes, laughing and blushing, batted the gnarled and filthy hand which was trying to feel his chin. Little Olaf watched it all with interest, saying nothing.

‘Either you flew,’ Jon said, looping a leg over a bench as if it were a horse and pouring ale, ‘or my message to you is still sailing.’

‘What message?’ grunted Kvasir, then was nudged by Thorgunna into making introductions. Jon Asanes had been told of Kvasir’s marriage, but this was his first meeting with Thorgunna and everyone could see she was dazzled by him. It was hard not to be for, with a youth’s summers on him, The Goat Boy now had a breadth of chest and a slender waist and a bright and even smile that was always echoed in his dark eyes.

Then Olaf stepped up, having to look up to Jon Asanes, who now had some height on him, too. Jon was, I realized as I watched him and Olaf study each other, about the same age now as I was when we had met on Cyprus and called him Goat Boy. Yet, with less than a handful of years between us, I felt old enough to be the Goat Boy’s grandfather.

‘You smell nice,’ said Olaf. ‘Not like a man, though. Like a flower.’

Jon Asanes astounded me and showed how much he had learned about dealing with traders, for he didn’t bristle at this, as I expected from someone of his age. Instead, he grinned.

‘You smell like fish dung,’ he countered. ‘And your eyes cannot make up their minds on colour.’

They stared for a moment longer, then Olaf laughed with genuine delight and you could see the pair of them were friends already.

‘The message?’ I asked and Jon Asanes smiled a last smile at little Olaf and turned to me, a storm gathering on his brow.

‘I sent it awhiles since, by a Gotland trader,’ he said and looked sideways at me. ‘An old friend is arrived,’ he added. ‘He is staying with Christ-followers in the German quarter. I say friend, but I doubt if it is true.’

He paused and looked at me, then the others.

‘I did not tell Tvorimir,’ he added, ‘since it was a matter best kept between few, I was thinking.’

I felt the chill then and it was nothing to do with draughts from the door. Magpie caught my eye and slapped a grin on his red face.

‘I will go if you like,’ he said, but I shook my head; I trusted Tvorimir – well, as much as I trusted any trader – and, besides, we had few friends in this part of the world. Instead, I turned to Jon Asanes and asked, though I already knew the answer.

‘Who?’

‘Martin, the monk, with news for you, he says.’

‘Odin’s eye,’ growled Finn. ‘That name again, like a strange turd in your privy. I thought he had died.’

‘Not yet,’ Jon answered with a grin, ‘though he looks much like a corpse.’

‘I had thought to have seen the last of him in Serkland,’ Kvasir admitted. Thorgunna, who had heard some of this, kept quiet and Magpie, who was bemused by all of it, looked from one to the other, demanding explanations.

‘What does he want?’ I asked and, again, I already knew the answer – his holy spear, which I had in my sea chest, wrapped in sealskin. Jon Asanes confirmed it.

‘In exchange,’ he went on, ‘he says he will give you news worth the value of it to you.’

‘I doubt that,’ muttered Finn, ‘for he was ever as slippery as a fresh-caught herring.’

They tossed the tale of it between them for Magpie’s benefit – how Martin, the German monk, had stumbled on the secret of Attila’s treasure and been forced to reveal it by Einar, so putting all the Oathsworn on the hard road to that cursed hoard.

Martin, though, had only ever wanted one thing – the holy spear he swore was the one the Old Romans had thrust into the side of his Christ and whose iron point had been used in forging two sabres for Attila. They had been buried with him – and I had brought one of them out of the tomb.

I sat and listened to them chewing on it, though I already knew Martin and I would have to meet. I had no use for his Christ icon and had simply picked it up from the body of the man who had stolen it – but never throw away anything that might be of use, my old foster-mother Halldis had dinned into me.

‘You know where Martin is?’ I asked into the middle of their conversation, killing it. Jon Asanes nodded.

‘Where is best to meet?’ I asked. It would be better in a public place, this first one, for Martin was a man easy to dislike and somehow sparked me to anger like no other. I had almost killed him once and there were times since I wished I had.

Jon nodded, knowing all this. ‘The Perun likeness,’ he said. ‘Everyone uses it as a landmark and it is in the marketplace.’

I knew it well – you could not miss the great oak pillar on its mound of concentric circles, the top carved in the shape of a powerful warrior carrying an axe and with a head of silver and moustaches of gold. Perun, the Slav god of storms, who was as like Thor as to be his brother. I nodded.

We laid out the tale of what had happened to us thus far and Jon sucked it in as if it was no more than air, nodding and silent. At the end of it, he blew out his cheeks, stuffed bread in his mouth and rose from the bench.

‘We will start with Martin, then,’ he said simply and slammed out, dragging a warm cloak in his wake.

‘Bloody boy goes everywhere at a run,’ complained Magpie.

‘He will learn when he gets to our age,’ grunted Kvasir, ‘the truth of the old bull.’

We chuckled, while Thorgunna scowled. Magpie was too Slav to have heard this tale, so Finn took great delight in telling him, because it outraged Thorgunna that he did.

‘Let us not run down and hump one of the heifers,’ Finn finished, in his role of the old bull advising his eager son. ‘Let us walk gently down and hump them all.’

So we laughed and argued the rest of that morning, in the warm of Magpie’s izba, until Jon Asanes returned and said, simply: ‘Nones’.

I told them it was Latin for the way Christ-priests from the west judge the day – late afternoon, by which time it would growing dark.

‘We will keep a sharper eye open then,’ Finn said cheerfully, ‘in case he has found people stupid enough to try and take what he wants.’

I thought it unlikely, for he knew I wouldn’t bring the holy spear with me. Better for Finn to go with Kvasir and Thorgunna, who were taking Olaf to buy him new clothes.

‘You might need someone to help you string Martin up,’ Finn growled moodily, ‘while you use the Truth Knife on him to get what he knows. He is no stranger to it, after all.’

I shook my head, while the flash of memory, like lightning on a darkened sea, flared up the scene – Martin, swinging like a trussed goose from the mast of Einar’s Elk, spraying blood and green snot as Einar hacked off the monk’s little finger and threw it over the side. Einar’s magic Truth Knife, which, he told victims, knew when someone lied and would cut off a piece every time they did. It was now sheathed in the small of my back and I had used it once or twice myself. Most did not keep their secrets beyond two fingers.

Shrugging at my folly, Finn strode off after Thorgunna, Kvasir and Olaf, leaving me with Jon Asanes, who rolled his eyes towards the sky.

‘I have not seen Finn for some years,’ he said. ‘He seems even wilder than he was before.’

‘As you say,’ I countered, ‘you have not seen him for some years. You have just forgotten how he is.’

Even though I knew it was a lie.

We were silent, pushing through the throng on the wooden walkways of the city while the sky pewtered and the rain spat itself to sleet.

‘You seem… older,’ Jon Asanes said eventually, as we stopped to watch an army of carters manhandle a huge brass bell, almost as big as a small house, destined for the kreml

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