The White Raven

‘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.